Seeing Sentient Beings: Śāntideva's Moral Phenomenology

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Seeing Sentient Beings: Śāntideva's Moral Phenomenology
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What do we gain from reading Śāntideva as a moral phenomenologist? For one thing, we avoid the procrustean strategy of locating him in the standard Western doxography of ethical positions comprising areteic, deontological, and consequentialist ethics, and then having to explain away all of the differences between his views and the doctrines central to everyone else in each of those philosophical systems (siddhāntas). I have argued elsewhere for this understanding,[1] and will not repeat those arguments here. More importantly, we open ourselves to a very different way of thinking about the content of ethics and moral development than those dominant in Western ethical thought, and we find in classical Indian ethics a way of responding to some important contemporary moral issues.
      In this chapter, I will first explore a bit more deeply the idea of moral phenomenology and Śāntideva's account of moral cultivation. I will then turn to the use to which we can put moral phenomenology in thinking about phenomena like implicit bias, and conclude with a few remarks about how to imagine the bodhisattva vows in the contemporary world. (Garfield, preliminary remarks, 192)

Notes
  1. Garfield, "What Is It Like to Be a Bodhisattva"; Garfield, "Mindfulness and Ethics"; Garfield, "Buddhistische Ethiks"; Garfield, Engaging Buddhism.
Citation
Garfield, Jay L. "Seeing Sentient Beings: Śāntideva's Moral Phenomenology." In Readings of Śāntideva's Guide to Bodhisattva Practice, edited by Jonathan C. Gold, and Douglas S. Duckworth, 192–208. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
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Books2019About this item
This book serves as a companion to the Bodhicaryāvatāra. The fifteen essays contained here illuminate the Guide's many philosophical, literary, ritual, and ethical dimensions.
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Classical WorksAbout this item
An "Introduction to Bodhisattva Practice," the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra is a poem about the path of a bodhisattva, in ten chapters, written by the Indian Buddhist Śāntideva (fl. c. 685–763). One of the masterpieces of world literature, it is a core text of Mahāyāna Buddhism and continues to be taught, studied, and commented upon in many languages and by many traditions around the world. The main subject of the text is bodhicitta, the altruistic aspiration for enlightenment, and the path and practices of the bodhisattva, the six perfections (pāramitās). The text forms the basis of many contemporary discussions of Buddhist ethics and philosophy.