Buddhist Ethics

Freedom vs. Liberation

Buddhism today is testing the idea of freedom vs. liberation, their differences, and compatibility in the laboratory of the Western liberal consensus.

The liberal idea of individual freedom and rights and the Buddhist idea of liberation (mokṣa) could not be more different. The former is predicated on the inherent autonomy of the person, grounded in an ideal of personal freedom and inherent rights; whereas the latter is predicated on freedom from afflictions that bind one to samsaric rebirth and on the absence of the identity of persons and phenomena.

The liberal view of the world was birthed roughly in the seventeenth century and seems to be largely based on the idea of individual freedom and rights that were first encountered by the French, Dutch, and English among the indigenous population of North America. Graeber and Wengrow describe this as the outcome of what they term the “indigenous critique” (see D. Graeber and D. Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, Picador, NY). The encounter with the indigenous population of the Americas seems to have stimulated a whole discussion of individual rights, property, class, and so on in the writings of Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith—all very influential on the architects of the Early American Republic—as well as Marx, Engels, and beyond, leading to what we now know as “liberalism.”

There is a dearth of ethical writing in traditional Buddhist cultures. The notion of individual freedom is entirely absent in Buddhist sūtras and śāstras. This is not surprising—ethics is generally a mundane social domain, whereas for pre-modern Buddhist writers, ethics generally pertain only to the path. Even the broad ethics of Mahāyāna bodhicitta are framed in terms of how we achieve our own goal of liberation in connection with our relationships with others.

Further, in India, secular writing that touched on what we would call “ethics” was largely concerned with governance, warfare, the role of the family, and so on. Virtually nothing concerning the underlying philosophical exploration of ethical questions that we find in analytical philosophy, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition, can be found in pre-modern Buddhist writing.

Broadly speaking, Buddhist ethics are catechistic, mostly concerned with personal karma and the results of those actions. Buddhist ethics are fundamentally epicurean or hedonistic in the sense that they seek a eudaemonic outcome for the individual. However, a broader Buddhist social ethic, while not entirely absent, is stunted, depending principally on the whims of monarchs.

The fortunes of Buddhism in the countries from where it originated—the various small kingdoms of central India—and to where it spread in Asia have largely depended on the largesse of absolute monarchs in these regions. And while there is a Buddhist literature of political advice for rulers, beginning with the Buddha up to Mipham in the 19th century, it has always been catechistic—“do this, don’t do that”—rather than a systematic ethics developed in the West, like that of Aristotle through Kant and up to the present.

Buddhism, in the end, is not concerned with saving the world, saving souls, class struggle, or any of the broad range of social concerns that sprang out of Christian and Socialist movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its position toward the world is driven by skepticism of mundane attainments such as wealth, status, power, fame, and so on. It is also driven by skepticism toward rights, individual autonomy, and so on. This skepticism is grounded in the doctrine of karma, the causes, and results of moral actions, as well as the doctrine of dependent origination. In other words, even if there are individual rights and so on, a person’s outcomes of happiness or suffering in a given incarnation are not dependent on some inherent quality we call “inalienable rights,” guaranteed by a document; rather, they depend on the past causes and conditions from a given person’s past lives, which come to fruition in this incarnation.

Take, for example, the famous trolley problem, which poses the dilemma of saving one person over a group of people by pulling a lever to divert a trolley to a different track. This type of thought experiment is wholly absent from the Buddhist tradition. Someone might respond that this scenario is covered by the Mahāyāna narrative of the sea captain, where, in a past life, the Buddha is held to have killed a thief planning to murder a ship full of merchants to save their lives and prevent the thief from engaging in a terrible nonvirtue. However, this again is a simple catechistic exercise and merely reflects the situational morality of Mahāyāna. But to illustrate the problem of Mahāyāna ethics, we also have the narrative of the bodhisattva prince’s practice of the perfection of generosity, where he gives away his wife and children into slavery as a function of his practice of the perfection of giving. You can imagine the shock of many people when this idea was advanced in a course I attended in 1990 on Sakya Paṇḍita’s Clarifying the Muni’s Intent (Thub pa’i dgongs gsal).

Due to the fact that liberalism, predicated on individual rights, never existed in Asia or India (or, for that matter, in the West before the Enlightenment), an ethic of personal responsibility (i.e., with rights come responsibilities) in the world never existed in pre-modern Buddhist urban cultures. Kings and ministers were responsible for the broad range of social issues—commoners were supposed to shut up, pay taxes, and obey their betters.

Individual rights are the foundation upon which any ethical theory, such as Kant’s categorical imperative, Rawls’s theory of social justice, and so on, must be built. One can see from the outset that the notion of the individual itself conflicts with the fundamental Buddhist principle of the absence of identity, selflessness, anātma. The self, personal identity, in Buddhist teachings is considered an error of cognition.

Rights must be predicated on the integral existence of a person. For this reason, in the burgeoning discourse of liberalism, the extension of rights from people of European descent to enslaved Africans, to corporations, to women, to animals—and these days, to rivers and forests—all are predicated on this integral notion of personhood and its boundaries.

According to Locke, for example, water in a river is owned by no one, but the minute one scoops it up with a bucket, the act of appropriation renders that water the possession of a person, and it is thus bounded by ownership. Of course, on a conventional level, ownership is recognized in Buddhism, hence the prohibition against stealing. However, the ethical theory behind the prohibition against stealing is not so much predicated on the rights of the offended party as it is on the karmic consequence of the act—future poverty.

As a result, there is serious tension between Buddhism and liberal ethics. I know this will come as a surprise to many Western Buddhists, who tend to skew to the left in their political leanings. We are often surprised by the right-wing views of Asian Buddhists, who are socialized in totalitarian societies, like China, and so on, and simply do not view the discourse about personal rights the same way as Western liberals. Those of us in the West who are left-leaning view authoritarian systems as soul-crushing and something to defeat and overthrow. But people in these authoritarian systems often regard Western democracies as corrupt and unable to live up to the promises the prophets of democracy extol.

Even liberal Buddhists can succumb to a kind of Dharma authoritarianism, accepting the decrees of their teachers about their lives and engaging in utopian fantasies about Dharmarājas and enlightened societies. Well, there are none, and there have been none—ever. As Āryadeva points out, all kings are fools.

Fortunately, Buddhism is flexible precisely because it is not that concerned with worldly, political affairs, called mi chos in Tibetan, “human Dharma,” as opposed to lha chos, higher or divine Dharma. We can allow our ethical ideas of rights and so on to inform our practice of Buddhism, but we will not find our liberal ideals about ethics validated by traditional Buddhist texts. In fact, we will find much in them that challenges our ethics, and some narratives that many, if not most, will find absolutely repugnant. But we do not have to pay attention to every Buddhist sūtra or tantra or give it much credit. We only have to discern what is definitive and what is not. That is the only way to resolve the tension between freedom and liberation.