Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

It is not surprising that Mahāyāna Buddhism is frequently criticized that its doctrine cannot cope with contemporary ethical or social issues. Despite the plenitude of ethical ideas the Mahāyāna doctrine includes, Buddhist ethics has been the subject excluded from the mainstream of Buddhist studies. One conspicuous reason for the isolation of Buddhist ethics is the antinomian interpretation of the final awakening, which was introduced by D. T. Suzuki, and thereafter, became widespread. According to this interpretation, good and evil are relative concepts that belong to the worldly realm in which nothing has its substance. Thus, if a practitioner achieves the final awakening and sees the world from the perspective of the supreme wisdom, the relativity becomes extinct and nothing can be labeled good nor evil anymore. This understanding inevitably entails that studying and practicing the teaching of Mahāyāna Buddhism cannot be compatible with Ethics, which necessarily requires discriminating between good and evil. In my paper, I argue that the antinomian approach is a misinterpretation of Buddhism by showing that it missed one important aspect of Buddhism, that is, compassion. Dasheng qixin lun, the compendium of Mahāyāna doctrine which has been considered the most important in East Asian traditions, clearly explains the ontological and epistemological relationship between the final awakening and compassion. This point indicates that good in the Mahāyāna teaching is not to merely fall into the worldly relativity with evil, but to continuously function on the absolute basis.