Buddhist Ethics in Buddhist Studies

Buddhist ethics is a relatively new field which was begun in 1964 when Winston King brought up
the almost total lack of contemporary material on Buddhist ethics in English and raised general
questions on the role of ethics in Buddhism. Following him there were some Sri Lankan scholars,
such as Jayatilleke and Premasiri, who plunged into this field of study in the 1970s. In 1994 the
online Journal of Buddhist Ethics was founded by Damien Keown and Charles Prebish, and since
then Buddhist Ethics has become a popular discipline in Buddhist studies.
Among the development of the study of Buddhist Ethics, there are three major aspects:
1. The contents of Buddhist Ethics in three major traditionsEarly Buddhism, Mahayana,
and Tibetan Buddhism, such as rules, moral stories and guidelines for every perspective of
human life, extracting from Buddhist literature.
2. Applying the concepts of Buddhist Ethics in modern issues like: euthanasia, abortion,
human cloning, embryo stem cell research, sex equality, etc., in order to provide a Buddhist
view on these controversial issues.
3. Finding a suitable theory to interpret Buddhist Ethics. Scholars have been trying to
understand Buddhist ethics in the light of Western ethical theories, such as deontology,
utilitarianism or virtues ethics, but none of them is completely satisfactory. Therefore, one
who can find a new ethical theory which fits Buddhism actually contributes a lot to this
discipline.
This dissertation will include the first and last aspects and focus on laypeoples ethics which has
been ignored in this field. Pali commentaries and Chinese parallel texts will be used to cover more
materials, which previous scholars did not utilize, for building up an ethical system especially for
laypeople to achieve happiness preached by the Buddha.
As for finding a suitable theory to interpret Buddhist Ethics, I think this could be settled in the
Buddhist context since there is no suitable Western theory which is generally accepted by scholars.
Re-investigating this problem in terms of Buddhist theories may provide a good solution, and
Buddhist ethics can be established as a class of its own, just like Aristotelian or Kantian ethics.
This paper is based on Early Buddhist literaturesPali Nikayas and Chinese Agamas, and the
ethics here is confined to advices the Buddha gave to laypeople, excluding the monastic. A clear
moral system will first be built based on new translations from Pali commentaries, and further, an
ethical theory which is applicable to Buddhist ethics will be constructed based on the system.