Abstract
This chapter turns to the development in the Mahāyāna of the notion of auspicious or compassionate killing, typically performed by bodhisattva agents, the superlative moral exemplars of the Greater Vehicle. This development can be seen as in part emerging from some of the metaphysical considerations already noted concerning the ultimate ontological status of persons, the moral axiology of the agent and object of ‘quality’ and the comparative scale of value entailed by it, and the role of altruistic compassion in modifying both the moral valence of lethal acts and their consequences. These themes are brought to a culmination in the ethic of the aspiring and actual bodhisattva, a Buddha-to-be, whose constitutive qualities of supernormal compassion and phronetic insight can be summarised in a fourth major heuristic of wisdom (prajñā) informing, in revised terms, the norms undergirding the first precept. Given the central role of karman in valorising auspicious lethal acts, a question arises as to its universalizability as a norm of moral epistemology: are all Buddhist agents justified to engage such acts, depending on their degree of compassionate motivation? Ultimately, the causal function of karman in intentional acts proves epistemologically obscure for most moral reasoners, such that, as attested by the Pramāṇavāda exegete Dharmakīrti, its application in public ethical reasoning is seen to be ill-advised, and Buddhist ethicists prompted to engage alternative modes of epistemically accessible moral argument.
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Notes
- 1.
AKBh IV 72c–d (649).
- 2.
There is growing scholarship that interrogates Theravāda and Mahāyānist exceptionalism with regard to the first precept, by close textual readings of lesser-known canonical and other literature (Jenkins 2010, 2010/2011; Zimmerman 2006; Delhey 2006, 2009; Anālayo 2010, 2011).
- 3.
A text that tradition, probably falsely, attributes to Nāgārjuna, preserved in the Chinese translation (Ta-chih-tu-lun) of Kumārajīva, completed in 404 or 405 C.E. See Ruegg (1981, 32ff.) for discussion of the contested nature, and possible plurality, of this attribution.
- 4.
This radical hermeneutic of ‘empty killing’ is also evident in the Chinese Mahāyāna Susthitamati-Paripriccha, in which the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī attempts to kill with moral impunity none less than the Buddha. This example, and others like it, privileges the ultimate dimension of an act, whereby superlative agents transcend the relative dimension of karmic consequence. See e.g., Jerryson (2016, 158) for discussion, which briefly refers this religious hermeneutic to Zen-influenced appropriations of ‘empty’ homicide in historical war, without however analysing the morally relative, karmic side—and thus a robust Buddhist ethics—of the latter phenomenon.
- 5.
Cf. Schmithausen (1999, 59).
- 6.
See Cowherds (2011) for a range of discussion.
- 7.
Gethin (2004a, 175); Schmithausen (2000, 49). The Abhidhamma analysis of lethal action by way of its causal basis is only one of five analytic means of defining it; the others are by way of its intrinsic nature or essence (dhamma/sabhāva), its grouping (koṭṭhāsa), its object (ārammaṇa), and feeling (vedanā). This last in particular is considered in depth in Chap. 6.
- 8.
For discussion of upāya see among others Pye (1978), Federman (2009), McGarrity (2009).
- 9.
See for example discussion of karma, Mahāyāna śīla and utility in Goodman (2009, 2017).
- 10.
They are: dāna (generosity), śīla (morality), kṣānti (patience), vīrya (vigour), dhyāna (meditation, prajñā (wisdom).
- 11.
Jenkins notes this Mahāyāna shift largely with reference to the Madhyamaka, but even here it is not universal. He writes that “Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva do not explicitly allow for deadly violence, but do allow for inflicting pain or performing normally inauspicious action based on intention.” (2010/2011, 299).
- 12.
We will encounter a similar performative contradiction in Chap. 10, with reference to securing retributive justice in capital punishment.
- 13.
Jenkins notes that “even the portrayal of compassionate murder is used to discourage murder by malicious people” (322–323), which portrayal is not thereby a persuasive reason for the permissibility of compassionate killing (as Jenkins appears to suggest in his ensuing remarks).
- 14.
Harvey (2000, 135) recounts this oft-cited example of altruistic murder in the Upāyakauśalya Sūtra. For Jenkins’ discussion see 2010/2011, 315ff., and Gethin’s (2004a, 188ff). For a more philosophical account, with reference to contemporary Buddhist violent resistance, see Kovan (2009).
- 15.
See for example cases that calibrate moral judgement to varying realistic intentions noted at Vin. IV 125; III 78; II 91.
- 16.
See Jenkins (2010/2011), from the section “Compassionate violence as common sense” (323ff.), though violence and killing are distinct ethical categories whose semantic conflation (311) leads to considerable equivocation.
- 17.
Nor does this imply the need for a naturalized karma, which would itself assume that an essentially metaphorical conceptual function need be scientifically or otherwise literalized to better serve the same rationalizing purposes; see Coseru (2007), and Finnigan (2022).
- 18.
This could in theory take in Buddhist-praxiological means as well, such as the insights of meditative experience into the causal nature of the mind and its effects, independent of a karmic belief per se. As we’ve seen, Buddhist ethics and practice involves the self-interrogation of intention, its psychological inflexions, and observation of its psychosocial effects in lived intersubjective life. That privately-gained insight might well displace a belief in efficacious karmic causation; it may, on the other hand, affirm it.
- 19.
E.g., Dhs. 413,421; Vism. XIV 92; Abhidh-s V 23 (Bodhi 2012, 208). Cf. Gethin (2004a, 175). All refs. to Dhs. are to numbered paragraphs of the PTS edition (in English tr. of Rhys Davids, ed. 1997.).
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Kovan, M. (2022). Mahāyāna Exceptionalism and the Lethal Act. In: A Buddhist Theory of Killing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_5
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