Abstract
This chapter continues the discussion of Pali Buddhist grounds for the prohibition of killing, and its moral evaluation more generally, in a focus on the Theravādan commentarial statements of Buddhaghosa. This is preceded by a broader discussion of how the first precept is discursively framed in the early Buddhist canonical and social context, distinguishing between its senses as a marker for moral and legal transgression, and as a theoretical basis for ethical systematisation. These features are then contextualised with respect to the psychological theorisation of agency, as well as its moral epistemology. The precept prohibiting killing is understood to involve a moral-religious hermeneutics differing across personal and collective, social and soteriological registers, with respect to exemplary beings (such as arhats and ārya-beings), monastics, lay-people, and non-human animals. This hermeneutics is then seen to be encoded in the hierarchical levels of evaluation of killing made explicit in Buddhaghosa’s Theravāda theorisation of an ethics of killing, but otherwise largely unexplained in this and other sources (such as Vasubandhu’s contemporaneous reiteration of similar claims in the Sarvāstivāda context). The distinctions he draws between different criteria for evaluation are assessed, internal and external to the early Buddhist worldview they express more generally. These include values, centrally that of ‘quality’ (guṇa), attaching to and between human and non-human killing, and its differing human agents, expressing a third major heuristic (following those of dukkha and kamma) determining an early Buddhist ethics of killing.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Stewart (2014, 631; passim) and Schmithausen (1997) discuss interspecies ethical attitudes between animal and human agents in sutric and jātaka texts.
- 2.
The other two being abstaining from stealing and sexual misconduct.
- 3.
It might be noted here and in general that to explore the logical implications of Buddhist-ethical evaluative norms is just to focus on their conceptual content. The brief analysis that follows is therefore intended neither as textual exegesis nor reconstructive revision of the norms it engages, but rather as a rational clarification of the discursive context in which they appear.
- 4.
E.g., at Vin. III 78; cf. II 91. Manslaughter, attempted murder and murder are clearly distinguished in the Vibhaṅga, where the first two are grave offences (thullaccaya) and only the latter an offence of expulsion (pārājika).
- 5.
The same question in principle applies to cases of collateral damage in warfare, as well as torture (see Chap. 8, Sec. 3, for related discussion).
- 6.
See MN II 140 for the Buddha’s forceful rejection of the alignment of his own teaching with the annihilationism of the Ājīvika’s a-kammic doctrine of causeless and meaningless suffering.
- 7.
Garfield points out however that the distinction between thick and thin description is not always relevant to the debate between particularism and universalism, and that the debate hinges not on the ontological status of moral descriptions but their epistemological function in the acquisition of moral truth/s, and how that knowledge is deployed in context.
- 8.
See for e.g., Harvey (2000, 166ff.). Cf. Stewart (2014, 2015).
- 9.
Harvey (2000, 255ff.) Cf. Schmithausen (1999), Keown (2016), Deegalle (2006).
- 10.
See Delhey (2006), Ratanakul (2000).
- 11.
See Benn (2007), Yün-hua Jan (1965).
- 12.
See Keown (2001, 2005, 2014), Perrett (1992), Finnigan (2017).
- 13.
The same hermeneutic tension is constitutive of the moral evaluation, between interlocutors East and West, of Tibetan Buddhist self-immolation (see Kovan 2013, 2014, 2018; Davis 2016).
- 14.
Similarly, it is not clear even for many Buddhist Studies scholars and anthropologists whether suicide, in the context of the first precept, carries the sense of being a lethal act; some tend to the view that it doesn’t (see Delhey 2009, among others).
- 15.
These include (1) greed (lobha) (2) hatred (dosa) (3) delusion (moha) (4) conceit (māna) (5) speculative views (diṭṭhi) (6) sceptical doubt (vicikicchā) (7) mental torpor (thīna) (8) restlessness (uddhacca) (9) shamelessness (ahirika) (10) lack of moral dread or unconscientiousness (anottappa).
- 16.
Of sense-desire (kāmāsava), of desiring eternal existence (bhavāsava), of (wrong) views (diṭṭhāsava), and of ignorance (avijjāsava).
- 17.
Especially evident in the Sutta Nipāta, which for some scholars represents “a very early stage of Buddhist literature.” Its verses “represent the summation, in Theravāda literature, of the style of teaching which is concerned less with the content of views and theories than with the psychological state of those who hold them.” (Collins 129).
- 18.
See also MN I 389–391, DN I 163, SN V 104, AN II 234.
- 19.
See Heim (2014, 17ff.) for discussion of differing Western and Buddhist conceptions of ethical agency.
- 20.
By contrast, witness the difference in moral gravity, for example, of abuse committed by an ordained minister, and a lay repeat-offender. In Western ethics, the culpability of the crime is equivalent even where the degree of moral transgression can be seen to be inequivalent.
- 21.
This would also imply that, within the human scale of quality, the icchāntika or irredeemable person deemed incapable of achieving Buddhist realization, is the polar opposite in quality from the Buddha (and is in some texts described as being able to be killed with kammic impunity; Harvey 2000, 138). See also Sect. “Anthropological Conditions for the Conventional Social Constitution of the Person”in Chap. 9, below.
- 22.
In Harvey (2000, 52). Cf. Asl. 97; Spk. II 144; Nidd.-a. 115; Khp-a. 28–29; Sv. 69–70; AKBh IV 73a-b (649–650).
- 23.
Buddhaghosa, in addition, suggests six methods applicable: “with one’s own hand, by instigation, by missiles, by contrivance (trap or poison), by sorcery, by psychic power.” (Harvey 2000, 52).
- 24.
The Tibetan Mahāyāna, based on Indian sources, adds a further, sixth, factor involving the delusion (moha) that refers to the presence of ignorance (as well as greed or hatred) as also constitutive of a fully kammic lethal act (Williams 2000, 250 n. 23). Williams suggests that this inclusion allows for the ethically permissible killing performed by a realized being lacking delusions, and thereby not driven by unwholesome intention. Chapter 5 considers how the Mahāyāna makes wisdom (prajñā) an integral dimension of its own framing of the precept.
- 25.
Their justification being alien in that limited sense, however, need not imply that the criteria are inherently misguided or false; on the contrary, they are embedded in a cultural context for which they evidently are, or were, salient.
- 26.
Jenkins discusses these generally held ideas which travel in a shared metaphor from the Nikāyas (in for example the Loṇaphala Sutta, AN) through inter alia the Abhidharmakośa to Asaṅga and then Bhāviveka (2010/2011, 308).
- 27.
See the Mahāvagga (2nd Khandhaka, Chap. 25).
- 28.
Modern Western legal theory of course recognises the ‘insanity defence’ as mitigating the criminal severity of murder (see e.g., Asokan 2016). Where mental disturbance as a condition of criminal acts can be a mitigating factor in legal judgement, the Buddhist moral case makes it an aggravating factor. What each rather shares is a recognition that legal guilt must be based on an intention to knowingly so act.
- 29.
Guṇa functions as an umbrella concept between Buddhist and non-Buddhist (notably Nyāya) contexts, though the appearance of the compound term in Pāli exegeses of the first precept is limited to those of Buddhaghosa in his commentaries, and those of others. The passage of Buddhaghosa (MN-a I 198) above, is quoted almost verbatim by Dhammapālācariya (It-a. II 49) and Mahānāma (Paṭis-a. I 220).
- 30.
Unp. MS. textual note “Assessment of kamma in pāṇatipāta in Pāli commentarial literature”, Giustarini (2014). The relevant passage is at Asl. 97 (all Asl. refs. are to bracketed section numbers).
- 31.
puna ca metteyyassa bhagavato sabhāvaguṇaṃ paridīpayamānena bhagavatā evaṃ bhaṇitaṃ.
- 32.
See however Powers (2009) and Mrozik (2007) for studies focused on the socio-cultural and religious dimensions of ‘virtuous bodies’ in Buddhist religious studies and ethics.
- 33.
Western philosophical discussion of the perceived or inferred relations between beauty and goodness in persons is of course evident at least from Plato (Symposium) and Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) through to Kant (Critique of Judgement). But it is also Kant who seminally locates the value of persons in an inherent dignity and autonomous capacity to recognise moral values absolutely superseding contingent ones (such as physical constitution).
- 34.
This does not imply that there is no perceived relation between beauty and goodness at all. A recent study cites neuropsychological evidence that “moral judgment and aesthetic judgment mutually affect each other. With the development of neuro-imaging technology, researchers have adopted brain imaging methods to explore the neural features underlying the connection between moral and aesthetic judgments.” (Cui et. al. 2019, 2) However, “Based on reviews of previous studies of moral and aesthetic judgments, it can be concluded that moral goodness judgments mainly involve cognitive and affective processes, while moral beauty judgments mainly involve sensory-perceptual, high-level cognitive and affective processes” (ibid. my italics) and it is the latter judgements, moreso than the former, which correlate with perceived attractiveness.
- 35.
And this despite the many canonical expressions of compassion for animals, and exhortations to their non-harm, noted in Chap. 3. Cf. also Schmithausen (2000, 44–46) for variant views.
- 36.
Gethin (2004a, 172–3) also claims that this same belief is “taken for granted in contemporary society.”.
- 37.
It is not clear that intention as an ethical index would play any appreciable part in the apparently intentionally ‘neutral’ context of industrial animal slaughter. The question of the desensitization of affect in human genocidal contexts is relevant here too, where a dissociative intentionality could theoretically modify a Buddhist-intentional account. See Chaps. 6 and 10 for further discussion.
- 38.
Stewart (2014, 640) notes that: “This is apparent in works such as the Jātaka where stories are told of former humans, and future Buddhas, who are born as various animals. These tales effectively treat animals as humans insofar as the animals are typically regarded as having the same cognitive potentiality as humans, are socially organized, and are able to strategize and communicate with each other as human beings do. The implication, therefore, is that hurting an animal is like hurting a fellow human being.”.
- 39.
Schmithausen notes that “From a traditional Buddhist point of view, slaughtering or hunting animals for food or other requirements, not to mention for fun, is blameworthy and unwholesome. The same would hold good for the modern mass rearing of fowl and other animals. Even animal experiments for medical research would seem to be highly problematic if they involve killing or the inflicting of pain, the more so animal tests for other purposes, and vivisection.” (2000, 30).
- 40.
e.g., MN I 343–344. Mahāyāna texts, such as the Aṅgulimālīyasūtra, include in this disapprobation of animal killing the notion that animals share in a latent or potential Buddhahood (tathāgata-garbha) which alone justifies why realised beings such as Buddhas neither kill nor consume them (Schmithausen 2000, 34). However, this latter claim clearly contradicts earlier Pāli canonical reference to the historical Gautama Buddha both eating meat and not prohibiting it from the Saṅgha, where it has not been solicited (see Stewart 2010 for discussion of vegetarianism and Pāli Buddhism).
- 41.
See Stewart (2014, 2015), Finnigan (2017), Waldau (2018) and Schmithausen (1997, 2000) for recent accounts of Buddhist animal ethics.
- 42.
To the degree that our former reading of the sarīra-guṇa can be taken at face-value, then the five (physical) beauties (pañcakalyāṇa) straightforwardly express the great positive kamma and thence merit (mahāpuñña) that, for example, the Dhammapada commentary explicitly associates with them.
- 43.
The use of the term “object” for human person is purely in order to facilitate a distinction from the agent of action, also a person. It is not to inadvertently render the person objectified as a thing.
- 44.
As when Buddhaghosa (Asl. 97) suggests that the bodily qualities (sarīraguṇa) of two or more victims, perhaps by having already been killed, do not show clear evidence of quality beyond purely external signs because they are dead (Giustarini 2014).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kovan, M. (2022). Interpreting the Precept: Evaluative Criteria in the Theravāda. In: A Buddhist Theory of Killing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-19-2440-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-19-2441-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)