Toward a “Wider and Juster Initiative”: Recent Comparative Work in Buddhist Ethics

Abstract

This essay considers some of the important trends in comparative approaches to Buddhist moral thinking, including early reflections on how and where to place Buddhist thought. It argues that some of the formative gestures shaping the field of Buddhist ethics sprang from contested efforts by historians of religion and philosophical formalists to chart a comparative methodology. The essay describes the methodological holism that characterizes important work in the field and argues against it, pointing instead to more diffuse lines of inquiry that do not efface Buddhism's historical diversity and the distinctiveness of its moral discourses. The essay begins to develop a different orientation in ethics that centers on the ethical study of human nature. To this end, it offers a small exercise in comparative moral psychology to explore the moral sentiment “sympathetic joy.”