Lecture Announcement

"Buddhism and Non-substantialist Ethics"

Professor Jin Park, Religious Studies Department, American University

Tuesday, Nov. 15,

4:30 to 6:00 p.m., Johnson Center, room G (third floor)

Since Zen Buddhism’s entry into the Western world, the ethical nature of Zen Buddhism has become one of the most discussed topics. This topic, however, has largely been disregarded in the discourses of Zen Buddhism in East Asia. Recent Buddhist scholarship in the West provides us with a rather problematic status of Zen Buddhism in the context of ethical discourse. First, scholars claimed that Buddhism in general, and Zen Buddhism in particular, needs to offer a clearer blueprint on social issues and demonstrate its viability as an ethical discourse in order for the tradition to survive in the West. Secondly, recent scholarship on Zen Buddhism has revealed how “un”-ethical Zen Buddhism has been: Zen Buddhism -- especially in the form that became familiar to the Western practitioners and scholars of Zen Buddhism in the twentieth century--was closely related to and even a result of Japanese nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Is Zen Buddhism capable of offering any ethical theory?

In this talk, we will consider the ethical theory that can be developed out of Zen Buddhist philosophy. Since basic doctrine of Zen Buddhism is anchored in the antinomian and non-dualistic vision of the world, traditional normative ethics is an object to overcome, rather than to internalize, from Zen Buddhist perspective. However, Zen vision itself offers a new form of ethics, which can be also shared by postmodern philosophy. As opposed to the metaphysical substantialist ethics, this new ethics can be identified as non-substantialist ethics, which demands us a radical re-orientation in our ethical thinking.