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Chapter 10 Sharing Insights: Buddhism and Recent Aristotelian Ethics Sheila Mason & 1. Introduction In the last few decades we have seen increasing turmoil in the world and an increasing concern about the weakening of moral bonds within the Western societies.1 At the same time we have seen a great outpouring of writings on Buddhism in North America. Buddhist masters have founded centres for the study and practice of meditation, many North American men and women have become practitioners and teachers of Buddhism, some taking vows and becoming monks or nuns, while the Dalai Lama has become a public figure of great renown. Anyone with the inclination can easily find books, websites and courses on the practice of meditation. During the same period, Anglo-American academic moral philosophy has taken a turn toward the integration of theory and practice. Ethics has become a popular subject in and outside the university, and many philosophers have found ways around long-standing dichotomies, such as the sharp division of fact from value, intellect from will, reason from emotion, mind from body and so on. The recognition of moral complexity and the subtlety of intuitive forms of understanding have become central to thinking about how to live well. Questions that were once deemed unsuitable in the tradition of analytic philosophy, such as questions about the meaning of life and how to live well, have been reinstated, bringing with them a radical shift in our thinking about moral life.2 Whether it is possible to say anything interesting about these phenomena, without drastic simplification or without too much distortion, is not so clear. Having 1 Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre, ed., Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), vii. 2 David Wiggins, Needs, Values and Truth, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 87. 202 Mason stated these reservations, I will discuss what appear to me to be interesting similarities and important differences in some of the central concepts that are used to frame the question of how to live well in both traditions as they are currently discussed. The question I address in this chapter is related to the theme of ‘migrating texts’ in the following way. I simply assume that to draw comparisons between salient points in each of these evolving traditions of thought is to contribute to the ‘migration’ of these texts. To say that texts of either tradition are ‘migrating’, or have ‘migrated’ into the other is to say that they have been put in some relation in the same time and place. In this chapter I shall use a loose notion of ‘text’ as a subject, or theme, which can be addressed by different thinkers, rather than the more literal interpretation of a text as “the wording of anything written or printed”.3 Thus the recent writings on virtue theory and on Buddhist practice are treated as migrating ‘texts’ in the sense of groupings of ideas about a subject that have travelled from one place, or abode, to another. Since themes originally discussed by Aristotle in ancient Greece have received renewed interest in the Anglo-American world of contemporary philosophy, and themes originally set out by Tibetan Buddhists centuries ago—themes originally adumbrated by Sakyamuni, or ‘the Buddha’ in Northern India in the 5th century BCE—are now receiving increasing attention and lively treatment by contemporary practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism in the English-speaking world,4 it is possible to claim that the texts in each tradition have migrated through time and place. To the extent that I compare Buddhist themes or texts, with neo-Aristotelian themes, one might say that this is a preliminary attempt at a small migration of one text into another, at least in so far as putting themes side by side, noting similarities and differences and remarking on how one tradition might be enhanced by the inclusion of insights from the other might be thought of as a form of migration of texts. I begin, in the next section, with a brief description of neo-Aristotelian virtue theory, followed, in section 3, by a presentation of five central insights of virtue theory and three basic concepts of recent ‘Western’ writings on Buddhism, which I shall refer to simply as ‘Buddhism’. In sections 4 to 8, I attempt a comparison, concluding, in section 9, that Buddhism has a good deal to offer virtue theory because of its consistent focus on the presence of suffering in the world and the central...

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