Making, Unmaking, and Discovering Buddhahood: Three Paradigms of the Relationship Between Meditation and Ethics

Abstract

This article maps out three broad approaches to understanding the relationship between ethical behavior and meditation in examples of classical Buddhist literature. It then traces these approaches to the contemporary period, where they are echoed in modern articulations of meditation and mindfulness. I refer to these approaches as constructivist, deconstructivist, and innateist, or alternatively, making, unmaking, and discovering Buddhahood. The constructivist approach suggests that one cultivates and reinforces the qualities and virtues of a Buddha through meditation, along with abandoning those contrary to it. Meditation is also used to help fashion and reinforce a distinctively Buddhist lifeworld. The second approach is the deconstructivist move prominent in some Mahāyāna literature. In this attitude, the fundamental insight of emptiness (śūnyatā), the idea that nothing has independent, permanent, or enduring self-existence (svabhāva), supersedes all else, and meditation is not about cultivating virtues, but about deconstructing fixed concepts, reifications, and views. The third paradigm is the “innateist” model, which asserts that all qualities of the Buddha are already present in everyone; therefore, there is no need to cultivate them. Several contemporary approaches to Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditation practice reflect these approaches as well as the tensions between them. These include meditation practices influenced by debates on the status of mental and emotional states in cognitive science, others influenced by a combination of Zen innateism and Romanticism, and innovative reinterpretations of the relationship between meditation and ethics by contemporary teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh.