Abstract
This chapter explores the theoretical and practical aspects of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism’s ethics of generosity from a philosophical point of view. Buddhism is a religion par excellence of strangification and generosity. After an introduction, I discuss some essential sources both from Indian and Chinese Buddhism. Then I develop the idea of strangification and ethic of generosity in Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, before I arrive at some words of conclusion.
On the theoretical side, I explore the ontological foundation of the ethics of generosity in The Awakening of Faith. This is one of the founding texts in the history of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism that offers an ontological foundation to Buddhist generosity. It does this by the affirmation of One Mind or the Mind of All Sentient Beings as the Ultimate Reality. However, it also sets certain limits to generosity by denying difference/otherness, and sees difference/otherness as merely a delusion. On the practical side, I discuss three types of gift, namely the gift of material goods, the gift of no fear and the gift of teaching Dharma, and more interestingly, the practice of huixiang 迴向 (turning one’s merit to many others) as discussed by Huiyuan in the entry “huixiang” of his Dasheng Yizhang (The Meaning of Mahayana Buddhism).
Some conclusive reflections are done to consider the Chinese Buddhist ethics of generosity in relation to the post-modern ethics of generosity to many others.
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Notes
- 1.
The term waitui 外推 (strangification) is a neologism used here to refer to the act of going from outside of one’s familiarity to reach strangers. The term “strangification” was first used by F. Wallner to serve as an epistemological strategy of interdisciplinary studies (Wallner 1992), after which it was modified by myself as waitui 外推 (strangification) and extended to cultural interaction and religious dialogue (Shen 1994, 1997, 2002). I discern three levels of waitui 外推 (strangification), linguistic, pragmatic and ontological. Concerning the developments of Buddhism in China in regard to its linguistic, pragmatic and ontological strangifications, see Shen 2003: 43–62.
- 2.
“I take refuge in [the Buddha] the greatly Compassionate One, the Saviour of the World, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, of most excellent deeds in all the ten directions; And in [the Dharma], the manifestation of his Essence, in Reality, the sea of Suchness (True Thusness), the boundless storehouse of excellences.”(Hakeda 1967: 23) In the following, I’ll translate zhengru 真如 as True Thusness, to replace Hakeda’s translation as Suchness.
- 3.
By linguistic waitui 外推 or strangification I mean the act by which one translates the language of one’s own philosophical/religious or cultural tradition into the language of or understandable to another tradition, to see whether it becomes understandable or absurd thereby. In the latter case, reflection and self-critique should be undertaken with regard to one’s own tradition rather than taking a self-defensive stance or using other more radical forms of apologetics. Although there is always some untranslatable residue or hard core of meaningfulness, commonly shared intelligibility would be enough to prove universalizability. If one can only talk of the meaningfulness of one’s philosophy/religion within one’s own cultural tradition, as some nationalist philosophers and scholars of religion would maintain, this is only proof of its own limit rather than its own merit.
- 4.
“After the passing away of the Tathagata, there were some who were able by their own power could listen extensively to others and to reach understanding; there were some who by their own power could listen to very little yet understand much; there were some who, without any mental power of their own, depended upon the extensive discourse of others to obtain understanding; and naturally there were some who looked upon the wordiness of extensive discourses as troublesome, and who sought after what was comprehensive, terse, and yet contained much meaning and then were able to understand it.” (Hakeda 1967: 26–27)
- 5.
This is a radical change in post-modern philosophy: instead of the Aristotelian tradition which takes metaphysics to be the first philosophy, post-modern thinkers such as Levinas and Derrida take ethics to be the first philosophy.
- 6.
Cf. Xuanzang 玄藏 1973.
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Shen, V. (2018). The Ethics of Generosity in Chinese Mahayana Buddhism: Theory and Practice. In: Wang, Y., Wawrytko, S. (eds) Dao Companion to Chinese Buddhist Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2939-3_3
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