A Buddhist Theory of Killing: A Philosophical Exposition 9789811924415, 9811924414

Table of contents :
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
1 General Introduction
1 The Purpose of the Book
2 Textual Studies and Philosophy: Difference and Complementarity
3 Structure of the Text
4 Summary and Textual Note
Part I Foundations: The Nature of the Problem
2 Text and Tradition: An Overview of Sources
1 The Nikāyas, Vinaya and Abhidhamma
2 Buddhaghosa and the Theravāda
3 Mahāyāna Criteria
3 Canonical Buddhist Discourse on Killing
1 The First Precept (Pāṇātipātā) in Its Typical Schema
2 Life, and Sentience; the Principle of Dukkha (PD)
3 Cetanā as Intention and Volition
4 The Buddhist Ethical Economy; the Principle of Kamma (PK)
4 Interpreting the Precept: Evaluative Criteria in the Theravāda
1 Framing the Precept: Transgression or Systematisation
2 A Buddhist Hermeneutics of Action
3 The Precept in Its Psychological Context
4 A Third Evaluative Criterion: The Principle of Quality (Guṇa) (PG)
5 The Buddhaghosan Criteria for Evaluation
6 Buddhaghosan Problematics
6.1 Semantic Implications
6.2 Normative Implications
7 The Human Killing of Animals
8 The Human Killing of Humans
5 Mahāyāna Exceptionalism and the Lethal Act
1 An Exception to the Precept: Doctrinal Context
2 The Principle of Wisdom (Prajñā) (PP)
3 Auspicious Violence in the Mahāyāna
4 Lethality in Religious Studies Discourse: A Modus Vivendi
5 Karmic Consequence and Ethical Discourse: A Pramāṇavāda View
6 Affect and Cognition: Unwholesome Consciousness, Hatred, Wrong View, and Delusion
1 Consciousness, Affect, and Cognition
1.1 Consciousness (Viññāṇa/citta)
1.2 Unwholesome Consciousnesses (Akusala-Cittāni)
2 Feeling (Vedanā) and Cognition of the Object of Consciousness
2.1 Affect and the Representation of the Object
2.2 Hatred (Dosa) and Habitual Cognition
3 Wrong View (Micchā-Diṭṭhi) as a Function of Cognitive Delusion
4 Delusion-Rooted Cittas (Mohamūlacittāni)
5 Wrong View and Aversion with Reference to Hatred-Rooted Consciousness
5.1 Corroboration in the Sarvāstivāda-Abhidharma: Mithyā-Dṛṣṭi as a Primary Cause
7 Buddhist Personhood and a Doxastic Rationale for Killing
1 Buddhist-Metaphysical Analysis of the Person
1.1 An Implicit Metaphysics of Value
1.2 The Non-intrinsic Value of Life
2 Descriptive Analysis of Nāmarūpa: The Five Aggregates
2.1 A Genetic Condition for Killing? Nāmarūpa as a Function of the 12 Links of Dependent Origination
3 Dependent Conditions: Functional Interactionism of Nāmarūpa
3.1 Making Sense of Killing: An Explanation from Interdependence
4 Selves Engaging Others: Agents as Actors and as Thinkers
4.1 Reification as a Global Badmaker for Intentional Killing
4.2 Two Claims About Killing as a Function of the Reified Self/Selves
4.3 The Cessation of Volition
Part II Constructions: The Nature of the Act
8 Critique of the Conventional: The Cessation of Volition and Buddhist Dualism of the Person
1 Introduction: Materialism, Mental Continuity, Volition
1.1 The Post-mortem State
1.2 Killing the Bearer of Volitions
1.3 Volitional Formations (Saṃskāras) as Mental Properties
2 Nāmarūpa and Trope-Dualism of the Person
3 A Causal Objection: An Account of the Non-cessation of Saṃskāras
3.1 Normative Considerations
4 Knowledge Acquisition and Buddhist-Telic Implications
5 A Causal-Axiological Objection
9 Constituting the Other: The Conventional Identity of Persons
1 From the Soteriological to the Mundane
2 Social-Cognitive Construction of the Person as Apt for Killing
3 Anthropological Conditions for the Conventional Social Constitution of the Person
4 The Place of Representation: Intentional Content in the Intersubjective Field of the Lethal Act
5 Four Intentional Groupings of Person as Object of the Act
11 Killing and Oblivion: The Obviation of Suffering
1 Introduction: Suffering and the Post-mortem State
1.1 Buddhism and the Consensus View
1.2 The Person as the Object of States of Suffering
2 Conscious Mental States and Events
2.1 Mental States as States of Suffering
2.2 The Buddhist Case for Post-mortem Mental States and the Freedom from Suffering
3 Buddhist-Philosophical Refutation of the Possibility of Oblivion
3.1 Post-mortem Oblivion, Cessation (Nirodhasamāpatti) and the Buddhist Understanding of Death
3.2 The Temporal-Causal Constitution of Mental States Approaching Death and the Termination of Suffering
3.3 Oblivion, Cessation and Nibbāna
4 Conclusion: Cessation of the Mental, and the Cessation of Suffering
12 Representational Persons: Identity as the Object of Killing
1 Introduction: The Ascription of Identity
1.1 Abstract Objects and Persons
1.2 Exploiting the Living Body
1.3 Co-ascriptive Asymmetry
2 Relativisation and the Reification of Identity
3 Valorising the Universal Over the Individual
3.1 What RK Intends: Social Power and Its Reconfiguration
3.2 Normative Reasons and a Buddhist Global Objection
3.3 A Kantian Caveat?
4 Buddhist Human Rights: The Dignity of Persons
4.1 Buddhist Human Rights: A Basis in Compassion
4.2 That Which is Violated in RK: Values, Rights, Relations
5 The Dichotomy Between RK and the Normative Buddhist Lifeworld
6 Conclusion: From the Conventionally True to the Merely Conventional
13 Conclusion: Buddhist Violence, Self-defence, and the End of Life
1 Generic Buddhist Violence: Descriptive and Normative
2 The Conventionalist Objection: Instrumental Efficacy
3 The Person as Imminent Lethal Threat: Killing in Self-defence
4 A Coda: Buddhist Ethics and the Soteriological Value of Life
Bibliography

Citation preview

Martin Kovan

A Buddhist Theory of Killing A Philosophical Exposition

A Buddhist Theory of Killing

Martin Kovan

A Buddhist Theory of Killing A Philosophical Exposition

Martin Kovan Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-981-19-2440-8 ISBN 978-981-19-2441-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Dedicated to my parents

Foreword

All tremble at violence, to all life is dear. Comparing (others) with oneself, one should not kill or cause to kill. Dhammapada Accordingly, the Captain Great Compassionate protected those 500 merchants and protected that person from going to the great hells, by deliberately stabbing and slaying that person who was a robber with a spear, with great compassion and skill in means… At that time, in that life, I [the Buddha] was none other than the Captain Great Compassionate. Have no second thought or doubt on this point. Up¯aya-kau´salya Sutra

Say you are a Buddhist—Sri Lankan, Tibetan, Japanese, Australian, or any other variety—who finds herself wondering about the morality of life-and-death issues: whether as a Buddhist you can kill animals for their flesh (or consume that flesh), support the death penalty for murderers, terminate a pregnancy, agree to euthanasia for a suffering relative, kill yourself in protest over oppression, kill the enemy if you are a soldier, or kill an armed menace if you are a police officer. You know that the first training precept for all Buddhists is ahim . s¯a (nonharm). Intending harm is considered the paradigmatic “unwholesome act” (aku´salakarmapatha). That seems straightforward enough. But surely there are instances where absolute pacifism is extreme, where a greater good, regrettably, demands some harm? You might scour translations of the canonical sources for a Buddhist position on particular circumstances and find little there to guide you. You might read or hear the discourses of modern Buddhist leaders such as the Dalai Lama who opine that lethal actions are sometimes justified, if only by enlightened persons in unusual circumstances. You understand that actions motivated by delusion, ill-will, or greed are unwholesome, but what about compassionate euthanasia, suicide and assisted suicide, abortion, self-defence, or counterterrorism, where these negative

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motivations seem to be absent? At the end of your search, you might be as uncertain as when you began. Recent scholarship has shown us that Buddhist cultures have often countenanced killing. Buddhism has been a religion in which monastics must follow a strict code of ethics, vowing to do no harm in their relationship with other humans, animals, and even plants; however, laypeople, beyond the vague instruction “do no harm”, have often rationalised some harmdoing, such as hunting, fishing, and the violence perpetrated by law enforcement and military personnel in defence of communities and nations. And monastics themselves, this scholarship has shown, have also sometimes excused harmdoing, calling for the violent subjugation of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Hindus, Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims, and Imperial Japan’s neighbours, to name just a few incidents from the past century. This book brings much-needed clarification to the Buddhist ethics of killing. What the various Buddhist traditions have lacked is a systematic approach—an ethic—to justify exceptions to the general rule of ahimsa. The existing historical or anthropological studies of Buddhist violence tell us what Buddhists have done and how they have rationalised their actions, but these accounts cannot provide the basis for such an ethic. Kovan rightly observes that for a Buddhist stance on killing to be coherent, it is necessary for us not only to re-construct, as best we can, the ethics of canonical Buddhism, but to engage in what he calls “constructive philosophy”. He asks what “plausible Buddhist reasoning” unites the “most morally and philosophically significant and prominently repeated” of past Buddhist ethical claims, and then subjects that reasoning to further analysis. Then, he thinks, it will be possible to “determine the truth and coherence of any given normative claim” made at a specific time and place. If this analysis does not in every case provide an answer to what a Buddhist should do, it does provide the essential considerations required for how a Buddhist agent should think about determining whether or not a lethal act is justified. This book thus provides the first truly sustained philosophical analysis of the Buddhist conception of killing in its various forms, including murder, manslaughter, suicide, euthanasia, capital punishment, and killing in the context of war and selfdefence. How, precisely, does the first precept and more general prescription against killing correlate to other foundational Buddhist principles such as duh.kha (unease), karma, and compassion? What is the relationship between “killing” and lesser forms of causing harm? What is the role of intention (cetan¯a)? How and why is killing a human worse than killing an animal, and what does “sentience” imply in a Buddhist understanding of killing? How do these principles cohere, if at all, with Buddhist understandings of the mind, the person, and the self—particularly the doctrines of non-self (an¯atman) and emptiness (´su¯ nyat¯a)? Indeed, the analysis goes further and provides an argued Buddhist account, a global theory, for why human beings find themselves in such a predicament of killing to start with.

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The moral issues involved in life-and-death decisions are thorny, to be sure, no matter what religious or secular ethic one relies upon. Kovan’s analysis will be a touchstone for Buddhist practitioners and scholars alike. Carlisle, USA Lewisburg, USA

Daniel Cozort James Mark Shields

Preface

During the latter stages of the first drafting of this text, cultural Buddhists in August– September 2017 committed the worst genocidal violence seen so far this century, in Rakhine State, Myanmar. Its agents were military and civilian, tacitly tolerated by the lay Buddhist population, and by many among the revered Buddhist clergy. One of its infamous members actively called for violence against the Muslim enemy. Footage circulated online of a saffron-robed monk beating a victim in a situation where murders appeared to have been committed, in the name of Buddhist ethnic sovereignty. Indeed, the “Buddhist” violence did not end in 2015–2017. In late 2021, as I write this Preface, the world has witnessed the military and civilian population of Myanmar descend into some of the worst barbarity the country has ever seen. Buddhist violence, needless to say, is not limited to beleaguered Myanmar; it endures in neighbouring Thailand, in Singapore, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka, and in vestigially Buddhist China. This is not to suggest that such resorts to violence are always unjustified, and indeed the civilian population of Myanmar willing properly democratic statehood might have little choice. But it does raise the question of where Buddhism belongs in the process, whether we are speaking of civil war or capital punishment. If these actors are nominally Buddhist, are they really Buddhist? What is a “real” Buddhist? Is there a form or sense of Buddhism that can conceivably, or even in practice, tolerate the kind of abysmal violence evident in these events? For some, it might seem so—or the question be at the least up for debate, especially following H.H. the Dalai Lama’s apparent exoneration, in May of 2011, of the state assassination of Osama bin Laden. In the years prior to the outbreaks of ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State, some Western religious studies and Buddhist Studies scholars were concerned to demonstrate the record of violence and killing in Buddhist history, and in some texts of religious and nationalist identity formation, often going back centuries, but extending to more recent times as well. Myanmar seemed only to be the most recent exemplar in that lengthy catalogue. I was myself in Myanmar at this time, meeting with ugyi (underground) prodemocracy activists, often former political prisoners, to learn more about the many lay and monastic activists who had been taken into police custody, often years xi

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before, and never seen again, many having perished from torture and years of mistreatment. Some, who did return, became personal friends. All were cultural Buddhists and publicly decried lethal violence. Yet, violence was overwhelmingly all around. Indeed, two years later, the aforementioned Burmese ethno-nationalist monk appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine as “the face of Buddhist terror”. Buddhist Studies to date has identified and contextualised many of the classical, modern, and contemporary Buddhist attitudes to violence, evident in a range of textual, historical, and ethnographic sources, as well as focused in some depth on specific domains of killing. Yet no such studies have approached the phenomenon of killing per se in a systematically philosophical form; this is unsurprising insofar as such disciplinary studies are not typically philosophical in intention. Similarly, killing has usually been conflated with non-lethal violence, despite their arguable moral incommensurability. The study of lethal violence in the context of Buddhist Ethics has in general approached the subject in similar, if more overtly normative, terms: as an object of textual analysis, of cultural anthropology, and of contemporary normative and applied ethics, focusing on familiar virtue ethical or consequentialist modes of evaluation. Again, the Buddhist ethics of killing has been subsumed under one or another mode, or combinations thereof, of descriptive ethnography or religious hermeneutics (e.g. in studies of abortion, warfare, altruistic suicide, self-immolation, animal slaughter, or death), of textual studies (with respect, e.g., to suicide, homicide, or euthanasia), or of applied ethics and bioethics (evident in considerations of genetic engineering, just war and counterterrorism, or animal rights, among others). Again, however, for reasons of their exclusive focus, these studies of killing do not usually conceive killing per se as an object of philosophical analysis, with respect to its metaphysical, phenomenological, psychological, and cognitive constitution. Indeed, this framing of the ethics of killing is largely true of studies outside the Buddhist Studies context, as well. Killing as a moral category of action is assumed, and its normative adjudication decided by virtue of various forms of moral calculus. While more systematic in nature, a basic lacuna of analysis obtains in both Buddhist and non-Buddhist studies of the ethics of killing. This study attempts to fill that lacuna, from the Buddhist-philosophical side of the equation, and in dialogue with relevant and prominent Western interlocutors. This is a particularly natural move for the Buddhist-philosophical orientation to take, for the reason that Buddhism is concerned perhaps most centrally with the relationship between the cognitive acquisition of the truth of how objects, including persons, exist, and the normative dimensions of action entailed by that truth acquisition. Buddhist philosophy, broadly conceived, and especially in its metaphysical, phenomenological and psychological modalities, can provide highly nuanced accounts of different cognitive and intentional contexts of killing, and thus adjudicate between the norms and evaluations appropriate to them. It is important though to be clear about what the methodological focus of this study is not. Firstly, this text is not a contribution to the discipline of textual studies which seek to understand what certain Buddhist thinkers or scribes have historically written, the contexts of their doing so, and the comparison of such texts with others

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of a relevantly different linguistic, cultural, or historical kind. I draw, repeatedly and with gratitude, on these primary textual studies, without which secondary and tertiary studies, of which this text is an example, would not be possible. Secondly, it is not a work in religious studies, which might in this case describe and analyse the contexts of lethal action committed by cultural Buddhists across time and space. At various points in the text, I discuss why I think a descriptive ethics of that kind is not probative, or commensurable with an ethics that rationally demonstrates by reasons and argument the justification of universal claims. I therefore reject the notion that descriptive ethics, however exhaustive its scope, functions discursively as a normative ethics, even though it is of prime importance for understanding what nominal Buddhists do, and why they do what they do. Finally, in laying a philosophical groundwork for a Buddhist ethics of killing, this study provides essential terms of argument in which that project could be theorised, though it is not an ethics, normative or applied, in the first instance, in every case: some domains of killing are not extensively engaged (or have been already in work by this author published elsewhere), for both practical and theoretical reasons (such as animal killing, discussed in Chap. 4). Important sites of such an ethics, such as those of abortion, just war, and other state-sanctioned forms of lethal force, require further analytic treatment. What then does this study uniquely propose to do? It seeks to answer two related questions, from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy, metaethics, and ethics. First, what is the act of intentional killing, beyond its definitional status as the act of taking life, and how does it arise? Second, why does Buddhism hold such acts to be wrong, and what constitutes wrongness? In engaging the first set of questions, by providing a descriptively causal account of the nature of killing, the second set can be more precisely answered. This is true in multiple senses: where it remains a truism that Buddhism strongly disapproves of committing intentional lethal acts in general, it is not clear how this disapproval pertains to different classes of such acts, and to how their normative status might and does vary, and so might be determined. This project of a greater refinement of analysis is central to the aims of this study: an unprecedented systematic account from first principles to argued conclusions, across the intentional spectrum of killing as such. This is pursued, initially, by engaging a representative synopsis of Buddhist claims about killing and its moral evaluation, evident throughout canonical Indian Buddhist texts, as a basis for their philosophical interrogation and possible appropriation to the contemporary context. The first half of the study, Foundations, provides an analysis of those claims in their original conceptual formulation. The second half, Constructions, wherein lies the properly theoretical task, continues that analysis in a systematic account of a full range of classes of intentional lethal action where these are construed as rationally justified. This centrally, but not exclusively, engages the domains of killing as (1) preventive, deterrent, and retributive punishment; (2) as a form of mercy-killing (including relevant cases of euthanasia, suicide and assisted suicide, and abortion); (3) as ideological-religious contestation (relevant to terrorism, religious and political violence, and ideological

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militarism among other forms of symbolically constituted action); and (4) as existential self-defence. Hewing both parts of the analysis together is their exclusive reliance on philosophical claims held across the range of Indian Buddhist schools (and often their extension in Indo-Tibetan and classical Chinese doctrine as well)—that is, through roughly the first millennium of the religion’s existence. In sum, the time appears to be apt for a study engaging the moral problem of killing, in the Buddhist context as outside it, from the basis of a foundational interrogation of the most primary and prominent claims of the tradition. If these are not in every case exhaustive, they are indubitably representative of the broadest and most-encompassing of Buddhist views on killing, and sufficient for the universal discourse of philosophy to proceed. This is a discourse that does not depend for its epistemic authority on the sum of testimony concerning empirical, historical, contingent events and circumstances, but rather on fundamental truth-claims about reality—that is, about persons, intentions, causality, action, cognition and affect, among other universal categories of existence—independent of those circumstances. In the rational analysis and extrapolation of those claims, the argument of the text demonstrates what can be concluded of the Buddhist record, by virtue of Buddhistphilosophical commitments and norms that most if not all Buddhists share. My hope is that, in apprehending the argument, Buddhist and non-Buddhist thinkers alike might be motivated to further the discussion of the Buddhist and even nonBuddhist ethics of violence into a much less violent future. More particularly, this would, I contend, require a greater clarification around what a commitment to Buddhist norms and philosophical theses actually means—and so too to what “being a Buddhist” means. May this work contribute to that end. Sydney, Australia October 2021

Martin Kovan

Acknowledgements

This work is indebted to the encouragement of two philosophers who in their depth and breadth of philosophical insight demonstrate the vigour and richness of contemporary Buddhist philosophy. Jay L. Garfield, as the supervisor of this text in its initial form as a doctoral dissertation, was tirelessly and selflessly committed to seeing the work brought to completion. Graham Priest, who braved a query from the Burmese borderlands, showed yet more courage in taking on a raw novice at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. That institution generously provided, and extended, a Melbourne Research Scholarship (MRS) during much of my period of doctoral candidacy. Roy Perrett also expertly assisted at the early stages of research. Damien Keown originally welcomed my ideas for a doctoral thesis under his supervision at Goldsmiths College in London, before my relocation to Australia precluded the possibility. I remain grateful to his foundational importance for Buddhist Ethics as an academic discipline, and his generosity in reaching out to and intellectually accommodating so wide a range of views, approaches, and cultural contexts, including my own, for its study in the online Journal of Buddhist Ethics. I am also grateful to Victor Forte as editor of that journal for permission to reproduce a paper published in 2019 (“Buddhism and Capital Punishment: A Revisitation”) that now appears, in revised form, as Chap. 10 of this book. In Australia, Wendi Adamek in April 2013 warmly hosted a lecture for the Australasian Association of Buddhist Studies (AABS) at Sydney University, that comprised some of the early material of this book, as had a previous presentation at the AABS/AASR (Australian Association for the Study of Religion) conference in late 2012. An exchange scholarship programme at the University of Melbourne facilitated a semester of seminar study with Jay Garfield at N.U.S. in Singapore in 2014. John Whalen-Bridge of the English Department at the same institution invited my participation in a round-table discussion on Tibetan self-immolation and Buddhist ethics. Giuliano Giustarini was instrumental in organising a semester scholar’s residency at Mahidol University in Bangkok for the second half of 2014. Kieko Obuse hosted a seminar given at that university’s College of Religious Studies, where Warren Todd xv

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was a valued interlocutor. André van der Braak provided congenial academic refuge at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in Spring 2016. Daniel Cozort and James Mark Shields generously invited some of the auxiliary research for this text to their coedited Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics for Oxford University Press (2018) and have graced this book with its Foreword, for which I warmly thank them. Dr. Toby Mendelson and Dr. Ruth Fitzpatrick provided invaluable philosophical, academic, and moral comradeship, and Dr. Sebastian Job has further manifested the authentically universal kaly¯an.amitra. The research herein, and its writing, was substantially aided by the greatly valued support and generosity of my mother Dr. Flis Andreasen, and of friends between Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Bristol, and Prague, including the late Dr. Gavin Greenoak, Jitka Prokop, Alicia Sureenawathi, Dimitri Vouros, and Ana Panadero. My gratitude is imbued in the following pages, which would have remained uncompleted without their and many others’ patience, generosity, and compassion.

Contents

1

General Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Purpose of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Textual Studies and Philosophy: Difference and Complementarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Structure of the Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Summary and Textual Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part I

1 1 5 7 9

Foundations: The Nature of the Problem

2

Text and Tradition: An Overview of Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Nik¯ayas, Vinaya and Abhidhamma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Buddhaghosa and the Therav¯ada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Mah¯ay¯ana Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

13 16 19 20

3

Canonical Buddhist Discourse on Killing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The First Precept (P¯an.a¯ tip¯at¯a) in Its Typical Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Life, and Sentience; the Principle of Dukkha (PD) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Cetan¯a as Intention and Volition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Buddhist Ethical Economy; the Principle of Kamma (PK) . . . . .

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4

Interpreting the Precept: Evaluative Criteria in the Therav¯ada . . . . 1 Framing the Precept: Transgression or Systematisation . . . . . . . . . . . 2 A Buddhist Hermeneutics of Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Precept in Its Psychological Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 A Third Evaluative Criterion: The Principle of Quality (Gun.a) (PG) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Buddhaghosan Criteria for Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Buddhaghosan Problematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Semantic Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Normative Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 The Human Killing of Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 The Human Killing of Humans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45 45 50 52 56 58 60 60 63 64 66

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Contents

Mah¯ay¯ana Exceptionalism and the Lethal Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 An Exception to the Precept: Doctrinal Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Principle of Wisdom (Prajñ¯a) (PP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Auspicious Violence in the Mah¯ay¯ana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Lethality in Religious Studies Discourse: A Modus Vivendi . . . . . . . 5 Karmic Consequence and Ethical Discourse: A Pram¯an.av¯ada View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 69 73 74 76 81

6

Affect and Cognition: Unwholesome Consciousness, Hatred, Wrong View, and Delusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 1 Consciousness, Affect, and Cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 1.1 Consciousness (Viññ¯an.a/citta) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 1.2 Unwholesome Consciousnesses (Akusala-Citt¯ani) . . . . . . . . . . 90 2 Feeling (Vedan¯a) and Cognition of the Object of Consciousness . . . 94 2.1 Affect and the Representation of the Object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 2.2 Hatred (Dosa) and Habitual Cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 3 Wrong View (Micch¯a-Dit..thi) as a Function of Cognitive Delusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 4 Delusion-Rooted Cittas (Moham¯ulacitt¯ani) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 5 Wrong View and Aversion with Reference to Hatred-Rooted Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 5.1 Corroboration in the Sarv¯astiv¯ada-Abhidharma: Mithy¯a-Dr.s..ti as a Primary Cause . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

7

Buddhist Personhood and a Doxastic Rationale for Killing . . . . . . . . 1 Buddhist-Metaphysical Analysis of the Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 An Implicit Metaphysics of Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 The Non-intrinsic Value of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Descriptive Analysis of N¯amar¯upa: The Five Aggregates . . . . . . . . . 2.1 A Genetic Condition for Killing? N¯amar¯upa as a Function of the 12 Links of Dependent Origination . . . . . . 3 Dependent Conditions: Functional Interactionism of N¯amar¯upa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Making Sense of Killing: An Explanation from Interdependence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Selves Engaging Others: Agents as Actors and as Thinkers . . . . . . . . 4.1 Reification as a Global Badmaker for Intentional Killing . . . . . 4.2 Two Claims About Killing as a Function of the Reified Self/Selves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 The Cessation of Volition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

107 107 108 111 114 118 121 124 128 128 130 131

Contents

xix

Part II Constructions: The Nature of the Act 8

9

Critique of the Conventional: The Cessation of Volition and Buddhist Dualism of the Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction: Materialism, Mental Continuity, Volition . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 The Post-mortem State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Killing the Bearer of Volitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Volitional Formations (Sam . sk¯aras) as Mental Properties . . . . . 2 N¯amar¯upa and Trope-Dualism of the Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 A Causal Objection: An Account of the Non-cessation of Sam . sk¯aras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Normative Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Knowledge Acquisition and Buddhist-Telic Implications . . . . . . . . . . 5 A Causal-Axiological Objection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135 135 138 140 141 142 145 149 150 153

Constituting the Other: The Conventional Identity of Persons . . . . . 1 From the Soteriological to the Mundane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Social-Cognitive Construction of the Person as Apt for Killing . . . . 3 Anthropological Conditions for the Conventional Social Constitution of the Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Place of Representation: Intentional Content in the Intersubjective Field of the Lethal Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Four Intentional Groupings of Person as Object of the Act . . . . . . . .

155 155 157

10 Persons as the Objects of Lethal Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 The Legal Sanction of State Execution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Punishment as Prevention: “Reformative” and “Obstructive” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Prevention as Deterrence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Lethal Punishment as Retribution: A Neo-Kantian Defence . . . . . . . 3 A Buddhist Contextualization of Lethal Retributivism . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Returning Suffering for Suffering: The Contravention of PD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 That Suffering Ought to Be Returned: The Contravention of PK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Kantian Division of the Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Lethal Intention and the Infliction of Harm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Civilising Norms: Restorative Justice and Aretaic Cultivation . . . . .

165 165 167

11 Killing and Oblivion: The Obviation of Suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction: Suffering and the Post-mortem State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Buddhism and the Consensus View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 The Person as the Object of States of Suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Conscious Mental States and Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Mental States as States of Suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

189 189 193 194 195 195

158 160 163

168 168 170 172 173 176 180 182 185

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Contents

2.2 The Buddhist Case for Post-mortem Mental States and the Freedom from Suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Buddhist-Philosophical Refutation of the Possibility of Oblivion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Post-mortem Oblivion, Cessation (Nirodhasam¯apatti) and the Buddhist Understanding of Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Temporal-Causal Constitution of Mental States Approaching Death and the Termination of Suffering . . . . . . . . 3.3 Oblivion, Cessation and Nibb¯ana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Conclusion: Cessation of the Mental, and the Cessation of Suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Representational Persons: Identity as the Object of Killing . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction: The Ascription of Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Abstract Objects and Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Exploiting the Living Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Co-ascriptive Asymmetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Relativisation and the Reification of Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Valorising the Universal Over the Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 What RK Intends: Social Power and Its Reconfiguration . . . . . 3.2 Normative Reasons and a Buddhist Global Objection . . . . . . . . 3.3 A Kantian Caveat? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Buddhist Human Rights: The Dignity of Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Buddhist Human Rights: A Basis in Compassion . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 That Which is Violated in RK: Values, Rights, Relations . . . . . 5 The Dichotomy Between RK and the Normative Buddhist Lifeworld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusion: From the Conventionally True to the Merely Conventional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Conclusion: Buddhist Violence, Self-defence, and the End of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Generic Buddhist Violence: Descriptive and Normative . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Conventionalist Objection: Instrumental Efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Person as Imminent Lethal Threat: Killing in Self-defence . . . . 4 A Coda: Buddhist Ethics and the Soteriological Value of Life . . . . .

196 198 198 201 203 205 207 207 209 210 211 212 215 215 217 217 220 223 224 227 230 233 233 236 237 240

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

Abbreviations

AKBh AN Asl. Dhp. Dhs. Dhs-a. DN It-a. Khp-a. Miln. MMK MN MN-a. Mp. M-t. Pat.is-a. PV PVSV SN Sn. Sp. Spk. Sv. Thag. Ud. Ud-a. Uss. Vibh.

Abhidharmako´sa-bh¯as.yam A˙nguttaranik¯aya Atthas¯alin¯ı (Dhammasa˙ngan.¯ı-at..thakath¯a) Dhammapada Dhammasa˙ngan.i Dhammasa˙ngan.i-at..thakath¯a D¯ıghanik¯aya Itivuttaka-at..thakath¯a Khuddakap¯a.tha-at..thakath¯a Milindapañho M¯ulamadhyamakak¯arik¯a Majjhimanik¯aya Majjhima-nik¯aya-at..thakath¯a (Papañcasudani) Manorathap¯uran.¯ı (A˙nguttaranik¯aya-at..thakath¯a) Papañcasudani-t.ika Pat.isambhid¯amagga-at..thakath¯a Pram¯an.av¯arttika Svavr.tti Sam . yutta-nik¯aya Sutta-nip¯ata Samantap¯as¯adik¯a S¯aratthappak¯asin¯ı Suma˙ngala-vil¯asin¯ı (D¯ıghanik¯aya-at..thakath¯a) Therag¯ath¯a Ud¯ana Ud¯ana-at..thakath¯a Up¯asaka-´s¯ıla S¯utra Vibha˙nga

xxi

xxii

Vin. Vin-Pat. Vism. Vism-t.

Abbreviations

Vinaya Pitaka Vinaya P¯atimokkha Visuddhimagga Visuddhimagat.¯ık¯a (Paramatthamañj¯us¯a)

Chapter 1

General Introduction

Abstract This chapter, a general introduction to the book as a whole, provides a broad summary of its aims, methodology and structure. Firstly, it considers its purpose in engaging the question of the Buddhist prohibition of killing, with respect to existing secondary literature (provided in some detail), and how that question is generally contextualised within existing studies. Secondly, in describing the methodology developed in the text, it highlights the distinction between it and preceding general or area-specific studies of the subject, and explains the sense in which its own philosophical focus has not yet been attempted, and what it adds in terms of a new level of systematisation and overall conceptual enquiry to existing studies. It engages the senses of the difference and complementarity between textual and religious studies approaches in Buddhist hermeneutics, and the philosophically and conceptually driven approach of the book. Thirdly, it provides a broad overview of the structure and content of the book, before, fourthly and finally, summarising its essential aims and noting terminological conventions in use throughout the text. Keywords Buddhist ethics of killing · Buddhist violence · Buddhist hermeneutics · Philosophy of lethality

1 The Purpose of the Book This book addresses the question of why, in Buddhist thought, intentional killing is held to be fundamentally wrong. Buddhism’s first precept (P. p¯an.a¯ tip¯at¯a; Skt. pr¯an.a¯ tip¯atah.) does not suggest killing is only in most cases wrong, or interpretable otherwise, or dependent on historical-cultural conditions. It asserts that intentional killing is to be universally rejected by Buddhists, inasmuch as to be Buddhist requires at the least upholding the five precepts (pañca´s¯ıla) and general injunction to non1 harm (ahim . s¯a) that pervades the Buddhist canon, the eightfold path, and indeed the religion across its diverse doctrinal and historical contexts (Harris 1994; Harvey 2000, 239–85).

1

See for example, SN IV 308-9; SN I 183; Dhp. 201. Many other such examples will be thematized in Chap. 3, and passim. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_1

1

2

1 General Introduction

If it is uncontroversially true that Buddhist ethics unequivocally prohibits killing, the comparatively rare exceptions to this prohibition generally pertain to the soteriology of Mah¯ay¯ana bodhisattva ethics rather than that of the unenlightened worldling (P. puthujjana Skt. pr.thagjana), or even the Buddhist layman (upas¯aka) and laywoman (up¯asik¯a). I address this contrast in greater philosophical detail throughout this book (but particularly in Part I and Chap. 9). Early Buddhist sources in both P¯ali and Sanskrit texts also describe a few rare examples of the Buddha’s apparent exoneration of suicide committed by enlightened Buddhist practitioners, or arhats, in particular those who are incurably ill and have no further purpose in living.2 In the contemporary period, also, a number of Buddhist studies scholars and Buddhist ethics theorists (Perrett 1996, 2000; Jenkins 2010/2011; Keown 2014, 2016, 2021; Jerryson 2016; Barnhart 2018) theorise permissible killing in some cases, or even more generally, based on textual hermeneutics but also on grounds independent of canonical and historical precedents. While the prohibition against killing is recognised as the normative Buddhist position, it appears secondary in these cases to the more realistic human contingencies of, for example, negotiating intolerable suffering, unwanted pregnancy, defensive and just war, counter-terroristic combat, legitimate lethal self-defence, and so on. Given this fairly broad spectrum of contexts for conceivably justified killing, the Buddhist ethics of killing, if not its religious hermeneutics, comes to appear not so dissimilar to a secular ethics of permissible lethality. Significant secondary scholarship tends generally to argue for or against these cases in much the same conceptual register as non-Buddhist ethical theory does, if with some Buddhist qualifications (for example in Keown 2001, 2005, 2014; Schlieter 2014; Perrett 2000), or in the more descriptive terms of cultural anthropology and the sociology of lethal practices in Buddhist societies more generally (Florida 2000; Keown 1998; Perret 1996; LaFleur 1992). Moreover, some Buddhists themselves, including monastic exemplars of traditional doctrinal formation, promulgate apparent justifications for killing in serving religious, political, ethnocentric or ideological purposes (Bartholomeusz 2002; Deegalle 2006, Jerryson and Juergensmeyer 2010; Kawanami 2016; Tikhonov and Brekke 2012). This issue is becoming more than a pressing one in contemporary Buddhist polities, as we see it played out to tragic effect in recent South Asian history. Buddhists have in recent years been guilty of the most heinous and cruel acts of killing it is possible to conceive, most obviously in Myanmar, but not many decades earlier in Sri Lanka. How are these and other lethal acts that may be religiously motivated to be understood from a Buddhist perspective, beyond being judged, rightly but facilely, as impermissible and so morally regrettable? Addressing this question philosophically is a central task, among others, of this book.

2

I have discussed the P¯ali canonical and related early Buddhist context for suicide, and its Mah¯ay¯ana correspondences in altruistic suicide, most recently in Kovan (2018). Further references for research in Buddhist suicide are given below.

1 The Purpose of the Book

3

There is now a rich scholarly background upon which such an enquiry can be foregrounded. Most broadly, a range of cultural-anthropological, historical, and religious studies of Buddhism and violence represent a burgeoning academic industry (see Bond 2009; King 2009; Jerryson and Juergensmeyer 2010; Jerryson 2011, 2013, 2016, 2018a, b; Nelson 2009; Zimmerman 2006; Deegalle 2006; Tikhonov and Brekke 2013; Kawanami 2016). Secondary literature in Buddhist Studies has also grown in response to empirical and textual research regarding specific classes of killing, particularly in studies of Buddhism and abortion, euthanasia and suicide, to which might be recently added capital punishment and just war, for which there is now a varied literature (see Keown 1996a, 1998, 1998–1999, 2001, 2005, 2014, 2016, 2018a, 2021; Jerryson 2013, 2016; Barnhart 2018; Koike 2006; Florida 2000; Hayes 1994; LaFleur 1992; Ratanakul 1988, 2000, 2009; Perrett 1992, 1996, 2000; Delhey 2006, 2009; An¯alayo 2010, 2011, 2014; Schmithausen 1999; van Oosterwijk 2019; Kovan 2009, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019). This is not yet to mention scholarship detailing violent or lethal action in Buddhist Tantric tradition (Broido 1993; Gray 2007; Dalton 2011), medieval Chinese Buddhist religious suicide (Benn 2007), or the religious, political and ethical dimensions of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist self-immolation (Kovan 2014, 2018; Davis 2016). Last, but not in any sense least, there is an important new theoretical focus on the killing of animals and animal rights (Stewart 2014, 2015; Waldau 2000, 2018); as I explain in Chap. 4 this area of enquiry entails conceptual and ethical problemata distinct from intrahuman lethality and so is conceived here as analytically separable from the prior domains, but no less significant than those. Some aspects of the area-specific literature overlap with theoretical issues raised in Buddhist bioethics in general, and on this common ground important dimensions of the Buddhist ethics of killing have received attention in respect to both textual and normative analysis. Keown’s (2001, 2005) extensive work in bioethics, and texts by Harvey (2000) and Tsomo (2006) are notable, along with variedly-focussed individual monographs and papers on textual and theoretical questions of killing and its justification (Schlieter 2014; Pandita 2014; Jerryson 2016; Jenkins 2010, 2010/2011; Gethin 2004a; Keown 2016; Ratanakul 2004). For the good reason of its thematic focus, however, this pioneering work in Buddhist studies and Buddhist ethics is not systematic across a range of disparate areas in the ethics of killing. This leaves open theoretical problems of a more directly philosophical nature that apply to any and all of its forms. Most obviously, if all lethal acts are by definition just acts of taking life, and the Buddhist prohibition on taking life tells us they are thereby wrong, accepting (or indeed denying) the impermissibility of killing does not provide the systematic means to differentiate between such acts as constitutively distinct, and why some may be more or less wrong than others. Obviously killing may, by taking life, achieve many varied goals and while always normatively problematic many argue that its negative valence may be mitigated by such factors as intention or compassionate motive, or the comparative grounds of positive benefit, the amelioration of a worse suffering, the obviation of other forms of violence, and so on. In the Buddhist context, too, the rationales and normative status of acts are in general assessed by virtue of their valenced intentions (cetan¯a) giving

4

1 General Introduction

rise to morally-laden action (kamma) and probable consequences (vip¯aka)—these three related categories summarising much of the conceptual ground for classical and modern Buddhist ethics, and confirming more recent virtue-ethical and consequentialist models for its normative theorisation (see for example Keown 1992 and Goodman 2009, respectively). But if we seek to understand why some among other lethal acts conceivably aren’t always wrong, if true, this may not only be due to contingent factors such as intentions or their consequences. For example, one could hold, on the one hand, that euthanasia is more or less wrong by virtue of the intention behind, or perhaps the object of, its commission, or on the other hand because of something about it that intrinsically differentiates it normatively from otherwise similar classes of killing, such as homicide. In this latter case, moral reasoning would not rely wholly on tokenevaluations of contingent and subjective conditions (and epistemic imponderables such as discrete intentions), significant as these may be, but more fundamentally on type-evaluations of the essential and objective conditions of possibility for such acts to occur at all. Neither the primary literature nor secondary scholarship on the Buddhist ethics of killing articulates a Buddhist-philosophical theorisation of killing per se, in its metaphysical, ontological, cognitive, psychological and phenomenological dimensions. However, when we begin to theorise killing in these terms, the very broad spectrum of classes of killing becomes more precisely differentiated beyond merely thematic differences. Instead of killing being conceived in the first instance through a normative lens (whether good or bad, permissible or impermissible) with respect to extrinsic moral determinants, it is conceptually re-framed by understanding its intrinsic cognitive provenance. The analytic focus then turns to what moral agents knowingly take themselves to achieve in engaging any particular lethal act, as a type or class of more or less rational act (and thence as a more or less rational token of that class). The rationales and normative status of lethal acts can then be evaluated not merely by the moral calculus of their putatively valenced intentions or possible consequences, but more objectively through understanding their intentional constitution with regard to the fundamental ontology of the person (as object) and the agent (as subject) in the metaphysical context of co-arising interdependence (P. pat.iccasamupp¯ada Skt. prat¯ıtyasamutp¯ada) in which such acts are undertaken. When we have those analytic means for differentiating the intentional and cognitive structures of different types (and thence tokens) of acts, then we can also theorise different lethal acts in a much more fine-grained manner. In assessing the relations between the cognition and phenomenology giving rise to killing, and the real effects that do or do not arise therefrom, we can gauge whether the variously justified lethal projects are rationally coherent and so to that degree defensible. It is to provide such analyses that Part II of the text engages in-depth the cognitive preconditions for and rational status of the major intentional classes of killing, a hitherto unprecedented philosophical project in Buddhist ethics and philosophy.

2 Textual Studies and Philosophy: Difference and Complementarity

5

2 Textual Studies and Philosophy: Difference and Complementarity In addressing the general question of why the various Buddhist traditions uphold the first precept prohibiting killing (and all Buddhist doctrinal schools do), two important findings emerge. These have been crucial in determining the methodological imperatives I have followed, above all in Part I, in this book. (1)

The first finding is that on consulting the canonical Buddhist corpus, and its relevant recensions, in search of an explanation for the prohibition, no philosophically robust account is to be found. The P¯ali canonical sources (Suttanta, Vinaya and Abhidhamma) clearly identify that lethal acts are prohibited, and provide some evaluative criteria for how they are to be judged and punished. They do not explain why the many and varied lethal acts are wrong—apart of course from the fact that they are all acts of harm that contravene the first precept.

Similarly, no single major Buddhist school of doctrine provides an exhaustive account of intentional lethality, even though texts of different schools or vehicles (above all the Therav¯ada, Sarv¯astiv¯ada or Indian Mah¯ay¯ana) do variously include significant comment that could be interpreted as potentially, if partially, constitutive of such an account.3 Hence, the theorist of killing in Buddhism must consult a wide range of primary sources for relevant Buddhist claims contributing to a potential, and plausible, explanation. Finally, the statements about killing by such individual thinkers as Buddhaghosa, Vasubandhu and N¯ag¯arjuna are not always consistent with one another. To contextualise the possible badmakers (those reasons which make such acts wrong) of different classes of killing, we must also consider premises these and other Buddhist thinkers employ in their philosophical and ethical reasoning more generally. In this way, the contemporary interpreter of Buddhist philosophy can engage the same rational norms and premises, values and desiderata, which the intellectual traditions through these thinkers and their writings abundantly codify. Indeed, there is no other discursive means to philosophically engage them; (I put to one side, without denying its psychological and cognitive import, the kind of intuitive knowledge involved in meditative practice). (2)

3

The second finding, and perhaps more significant for the present context—and even when the contemporary theorist has engaged these central figures and the philosophical traditions they represent—is that it is not possible to identify Buddhist positions regarding all contemporary ethical issues of intentional killing, especially considering the very wide range of classes of lethal action as such. The aforementioned Buddhist thinkers do not provide argued accounts of, for example, religiously-inspired killing, or counter-terrorism, or even some forms of mercy-killing.

Damien Keown (in 2005, 2017) has frequently made a similar, more general point with regard to the absence of an explicit normative theory of Buddhist ethics.

6

1 General Introduction

Until a hypothetical classical Buddhist treatise on the ethics of killing is unearthed, we must rely on primary textual scholarship, and judicious reasoning, respecting the extant sources and deriving what we reasonably can from them. Moreover, even should such a treatise be discovered, it is not at all certain that what, for example, a sixth-century Buddhist thinker might assert is straightforwardly germane to the context and ethical questions of our own time. (Indeed, we run into this problematic with regard to Buddhaghosa, who provides one of the more substantial commentarial accounts to which we can refer.) Hence, we are driven back on our own capacity to engage not merely a wouldbe reconstructive ethics from the Buddhist claims to which we can reliably turn (such as those repeated through the Suttanta and Vinaya and their commentaries); rather, we are necessarily compelled to engage in constructive philosophy as such, grounded explicitly on as much of the classical corpus available to us, its subsequent commentaries, primary textual scholarship concerning both of these, up to date secondary scholarship, and on robust standards of philosophical and ethical reasoning. Constructive philosophy in the context of Buddhist ethics is thus not merely a hermeneutical option; it is an intellectual necessity. In what follows I recognise that necessity and proceed, with caution and constant reference to textual precedent, accordingly. To repeat, this project cannot be undertaken by further interpretation of what classical or commentarial sources may have said (but generally didn’t) concerning the analysis of killing, because this was not the philosophical task Buddhaghosa, Vasubandhu or N¯ag¯arjuna, among others, explicitly undertook, even though they and others might make more or less tantalising if isolated statement, usually of a metaphysical nature. Taken as a whole, these disparate statements on killing, conceptually embedded in distinct metaphysical doctrines, do not amount to a fully-fledged theory. The reasons should now be clear for why this study is primarily a philosophical exposition, rather than a work of textual scholarship. In order fully to engage the constructive project just described, the discursive focus must be on argument which seeks to determine the truth and coherence of any given normative claim in any given ethical context. Elucidating the claims of a single doctrinal school, or comparing canonical or other relevant texts between schools, allows only for the clarity of knowing what such texts and thinkers have said, not whether their claims are comprehensible or cogent for a succeeding era (again, Buddhaghosa is a case in point). These sources need not be exhaustive, though they must be representative. This is because a collection of relevant statements, however extensive, does not in itself provide for a coherent explanation, if there is one, of what conceptually connects them, or even why seeking such connections would be important for building a philosophical theory. We are concerned not with how many, of how varied a cultural context, of such Buddhist claims can be amassed of all such possible claims, but rather with what plausible Buddhist reasoning unites (or indeed disunites) the most morally and philosophically significant and prominently repeated of those claims. In this way we have a fair chance of representing how prominent Buddhist thinkers across a millennium generally thought about killing, and also of trying to account

3 Structure of the Text

7

for why at best their claims are mutually coherent. We will see in Part I that this hermeneutic task is fruitfully congruent, in large part, with the philosophical task of analysing what such claims mean, and of how they respond to and reflect other Buddhist norms and values. With that provisional knowledge, we are then better positioned to understand whether and how they sustain such meaning into our own historical period.

3 Structure of the Text Because this study asks why Buddhist traditions prohibit killing, it must focus on the philosophical project described above. But, as noted, no single Buddhist source or school provides an exhaustive or unequivocal set of relevant statements; we must therefore seek these across a reasonably wide range of sources. Hence, this study is necessarily synoptic and not exhaustive in its range of textual reference, the discourse guided primarily by a conceptual rather than hermeneutic analysis, even where the latter remains foundational (in Part I) as primary source-material for the philosophical task (of Part II). The descriptive task of identifying just what the relevant Buddhist claims concerning the question are, across time and textual tradition, is taken up in Part I: Foundations. After surveying the nature of the problem of killing in Buddhism, its Introduction, as Chapter 2, discusses the kind and range of canonical sources that have been consulted, initially, in the Nik¯ayas, Vinaya and Abhidhamma of the P¯ali Canon, and later in various texts of the Indian Mah¯ay¯ana. Chapter 3 surveys the foundational norms relevant to the evaluation of killing evident across the Suttanta and Vinaya, focussing on guiding norms for the alleviation of suffering (dukkha), by means of the cultivation of beneficial consequences in skilful action (kusala kamma), along with a wide range of determining terms and their conceptual relations. The Suttas provide exhortatory guidance concerning prudential action, in contrast to the harmfulness of lethal action and its always negative consequences. Similarly, the Vinaya describes kinds and degrees of punishment of monastics, for lethal acts, with respect to their membership in the Sangha. However, these accounts do not provide robust philosophical explanation for the normative status of such claims. The analyses of Chap. 4, investigating the more informative but still fragmentary claims in Buddhaghosa’s Therav¯ada account, seek to deepen this explanation. They consider how the injunction of the first precept, differences between animal and human objects of killing, and central philosophical and normative terms, especially that of ‘qualitative or virtuous’ (gun.a) properties, invoked by Buddhaghosa are undergirded by their metaphysical and soteriological contexts, without the apprehension of which they are comparatively ungrounded. To do justice to the Buddhist record on killing we must include in any theoretical explanation those textual cases—of arhat and bodhisattva suicide in the Therav¯ada and (Chinese) Mah¯ay¯ana, and of bodhisattvas as lethal agents in the Indian Mah¯ay¯ana—that appear to valorise intentional killing, in those highly specific

8

1 General Introduction

contexts. This moral exceptionalism coheres around a valorisation of transcendental wisdom (prajñ¯a) characteristic of such moral agents in the best case. Again, not every Mah¯ay¯ana phenomenon of empirical killing—such as that in evidence in some schools and more recent history of Zen—is addressed, even where the philosophical grounds for some of those phenomena might be engaged. Similarly, not every textual case of killing in every Mah¯ay¯ana Buddhist context is considered. Rather, Chap. 5 considers a range of representative Indian Mah¯ay¯ana accounts, juxtaposed to the earlier accounts already surveyed. Doing so entails considering how these accounts are underwritten by universal claims of Buddhist psychology relevant to killing, evident in the P¯ali Abhidhamma, including in its later commentarial contexts, and largely reiterated, with some noteworthy variation, in the Sanskrit Abhidharma. Chapter 6 thus investigates how according to these intellectual traditions affective valences are constitutive of the moral evaluation of killing. Allied to this enquiry is one that assesses to what degree properly cognitive dimensions of killing can also be understood to contribute to the Abhidhammic moral evaluation of killing. This introduces the dimension of the rational justification of killing and its putative instantiation in Buddhist-ethical precedent and its possible contemporary appropriation. Chapters 7 and 8 engage a philosophical transition between the broader textual record on killing surveyed in Part I, and a focus on determinate classes of persons as the objects of killing examined in the successive chapters of Part II. Chapter 7 provides a Buddhist-metaphysical account of the person, and a general doxastic account of killing, which Chap. 8 then dialectically re-considers with respect to theoretical issues that emerge from the prior account. These concern in particular psychophysical constitution and causation, volition and its potential cessation, and the soteric dimensions of kamma/karman ostensibly determining rebirth. As these concerns pertain to all possible persons, on any Buddhist account, their investigation follows the broader textual survey but precedes the consideration of specifically differentiated classes of persons relevant to intentional killing. Part II of the book, Constructions, turns to the task of engaging the findings and conclusions of Part I in a constructive philosophical project, with constant reference to the doctrinal premises of relevant Buddhist schools. Chapter 8 focusses on the tropedualistic nature of the person that is in every case the object of putatively justified intrahuman killing, in this case where it pertains to the cessation of volition. This metaphysical and soteriological context is considered in further depth in Chap. 9, with respect to more this-worldly or mundane conceptions of personhood, preparatory to the further analyses of Part II. What then are the fundamental intentional classes of killing, analyses of which form the body of Part II? Obviously, a vast range of reasons are brought to bear on killing (including potential non-reasons, or purely irrational killing, such as that evidenced in pathological psychiatric conditions) by its many agents. On consideration, however, these can for analytic purposes be grouped under four main headings, each of which forms a distinct basis for discussion as a chapter of Part II. Again, some contemporary Buddhist theorists, and some cultural Buddhists, explicitly hold, or have held, that: (1) lethal punishment is permissible or justified in

4 Summary and Textual Note

9

some criminal cases4 ; (2) some cases of incurable illness, or undesired, unintended or clinically unfortunate pregnancies, or states of intolerable suffering in general, might justify the taking of life (Perret 1996, 2000; Barnhart 2018); (3) the killing of specified others can in theory, and sometimes in practice, be justified to defensively serve national security goals (Keown 2016, 2021; Gyatso 2001; Jerryson 2016; Jenkins 2010); and (4) that in circumstances of unprovoked attack, lethal self-defence could in theory be a justified response (Keown 2014, 2016; Gyatso 2001). Successive chapters of Part II provide philosophical explanation for why in the first instance each of these normative positions fails a properly Buddhist interrogation, on the basis of premises that represent an uncontroversial consensus of Buddhist views on sentient beings, affect, justified cognition and belief, the metaphysical status of selves, persons, abstract identities, consciousness, ideation, and much else entailed in the analysis of lethal acts. The rational cogency as well as causal efficacy of killing, vis-à-vis its specific intentions, is explicitly shown to be mistaken. Demonstrating this mistakenness is the analytic burden of Part II, and it can only be demonstrated by virtue of analytically distinguishing the intentional complex by which each class of killing is mentally constituted. I will argue that Buddhistethical theorisation that argues on Buddhist grounds for a norm of justified killing is misguided. Even in those domains where the case for justified killing seems strongest (as in some cases of abortion or euthanasia), the argumentation of Part II demonstrates that, at least in the Buddhist case and in the first instance, they fail robust justification. As noted above, however, this conclusion does not mean that this study intends to be an exercise in applied-ethical theory. Rather, it should be clear that it is an exercise in the fundamental Buddhist metaphysics, ontology and phenomenology of intentional killing per se. Its focus lies in interrogating intentional cognition as a causal basis for lethal acts, rather than disputing one or other existing justification for them, thereby explaining why a Buddhist might hold the prohibition against intentional killing to be indefeasible. Throughout the course of Part II, I demonstrate how, in each major domain of rationalised killing, this might be understood to be so.

4 Summary and Textual Note With this philosophical groundwork in place, it might then be possible to reframe the Buddhist-ethical context in such a way as to take into account fundamental Buddhist concerns around the acquisition of rational insight into the unmistaken nature of persons, selves, and action, intention as cause, and its effects and moral consequences. In that event, a would-be Buddhist ethics of killing might have more rigorously philosophical underpinnings. That, in short, is the purpose of the study, and what I take it to engage as its central analytic task. Having provided these 4

Harvey (2018, 401) references multiple Buddhist polities such as Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore, and to a lesser extent Thailand, where the death penalty is extant. Singapore, a secular state with in 2020 a substantial Buddhist religious majority, has the highest rate per capita in the world.

10

1 General Introduction

underpinnings in each domain of killing, however, it is not yet clear in every case how, or the degree to which, they might modify any given area of normative Buddhist discourse on killing; as suggested, that might require a separate enquiry. The purpose here is to treat rigorously the essential grounds and terms required for that subsequent discussion. This raises a related question of what such a discussion might mean for thinkers who do not normally entertain Buddhist thought or ethics in general. To the degree that a non-Buddhist audience finds some or any Buddhist metaphysical or psychological premise in the discussion persuasive, and identifies its effective deployment in the argumentation of Part II, then they might also find some of its conclusions worth consideration, either as novel forms of explanation or as normative critique. A final note on conventions for the use of P¯ali, Sanskrit and English Buddhist terms in this book. Cognate terms in P¯ali and Sanskrit may appear in proximity on their first appearance, or used interchangeably thereafter, depending on their discursive and doxographical contexts. Many central Buddhist terms, such as anatt¯a/an¯atman, dukkha/duh.kha, sa˙nkh¯ara/sam . sk¯ara, are more or less semantically equivalent, and so their differentiation usually just a matter of obeying context. Less commonly, distinguishing between P¯ali and Sanskrit terms might mark a significant contrast of doctrinal reference (for example, the Mah¯ay¯ana sense of karman in those cases where its comparatively radical meaning in the case of bodhisattva ethics would, in ´ avakay¯ana5 context of kamma, render it quite distinct from the P¯ali sense of the Sr¯ the word). Indic words that have entered the English language in their own various senses (such as karma, nirvana, or samsara), are generally avoided as otiose, though karma in its specifically Buddhist sense is used where it is typically engaged by interlocutors in a given context. However, generic English translations of Buddhist terms, such as no-self, or emptiness, as well as their P¯ali and Sanskrit originals, and indeed any other Buddhist term, may be intended in two other, related, ways: as a bare concept of philosophical analysis or, by extension, wherein a merely nominal (and not sociological) sense of a ‘global Buddhism’ is intended—a singular ‘Buddhism’ in the abstract that Buddhist Studies scholars generally reject as non-referring. However, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the categorial Five Precepts, Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path, Three Refuges, Five Aggregates, Six Perfections, etc., indeed any fundamental Buddhist category, pertain to something that could for convenience name a theoretical entity true of all the different Buddhist traditions through space and time. While there are many empirical Buddhisms, there is, and perhaps always has been, a virtual ideal ‘Buddhism’ as well, to which they, in an opaque sense, might themselves refer. ´ avakay¯ana (or “vehicle of hearers”) is used for referential convenience in the same The term Sr¯ sense as the better known (but pejorative) appellation H¯ınay¯ana (following Harvey (2013, 113), in a comparable usage). I take this reference to invoke philosophical claims of the P¯ali canon and its commentaries and, secondarily, their extensions in the Abhidhamma and subsequent Therav¯ada syntheses and commentaries on these. (Sanskrit Abhidharma and Sarv¯astiv¯ada sources are of course to be doctrinally differentiated from the former sources, though they often share the same or similar claims regarding killing.).

5

Part I

Foundations: The Nature of the Problem

Chapter 2

Text and Tradition: An Overview of Sources

Abstract This chapter provides an introductory thematic overview and contextualisation of the Pali-language sources available for early Indian Buddhist statement concerning the moral evaluation of killing, its prohibition in the first precept, and the larger normative context of non-violence in which these emerge. Such statement is founded, as is much normative Buddhist discourse, on the canonical record of the Nik¯ayas, or discourses of the Buddha, the Vinaya or legal code of the monastic order, and on the philosophical elaboration of the Abhidhamma, or so-called higher teaching. Representing the core of early Indian Buddhist normative and ethical teaching, these statements are developed in commentarial traditions, in multiple linguistic and cultural contexts (including Sanskrit and classical Chinese, and then Tibetan sources, among others). For purposes of exegesis, the Therav¯ada commentarial tradition, especially that of Buddhaghosa, is prominent for sourcing later Pali Buddhist discourse on killing (reflected also in roughly contemporaneous Sanskritlanguage sources such as the Abhidharmako´sa of Vasubandhu, considered in subsequent chapters). The Indian Buddhist record on killing is rounded out by a brief survey of the Mah¯ay¯ana discussion of the moral exemplarity of the bodhisattva, the high soteriological value of which introduces exceptions to the norm prohibiting killing evident in the early Buddhist record. Keywords Pali canon · Buddhist first precept · Abhidhamma psychology · Therav¯ada ethics · Mah¯ay¯ana ethics · Bodhisattva ethics As noted above, the normative status of intentional killing in the Buddhist context has, in recent years, attracted critical attention. Often lauded as perhaps the most peaceful of world faiths, a bastion of quietism within a welter of religiously-inspired violence, the first Buddhist precept prohibiting the intentional taking of life is virtually synonymous with the religion itself. Writing in 1957, Demiéville noted that “No other precept is followed so strictly by all Buddhists, even now. Not-killing is a characteristic so anchored in Buddhism that it is practically considered a custom.” (2010, 18) How true does this remain over a half-century later? The purpose of this introduction is to provide a general background to Demiéville’s claim: how the meaning and import of the first precept is embedded in Buddhist texts and traditions, and of how modern Buddhist Studies scholarship has engaged that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_2

13

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2 Text and Tradition: An Overview of Sources

understanding in research on primary textual sources and their interpretation. The subsequent chapters of Part I consider in more depth the central dimensions of this received Buddhist conception of intentional lethality. Prominent scholars of Buddhist ethics (Cozort and Shields 2018; Harvey 2000; Kalupahana 1995; Keown 2005; Sadhatissa 1997) interpret the first precept unequivocally, again noting that it is backgrounded by the more general value of universal ahim . s¯a or non-violence (itself deriving from and shared with other of the Indic religious traditions).1 The paracanonical Milindapañha has the monk N¯agasena quoting the Buddha to the effect that non-injury or ahim . s¯a is “approved by all the Tath¯agathas as conducive to one’s welfare.” (Ronkin 2005, 106) N¯agasena even informs his interlocutor the king that the defining characteristic (lakkhan.a) of the dhamma, indeed its own-nature (sabh¯ava), is non-injury. Scholarship of recent decades, however, has also charted the many minor (and not so minor) historical lapses of this ideal through Buddhist traditions, and contextualisations of them in some, generally non-canonical, texts. This sociocultural and textual terrain is large and diverse, undermining the possibility of a wholly consistent or uniform account of killing. Indeed, Buddhists from different cultural backgrounds approach the fact of violence, and its potential permissibility, in different ways (Marchman 2016). In the historical Buddhist lifeworld, as elsewhere, killing functions in ambiguous and multiple ways, strongly inflected by other (religious, ethnocentric, political) facets of would-be moral action. It shouldn’t be surprising then, though it is still disturbing, that public Buddhist figures—including both Therav¯ada and Mah¯ay¯ana monastic exemplars—have engaged in activities ranging from hate speech to racial and ethnocentric vilification that have been used to justify civilian violence and murder, in which, at worst, those exemplars have been more or less directly implicated (see a range of examples in Tikhonov and Brekke 2013). Nor is such animus especially recent, and a range of examples have been detailed of similar tendencies through Buddhist history (Batholomeusz 2002; Bond 2009; Gethin 2007; Jerryson 2010, 2011, 2013, 2018a, b; Jerryson and Juergensmeyer 2010; Victoria 2006; Zimmerman 2006). Clearly there is a deep rift, in these and other cases, between Buddhist normativity and some features of Buddhist religious and social culture. The majority of these more or less pressing tensions have not culminated in intentional killing, but some have, and in some cases Buddhists implicated in lethal violence have sought public forms of self-exoneration (see Harvey 2000, 255ff .). His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has claimed that the intentional use of force is justifiable in Buddhist terms as a form of constraint. While he stops short of endorsing intended killing, he has also expressed an apparent tolerance of premeditated homicide in the context of modern warfare and counter-terrorism (Gyatso 2001; Peralta 2011); on other occasions he has arguably condoned killing with intent (Flanagan 2012). These views, while equivocal, should be and are taken seriously as guiding 1

Bodhi writes, “Though the precept’s wording prohibits the killing of living beings, in terms of its underlying purpose it can also be understood to prohibit injuring, maiming, and torturing as well.” (1994, unpag).

2 Text and Tradition: An Overview of Sources

15

normative discourse for many Buddhists in the current period of the growth and assimilation of Buddhism, in particular, in the West. In this broad context, then, recent scholarship in Buddhist Studies has been devoted to unearthing the evidence for violence in the canonical and other corpus, and to what degree one or another condition of its commission might serve its rationalization. Major distinctions within the domain of killing are generally not systematized in the primary literature, where instead singular cases of killing illustrate a pedagogical rather than theoretical point about, most often, its regrettable cause and negative consequence. Indeed, some categories of killing are not considered as such, or only equivocally, and thence attended with hermeneutic dispute (especially around, for instance, suicide, for a general synopsis of which see Kovan 2018). Nevertheless, the unifying feature of the relevant acts evidenced in both primary and secondary literature is that they are violent acts that lie open to the charge of transgressing the first precept, even though they do so with differing intentional, philosophical and normative presuppositions, and vary in the kinds of culpability and consequence that ensue from them. Prominent religious studies scholars (Jerryson 2010, 2013, 2016, 2018a; Jenkins 2010, 2010/2011, 2011) of the primary literature and historical record casually conflate physical violence with killing, and so obscure the morally salient difference between them, this false equivalence appearing to warrant normative conclusions about Buddhist killing as a form of otherwise justified violence. I return to this issue in Chaps. 5 and 13, arguing that there is a crucial distinction to be drawn between the descriptive project of religious studies hermeneutics and normative argument, with regard to the ethical discussion of intentional killing. Similarly, as we are concerned with the philosophical grounds for the first precept, rather than the degree to which it is empirically observed, Part I will not survey the full extent of textual and historical variation that could be brought to bear on a descriptive account of killing in Buddhism. For example, homiletic canonical literature, including some of the narrative biographies of the Buddha’s past lives as recounted in the j¯ataka tales (birth stories), those of his disciples and devotees in the avad¯anas (glorious deeds), and hortatory or hagiographical literature generally, has not been included. This is because the source-statements that might form the basis for a philosophical account of killing in Buddhism would ideally be propositional and entail at the minimum “the kind of systematic explanation and practical instruction that characterizes so much of the Nik¯ayas.” (Adam 2018, 85) The narrative rhetoric of the j¯atakas and avad¯anas, fertile in normative content as they are, functions nonetheless in an imaginatively metaphoric, fabulous and even therianthropic mode. Killing between humans and demons (for instance the Pañcavudha-j¯ataka), nature-spirits (Appanaka-j¯ataka), other humans (Sam . kicca-j¯ataka) and animals (Matakabhattaj¯ataka) is framed in transpersonal and translife moral terms that go well beyond an empirical understanding of interspecies or even intrahuman behaviour. Mining the abundance of contexts in which killing occurs, in this literature, would fail to elicit the propositional content needed for an analysis of the putative ethics of killing in the canon, as opposed to the moral casuistry of kamma, where killing is one among a range of unwholesome or unskilful courses of action (akusala kamma-path¯a)

16

2 Text and Tradition: An Overview of Sources

more generally. The central focus of Part I thus lies in assessing the philosophical foundations of guiding Buddhist claims, both of the earlier textual and historical record, and of the recent and present time. In surveying texts of the canonical record most philosophically relevant to the first precept, we first need to understand the cultural and conceptual context of its master terms, in evidence most obviously in the tripartite Tipit.aka: the Buddha’s discourses, the legal code (Vinaya) of his monastic order, and their philosophical extensions in the Abhidhamma (or ‘higher teachings’).

1 The Nik¯ayas, Vinaya and Abhidhamma The Buddha’s discourses (suttanta) in the Nik¯aya-pit.aka (or first basket of the canon, some of which with the Vinaya forms the earliest textual strata of the canon) provide an initial and broadest framework for interpretation. In these putatively original ´ akyamuni Buddha, reference to intentional killing is discourses of the historical S¯ variously made, often in response to the questions of interlocutors. These references, often embedded in larger iterations of paradigmatic kinds of unwholesome action (for example at AN II 234), are generally framed in terms of causes of killing in affects such as hatred (DN II 276–277) and fear (DN III 182), in cognitive delusion and the reified sense of ‘I’ or ‘mine’ (DN I 3), and in fixed and dogmatic moral, religious or social views (even where these are correct).2 These among other factors, as causes for extremes of violence of which killing is the limit-point, make it constitutively wrong to the extent that such factors are themselves morally and affectively unwholesome (akusala). Most generally, though, killing (and abstention from it) is shown to entail corresponding forms of kammic effect, notably rebirth in hell (or heaven).3 Killing is thus taken as an example of the moral demonstration of kamma, rather than as an object of analytical enquiry. I take up the analysis of the discourse of killing in the Nik¯ayas in greater depth in Chap. 3. The second major canonical source for enriching our understanding of the early Buddhist conception of killing is the Vinaya-pit.aka4 (more simply vinaya). This early stratum of the Tipit.aka presents legalistic reasons for the expulsion (p¯ar¯ajika) from the san.gha, or other lesser penalty, of its members having committed, abetted or encouraged lethal acts. This case law thus asserts the varying circumstances requiring a greater or lesser punitive response, pertaining to monastics. While crucial to a fuller portrait of the first precept, the explanatory content of the third p¯ar¯ajika rule leaves the

2

AN I 201–202; 134–135; III 338–3; D I 3–4; M III 203; SN V 394; Sn. 766–975. See MN I 285–288; 313–31 5; III 203; AN I 211; II 226; 253; III 35; 204; 275–276; 432; IV 251–255; V 264–268; 283. 4 The second of three main baskets (pitaka) of canonical Buddhist teachings originating from the . Buddha’s guidance to the monastic order concerning its legal rules, but including also hagiographic and narrative episodes. 3

1 The Nik¯ayas, Vinaya and Abhidhamma

17

original question unanswered: what are the fundamental grounds by which Buddhism prohibits any lethal acts as such, performed by any, and not just a monastic, agent? One response to this question could lie in turning to the third collection of the Tipit.aka, the Abhidhamma. This more psychologically-oriented discourse taxonomizes the universal mental-affective conditions giving rise to certain classes of behaviour, and so theoretically provides the analytic means to describe the cognitiveaffective constitution of mind and probable states causally determining lethal acts. Identifying such states and conative tendencies might similarly allow for developing a third-personal account of the likely psychological effects, for the agent, of any lethal act in generic terms (the most central of these in respect of affectivity are addressed in Chap. 6). But, as noted above, all lethal acts have a specific intentional constitution and so require quite distinct affective and psychological analyses (even before their putative reasons and justifications are considered): not all acts of killing conform to generic constitutive models. Compare for example in this sense the great difference between murderous homicide and compassionate euthanasia. Appealing to taxonomical theorisation to explain the prohibition of killing also highlights the difference between a descriptive analysis of the mental-affective constitution and phenomenology of akusala or morally unwholesome acts, and the explication of normative masterterms that guide Buddhist-ethical thought. Are both the above-mentioned forms of killing equally unwholesome? If so, are they unwholesome because of a psychological property they share (such as aversion), or despite different degrees of that property, or are they unwholesome because of distinct instantiated properties (such as delusion and aversion, respectively)? Could these distinctions begin to explain different moral valence also, and does the Abhidhamma provide a perspective for distinguishing between such properties? It is not certain that even a philosophically sophisticated exegete of the Abhidhamma, such as Buddhaghosa, would seek the high degree of theoretical explanation of the first precept implied by these questions, beyond more accessible Nik¯aya norms and their interpretation. This would seem even more true with respect to the broader Buddhist religious and ethical lifeworld, and its folk explanations attending the precept. Moreover, causal factors for killing such as those typically identified in the Abhidhamma as hatred, anger, unskilful consciousness, wrong view and delusion (all detailed in Chap. 6), are not ipso facto explanatory for why the actions issuing from them are wrong. To see a causal account as a complete explanation for the badmaker(s) of killing would be a fairly natural, but misleading, case of the genetic fallacy that identifies the wrongness of actions in their origins. To grasp the fundamental wrongness of lethal acts we need to look still deeper than to Buddhist claims around the inherent badness of unwholesome affect and its necessarily unwholesome moral-psychological effects.5

5

Gethin (2004a) argues this theme in a study of the Abhidhamma and P¯ali commentarial sources on the norm against killing. See Chaps. 4 and 6 for discussion.

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2 Text and Tradition: An Overview of Sources

There are also a large number of lethal cases which could be and are arguably conceived, including by Buddhist theorists themselves, as not causally grounded in extreme hatred or aversive affect (such as in compassionate euthanasia, suicide and assisted suicide, abortion, self-defence or counter-terrorism), in which cases the causal basis of unwholesome affect as explanation for the wrongness of killing has only limited or no application. Keown (2016) challenges Gethin (2004a) on just this point, to the end of claiming that some psychologically select forms of mercykilling could, contra Gethin’s Abhidhamma argument, be conceived, if not rendered permissible, in Buddhist ethics. If negative affect is not the exclusive Buddhist badmaker for killing, then what can be considered as foundational reasons informing the prohibition of killing in the canon? Most broadly, according to its texts, any action that gratuitously produces or contributes to suffering (dukkha) in its various forms is to be eschewed. The prospect of death is a form of suffering, as are the sorrow and lamentation, sadness and distress, ineluctably associated with it. Being separated from loved ones is suffering, as is not getting what one wants, and getting what one does not want.6 Hence, if people seek not to die then (1) the possibility or probability of being killed produces anticipatory anxiety for them, and their loved ones, and prohibiting killing obviates such suffering.7 Killing (2) minus this factor of anticipation (such as in unexpected or sudden murder) also causes posthumous suffering for those still living, who were relevantly related to its victim. Moreover, killing (3) from negative psychological causes, which (Gethin argues) is always the Buddhist-psychological case, produces (more) suffering for its agent. Any lethal act thus appears, by this threefold generation of suffering, to contradict the fundamental desiderata of the earliest bases of Buddhist ethics. Of course, this simple schema can be undermined on other related normative (such as utilitarian) grounds, but it serves here merely a heuristic purpose. Moreover, these Buddhist criteria for suffering are substantially in accord with Eric Cassell’s prominent notion in contemporary Western ethics of suffering as “the state of severe distress associated with events that threaten the intactness of the person.” (1991, 33).8 The prime normative concern of the Nik¯ayas, and early Buddhism more generally, is with the amelioration of suffering and the best means for doing so: the volitional

6

Mah¯asatipat..th¯ana Sutta (DN II.306–307; in Walshe 1995, 344). Cf. Schmithausen (2000, 35) for a similar expression of this basic value. 8 Schlieter sees this accord between early Buddhist criteria and Cassell’s as “less fitting” inasmuch as “the intactness of the person” is not a desideratum in the Buddhist case because “According to the Buddhist concept of personhood, the very idea of a substantial “self” is a prominent source for suffering” (2014, 311). But person (puggala) and self (att¯a) are distinct ontological concepts, and Schlieter appears to mistake the legitimate conventional existence of the former with the nonexistence of the latter. Otherwise, the supposed Buddhist devalorisation of the person would have to justify the precept against killing (especially) persons in terms that contradict the sense of the individual as a conscious sentient being possessing ontological and moral-psychological integrity (or intactness). 7

2 Buddhaghosa and the Therav¯ada

19

capacity for moral agency to engage that kind of action (kamma) that ensures positive or skilful (kusala) consequences for others as well as oneself.9 In the canonical discourses, kamma10 is thus a master explanatory term determining the degree of suffering for the agent of intentional action.11 These related principles of globally intending to mitigate dukkha by means of skilful (kusala) kamma, as a partial explanation for the first precept, are considered in-depth in Chap. 3.12 As the most general conceptual underpinnings for the precept, they extend into commentarial discussion of killing in other P¯ali Buddhist traditions and texts, most notably in Buddhaghosa’s prominent Therav¯ada commentaries on canonical sources.

2 Buddhaghosa and the Therav¯ada Buddhaghosa’s extensive 5th-century translations and syntheses of earlier Sinhala commentarial texts into P¯ali made him the exegetical authority for the later Therav¯ada tradition.13 His commentaries on relevant claims in the Majjhima-nik¯aya, Vinaya and its commentaries, and the Abhidhamma Dhammasa˙ngan.i in particular, present a normative Therav¯ada view regarding killing, oft-repeated by his own commentators. Because his summary account of these claims constitutes a pervasive evaluation of killing in the P¯ali Buddhist traditions, they deserve a particular focus. The criteria Buddhaghosa offers for judging the gravity of lethal acts are based principally on the notion of the physical quality, also virtue (gun.a) of human objects, but also agents, of killing: what I will schematise as a third major early Buddhist principle undergirding the prohibition, insofar as it is what first determines the degree of ethical fault of any homicidal act (if not the human killing of animals for which, as we will note, Buddhaghosa presents different evaluative criteria). Furthermore, where agent and object can be determined as equal in this sense of quality, the degree of mental defilement and of intensity of effort on the part of the lethal agent also indicate degrees of culpability.

9

See AN IV 246. See also Goodman (2009) for a broad consequentialist elaboration of this foundational claim; also Keown (1996b). 10 Kamma is the P¯ ali term, karman the Sanskrit, and karma the non-technical word (derived usually from Hindu contexts) that has now entered the lexicon of English and other modern languages to signify notions only tenuously related to its Buddhist use. In what follows I maintain the P¯ali kamma, unless the Sanskrit form is required for the Mah¯ay¯ana context. (On other occasions, karma might appear in the secondary scholarship, where it refers only to Buddhist senses of the term.). 11 Cousins (1996) and Harvey (2018) survey the canonical and commentarial contextualisation of kusala and kamma more generally. Keown notes that “In the sermons [suttanta] of the Buddha, belief in karma is presupposed, although not articulated as a formal doctrine.” (1996b, 335). 12 Schmithausen (2000, 40) also identifies kamma in relation to the mitigation of suffering as a primary doctrinal basis for the first precept. 13 Established around the Lankan Mah¯ avih¯ara monastery and its teaching tradition flourishing in the fifth century CE (see Heim 2014, 9ff .).

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2 Text and Tradition: An Overview of Sources

These three related evaluative criteria of dukkha, kamma and gun.a indicate most broadly what is, in the early Buddhist context, ethically salient for identifying the greater or lesser moral gravity of lethal acts and the effects, or kammic quotient, they incur. Again, they are identified here not as exclusively explanatory, but as heuristics that must be considered in any general account. Moreover, indicating only reasons for degrees of moral fault is still not equivalent to an explanation of its relevant badmakers, and so these three principles can’t be seen as exhaustive of that explanation. Their apparent salience, moreover, suggests significant problems of interpretation, and then of evaluation: they are in important senses obscure to a modern ethical (and even Buddhist) audience, and their most intelligible appropriation depends on how questions of their interpretation are determined. These questions, and the criteria and conceptual context that give rise to them, are closely considered in Chaps. 3 and 4.

3 Mah¯ay¯ana Criteria Mah¯ay¯ana traditions philosophically invoke the criterion of virtuous and physical quality, here of an emphatically ethico-soteriological kind and superlatively exemplified in a¯ rya (noble) beings such as bodhisattvas and Buddhas. This extension of the criterion subverts, by radicalizing, the normative sense of the precept: the lethal act is, counter to earlier exegesis, theoretically permissible for such morally exemplary agents because their virtue is more or less infallible.14 According to Buddhaghosa, any such act committed against these beings of superlative quality entails the greatest kammic effect (by reason of the prior grounds of kamma and quality), so that the intended killing of a Buddha cannot be surpassed as an evil or grossly unwholesome act. Here we see all three prior principles of dukkha, kamma and gun.a functioning as implicit criteria for evaluation, if in a comparatively rarefied manner. However, by the same token, an a¯ rya being possesses the cognitive (sometimes clairvoyant) powers to ascertain that the most compassionate course of action may require an intentional lethal act (Harvey 2000, 135ff ). In that case it does not incur the negative consequences that the same act would when committed by a so-called ordinary or unawakened person (puthujjana). The Mah¯ay¯ana thus presents a fourth major criterion for the first precept: the ethical supererogation of prajñ¯a or wisdom, engaged in depth in Chap. 5. This criterion supersedes, by sublating, all three prior criteria as also an exception to them: a noble being can be the efficient cause of local

14

A significant pre-emption of this is in the canonical cases of Arhat suicide in which (in three reported cases at least) any moral fault appears to be exonerated by the Buddha. Suicide in general, especially of a typical or pathological kind, is considered in terms of the discussion of Chap. 11; Arhat autothanasia and religious-altruistic suicide in Mah¯ay¯ana contexts are addressed in-depth in Kovan (2013, 2014, 2018).

3 Mah¯ay¯ana Criteria

21

suffering, and of a (nominal) kammic demerit to him or herself, if the greater global good of averting the suffering of others is certain to result.15 Such utility is, nevertheless, a normative wild-card: it is predicated on the existence and attainment of an episteme internally salient to the pre-modern Mah¯ay¯ana worldview, but not necessarily beyond it.16 Whether the reasoning pertaining to it translates easily into the contemporary ethical context is a question addressed in Chap. 5, just as that presented by Buddhaghosa is similarly examined in Chap. 4. This summarises essential conceptual territory informing the traditional Buddhist evaluation of lethal acts in the obviation of dukkha (PD), the optimisation of skilful kamma (PK), with regard to the quality or virtue (gun.a) of persons as objects and agents of lethal acts (PG), and as acts instantiating optimal or transcendental wisdom (prajñ¯a) (PP). There are of course other organising values or concepts (such as the inherent unwholesomeness of hatred, or the ubiquity of delusion in unskilful acts) significant for an explanation of the aetiology of killing; they will be considered as part of its general account as they are encountered. However, the many related causes of ill-action are not always explanations for its wrongness, especially considering the wide range of lethal acts that, having different mental-affective causes, might have their own badmakers as well (which is not to imply that causes and badmakers need be identical). The four principles of evaluation sketched in this introduction act only as heuristics, or necessary compass-points of a map of the territory, by means of which we can navigate through a range of heterogeneous discourse, in the chapters of Part I which follow.

15

This kind of reasoning is explicit, for example, in Asa˙nga’s Bodhisattva-bh¯umi (in Tatz 1986, 70– 71) and the oft-cited Mah¯abodhisattva-Up¯aya-kau´salya S¯utra, noted in Chap. 5. Other Mah¯ay¯ana references to compassionate killing will be noted where thematically relevant. 16 This is arguably even more true of the Vajray¯ ana record concerning either literal or symbolic homicide (for an overview see Jerryson 2016, 159–63; also references given above). That context is thematically specific enough to require its own analysis, under a religious studies rubric, so not included here in a focus on the philosophical ethics undergirding a generically normative Buddhist ethics. It can though be plausibly held that Tantric praxiological extensions of Mah¯ay¯anist ‘auspicious killing’ are broadly predicated on the philosophical features of the Indian Mah¯ay¯ana examined in Chap. 5.

Chapter 3

Canonical Buddhist Discourse on Killing

Abstract This chapter focusses on the guiding norms concerning intentional killing and its prohibition encoded in the first Buddhist precept. These are embedded in a broader theoretical structure which includes explicit and implicit value-claims concerning life and sentience, and the ways in which they’re understood in protobiological and ethical terms, especially with regard to the suffering (dukkha) attending them. Early Buddhist norms around killing involve claims for the constitution of life, as well as value-hierarchies between different kinds of sentient being instantiating it, which given differing attributions of sentience guides the moral evaluation of killing as well. Criteria for intentional killing, in both theoretical and legal modes, also entail moral quandaries arising from the early Buddhist metaphysical frameworks in which this discussion occurs, questions taken up through early Buddhist history by such interlocutors as Vasubandhu, Buddhaghosa and N¯ag¯arjuna. The precept prohibiting killing is seen to encode a general principle of the amelioration of suffering, which entails the recognition of moral agency in intention (cetan¯a), itself determining the moral valence of acts and so their instantiation of kamma, or moral consequence. Hence, concerns to ameliorate suffering, by means of kammaladen acts, are seen to centrally undergird the moral evaluation of killing in the canonical record of early Buddhism. Keywords Buddhist first precept · Dukkha · Kamma · Human and non-human sentience · Life-theory · Cetan¯a · Moral agency · Moral causation

1 The First Precept (P¯an.a¯ tip¯at¯a) in Its Typical Schema We noted above that non-harm is characterised in the Milindapañha1 as “the distinguishing mark of dhamma”, confirming its status as the most important of the five precepts (pañca-s¯ıl¯ani),2 particularly in view of its kammic gravity. The variation of attitudes towards killing between Buddhist traditions, sketched above, does 1

A para-canonical Therav¯ada text of c. first century C.E. recording a dialogue between the monk N¯agasena and King Milinda (155–130 B.C.). 2 Proscribing killing, stealing (and cheating), sexual misconduct, lying, and the use of intoxicants. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_3

23

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not however signify the attenuation of the first precept as central to normative Buddhist practice. Harvey (2013, 271) claims it is “regarded as the most important” of the precepts; Demiéville quotes the Mah¯ay¯ana Mah¯aprajñ¯ap¯aramitopade´sa as confirming that there is nothing more worthy than not-killing. The canonical tradition is unanimous on this: “Murder is the most serious of all sins.” It is also ranked number one in the ten major sins that we call “negative paths of karma” (aku´sala-karma-patha) and which are forbidden to the clerics, beginners, catechumen, monks, and nuns. (in Jerryson & Juergensmeyer 2010, 18)

The 20th-century Burmese meditation master Ven. Mah¯asi Say¯adaw provides a gloss on an important temporal dimension implied in the etymology of the precept: “P¯an.a means a living being or life; ati means “very quickly” and p¯ata means to make something fall. So p¯an.a¯ tip¯at¯a literally means to cut off a life prematurely.” (1997, 29) Hence, inscribed in p¯an.a¯ tip¯at¯a is the idea of the taking of a life before the ripening of its natural span (¯ayus).3 The precept is repeated in varying forms throughout the Nik¯ayas, such as in the Sutta-nip¯ata which counsels of a Buddhist that Laying aside violence in respect of all living beings in the world, both those which are still and those which move, he should not kill a living creature, not cause to kill, nor allow others to kill.4

The proscription is universal with regard to sentient life, and implicates three modes of action: direct, indirect, and that by omission or persuasion (of discouraging or encouraging others respectively). In all Buddhist traditions particular destructive acts are excluded from the category of killing (and therefore lack the kammic weight of the conditions given above) where: (1) non-sentient living beings such as microorganisms (and in many cases plants) are destroyed in the processes of living (see Vin. IV 125; Miln. 166) (2) a sentient being is mistaken for an inanimate object and killed without intent (see Vin. IV 125;) and (3) any act accidentally results in the death of a sentient being (see Vin. III 78; II 91).5 The intended lethal act, on the other hand, is one of forty-four kinds of unwholesome physical act, speech and thought (akusala kamma) that must be avoided for the permanent overcoming of mental pathologies or cognitive dysfunctions (P. kilesa Skt. kle´sa) central to the Buddhist path of mental-affective purification. The transgression 3 The pre-Buddhist sense of a ´ ¯ yus is extensive and in the post-Vedic Satapatha Br¯ahman.a aligned to the notion of amr.tam, or the undying, which in the context of the human mortal signifies a ‘full life’ (sarvam a¯ yus) of a hundred years. Hence, the later Buddhist injunction against killing is not merely a valorisation of life per se, but carries the much older connotation of the value of a full life seen as a worldly desideratum, and rooted in the eschatology of rebirth into more fortunate (or eternal) lifetimes as highly-placed men or gods (see Collins, 44–47). 4 Sn. 394: p¯ an.am . na hane na ca gh¯atayeyya na c¯anujaññ¯a hanatam . paresam . / sabbesu bh¯utesu nidh¯aya dan.dam ye th¯avar¯a ye ca tasanti loke. (Cf. MN I 345; DN I 4). 5 Schmithausen (2000, 41) notes that the recognition of accidental killing is only evident in later Vinaya and some suttanta formulations of the precepts.

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of the precept is also among the five heinous crimes (¯anantarya)6 which result in a rebirth in a hell-realm (especially when its object is an a¯ rya-being: a Buddha, Arhat or adept who has perceived anatt¯a). The Vinaya defines homicide as the third of four offenses that result in irrevocable exclusion (p¯ar¯ajika) from the monastic order. The P¯ali text of the first precept reads: P¯an¯atip¯at¯a veraman.¯ı sikkh¯apadam . samadiy¯ami; (I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking life.)7

This formulation suggests two main considerations. First, it leaves relatively undetermined the degree and kind of life signified; second, it implies, by reference to abstention (veraman.¯ı) that, as noted, its object is only the intentional taking of such life. The precept is thus a proscription of intentional killing, not a value-judgement about preserving life, though these might appear mutually implicative.8 Moreover, focusing almost exclusively on what makes lethal acts better or worse (as the Vinaya and associated discourse around killing does) does not address what it is about life, and what kind of life, and what its sentience signifies, that makes its privation wrong as such. The two large areas of Buddhist discourse thus signalled in the precept—life, and its apparent sentience, and intention—are central to any analysis of what is ultimately valorised in its injunction. We can turn to the first of these, before considering in more depth the second, and thirdly kamma as the causal basis for the morality of intentional action.

2 Life, and Sentience; the Principle of Dukkha (PD) Living, breathing, conscious beings The P¯ali p¯an.a¯ (in p¯an.a¯ tip¯at¯a) denotes that which breathes and so the capacity to sustain consciousness, and so sentience (we will consider, below, how the Latinate ‘sentience’ serves as a placeholder for related Buddhist concepts). As the Sanskrit pr¯an.a connotes breath as life or a universal life-force, so the semantic range of the P¯ali term in the Therav¯ada context connotes breath (actual or potential9 ), the property of 6

Parricide, matricide, killing an Arhat, breaking up the Sa˙ngha, and causing, with evil intent, the Tath¯agata (or Buddha) to bleed. 7 Harvey’s (2000, 67) more literal rendering is “I undertake the training-precept to abstain from onslaught on breathing beings.”. 8 The distinction is important when it comes to conceiving the morally relevant ending of life. For example, most Buddhist discussion of euthanasia concerns identifying the morally salient difference between its active and passive forms, insofar as the first precept is clearly implicated in the former, but possibly not the latter (Ratanakul 2000, 176). If however these two forms are not morally distinguished (Keown 2018a, 613) then the Buddhist-ethical status of passive euthanasia is reconfigured. 9 For example, the embryo is alive but not yet breathing, though it carries that intrinsic capacity as it develops in utero.

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being alive, and ‘life’ as a substantive faculty or principle (j¯ıvitindriya) of both physical (r¯upa) and mental (n¯ama) kinds.10 According to the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma, the latter n¯ama-j¯ıvitindriya is more technically one of the seven universal mental factors (cetasikas) momentarily conditioning all states of consciousness (P. viññ¯an.a; Skt. vijñ¯ana) (van Gorkom 51).11 All conscious beings thus definitionally possess an animating mental ‘life-principle’ (n¯ama-j¯ıvitindriya), and as embodied sentient organisms possess r¯upa-j¯ıvitindriya as well.12 But not all living beings breathe, or are conscious, so what property determines the possession of life, if it is not the capacity for those alone? Gold describes two horns of an explanatory dilemma that faced theorists of protobiological continuity and consciousness with respect to a global Buddhist assumption of metaphysical impermanence: The problem comes from an apparent inconsistency among well-founded early Buddhist scriptural positions. On the one hand, there was the orthodox belief that the body was kept alive by consciousness. Even in deep sleep, it was believed that there was some form of subtle consciousness that was keeping the body alive. On the other hand, there was the very old belief, possibly articulated by the Buddha himself, that there are six kinds of consciousness, and that each of them is associated with one of the six senses—the five traditional senses, plus the mental sense (which observes mental objects). The problem was that there are some meditative states that are defined as being completely free of all six sensory consciousnesses. So the question becomes, What keeps the meditator’s body alive when all consciousness is cut off? (Gold 2021)

The orthodox belief regarding consciousness as ‘keeping the body alive’13 seems to inform a ‘vitalistic’ or physical (subtle-energy) notion of consciousness, indeed, the very one that in theory perdures between lifetimes, and so suggests a rough identity between ‘life’ and that which, by being conscious or sentient, enables its ongoing existence. Consciousness appears to unify or sustain multiple psychophysical factors, such as the sense-faculties, for life. But it would be wrong to suppose consciousness is either a necessary or sufficient condition for life, according to the P¯ali Canon. Jaini notes that “Although the term 10

The pre-Buddhist origins of this equivalence between breath (or the capacity to breathe) and a universal life-force are extensive and evident from the Vedic scriptures to the Br¯ahman.as and Upanis.ads and beyond. Collins (1982, 50) observes the function of pr¯an.a in the metaphysical formation of the a¯ tman concept and the growth of Brahmanical rebirth theory, which itself forms the origin for the Buddhist appropriation of rebirth as an ethical eschatology. 11 The seven ‘universal’ mental factors constituting any moment of consciousness (citta) are: phassa (contact), vedan¯a (feeling or sensation), saññ¯a (recognition, or perception/conception), cetan¯a (volition or intention), ekaggat¯a (concentration or one-pointedness), j¯ıvitindriya (life-faculty), manasik¯ara (attention). 12 Though, as noted in the Abhidhamma Patthana (or Conditional Relations) the r¯ upa-j¯ıvitindriya .. pertains only to those r¯upa-dhammas produced by kamma, rather than those produced by heat (usm¯a) or mental and nutritive physical causes (van Gorkom 52). See Jaini (540) for discussion of the taxonomical geneses of the Therav¯ada theory of dual psychophysical j¯ıvitindriyas and their differential appropriation in the Sarv¯astiv¯ada schools. Here we are concerned only with a general characterisation of the canonical and Therav¯ada presentation. 13 Schmithausen (2000, 38), speaking with regard to P¯ ali sources of the relation between a liberated person and their death, also understands by “vijñ¯ana, the sentience that kept his body alive”.

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j¯ıvita is known to the P¯ali suttas, the technical term j¯ıvitindriya is mostly found in the Abhidhamma Pit.aka. In the suttas the term a¯ yu is more commonly used in the ¯ or ‘vitality’ is central sense of a principle signifying life-duration.” (Jaini 539) Ayu to a discussion of what maintains the five sense-faculties (pañcannam . indriy¯anam . avakanti) in a canonical sutta (MN 43) of the Majjhima-Nik¯aya (Mah¯avedalla-sutta). This sutta presents a dialogue between Mah¯akot.t.hita and S¯ariputta in which the latter claims that the five sense-faculties remain stable in dependence on their longevitydetermining a¯ yu, which itself relies on heat (usm¯a)—but which in turn relies upon the a¯ yu. S¯ariputta’s interlocutor unsurprisingly questions this circularity, to receive by way of answer its analogy with a burning oil-lamp: as its light requires the flame, so its flame can only be perceived by its light. Jaini’s summary of the subsequent discussion is worth quoting in full: a further question is raised whether the a¯ yusam . kh¯aras (constituents of life) are identical with feelings (i.e., vedan¯a). S¯ariputta says that they are not identical, for, if they were, a person under-going the trance called saññ¯a-vedayita-nirodha will not rise again from that trance. It may be recalled here that according to the Therav¯adins, the four n¯ama-skandhas [-khandhas] always rise and disappear in one time. The nirodha (cessation) of vedan¯a and saññ¯a would, therefore, automatically mean nirodha of all the four. Consequently, if a¯ yu is identical with any of them, it will also cease to be, resulting in the death of the yogin. S¯ariputta further explains that when a person dies, three things abandon him, viz. the a¯ yu, the usm¯a, and the mind (viññ¯an.a). In the case of a person who has undergone the above sam¯adhi the a¯ yu and usm¯a still exist. (539–540)

This Suttanta canonical discussion confirming the dependence of consciousness on the life-principle confirms the Abhidhammic understanding of the unifying cognitive function of the latter as well. Van Gorkom stresses the co-constitutive nature of the “ceaselessly watching” n¯ama-j¯ıvitindriya with cittas and cetasikas, where its function is to maintain the life of the accompanying dhammas, its manifestation the establishment of them, and the proximate cause are the dhammas which have to be sustained. The function of j¯ıvitindriya is to maintain the life of citta [consciousness or mind] and its accompanying cetasikas [mental factors]. It keeps them going until they fall away. Since j¯ıvitindriya arises and falls away together with the citta, it performs its function only for a very short while. Each moment of citta consists actually of three extremely short periods […] J¯ıvitindriya arises with the citta at the arising moment and it maintains the life of citta and the accompanying cetasikas, but it cannot make them stay beyond the dissolution moment (van Gorkom 51).14

This metaphysical, rather than proto-biological, construal of a ‘life-principle’ seems to take us far from a notion of a substantial or vitalistic, rather than merely 14 van Gorkom is largely summarising Buddhaghosa’s commentary the Atthas¯ alin¯ı on the first book of the Abhidhamma Pit.aka, the Dhammsa˙ngan.¯ı, which treats of the 52 mental factors of the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma. Dhammas, most broadly, in the Abhidhamma/Abhidharma denote the most irreducibly fundamental constituents of psychophysical experience. Jaini claims that the j¯ıvitindriya is one of the 24 kinds of ‘derived matter’ (up¯ad¯aya-r¯upa) which “According to the Therav¯adins are ‘dhammas’ and hence ought to be recognized as ultimate elements. But a large number of these can be treated rather as aspects, modes, or qualities than as separate entities […] The j¯ıvitindriya, for instance, does not consist of a separate r¯upa, but is only a name given to the life of matter.” (533–34).

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perduring, substrate of/for life. Indeed, the intrinsic momentariness of the j¯ıvitindriya, as just described, is later engaged by Vasubandhu (fourth–fifth century C.E.) in his discussion of killing in the Abhidharmako´sa.15 There he exploits the conceptual tension in the relation between p¯an¯a/pr¯an.a and j¯ıvitindriya in an important metaphysical contextualisation of these terms. By virtue of the Sarv¯astiv¯ada Abhidharma doctrine of momentariness (ks.anikav¯ada) assumed in this text, the living being (sattva) and the aggregates of the person (skandhas) thereby animated, are ultimately only series of momentary psychophysical events (of which the j¯ıvitindriya is one crucial dharma kind16 ). In the karma-nirde´sa chapter of the AKBh Vasubandhu claims that “pr¯an.a is annihilated by a murderer in the same way in which one annihilates a flame or a sound of a bell, that is to say, by obstructing the continuation of its reproducing itself. Or rather, pr¯an.a is the vital organ (j¯ıvitendriya): when a person creates an obstacle to the arising of a new moment of the vital organ, he annihilates it, and is touched by the transgression of killing.” (AKBh IV 73a–b; 650) But if living beings are constitutively impermanent and their real component psychophysical constituents intrinsically momentary, Vasubandhu asks, “to whom do you attribute the vital organ? Who do you say is dead when life is absent?” (ibid.) If the precept prohibits killing it can’t be with reference to momentary microevents in the causal series identified as the perduring macro-event known as a living being, for all that ‘dies’ is the illusion of a self-subsisting individual that never existed as such. Vasubandhu raises (as we will see N¯ag¯arjuna does also) the moral as much as metaphysical question of what it is, in the momentary series of psychophysical events, that early Buddhist texts and traditions uphold as the cardinal value implied in the precept. If it is the life-principle, what is uniquely valuable about it? What preeminent purpose does it serve, and is that purpose self-evident? Or, is it something it produces? Is that object contingent or telic? A quality or a capacity, a unitary state or a process? Is it a combination of elements of, for example, breath, consciousness, sentience, the awareness of sentience, and the potential for self-aware cognition they give rise to? These questions are fundamental to Buddhist soteriology and its philosophy of mind, and we return to them in Chap. 7, where addressing them goes some way toward accounting for the meaning and purpose of life in the Buddhist worldview.

15

The central text of the Sarv¯astiv¯ada in which Vasubandhu presents Vaibh¯as.ika doctrine along with his commentary engaging Sautr¯antika critique of it. In the (1971 reprint of the) 1923 French translation by Louis de la Vallée Poussin, the relevant discussion appears in Volume III, 71c-d through to 73c-d (pps. 151–155). Pruden’s English translation (1991) of the same passage is in Vol. II, pps. 644–651. (All refs. to AKBh are to its identification by chapter (usually IV) and numbered section, generally followed by its corresponding page number in the Pruden translation.). 16 But whose ambiguous ontological status is also contested; see Jaini 541.

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The attribution of sentience17 The Buddhist understanding of the biological extension of the ‘life-faculty’ includes all animals, denoting centrally human, primate and other animal, but also insect, species.18 The extreme ends of this spectrum become transhuman or speculative— from jealous and delightful gods and goddesses to so-called one-facultied life (ekindriya j¯ıva), such as unicellular organisms.19 The emphasis in the precept on ‘breathing beings’ means that killing animal sentience is categorically worse than destroying plants, while killing human sentience is worse than both (MN-a I 198; DN-a I 69).20 Kingdom Plantae is thus typically excluded from the category of living beings pertaining to the first precept as lacking the capacity to breathe and to be conscious (Harvey 2000, 151). However, the Buddha is often described as avoiding harm to seed and plant life (e.g., DN I 3–5; MN I 345), and where plants are conceived as sentient, if not breathing, living beings, then wilfully destroying the integrity of all living entities, including plants, is wrong (or else ‘avoiding harm’ to them would be morally irrelevant). Schmithausen notes that the inclusion of plant-life with regard to the prohibition against intentional harm as a practice was the case, at least for monks (1991, 6–7). The formulation of the precept typical of its monastic contexts emphasises an ethos of sympathy (day¯a) and caring (anukamp¯a) for living beings,21 and some versions and readings of the Vinaya include plants among them, the intentional destruction of which requires mental purification to counter-act its psychological harm and kammic demerit (Vin. IV 32–5; I 137; Demiéville 2010, 18). The Buddha also recognises (Vin. III 156) that ‘the people’ (manuss¯a) perceive ‘one-facultied life’ in a tree cut down by a monk; while (at Vin-Pat. 265) monks are forbidden to build huts from mud for fear that firing bricks will kill minute living beings. That ‘the people’s’ perception confirms the real existence of such modes of life (whether pertaining to trees or plants, or microscopic organisms such

17

The term ‘sentience’ is here used, as it is generally in Buddhist ethics as elsewhere, to summarise a range of values that, as Harvey suggests, in the Buddhist context most broadly denotes “the ability to experience and to suffer, and the related ability, in this or a future life, to transcend suffering by attaining enlightenment.” (2000, 151). 18 See MN III 167–9, SN II 1890–90, for reference to human, animal and insect sentience particularly in relation to rebirth and kammic relations between them in past lives. (AN I 161 describes human consideration shown to insects in feeding them.). 19 This chapter doesn’t thematize animal ethics in depth, for reason of the general inclusion of animals in an early Buddhist ethics of care and consideration extended to all sentient beings (see e.g., AN II 72–73; Vin. 109–110; Vin. III 62; Sn. 967b; MN II 371; Ud. II 3). Chapter 4 more closely considers the evaluative and categorial distinctions between human and animal objects that inform the conceptual grounds for a would-be early Buddhist ethics of killing. See also Schmithausen (2000, 45ff ). 20 Confirmed also in the different degrees of penalty for human killing (p¯ ar¯ajika no. 3) and animal killing (p¯acittiya no. 61) in the P¯atimokkha-sutta: expulsion from the Order, and atonement of an offence, respectively. 21 See DN I 4; 63; 171; 181; MN I 179; 267; 345; III 33; AN II 208: V 204.

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as those ostensibly protected from monks by the P¯acittiya rules 20 and 62)22 could be countered by the view that the Buddha is in this case deploying the skilful means that defers to the commonfolk’s pretheoretical faith in dhamma, rather than their scientific acumen in identifying such forms of life. As Harvey notes (2000, 175), the ‘one-facultied life’ the faithful appear to perceive in some plants (especially trees) is neither endorsed nor denied by the Buddha, and does not appear in the extensive typologies of simple or complex reals of the Abhidhamma. Though plants can be safely assumed to lack the kind of consciousness true of animal and human sentience, the question of the existence of plant sentience as such was left theoretically undetermined (Schmithausen 1991, 69), while otherwise assumed in the norm of monastic non-violence towards plants as well as animals. It is also not clear whether the disapprobation of harm in these ambiguous limitcases of sentience is grounded primarily on a wish to obviate definite suffering in its objects, or to protect human agents from their own aggressive tendencies which, in less ambiguous cases, will have graver consequences. Indeed, the focus on intention and other subjective qualities as the moral arbiter for the gravity of lethal acts comes, as we will see, to centrally define all of the subsequent theoretical claims regarding killing in the Buddhist lifeworld.23 H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama confirms the global importance of the criterion of sentience in determining the moral status of killing, construing its limit-point in these terms: in the Buddhist context […] when you take the life of a sentient being, that constitutes a wrong deed. So is it wrong to kill an amoeba? Buddhists would say that if an amoeba feels pleasure and pain, wishes to be […] free of suffering, then it is wrong to kill it, and otherwise it is not wrong. (Hayward and Varela 1992, 67)

At issue here is not so much whether the sentience of amoeba or other candidates (such as bacteria) for the limit-point of sentience can in practical terms be determined (as suggested by the Dalai Lama, that is likely to remain at best an hypothesis). The salient point of the claim is that the registration of suffering of whatever local configuration determines a fundamental Buddhist reference-point for morally-valenced acts. But even if the Dalai Lama’s heuristic of amoeba sentience is accepted as morally determining, and thus makes killing amoeba wrong just because it contravenes the first precept, this does not answer the question of what it is about sentience, and its presumed kinds across species, that makes destroying its subjects (more or less) wrong. It is also not clear that sentience per se, in its dependence on consciousness, can be destroyed, even while a living individual can be. Indeed, we have seen Vasubandhu suggest that inasmuch as consciousness (and with it the psychophysical aggregates, and their constituent dhammas/dharmas, that comprise the person) is inherently momentary, but which also (in some form) perdures post-mortem, then it is conceivable that its constitutive sentience in some potential configuration can’t be 22 23

Vin. IV 49 and 125. See Schmithausen (2000, 47) and passim.

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31

destroyed either. Moreover, the proto-embryonic gandhabba (or disembodied intermediate being) that descends into the womb at conception is already conditioned by kamma and “hence bound to suffering.” (Schlieter 311). The Therav¯adin exegete Buddhaghosa describes the excessive suffering of the embryo (kalala) in utero and during abortion (Vism. XVI 3724 ). There are also references in the Pr¯atimoks.a-S¯utra of the M¯ulasarv¯astiv¯adan Vinaya to a proto-embryonic being that possesses human-like form (Skt. manus.yavigraha), existing according to some texts (Huimin Bhikkhu 457–470) for the first forty-nine days of post-conception development; that is, before that stage of its development at which it is fully capable 25 of the consciousness of suffering (duh.khasam . jñ¯a-prapanna). Schlieter notes that killing even this being is “explicitly forbidden” (313) presumably because of an innate sentience entailing this nascent capacity for suffering. Sentience could be said, in these texts, to manifest all the way down, at least in the case of human being. Schlieter claims that: Most Buddhists distinguish between “pain” and “suffering,” claiming the former to be unavoidable, while regarding the latter to be completely overcome by the spiritually advanced practitioner. The anthropological […] basis of Buddhist views on suffering lies in the capacity of sentient beings to recoil if they experience aversion (e.g., pain, violence) and seek situations in which they are secure, happy, and at ease. (312)

Pain is ‘unavoidable’ insofar as it is an intrinsic feature of embodied life (though it can of course be managed in many critical medical cases; see Chap. 11), and its causal role in suffering is recognised, as above, as a motivating factor for avoiding it where possible. Yet as Schlieter points out “There is […] no classical text that explicates how the victim’s capacity to feel pain should guide ethical decision making in regard to human beings.” (313). This is important, especially with regard to the appliedethical criteria for Buddhist bioethics, because there may be other principles guiding ethical decision-making that may override a narrow concern to avoid pain. Where the avoidance of pain is not a global Buddhist criterion for the moral evaluation of acts, the larger category of the obviation of suffering is; that is, whatever enables such obviation takes precedence over but does not exclude the relief of pain in moral evaluation. This distinction clearly relates to the Dalai Lama’s formulation, above, which conflates the two by making the possession of sentience equivalent to the potential experience of suffering (for example, that experienced by amoeba) wherever there is a capacity for pain or pleasure. But does an ascription of sentience necessarily entail an attribution of potential suffering? As we have seen, the Buddhist attribution of sentience (and thus who or what suffers) is, like the possession of a life-faculty, not univocal; where humans are distinguished from other animals (including insects) in 24

All refs. to Vism. are to the chapter number followed by paragraph, in ѯan.amoli (tr., 2011). Cf. the Garbh¯avakr¯antyavad¯ana. Barnhart (2018, 601ff .) discusses the relations between the P¯ali Buddhist proto-biological notion of intermediate being (gandhabba) and the embryo. Schlieter also notes that “Tibetan embryological texts stress the homogeneous continuity of the development [between intermediate being and embryo] with the fact that the karmic “consciousness principle” may even “experience” entering the womb.” (2014, 313).

25

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the context of kinds of rebirth (MN III 167–9), so too are their kinds and qualities of sentience. Human and non-human sentience Sentience (as the root Latin verb sentire suggests) is the capacity to feel sensation and emotion, which in the Buddhist context significantly implies (as the Dalai Lama suggests) the capacity to register pleasure and pain, and thus tend by virtue of an apparently innate hedonic propensity to seek pleasure and avoid pain.26 The sense of human sentience derives from the psychophysical factors (n¯amar¯upa) ensuing on the rebirth of consciousness in a new physical form (SN II 3–4).27 Of these, most sentient animal species share varied capacities for feeling (vedan¯a), sensory contact (phassa) with and attention to sensory stimuli, if not the same kind of capacity for perceptionconception (saññ¯a), or volitional intention (cetan¯a), but these differentiations are vague, especially where they entail grounds for degrees of moral status. Harvey notes that “it is clear that there is a gradation among animals as regards their relative degree of freedom, or capacity for virtue (AKBh IV 97b-c). Insects would seem to have little, if any, of either.” (Harvey 2000, 150). These are claims about objective functional capacity, with a view ultimately to approaching the question concerning the attribution of sentience, and thus the capacity for suffering, by way of qualitative considerations. To take Harvey’s example of an apparent case of sentience lacking basic criteria for suffering attributable to human subjects, the biology that impels an intrepid ant and a curious human alike to avoid burning by fire, is registered by the one as a value-neutral stimulus provoking avoidance, whereas for the other it is a sign of mortal danger. The latter includes complex mental and affective functions of aversion and fear, and only then a valuejudgement of undesirableness that informs a biological resistance to both pain and the imminent potential for death signalled by its worst case. It is not certain that the ant faced with fire does anything more than sense a biological threat: it is, then, sentient, but not in the richly complex conscious (let alone self-conscious) sense that the human registration of the same stimuli is. On the one hand, while insects are classified as sentient, it isn’t clear in what sense they, among other sentient species, potentially suffer. On the other hand, Buddhists class both humans and insects as sentient, but it is not yet clear what is indicated in the understanding of human sentience that objectively renders it the most highly-valued form of animal sentience implicit in the precept (MN-a. I 198; Harvey 2000, 29). If pleasure and pain are no more than sensory or psychological phenomena, something else must render them axiological categories. The doctrine of pat.iccasamupp¯ada or dependent origination (in its diachronic or causal sense) identifies (e.g., DN II 33) feeling (vedan¯a) as consequent upon the contact (phassa) of

26

The contrary possibility, present in some pathological conditions, to seek pain and avoid pleasure, would not qualify sentience per se but would question its hedonic configuration as generally presupposed. 27 DN II 62–3 describes the conditionality of consciousness for the birth of a sentient body.

2 Life, and Sentience; the Principle of Dukkha (PD)

33

senses with sensory objects (¯ayatana). As noted, feeling is the capacity to comprehend a sensum as being a source of either pleasure or pain and so is a condition for the key cause of suffering in craving for pleasurable or non-aversive states (and by the same token, in aversion to non-pleasurable ones). Inasmuch as craving (tan.h¯a) identifies pleasurable states and their objects as primordial goods, the subject of craving endows them with value, and the further conditioned link of up¯ad¯ana or attachment to such objects arises. While this causal conditioning characterises all unawakened sentient beings, human sentience is characterised by its capacity to introduce a normative, and so to some degree less conditioned, response to sensory experience, and it is this capacity to cognise (and recognise) such sensa as valuable or not by virtue of being productive of desirable or undesirable states, that determines the presence of human sentience (and possibly some if not all forms of animal sentience as well.)28 Every sentient being that can register pain may theoretically also be able to experience an aversion to pain, and so (as Schlieter suggests, above) seek states opposite to it: those that produce ease. But presumably only some developed sentient kinds, pre-eminently the human, will recognise that attachment to pleasure and the craving it produces is itself a form of suffering also.29 In particular (and probably unique to the human case), a philosophically virtuous suffering extrapolates first-personal pain and suffering to its pervasive nature, as the apprehension of the fact of dukkha (Skt. duh.kha) as universal suffering, the first noble truth, and such suffering as morally unsatisfactory (and not merely unpleasurable) and so something ultimately to be extirpated. The canonical Dhammapada provides a locus classicus for the same principle, undergirding the early Buddhist sense of intentional lethality: All tremble at violence, to all life is dear. Comparing (others) with oneself, one should not kill or cause to kill. When a man considers this, he does not kill or cause to kill. Whoever injures with violence creatures desiring happiness, seeking his own happiness he does not gain happiness when he has passed away. Whoever does not injure with violence creatures desiring happiness, seeking his own happiness he gains happiness when he has passed away. (Dhp. 130–132, in Norman 2000, 20).30

Hence, if intentional killing engenders anticipatory and subsequent suffering (for its object and related others, as well as its agent), then the first precept presupposes:

28

The j¯atakas in particular narrate accounts of a shared sense of the normative status of suffering between humans and some (linguistically as well as morally gifted) animals. But this idea tends mainly to bolster an account of the kammic continuities of virtue between transspecies lifetimes, rather than of animal sentience per se (indeed most animals in the same tales do not share the same virtue). 29 Elsewhere in the canon (e.g., DN III 216), suffering is conceptualized in a threefold differentiation as: dukkha-dukkhat¯a (suffering due to pain), sa˙nkh¯ara-dukkhat¯a (caused by conditioning), viparin.a¯ ma-dukkhat¯a (caused by change). Inasmuch as pleasure as an object of biological desire or craving and thence psychological attachment is impermanent, then the hedonic value of pleasure soon provides the condition for an anhedonic form of the suffering of change, and conditioning, if not of pain. 30 Cf. MN III 203.

34

3 Canonical Buddhist Discourse on Killing the universal fact of dukkha, and the concomitant fact that sentient beings with the capacity to experience and recognize such suffering experience it as intrinsically undesirable,

and thus a principle of suffering (PD) that recognises suffering-producing acts as intrinsically undesirable. The first three sentences of the quotation from the Dhammapada clearly encode the same principle (the remaining two encode the subsequent principle of kamma, PK, below). But this claim also suggests an objection to at least one aspect of it: it is arguably possible to kill with negligible or no subjective suffering for its direct object, if the latter is wholly unaware of it before or when it occurs. This, for example, is what for some defenders of the ethical killing of animals exonerates the animal-slaughter industry from moral culpability: animals are believed not to suffer at all, or to suffer much less, in efficiently instant execution.31 However arguable such claims are it appears the PD as an exclusive criterion for not killing requires rescue, at this point, in the Buddhist account. Integral to that account (and to the quotations from the Dhammapada, and Schlieter and Harvey, above) is understanding how intention constitutes a conscious agency that modulates human sentience by being able to produce or obviate the suffering central to its definition, as well as to the precept, noted in the PD.

3 Cetan¯a as Intention and Volition As noted above, early Buddhist discourse broadly substantiates the precept by engaging three related aspects of morally-valenced acts: (i) the intentional circumstances (kamma-path¯a) that qualify the kammic status of a full lethal act; (ii) the qualitative natures (gun.a) of the agent and recipient of the act; and so (iii) the kinds of kammic consequence (vip¯aka) entailed in the values pertaining to (i) and (ii).

Here we are concerned with the first of these determining elements of any given lethal act (the second is the central theme of Chap. 4, and the third, concerning kamma, follows below). The notion of intention, a common translation for cetan¯a (in both P¯ali and Sanskrit) has important conative, psychological, ethical and legalpunitive dimensions all of which become relevant to analysing the first precept. The Therav¯adan commentarial Khuddakap¯a.tha-at..thakath¯a defines the basic intentional conditions for killing as follows: The taking of life is the volition of killing expressed through the doors of either body or speech, occasioning action which results in the cutting off of the life faculty in a living being, when there is a living being present and (the perpetrator of the act) perceives it as a living being. (Khp-a. 26; in Bodhi 1994) 31

Parallel (if somewhat perverse) claims could be raised regarding legal human killing, for example among some forms of state-sponsored premeditated execution such as counter-terroristic assassination; see Chap. 12 for extended discussion.

3 Cetan¯a as Intention and Volition

35

Intention thus initiates verbal or bodily action, the former indicating a command or recommendation intended to be obeyed or followed. Most broadly, the circumstances of a contemplated, conceived, commanded, or completed, course of action determine to what degree the act is fully achieved as morally determinate. Canonical and commentarial texts reiterate five necessary conditions (sambh¯ara) for any act to qualify as a complete morally-valenced course of action (kamma-patha), of which ten unwholesome types (akusala-kammapatha) are commonly identified: killing being the first, bodily type, of these.32 These are that the act entail: a living being, the perception of the same as living on the part of the agent of action, the thought or intention to kill, its enaction, and the death of the same being as a result.33 Intention alone is thus not a sufficient condition for the kamma-patha of killing, but is decisive in forming its necessarily mental, and so morally determining, cause. In the commentary on the A˙nguttara Nik¯aya (Manorathap¯uran.¯ı), Buddhaghos.a glosses cetan¯a as “taken in the sense of arranging, in that it collects everything together.” (Mp. III 408), where as a mental factor (cetasika) (and one the seven universal cetasikas of the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma) it coordinates other mental factors and kinds of consciousness (cittas). Affect, motivation, cognition, modes of consciousness, and even unconscious volitional factors, are all implicitly or explicitly intended in any given intentional act. By unifying disparate psychophysical functions cetan¯a focusses a range of conative forces that would otherwise lack mutual cohesion and the capacity for actualization. The output of these complex functions are generally summarised under one of three moral valences: as wholesome (kusala), unwholesome (akusala), or indeterminate (avy¯akata).34 Intention also more broadly summarises moral-affective categories, whereby a mind characterised by wisdom (paññ¯a) and loving-kindness (mett¯a) will intend an act with a degree of virtue lacking in the same act intended by a mind characterised by greed (lobha), hatred (dosa), and ignorance (moha). This means that the moral valence of intention can be and is often more morally salient than the given act itself. Hence, any intentional lethal act, constituted by one or other of these cognitiveaffective features, will in theory produce better or worse kammic merit (P. puñña Skt. pun.ya) and consequences (vip¯aka). It is however also made clear, especially in Therav¯ada commentary, that intentional killing is always associated with aversion, or less centrally delusion, in one or another form.35 Moreover, in undertaking to abstain from a range of physical, verbal and mental acts, itself a positive intention, the precept encodes a complex configuration of cetan¯a 32

See for example AN X 28, 176; MN 9, 114; Cf. MN-a I 198; Sp. 439. 34 The threefold division belongs to the Abhidhamma matrix of triplets (tika-m¯ atik¯a) set out for example at the beginning of the Dhammasa˙ngan.¯ı. Some scholars (such as Heim 2014) simply use the English good and bad for kusala and akusala respectively. 35 See Schmithausen (2000, 47); Gethin (2004a, 178) and passim. This claim is a central focus of Chap. 6, there discussed in-depth. There is an apparent exception to it in the Vinaya of the Mah¯ıs´a¯ sakas which conceives the legal blamelessness of compassionate killing by monks (Schmithausen 48). However, the assertion of the legal provision de jure does not thereby ensure the truth of the psychological case de facto. 33

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in reverse: more than one constitutive factor is required to be intentionally resisted for full moral-psychological abstention from such acts to occur. If some of these are unavailable (to a single conscious agency), then intention needs to be understood as multivalent and heterogeneous, both psychologically and morally. Indeed, many commentators (Bodhi 1994; Guenther 1976; Devdas 2008; McDermott 1984; Heim 2014) conceive cetan¯a in terms of a conative volition which conveys the comparatively non-agential nature of the constitutive motivation of action. Volition, another frequent translation of cetan¯a, expresses multiple conscious and less conscious factors that question the assumption of a self-determined and autonomous agent. As Heim notes, “Cetan¯a is not a process of making autonomous and deliberate choices, but rather is the psychological drive that projects and sustains human activity in the world.” (2014, 20) Hence, appropriate terms for desires or aims of the agent (I want to become a millionaire; I will go to Spain next year) conceived in terms of an overtly self-oriented, as opposed to impersonal, volition, are distinguished from cetan¯a: adhipp¯aya, or chanda. This distinction between intentional freedom and volitional determinism also guides a larger discussion of motivations for killing (premeditated and unpremeditated, respectively) and hence the culpability attached to the intentional sliding-scale they represent (Harvey 2000, 52–57), something clearly true also of modern legal theory. For our purposes cetan¯a can carry this twofold reference: intention when it refers to its more cognitive, deliberative or goal-oriented aspects, and volition with respect to conative, affective or comparatively unpremeditated ones, though these should be conceived as functioning in concert (or, occasionally, as we’ll see, in some tension). Heim summarises this range of reference by suggesting that cetan¯a does not act as a sovereign will or decision-making process, but rather as a volitional process that intends, initiates, and directs action toward fulfilling a goal. It has both cognitive and conative functions, but it always operates with and through the myriad factors at work in dependent origination. (2014, 21)

Cetan¯a thus engages in self-conscious, thematized, or moral, terms those volitions that engage comparatively less-conscious, heterogenous, and non-moral impulses. That cetan¯a has both cognitive and non-cognitive reference is in keeping with the sense in the Abhidhamma (and Buddhist metaphysics more generally) of functional terms entailing contextual definition for their full comprehension. This also reflects a possible ontological indeterminacy, on a spectrum between the mental and material, or the thetic and non-thetic. For example, speech acts (as noted, also culpable in lethal acts), conflate mental and bodily intentional acts with corresponding intentional features that require cetan¯as of both mental and material, cognitive and noncognitive, status: how one speaks can be as morally or psychologically significant as what one says.36 36

By the same token, silence, or the intended omission of speech, is as morally significant qua abstention as intended speech, and right speech (samm¯a-v¯ac¯a), the third of the path factors of the Eightfold Path, is characterised in terms of abstention not only from lying and divisive speech, but

3 Cetan¯a as Intention and Volition

37

Cetan¯a is also importantly conceptually linked to larger causal factors with respect to the agent of killing. Its role in the ‘gathering together’ of cognitive-affective states, and its functional relation to global and local forms of ignorance (avijj¯a), constituting many types of action but particularly those which are unwholesome or unskilful (akusala), will be considered in more depth in subsequent chapters. These two aspects of mental-affective states and ignorance also invoke two senses of the person as the moral agent of action: synchronically, as constituted by the five aggregates (P. khandhas Skt. skandhas), and diachronically, where cetan¯a functions as the causal agent of the fourth of these, the sankh¯aras or volitional formations, determining action as value-laden (e.g., at Vism. 462). Here cetan¯a determines the kamma that generates the impersonal impetus for both future acts and lives.37 More specifically, cetan¯a crucially accompanies but is not equivalent to the primary mental factor (cetasika) responsible for all intended action (kamma). Heim writes, It is important to note that a mental action (mano-kamma) is not identical to cetan¯a; rather, one has cetan¯as for each of the three actions […] mental actions, though considered complete actions, can also (though they need not) have motivational force leading to bodily or verbal actions in addition to the mental activity. But they are not to be conflated with cetan¯as, which are the central component of all three types of action. (42)

If all three types of action (of body, speech and mind) are motivated by cetan¯a, how is it that “identification of the transgression with volition implies that the ultimate responsibility for the act of killing lies with the mind, since the volition that brings about the act is a mental factor”? (Bodhi 1994) The act requires, as Bodhi suggests, mental intention as its first cause: it cannot come into existence (and kammic fruition) without that initial cetan¯a. He writes, The body and speech function merely as doors for that volition, i.e., as channels through which the volition of taking life reaches expression. Killing is classified as a bodily deed since it generally occurs via the body, but what really performs the act of killing is the mind using the body as the instrument for actualizing its aim. (ibid.)

Bodily (or verbal) acts consequent on mental ones thus entail their own intentional factors, but it is the mental cetan¯a determining the entire sequence that can be said to ultimately cause their collective effect. Hence, we have seen that a subsidiary dimension of cetan¯a with regard to the precept is that a purely written, verbal, or gestural intention to command others to kill is morally equivalent to the bodily act (Heim 43–44), even if the act is not thereby complete. This is possible because it is the originating cause of the final effect (the death of a sentient being), and not its efficient cause, that is ethically salient, and hence primarily, if not exclusively, culpable.38 Hence, the causal role of cetan¯a is central also abuse and gossip (SN 45.8), and where both affectionate (AN 5.198) and pleasant (Thag. 21) affect are recommended. 37 How kamma as an effect of cetan¯ a entails a quotient of soteriological value (rather than the various popular but misleading notions of just desert) will also emerge in Chap. 7, below. 38 A reasoning that echoes the attenuation (even exoneration) of combat soldiers’ guilt from killing in Western moral tradition. However, the Buddhist sense of primary intention also modifies this

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in determining culpability: the will to take life, even unsuccessfully, overrides the fact of having done so, or of nearly doing so, and carrying out the act incurs moral blame only very negligibly (or not at all) when it is unintended (Vin. IV 125). However, as we’ve seen, psychological motives and moral intentions of the same intentional act are often enmeshed as well as heterogenous, so that intention as a hold-all category for moral evaluation is likely in practise to be fuzzy. For instance, Gethin (2004a, 183) argues that an overtly compassionate and so skilful motivation (hetu), for example to relieve suffering, need not preclude comparatively covert or subconscious dimensions of aversion (such as towards the source of suffering in the sufferer) as a ‘decisive intention’ (sanit..th¯apaka-cetan¯a) determining the same act. Moreover, given the varied range of intentional factors characterising typical acts of abortion, euthanasia, suicide or even normal homicide, as well as their differing senses of ‘life’ qua the object of deprivation (as disposable, intolerable, meaningless, obsessively significant, etc.), a straightforward binary evaluation of intention between wholesome or unwholesome (kusala or akusala) seems to mistake their moral multivalence. If so, the tripartite schema above can only function as a broad heuristic for value-judgement, rather than as a basis for enquiry into the object of abstention central to the first precept: there are all too many ways to do something as well as not to, but if cetan¯a is to morally adjudicate these it requires significant finessing. For example, where intention necessarily requires an intentional object, this object may be of abstract or concrete kinds (this will become significant for the analyses of Part II). Where cetan¯a as it pertains to killing references acts of mind, speech and body with respect to their intentional objects, then n¯amar¯upa (the psychophysical dyad of ‘name-and-form’ or mind-and-body) in its specific configurations is necessarily its adjunct concept, and not just ‘a living, breathing body’, or even a generic ‘person’, per se. It is also significantly cetan¯a which mediates consciousness and what it is conscious of—what it ‘intends’ in the technical sense, and how it intends it: in Western phenomenological terms, its noematic and noetic constitution, respectively. The consideration of how intention in these Buddhist contexts of action and its effects relate to this latter understanding of intentionality as a directedness of consciousness to its objects of awareness, needs to be considered in the Buddhist case as it informs moral phenomenology more generally. Intentions entail accompanying affects and dispositions that contribute to the cognition of external and internal objects of perception, and their moral evaluation (Heim 46–50). Western theorizations of consciousness often conceive of intentionality as an epistemically and axiologically neutral feature of perception and apperception: conscious awareness just registers intentional contents as such, whatever their constitution, before those contents enter into higher order cognitive appropriations. In other words, that which is given in appearances is assumed to be given more or less veridically as it is: reasoning, such that the guilt of one member of the group pertains to all members sharing a collective intention. (See Vasubandhu’s claim at AKBh IV 72c-d, 649, which holds the guilt of one soldier committed to killing as the guilt of all, no matter which of them acts on their shared intention; cf. also Sect. “An Exception to the Precept: Doctrinal Context” in Chap. 5).

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39

one can be mistaken about what the given signifies, but not about given phenomena as such. In its Buddhist theorisation, however, any apparently ‘pure’ function of consciousness is conditioned by other constituting factors that erode the assumption of an autonomous capacity to register intentional objects without significant cognitive distortion (Garfield 2015).39 Intentionality is thus determined by more or less errorprone forms of sensory perception, cognition, affect and emotion, and broader cultural formations of pretheoretical belief, all of which are relevant to the Buddhist analysis of the role of intentionality in the cognitive construction of the object (person) of lethal action (which will be central to Part II). In the Buddhist moral-psychological context of killing, in which the intensity of volition is morally salient, this raises the question of whether, for example, the strong presence of an abstract or imaginary intentional object (the ‘enemy’ or ‘them’) significantly differs morally from an intentional consciousness only weakly directed to a unique and real worldly object (the particular person actually in front of me). Many otherwise apparently normal people, such as those who routinely enjoy horrorfilms or extreme video-games, may strongly fantasise violent acts they suppose they will never commit; while gunmen responsible for mass-killings or perpetrators of genocide may conceivably commit similar kinds of acts in indifferent or dissociated states of a transactional instrumentality. How intention is theoretically parsed in Buddhist analyses of such cases is central to how they might be understood morally. Intentionality can be modulated in other ways relevant to a Buddhist-ethical context. Medically, brain injury or mental disturbance may compromise the intentional functions of consciousness. Convicted criminals sometimes speak of acting ‘in a blur’, others that ‘it wasn’t really me’ who was acting. If it wasn’t ‘me’, a Buddhist might be tempted to remark, perhaps it was no substantial agent at all, in which case what kind of moral cetan¯a can be legally associated with that absence (or unfulfillment) of intentional agency? Indeed, Buddhist moral theory needs to confront the problematic issue of the decentred or diminished self, insofar as it might imply a positive soteriological role in one of its most important but elusive doctrines: anatt¯a. The Buddhist can plausibly claim that the so-called de-centred self is not metaphysically or psychologically equivalent to anatt¯a, and that to conflate them misses the sense in which a weakened sense of self (including a weakened sense of responsibility) is rather an effect of the inherent dysfunction of the reified sense of self—which will, as reified and so to that degree illusory, always suffer implicitly from a sense of its own groundlessness and thus a constitutive dis-ease,40 a compromise of its adequate moral self-understanding in Buddhist terms. 39

While according to the Pram¯an.av¯ada (or epistemological) school perceptual objects are in theory perceived veridically, it is also the case that perception-conception (sam . jñ¯a), the third khandha/skandha, perceives only mental representations (¯ak¯ara) of intrinsically real specificallycharacterised phenomena, which entails complex conceptual superimpositions on them before they are cognizable as such (see Dunne 2004). 40 See Loy (1996, 2000a).

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In a medical or legal context, however, it’s not at all clear how the realization of non-self valorised by (all) Buddhist metaphysics differentiates itself ethically from borderline or pathological conditions recognized by legal and penal justice systems, even if it might do so metaphysically or psychologically. Ascertaining how a contemporary Buddhist philosophy of mind could make the right kinds of distinction, with respect to a Buddhist psychology of the conventionally-real moral person, to serve potential ethical judgments is a necessary part of a deeper discussion of Buddhist intentionality. These examples serve only to illustrate provisionally what kind of dilemmas a generic Buddhist philosophy of mind faces when its dominant morally-determinative trope of cetan¯a as subjective intention and volition is brought into the 21st-century ethical context. For now, we can summarize the role of cetan¯a by observing how it is a function of every morally-laden (i.e. kammic) action and in every case aligned with one or more types of action of body, speech and mind. While the lethal act will in every case be ultimately caused by a mental cetan¯a, as Bodhi remarks, the full course of action giving rise to it will involve a complex of intentional and other elements of the cognitive-affective mind and body. If cetan¯a is the actualization, in three different kinds of act, of kamma, we need now to summarise what the P¯ali tradition communicates about how kamma constitutes intentional lethal action in particular.

4 The Buddhist Ethical Economy; the Principle of Kamma (PK) Coterminous with cetan¯a in what could be called the presentation of the Buddhist ethical economy, is kamma, a locus classicus for which is given by Gautama Buddha in the A˙nguttaranik¯aya: “it is intention (cetan¯a) that I call action (kamma); intending, one acts by body, speech, and mind.”41 As noted above, kamma conceptually extends the principle of dukkha (PD) in important ways because, as observed in the latter part of the quotation from the Dhammapada (end of §2, above) it engages dukkha insofar as any intentional commission of an unwholesome action entails a concomitant suffering for its agent as well as its recipient. The larger sense of kamma thus amounts to the familiar notion, across religious and ethical borders, of recognizing malign consequences as a deterrent to committing malign actions (and mutatis mutandis as an incentive for committing benign actions). Speaking of the negative kammic causation attaching to action that is ‘dark and with a dark ripening’ (kammam . kan.ham . kan.ha-vip¯akam . ) AN II 234 exemplifies killing as paradigmatic. In similar terms, killing is ubiquitously framed throughout the canon in terms of this consequentialist economy of moral cause and effect, illustrating 41

AN III 415: cetan¯aham . bhikkhave kammam . vad¯ami |cetayitv¯a kammam . karoti. As this paradigmatic quote indicates, kamma refers to all intentional action, which being intended generates wholesome, unwholesome, or neutral, psychological and ethical effects.

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41

not so much the unique nature of killing as a specific act among other similarly ‘dark’ acts but rather the psychological-moral causation in which they all participate: as these acts are all so constituted, then so will their effects be. Harvey however makes clear that kammic cause and effect is not itself what makes such dark action, or its effects, dark. He writes that “Its having dark karmic results is a sign of its dark, afflictive, unwholesome nature, but not the criterion for its being unwholesome in the first place.” (2018, 11; italics original) If so, we can’t assign a consequentialist basis to an explanation for the wrongness of killing: that it is wrong because its causal consequence is ‘dark’ or unwholesome. Rather, as Harvey suggests, if negative kamma is essentially symptomatic of a dark act like killing, the criterion for its unwholesomeness must lie otherwise than in its kammic constitution, which refers essentially to the nature of its effect.42 This indirectly confirms other normative responses to killing in the canon. For example, on three occasions the Buddha’s responses appear to exonerate lethal acts, specifically in the case of arhat suicide.43 Arhats by definition have purified all cognitive-affective afflicted intention and its attendant negative kamma. If arhat suicide is the result of a fully wholesome intention (kusala cetan¯a) this could explain the absence of any ill-effect of arhat suicide, on its face a plausible explanation for the Buddha’s exoneration of the arhat’s action as blameless (anupavajja) because it will not result in a rebirth determined by akusala kamma (Keown 1996a, 22–24).44 But this seemingly plausible explanation for the moral status of killing (here suicide) solely in terms of kammic consequence would also suggest that killing per se is not paradigmatically exemplary of unwholesome action, and would moreover suggest that other cases of killing are wrong only because of their negative kammic consequences: if all sentient beings were arhats they would be morally licensed to engage in mass-slaughter! But canonical sources predicate of arhats just the opposite: that they are constitutively unable to kill with intention (DN III 133). That they cannot kill appears to render the claim that they could in theory kill, with impunity, morally otiose.45 In short, akusala kamma may be a necessary condition but not a sufficient reason for what makes killing in canonical Buddhism wrong, in accord with Harvey’s claim that kamma is a sign of, and not the criterion for, its wrongness. How kammic consequence is conceived has its own explanatory consequence, because while certain 42

Similarly, with reference to the three poisons of greed, hatred and delusion as the causal roots (m¯ula) for all unwholesome acts more generally, Harvey writes “Greed, hatred and delusion are presented here [at MN I 46-47] as the inner causes of the unwholesome, though not the criteria for labelling something as the unwholesome. They are, though, themselves unwholesome (AN I 201).” (2018, 13; italics original). 43 Channov¯ ada Sutta (MN III 263–6, n.144; SN IV 55–60); Vakkali Sutta (SN III 119–24); Godhika Sutta (SN I 120–2). See Keown (1996a), Delhey (2006, 2009), An¯alayo (2010), Kovan (2013, 2014, 2018) for varied discussion. 44 For a survey of alternative accounts of the Buddha’s exoneration of arhat suicide see Kovan (2013, 2018). 45 Clearly the canonical suicidal arhats are an exception to this claim, but in Kovan (2013, 2018) I argue that the salient distinction in their case is not only that they are morally blameless, but that suicide is constitutively sui generis as a literally and morally reflexive lethal act.

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effects are in the canon repeatedly claimed for certain kinds of kamma, it is not clear how they are effected, and indeed current senses of the nature of kammic causation differ.46 These can be construed, very broadly, as psychological or metaphysical. Keown describes the distinction this way: The emphasis placed upon intention and the fact that the same action can have different results for different individuals both suggest that the connection is to be explained in terms of psychology rather than by reference to a transpersonal chain of cause and effect. There seems, however, to be some evidence that the consequences attributed to karma are not purely of a psychological nature. The distinction between these two is made using the term phalas to denote the future “fruit” of action and sam . sk¯aras to designate the transformative effect that moral action has upon the character of the agent. (1996b, 336)

The psychological signification of kamma (here correlating to but not identical to its sense in terms of sam . sk¯aras) is as the variable but consistently observable local effects of similar intended actions, a sense that carries minimal metaphysical baggage: few would dispute that the commission of malign (or benign) action is a frequent condition for more or less malign (or benign) effects in its agents as well as in the ambient social-moral environment, especially when agent and human environment share a psychological or cultural formation (see also Finnigan 2022, 12– 13). Similarly, the regular commission of such acts will tend to the likely repetition, and habitual cultivation over time, of similar courses of action of body, speech and mind. To conceive of kamma in this weak, and comparatively naturalised, sense of psychological-empirical causation pertaining to both individual and social psychology is not to claim that it is a literal rendering of its original P¯ali Buddhist signification, or to map the complex semantic terrain pertaining to the historical conceptualisation of kamma across a wide range of Buddhist (as well as other Indic) traditions.47 Rather, kamma in this weak sense functions discursively as a heuristic to signify a plausible sense of psychological and interpersonal contiguity and continuity between the causes of actions and their probable but not determinate effects.48 If moral agency operates on this level of the individual agent vis-à-vis the other then it also entails an intersubjective form of social conditioning where agents habitually ‘effect’, or solicit, expected behavioural dispositions in others, and thus ‘causal’ interactions between larger structures of collective agency and its effects (a straightforward negative example is the tendency to violent flare-ups between disputing

46

See for example Keown (1996b), Goodman (2017), Coseru (2007), Finnigan (2022). The task undertaken in McDermott (1984), Reichenbach (1990), O’Flaherty (1980), Prasad (1989), among others. 48 It should be noted that such effects (vip¯ aka) of intentional action are themselves kammically neutral and hence not kammic causes of subsequent action (even if they are among the important psychological or other conditions for it), which instead requires the cetan¯a for committing some morally-laden act. Also, physical objects produced from kammic causes (such as a sentient being) are not themselves kamma-vip¯aka, which refers only to mental phenomena. 47

4 The Buddhist Ethical Economy; the Principle of Kamma (PK)

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social groups).49 While there is a strong element of predictive and behavioural consistency in this sense of moral causation, it is not clear that it is best understood as determinative either morally or psychologically, vulnerable as it is to the socialpsychological relativism that empirically observes the same or similar behaviours eliciting widely inconsistent consequences across cultures. The strong version of kamma, on the other hand, more literally views it as a global metaphysical claim concerning the consequences of moral action by which all sentient (and even insentient) life is universally conditioned, irrespective of spatiotemporal, cultural, historical, or even religious, empirical circumstance. That is, wholesome intentions necessarily produce wholesome effects (though these can be mitigated by other factors), and mutatis mutandis with unwholesome intentions and their effects, and so to that degree are causally deterministic. This core of causal necessity makes kammic causation a putative law and not just the observation of contingent regularities. A causal law is only possible because, in this case, the kammic effect of any token of a type of intention is in principle invariant, even where the actual effect(s) of an act is likely to be modified by other conditioning circumstances (such as, in the Buddhist case, the nature of the act’s recipient). Moreover, this nomologically invariant relation between intention and effect expresses a universal law of inherently rightful normative consequence, thereby providing a theoretical security for the evaluation of moral phenomena that might otherwise appear opaque (we will consider one such case in Sect. 1 of Chap. 4, below). But what then obtains in any explanation for such complex phenomena is an infinitely variable kammic effect of intended acts, the epistemic access to which is limited to awakened beings such as arhats and Buddhas (MN III 178–79), amounting to a moral epistemology otherwise inaccessible to unawakened (moral and epistemic) agents.50 This problem is addressed again in Chap. 5. For now, it suffices to observe that a broadly-construed principle of kamma, interpretable in either the weak or strong sense, serves dialectically with the PD as explanation for the first precept prohibiting killing: lethal acts produce psychological, social and cosmological malign effects that cause suffering for their agent, given a more or less consistent regularity between such causes and such effects, by which Buddhist tradition conceives of all intentional action, or kamma.

This formulation of a principle of kamma (PK) carries more potential persuasive force than the PD on its own terms, if the sense of the precept refers to lethal action 49

Ricard and Singer (2017, 181–182) discuss the intersubjective causation of moral phenomena in Buddhist-psychological and neuroethical terms (cf. Coseru 2017a). Coseru (in 2007) also develops a naturalized model of kamma. 50 MN III 202–03; SN I 91–93. Reichenbach (1990, 27) rejects a purely samsk¯ . ara-based or ‘subjective’ theory of kamma as inadequate to addressing the objective wrongness of acts and not merely the intentional dispositions which give rise to them. Keown counters this claim by correctly asserting that “A sam . sk¯ara theory of karma is not a normative theory but a theory about moral causation. It says nothing about moral axiology and does not require a commitment to the view that normative principles are reducible to psychological states.” (1996b, 338).

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rather than the more general category of harm: with the PK, negative effect necessarily always ensues even where suffering consequent on acts appears negligible. (This persuasiveness would of course also depend on how kamma is assessed, and whether the strong version is as philosophically tenable as the weak.) The PD aligns more naturally with the interpretation of the precept as prohibiting all kinds of harm, and the PK with that regarding killing. The PD is intrinsically altruistic, focused as it is on mitigating the suffering of the other (as well as the self), while the PK (at least in ´ avakay¯ana context) is comparatively agent-oriented, prudentially focused on the Sr¯ averting future negative kamma attached to the acting subject. As we will see, Mah¯ay¯ana ethical universalism sublates this prudential orientation by making the kamma of the other the primary moral concern, over the kamma of the acting subject. Before continuing to summarize the grounds for the precept with regard to the extensions and exceptions to them that arise with the Mah¯ay¯ana, we need to consider how the PD and PK are further elaborated in claims common to the ´ avakay¯ana traditions more broadly, and prominently articulated by Therav¯ada and Sr¯ the exegete Buddhaghosa.

Chapter 4

Interpreting the Precept: Evaluative Criteria in the Therav¯ada

Abstract This chapter continues the discussion of Pali Buddhist grounds for the prohibition of killing, and its moral evaluation more generally, in a focus on the Therav¯adan commentarial statements of Buddhaghosa. This is preceded by a broader discussion of how the first precept is discursively framed in the early Buddhist canonical and social context, distinguishing between its senses as a marker for moral and legal transgression, and as a theoretical basis for ethical systematisation. These features are then contextualised with respect to the psychological theorisation of agency, as well as its moral epistemology. The precept prohibiting killing is understood to involve a moral-religious hermeneutics differing across personal and collective, social and soteriological registers, with respect to exemplary beings (such as arhats and a¯ rya-beings), monastics, lay-people, and non-human animals. This hermeneutics is then seen to be encoded in the hierarchical levels of evaluation of killing made explicit in Buddhaghosa’s Therav¯ada theorisation of an ethics of killing, but otherwise largely unexplained in this and other sources (such as Vasubandhu’s contemporaneous reiteration of similar claims in the Sarv¯astiv¯ada context). The distinctions he draws between different criteria for evaluation are assessed, internal and external to the early Buddhist worldview they express more generally. These include values, centrally that of ‘quality’ (gun.a), attaching to and between human and non-human killing, and its differing human agents, expressing a third major heuristic (following those of dukkha and kamma) determining an early Buddhist ethics of killing. Keywords Buddhist hermeneutics · Buddhist first precept · Buddhaghosa and Therav¯ada ethics · Moral evaluation of persons · Moral virtue and axiology · Gun.a · Animal and intrahuman killing

1 Framing the Precept: Transgression or Systematisation In Chap. 3 we surveyed some of the terms central to the canonical formulation of the first precept: in particular suffering, life as breath, the living being, lifefaculty, sentience or the functional elements of n¯ama, intention, volition or intentionality, and action (kamma) as a morally-valenced normative category central to early © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_4

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Buddhist accounts of causation. We established the grounds for two broad heuristics in the canonical justification for the precept summarised in the principles of dukkha (PD) and kamma (PK). This chapter provides further context for the precept by engaging norms evident in Therav¯ada commentarial texts by Buddhaghosa and ´ avakay¯ana exegetes, and introduces a third major heuristic as a ground for other Sr¯ the moral evaluation of killing before summarizing the conceptual transition of all three of these grounds to the Indian Mah¯ay¯ana context. We also noted the broadest basis for the precept in the value of ahim . s¯a (noninjury or non-harm), also dominant in Hindu and Jain contexts, and taken into the Buddhist lifeworld with emphases reflective of a particularly Buddhist ethical ideal. The normative extensions of ahim . s¯a are woven throughout the canonical corpus and its commentaries, including in j¯atakas concerning the Buddha and other awakened beings, and in tales even of the compassionate doings and spiritual progress of animals and lower-realm beings.1 The first of the five precepts or rules of training (sikkhapad¯a) for the ordained and lay-people alike, is one of three forms of ‘right action’ (P. samm¯a-kammanta Skt. samyak-karm¯anta).2 As the paradigmatic unwholesome act (akusala kammapatha), and given the central normative concern to avoid unwholesome acts and extended courses of unwholesome action, the taking of life is prohibited. The C¯u.la-Kammavibha˙nga Sutta warns that: Some man or woman kills living beings and is murderous, has blood on his hands, is given to blows and violence, is without pity for living beings. Because of performing and carrying out such action, at the breaking up of the body, after death he reappears in a state of misfortune, an unhappy destiny, a state of affliction, hell. (MN III 203; Gethin 2004a, 168)

As with the earlier quotation from the Dhammapada, this is a direct statement of the strong version of PK: the kammic-causal status of the act, for Buddhist soteriological purposes, is clear. The skilful (kusala) action to refrain from violence is as much a function of intention (cetan¯a) as the commission of an act, and thus can be seen positively as an act of omission. Indeed, the ethic of non-harm pervades many of the norms central to Buddhist praxis: in care or compassion (karun.a¯ ), loving-kindness (mett¯a), sympathetic joy (mudit¯a), equanimity or impartiality (upekkh¯a) and, foundationally for the Mah¯ay¯ana, the altruistic aspiration to awakening (bodhicitta). The same ethic is often described as integral to the attainments of the three paths of morality (s¯ıla), concentration or meditative stabilization (sam¯adhi) and insight (paññ¯a). The meditative practices of one-pointed concentration (ekaggat¯a), mindfulness (sati), calm-abiding (samatha) and analytical insight (vipassan¯a) are all conceived as dependent on the absence of hatred (adosa) and of impulses to violence, in even a purely mental sense; in turn, those meditative attainments significantly attenuate those physical and mental impulses. It is then not surprising that early Buddhist formulations of the precept view being the cause of another’s intentional lethal act, and even approving of another’s act, as morally equivalent to performing the act 1

Stewart (2014, 631; passim) and Schmithausen (1997) discuss interspecies ethical attitudes between animal and human agents in sutric and j¯ataka texts. 2 The other two being abstaining from stealing and sexual misconduct.

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oneself (e.g., Sn. 394). A scale of moral gravity attending any violent act emerges based on degrees of agential intention and cognisance, vis-à-vis its object, of the action (Harvey 1999; Gethin 2004a, 170). The potential mastery of the precept by virtue of intention thus invokes one of the most critical canonical formulations of the Buddha, noted above, and repeated throughout commentarial texts: “It is intention that I call action (kamma); having formed an intention one acts.” By the same token, offensive bodily injury not intending death, while not condoned (AN III 213), and accidental death resulting from offensive and defensive attack (Uss. 171), do not transgress the precept (Harvey 2000, 53–54; 69). However, the moral weight of the injury, or the effect of any intended act, also depends upon the nature of its object, even where its recipient fails to die. Hence, killing a person worthy of respect is worse, just as for example giving to them is better, than those actions would be with regard to a less praiseworthy recipient of the act (DN I 85; AN IV 237–78; Vibh. 378). We’ve noted that a subsidiary criterion that qualifies intention (cetan¯a) is its intensity: if volition is weak or mild the kammic effect is similarly weak; if strong or intense so too is its moral effect (MN-a. I 98; Harvey 2000, 52). An important aspect of this criterion is that the force of such intention leaves a corresponding kammic imprint in its agent’s mental continuum. Intensity of intention is thus a cause of the secondary criterion of mental defilements (kilesas), or habitual negative emotional states, also determining by its severity their moral effects. Such mental states exacerbate the kammic effect of intention, notably in the case where they inform an action directed against a being (typically a Buddha or bodhisattva) which comparatively or absolutely lacks them (MN-a. I 98). These qualifications are telling inasmuch as the introduction of auxiliary grounds for the moral evaluation of killing suggests heterogeneous responses to a diversity of intentional circumstance; that is, qualifications often respond to ambiguous circumstances which by their nature require a degree of moral interpretation.3 To illustrate this question of ethical hermeneutics we can return to the case just noted of accidental death resulting from offensive attack, and assume that such attack intends grievous bodily harm. Acts entailing intended bodily injury do not unequivocally transgress the precept because, while producing possibly severe suffering for its object (PD), they do not result in the much more morally grave kammic effect ensuing from intended death (PK). The Vinaya rules on accidental death4 make special provision for those cases in which “if it was unintentional, if he did not know, if he were not meaning death, if he was out of his mind, the first offender (who caused the rule to be made)” do not result in ‘defeat’ (expulsion from the order) for the monastic agent of acts so constituted. 3

It might be noted here and in general that to explore the logical implications of Buddhist-ethical evaluative norms is just to focus on their conceptual content. The brief analysis that follows is therefore intended neither as textual exegesis nor reconstructive revision of the norms it engages, but rather as a rational clarification of the discursive context in which they appear. 4 E.g., at Vin. III 78; cf. II 91. Manslaughter, attempted murder and murder are clearly distinguished in the Vibha˙nga, where the first two are grave offences (thullaccaya) and only the latter an offence of expulsion (p¯ar¯ajika).

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However, this is a legal and not a moral judgement. The moral evaluation of such intended action could be seen in theory to invoke the PK in its extension to a hypothetical worst case: for example, if someone is beaten severely enough to be hospitalized or put in a coma, and possibly dies or is taken off life-support, then death has in fact occurred as a consequence of intended bodily injury and, it would seem, necessarily incur some kammic effect. Yet by canonical reasoning the original intended action does not entail transgression of the precept because the death of a breathing being was not intended. Nonetheless, death in this would-be accidental case surely results in the gravest effects of suffering, for the loved ones of the deceased, and plausibly also the agent of the act. Yet this criterion of suffering (PD), even at its extreme, does not carry anything approaching the same moral-evaluative force as the PK, whereby, by contrast, the mere approval of another’s lethal act warrants full transgression of the precept. But it seems morally counter-intuitive that the fault of the unintended commission of a lethal act, consequent on intended grievous violence, should incur such apparently negligible culpability compared to that of a mere passive approval of another’s lethal act. If the moral effect of life unintentionally taken is held to be kammically neutral (this is not equivalent to the moral effect of intentional non-lethal violence, which would incur some kammic effect), then intention as the guiding criterion for evaluation in the early Buddhist code of ethics under-determines the full moral constitution of a common and probable case, in contemporary Buddhist experience as outside it. What is the moral cost that the violent agent pays for having effectively taken life?5 If this question is not meant, in the Buddhist context, in terms of punitive desert but rather in terms of impersonal ethical effect, and if that effect is not otherwise made explicit by the authority of case law or moral discourse in general, how then might a Buddhist ethics of lethal action account for it? We’ve noted in Chap. 3 that early Buddhist doctrine presents one nomological response: that a universal law of kamma registers the commission of harm, including the effects on others of a life taken, as sufficient cause for some corresponding effect (vip¯aka) reflecting the moral valence of the initial act. Thus, the law of kamma also militates against the moral nihilism that a rejection of such kammic determinism might entail.6 The violent agent will necessarily suffer unhappy consequences, but it is not clear what they will be and when they will be suffered, and they will remain uncodified in the case-law of the Vinaya. On this account a kammic consequence of intentional action is presumed, even where criteria for transgression of the precept seemingly fail to honour the indirect killing of an innocent. Hence, early Buddhist ethics does not provide overt moral judgement of a great variety of cases of lethal action, but instead maintains a doctrine of the universal 5

The same question in principle applies to cases of collateral damage in warfare, as well as torture (see Chap. 8, Sec. 3, for related discussion). 6 See MN II 140 for the Buddha’s forceful rejection of the alignment of his own teaching with the ¯ ıvika’s a-kammic doctrine of causeless and meaningless suffering. annihilationism of the Aj¯

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determinism of rightful moral consequence in kamma. This means there is for it no ontological distinction between a causal and moral explanation where any intentional action always has its congruent effect. The suffering consequent upon intended acts in theory cannot and does not vanish into moral inconsequence; rather, its concomitant psychological and social effects generate moral meaning, innate justice, and resolution for the early (and subsequent) Buddhist lifeworld. The space of interpretation We’ve just seen how ambiguous or borderline ethical cases question the hermeneutic of a transparent correspondence, or assumption of coherence, between an event, its effects and their reciprocal interpretation: how to make sense of each as parts of a meaningful moral whole. This illustrates a further hermeneutic point about Buddhist-ethical reasoning generally: that, broadly speaking, a foremost concern in the early literature (most obviously the Vinaya) is to establish how, and under what circumstances, the precept is transgressed, rather than to establish systematic criteria for the moral judgement of cases in and of themselves. But providing the required conditions for legal judgement in case-law, or stipulating a limit-case beyond which moral interpretation does not venture, does not provide moral reasoners with criteria for evaluating causal-intentional complexes of circumstances for action. If an innocent party dies from my fully intended act of aggression, how can I fail to be morally responsible for its effects? The Buddhist ethical emphasis on the intentionality of acts rather than objective norms and reasons by which to systematically evaluate them perhaps derives in large part from the institutional prerogative of the ordained body: the Vinaya spells out the first-order explicit conditions for behaviour directed to its members, rather than a second-order theory systematising all possible conditions. However, differing social, institutional or even soteriological emphases modify normative univocity, not least given the implicitly contrasting natures of the lay, monastic, and solitary renunciate lifeworlds. As Collins notes, the difference in status between monk and layman is clear enough; we must, however, interpret a body of heterogeneous texts which both uses such simple ideological distinctions, and at the same time reflects more complex social reality. (1982, 66, my italics)

The complex social conditions Collins points to as implicitly present in legal and moral reasoning are not a neutral ontological background for otherwise autonomous ethical evaluation; they are the only context within which ethical judgement generates meaning, and so its proper purpose, and monastic standards implicitly reflect and refer to it (we noted this in Chap. 3, for example, in the monastic deference to lay public but pretheoretical notions of sentience). Borderline circumstances require nuanced attention (Gethin 2004a, 170–171) as they come to be recognized as problematic dimensions of broader social and institutional interdependencies—evident for example in solitary monastic, and non-monastic, suicide, or assisted-suicide and euthanasia, the procuring and consumption of meat, and (with more reference to the laity) abortion, criminal punishment, incarceration, and local warfare, among many

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other domains for the exercise of moral judgement potentially involving cases of intentional killing. Yet, these very distinct areas of ethical concern, in their heterogeneous forms, all fall equally under the injunction of the first precept. All lethal acts in these contexts are wrong however different they are, but they also incur sometimes widely divergent kinds of moral demerit by reason of intention as well as object. If moral evaluation is to be determined by agential intention, then intention as a complex phenomenon requires interpretation in terms not only of its contextual psychology, but also the kinds of wider social conditions that produce, or fail to produce, its optimal expressions. The demand of the injunction might be more or less transparent within any given Buddhist culture, but the conditions for its application, formed by individual agents across cultures, very often may not be. It follows from this complex context of moral evaluation that observances of the precept will be heterogeneous even where they share more or less wholesome intentional features with other such observances. That is, they are constituted by virtue of unique volitional, affective and cognitive mental factors that condition their apprehension and appropriation, which are themselves conditioned by larger and particular social and cultural factors. Any such observance thus entails, in other Buddhist terms, a unique dependent-arising (pat.iccasamupp¯ada) of specific social-cognitive and other causes and conditions, any reading of a norm engaging the interpretation of both its personal and social senses.

2 A Buddhist Hermeneutics of Action We might in passing compare this Buddhist-metaphysical basis for a particularist reading of rule-following with contemporary Western moral particularism. Following what Bernard Williams (1985) has termed the thickness or saturation with sociocultural meaning of the morally relevant descriptions of actions, Garfield claims these “cannot be cashed out in culture- or context- neutral terms, but rather implicate[s] a rich set of values and commitments, which inform, guide and motivate action.” (Garfield 2000, 180).7 Moral particularism thus draws attention to how universal descriptions of normative action “necessarily fail to be morally relevant or action-guiding precisely because they abstract from the very semantic connections that render moral descriptions relevant to action and to criticism.” (ibid.) By the same token, however, and as always so conditioned, the ineliminable ubiquity of such semantic connections gives rise to a potential conflict of interpretations of the relevant norm, especially between unlike— but even within like—cultures. Thus, in many pre-modern or agrarian cultures (many 7

Garfield points out however that the distinction between thick and thin description is not always relevant to the debate between particularism and universalism, and that the debate hinges not on the ontological status of moral descriptions but their epistemological function in the acquisition of moral truth/s, and how that knowledge is deployed in context.

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of which can be numbered among traditional Asian Buddhist communities) it can be doubted whether the senses of ‘killing’ in the killing of animals for sustenance, or as pests,8 the killing of invading foes (which can confer a social honour),9 or killing as ordinary suicide (which doesn’t)10 or as religious suicide (where in many East Asian Mah¯ay¯ana cultures it does)11 were or are commensurate with each other. Killing, in these and other cases, signifies significantly different things, as does its disapprobation—or indeed its freedom from the same. Contemporary Buddhists, both East and West, might and do read still other senses into these referents for killing as well, referring not so much to pre-modern culturalreligious tropes as to modern biomedical or secular-ethical ones.12 Scholarly discussion of the respective conceptions of killing between cultures in contexts involving euthanasia and abortion also betrays the degree to which the interpretation of norms and referents, and even philosophical reflection on these, is crucial to ethical understanding.13 Differing readings engage distinct intentional objects, subsumed under the same normative concept: that killing is wrong.14 The same can be said of wholesome and unwholesome properties of acts, and their binary evaluation, so central to Buddhist-ethical discussion. What is wholesome for one may be less so for another—for example, debates ensue in Buddhist Studies, as among Buddhists themselves, regarding non-offensive standards for the public placement of sacred imagery, a seemingly minor question to which much cultural heat is brought (Gindin 2018; Faure 1998). Similar hermeneutic conflicts flourish around meat-eating by Buddhists (Stewart 2010; Waldau 2018), sexual and gendered normativity (Collett 2018; Langenberg 2018), the relations between renunciate and politicised Buddhist praxes and identities (King 2018; Queen 2018; Shields 2013), and so on. Such significant disagreement around which categories of moral evaluation apply to certain norms, and whether certain practises are acceptable by their lights, can only arise failing univocal interpretation, just because different hermeneutical agents have social-cognitive criteria for interpretation that express specific forms of social-cognitive conditioning. Determining the nature of Buddhist-ethical justification thus requires theorizing a form of moral particularism: the specificity of any morally-laden situation in the first instance formally conditions the possibility of action-guidance or evaluation. This in itself depends upon normative judgments constituted by specific and varying forms of larger cultural-religious traditions regarding the interpretation of moral rightness. 8

See for e.g., Harvey (2000, 166ff .). Cf. Stewart (2014, 2015). Harvey (2000, 255ff .) Cf. Schmithausen (1999), Keown (2016), Deegalle (2006). 10 See Delhey (2006), Ratanakul (2000). 11 See Benn (2007), Yün-hua Jan (1965). 12 See Keown (2001, 2005, 2014), Perrett (1992), Finnigan (2017). 13 The same hermeneutic tension is constitutive of the moral evaluation, between interlocutors East and West, of Tibetan Buddhist self-immolation (see Kovan 2013, 2014, 2018; Davis 2016). 14 Similarly, it is not clear even for many Buddhist Studies scholars and anthropologists whether suicide, in the context of the first precept, carries the sense of being a lethal act; some tend to the view that it doesn’t (see Delhey 2009, among others). 9

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Indeed, the very history of the Buddhist religion, and its ethical-philosophical tenets, is a literal demonstration of the cultural-historical variation through space and time of individuals and social groups interpreting, and very often transforming, the putatively ´ akyamuni Buddha. (Thus, scholars now refer to univocal and original teachings of S¯ literal plural “Buddhisms” rather than any actually-existing univocal Buddhism; Ling 1993). Three related observations thus emerge. First, a hermeneutic assumption of coherence between an evaluative criterion such as intention and the morally-valenced event by which it is identified, is vulnerable to simplification or analytic displacement, fixing a complex of conditions and effects in a univocal (and at worst false) interpretative frame. Second, an ethical injunction, and the norm it expresses, is more broadly determined by the contingent social-cognitive context in which it generates meaning. Third, Buddhist thinking about the moral mind is concerned to pay close attention to the intentional terms by which the successful observance of any injunction authentically or ‘rightfully’ functions. This in sum suggests that the norm that killing is in every case wrong—despite the great variety of circumstances in which ´ avakay¯ana conception of the prohibition as a it might occur—is grounded in the Sr¯ psychological as much as a moral desideratum.

3 The Precept in Its Psychological Context S¯ıla as a class of wholesome ethical comportment (encoded in the Noble Eightfold Path) embraces an inter-related structure of habituated action inhering between body, speech and mind. We’ve seen that intentional action, such as killing, is conceived in virtue of a network of mutually-determining non-cognitive as well as cognitive psychological and normative factors. Morally-valenced intention, the psychological presence or absence of mental defilements (kilesas)15 and ‘corruptions’ or obsessive fixations (¯asavas),16 of skilful or unskilful modes of consciousness (cittas) and the mental factors associated with them (cetasikas), and not least the effects of certain deep-volitional dispositions (sankh¯aras) in individuals and their social groupings, among other factors, provide a putatively universal moral-psychological framework17 for both analysing and evaluating action.

15

These include (1) greed (lobha) (2) hatred (dosa) (3) delusion (moha) (4) conceit (m¯ana) (5) speculative views (dit..thi) (6) sceptical doubt (vicikicch¯a) (7) mental torpor (th¯ına) (8) restlessness (uddhacca) (9) shamelessness (ahirika) (10) lack of moral dread or unconscientiousness (anottappa). 16 Of sense-desire (k¯ am¯asava), of desiring eternal existence (bhav¯asava), of (wrong) views (dit..th¯asava), and of ignorance (avijj¯asava). 17 Especially evident in the Sutta Nip¯ ata, which for some scholars represents “a very early stage of Buddhist literature.” Its verses “represent the summation, in Therav¯ada literature, of the style of teaching which is concerned less with the content of views and theories than with the psychological state of those who hold them.” (Collins 129).

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As one of the five heinous crimes (¯anantarya) the moral status of the lethal act is constituted by virtue of its unwholesome causes and effects (for example, at MN III 203). But is killing a moral wrong only because its causes and effects are unwholesome? As noted in Chap. 3, Harvey claims that the canonical description of the effects of unwholesome (and wholesome) acts “makes clear that while the nature of an action’s karmic ripening corresponds to the nature of the action, it does not determine its nature.” (2018, 11)18 The effects of killing are unwholesome because something else about it, and its causes, is wrong. What is not clear is whether, like intention and its unwholesomeness, this is a valenced psychological quality or something objective to phenomenal experience. Discussing the relation between Abhidhamma psychology and the ethical norms it informs in the case of killing, Gethin suggests that Therav¯ada Buddhist normativity is not in the first instance cognitive—that is, that an agent acts rationally on certain principles because they inscribe recognised truths. Rather, it can be read as phenomenologically motivated, since the constituting nature of the intentional mind comes analytically prior to the determinations of value encoded in the norm. He writes, Abhidhamma—and hence I think mainstream Buddhist ethics—is not ultimately concerned to lay down ethical rules, or even ethical principles. It seeks instead to articulate a spiritual psychology focusing on the root causes that motivate us to act: greed, hatred and delusion, or non-attachment, friendliness, and wisdom. Thus that intentionally killing a living being is wrong is not in fact presented in Buddhist thought as an ethical principle at all; it is a claim about how the mind works, about the nature of certain mental states and the kinds of action they give rise to. It is a claim that when certain mental states (compassion) are in the mind it is simply impossible that one could act in certain ways (intentionally kill). (2004a, 190)

This claim in effect removes the normative from the ethical: the real reason one acts skilfully is just because given certain mental states one cannot act otherwise. But it also preserves the sense of intrinsic unwholesomeness as a master criterion for the badmaker of killing: where a mental state is inherently wholesome (e.g., compassionate) then killing is impossible; hence, only unwholesome psychological states make killing possible. This causal account of how the mind functions, and is then ideally interpretable as achieving kusala moral status, according to Gethin provides the Abhidhamma answer to why ‘intentionally killing a living being is wrong’. Since the intentional state that determines moral evaluation is defined in the Abhidhamma in terms of ‘kinds’ of consciousness and their respective mental factors, any action is determined by non-cognitive as well as cognitive factors. Following the precept, and thus avoiding wrong, entails a synergy of mental, intentional and affective elements. The Buddhist-psychological context of the prohibition of killing thus provides an implicit theoretical basis for understanding ethical failure or transgression, or what it means to act wrongfully. That is, where the positive observance of ethical precepts requires non-intentional mental states (e.g. equanimity, compassion, or non-grasping, among others) as well as intentional ones (not to steal this object, 18

See also MN I 389–391, DN I 163, SN V 104, AN II 234.

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lie to that person etc.), then their failure or non-observance will be also due to the absence or weakness of one or more of those non-intentional states, just because right action is morally compromised, or at worst cannot even occur, without them. If following the first precept is the cause of abstention from lethal action, then the mental act of abstention must also positively involve at the least forbearance (khanti), the absence of hatred (adosa), one of the five forms of overcoming (pah¯ana) or resistance, and must reflect some degree of the wisdom (paññ¯a) which recognises the value of abstention. Hence, to abstain from a violent physical act when the mind remains dominated by a will to violence is to abstain incompletely; we’ve noted the Buddhist-psychological claim that a purely mental aggression is still causally unwholesome even where no physical act results from it, and ultimately culpable when it does. A heavily afflicted mind in which defilements are strong, is ipso facto that much less capable of sustaining the precept authentically. Merely to abstain from any given action (for example, from fear of its legal consequences) would not engage the positive mental-affective qualities able to perceive the virtues and benefits of abstention, lacking which it is morally hollow. This congruence between conscious intention and the psychology that subserves it is what underlies efficacious relations between right view, action, intention, and their moral effects. In other words, intention is only one, relatively late, element in the causal series comprising action, and perhaps given causal prominence just because it is the point at which conscious agency ‘gathers together’ pre-conscious aspects of volition. As Heim notes (2014, 21 quoted above) the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma analysis of mind precludes a psychologically (or ontologically) autonomous agency for the observance of a norm: for it, there is no purely ethical faculty of the will, and as we’ve seen cetan¯a implicates a range of associated facilitating mental states. (This will become significant in Chap. 10, in a Buddhist analysis of the Kantian notion of a sovereign will.) This has notable consequences for broader Buddhist analyses of action. First, as we have seen, ethical injunctions are implicitly psychologised, thickening their content as cognitive motivators of action. Second, actions and their intentions are viewed as the effects of covert subjective processes, conditioned by a larger intersubjective domain. Third, actions represent interdependent levels of hermeneutic sensitivity: to the nature of the self, the human or non-human other, the larger social context and cultural worldview in which they occur. All these dimensions background Gethin’s remark, above, which emphasizes psychological and pre-theoretical actuality over normative reasoning of the kind more familiar, for example, in much Western ethical discourse.19 A crucial aspect of abstention from lethal action is thus how intention is held in the mind, which might be more significant than its normative force alone: what determines the ethical status of the latter is the causal robustness of the former—a psychological, affective, and conative datum. Gethin (2004a) summarises the same point in these terms: 19

See Heim (2014, 17ff .) for discussion of differing Western and Buddhist conceptions of ethical agency.

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For the Therav¯ada Buddhist tradition there is in the end only one question one has to ask to determine whether an act is wholesome (kusala) or unwholesome (akusala): is it motivated by greed, hatred, and delusion, or is it motivated by nonattachment, friendliness, and wisdom. So if one were to respond to the Abhidhamma claim that an act of intentional killing motivated by compassion is a psychological impossibility, that it simply runs counter to actual experience, then what the Abhidhamma analysis offers is a kind of psycho-ethical puzzle or riddle. If you can intentionally kill out of compassion, then fine, go ahead. But are you sure? Are you sure that what you think are friendliness and compassion are really friendliness and compassion? Are you sure that some subtle aversion and delusion have not surfaced in the mind? In the end ethical principles cannot solve the problem of how to act in the world. If we want to know how to act in accordance with Dhamma, we must know our own minds. (190)

In allowing for this lack of moral closure the Abhidhamma suggests a theoretical sophistication, if also a practical quandary. While Gethin, with the Abhidhamma, pictures the intentional mind polarized between the wholesome and unwholesome, we have also considered how intentional states are often intentionally, qualitatively and contextually heterogeneous, characterised by potentially inconsistent cetan¯a. The Abhidhamma asserts that killing can be avoided because, as we have seen, it claims cetan¯a for its primary cause, manifested in mental and physical action, therefore allowing for an at least partial mastery over its arising as well. This is, however, a question of degree, and perhaps much killing occurs where all practical possibility of abstention has lapsed, irrespective of the maximal intention assumed by the precept itself. Gethin’s Abhidhamma-psychological framing of the criterion of intention explicitly re-introduces the hermeneutic imperative noted above: it requires introspectively interpreting the fundamental conditions of action—entailing, moreover, a quite profound degree of insight into sub-conscious as well as conscious motivators for it. But what kinds of agent possess this level of insight, and the wholesome psychological status that, on this account, underwrites morally skilful intention? Answering this question partly addresses understanding why, before religious or legal judgement imputes moral crime to action, early Buddhist moral evaluation calibrates the judgement of action to its mental-intentional context. Agents with a greater capacity for knowing their own minds eo ipso possess a greater capacity for deliberately not acting upon a less than exemplary intention because they are able, and not merely because they choose, to. This presents a plausible reason for why the moral fault of a crime committed by a virtuous agent such as, presumably, a monk or nun, is judged worse than the same crime committed by a less virtuous agent. This is so not merely because of a likely breaking of religious vows, but because of the betrayal of a greater moral virtue, which is to say a more robust capacity not to commit it (see also Harvey 2000, 51).20 As putatively capable of sustaining a much greater range of preceptual norms than less virtuous agents, monastics err that much more than others by wilfully violating them. 20

By contrast, witness the difference in moral gravity, for example, of abuse committed by an ordained minister, and a lay repeat-offender. In Western ethics, the culpability of the crime is equivalent even where the degree of moral transgression can be seen to be inequivalent.

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In this way the constitutive capacity for wholesome moral agency is correlated with moral value per se. Hence also, a harmful act committed against a more virtuous agent incurs a worse moral effect (DN I 85; Vibh. 378) than against a less-virtuous one. It is thus not surprising that one of the five intentional acts of the gravest kammic consequence is killing an arhat, the superlative human object of moral agency and value. Thus, the physical and moral quality (gun.a) of the agent and object of killing refers not only to conventionally virtuous character but also the potential for or actual attainment of the realizations of wisdom, the Buddha or other awakened being in the spectrum of sentience being of the very highest quality.21 By introducing the aretaic quality of the agent and object of killing as determinants of its moral status, the ´ avakay¯ana presentation of killing enriches but also problematises its metaethical Sr¯ determination.

4 A Third Evaluative Criterion: The Principle of Quality (Gun.a) (PG) The Therav¯ada exegete Buddhaghosa, in his 5th-century commentary (Papañcasudani) on the Majjhima Nik¯aya, offers a summary exegesis of the moral evaluation of the killing of humans and animals. It appears in similar form at least five times in commentarial texts and appears to derive from canonical discussion of the third p¯ar¯ajika in the Vinaya (Vin. III 68–86): ‘Onslaught on breathing [living] beings’ is, as regards a breathing being that one perceives as living, the will to kill it, expressed through body or speech, occasioning an attack which cuts off its life-faculty. That action, in regard to those without good qualities (gun.a-)— animals etc.—is of lesser fault when they are small, greater fault when they have a large physical frame. Why? Because of the greater effort involved. Where the effort is the same, (it is greater) because of the object (vatthu-) (of the act) being greater. In regard to those with good qualities—humans etc.—the action is of lesser fault when they are of few good qualities, greater fault when they are of many good qualities. But when size or good qualities are equal, the fault of the action is lesser due to the (relative) mildness of the mental defilements and of the attack, and greater due to their intensity. Five factors are involved: a living being, the actual perceiving of a living being, a thought of killing, the attack, and death as a result of it (MN-a. I 198).22

21

This would also imply that, within the human scale of quality, the icch¯antika or irredeemable person deemed incapable of achieving Buddhist realization, is the polar opposite in quality from the Buddha (and is in some texts described as being able to be killed with kammic impunity; Harvey 2000, 138). See also Sect. “Anthropological Conditions for the Conventional Social Constitution of the Person”in Chap. 9, below. 22 In Harvey (2000, 52). Cf. Asl. 97; Spk. II 144; Nidd.-a. 115; Khp-a. 28–29; Sv. 69–70; AKBh IV 73a-b (649–650).

4 A Third Evaluative Criterion: The Principle …

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The five factors Buddhaghosa lists describe killing as a fully unwholesome course of action, already noted.23 If any one of these factors is lacking, the concomitant kamma of the act is qualified, depending also on the kind or quality of its recipient.24 To summarise Buddhaghosa’s account: (i)

(ii) (iii)

regarding non-human animals, a difference of size, and hence of agential effort (payoga), determines the kammic gravity of the act; where effort is otherwise equal, the great size (mah¯asar¯ıra) of its object decides this; regarding human persons, a greater or lesser degree of intrinsic virtuous quality (gun.a) decides the moral gravity or mildness of the act respectively; where this is apparently equal between persons, the mildness (mudut¯a) and severity (tibbat¯a) of the mental defilements and attacks (upakkama) of the agent determines its greater or lesser gravity.

In sum, Buddhaghosa’s evaluative focus assesses comparative degrees of moral gravity in intentional lethal acts. It also assumes value-claims for human sentience and its intrinsic quality, i.e., as human, sentient beings are necessarily constituted by a sum of such quality. The measures divide worse wrong-doers from lesser ones, imply the moral importance of the volitional intensity of intention, of the presence or absence of mental defilements in its agent, the categorial superiority of human over non-human virtue, and the significance attached to physical size as an index of volitional effort. But, again, neither the measures by quality in the human (and sometimes, animal) case, and size in the animal case, make clear what is explicitly wrong in the act beyond their incurring degrees of kammic demerit for these related reasons. However, the pervasiveness of the measure of quality (gun.a) of both object and agent of killing in judging the gravity of the act, warrants a principle of quality or gun.a (PG) being classed as a third major criterion for the first precept: qualitative states of virtue predicated of animal, human and divine objects, ensure their primordial value. Where these inhere in living beings, their value renders the intentional killing of those beings prohibitive.

23

Buddhaghosa, in addition, suggests six methods applicable: “with one’s own hand, by instigation, by missiles, by contrivance (trap or poison), by sorcery, by psychic power.” (Harvey 2000, 52). 24 The Tibetan Mah¯ ay¯ana, based on Indian sources, adds a further, sixth, factor involving the delusion (moha) that refers to the presence of ignorance (as well as greed or hatred) as also constitutive of a fully kammic lethal act (Williams 2000, 250 n. 23). Williams suggests that this inclusion allows for the ethically permissible killing performed by a realized being lacking delusions, and thereby not driven by unwholesome intention. Chapter 5 considers how the Mah¯ay¯ana makes wisdom (prajñ¯a) an integral dimension of its own framing of the precept.

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5 The Buddhaghosan Criteria for Evaluation The evaluative categories Buddhaghosa adumbrates require some comment. We’re concerned not merely to ascertain how these determinations of the moral status of ´ avakay¯ana lifeworld, but also whether acts might be rationalised from within the Sr¯ their exegesis renders the salience of the criteria, and their normative appropriation, transparent to a contemporary understanding. It’s not clear that the criteria are intended as a more or less precise means for calibrating moral culpability (see Keown 2001, 96–100); nor does Gethin’s suggestion (2004a, 172) that they are analogous to the kind of common-sense reasoning that informs modern legal judgements elaborate on how they might inform the distinct purposes of Buddhist religious-ethical justification. In the following section I argue that their utility relies on a sense of justification quite alien to that of twenty-first century ethical or rational discourse.25 Formally implicit in Buddhaghosa’s claims is the assertion of a hierarchical order of explanation whereby properties of both objects and agents determine the moral gravity of a lethal act, each entailing distinct modes of judgement. That is, (1) (2)

(3)

(4) (5)

a perceptual judgement of the comparative size of animal objects, and where they are judged equal a phenomenological judgement regarding the degree of (human) effort entailed in killing them. Where such effort is similarly judged equal, the criterion reverts to a judgement regarding the physical size of the animal. The relevant criterion moves from the object of action in (1) to the agential subject in (2) and back to the object in (3). Similarly, in the intra-human context, where an axiological evaluation of the aretaic and aesthetic quality of human objects is neutralized due to a judgement of their equivalence, then a psychological judgement regarding the degree of mental defilements and intensity of action of the agent is what determines the moral gravity of the lethal act.

The ethical gravity of the killing of human and non-human animals is judged by these criteria. They might be conceptually or axiologically connected, but Buddhaghosa does not thematize the connections. Gethin argues that these categories accord with “what is in many ways a “common sense” attitude towards the relative blameworthiness of different unwholesome acts” (2004a, 172–173). It is not, however, at all clear why or how these diverse kinds of judgement function morally, or which principle functions to cohere their distinct elements. The modes of judgement engage highly diverse objects: physical entities, volitions, virtue and beauty,

25

Their justification being alien in that limited sense, however, need not imply that the criteria are inherently misguided or false; on the contrary, they are embedded in a cultural context for which they evidently are, or were, salient.

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and cognitive-affective states of subjective affairs. In short, they are indices for an axiological hierarchy determined by no clear overarching principle or moral value. Most simply, one set of criteria concerns objective properties, while another concerns subjective properties. On the other hand, the central criterion of volition functions in this passage in both objective and subjective senses: objectively, as the physical effort required to kill large versus small animals; subjectively, as the intensity of mental defilements entailed in killing a person. There may however be straightforward metaphysical reasons underlying what appear to be somewhat arbitrary or at least unexplained claims. Buddhaghosa’s criteria en groupe move between objective judgements of the comparative objects of killing, to judgements regarding the subjective condition of the agent most simply because it is the morally-valenced relational interaction between a particular kind of subjective intention and the objective nature of a particular kind of recipient of that intention, that ostensibly decides the ethical gravity of the lethal act for Buddhistevaluative purposes. In this way, the central Buddhist ontological principle of subjectobject interdependence metaphysically underwrites the moral interdependency of the criteria as a whole. Hence, we’ve noted that to kill an Arhat or a Buddha is the worst possible breach of the precept, especially when committed by the ordinary worldling (puthujjana), because the Arhat by definition possesses no mental defilement of any kind, while the unenlightened do. Conversely, for a Buddha to kill a heavily defiled worldling incurs much less fault—indeed, effectively almost none, given the qualitative disproportion of the subjective nature of the agent’s action and the nature of its object.26 (Of course, the moral soundness of this conclusion is another matter—addressed in §6.2, below.) In sum, neither subjective nor objective evaluative judgements alone are sufficient to decide the degree of moral gravity of killing and, given the relations mutually determining them, their implications are less morally transparent than a contemporary Buddhist ethics of killing might assume. There is, moreover, a final point to be made in this regard: the criterion of mental defilements (P. kilesas Skt. kle´sas), which deems that a lethal act (when judging between cases where its objects are equal in virtue) is morally worse where agential defilements are more severe, is somewhat incongruent with other canonical evidence regarding the legal punishment of crime. We’ve already noted that the Vinaya (Vin. III 78) states clearly that there is no ‘defeat’ (permanent exclusion from the order), and so no transgression of the first precept, in monastic cases of homicide where its agent is ‘out of his mind’ (ummatta), aligning this case with others in which “it was unintentional, if he did not know, if he were not meaning death” (Harvey 2000, 53).27 Madness here is equivalent to a total absence of intention; yet mental defilements are otherwise dynamically linked to a heightening of the moral valence of intention.

26

Jenkins discusses these generally held ideas which travel in a shared metaphor from the Nik¯ayas (in for example the Lon.aphala Sutta, AN) through inter alia the Abhidharmako´sa to Asa˙nga and then Bh¯aviveka (2010/2011, 308). 27 See the Mah¯ avagga (2nd Khandhaka, Chap. 25).

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Harvey (2018, 399) also draws attention to the paracanonical Milindapañha which similarly claims (Miln. 221) that acts of the mentally disturbed should not be punished (disturbed to what degree, is not clear). Yet mentally deranged action is plausibly conditioned by an extreme of mental defilement (of delusion, wrong views and recklessness, if not other of the kilesas), and with respect to delusion (moha) entails one of the three unwholesome roots (akusala-m¯ula) of action (the other two unwholesome roots being lobha and dosa, attachment and aversion). This kind of action could as equally be understood as a limit-point of akusala cetan¯a, at which intention can be no more morally grave. It is not clear at what point gravely kamma-apt intention turns into blameless kamma-free insanity, with respect to this important Buddhist criterion for the moral gravity of killing. Moreover, is a contemporary Buddhist hermeneut to understand these signs of the exoneration of guilt for killing in cases of psychotic (or other psychiatric) conditions to refer only to legal, or do they extend to moral kammic, effect? The alignment of insane lethal acts with non-intention tends to the conclusion that kammic effect is similarly inoperative in this case: after all, we’ve seen that kamma paradigmatically obtains exclusively by virtue of intention. If so, the moral exoneration of lethal acts committed by the insane renders the comparative criterion of defilements otiose, unless we are to understand that criterion only in the restricted terms of its degrees of influence in mentally disturbed agents who are otherwise sane.28 However, if it is not obvious that insanity distinctly evidences a difference of kind and not degree of mental defilements, then even this latter restricted case would seem to undermine not only what the kilesas and the moral criterion based on them psychologically signify, if they do indeed function to measure degrees of the moral gravity of killing. It also potentially undermines how kamma as an effect of intention, the intensity of which is exacerbated by defilements, determines moral gravity as well. In the following section I consider further salient hermeneutical implications of Buddhaghosa’s criteria.

6 Buddhaghosan Problematics 6.1 Semantic Implications Interpreting canonical Buddhist texts is not unlike doing a jigsaw puzzle: their disparate parts betray explanatory lacunae, obscuring a full picture of the reasons unifying the normative behaviour of the ideal Buddhist community. Similarly,

28

Modern Western legal theory of course recognises the ‘insanity defence’ as mitigating the criminal severity of murder (see e.g., Asokan 2016). Where mental disturbance as a condition of criminal acts can be a mitigating factor in legal judgement, the Buddhist moral case makes it an aggravating factor. What each rather shares is a recognition that legal guilt must be based on an intention to knowingly so act.

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Buddhaghosa’s criteria for the evaluation of killing seem to evidence a metaphysical rationale without spelling out their systematic explanation. Another important instance of a claim requiring some justificatory grounding, only touched upon above, involves distinctions Buddhaghosa invokes between degrees of quality in persons. The lexical bases of the compound sar¯ıra-gun.a (physical virtues or qualities) in the P¯ali (Sk. s´ar¯ıra-gun.a) are textually and historically complex.29 Giustarini (2014) suggests that sar¯ıra-gun.a “plays a key role in the Buddhist analysis of the first precept, but its function is not immediately clear, and the English translations available may not convey satisfactorily its meaning and nuances.”30 Ronkin (2005, 128 n. 104) notes an unusual use of gun.a to mean special quality in the Milindapañha, where it appears compounded with sabh¯ava (essence) in place of the more typical lakkhan.a (defining characteristic). The referent for gun.a in this case describes the specially valorised nature of the coming Buddha Mettaya: “Moreover, this was said by the Blessed One when he was illustrating the essence and special qualities of the Buddha Metteyya.”31 (ibid.). It’s not implausible that the temporal proximity of the latter parts of this text with Buddhaghosa’s possible flourishing in the 4th-century (op. cit. n. 97) suggests a common cultural source for this elevated understanding of the term, and that his use of sar¯ıra-gun.a implies superlative soteric qualities as well. Giustarini’s analysis supports this reading of the term in a sense often undertheorised in secondary scholarship32 on the first precept and Buddhaghosa’s discussion of intrahuman killing: The text seems to reveal that the sar¯ıragun.as are visible marks that indicate the spiritual accomplishment of an individual; specifically, they may consist of qualities of the body of a victim of murder, and thus represent one of the two factors that determine the specific degree of gravity of killing a human being—the other being the defilements of the murderer. In the sub-commentary of the Janapadakaly¯an.¯ısutta of the Satipat.t.h¯ana Sam . yutta, the sar¯ıragun.as are said to be tantamount to the “five beauties” (pañcakaly¯an.a), opposites to the six flaws; they are listed in the commentary (S¯aratthappak¯asin¯ı) of the same sutta: chavikaly¯an.am . , mam . sakaly¯an.am . , nah¯arukaly¯an.am . , at..thikaly¯an.am . , vayakaly¯an.anti (PTS III.127), “the beauty of flesh, the beauty of muscles, the beauty of bones, the beauty of skin, the beauty of youth.” In the commentary of the Dhammapada “the beauty of muscles” is replaced by “the beauty of hair” (kesakaly¯an.a), which is the first of this list (Dh-a. PTS I.387), and in the commentary to the Ud¯ana Nandasutta (Ud-a. PTS 170) it is replaced, in the same order, by “the beauty of fingernails” (nakhakaly¯an.a). This latter commentary offers a detailed description of each beauty. Particularly noteworthy in terms of kamma and morality, the commentary 29

Gun.a functions as an umbrella concept between Buddhist and non-Buddhist (notably Ny¯aya) contexts, though the appearance of the compound term in P¯ali exegeses of the first precept is limited to those of Buddhaghosa in his commentaries, and those of others. The passage of Buddhaghosa (MN-a I 198) above, is quoted almost verbatim by Dhammap¯al¯acariya (It-a. II 49) and Mah¯an¯ama (Pat.is-a. I 220). 30 Unp. MS. textual note “Assessment of kamma in p¯ an.atip¯ata in P¯ali commentarial literature”, Giustarini (2014). The relevant passage is at Asl. 97 (all Asl. refs. are to bracketed section numbers). 31 puna ca metteyyassa bhagavato sabh¯ avagun.am . parid¯ıpayam¯anena bhagavat¯a evam . bhan.itam .. 32 See however Powers (2009) and Mrozik (2007) for studies focused on the socio-cultural and religious dimensions of ‘virtuous bodies’ in Buddhist religious studies and ethics.

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4 Interpreting the Precept: Evaluative Criteria in the Therav¯ada to the Dhammapada also connects these beauties to the accumulation of great virtue/merit (mah¯apuñña). (2014, 1–2)

Thus, sar¯ıra-gun.a connotes a simultaneously aesthetic and moral value, invoking capacities for fine-grained perception, virtue, cognition and the qualitative states these higher-order processes facilitate. Yet secondary scholarship listing sar¯ıra-gun.a as a moral criterion for killing subsumes these aesthetic and soteric dimensions in the more general notion of gun.a- as merely ‘good’ quality (Harvey 2000); elsewhere they are not explicitly discussed in the context of the early Buddhist moral evaluation of killing at all (Gethin 2004a; Keown 2016). But the reading of virtuous quality as a specifically physical sign does not necessarily render exegesis transparent. How a reliance on this “nonfalsifiable set of physical attributes” (Powers 90) aligns with early Buddhist epistemology more generally is uncertain. Giustarini notes that: The term sar¯ıra may refer to a dead or alive body, and here both possibilities might be intended. It could be a dead body since by looking at the marks/qualities of the dead body one may assess the spiritual development of the victim, and thus determine the level of negative kamma accumulated by the murderer. And it may refer to a living body for at least two reasons: it could be necessary to identify those marks before acting; the compound mah¯asar¯ıra is used in the same passage to indicate the large body of a big (living) animal (e.g. an elephant), the killing of which would require a bigger effort. When the s¯ariragun.as of the victims are the same, the Atthas¯alin¯ı uses another element to understand and normatively compare the consequences of killing for the perpetrators: this consists in detecting the gentleness (mudut¯a) or severity (tibbat¯a) of the defilements (kilesa) and of the attacks (upakkama). In the sub-commentary of the same passage occurring in the Papañcasudan¯ı (M-t. III.88), this is glossed as the intention (cetan¯a) of murdering (vadhaka), which also paraphrases one of the five requisites (sambh¯ara) i.e. the vadhakacitta. (2014, 2)

Giustarini here confirms the evaluative dialectic between subject and object already addressed, assuming the possibility of epistemic access to both measurements, as well as the measure of equality in general. Powers also persuasively demonstrates that “The body is particularly important as a marker of morality. In Indian Buddhism, virtue is beautiful, and the most morally advanced beings are also those with the most attractive physiques” (2009, 71), and Buddhaghosa’s passage indubitably confirms the same. But sar¯ıra-gun.a is above all problematic because its ascription to persons appears to be perhaps the most significant criterion for moral judgment in Indian Buddhist dogmatics on the subject of intra-human killing. In what sense can the proposition that “a person’s outward appearance is generally a reliable guide to his moral stature” (69, my italics) be taken as normative for Buddhist ethics when, as suggested above and as Powers confirms, “Such concerns are commonly dismissed by contemporary commentators on Buddhist ethics” (90)? At this point, critical exegesis enters into normative philosophical critique.

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6.2 Normative Implications It is one thing to invoke a moral principle of gun.a (PG) with respect to its indigenous lifeworld. To assert its truth is more problematic. We can for exegetical purposes separate Buddhist value-claims from the epistemological concern for how such claims provide moral knowledge, but at risk of losing insight into their deeper justificatory structure. The value-claims involved in the evaluation of sar¯ıra-gun.a rely on ostensible causal relations between the physical attributes of the agents and objects of acts and the moral value of those acts. But to have moral knowledge requires having epistemic access to at least the most decisive of those causal relations, failing which we possess not knowledge but mere opinion. We’ve seen that Buddhaghosa claims that we know that a human object of killing is more or less valuable, and so the commission of the act more or less culpable, depending on the physical virtue or qualities of that being. In contemporary terms, if not historically, a person’s moral quality is not substantively defined by physical properties but rather by his or her status as an embodied person.33 More precisely, we value personal virtue, just as Buddhaghosa does, but we locate virtue in corresponding attributes of character, psychology, and behavioural integrity, none of which for the modern moral mind are inherently objectified in physical properties.34 If so, the contemporary moral judgement of persons ineliminably requires some familiarity with, or socially-accessible knowledge of, those attributes of personhood. But the Indian Buddhist criterion of sar¯ıra-gun.a for the moral fault of killing presupposes a direct correlation between virtuous character and beautiful physical attributes: that the former causes the latter, so that the lack of the latter entails the absence of the former. It’s not clear how that criterion, and so the PG, can be appropriated by a contemporary Buddhist ethical discourse, a hermeneutic problem to which Powers points, but does not address. The following sections illustrate ways in which philosophical reflection on Buddhaghosa’s criteria sheds light on the rationality and cogency of the norms which the criteria, ostensibly, undergird—first with regard to the moral evaluation of the killing of animals and then, in preliminary terms, with regard to that of intrahuman killing. 33

Western philosophical discussion of the perceived or inferred relations between beauty and goodness in persons is of course evident at least from Plato (Symposium) and Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) through to Kant (Critique of Judgement). But it is also Kant who seminally locates the value of persons in an inherent dignity and autonomous capacity to recognise moral values absolutely superseding contingent ones (such as physical constitution). 34 This does not imply that there is no perceived relation between beauty and goodness at all. A recent study cites neuropsychological evidence that “moral judgment and aesthetic judgment mutually affect each other. With the development of neuro-imaging technology, researchers have adopted brain imaging methods to explore the neural features underlying the connection between moral and aesthetic judgments.” (Cui et. al. 2019, 2) However, “Based on reviews of previous studies of moral and aesthetic judgments, it can be concluded that moral goodness judgments mainly involve cognitive and affective processes, while moral beauty judgments mainly involve sensory-perceptual, high-level cognitive and affective processes” (ibid. my italics) and it is the latter judgements, moreso than the former, which correlate with perceived attractiveness.

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7 The Human Killing of Animals We’ve seen that physical size itself, the most baldly objective measure suggested by Buddhaghosa, is a measure for the relative moral gravity in killing large(r) and small(er) animals. This is initially because size implicates the relative level of effort required on the part of the (human) agent to kill an animal, which agency is where determinate moral fault lies. However, agents may differ in strength: a weak agent requires a greater effort of attack (upakkama) in killing an elephant, where a strong one does so with significantly less effort. This raises an obvious question: does a comparison of efforts (rather than of animal size) potentially modify their respective ethical gravity? That is, if I must labour to kill an animal that my friend kills with ease, is my act intrinsically worse than his, and so his only negligibly bad, though they have the same result? Buddhaghosa’s measure of effort would suppose it is. If so, then the original determinant of animal size is irrelevant because the only measure that morally counts is a relational one obtaining between the weak(er) and strong(er) efforts of respective agents. If not, a relevantly similar conclusion applies: it is just unique isolated efforts that morally count, contingently depending on individual strength and relative to different acts of that same agent, again irrespective of animal size. For Buddhaghosa’s claim for animal size as a measure of the gravity of killing animals to work, it has to presuppose that lethal agents are of uniformly equal strength or fitness, so their degree of effort will be equal as well. (This is confirmed in the reversion to size as morally determining in cases of equal effort.) Whether or not we accept this hidden premise, this conclusion appears to confirm the PK as a measure of the degree of intention, where more intense effort implies a greater will to kill, despite significant obstacle, and thus worse kammic effect. By doing so, however, it also anthropocentrically focuses on a purely human criterion (intensity of intention) for the moral status of killing animals, rather than one pertaining to the animal qua animal (whether as object or agent) in its own right.35 (By extension, it is not clear that the same measure applies for animals killing other animals.) Any objective moral measure pertaining to animals (once the relative objectivity of their different sizes vis-à-vis their human executioner is put aside, as above) is only possible when they require an equal human strength and thus effort to be killed. To be clear, however, P¯ali at..thakath¯as do claim that “even when the effort is the same, [killing a large animal is still more blameworthy] because of its greater physical substance.” (Gethin 2004a, 171)36 In this regard, it might be noted that since the invention of firearms, and the animal slaughter industry that mechanises killing, the equal effort condition is in any case now moot: animals of any size can

35

And this despite the many canonical expressions of compassion for animals, and exhortations to their non-harm, noted in Chap. 3. Cf. also Schmithausen (2000, 44–46) for variant views. 36 Gethin (2004a, 172–3) also claims that this same belief is “taken for granted in contemporary society.”.

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in theory be killed with roughly equal facility.37 This historical contingency undoes the anthropocentric criterion, above, by reverting the moral argument to a claim about animal substance—that simply, for example, it is worse to kill a horse than a mosquito (see Gethin 172–173) because the former is a larger and more complex organism in important respects than the latter. If this conclusion is accepted, so might be Buddhaghosa’s claims. If not—and some tend to this view, including practicing Buddhists (ibid. 173)—Buddhist ethics would appear to require an alternative objective measure for animal value other than size or physical substance, if it is assumed to measure the moral gravity of killing animals. Buddhaghosa doesn’t provide a further objective measure for determining animal quality, but we can assume it would remain a function of the human valuation of animals, perhaps in Buddhist terms as potential enlightened beings (for example, how the worth of animals is contextualized in the j¯ataka tales).38 Animal quality as such would then not be a function of the valuation of animals qua animals, in which their status as potential enlightened Arhats or Buddhas is not overtly at issue, it appears, either for them or for their inter-species predator. Their independently animal status appears to hold little or no value apart from the degree to which sentience might at best be ascribed to it (Schmithausen 2000, 31–32). Apart from the injunction against harming sentient beings animality in itself is not, in these Therav¯ada commentarial criteria, afforded specific ethical status in the discourse around killing, despite so much of the canonical framing of non-harm to animals (Stewart 2014). Whether the claims Buddhaghosa and others represent are persuasive for a contemporary Buddhist ethics of killing animals is a question this study will have to forego. In general, humans now kill animals for reasons that express a straightforward causal relation between a nutritional and material need or exploitation and the violent appropriation of animal bodies. In the limited sense of securing its corporeal objects for direct consumption, killing animals is at best a rational and in some cases arguably justified human practice, at worst a gratuitously contingent and abusive one.39

37

It is not clear that intention as an ethical index would play any appreciable part in the apparently intentionally ‘neutral’ context of industrial animal slaughter. The question of the desensitization of affect in human genocidal contexts is relevant here too, where a dissociative intentionality could theoretically modify a Buddhist-intentional account. See Chaps. 6 and 10 for further discussion. 38 Stewart (2014, 640) notes that: “This is apparent in works such as the J¯ ataka where stories are told of former humans, and future Buddhas, who are born as various animals. These tales effectively treat animals as humans insofar as the animals are typically regarded as having the same cognitive potentiality as humans, are socially organized, and are able to strategize and communicate with each other as human beings do. The implication, therefore, is that hurting an animal is like hurting a fellow human being.”. 39 Schmithausen notes that “From a traditional Buddhist point of view, slaughtering or hunting animals for food or other requirements, not to mention for fun, is blameworthy and unwholesome. The same would hold good for the modern mass rearing of fowl and other animals. Even animal experiments for medical research would seem to be highly problematic if they involve killing or the inflicting of pain, the more so animal tests for other purposes, and vivisection.” (2000, 30).

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While canonical texts put a negative value on this human need,40 its ethical import will not be considered further here.41 The important Buddhist and other debate surrounding the putative necessity and justification for industrial animal slaughter, for purposes of human consumption and commerce, concerns problems conceptually distinct from those of the enquiry of this study as a whole, because they do not entail the intentional and cognitive conditions relevant to intrahuman killing that are its specific concern.

8 The Human Killing of Humans In summary, we’ve seen that the measurement of virtuous embodied quality or sar¯ıragun.a is central to the evaluation of intrahuman killing, its moral gravity depending explicitly on claims for the identifiable physical qualities of compared people.42 Where the judgment of relative quality of the objects43 of lethal acts proves either equal or indeterminate,44 then the subjective measures of mental defilements and the intensity of attack in their agents measure degrees of culpability. These two criteria are again psychological in a sense which, as we’ve seen, also implicates the axiological and ethical: mental defilements imply a diminished value of the agent and thence unskilful (akusala) agency. This augments the quotient of unwholesome intention, the increased intensity of which exacerbates the negative valence of such action. By the same token, the comparative absence of mental defilements, and hence a diminished degree of unwholesome volition, raises the probability of skilful agency. Elevated to a superlative level, gun.a or virtuous quality becomes the basis for a ´ avakay¯ana valorisation of the (more or less) enlightened soteric activity of post-Sr¯ bodhisattvas. As a radical extension of the PG, this development ultimately radicalizes the PD and PK as well, just because it serves the radical amelioration of suffering, 40

e.g., MN I 343–344. Mah¯ay¯ana texts, such as the A˙ngulim¯al¯ıyas¯utra, include in this disapprobation of animal killing the notion that animals share in a latent or potential Buddhahood (tath¯agatagarbha) which alone justifies why realised beings such as Buddhas neither kill nor consume them (Schmithausen 2000, 34). However, this latter claim clearly contradicts earlier P¯ali canonical reference to the historical Gautama Buddha both eating meat and not prohibiting it from the Sa˙ngha, where it has not been solicited (see Stewart 2010 for discussion of vegetarianism and P¯ali Buddhism). 41 See Stewart (2014, 2015), Finnigan (2017), Waldau (2018) and Schmithausen (1997, 2000) for recent accounts of Buddhist animal ethics. 42 To the degree that our former reading of the sar¯ıra-guna can be taken at face-value, then the . five (physical) beauties (pañcakaly¯an.a) straightforwardly express the great positive kamma and thence merit (mah¯apuñña) that, for example, the Dhammapada commentary explicitly associates with them. 43 The use of the term “object” for human person is purely in order to facilitate a distinction from the agent of action, also a person. It is not to inadvertently render the person objectified as a thing. 44 As when Buddhaghosa (Asl. 97) suggests that the bodily qualities (sar¯ıraguna) of two or more . victims, perhaps by having already been killed, do not show clear evidence of quality beyond purely external signs because they are dead (Giustarini 2014).

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and optimisation of kammic merit and so universally beneficent effect, thereby justifying an exception to the first precept. Despite being an overt exception to the norm of ahim . s¯a, its justification for intentional killing hyperbolises Buddhaghosa’s evaluative criteria, with the result that some such acts are even regarded as meritorious. This also introduces new, and otherwise problematic, features that reflect an importantly distinct metaphysical and moral landscape. ´ avakay¯ana norms concerning the evaluation of This chapter has examined Sr¯ animal and human objects of killing and thus the moral gravity of those acts, and their elaboration in the Therav¯ada commentaries of Buddhaghosa and P¯ali exegesis in general. Having considered the hermeneutical and analytical constraints and quandaries involved in engaging this framework in a contemporary ethical idiom, we can now focus on how these norms significantly inform the subsequent development of the Buddhist evaluation of intentional lethality. This requires more closely examining the sense in which those central among them, and the evaluative criteria of PK and PG in particular, are reconfigured in the classical Indian Mah¯ay¯ana conception of auspicious killing—a notion that has no moral place in the earlier Buddhist corpus.

Chapter 5

Mah¯ay¯ana Exceptionalism and the Lethal Act

Abstract This chapter turns to the development in the Mah¯ay¯ana of the notion of auspicious or compassionate killing, typically performed by bodhisattva agents, the superlative moral exemplars of the Greater Vehicle. This development can be seen as in part emerging from some of the metaphysical considerations already noted concerning the ultimate ontological status of persons, the moral axiology of the agent and object of ‘quality’ and the comparative scale of value entailed by it, and the role of altruistic compassion in modifying both the moral valence of lethal acts and their consequences. These themes are brought to a culmination in the ethic of the aspiring and actual bodhisattva, a Buddha-to-be, whose constitutive qualities of supernormal compassion and phronetic insight can be summarised in a fourth major heuristic of wisdom (prajñ¯a) informing, in revised terms, the norms undergirding the first precept. Given the central role of karman in valorising auspicious lethal acts, a question arises as to its universalizability as a norm of moral epistemology: are all Buddhist agents justified to engage such acts, depending on their degree of compassionate motivation? Ultimately, the causal function of karman in intentional acts proves epistemologically obscure for most moral reasoners, such that, as attested by the Pram¯an.av¯ada exegete Dharmak¯ırti, its application in public ethical reasoning is seen to be ill-advised, and Buddhist ethicists prompted to engage alternative modes of epistemically accessible moral argument. Keywords Mah¯ay¯ana and moral exceptionalism · Bodhisattva ethics · Buddhist auspicious violence · Moral evaluation and karma · Buddhist morality and prajñ¯a

1 An Exception to the Precept: Doctrinal Context Demiéville, in his 1957 survey of Buddhist warfare, suggests that, paradoxically, The Lesser Vehicle, which tends to condemn life, remains firm in its interdiction of killing; the Great Vehicle lauds life, and it is the Great Vehicle that will in the end find excuses for murder, and will even glorify it. (2010, 20)

While in broad terms not false, Demiéville’s formulation obscures the degree to which there is more of a relevant continuity between the two vehicles than it would suggest. The P¯ali record is ambiguous with regard to the first precept in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_5

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only very few isolated cases: regarding the normative status of arhat suicide (most typically autothanasia) in particular (Delhey 2006; Kovan 2018). Homicide in warfare or any other deliberate lethal violence is unequivocally condemned, particularly as it implicates Buddhist exemplars (Demiéville 18–19; 46). The general prohibition of killing is sustained throughout the Nik¯ayas, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma, and their commentaries, but apparent anomalies within this received picture also emerge. In discussing Abhidhamma/Abhidharma theories of momentariness with respect to the psychophysical series of five aggregates, we observed in Chap. 3 that Vasubandhu (fourth–fifth century C.E.), in the Sarv¯astiv¯ada Abhidharma context, questions the justification for prohibiting the truncation of that selfless series in a lethal act. If it is true that the integrity of a person, which has only nominal existence (prajñaptisat), might be only nominally interrupted, then it is also true that the causal series of dharmas as simple events ultimately constituting the skandha, and which alone have substantial existence (dravyasat), in these ultimate (param¯artha) terms perdure in any case. Yet in the Abhidharmako´sa Vasubandhu also describes an unequivocal list of karmapathas, just as the Therav¯ada does: ten kinds of action that as well as being unethical will incur unfavourable effects (AKBh IV 68–74), the first of which (as in the P¯ali list) is unsurprisingly the killing of sentient beings. Indeed, in the Abhidharmako´sa the karmapatha of killing extends even to those, such as soldiers, commissioned by to kill.1 Soldiers must accept the inevitable karmic stain incumbent on obeying military orders and their colleagues’ killing, unless they have resolved to put all other life before their own, even on pain of death, which alone absolves them of it (Demiéville 18–19; Schmithausen 1999). Yet, in a way that will become notable in the Mah¯ay¯ana, this moral force of altruistic resolve is the causal factor that also exonerates intended killing on the part of sublimely motivated a¯ rya-beings, such as those former lives of the Buddha as a bodhisattva featured in the Up¯aya-kau´salya S¯utra, the j¯atakas and other Mah¯ay¯ana hagiography.2 The canonical P¯ali tradition had already distantly prepared for this theme by reference to the non-existence of self in the conventionally-existent person (puggala). For example, the nun Vajir¯a answers M¯ara the god of death regarding the nature of a being: “This [the idea of a being] is a prejudice [dit..thigatam . ] on your part; there is no being here, purely a heap of conditioned elements” (SN I 135; cited in Collins 132). Buddhaghosa, in the 5th-century Visuddhimagga (XV III 32), similarly disclaiming any notion of a personal selfhood that could be the object of genuine assertion or refutation, offers an early ‘zombie’ metaphor (much as the roughly contemporaneous Vasubandhu does) that could be seen to have nihilistic implications: Just as a puppet is empty, soulless (nijj¯ıvam . ) and without curiosity, and while it walks and stands merely through the combination of strings and wood, yet it seems as if it had curiosity and interestedness; so too this [human] name-and-form is empty, soulless and without curiosity, and while it walks and stands merely through the combination of the two together, yet it seems as if it had curiosity and interestedness. (in Collins 132–33) 1

AKBh IV 72c–d (649). There is growing scholarship that interrogates Therav¯ada and Mah¯ay¯anist exceptionalism with regard to the first precept, by close textual readings of lesser-known canonical and other literature (Jenkins 2010, 2010/2011; Zimmerman 2006; Delhey 2006, 2009; An¯alayo 2010, 2011). 2

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Buddhaghosa suggests that any valorisation of a personal self, and its interiorization of an external world available for its own purposes, is based on a falsehood: such individuality only “seems” to have personal, self-directed or self-interested intentionality; in truth that self exists only as an illusion, just as the animation of a puppet is only a form of make-believe. We saw above that Vasubandhu suggests a potential normative loophole generated by the atomistic reduction of the person to his constituent dharmas. If the dharmas per se are not killed, and they alone possess real being (sad dravya), then what is? A merely nominal, conceptual fiction. Buddhaghosa and Vasubandhu also suggest that where intentional killing entails the primordially ignorant belief in a self, and where the person that is its object is conventionally real, a negative kammic/karmic effect necessarily ensues from the akusala kammapathas/aku´sala karmapathas. If so, such negative effect justifies the precept on that conventional (sammuti/sam . vr.ti) level, despite the ultimately true state of affairs, and one can presume that the Buddhist audience to whom justification is directed perceives other persons as both substantially real and as persons. The normative force of the precept thus depends on the conventionally real, and not ultimately real or true (param¯artha satya), status of the person. Mah¯ay¯ana thinkers such as N¯ag¯arjuna suggest similar normative problems given the emptiness of the dharmas themselves. The philosophical tradition N¯ag¯arjuna inaugurates as the Madhyamaka goes still further by questioning what it is in the person that requires the moral protection of the first precept, when the person is ultimately not even reducible to momentarily impermanent reals. Hence, in the Mah¯aprajñ¯ap¯aramitopade´sa3 N¯ag¯arjuna makes a claim that persists, as we will see, into the later Mah¯ay¯ana textual tradition: [S]ince the living being [sattva] does not exist, neither does the sin of murder. And since the sin of murder does not exist, there is no longer any reason to forbid it […] In killing then, given that the five aggregates are characteristically empty, similar to the visions of dreams or reflections in a mirror, one commits no wrongdoing. (Cited in Demiéville 2010, 20).

This passage (extant no earlier than the 2nd–3rd-century C.E.) anticipates subsequent justifications by Mah¯ay¯ana exegetes of auspicious intentional killing on the part of superlative moral agents such as bodhisattvas, or Buddhas in their previous lives. The living being, the author of this text argues, does exist, but only conventionally as a person constituted by the five aggregates which, being ultimately empty of intrinsic existence, also exist only conventionally.4 But since intentionally killing a conventionally real sentient being remains karmically valenced, the precept, which 3

A text that tradition, probably falsely, attributes to N¯ag¯arjuna, preserved in the Chinese translation (Ta-chih-tu-lun) of Kum¯araj¯ıva, completed in 404 or 405 C.E. See Ruegg (1981, 32ff .) for discussion of the contested nature, and possible plurality, of this attribution. 4 This radical hermeneutic of ‘empty killing’ is also evident in the Chinese Mah¯ ay¯ana SusthitamatiParipriccha, in which the bodhisattva Mañju´sr¯ı attempts to kill with moral impunity none less than the Buddha. This example, and others like it, privileges the ultimate dimension of an act, whereby superlative agents transcend the relative dimension of karmic consequence. See e.g., Jerryson (2016, 158) for discussion, which briefly refers this religious hermeneutic to Zen-influenced appropriations of ‘empty’ homicide in historical war, without however analysing the morally relative, karmic side—and thus a robust Buddhist ethics—of the latter phenomenon.

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applies to intentional action committed or intended by conventionally-real sentient beings, is to be observed. The wisdom (prajñ¯a) of a Buddha or a¯ rya-being perceives the ultimately empty (´su¯ nya) nature of this entire conventional proceedings and, given that knowledge, and with an unimpeachable compassion and freedom from cognitive-affective defilement, acts within the conventional moral-kammic economy while simultaneously cognising its emptiness of intrinsic existence (svabh¯ava). Only in this latter sense is it true that he ultimately ‘commits no wrongdoing’, given also that he seeks, conventionally, to mitigate a worse suffering by means of a lesser one. ´ akyamuni Buddha has historically been to aid sentient Moreover, the work of S¯ beings in mitigating and ultimately extirpating the causes of their suffering, and we’ve already established the justificatory function of the PD and PK, as well as PG, for the precept. The canonical and commentarial literature in which these heuristics are encoded, as detailed above, confute the notion that lethal acts committed by normal sentient beings, or even a¯ rya-beings, is in any sense normative. The theoretical exceptions, which typically involve a¯ rya-being agents, positively weigh the overall utility of compassionate action, including its soteriological dimension, against the conventional cost of negative moral effects for the potential agent of lethal action. Schmithausen observes that a bodhisattva (who may be, of course, a layman and even a ks.atriya) is, in certain situations […] recommended to kill out of compassion, but […] only in order to prevent a human being from committing a heinous crime, i.e. in cases where the otherworldly welfare of that person is seriously endangered. Therefore, these cases only prove that otherworldly welfare is a higher value than biological life. (2000, 480, italics original).5

An ordinary agent, holding both sentient beings and his lethal act to be intrinsically real events, necessarily incurs whatever grave karmic effect ensues from intentional action pursuant on these conditions. As suggested by the author of the Mah¯aprajñ¯ap¯aramitopade´sa, the emptiness of these events and their constitutive objects does not entail an axiological claim regarding their properly conventional existence. Certain value-claims and the norms that encode them (such as the pr¯an.a¯ tip¯atah.) remain true with regard to the conventionally-real lifeworld, where conventional truths remain conventionally true.6 We’ve seen that intention is the master term of Buddhist-ethical argument, usually identified in general terms as wholesome, unwholesome, or neutrally indeterminate. However, the extensive Mah¯ay¯ana record valorising superlative altruistic intention invites a more explicit descriptor of what might, at least in part, mediate between or comprise these moral valencies. This is because, as a limit-case exception to the earlier understanding of the precept, which now views the intention to kill in inverse terms of approbation, it exposes the criterion that enables a Buddhist adept to literally do so without moral fault.

5 6

Cf. Schmithausen (1999, 59). See Cowherds (2011) for a range of discussion.

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2 The Principle of Wisdom (Prajñ¯a) (PP) In considering in Chap. 4 the five-fold conditions for killing as a fully-completed unwholesome course of action, it was noted that a sixth is on occasion added in the (Tibetan) Mah¯ay¯ana understanding of these five factors, requiring the presence of ignorance—itself one of the three poisons of greed, hatred and delusion. The Abhidhamma also recognises the last two of these as the causal roots of the lethal act.7 A lethal act lacking these factors is less than fully constituted and is therefore less karmically weighty. While the possibility of the constitutive absence of hatred or delusion in killing is excluded in the Abhidhamma on psychological grounds (Gethin 2004a, 175), a claim we will explore in greater detail in Chap. 6, in the Mah¯ay¯ana context the only sentient being psychologically capable of, and so theoretically able to blamelessly commit, such an act is a highly-realised bodhisattva or Buddha. The Mah¯ay¯ana thus brings two related approaches to normative evaluation in the theorization of the first precept, in addition to the PD, PK and PG: i) lethal acts are prohibited where they are directed against a¯ rya beings such as Buddhas and bodhisattvas possessing the highest value or perfection of transcendental virtue and wisdom. ii) where understood by such wisdom beings as compassionately imperative, and where their omission results in overall reduced utility, their lethal acts are exceptions to the prohibition of the first precept.

This principle of prajñ¯a (PP) extends PG, PK, and ultimately PD in two ways: a¯ rya-beings, Buddhas and bodhisattvas are, firstly, the exemplary prohibitive objects of the lethal act due to their superlative quality (PG-PP), and secondly (in the Mah¯ay¯ana context) its valorised active agents. In the latter case lethal agency teleologically suspends the prohibition, with a view to the amelioration of suffering as part of the transcendental realisation of Buddhahood. Such agency can of course be seen as a specific, and extreme, instance of the broader category of ‘skilful means’ or up¯aya, typically characterising bodhisattva ethics in its distinction from the Nik¯aya ethics of the Buddhist layperson, or that of the Vinaya for the ordained, evident in ´ avakay¯ana schools.8 Sr¯ We saw that the PG relied on the reciprocal relation between the qualitative identities of the objects and agents of killing. It deployed comparative measures with regard to hierarchies of more or less static quality between animals and humans, and then ordinary humans and highly-realized Buddhist exemplars. Referring to Therav¯ada commentarial claims (considered in Chap. 4), Schmithausen writes of these hierarchies that The reason adduced is that ordinary persons have few and animals no qualities (gun.a). It is obvious that these qualities are spiritual qualities, and […] would have to be taken as actually or potentially enabling their owners to attain ultimate security (i.e. nirv¯an.a), which 7

Gethin (2004a, 175); Schmithausen (2000, 49). The Abhidhamma analysis of lethal action by way of its causal basis is only one of five analytic means of defining it; the others are by way of its intrinsic nature or essence (dhamma/sabh¯ava), its grouping (kot..th¯asa), its object (¯aramman.a), and feeling (vedan¯a). This last in particular is considered in depth in Chap. 6. 8 For discussion of up¯ aya see among others Pye (1978), Federman (2009), McGarrity (2009).

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5 Mah¯ay¯ana Exceptionalism and the Lethal Act is inextricably linked to one’s own offering security to others and thus renders the life of such a person more precious for others. (2000, 45, italics original)

The PP similarly recognizes the relation between the soteriological status of the agent and that of the object, evaluating ethical action on the basis of that relation, but with a difference congruent with what we’ve already noted: it exploits differences of quality between agents and objects in order to morally augment rather than gauge negative moral valencies of the action. For example, a Buddha or bodhisattva supererogatively gives his or her own life for the sake of the beings of inferior gun.a the sacrifice benefits, even where they are by the earlier criterion (PG) of inherently less moral value: a supererogation the PG itself does not justify, and even contradicts. In the same case the PG would insist that the intentional killing of a being of higher quality for the sake of a lower one must produce negative moral effect: its poles of kammic evaluation are in that sense causally fixed. In the terms of the PP, however, this negative effect is reversed just because the higher being altruistically wills to subordinate greater gun.a to lesser—a theme of the abnegation of self to other that, by virtue of the continuing development of a moral exchange-economy of karma, becomes central to Mah¯ay¯ana Buddhist ethics.9

3 Auspicious Violence in the Mah¯ay¯ana Mah¯ay¯ana texts provide a wealth of detail and example for this same fluid moral ¯ economy. Thus, in the 3rd-century C.E. Aryadeva in the Catuh.s´atakam extends the master term of cetan¯a by claiming that “Because of their intention both bad and good actions become auspicious for a bodhisattva.” (cited in Jenkins 2010/2011, 309) A bodhisattva’s altruistic intention reconfigures all previously morally-inflected action to its own norm: depending on the degree of compassionate altruism, even previously proscribed action becomes meritorious. Moral valencies previously attached to kamma-path¯a as ‘dark’ or unwholesome because of their constitutive nature, are made comparatively wholesome, in terms of their moral effect, only because of the nature of their agent. The prioritization of both wisdom (prajñ¯a) and great compassion (mah¯akarun.a¯ ) in a bodhisattva’s progress to awakening produces a teleological suspension of the ´ avakay¯ana norms of kusala and akusala in a bodhisattva’s agency ethical, sublating Sr¯ that transcendentally renders their acts as states of exception. Similar claims are echoed in other Mah¯ay¯ana s¯utras and s´a¯ stras and at least “Asa˙nga, Vasubandhu, ´ antideva, Aryadeva, ¯ S¯ Bh¯aviveka and Candrak¯ırti agree on the basic point that a bodhisattva may do what is normally forbidden or inauspicious.” (Jenkins 310) The normative force for the Mah¯ay¯ana of such an illustrious roll-call of philosophical authority can hardly be minimized. Characteristic among them might be Asa˙nga’s 9

See for example discussion of karma, Mah¯ay¯ana s´¯ıla and utility in Goodman (2009, 2017).

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claim in the 4th-century Mah¯ay¯anasam . graha that “even if a bodhisattva in his superior wisdom and skilful means should commit the ten sinful acts of murder etc., he would nevertheless remain unsullied and guiltless, gaining instead immeasurable merits.” (319). ´astra, reproIn the same century the theme is repeated in the Yog¯ac¯arabh¯umi S¯ ducing the narrative familiar from the Up¯aya-kau´salya S¯utra. N¯ag¯arjuna also conceives of violence as a potential form of skilful means (up¯aya-kau´salya) in his advice to a Buddhist king in the Ratn¯aval¯ı, such that “the Buddha says to even cause extreme pain, if it will help another” (312); and Candrak¯ırti (in the early 7th-century) extends the theme to the point that “If an act of killing may make merit, then it is neither a necessary evil, nor merely value free, but is clearly auspicious” (310)— clearly the superlative extension of PK, even in its overt contradiction of the first precept. This revaluation of values also signals the topos of skilful means which might include otherwise forbidden acts, including lethal ones. While the six perfections (p¯aramit¯as) of the Mah¯ay¯ana10 cohere with the focus on compassion and non-harm ´ avakay¯ana traditions, the sixth perfection of prajñ¯a already familiar from the Sr¯ throws a hermeneutic wildcard into the otherwise consistent, if sometimes equivocal, textual history around the moral evaluation of killing. Vasubandhu’s and N¯ag¯arjuna’s earlier metaphysical provocations now inform what has become normative, at least for bodhisattvas and a¯ rya-beings.11 Jenkins indeed suggests that the justifications for compassionate killing by bodhisattvas are “double-edged in opening the possibility for murder precisely to prevent its horrific karmic outcome.” (2010/2011, 323). In this way, however, Mah¯ay¯ana discourse on compassionate violence suggests that while a Buddha or bodhisattva possesses the transcendental insight and skilful means to justify a blameless intention in killing, someone else, who might not possess those qualities and who kills to prevent the negative consequences of killing, is caught in a double-bind: forestalling one lethal act now justifies committing the very act whose consequences it is meant to neutralise.12 But even for a ´ antideva commenting in the 8thbodhisattva the reasoning becomes paradoxical. S¯ ´ century Siks.a¯ samuccaya on the oft-cited Up¯ayakau´salya-s¯utra says “Behold, son of good family, the very action which sends others to hell sends a bodhisattva with skill in means to the Brahmaloka heaven realms.” (319) As Jenkins writes, the more pure a bodhisattva’s intention is to go to hell [upon committing a willed murder] the less likely she is to do it. The bodhisattva dramatically shortens the path to buddhahood, precisely because of being willing to sacrifice his or her own spiritual progress […] In fact

10

They are: d¯ana (generosity), s´¯ıla (morality), ks.a¯ nti (patience), v¯ırya (vigour), dhy¯ana (meditation, prajñ¯a (wisdom). 11 Jenkins notes this Mah¯ ay¯ana shift largely with reference to the Madhyamaka, but even here it is ¯ not universal. He writes that “N¯ag¯arjuna and Aryadeva do not explicitly allow for deadly violence, but do allow for inflicting pain or performing normally inauspicious action based on intention.” (2010/2011, 299). 12 We will encounter a similar performative contradiction in Chap. 10, with reference to securing retributive justice in capital punishment.

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5 Mah¯ay¯ana Exceptionalism and the Lethal Act the motivation can produce the opposite of what is intended; those who intend to endure hell realms do not, precisely because they are willing to do so. (319)

The same reasoning can be extended further: if I compassionately kill with the explicit and religiously-sanctioned intention to suffer hell-realms as a result, and know I thereby will not enter hell-realms, then I can only actually enter hell-realms by killing without that intention. In order to actually enter hell, indeed with a pure intention to do so, I would have to kill in the samsaric mode of ignorance (avidy¯a), with hatred (dves.a) or ill-will (vy¯ap¯ada), which defeats my compassionate purpose in killing at all. It appears that, unlike the ordinary worldling (puthujjana), or indeed would-be bodhisattva, who can still deceive himself by imagining his lethal compassion is not self-serving, and thereby genuinely risk going to hell as a result, as a nonself-deceiving and authentically compassionate bodhisattva I can only successfully compassionately kill by not killing. The casuistry of karman with which the moral calculus of intention is pursued is nonetheless a large part of the conceptual means whereby the Mah¯ay¯ana contextualises a putative ethics of auspicious violence. As Jenkins notes, “Allowances for compassionate violence, even killing, are found among major Buddhist thinkers across philosophical traditions and in major scriptures.” (299) The following considers how this claim might be conceived first in the terms internal to Buddhist religious studies discourse, and then with respect to a broader philosophical project of a normative Buddhist ethics of killing.

4 Lethality in Religious Studies Discourse: A Modus Vivendi The work of Jenkins (2010/2011, 2010), Jerryson and Juergensmeyer (2010), Gethin (2007), Gray (2007), Harvey (2000), Schmithausen (1999), Demiéville (2010/1957), Tatz (1986), among others (see above), explores in exemplary detail the descriptive ´ avakay¯ana and and normative dimensions of violence evident in the canonical, Sr¯ Mah¯ay¯ana textual record, and we have just noted the abundant textual evidence for the notion of a morally auspicious violent, and even lethal, agency in the latter. A summary statement by Jenkins concerning the Mah¯ay¯ana record claims that: Both allowing and preventing murder is validated. No specific outcomes or actions are essentially evil. Killing, preventing murder, and allowing a murder are all auspicious within one narrative context. (2010/2011, 318)

In these narrative contexts killing per se does not bear value: as Jenkins makes clear, it can be auspicious or inauspicious in differing circumstances. As a literal and moral act it thus remains normatively under-determined. That is, bodhisattva agents kill not because a situation absolutely calls for the death of its object, but because by doing so their superabundant compassion garners superlative karmic reward, for both altruistic agent and misguided or ill-intentioned object of the act. Where karma is the value that regulates the moral consequence of acts, so too is intention what

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regulates the karma attaching to them. Hence, it is not something about killing per se which determines the auspicious valence Jenkins identifies, but rather that: (A) intentional killing is always an act that mediates its more morally significant wholesome (ku´sala) and unwholesome (aku´sala) (karmic) consequence.

The Mah¯ay¯ana cases of killing thus function to illustrate these master terms of Buddhist-ethical discourse, rather than to explicitly engage the many potential moral quandaries of real-world killing. One case related by Candrak¯ırti (cited in Jenkins 315), for example, has a father accidentally kill his only son in vigorously, but lovingly, embracing him, due to the latter’s extremely poor health (something the father cannot perceive!). The moral message here is that unequivocally wholesome intention can result in killing without moral ill-effect. As a lethal case that escapes the karmic consequence of intended killing, it pointedly illustrates the ethical significance of intention informing action, as Jenkins notes, but not at all that of the moral consequence of killing—unless, as the broad context suggests, there is simply none at all outside that determined by intention. But the realistic implausibility of the case also serves to underline the point that the signifier “killing” in these many canonical examples serves an essentially performative and rhetorical purpose.13 That is, in pointing to something other than itself this sense of “killing” signals not that these are cases in which killing is normatively permissible, but rather these are cases in which even killing is auspicious because of its superlative moral-psychological provenance. It is then not surprising that the Mah¯ay¯ana cases of auspicious killing do not generally concern the putative ethical effects of different conditions of real-life killing (e.g., in medical contexts, war-combat and counter-terrorism, abortion and euthanasia) which are rarely explicitly distinguished as invoking class-specific moral distinctions. Why then do these exemplary cases consistently invoke killing, if the great range of actual lethal behaviours are not their primary ethical concern? After all, the causal functions which killing positively serves, in the examples repeatedly cited in secondary literature, could as easily be secured by robust bodily restraint. But in that case, of course, the rhetorical moral force that invoking killing exploits would be diminished, if not lost. Killing as an instance of a bodhisattva’s action is thus deployed as a paradigm of high-moral behaviour, in often hyperbolic or unrealistic depictions of homicide— indeed, involving the potential killing of many hundreds of a¯ rya-beings, such as bodhisattva merchant seamen, at a time, by a single benighted attacker!14 Killing in these cases thus serves a rhetorical function of persuasion—as opposed to, for 13

Jenkins notes that “even the portrayal of compassionate murder is used to discourage murder by malicious people” (322–323), which portrayal is not thereby a persuasive reason for the permissibility of compassionate killing (as Jenkins appears to suggest in his ensuing remarks). 14 Harvey (2000, 135) recounts this oft-cited example of altruistic murder in the Up¯ ayakau´salya S¯utra. For Jenkins’ discussion see 2010/2011, 315ff ., and Gethin’s (2004a, 188ff ). For a more philosophical account, with reference to contemporary Buddhist violent resistance, see Kovan (2009).

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example, the comparatively sober and forensic register of Vinaya discussion of different lethal behaviours.15 This is further evident in considering a counter-factual case, suggested above. What kind of karmic consequence might follow from merely restraining an aggressor (perhaps with only minor injury), but with otherwise the same causal (not karmic) outcome, and would this karmic case be pedagogically compelling? The plausible response is that such action would accrue negligible karma, in which case the doctrine of the karmic result of action impresses a sense of only minimal moral relevance, barely worth remarking on, and despite the same concrete result (of restraint) that killing a malefactor would achieve. It would then seem that karma, as a doctrine especially of ethical reasoning and judgement, is not overly persuasive in assessing perhaps a majority of real-world cases such as those pertaining to the averting (rather than altruistic commission) of lethal injury: the latter surely an outcome of considerable ethical value inasmuch as it protects life on at least two (and probably more) counts. Unsurprisingly, the texts Jenkins analyses do not celebrate, for example, innumerable instances of the great karmic boon of altruistic resistance to killing in realistic lethal contexts. Moreover, because they ostensibly possess the cognitive insight to more or less cognise the karmic cost–benefit analysis that underwrites their permissibility, only the morally superlative bodhisattva and Buddha agents in these lethal cases can so act. Hence, also, the frequent pitting of diametrically unalike protagonists (Buddhas or bodhisattvas vs. wretched malefactors): realistic portraits of the typical parties to lethal acts would not only be more nuanced, but also render karmic distinctions between them considerably more opaque. In sum, Mah¯ay¯ana narratives of auspicious violence do not invoke the real, and thus often only ambiguously justified, killing by and of agents who are typically multi-valenced morally. Rather, they illustrate an exceptionalist teaching of karma by exploiting “killing” as a rhetorically potent example of moral action. The broader context for this pedagogy, beyond the text, is thus faith (´sraddh¯a) in both the Mah¯ay¯ana soteriological emphasis on bodhicitta and its exemplification in saintly agents such as bodhisattvas and Buddhas. Indeed, the examples of auspicious bodhisattva killing appear to be predicated on the cognitive (in some cases clairvoyant) powers that warrant pre-emptive action, most commonly in knowing clearly what has not yet occurred, which unseen ethical effects will devolve from it, what is in the mind of a would-be murderer, and what kind of mind it is. While these conditions entail the PK, as well as the PG, and while the Mah¯ay¯ana examples of killing involve plausible examples of bodhisattva behaviour consistent with the translifetime ethical economy of karma that sustains it, these are not instances of the demonstrably familiar knowledge, and its privation, with which a normative ethics is concerned.

15

See for example cases that calibrate moral judgement to varying realistic intentions noted at Vin. IV 125; III 78; II 91.

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A second major point then concerning auspicious killing in the Mah¯ay¯ana record is that once the typically rhetorical function of its discourse on killing is made apparent, it becomes clear that: (B) auspicious killing is possible only for Buddhas and bodhisattvas, rather than for unenlightened people, of whatever degree.

If so, are religious studies scholars of the Mah¯ay¯ana record claiming that ordinary people are correct (as Buddhists) in appealing to arguments purporting to justify compassionate violence, and so to themselves claim that compassionate killing in general is permissible?16 If some ordinary people (Jenkins mentions for example “doctors, leaders, parents or pilots”, 323) must sometimes confront circumstances of engaging in “common sense” (ibid.) compassionate killing, then they do so as persons more or less cognizant of the uncertainties, exigencies, and inevitable suffering, as well as putative benefits, incumbent on that course of action. Apodictic confidence in the form of knowledge that underwrites bodhisattva normativity is precisely the feature that disenables its relevance for a normative Buddhist ethics of killing. That claim does not imply the irrelevance of a bodhisattva’s skilful means to the aspirational dimensions of that ethics; on the contrary (as I argue for example in Kovan 2014). Moreover, individuals can and do act upon their private religious beliefs and compassionate or other convictions, and not merely publicly sanctioned ones. Perhaps some of them, in Buddhist terms, are even bodhisattvas. But the distinctions between what an agent might be or could become (e.g., a Buddha) and what they actually are, and between acts justified by reason and those justified by multiple articles of faith, is critical for Buddhist epistemic and normative purposes. This general claim seems clearly borne out by the fact that a straightforward ethics of auspicious killing is not independently developed, anywhere, in the Buddhist canon; as we’ve seen above, quite to the contrary. We can plausibly conclude that an auspicious killing by Buddhists, karmically justified or otherwise, is not obviously applicable to ordinary people—a claim with which Gethin, Keown, Harvey and Jenkins, with their differing interpretative emphases of the textual record on killing, would surely concur. However coherent or morally compelling a karmic-transcendental justification of killing might appear within Mah¯ay¯ana textual discourse, and the religious studies discipline focussed upon it, we are here concerned to speak not of the ethics of (more or less clairvoyant) bodhisattvas but of the actual persons who commit the lethal acts we seek to ethically understand and evaluate as fellow normal persons. Whether such persons are or are not actual or potential bodhisattvas is entirely irrelevant to that end: as we have just seen, bodhisattva behaviour is antinomian because by its own lights it functions morally by virtue of standards of wisdom and compassion transcendental to comparatively conventional ones, so that whatever normative effect it generates is also transcendental to whatever apt moral judgement 16 See Jenkins (2010/2011), from the section “Compassionate violence as common sense” (323ff .), though violence and killing are distinct ethical categories whose semantic conflation (311) leads to considerable equivocation.

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accrues to it in the conventionally real lifeworld (lokasam . vr.tisatya) with respect to which for ordinary persons it occurs. That is, bodhisattva agency necessarily partakes of the karmic economy of that lifeworld, but it does so only in transcendental terms. One can thus envision, for example, that the hypothetical bodhisattva lethal agent sentenced to lifeimprisonment (or even the death-penalty) by a court of law for the homicide of a would-be murderer of, say, a bus full of bodhisattva day-tourists, will not resent such a punishment: the authentically altruistic bodhisattva’s superlative karmic compensation is always already assured him, in prison or out, as a social pariah or not, irrespective of the necessarily ignorant worldly conditions he seeks to transcend. Thus, the putative soteric auspiciousness of bodhisattva killing within the conventional moral economy is not precluded. Where Jenkins notes that “Studies so far have been reluctant to accept that compassionate killing may even be a source of making merit” (299) this might be because there is a normative tension between distinct senses and contexts of ethical acceptance. Similarly, when Jenkins (2010) discusses Mah¯ay¯ana notions of karmic meritmaking through warfare and torture, this is surely relevant for a Buddhist religiousstudies hermeneutics. By the same token, however, it is not clear how karmic meritmaking as a form of moral explanation, in the context of that hermeneutics, could feature in a justificatory discussion of the Buddhist permissibility of torture, even where aligned notions such as utility might conceivably do. But this is not because the karmic account for the rightness of action might be false. Indeed, it may be granted that it is true, without altering the discursive and normative predicament a Buddhist ethics of killing then faces. This predicament was recognised by Buddhist philosophers such as Dharmak¯ırti (sixth or seventh century C.E.), who addressed the issue of karmic justification in moral argument. His scepticism concerning a public appeal to karmic explanation in ethical discourse suggests that a contemporary bracketing or suspension of kamma/karman as a form of philosophical justification need not be seen as anachronistic. The following briefly explores classical Indian Buddhist scepticism about karma as probative in ethical debate. It offers Buddhist-philosophical grounds for the moral evaluation of killing that eschews an appeal to karma as a primary mode of the moral justification for acts.17 This discussion is significant epistemically for how the remainder of the argument proceeds, into Part II.

17

Nor does this imply the need for a naturalized karma, which would itself assume that an essentially metaphorical conceptual function need be scientifically or otherwise literalized to better serve the same rationalizing purposes; see Coseru (2007), and Finnigan (2022).

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5 Karmic Consequence and Ethical Discourse: A Pram¯an.av¯ada View Jenkins’ (2010/2011) study of Mah¯ay¯ana sources on the theme of auspicious killing suggests that any attempt to comprehend the ethical economy of karma in that context results in discursive aporia: The ethics of compassionate violence are a complex matrix of multiple interrelated and competing concerns, including proportionality, intention, virtue, situation, and consequences conceived from a multiple-life perspective. The basic principle that the auspicious is defined by that which leads to positive karmic outcomes only increases the level of ambiguity by removing the possibility that any action is essentially inauspicious. Although there are many warnings of hell and promises of heaven for specific acts in Buddhist ethical rhetoric, there are as many reminders that the workings of karma are ultimately inconceivable. If karma is inconceivably complex, then the auspicious is equally inconceivable, and so follows Buddhist ethics. (326)

In engaging the Mah¯ay¯ana record regarding killing, we can concur with Jenkins that “this makes the application of Western metaethics especially challenging, since it tends to function in the opposite way, that is, by clarifying narrative through systematic analysis” (ibid.). The theorist of ‘Buddhist killing’ therefore confronts a problem: if I seek to engage Buddhist-philosophical analysis of the very many and distinct contexts of intentional killing, then an appeal to the “ultimately inconceivable” workings of karma will be unable to provide epistemic access to the means of moral judgement, and thereby rational conviction in my judgements concerning those contexts. Much as I might as a Buddhist-ethics theorist prefer to, I can’t confidently or usefully engage the inconceivably complex workings of karma in morally evaluating lethal acts. Is there a way to proceed that generates an epistemically transparent Buddhist-philosophical discourse that is theoretically available to all rational moral reasoners? One such philosophical resource might be found in the Pram¯an.av¯ada appropriation of epistemological norms that involve an appeal not to karma but to reasons agents actually and identifiably do have for their acts. This possibility is a focus of Tillemans’ (2010/2011) study which discusses the problem he sees arising from the ambiguous utility of karmic claims in Buddhist-ethical discourse: While some karmic consequences will be accessible to ordinary reflecting individuals […] many will be completely unfathomable by any ordinary human beings, in that they are supposedly unobservable and not inferable from anything observable. These so-called “radically inaccessible facts” (atyantaparoks.a) […] are thus supposedly only understandable through scriptures authored by individuals with extraordinary understanding. (366)

That is, such facts remain unavailable to either of the two Buddhist epistemic instruments (pram¯an.as) of perception (pratyaks.a) or inference from it (anum¯ana). Instead, they have to rely for their epistemic warrant on a separate pram¯an.a of testimony or scriptural authority (´sabda), not entertained by the Pram¯an.av¯ada logicoepistemological tradition (sixth-seventh centuries C.E.) developed by Dign¯aga and Dharmak¯ırti. Because of this, Tillemans effectively rejects (373–376) the karmic

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justification for acts as a basis for Buddhist metaethical theory. He grounds his view in a Dharmak¯ırtian concern to arbitrate between public and private applications of karmic justification in ethical reasoning: Dharmak¯ırti, in Pram¯an.av¯arttika I and IV, maintained that this type of faith-based reasoning about the specifics of karma would not be persuasive to non-believers; not only is the reasoning extremely uncertain, but many opponents would simply refuse to recognize its subject matter (dharmin), ie., Buddhist accounts of the details of karmic causality. […] While scripture may provide direction (albeit very fallible) in a closed context of believers, it is not at all probative (i.e., a s¯adhana) in a public context when appeals to authority are contested. I think that some such distinction between private and public is indeed important to the Buddhist position. On the one hand, Dharmak¯ırti would steer clear of outright denial of karma—which no scholastic Buddhist writer can just flatly deny—but on the other hand he knows that he cannot and should not use scriptural descriptions of karmic consequences to clinch debates in the public domain, where rebirth and the causality between lives are either contested issues or too obscure to be admitted in “fact-based” (vastubalapravr.tta) debates. (371–372, italics in original)

Here we’re similarly concerned not only to present epistemically transparent argument for its ethical conclusions, but also to be of intellectual relevance to a philosophical audience, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, for whom an appeal to karma is not a live option just because it is not rationally available. We must then ask which register of argument is appropriate for understanding and evaluating lethal acts, if that is not served by a karmic casuistry the “unfathomable complexity” (Jenkins 326) of which will not enable scriptural argumentation about karma to be used convincingly in an adversarial debate on ethics […] this would be an illegitimate […] attempt to promote certain Buddhist ethical ideas in the public domain all the while insulating them from criticism by stressing people’s epistemic incompetence. (Tillemans 373–374)

If Dharmak¯ırti “cannot and should not use scriptural descriptions of karmic consequences to clinch debates in the public domain” then no Buddhist-philosophical ethicist concerned to address issues of public moral import can intelligibly exploit karmic argument as a would-be analytic tool.18 This appears to have been the case in the Pram¯an.av¯ada school and some of its Madhyamaka fellow-travellers. “There is”, Tillemans writes, a recurring insistence, by […] authors aligned with Dharmak¯ırti’s school […] that ethical argumentation should be accessible to an open-minded rational being who provisionally suspends religious commitment; this is the so-called “judicious person” (preks.a¯ vat) who represents an ideal figure in that she adopts positions, ethical or otherwise, purely on the basis of sound justificatory reasoning alone. It is thus incontestable that there were such rational strategies for justification in non-Madhyamaka and Madhyamaka Buddhist ethics alike. M¯adhyamikas not only thought they were important, but that they functioned unproblematically on the level of conventional truth/reality. (362–363) 18

This could in theory take in Buddhist-praxiological means as well, such as the insights of meditative experience into the causal nature of the mind and its effects, independent of a karmic belief per se. As we’ve seen, Buddhist ethics and practice involves the self-interrogation of intention, its psychological inflexions, and observation of its psychosocial effects in lived intersubjective life. That privately-gained insight might well displace a belief in efficacious karmic causation; it may, on the other hand, affirm it.

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This precedent suggests that a contemporary Buddhist-ethical theorist can with non-anachronistic reason justify her account on a basis other than that of karma. An epistemically respectable generic Buddhist account of killing would therefore require, first, describing relevant metaphysical, psychological, phenomenological and intentional dimensions of a given class of intentional lethal act and then, second, identifying the problems that analysis presents with regard to the philosophical and ethical commitments of that Buddhist account. This procedure allows the Buddhist-ethical theorist to juxtapose the putatively rational status of lethal acts with her own philosophically adequate understanding of them. The critique that emerges from a comparative analysis of the metaphysical conditions of lethal acts and their putative justification can then be mobilised to respond to the normative contentions Buddhist-ethical discourse must attempt, as a social project, to publicly address if not resolve. As Tillemans summarises: I think it is clear that in a critical approach to ethics appeals to humanly unfathomable facts […] fail[s] to conform to what the world on reflection, values and demands in debate on contested issues, namely, that a discussion, if not between the already convinced, must be open for both parties to criticize and evaluate on the basis of publicly accessible information. (374)

Hence, the above-noted position of the judicious person “who represents an ideal figure in that she adopts positions, ethical and otherwise, purely on the basis of sound justificatory reasoning alone” (362) can be seen as an apt Buddhist model for the discourse which follows, in particular in Part II. If a critical enquiry into the moral evaluation of killing is to rely on rational argument that demonstrates sound justification, then it will respond to and deploy reasons that in being cognitive feature propositional content that can be so engaged by rational others. We’ve seen in previous chapters that a large part of the causes of killing according to the early Indian Buddhist traditions, as beyond them, lies in unwholesome affect and the associated mental states and factors that sustain and cognitively reinforce it. These cognitive features of intentional killing can theoretically form a preliminary basis for interrogating the thinking that is supposed to justify it. Is there an exegetical mandate for focussing on the cognitive, as much as affective, provenance of intentional lethal acts? In order to answer that question, the following chapter will map the Abhidhamma/Abhidharma account/s of the psychological basis for the moral evaluation of intentional killing we’ve already encountered in previous chapters: that it is unwholesome because it necessarily entails a consciousness dominated by the root motivation of hatred (dosam¯ulacitt¯ani), accompanied by delusion (moha), and so is to that degree morally wrong.19 Chapter 6 thus turns to ascertaining how the cognitive factors associated with these unwholesome root causes for action provide a crucial preliminary context for the interrogation of justificatory reasons for killing, pursued at length in Part II. 19

E.g., Dhs. 413,421; Vism. XIV 92; Abhidh-s V 23 (Bodhi 2012, 208). Cf. Gethin (2004a, 175). All refs. to Dhs. are to numbered paragraphs of the PTS edition (in English tr. of Rhys Davids, ed. 1997.).

Chapter 6

Affect and Cognition: Unwholesome Consciousness, Hatred, Wrong View, and Delusion

Abstract This chapter engages the relations between affective and cognitive causal factors in killing evident in Abhidhamma and Abhidharma commentarial Therav¯ada and Sarv¯astiv¯ada literature. In particular it seeks to establish the degree to which the latter factors can be understood as psychologically determinative in intentional killing, alongside the dominant affective cause in aversion (dosa). Affect is seen to be grounded in the intentional nature of consciousness, which in the lethal case perceives and conceives its object in globally unwholesome (akusala) modes of awareness, constitutively inflected with delusion (moha), thus producing habitually distortive affective-cognitive constructions of others vis-à-vis the affected subject. Answering to the question concerning cognitive causal factors, the epistemic category of wrong view (micch¯a dit..thi), especially in the Abhidharma context, similarly functions as a precedent if not proximal causal factor. Deliberation and decision, manifest in reflective thought, entails rational cognition, and aversion is always associated with the hatred-rooted consciousness which itself depends on the specifically cognitive impetus for the akusala-cetan¯a intentionally giving rise to lethal acts. Keywords Abhidhamma psychology · Buddhist theory of consciousness · Intentionality and affect · Phenomenology of lethal acts · Habitual affect and cognition · Homicide and genocide

1 Consciousness, Affect, and Cognition This chapter examines early Indian Buddhist claims concerning the affective and cognitive causal bases for killing, available in Abhidhamma/Abhidharma textual resources. These provide the most explicit and consistent statement of its psychological-causal dimensions. My concern is also to demonstrate whether and to what degree these texts take cognitive factors to be as significant causally as affective ones in the aetiology of lethal acts. In doing so, we can gauge the truth of the claim that cognitive variables are at least as morally relevant as affective ones, preliminary to developing the arguments of Part II which engage metaphysical analyses of the person, and intentional killing in the context of those analyses.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_6

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Our primary concern is with the mental constitution of agents who entertain a putatively rational intention to kill, and do not do so through acts of wholly impulsive passion or extreme affect, or psychotic illness, though those cases are not in principle irrelevant here.1 It is telling that the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma2 explicitly exemplifies the two types of hatred-rooted consciousness—one ‘unprompted’ (asankh¯arika), the other ‘prompted’ (sasankh¯arika)—with spontaneous and premeditated murder, respectively. Bodhi notes that “delusion is always present as a root in cittas accompanied by greed and hate, [though] its function there is subordinate” (2012, 38), but also that “Greed and hatred, according to the Abhidhamma, are mutually exclusive: they cannot coexist within the same citta.” (33) Hence, the focus here concerns the causal nexus of hatred with delusion as the exclusive cognitive wellspring of the akusala kammapatha of killing. In this chapter I take a primarily exegetical rather than an interrogative approach: the philosophical justification of the Abhidhamma premises relevant to the relations between affective and cognitive causes for killing is not its overriding concern. Inasmuch as Part I as a whole reconstructs a generic Indian Buddhist account of intentional lethality, it does not also provide probative argument for all of its relevant claims; instead, I report them as represented in the Abhidhamma/Abhidharma traditions, and by secondary scholarship on those. Moreover, philosophical justification for tangential claims is orthogonal to the task of explaining, internal to the traditions, how cognitive variables importantly feature in the lethal case. Finally, as I argued in Chap. 1, investigating generic Buddhist grounds for the prohibition of killing requires a doxographically synoptic survey. Our examination of primary canonical texts shows that these require either substantiation or supplementation by associated elements of the tradition(s). Hence Buddhaghosa’s elaboration of canonical claims in Chap. 4 provided a more detailed basis for investigation just as, in Chap. 5, Pram¯an.av¯ada sources provided an important philosophical counterpoint to some contemporaneous Mah¯ay¯ana claims. Similarly, in this chapter, while the primary exegetical focus on the canonical and Therav¯ada Abhidhamma continues, I juxtapose these claims, and supplement them, with others drawn from Sautr¯antika and Vaibh¯as.ika sources. This is pertinent inasmuch as the Pram¯an.av¯adin Dharmak¯ırti, whose views noted in Chap. 5 provided an epistemic model for a contemporary Buddhist methodology,

1

As they entail more inaccessibly unconscious, as well as biochemical and neurological, causes they are comparatively less transparent cases of cognitively-mediated killing, but there may be some overlap between the two. If the Buddhist root-cause of delusion (moha), mediated by hatred and its cognitive effects, applies to the former cases their analyses would demand a different kind of (usually neuropsychiatric or genetic) episteme. With regard to the biochemical processes that in part explain psychosis, Buddhist terminology and theory can only describe a phenomenology of conscious (and potential senses of unconscious) mentation plausibly associated with them. 2 Reiterated in the Abhidhammatthasa˙ ¯ ngaha of the Therav¯adin Acariya Anuruddha (see Bodhi 2012, 39. All refs. to Abhidh-s. are to this edition).

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wrote largely from a grounding in Sautr¯antika doctrine, including that philosophically evident in or critical of the Sarv¯astiv¯ada-Vaibh¯as.ika Abhidharma.3 Attention to this range of doctrine provides a fuller picture of the relevant Buddhist conceptual context, philosophically enriching the present account as well as a ‘generic Buddhist’ understanding of the phenomenon of killing more generally.4 To focus solely on one tradition of thought arbitrarily forecloses the possibility of that understanding. The methodology engaged here is syncretic and conceptual rather than exclusive and exegetical-historical. In brief, we’ve seen that canonical Buddhist ethics and psychology, and especially the Abhidhamma theorists, take unwholesome action to be integrally tied to certain kinds of consciousness by virtue of the intentions they embody. But we’ve not yet detailed what these kinds are, what consciousness itself is taken to be, or how it functions. In the following, we’re concerned to delineate the relevant consciousnesses detailed in the Abhidhamma with a view to establishing their relation to the primary causes of intentional lethality—in brief, hatred-rooted consciousness (dosam¯ulacitt¯ani) conditioned by the root of delusion (present in every state of unwholesome consciousness) and motivated by (but not occurring simultaneously with) wrong view (micch¯a-dit..thi).

1.1 Consciousness (Viññ¯an.a/citta) In the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma the 89 kinds (or modes) of consciousness5 include the 12 unwholesome consciousnesses (akusalacitt¯ani), partly constitutive of the 54 ‘sense-sphere’ consciousnesses (k¯am¯avacara-cittas). These latter forms of consciousness6 are themselves partly constitutive of the larger category of 81 mundane consciousnesses (lokiyacittas) (which also includes the 15 fine-materialsphere r¯up¯avacara-cittas and the 12 immaterial-sphere ar¯up¯avacara-cittas). First, we must broadly consider the understanding of consciousness presented in the Abhidhamma. Consciousness (viññ¯an.a), or mind (citta),7 is the first of the 3

See Coseru (2012, 9), Tillemans (2020), Dunne (2004) for discussion. Of relevance to the tension between realist and idealist construals of Pram¯an.av¯ada thought, Tillemans notes that “Dharmak¯ırti’s metaphysics […] is largely unaffected by the choice of [Sautr¯antikan] external realism or idealism. […] he goes to great length[s] to show that the Yog¯ac¯ara idealist can use the same arguments for other minds […] as the Sautr¯antika realist, and just as the realist can avoid solipsism so the idealist supposedly can too.” (5) 4 We can identify a doctrinal transition through Chaps. 3–6 as synoptically encompassing early canonical, Abhidhamma, Therav¯ada, Abhidharma, and Sautr¯antika, to (Indian) Mah¯ay¯ana (Madhyamaka) and then Pram¯an.av¯ada claims and concerns around killing. 5 In an optionally expanded sequence there are 121 (see Bodhi 2012, 28–29). 6 The 18 rootless cittas and 24 sense-sphere beautiful cittas complete the set of 54 sense-sphere cittas, but will only be referenced where relevant, insofar as the discussion is largely concerned with the hatred- and delusion- rooted unwholesome cittas. 7 Collins writes that “Although for some purposes the terms viññ¯ an.a, consciousness, and citta, mind are differentiated in Buddhist thought [here] they amount to the same thing. Indeed, they are

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four ultimate realities,8 the other elements of which comprise (ii) mental factors (cetasikas) (iii) form, or matter (r¯upa) and (iv) nibb¯ana.9 Bhikkhu Bodhi states that consciousness comprises the first consideration in much Abhidhamma discourse because “the focus of the Buddhist analysis of reality is experience, and consciousness is the principle element in experience, that which constitutes the knowing or awareness of an object.” (2012, 27). The P¯ali-Sanskrit word citta derives from the verbal root citi, to cognize, or to know. The commentarial tradition offers three main definitions of citta as (i) agent (ii) instrument and (iii) activity. The first is active; as agent citta cognizes an object (¯aramman.am . cintet¯ı ti cittam . ). As the instrument, citta is passively used by its accompanying mental factors (cetasikas) to cognize the object (etena cintent¯ı ti cittam . ). As activity, citta is the process of cognizing the object (cintanamattam cittam ). . . This third definition importantly conveys the sense in which citta is simply the capacity for, and enaction of, the processes of cognition; it is not an autonomous entity that exists above and beyond those processes. Heim notes of the pedagogic purpose of the Abhidhamma generally that: Buddhaghosa says that the Abhidhamma is taught expressly for those who falsely hold onto a sense of self in what is really just a collection of changing factors […] It dismantles a static and enduring sense of selfhood in favour of a dynamic system of constantly changing and interrelated events. With the Abhidhamma […] a complex sense of agency […] is explored through lists and classifications of mental factors. (2014, 87)

Indeed, the first two definitions above of citta as agent and instrument pertain to the refutation of non-Buddhists who hold that an autonomous and permanent self or ego is the agent of cognition. According to their Buddhist opponents, it is citta and not an intrinsic self (att¯a) which performs cognitive acts. They argue that citta is nothing other than the occurrence of cognition, which is itself impermanent and conditioned by, for example, the existence of sentient r¯upa elements such as healthy or unhealthy sense-faculties. The Abhidhamma definition of ultimate reality is fourfold: with respect to its defining characteristic (lakkhan.a); essential function (rasa); manifestation (paccupat..th¯ana); and proximate cause (padat..th¯ana). The ‘defining characteristic’ of consciousness is the knowing of any object. Phenomenologically, citta is the noetic event that cognizes its intentional object. It is the active conjunction of the seven universal mental factors (noted in Chap. 3, Sect. 2) in any state of conscious explicitly said to be synonyms: that which is called ‘mind’, ‘thought’ [manas], ‘consciousness’” (1982, 214, citing SN II 94). Vasubandhu frequently conflates all three (see AKBh II 34: cittam . mano tha vijñ¯anam ek¯artha). There are some analyses of mind (for example of unconscious or dream states) where functional distinctions should be drawn between consciousness and mind. 8 These are ultimately real because according to the Abhidhamma they are dhammas (even where they are conditioned, or dependently-arisen). According to philosophers in the Mah¯ay¯ana tradition, such language is ultimately false, if all dhammas are empty of intrinsic (or ultimately real) existence. What consciousness, mental factors, form and nibb¯ana do have is the kind of existence that serves as a nominal foundation for Buddhist analyses of that which is causally or mereologically dependent on, or conceptually constructed from, them. 9 Of the four, the first three are all conditioned ultimate realities; nibb¯ ana is unconditioned.

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awareness—particularly contact (phassa), one-pointedness (ekaggat¯a) and attention (manasik¯ara)—that in early Buddhist terms collectively summarise intentionality. Its ‘essential function’ is to prefigure and pre-empt (pubbangama) its associated mental factors insofar as citta is always accompanied by and directs them. The ‘manifestation’ of citta in experience is as a continuity of processes, and its ‘proximate cause’ is n¯amar¯upa because consciousness is interdependent with psychophysical factors as its conditions of possibility. A singular citta is not unitary, for two reasons. First, since dhammas are momentary, what we perceive or presume to be a unified synchronic identity (this citta or generic moment of conscious awareness) is in fact a series of minutely momentary occurrences of conscious experience in which, second, each separate occurrence is differentiated from its precedent in quality and intensity of mental factors and their specific affective, cognitive and conative functions. It is the causally dominant quality of mental factors (or combination of cetasikas) whose force (satti) will characterize any local series, but any such series is always a complex of unique combinations of occurrences and types of consciousness and mental factors, including the ethically-charged or kammic dimensions of volitional citta. The universal ‘ethically-variable’ mental factor (aññasam¯anacetasika) of manasik¯ara, or attention, has the characteristic of drawing or conducting (s¯aran.a) associated mental factors to the object (Vism. XIV 152). It can be unwise (ayoniso) or wise (yoniso),10 depending on whether those mental factors constitute the cetasikas of delusion and wisdom, respectively. In being dominated by one or other of these forms of attention, even apparently neutral cognitive functions entail a moral valence before the 6 ‘occasional factors’ (pakin.n.aka) of initial application actively apply or mentally attach them to the intentional object of consciousness (Vism. IV 88–98). All these factors are constitutive of being-conscious, well behind the scenes so to speak, and before the curtain is even raised on intentional action per se. The Abhidhamma also classifies episodes of consciousness with respect to their category (j¯ati). Different forms of consciousness fall into four broad classes: unwholesome, wholesome, ‘resultant’ and ‘functional’. As the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma claims hatred (dosa) to be a necessary causal and constitutive feature of all lethal acts,11 and hatred-rooted consciousness is an unwholesome root,12 the wholesome j¯ati (which must ipso facto lack hatred) is not importantly relevant to the Abhidhamma analysis of killing. The latter two categories, above, can be summarised before focussing on the unwholesome j¯ati.

10

This qualification of wisdom would relate to the degrees of wholesome consciousness, but especially volition, informing an instance of being-conscious. As a universal ‘ethically-variable’ mental factor, cetan¯a is likened to a chief pupil who recites his own lessons and also makes the other pupils (cetasikas) recite theirs as well, as a ringleader who sets the agenda for all. Bodhi writes that “it is the most significant mental factor in generating kamma, since it is volition that determines the ethical quality of an action.” (2012, 80) 11 Abhidh-s V 23. 12 Dhs. 413, 421; Asl. 257–258.

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The cittas that arise (across all 89 mundane and supramundane cittas) through the effect(s) of kamma are called ‘resultants’ (vip¯akacittas).13 All resultantconsciousnesses per se, lacking intention, are themselves neither kammically wholesome nor unwholesome, but rather indeterminate (avy¯akata). Kamma and its effects are mental properties and do not directly cause the arising of physical properties or objects (even if they contribute to the causes of physical acts and their physical effects, and for example feeling as a mental aggregate can cause bodily effects for the sense-consciousnesses; Bodhi 2012, 42). The cittas caused by kamma are causally related to the kusala and akusala cittas that produced that kamma, but the critical causal link between them is kammic or intended action, rather than whatever kind of consciousness happens to be dominant in the preceding causal series of cittas. As the resultant cittas are ‘rootless’ (ahetuka) they lack the stability or firmness of those rooted in one of greed, hatred or delusion, and are hence weaker in causal force and effect than the latter. The fourth and final class of consciousness is that of the three kiriyacitt¯ani, also rootless, known as ‘functional consciousness’.14 They cause and accompany voluntary activity but not of a kind either charged by kammic content or capable of giving rise to kammic results. The resultant and functional consciousnesses will however be significant when we consider the delusion-rooted cittas in our analysis of the mental factors implicated in killing, below. The classes of consciousness germane to our analytic purposes are the akusala-citt¯ani, and secondarily, the unwholesome-resultant forms,15 since whatever is generated by unwholesome intention will generate unwholesome effects, and as we’ve seen this is a primary canonical criterion (PK) undergirding the prohibition of killing.

1.2 Unwholesome Consciousnesses (Akusala-Citt¯ani) As our enquiry concerns those consciousnesses implicated in intentional killing, we can limit our focus to the 12 unwholesome cittas (especially the 2 hatred-rooted cittas, and 2 delusion-rooted cittas), and indirectly and only derivatively, the 7 unwholesome-resultant cittas of the ‘rootless’ cittas. The Abhidhamma groups the unwholesome cittas according to their dominant root of greed, hatred and delusion. To say that an action is unwholesome is to say that it is inherently dysfunctional or disordered, and that it also produces painful and distressing effects (akusala kamma). To say that an action is wholesome is to say that it is motivated by non-greed or generosity (alobha), non-hatred (adosa) or loving-kindness (mett¯a), or non-delusion (amoha) or wisdom (paññ¯a). Where there is wholesome consciousness or action there is the happiness of moral blamelessness (anavajja-sukha) and inevitably the

13

See Dhs. 431, 443, 455, 469, 484, 556, 562, 564. Dhs. 566, 574, 568. 15 See Vism. XIV 101; Asl. 293. 14

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pleasant or beneficent effects true of kusalavip¯aka-citt¯ani in general.16 Since any intentional lethal act entails kamma, any such action, with a constitutive basis in unwholesome consciousness, will also produce psychologically unhealthy, morally blameworthy and otherwise malign effects.17 Hatred is universally classed as unwholesome in Buddhist thought and so accompanied by unpleasant feeling (domanassa), classed under the aggregate of feeling (vedan¯akhandha).18 It is associated with aversion as anger (pat.igha), a mental attitude ranging from intense rage to subtle irritation, classed under the aggregate of volitional 19 formations (sam . kh¯arakhandha). This latter association is central to any Abhidhammic Buddhist analysis of the affectivity of killing. Meaning literally “striking against” pat.igha signifies at its extreme, which the lethal act exemplifies, “a mental attitude of resistance, rejection, or destruction.” (Bodhi 2012, 37) The unwholesome consciousnesses central to the Abhidhamma analysis of killing are thus those rooted in hatred and accompanied by displeasure. Greed-rooted cittas are excluded because as noted they are categorically exclusive of hatred: these roots cannot coexist within the same citta, and it is clear that hatred is the decisive constitutive factor in killing on any Abhidhamma/Abhidharma Buddhist view.20 Greedconsciousnesses, as manifestations of desirous covetousness, are taken to be always accompanied by the wholesome affects of either joy or equanimity,21 rather than aversion. Why might this be so? If greed- and hatred-rooted cittas are understood to manifest similar but opposing degrees of attachment to and aversion against their object respectively, then it might be supposed they enact psychologically contradictory simultaneous states, at least with respect to the same intentional object. The mutual exclusivity of greed and hatred in a conscious episode is canonically stipulated, not explained, but does not exclude the possibility that greed-rooted consciousness plays a significant causal role in the development of the full intention to kill.22 A Buddhist-psychological account would not entirely discount greed as a 16

Abhidh-s. 42–43; Vism. XIV 96–98. The contrary possibility already noted, of killing committed by a¯ rya-being such as arhats and bodhisattvas, presents intriguing tasks of psychological justification (as opposed to the affective or epistemic grounds considered earlier). According to the Abhidhamma, “when certain mental states (compassion) are in the mind it is simply impossible that one could act in certain ways (intentionally kill).” (Gethin 2004a, 190) However, we’ve seen that a bodhisattva by definition acts only and always from a mind of altruistic compassion (bodhicitta), including a resort to killing. Gethin goes on to suggest that the Abhidhamma-psychological account leaves theoretic room for such a possibility. For present purposes we can assume that the Mah¯ay¯ana claim is not justified by Abhidhamma psychology but would require additional psychological grounds, possibly inaccessible to mundane analysis. Cf. Keown (2016) who claims that Mah¯ay¯ana antinomianism around killing derives directly, and misguidedly, from Abhidhamma action theory and its doctrine of moral evaluation by motivational root (m¯ula) rather than intention (cetan¯a). 18 Abhidh-s. 36–37. Cf. Sv. 1050; MN-a. I 202; Spk. II 148; Patis-a. I 223; Asl. 102. . 19 Vism. XIV 92; Abhidh-s. 36–37. 20 Bodhi (2012, 39). Cf. Dhs. 413, 421; Vism. XIV 92. AKBh 70a-b (647–648). 21 Bodhi 34–35. 22 Independent of any Buddhist context, Hobbes in Leviathan notably draws attention to greed as a causal factor in killing. 17

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causal factor, in its Therav¯ada Abhidhamma construal facilitating an association with wrong view, where the latter “accompanies the consciousness rooted in greed as a conviction, belief, opinion, or rationalization.” (Bodhi 34–35) The Sanskrit Abhidharma, for its part, also understands greed as a general cause (hetu-samutth¯ana) generating relevant preliminary (s¯amantaka) or preparatory (prayoga) acts for any unwholesome course of action (aku´sala karmapatha), including killing ‘in order to seize some goods’.23 Perhaps not so coincidentally, the first part of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment offers a fictional representation of just this causal sequence: the impecunious Raskolnikov initially seeks to murder the aged moneylender purely for economic benefit, as an ostensibly rational motivation. Well before the act, he proceeds to justify “the idea” by specious utilitarian argument (so Dostoyevsky assures his reader, without fully spelling out his “razor-sharp casuistry”): “kill her, take her money, and with its help devote yourself to the service of humanity and the good of all […] One death in exchange for a hundred lives—why it’s a simple sum in arithmetic!” (Dostoyevsky 84) A basic covetousness is unmixed here with overt hatred—quite to the contrary, at least to Raskolnikov’s conscious mental deliberations. Raskolnikov is also described, however, as overwhelmed by aversion the closer he comes to actually committing the crime: “having found the woman, he at once, though he knew nothing about her, conceived a violent aversion for her.” (82) There is no rational or justified reason for this. The further from its genesis in greed Raskolnikov moves to carrying out murder, Dostoyevsky details its increasingly irrational, compulsive and even fore-ordained quality, and these latter appear as the efficiently decisive affective mindset for being able to complete, rather than merely project the possibility of, the act: “he could not understand where he had got such cunning from, particularly as his reason seemed to stop functioning altogether from time to time, and as he had almost lost the feel of his body.” (94) A similar causal trajectory is sketched in Therav¯ada commentaries,24 where an oft-cited “example adduced by the commentaries of a laughing king ordering the execution of a criminal reveals an understanding that allows for the rapid change from pleasant feeling to unpleasant feeling, and hence from greed to aversion in the motivations of the mind.” (Gethin 2004a, 183) Here, greed may be a prime motivation (hetu), but not a decisive intention (sanit..th¯ap¯aka-cetan¯a), driven also by a degree of delusion (for example, assuming that personally possessing such a sum will necessarily benefit humanity at large). In both contexts, however, it is solely hatred that tips these conditions over into the actual taking of life. This appears counterintuitive: obviously greed can and does form a major causal element in lethal crime where something in the possession of another is its object, and killing is rationalised as the most efficient means of gaining it. In such cases greed, taken as a decisive cause for killing, and associated with either joy or equanimity, might conceivably inform a sociopathic profile, and killing be a merely transactional means to other, non-lethal ends. Nonetheless, on the Abhidhamma view greed is not typically a causal factor in killing, although in fact it might not be unusual for it to 23 24

AKBh IV 10 (576); 68d (645). See also Gethin (2004a, 188). Sv. 1050; Ps I 202; Spk. II 148; Pat.is-a. I 223; Asl. 102.

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be so.25 However, inasmuch as the psychological factors constitutive of intention are most causally relevant, greed is in fact directed to another object only contingently related to the object-person of killing: clearly, the agent does not greedily covet the person he kills, but only something he might subsequently obtain by killing that person. So, even if greed can act as an initial part of the motivational complex for killing, the object of greed is not a wish to kill a particular person (here essentially an obstacle); hence, greed does not constitute the intentionality of killing as such, but rather a distinct and prior condition for it. For the lethal act itself according to the Abhidhamma, a specific intentional affect is required, most obviously provided by some quotient of hatred or aversion (as Dostoyevsky also pointedly describes). Greedrooted consciousness can thus be seen as an auxiliary, indirect causal condition (P. paccaya Skt. pratyaya), but not a necessary, sufficient, or efficient cause (hetu), of killing (Gethin 2004a, 178). We’ve seen that the third unwholesome root of delusion is present in every possible state of unwholesome consciousness (Bodhi 2012, 33), that is, as an underlying or subordinate determinant of all greed- and hatred-rooted cittas (ibid.). There are, however, two unwholesome consciousnesses where “sheer” delusion (mom¯uhacitta; the P¯ali mom¯uha is an intensification of moha) is exclusively determinative, without greed or hatred being present (ibid.). Again, according to the Abhidhamma these two consciousnesses are in causal terms only distally and not efficiently relevant to killing, inasmuch as they explicitly exclude hatred as a co-present factor26 ; we can call this the ‘distal cognitive role’ thesis (DCR) for further reference in what follows. Now, unlike consciousness rooted in greed, consciousness rooted in hatred does not arise in association with wrong view (micch¯a dit..thi).27 Again, this is canonically stipulated, not explained. It is however relevant to the current exegesis, which seeks to clarify the senses in which cognitive phenomena, such as those manifest in delusion, feature as causes of killing. Although in Abhidhamma accounts wrong view can motivate acts of hatred, occurrences of wrong view are never simultaneous with feeling-states of hatred (or consciousnesses rooted in hatred) in the same citta, but only in a preceding and numerically distinct citta (Gethin 2004a, 178). That is, wrong view can and does causally inform consciousnesses rooted in hatred (for example when associated with greed), but is never co-present with them; we can call this the ‘wrong view’ thesis (WV) for further reference. In sum, on an Abhidhamma account lethal acts are constituted neither by (1) simultaneous hatred and wrong view, nor (2) exclusively by consciousness rooted in 25

This would accord with Keown’s conclusion (in 2016, 77–78) concerning “everyday counterexamples such as euthanasia and other homicidal scenarios where there is no reason to assume that hatred plays any part.” 26 “Usually delusion leads to the arising of greed or hatred as well. But though delusion is always present as a root in cittas accompanied by greed and hate, its function there is subordinate.” (Bodhi 38, my italics) 27 “Although wrong view can motivate acts of hatred, according to the Abhidhamma the wrong view does not arise simultaneously with hate, in the same citta, but at an earlier time, in a different type of citta.” (Bodhi 36–37)

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delusion. This is despite the fact that, on this account, delusion is always present to some degree in any hatred-rooted consciousness. We need then to survey the role of hatred as the dominant affective factor giving rise to lethal acts, in the absence of its immediate association with wrong view. This will ground a further account of the relations between (ubiquitous) delusion and (occasional) wrong view relevant to those acts, and so confirm the sense in which mistaken cognition is, in the Abhidhamma/Abhidharma context, with hatred also constitutive of them.

2 Feeling (Vedan¯a) and Cognition of the Object of Consciousness 2.1 Affect and the Representation of the Object We’ve seen that the different modalities of consciousness (viññ¯an.a/citta) theorised in canonical P¯ali Buddhism (e.g., MN I 111–112) require cognition being directed to a sensory (including mental) object.28 Only after initial and then sustained applications to the object have grasped it, does interpretation of the object by way of its apprehended features occur, but this apprehension does not occur in a cognitively neutral context. Consciousness is determined by other mental factors (including feeling) and by the material bases (one or more of the physical sense-organs) which condition its functioning. These influence how an object is perceived and conceived. Although the essential characteristic of citta is the knowing of an object, by virtue of its root-forms and associated mental factors consciousness also constructs its objects. That is, the apprehension of the object is not a ‘view from nowhere’ unconditioned by specific cognitive-affective factors; rather, these more or less pre-conscious elements constituting the micro-processes of intentionality frame its object in determinate ways. Feeling (vedan¯a) is the most phenomenologically robust of these mental factors (cetasikas) because, unlike others, which experience the object via derived perceptual and cognitive processes, feeling as sensation has comparatively unmediated sensory access to the object.29 As one of the unwholesome ‘occasionals’ (akusala pakin.n.aka) of the fourteen unwholesome mental factors, hatred also functions in terms of basic feeling that is one of the seven (Therav¯adan) universal ‘ethically-variable’ mental factors 28

However, this model shifts emphasis, and as Coseru (2017b, 3.5) notes, “Abhidharma traditions […] operate with the assumption that all cognitions are inherently intentional. Indeed, for the Vaibh¯as.ika all types of consciousness are intentional: they are about an object that must necessarily exist. However, a detailed account of intentionality is only found in later philosophical developments associated with the Buddhist logico-epistemological school of Dign¯aga and Dharmak¯ırti.” 29 Paraphrasing the phenomenological account of vedan¯ a in Asl. 109–110, Bodhi writes that “whereas the other mental factors experience the object only derivatively, feeling experiences it directly and fully. In this respect, the other factors are compared to a cook who prepares a dish for a king and only samples the food while preparing it, while feeling is compared to the king who enjoys the meal as much as he likes.” (2012, 80)

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(aññ¯asam¯anacetasika) that are common to all consciousness (sabbacitta)30 ; they “perform the most rudimentary and essential cognitive functions, without which consciousness of an object would be utterly impossible.” (Bodhi 78) They’re ‘ethically variable’ inasmuch as their moral valence is changeable in dependence on the kind of citta positively, negatively or indeterminately inflected by other cetasikas or mental factors, and particularly their dominant roots such as hatred. Hence, on an Abhidhamma account, consciousness constituted by feeling states such as hatred, already prior to and independent of the cognition of an object, has a potent force in the directedness of awareness to that object: feeling is not added on to the object after its perception, it is present in the initial stages of the perceptual process. For example, a person might be perceived (as a visual object, r¯up¯aramman.a) as a dangerous threat, and one might need to identify the relevant danger in order to devise the best means of subduing or escaping it. But what feeling tone this perception takes is “ethically variable”, attended by more or less negatively-inflected mental and intentional conditions for action that could be, but often are not, unmotivated by any felt sense of fear or rancour and by the cognitions to which it gives rise.31 Hatred-rooted consciousness, underlaid as it is with the root of delusion (Abhidh.s 33), necessarily cognizes its antagonist in this case in terms of the mental factors that subserve that consciousness. The cognitive processes of conceptual designation (paññatti) of the object as a dangerous threat includes affect as a cause for the conceptual proliferation (papañca) which elaborates the correctly-designated object as not merely ‘a dangerous threat’ but also as inherently ‘an enemy and thus inherently bad’. Cognitive distortions (citta-vipall¯asa) become constitutive not just of intentionality, but also of acts determined by it (insofar as consciousness is embodied in and as a person acting in the world). A different consciousness, lacking the root factor of hatred (such as that of an arhat or a¯ rya-being), might conceive the perceived person as lacking inherently dangerous properties, including those functioning as a putative causal object (¯alambana-pratyaya) for one or another affective response. In the psychological analysis of the Abhidhamma, kinds of mental states and their associated mental factors thus constitute the conscious perception-conception (saññ¯a) of any object. The same is true of the conscious apprehension of an object which, with co-constituting cognitive and conative and volitional processes (e.g., sankh¯aras) consolidating that apprehension, culminates in lethal action. Foremost among the significant contributing mental factors here are those of the (universal and unwholesome) fearlessness of wrong-doing (anottappa), and one or more of the nine grounds for annoyance, or causes of malice (agh¯atavatthu) which are the proximate causes for the factor of hatred or aversion. The absence of the so-called ‘beautiful factors’ (sobhanacetasikas) are also relevant: the fear of wrong-doing (ottappa), the abstinence (virati) that leads to right 30

See Chapter 3, Sect. 2. Fear (or bhaya) is perhaps surprisingly not thematized as a mental factor in Abhidhammic psychology, though obviously occurs as a sensation in others that are, such as feeling, worry (kukkucca) and the fear of wrong-doing (ottappa). See Giustarini (2012) for discussion of its P¯ali canonical presentation.

31

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action (samm¯akammanta), and the factor of the wisdom faculty (paññ¯a) that would obviate the universal element of delusion which, caused proximally by unwise attention, is merely the beginning of the concatenation of factors that together contribute to a full course of unwholesome action. We won’t enter here into extended Abhidhamma analyses of action.32 Instead, we need to consider how hatred (as a mode of consciousness, factor and affect) is in the Abhidhamma psychological context generally related to cognition as a causal factor in killing.

2.2 Hatred (Dosa) and Habitual Cognition The foregoing account of unwholesome consciousness suggests that hostility induces a negatively-valenced internal representation of the relevant object in subsequent cognitions concerning that object. Once hatred has been mentally established in this way as a habitual response to occurrences of similar conditions, that very habituation enables seeing hatred as justified, and so its object as deserving of aggression, and even annihilation. In the terms of the Abhidhamma account surveyed here, these additional cognitions undergirding a justification for killing may be an effect of the more or less misguided relation between affect and the cognition of its object. However, different people perceive similar conditions differently, and react to similar situations with different affect, leading to different judgments and actions. This is well illustrated in a limit-case: someone suffering a paranoid psychotic episode might feel justified in killing by virtue of voices that predicate ‘evil demon’ of another person innocent of that property. For the psychotic, hostile feeling has all the reality required to catalyse a lethal act, and so affect feeds directly, however mistakenly, into a sense of cognitive justification. To normal society that cognition is itself regarded as fundamentally mistaken, and its affect no less so. Nonetheless, some cognitive and affective responses are comparatively universal. There persists a conventional but relatively stable range of affective norms pertaining to the cognition of a relevant object, within and by which lethal response is rendered more or less appropriate. While a disease-carrying mosquito is more or less irritating to a jungle-explorer and a water-buffalo, it does not warrant rage; hence, some Buddhist teachers take ubiquitous mosquitoes and other insects, for example, as 32

Any Buddhist theory of action is problematized by the metaphysics upon which it should rely. We’ve seen an example of this in Vasubandhu and N¯ag¯arjuna’s differing reasons for their questioning of the deep sense of the first precept: for the former warranted by the ultimate momentariness and dravyasat of dharmas, while for the latter those dharmas have no irreducible ontological-temporal status, and it is just the emptiness of persons and skandhas that casts doubt on the ultimate validity of the precept. It follows that any number of metaphysical positions on different questions will variously entail a differently-argued action theory (of which Vasubandhu’s Karmasiddhiprakaran.a is a prime example). We will, however, develop inter alia those premises that are accepted in all Buddhist accounts: of no-self, dependent-arising and the emptiness of all conceptual constructions (paññatti/prajñapti); this has the virtue of encompassing the fundamental metaphysical concerns of any normative would-be Buddhist theory.

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training objects to gauge inappropriate responses, and thus set an ideal range of affective norms for its reduction.33 The possibility of the radical modification of habitual affective and behavioural responses confirms that relevant stimuli (whether they be mosquitoes, queuejumpers, car-drivers or terrorists) do not in themselves warrant hatred. Irritation, or indeed murderous aversion, are dependently-arisen affects only contingently grounded on a psychologically (and kammically) determined intersubjective and social causal complex. This is significant for a Buddhist theorist of killing who wants to argue that consciousness dominated by delusion, along with the affective causes explicitly identified in the Abhidhamma, is also a cause of the lethal act. The following section considers affect and mistaken cognition in terms of the specifically cognitive unwholesome mental factors of wrong view and delusion, and the delusion-rooted cittas, described in Abhidhamma sources. This is all the more pertinent inasmuch as, as Gethin suggests, “If we consider the general use of the term dit..thi/dr.s..ti in Buddhist thought, we see that it combines two logically distinct dimensions: the cognitive and the affective.” (2004b, 20)

3 Wrong View (Micch¯a-Dit..thi) as a Function of Cognitive Delusion Dit..thi means view, which unless qualified with the prefix samm¯a (right) refers in the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma to wrong view (micch¯a dit..thi).34 With regard to the greed-rooted cittas, in which dit..thi exclusively occurs,35 it introduces the notion of conviction or belief, opinion or the rationalization of opinions held. Bhikkhu Bodhi writes that “the view may either reinforce the attachment from which the consciousness springs by providing it with a rational justification, or the view itself may be an object of attachment in its own right. Wrong view is associated with four types of [greed-rooted] consciousness in all—two accompanied by joy and two accompanied by equanimity.” (2012, 34) Gethin indicates more closely the relation between wrong views and the attachment (r¯aga) that enables their cognitive reification as dogma: On the one hand, certain specific views, ways of understanding that can be expressed in terms of formal propositions about the way things are, are characterized as false views (micch¯adit..thi) […] On the other hand, in certain contexts what seems to be significant about dit..thi is not so much the cognitive content of a view, but the fact that we cling to it as a dogma […] 33

See Zopa Rinpoche (1977/2021). The Samantap¯as¯adik¯a treats the example of offending bedbug eggs for a similar purpose (Sp. 864–865). Cf. Cozort (1995) for a Tibetan Gelug contextualisation of the training on anger; see also Chap. 10 in the context of retributive punishment. 34 The Therav¯ ada Abhidhamma and Vaibh¯as.ika Abhidharma contextualisations and construals of dit..thi/dr.s..ti are importantly different, particularly with regard to associated categories of paññ¯a/prajñ¯a and moha/avidya. Some of these are highlighted later in the chapter, which otherwise focuses on the Therav¯ada context. See Gethin (2004b) and Fuller (2005) for discussion. 35 Dhs. 365, 399, 403, 409.

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6 Affect and Cognition: Unwholesome Consciousness, Hatred, Wrong … Thus, even so-called right views can be views (dit..thi) in so far as they can become fixed and the objects of attachment. (2004b, 20ff .)

The cognitive dimension of view concerns truth-claims about the world. But afflictive defilements (kilesas) and fetters (samyojana) such as shamelessness (ahirika) and anger (pat.igha), respectively, but also the so-called ‘occasionals’ of energy (viriya) and desire (chanda), as well as of conceit (m¯ana) and avarice (macchariya), also register degrees of non-cognitive attachment to such truth-claims. Thus, many a politician or religious zealot has passionate conviction in his claims but may, according to the Abhidhamma, be both deluded and ill-willed in so holding them. The Abhidh-s. summarises: “Dit..thi here means seeing wrongly. Its characteristic is unwise (unjustified) interpretation of things. Its function is to preassume. It is manifested as a wrong interpretation or belief. Its proximate cause is unwillingness to see [or heed] the noble ones (ariya).” (Bodhi 2012, 84) The metaphor of seeing is deployed frequently in the Abhidhamma Pit.aka, such that the mental blindness (citassa andhabh¯avo) and not-knowing (aññ¯an.a) that characterize moha result in a failure to penetrate (appat.iveda) and get below the surface (apariyog¯ahan¯a) to the true nature of the object. Again, the proximate cause of moha is unwise attention (ayoniso manasik¯ara). This again points to its establishment in the quality of intentionality vis-à-vis the relevant object. Delusion as a universal unwholesome mental factor thus characterises mundane cognition; but in signifying the ignorance of ultimate truth it also, more positively, invokes its own potential extirpation in transcendent insight (paññ¯a), epistemically thematized in conventional terms as ‘right view’. In denoting knowledge (ñ¯an.a-sampayutta) associated with wholesome consciousness, implicit distinctions are drawn (already in the Nik¯ayas, as at MN III 72) between different senses of right view as paññ¯a. These senses are dependent also on such factors as the presence or absence of a¯ savas (‘influxes’ or defiling taints).36 In turn, their absence determines that right view is noble and thus potentially world-transcending and a factor of the path. Gethin notes that: for the Dhammasa˙ngan.i a moment of ordinary sense-sphere consciousness accompanied by knowledge constitutes a real occurrence of wisdom [paññ¯a] and right view [samm¯a-dit..thi], yet it is only at the moments of attaining stream-entry, once-return, non-return or arahatship that wisdom is strong or intense enough to constitute the awakening factor of investigation of dhammas. (2004b, 18)

Dit..thi thus in broad terms connotes an epistemically mundane relation to right and wrong views, associates these views with a cognitive-affective grasping, and invokes the relation of views to the ultimate truth, the acquisition of which reconfigures their epistemic valence as soteriological. This ultimately measures the cognitive function of right view not merely in terms of its status as truth-bearing (i.e., as a dhamma), 36

Fuller notes that “The term ‘accompanied by corruptions’ (s¯asav¯a) I take to imply anything with the potential to become an attachment. All kusala, akusala and avy¯akata dhammas are s¯asav¯a in the Abhidhamma. Something can be wholesome, a kusala dhamma, but still be an object of attachment.” (2005, 56)

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but of whether it is efficacious in enabling progress on the path to awakening. Gethin continues: the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma is clearly working with an understanding of paññ¯a/samm¯adit..thi that allows distinctions of degree to exist: some instances of wisdom or right view amount to a fuller or more complete understanding and knowledge than others, despite the fact that all instances represent manifestations of the one and the same kind of dhamma. (ibid. 19)

Conversely, the determination of suffering more broadly by delusion or ignorance, and more specifically by attachment to wrong view(s), would also explain the senses in which, while functionally distinct (as ‘universal’ and ‘occasional’ unwholesome mental factors respectively), delusion and wrong view are epistemically equivalent even where (1) wrong view is associated only with the greed- and not the hatred- or delusion-rooted cittas. We’ve also seen that delusion remains at the root of all that is unwholesome, and an underlying factor in all the unwholesome cittas, but (2) by Abhidhamma posit (Abhidh-s. 37–38) does not feature as a possible mental factor of wrong view in the delusion-rooted cittas. This dichotomy should be addressed before proceeding further.

4 Delusion-Rooted Cittas (Mohamulacitt¯ ¯ ani) I indicated above that given the Abhidhamma requirement of hatred-rooted consciousnesses for intentional killing, neither of the two delusion-rooted cittas are its proximate cause (the DCR, above). Both delusion-rooted cittas are rather accompanied by the mental factor of equanimous feeling. One of these two is associated with doubt, and the other with restlessness. Bodhi writes that: Even if a desirable object is present when a delusion-rooted consciousness arises, it is not experienced as desirable and thus pleasant mental feeling (somanassa) does not arise. Similarly, an undesirable object is not experienced as such and thus unpleasant mental feeling (domanassa) does not arise. Moreover, when the mind is obsessed by doubt or restlessness, it is not capable of forming a determinate positive or negative evaluation of the object, and thus cannot be associated with either pleasant or painful feeling. (2012, 38)

Unpleasant mental feeling, however, accompanies both cittas rooted in hatred, which in the Abhidhamma context must be taken as the efficient causal site for intentional lethal acts. Hence, the possibility of dispassionately willed killing entirely lacking hatred is not entertained in this literature.37 The DCR thesis is the claim that the delusion-rooted cittas might have only distal causal import for the lethal act, and thus suggests that the notion that delusion has 37

See Gethin (2004a) and Keown’s (2016) reply for exegetical debate. Gethin’s interpretation is here taken as authoritative with regard to the Abhidhamma analysis of the affective bases for killing. Further discussion in Chap. 10 considers the affectivity of lethal punishment, and Chap. 12 the psychological conditions for ostensibly dispassionate genocidal killing.

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a morally relevant causal role in killing appears moot. Nonetheless, some cognitive process, typically of reasoning or justification, must precede and so cognitively condition the development of a series of mental-affective states culminating in a volitional complex of kammic action rooted in hatred-rooted consciousness. The primarily affective cause of killing is therefore itself caused in part by some cognition (or series thereof). Bodhi confirms that “usually delusion leads to the arising of greed and hatred as well” and that “delusion is always present as a root in cittas accompanied by greed and hate” but that “its function there is subordinate.” (2012, 38) The two delusion-rooted consciousnesses however are described as instantiating sheer delusion with no other root-cause or kind of consciousness characterising its function. Hence, on an Abhidhamma account a delusion-rooted citta might arise as a preceding cause for hatred-rooted consciousness, for example in the form of deliberative justification for subsequent action (consider the witch-burning zealot, revolutionary assassin, or anti-Communist counter-revolutionary, etc.). But we know the Abhidhamma maintains that deluded consciousness is not itself sufficient to cause the local series of unwholesome consciousnesses and mental factors proximally giving rise to intentional killing. The Abhidhamma claim appears to be that the causal significance of delusive cognition would remain attenuated, compared to that of the hatred-rooted citta (with or without prompting). The same is true in the case of the mental factor of wrong view, in the WV thesis, which doesn’t occur in hatred-rooted consciousness at all, and so similarly doesn’t inform killing as a proximate cause. Perhaps one could theorise an alternative account of the two delusion-rooted cittas accompanied by equanimity. This alternative Abhidhamma reconstruction would characterise intentional killing as a dispassionately sociopathic act where pleasurable or unpleasurable mental feeling is absent, and a purely instrumental focus is dominant. This psychological dynamic could be individualized for example in the lone, affectless hitman or gunman who experiences murderous acts as a mere instrumental means to a more significant (perhaps ideological or political) end—or indeed no particular end at all. Here killing, and its moral evil, become phenomenologically, if not ethically, flattened in a sense that deprives it of any affective causal basis, not being overtly driven by hatred (or greed) per se.38 This is of course a very broad characterisation of complex psychosocial causal conditions, but the claim for affectlessness would nevertheless be rejected by Abhidhamma psychology. This is not to suggest that cases of a predominant affectlessness can never occur in lethal acts, but their occurrence can be qualified by the claim that

38

The locus classicus for a collective case of the same is, arguably, the Nazi genocide of European Jewry executed with an industrial efficiency that minimized personal affect—the very affectlessness of which prompted Arendt (with reference to Adolf Eichmann) famously to characterize it in terms of the ‘banality of evil’. Of course, the real case was more multi-dimensioned than this well-worn characterisation suggests; it seems plausible though that its functionaries (such as Eichmann) acted indifferently if knowingly, while its homicidal agents were motivated by some degree of hatred.

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some motive-force of aversion, as discussed above, must contribute to their generation, or they would be unlikely to occur.39 (It’s also probable that this applies largely only to intrahuman lethal acts; the distinct psychological case of industrial animal slaughter is addressed in Chap. 4.) Thus, the possibility of a completely affectless unwholesome motivation and intention is untenable in the context of Abhidhamma psychology.40 It is clear in these texts that the mental factors of wrong view and delusion can function as conditioning and subordinate causes for cognitive and physical acts accompanied by the hatredrooted cittas. Nonetheless, if it remains plausible that these factors could play an ineliminable causal role in the cognitive processes immediately determining lethal acts, then perhaps another exegetical means to its approach is still available.

5 Wrong View and Aversion with Reference to Hatred-Rooted Consciousness We saw above that the mental factor of wrong view can contribute to a cognitive habituation to the affects, attitudes and beliefs stimulated by and about their relevant objects, such as persons as the objects of intentional acts. We also saw that that cognitive habituation could inform significant thetic grounds for lethal acts (such as cultural and religious convictions). Nonetheless, if such acts are immediately conditioned by hatred-rooted consciousness, then wrong view, according to the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma, plays no immediate causal role. We’ve also seen (in WV) that wrong view can antecedently motivate lethal acts of hatred, but that its causal strength may be insufficient to be determinative. Cognitive conviction either operates as a decisive form of intention (sanit..th¯ap¯aka-cetan¯a) or not. The Abhidhamma in this case analytically temporalizes the function of, and thus assigns less causal strength to, wrong view. If cognitive content is a cause for

39

Cases of atypical murder triggered in psychosis (or as a rare but apparent side-effect of antipsychotic medications), are psychologically interesting as examples of apparently unmotivated killing, but lie (as does the general category of the psychiatric) beyond this analytic purview. From a Buddhist-theoretical perspective, psychotic causal conditions lie at an extreme of the unconscious aetiology of killing, which itself lies at an extreme of consciously volitional (often rationallymediated) cases, and it is towards these latter cases that (it appears) the Abhidhamma psychological account is directed. Indeed, as noted above, cases of lethal pathology are legally and ethically, as discussed in Chap. 3, marginalised from its moral-psychological purview. 40 This seems borne out by the empirical record. Genocidal Nazism, for example, obviously didn’t enact an arbitrary selection of the Jewish people as its victims; rather, it was the culmination of a centuries-long historical scapegoating of the Jew-as-other whereby collective aversion was socioculturally bred in the heart of the entire phenomenon. Not only was aversion a contributing motivation and thus (at the least) an implicit cause, but so was the delusion, and wrong view, that essentialised Jewishness (including Jewish self-essentialisation) as another background condition, both of which conclusions again confirm DCR and WV, above, in this real case and theoretical others.

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killing, its causal relevance, according to this analysis, appears to be comparatively attenuated. However, to understand the cognitive determinants of lethal action we must also consider more deeply the causal function of wrong view. In considering the two cittas rooted in hatred, we saw that the Abhidhamma details their association with two different mental properties: displeasure (domanassa) and aversion or anger (pat.igha). The former is a mental feeling that is always unwholesome (unlike the displeasure of bodily feeling, which is kammically indeterminate) and is categorised with the feeling-aggregate of the vedan¯a-skandha. The latter is synonymous with hatred, though pat.igha semantically takes in “all degrees of aversion, from violent rage to subtle irritation.” (Bodhi 2012, 37) Again, the word “means literally “striking against,” which includes a mental attitude of resistance, rejection or destruction.” (ibid.; my italics) Pat.igha is thus, unlike the feeling basis of displeasure, a mental attitude of ill-will generated by the aggregate of volitional formations (sankh¯aras). As we’ve noted, the paradigmatic Abhidhammic examples traditionally offered for the two hatred-rooted consciousnesses both concern acts of murder: one “in a spontaneous fit of rage,” and one committed only “after premeditation.” (39) Hence, a lethal act that occurs after premeditation, involves explicitly cognitive aspects: views concerning its object, reasons, deliberation, and possible justification—that is, mental phenomena plausibly pertaining, consciously or not, to dit..thi. Moreover, according to the Sautr¯antika tenet school volition can be classified into three aspects: deliberation (gaticetan¯a), decision (ni˙scayacetan¯a), and impulsion (kiran.acetan¯a). Skorupski writes: It should be noted that all three terms include cetan¯a, “mentation,” or the process of thinking. The first two constitute the “action of thinking” (cetan¯akarma), which in effect is volition, manifest as mental reflection (manask¯ara) or thoughts (caitta). They both represent the “action of thought” (manah.karma). The third aspect, “impulsion” (kiran.acetan¯a), is twofold: that which impels bodily movement and that which impels speech. This explanation reduces the actions of body and speech, conceived by the Vaibh¯as.ikas as realities (classed within the r¯upaskandha) that succeed mental action throughout a time process, to mere aspects of volition, which alone is a reality, manifesting itself momentarily in what is always effectively the present. It is thus thought alone that has moral value as good, bad, or indifferent. (1987, unpag.)

Deliberation and decision, manifest in reflective thought, clearly entail cognition of a more or less rational kind, and we know that aversion is always associated with both prompted or unprompted hatred-rooted consciousness. Thus, such consciousness either directly (in the former premeditated case) or indirectly (in the Sautr¯antika construal of volition) depends on the specifically cognitive impetus for the akusalacetan¯a intentionally giving rise to lethal acts. Indeed, the Sarv¯astiv¯ada-Abhidharma makes this association between deliberative cognitions implicated in aversion, and potential root motivations for killing in wrong view, still more overt.

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5.1 Corroboration in the Sarv¯astiv¯ada-Abhidharma: Mithy¯a-Dr.s.t.i as a Primary Cause The Abhidharma of the Sarv¯astiv¯ada-Vaibh¯as.ika agrees in large part with the characterisation of killing evident in the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma, discussed above (Gethin 2004a, 188). The former Abhidharma has seventy-five dharmas, of which three are unconditioned, and some of which are unique to it, though these do not include the (wrong) view of the Therav¯ada. Dr.s..ti (dit..thi) is according to the Vaibh¯as.ika Abhidharma significantly rather a mode of occurrence of a different dharma, prajñ¯a/mati, one of the ten caittas (mental factors) common to all occurrences of citta.41 Dr.s..ti forms one of the two basic sub-classes of prajñ¯a (wisdom), that which involves the capacity for judgment (sant¯ırika), as opposed to those forms of prajñ¯a that transcend judgment (asant¯ırika). The former sub-class can be divided into wrong views (mithy¯a-dr.s..ti) and right views (samyag-dr.s..ti). It follows that, unlike the view developed in the Abhidhamma sources, wrong view in the Abhidharma is conceived not as a conceptually-inflected cousin of delusion, but on the contrary as a form of wisdom compromised by a local conditioning by delusion. Gethin contrasts this with the Therav¯ada account: “the most striking and significant aspect of the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma treatment of dit..thi is the fact that it is considered to be exclusively a concomitant of citta rooted in greed (lobham¯ula): dit..thi can only be present in the mind when greed or attachment occurs.” (2004b, 20) Wrong view by definition (as sakkaya-dit..thi) plays a central role in the cognitive reification of the person. Similarly, the cognitive presuppositions informing the intention to kill are conditioned by perceptual acts and propositional attitudes that belong under the rubric of wrong view (specific instances of these are detailed in Part II). Gethin notes the Abhidarmic divergence from the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma in this regard: the Abhidharmako´sa distinguishes two types of “origin” for acts: the general cause (hetusamutth¯ana) and the immediate cause (tatks.an.a-samutth¯ana); the latter seems to correspond more or less to the Therav¯ada notion of the decisive intention (sanit..th¯ap¯aka-cetan¯a). The Ko´sa also distinguishes between the courses of action (karma-patha) proper and preliminary (s¯amantaka) or preparatory (prayoga) acts. On this basis the Ko´sa goes on to point out that the acts that form the preliminary to each of the ten aku´sala-karma-patha may be motivated by any of the three basic unwholesome causes: greed (lobha), hatred (dves.a), or wrong-view (mithy¯a-dr.s..ti), and gives examples of this in the case of killing a living being. However, the karma-patha proper of killing a living being is exclusively accomplished by hatred. (2004a, 188; my bold)

Vasubandhu in the Ko´sa, presenting Vaibh¯as.ika doctrine from a critical Sautr¯antika perspective, substitutes wrong view for delusion, when we have just seen that in the 41

This is not the case for the Therav¯ada, where far less than being a universal cetasika of all mental events, paññ¯a is in the sense-sphere consciousnesses limited to the four types of skilful consciousness associated with knowledge, and their corresponding resultant and functional consciousnesses.

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Therav¯ada Abhidhamma the two categories are conceptually related but functionally distinct in the case of killing, and that wrong view is even mutually exclusive of hatred-rooted consciousness. In the Abhidharmako´sa, however, wrong view becomes as significant an unwholesome root for unwholesome acts as delusion itself, a subtle but salient specification for exposing the thetic motivations for premeditated and cognitively deliberated, and so putatively justified, lethal acts: the very theme of this critical study of killing on the basis of Indian Buddhist sources. Abhidharma literature (for example, at AKBh IV 36c–d, 611; 68d, 645) is thus committed to the view that the third unwholesome root of delusion understood as wrong view is a secondary but salient causal factor in the unskilful paths of action proscribed in the first precept. If we combine the relevant statements from Abhidhamma/Abhidharma sources, we can conclude that most, if not all, intentional lethal acts foundationally if not proximally entail the unwholesome root-cause of delusion. We can even take the Abhidharma analysis to reveal conceptual implications of the prior Abhidhamma account not explicitly drawn out in that literature. It thus follows ´ avakay¯ana Buddhist context, wrong view and other cognitive faults are that, in the Sr¯ taken to be causally significant, despite the dominant role of the affective basis for killing in hatred. At the outset, I asked whether and to what degree primary and canonical Buddhist texts take cognitive factors to be significant causally in the aetiology for lethal acts. We confirmed that, according to these texts, an intentional consciousness dominated by hatred remains causally foremost. I was not, however, seeking decisive textual confirmation that cognitive factors are causally as prominent as affective ones; rather, in seeking a more fully-rounded picture of the generic early Buddhist account of the aetiology of killing, it was to query whether affective factors ought to be understood (as they often are in secondary Buddhist-ethical literature42 ) as the sole causes. We’ve seen that a hermeneutic comparison and analysis of related claims regarding the aetiology for killing in hatred-rooted consciousness unequivocally allows us to conclude that (1) with regard to the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma, delusive cognitions can and do function as distal causes, and thetic elements of volitional factors as more proximate causes. Indeed, the example of murder is consistently referenced in Abhidhamma texts as an example of an act, dominated by these modes of consciousness, that potentially implicates preceding cognitive causes. In addition, and confirming this conclusion, we also observed that (2) with regard to the Sarv¯astiv¯ada Abhidharma, delusive cognitions can themselves constitute a potential preliminary motivation; indeed, Vasubandhu (as above) explicitly associates (AKBh IV 68d, 645) the potential cause of wrong view—a thetic intensification, and so a subset, of delusion—with the series of mental events issuing in a lethal act. 42

See again the exegetical dispute between Gethin (2004a) and Keown (2016), which in large part revolves around the question of whether intentional killing in the Buddhist-scholastic context can ever be considered as motivated by any affect other than aversive ones. Despite their differing conclusions, the explanandum of both arguments is limited to the affective domain. Yet Keown’s conclusion that hatred need not be exclusively constitutive of killing seems to require cognitive causes for its substantiation, if the affective bases which supplant hatred are in fact justified (see 2016, 61).

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The primary texts do not allow us to conclude more than this. Nonetheless, the causal, constitutive and potential relations between hatred-rooted consciousness, aversion, volitional factors, and the thetic dimension of wrong view are sufficiently explicit that we can conclude that, in a Buddhist framework, they are plausibly regarded as cognitive causes of lethal intention. Indeed, Buddhist moral psychology is most broadly concerned with understanding and surmounting mistaken views of self and other as persons that generate personal and intersubjective suffering, gratuitously compounding the suffering already inherent in conditioned existence. The following chapter presents a preliminary Buddhist-metaphysical analysis of the doxastic understanding of the person, as the object of killing, that emerges from that mistaken basis. It will conclude this Part I survey of relevant Indian Buddhist doctrine on killing, preliminary to the theorisation to follow in Part II.

Chapter 7

Buddhist Personhood and a Doxastic Rationale for Killing

Abstract This chapter introduces in detail the Buddhist metaphysics of the person, in both soteriological and ontological registers. The implicit value of life is analysed with regard to the telos of Buddhist praxis, before describing the synchronic Buddhist conception of the person as an aggregated psychophysical entity (n¯amar¯upa) lacking substantive self. The same model of the person is then conceived diachronically in terms of the ontogenetic theory of the twelve links of dependent origination (pat.iccasamupp¯ada), theorising possible ontological bases for the aetiology of killing in human beings, with regard to volitional properties. The dependency relations between physical and mental properties of the aggregates of the person are then analysed prior to a generic account of what might doxastically justify killing, in the most general terms, for typical lethal agents. The analysis then turns to a fuller account of the person not merely as a universally reified metaphysical entity, but as a being with predicated properties of personhood and self which conceives other such propertied beings as a basis for intentional acts. This account further considers the predication of psychophysical properties as a cognitive-phenomenological basis for lethal acts, before narrowing this argument to the primal basis of volition in its role both in the commission, but also as the object of, such acts, to be continued in depth in Chap. 8, in Part II. Keywords Buddhist personhood and soteriology · Metaphysics of the person · Dependent origination and the person · Lethality and doxastic reasoning · Property predication · Cognitive phenomenology · Reification of self · Volition and agency

1 Buddhist-Metaphysical Analysis of the Person Chapter 6 discussed Abhidhamma/Abhidharma accounts of affective causes of the lethal act, including in hostility and aversion, as well as accounts of their role in the apprehension of its object, and the sense in which they are badmakers for killing. Causes are not ipso facto badmakers; in the Buddhist case of affect, however, we’ve seen that hatred always entails the moral valence of unwholesomeness: on a generic Indian Buddhist account it is intrinsically negative, and so functions in that account as a badmaker for intentional acts. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_7

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On the other hand, not all causes are necessarily badmakers in this way. Some causes, such as cognitive ones, can be axiologically neutral (for example, the veridical apprehension of the ‘dangerous threat’ we noted earlier). If, however, cognitive causes can be understood to function irrationally, or in conceptual tension with their own presuppositions, or in contradiction with larger cognitive or philosophical accounts of the nature of the entities engaged in the acts to which they give rise, then such causes may constitute moral badmakers. Introducing this concern invites a generic Indian Buddhist account of such cognitive badmakers, implicated in how lethal agents conceive the object of, and reasons for, killing in various contexts. An account of these badmakers requires: (1) understanding how Buddhist metaphysics conceives the person as the object of killing, an essentially descriptive task undertaken in order to (2) establish what it is about agents’ conceptions of the person per se (as the object of different kinds of and reasons for killing) that in the context of the prior Buddhist understanding makes their acts irrational and thus mistaken. In the remainder of this section, I consider a broad Buddhist metaphysical account ´ avakay¯ana and Mah¯ay¯ana doctrine. This account of of the person relevant across Sr¯ the person is then mobilised, in section 3, with respect to the sense-making of killing in the most general metaphysical terms. In other words, we establish there to what degree typical justifications of killing are consistent with the Buddhist ontological understanding of persons qua persons. In section 4, I consider general philosophical conditions informing the representation of a person as an object apt for killing that follow from the prior analyses, concluding with the question of how volition, and its cessation, features in causes for killing, preliminary to its in-depth analysis in Chap. 8. The subsequent chapters of Part II will investigate the cognitive-affective content of different intentional modes of lethal agency and how they presuppose adequate justificatory grounds for the causal projects they’re supposed to enable. We will then see, on a relevant Buddhist account, whether they are in fact justified on those grounds.

1.1 An Implicit Metaphysics of Value In the context of Brahmanical-Upanis.adic religion of the fifth-century BCE, from which Buddhist conceptions of the person evolved, the source of religious transcendence (Brahman) lay in a divine entity ontologically distinct from the individual person (purus.a). The religious task of the renunciant of worldly life was to disidentify absolutely with the impermanent objects of bodily and mental experience that failed to instantiate transcendent liberation (moks.a) from phenomenal enchantment or illusion (m¯ay¯a). Whatever element of the individual that failed to metaphysically ¯ pertain to the divinely unconditioned Self (Skt. Atman), by the sole knowledge of which the person could attain liberation from the repetitive cycle of rebirth (sam . s¯ara), was thereby soteriologically disvalued: “it is the search for the contentless self, and

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denigration of the constituents of the phenomenal person which […] gave the theoretical parallel of, and justification for, the self-mortificatory practices of asceticism (tapas).” (Collins 80–81) According to Buddhists, on the other hand, the same denigrated impersonal psychophysical constituents are all that the phenomenal person (purisa/puggala) is, lacking any intrinsic self (P. att¯a) either internal or external to those constituents. However, common to both Brahmanical and Buddhist conceptions of these constituents is a twofold and fourfold analysis: as n¯ama (name, or immaterial phenomena) and r¯upa (form, or matter); and (things) seen, heard, thought, and cognized, respectively (Collins 82). In the P¯ali suttas n¯amar¯upa is further analysed into the five heaps (pañcakkandh¯a), in which n¯ama comprises the four khandhas other than form.1 The five khandhas (Skt. skandhas) are thus form, feeling (vedan¯a), perception-conception (saññ¯a), volitional formations (sam . kh¯aras; sankh¯aras) and consciousness (viññ¯an.a). Other equivalent designations include the six-fold sense bases (¯ayatana) (the five senses plus mind as a sixth sense) that are further analysed into the theoretical classifications of mental states (cittas), mental factors (cetasikas), and irreducible property-particulars or tropes (dhammas/dharmas) central to the analyses of (the canonical and Therav¯ada) Abhidhamma2 and Sarv¯astiv¯ada Abhidharma.3 The khandhas were regarded by early Buddhists as being “like sandcastles, to be knocked down and abandoned when no longer desired” (Collins 125; see SN III 189ff .). But with the Buddhist negative posit of anatt¯a, the failure to attain att¯a was not anymore the soteriological problem: rather, it is the vain cultivation of its pursuit that obscures the ontological truth of anatt¯a.4 According to Buddhists, views of self or personality beliefs (sakkaya-dit..thi) as the first of the Ten Fetters all suffer heavy kammic demerit, and permanently surmounting these views guarantees achieving the first Streamwinner (sot¯apanna) status in the progression through the ranks of the four kinds of noble (ariya) persons.5 How then are the constitutive properties of personhood valued in the Buddhist soteriological scheme, if the Brahmanical ¯ distinction between the superlative value of Atman and its worldly ‘impostures’ (in the khandhas) ceased to obtain for it? On its face, any devaluing of the psychophysical aggregates would seem misplaced because Buddhist-soteriological value lies not in some more highly-valued object other than them, but in just the recognition that they are all the empirical person 1 SN II 3ff . otherwise specifies the functional properties of n¯ ama as “feeling, apperception, intention, contact and attention” ie. vedan¯a, saññ¯a, cetan¯a, phassa, manasik¯aro. 2 Gethin (1986) provides a thorough overview; cf. Harvey (1993). 3 We can understand by ‘tropes’ properties that are bare particulars rather than universals (e.g., a phenomenal redness, a coldness, or a dryness) specific to a place-time and not common to several. 4 In fact, everything, nibban¯ a included, is not-self: “Like all other things or concepts (dhamm¯a) it [nibban¯a] is anatt¯a, not-self. Whereas all conditioned things (sam . kh¯ara—that is, all things produced by karma) are unsatisfactory and impermanent (sabbe sam . kh¯ara dukkh¯a…anicc¯a) all dhamm¯a whatsoever, whether conditioned things or the unconditioned nibban¯a, are not-self (sabbe dhamm¯a anatt¯a).” (Collins 82) 5 Harvey (2000, 39ff .) The sot¯ apanna is, by definition, also incapable of murdering his parents, an Arhat, or maliciously drawing the blood of a Buddha.

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is or can be. What then motivates exegetical deprecation of the khandhas (such as Buddhaghosa’s at Vism. XX 19)? Rather than evaluate the khandhas in terms ¯ ´ avakay¯ana Buddhists empirically of their potential relation to a putative Atman, Sr¯ concluded that like all compounded phenomena the khandhas are impermanent and so a psychophysical source of the suffering of change. Moreover, the khandhas are the objects of up¯ad¯ana-khandh¯a, or their mental appropriation as a grasping to them as self (attabh¯ava). More specifically, as the psychophysical experiences identified as “mine” (mama), they’re necessary conditions for suffering as such (as Gethin 1986, 41ff . notes). They are, however, also the necessary positive condition for the early Buddhist soteric scheme, insofar as the apprehension of their emptiness of self is the basis for the achievement of nibb¯ana and anatt¯a, in its thetic sense as right view (samm¯a dit..thi), the doctrinal basis of the teachings to that end. The Buddhist conception of the person thus draws away the veil of a transcendental metaphysics of the Brahmanical person, revealing nothing other than the sensed and known data of empirical experience that alone constitutes the person (puggala). In the Buddha’s universal ethnicization of karma, a new sense of value is thus implicitly read into the moral status of the empirical person: persons possess the potential to achieve individual liberation as nibb¯ana. This potential of persons is what makes the Buddha’s path (magga) possible for all sentient beings: more probably than any other such beings, persons are able to achieve transcendental liberation on their own moral-kammic and cognitive merits. The potential for awakening (bodhi) is thus a crucial fact about the Buddhist person. Hence, the fact of birth into human material and sentient (n¯amar¯upa) form comes to be viewed as a rare soteriological boon in a sense that mere human personhood in itself had not signified in the Brahmanical lifeworld hitherto. For early Buddhism the person (puggala) is now imbued with an ethically potent value that lies at the very heart of what it is to be a person. Yet this quality is not an entity, a soul, a substance, or a material property possessed by the self, as can be evidenced ¯ in the Buddha’s fierce resistance to the Atmav¯ ada schools. Rather it is what ‘the self’ as such is: a more or less engaged potential that determines what kind of life and afterlife an individual, qua ethical being, will experience. This potential is what qualifies a being as human (manusso) sentient being. It is not a self, nor the summum bonum of nibb¯ana itself, which is never positively determined (Collins, 83). If both the process to its attainment, and the attainment itself, lack all intrinsic self, then the only existence that can be predicated of both is that of the theoretical value they, uniquely, instantiate in the world of suffering (sam . s¯ara). That kind of existence is immaterial, unquantifiable and a-temporal. For those reasons, such value transcends the empirical experience of the person qua the khandhas, and while transcendent to experience critically informs the phenomenally objective existence of name-and-form (n¯ama-r¯upa). A devout exegete such as Buddhaghosa might undervalue the khandhas by comparison with the value that renders them ultimately meaningful, because they’re the objects of sensory and mental grasping that mediate false views, and the craving and suffering that grasping to them entails. But nor should they become objects of mortification, which of course lies at the heart of the Buddha’s ‘middle way’.

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The potential for sentient beings to awaken is hence the value constituting what the Buddhist understanding of the person, most systematically in the Abhidhamma, comes to centrally valorise: its capacity for self-cultivation towards the achievement of nibb¯ana. This goal then grounds the teleology of early Buddhist metaphysics of the person and comparative descriptions of its degrees and kinds of achievement to that end.6 Thus, to kill a sentient being, and still more a person, is to deny them the opportunity to realise the primary good of their embodied lives.

1.2 The Non-intrinsic Value of Life It might however be useful to distinguish between possible senses of the value of this good, as broadly understood in contemporary ethics. Agar, for example, distinguishes between intrinsic and instrumental value: Intrinsically valuable things are usually held to be those things that have value regardless of any benefit they bring to other objects. Advocates of this interpretation often cite individual human beings as paradigms. Conclusive proof that a human is utterly incapable of bringing about some other desirable states of affairs would not void her or him of value. With this rough understanding of the concept, we can set up a contrast with the concept of instrumental value accorded a starring role in many anthropocentric ethics. Instrumentally valuable things are supposed to possess worth by virtue of their propensity to bring about some other valuable state of affairs. (2001, 4)

We’ve seen that in a broadly Buddhist framework, sentient life in general, and human life in particular, is afforded fundamental respect. Human life, and on some readings all sentient life, would thus seem to possess a basic, and so in some (axiological if not metaphysical) sense an intrinsic, value, just because it possesses the valuable property of sentience. On the other hand, we also know that on the canonical Buddhist account sentient life is inherently suffering life, failing the attainment of Buddhist awakening. Therefore, human life would seem to possess instrumental value as a means to the greater Buddhist end of awakening and solving the ubiquitous problem of suffering. This suggests that we should ask whether the first precept is a prohibition of all cases of human killing because all human sentient life is of equal value, or whether its value is tied to some lives more than others—as the PG especially, but also the PP, imply. In Chap. 3 we noted, in canonical attributions of sentience, and then later more pointedly in the principles of gun.a (quality) and prajñ¯a (wisdom) (the PG and PP) grounding the prohibition of intentional killing (as well as its exceptions), that these ´ avakay¯ana through strongly suggest that conscious sentient life is valued in the Sr¯ Mah¯ay¯ana contexts to the degree that (1) sentient beings manifest physical quality and so virtue, and (2) they manifest degrees of transcendental compassion and wisdom as 6 The A˙ nguttara Nik¯aya and the Puggala-Paññatti of the Abhidhamma develop these descriptions, particularly in terms of characterologies of kinds of persons and of the differences between them (puggala-vemattat¯a) (see Kuan 2015).

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bodhisattvas and Buddhas. We saw that intentionally killing these latter exemplars is in general unequivocally worse than killing those sentient beings failing to manifest these qualities. Hence, the Indian Buddhist textual record strongly suggests that sentient beings do not possess intrinsic value merely as sentient, but rather insofar as sentience enables them to manifest these more valorised properties. If so, sentient life is, on the evidence of the canonical record (surveyed in Chaps. 3 through 7) an instrumental rather than intrinsic good. While life is deserving of respect and care, this is primarily because it is the condition for a much greater good in Buddhist awakening, and the path thereto. Many contemporary theorists of Buddhist ethics draw similar conclusions (e.g., Keown and Keown 1995, 266). Perrett unequivocally rejects the notion that Buddhists espouse the sanctity of life by claiming that “Buddhism does not value human life as an intrinsic good. It is true that the extreme rarity and preciousness of a human birth is often emphasised […] But the preciousness of a human birth is because only as a human is it possible to practise the dharma successfully and [to] achieve the goal of the elimination of suffering.” (1996, 311) Others, such as Harvey (2000, 326), reluctantly admit some cases of abortion where killing may be permissible as a necessary evil, drawing on some of the Buddhaghosan criteria discussed above (316, 318). Barnhart (2018, 597) echoes these Buddhist claims and caveats while bringing them into discussion with contemporary arguments for the permissibility of early-foetal abortion (605ff .). Keown (2001; see also Barnhart’s paraphrase account of Keown in 2018, 599–601) objects to comparatively permissive Buddhist views of abortion inasmuch as given the presence of consciousness at conception, intentional killing in cases of abortion violates the first precept. However, Keown, consistent in arguing against the Buddhist permissibility of euthanasia and abortion, also claims that sentient life in the Buddhist-ethical context is not “an absolute value to be preserved at all costs” (1998–1999, 405). In short, none of the claims of these theorists either for or against euthanasia or abortion in the Buddhist context appeal to a Buddhist notion of an intrinsic value of life. On the other hand, we saw in Chap. 3 that all sentient life down to insect and even amoebic existence is to be considered as worthy of care, treated respectfully and even legally protected on pain of penalty. In this general sense, sentient life is for Buddhists a basic or primary good, even though it is qualifiable by consideration of the PK, PG and PP. How literally, though, are we to conceive these three principles as means for determining the Buddhist value of life in the contemporary context? After all, in earlier chapters we saw that some intelligible grounds for these principles are questionable, and are not in general endorsed in contemporary ethical theory. First, in Chap. 4, we found reason to question the cultural assumptions of PG (principle of gun.a), which functioned to determine the relative worth of different sentient beings and persons, and so to judge thereby the comparative gravity of lethal acts. Second, in Chap. 5 we considered why the PP (of prajñ¯a) presented problems for a contemporary Buddhist ethics seeking to engage moral interlocutors in rationally probative discourse. This was because the PP relied importantly upon the capacity of bodhisattva agents to acquire supernormal knowledge putatively informing the

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justification for lethal acts: knowledge that, as otherwise inaccessible to ordinary epistemic agents, could not feature in public ethical argument. Moreover, both principles were justified by the role the PK (of kamma) plays in the causal explanation for moral acts and consequences, which again in many cases was seen to function in inconceivably complex and so epistemically opaque terms. Hence, both the PG and PP, underwritten by the PK, functioning as potential Buddhist qualifications of the value of life of persons, themselves require qualification inasmuch as they present methodological, and thence ethical, dilemmas in the contemporary Buddhist understanding of a person’s life-value. If so, we can ask whether contemporary Buddhist ethicists should formulate a position concerning the varying life-values of persons on the bases of the PK, PG and PP as given or, perhaps with a view to their modernisation, in cognate non-Buddhist terms. If we consider the former case, then the problems I have just enumerated remain, perhaps irresolvably. If we consider the latter case, for example most obviously in the naturalisation of one or other of PG or PP, then both principles might entail a biological explanation for ‘quality’ and ‘wisdom’ in genetic and epigenetic rather than karmic terms: genetic inheritance (DNA) being in broad terms the causal loci for the transmission of physical and intellectual capacities (epigenetic inheritance being the causal loci for heritable changes not based in DNA) (Eisen and Konchok 2018). For example, the value of physical-virtuous quality targeted in PG presupposes that the beauty or physical perfection of a person is karmically determined in the first instance by an ostensible moral virtue. But if we reject the implausible metaphysics assumed by that relation, and a naturalised version of gun.a as physical beauty or quality is instead construed as determined in the first instance by genetic properties, then what really determines a person’s empirical value can be reduced to biological, not moral, causes. If Buddhist ethics wants to valorise the mentality and acts of exemplars of superlative gun.a over those deficient in it, then eugenic principles could in theory justify the production and valorisation of persons so genetically determined, as well as the lower moral evaluation of those less well favoured, and so their greater moral aptness for being killed. The same account could be made mutatis mutandis of the justification for the PP, whereby the intelligence and acumen of ‘noble beings’ is genetically—rather than karmically—determined, and prajñ¯a only an effect of selective breeding, and thus the value of sentient life calibrated according to such genetic inheritance. These conclusions are on their face at odds with Buddhist (and extra-Buddhist) values of universal compassion, moral self-cultivation, cognitive-affective training and the cultivation of transcendental insight. In determining fundamental Buddhist criteria for variable values of life, we are faced with a choice either to retain the irresolvably problematic presuppositions of the PK, PG and PP, or accept some equally problematic naturalised version of them. On the other hand, however, inasmuch as the PG and PP only describe comparative valuations of life, they do not thereby repudiate a theoretical Ur-principle in which the value of the potential for awakening applies across the sentient board, and so stands as a fundamental basis for the Buddhist prohibition of killing. That principle entails the conclusion that, no matter

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how karmically compromised (as per PK, PG or PP), sentient life per se manifests a potential the deprivation of which is an abuse of its fundamental soteric value, and thereby a global badmaker for intentional killing in Buddhism. The problem with this most general Buddhist badmaker for killing is that it returns us to the position noted at the very outset of Part I: it provides little or no analytic purchase on understanding or theorising those cases where killing was or is conceivably permissible in Buddhist terms. Moreover, inasmuch as we’ve seen that Buddhist ethics often requires a particularist analysis, the badmakers for lethal acts may also require a particularist, rather than universalist, theorisation. In other words, every intended lethal act is in actuality not merely a generic or definitional ‘act of taking life’, but rather a specifically-constituted intentional event determined by identifiable causes and conditions for its occurrence. This means that there are necessarily always reasons of some nature (rather than merely an abstracted desire to take life) that actually constitute its cognitive causes. While we can readily acknowledge the normative point that any intentional lethal act is on a generic Buddhist account wrong because sentient life is a basic and instrumental but not intrinsic good, we cannot ascertain thereby why one such act may be worse than another, and thus what the badmaker is that distinguishes between these. We need rather to understand the particular constitution of the given lethal case to ascertain its wrongness, if the badmakers of different lethal cases can be understood to be analytically distinct, and if some cases can, even in the Buddhist-emic context, be claimed to be more or less wrong than others. We can begin to develop this account by adumbrating the Buddhist ontological sense of the person as the five khandhas, as name-and-form (n¯amar¯upa),7 and as a mereologically decomposable and causally linked series of psychophysical events (n¯amar¯upadhammas), frequently described in canonical and Abhidhamma analyses of persons. This will provide the basis for an account of killing, in section 3, that offers a theoretical Buddhist-metaphysical explanation for why killing per se makes prima facie universal doxastic sense for a range of different reasons and for different moral-epistemic agents, and so to that degree succeeds in being a rational project. This provides a basis to consider in preliminary terms, in section 4, how the person as a cognitively constructed entity functions as an intentional object for lethal agents: that is, how persons present such agents (and groups of them) with pretheoretical and putatively justified reasons for killing them, such as to subdue or terminate volitions, to be considered in depth in Chap. 8.

2 Descriptive Analysis of N¯amarupa: ¯ The Five Aggregates The account of personal identity in Buddhism has a vast primary and secondary literature, and in its wider context characterizes a unique metaphysics of the person up to the present (e.g., Loy 1996; Siderits 2003; Ganeri 2017; Hanner 2018; Ricard and 7

N¯amar¯upa as a dvandva compound is common to Pali and Sanskrit.

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Singer 2017). At the same time, extensive discourse on anatt¯a and self-identity has so dominated Buddhist discussion of the person, that a positive ontological account of the person has been comparatively under-theorised (see though Harvey 1993; Lin 2013; MacKenzie 2019). Understanding the ontological import of the aggregates is crucial for any analysis of the person as the object of lethal acts, because it will allow us to delineate with more precision how justificatory reasons function with regard to specific psychophysical dimensions of the person implicated in them. As we’ve seen in Chap. 3, a person is a living being (P. satta Skt. sattva) which, in its capacity to breathe, evidences a life-faculty and sentience: it’s endowed with six ‘internal’ (jjhattik¯ani a¯ yatan¯ani) sense-bases which cognize their respective ‘external’ sense-objects or domains (b¯ahir¯ani a¯ yatan¯ani). Collectively these are the six pairs of sense-bases (sal.a¯ yatana). These in turn entail the six kinds of senseconsciousness that cognize their respective sense bases and domains (subsequent additions to these will be briefly considered in later chapters). The person is entirely devoid of a Self (att¯a) that subsists independent of these aggregates, sense-bases or elements. The person (puggala) predicated on these individuated sensory and conscious capacities is heuristically reducible to a group of five aggregate factors (khandhas/skandhas) of form (r¯upa), feeling (vedan¯a), perception-conception (saññ¯a/sam . jñ¯a), volitional formations (sa˙nkh¯ara/sam . sk¯ara) and consciousness (viññ¯an.a, vijñ¯ana). Form (r¯upa)8 is the sole aggregate representing the corporeal body (r¯upa-k¯aya), while the remaining four portion off distinct aspects of the mentalpsychological identification (n¯ama) of the person. N¯ama and r¯upa exist as mutually dependent, symbiotic functions of the nominal person: the person ontologically speaking just is n¯amar¯upa. To reify these would be to deny that at no point does any discernible self of an intrinsic kind exist, and that any supervenient self, such as the self-identity (attabh¯ava) conceptually predicated of the khandhas, is on any ultimate analysis anatt¯a. More fundamentally, they are in Abhidhammic terms understood as functionally distinct, but also reducible, continuities of dependently-arisen psychophysical experience composed of interacting and mutually dependent complexes of dhammas (property particulars or tropes) in spatio-temporal flux. In the Sam . yutta Nik¯aya the Buddha offers a pithy description of the n¯ama-r¯upa relation: And what, bhikkhus, is name-and-form? Feeling, perception, volition, contact, attention: this is called name. The four great elements and the form derived from the four great elements: this is called form. Thus this name and this form are together called name-and-form. (SN 12.2)9

N¯ama, literally ‘name,’ designates that which can only ‘be named’ insofar as it cannot be seen or touched and is not publicly observable by ostension: sensations of pleasure, pain or indifference (feeling); the perception of the sensible properties of 8

R¯upa signifies literally ‘form’ or ‘shape;’ as the first khandha however it designates that which manifests form or shape as any material entity. Hence, a drawn rectangle might be r¯upa, where an imagined one wouldn’t be. 9 Nidanasamyutta (tr. Bodhi 2000, 535). .

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perceptible objects (perception), the mental drives for bodily, affective or volitional acts (volition), or the direct awareness of all or any of these (consciousness). ‘Feeling’ (vedan¯a) and ‘perception/conception’ (saññ¯a/samjñ¯a)10 constitute the second and third of the five khandhas. Sa˙nkh¯arakhandha,11 the fourth aggregate, is a critical term in Buddhist philosophy of mind and requires some discussion. Bodhi writes that “Sa˙nkh¯ara is derived from the prefix sam . (=con), ‘together,’ and the verb karoti, ‘to make.’ The noun straddles both sides of the active–passive divide. Thus sa˙nkh¯aras are both things which put together, construct and compound other things, and the things that are put together, constructed, and compounded.” (2000, 45) This latter, passive sense refers to conditioned phenomena generally, but specifically to mental dispositions. These are called ‘volitional formations’ both because they are formed as a result of volition and because they are causes for the arising of future volitions.12 Sa˙nkh¯ara is often used in this first sense to describe the psychological conditioning, particularly with regard to the anusaya, of habitual patterns or latent proclivities of the unconscious mind that give any individual his or her unique character.13 In the active sense, sa˙nkh¯ara refers to that capacity of the mind to construct those formations which then function, in intentional action, as the morally-charged kamma entailing the continued existence of future sa˙nkh¯aras. This formation-creating faculty of the mind, the active aspect of the sa˙nkh¯arakhandha/sam . sk¯ara-skandha, is specifically designated cetan¯a, the determinative factor in all willed, especially moral, action (and as ‘intention’ one of the five functional aspects of n¯ama, as above). As we’ve already seen, as the ‘agent’ for the PK it is central to any normative account of the first precept, and has its genetic basis in the second link (nid¯ana) of dependent origination as the primordial site, preceding the arising of n¯amar¯upa, for conative willing and all value-laden, mentally constructive activity, and its volitional effects.14 10

Gethin notes that “there are a number of passages in which the translation “perception” fails to make sense of the nik¯ayas’ usage of saññ¯a as a technical term. Wayman suggests that it is the word “idea” that should regularly be employed as a translation of saññ¯a. This certainly seems to make better sense of the technical usage in connection with the khandhas. A saññ¯a of, say, “blue” then becomes, not so much a passive awareness of the visual sensation we subsequently agree to call “blue”, but rather the active noting of that sensation, and the recognising of it as “blue”—that is, more or less, the idea of “blueness”.” (1986, 36) 11 Different P¯ ali and Sanskrit transliterations appear interchangeably in the following, mainly due to differing usages of scholarly commentary. 12 Collins (1982, 207–8) discusses the related notions of constructed and constructive consciousness (abhisam . k¯ara-viññ¯an.a) and their conative agency in the variable evolution of samsaric experience. 13 Giustarini (2011, 98) suggests that “Sa˙ nkh¯ara is sometimes translated with coefficients, conditions, formations, physical or mental tensions, synergies, etc., but it is nevertheless an enigmatic term.” 14 Collins among others even assigns to this central feature of the person a metaphysical function: “we can understand the position of the concepts of sam . kh¯ara and abhisam . kh¯ara in Buddhist psychological thought, and how it is that these concepts were seen in conjunction with that of viññ¯an.a, ‘consciousness,’ as the basis of the ultimate Buddhist account of temporality and continuity.” (1982, 202) Here, the volitional-formative work of conative human existence structures the experience, and thence existence, of time, so that the ultimate dissolution of the constructive process

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‘Contact,’ following the Buddha’s enumeration of n¯amar¯upa, above, designates the P¯ali phassa (Sk. spar´sa), whereby the six forms of sensory intentionality (the five senses plus the ‘sense’ of mind or intellect) register their respective phenomenal objects, via their respective forms of cognizing sense organs. Contact is the implicit basis by which these functions give rise to other universal mental factors (cetasikas) including feeling (vedan¯a), perception (saññ¯a/samjñ¯a), and intention (cetan¯a). ‘Attention’ (P. manasik¯aro), the last of these universal mental factors, designates the focussed intentionality of the active dimension of consciousness. Harvey notes that In the Suttas, n¯ama is used to refer to all aspects of mind except consciousness itself. In later texts, it usually also includes consciousness. As ‘name’ it essentially refers to those states which are intensional: which take an object. According to the Abhidhamma, this differentiates all such states from the r¯upa states, which never take an object (Dhs. 1408). (1993, 32)

Thus, all five khandhas are variously represented or implicated in the Buddha’s fivefold taxonomy for n¯ama, mediated by the ‘contact’ entailed in the arising of the three conjunct elements (dh¯atus)—sense, sense-object and sense-consciousness.15 Where n¯ama states lack all form or material shape (varn.a), all remaining phenomena are classed as r¯upa. The Buddha (above) offers a twofold classification for r¯upa: it is the primary (up¯ad¯ana) ‘four great elements’ (catt¯aro mah¯abh¯ut¯ani) of earth, water, fire and wind (or air), and their respective derived (up¯ad¯aya) elements of solidity, fluidity, heat and movement or motion16 ; and then that material form that (as for Aristotelian morphe) supervenes on them in, most often, combinatory forms. Harvey writes that “Apart from the occurrence of the ‘four great elements’ and the various [twenty-four] forms of ‘derived’ r¯upa, all of which are mutually conditioning in various ways, there is no ‘material substance’: r¯upa is just the occurrence of these states or processes.” (1993, 32) R¯upa is thus not equivalent to the metaphysical substance of materialism; it is rather both materiality and ‘amenability to being-sensed.’ Sound therefore qualifies as r¯upa: it possesses physical phenomenality (however subtle) and can be sensed by the human hearing apparatus.17 Hamilton reiterates that the r¯upa-skandha refers in nibb¯ana deconstructs not merely the suffering intrinsic to the skandhas and their activity (in the suttas repeatedly made equivalent to dukkha) but the possibility, and experience, of temporality per se. 15 See for example MN 148. 16 Elsewhere in the canon (e.g., DN 33, MN 140 and SN 27.9) two additional elements are given: the space and consciousness properties. Space (¯ak¯asa) here signifies the idea of space occupied by any of the other four elements. Any physical object occupies space, and though that space is not a property of the object, the amount of space it occupies (or negotiates through various nonphysical functions) is a derived property of the elements. Hamilton (2000, 72) gives examples such as “processes of swallowing, retaining and expelling” to illustrate more concrete instantiations. For the more process-oriented Abhidhammic classifications as solidity, fluidity, heat and mobility see Dhs. 175, 177; Vibh. 82–4; Dhs-a. 333–6; Vism. XI 87, 93. 17 Like some other sensed objects, sound might be ambiguous between r¯ upa and n¯ama, ie., a heard or experienced sound is n¯ama, while sound-waves themselves, as physically capturable (via

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exclusively to the living physical organism and not “matter of the body qua matter [that is relevant], but that one’s body is the physical locus of one’s experience.” (2000, 29; cf. 72) She goes on to claim that “living bodies are the only objects that provide, or are associated with being, the locus of a consciously experiencing being.” (73, my italics) That is, the r¯upa-skandha is the primary, or at the least initial, object of both self-perception (including in proprioception and interoception) and other-perception in intentional acts directed to the ar¯upa-skandhas, that themselves definitionally lack this same material manifestation. This suggests a possible primally unconscious basis for killing in the genetic structure of the 12 links as they form (and un-form) sentient beings.

2.1 A Genetic Condition for Killing? N¯amarupa ¯ as a Function of the 12 Links of Dependent Origination In the analysis of the sentient life-cycle as a causal process of dependently originated processes (pat.iccasamupp¯ada) n¯amar¯upa is the fourth ‘link’ (nid¯ana) in the sequence of developmental stages of the person, immediately preceded by consciousness (viññ¯ana) and followed by the six sense bases (sal.a¯ yatana). Hence, the Buddha claims18 that the cessation of consciousness definitively arrests the developmental arising of n¯amar¯upa (the empirical body-mind), which as the fourth link (read from the first of ignorance, avijj¯a) initiates the phenomenality of embodiment as the suffering of sam . s¯ara. The three former links—(1) ignorance (2) volitional formations, and (3) consciousness—are all non-corporeal necessary causes, from the point of pre-natal conception, for the subsequent production of the remaining stages of the sequence. It’s significant that n¯amar¯upa occupies specifically this developmental transitionpoint: it is n¯amar¯upa that for the first time makes possible in spatio-temporality the actualisation of volitional formations (sa˙nkh¯aras) that otherwise remain in potentia. Once these are inaugurated in sensory (passive) response to sense-objects—initially in foetal and then infantile feeling, craving (as physiological need), and grasping (as its satisfaction), in particular—volitional (active) modifications of them by virtue of cetan¯a, which in this context represent accumulations of wholesome meritorious kamma-formations (puññ’¯abhisa˙nkh¯ara) and unwholesome demeritorius kammaformations (apuññ’¯abhisa˙nkh¯ara) pertaining to that person, are brought into play.19

the appropriate technology, including the natural human organ) might be r¯upa (as are also the graphemes variously representing them as sine waves or musical notes). 18 For e.g., in the Sutta Nip¯ ata; cf. DN II 62–3. 19 See 1. Suttantabh¯ ajan¯ıya of the Pat.iccasamupp¯adavibha˙nga (Analysis of Conditional Origination) (Chap. 6 of the Abhidhamma Vibha˙nga). A third kind of kamma-formation (the ‘imperturbable’ a¯ neñj’¯abhisa˙nkh¯ara) pertains only to those cetan¯as accompanying the four formless wholesome cittas, produced only in jh¯ana or meditative absorption states.

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N¯amar¯upa thus functions as the initial (looking developmentally forwards), or terminal (looking developmentally backwards), point of access from and to the volitional formations, insofar as they are otherwise phenomenally inaccessible, or only inferred from actions of body and speech (ie. constitutive functions of n¯amar¯upa as such). This focal position of n¯amar¯upa vis-a-vis the sa˙nkh¯aras has potential bearing on the theorisation of killing in Buddhism. It has become clear that n¯amar¯upa exists as a symbiotic unity manifesting differentiated functional and volitional capacities, such that mental volitions (as n¯ama) require the body for their actualisation, and material form (r¯upa) requires the motivating force of consciousness (for example, in its conative sense as ‘constructive consciousness’; see Chap. 8, Sect. 1.1, below) and its attendant habitual kammic tendencies (abhisa˙nkh¯aras) to persist as living. Given their causal status in the twelve links, ignorance (1st) and volitional formations (2nd) both constitute and require n¯amar¯upa for volitional action to occur in the phenomenal world (including vis-à-vis other individuated n¯amar¯up¯a). On this account then, all volitional constructs are conditioned by ignorance (avijj¯a) of the merely conventional status (sammuti-sacca, or voh¯ara-sacca) of their objects and motivations. In a similar fashion, SN 45.1 identifies ignorance as causal for wrong view (micch¯a-dit..thi), which itself is a cause for wrong resolve, wrong speech, wrong action, wrong livelihood, wrong effort, wrong mindfulness and wrong concentration—that is, the antithesis of all eight requisites of the Noble Eightfold Path. Why is the living body the phenomenal object (vis.aya) of killing when the terminal object (i.e., purpose) of killing is clearly not, in the greatest number of intrahuman cases, the body in and of itself ? It appears that a Buddhist theory of embodiment (as partly codified in the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination) suggests further responses to this question, which requires expanding on a point sketched above. Gethin provides an account of the mutual relation between cetan¯a as the active mental volition productive of the kamma constitutive of the sa˙nkh¯arakhandha, which then serves as the volitional ‘reservoir’ or causal basis for further active cetan¯as. He writes that The nik¯ayas define sam . kh¯aras primarily in terms of will or volition (cetan¯a); they also describe them as putting together (abhisam . kharonti) each of the khandhas in turn into something that is put-together (sam . khata). In this way sam . kh¯aras are presented as conditioning factors conceived of as volitional forces. Cetan¯a is, of course, understood as kamma on the mental level, and in the early Abhidhamma texts all those mental factors that are considered to be specifically skilful (kusala) or unskilful (akusala) fall within the domain of sam . kh¯arakhandha. Thus it is that the composition of sam . kh¯arakhandha leads the way in determining whether a particular arising of consciousness constitutes a skilful or an unskilful kamma. All this accords well with the nik¯ayas’ singling out of cetan¯a as characteristic of the nature of sam . kh¯aras. (1986, 37)

This constructive relation of cetan¯a to the sa˙nkh¯aras—the way in which they mutually structure the ethical nature of action—is only further consolidated in their relation to the primordial ‘grasping’ (up¯ad¯ana) by which all five khandhas are characterized (as the up¯ad¯ana-khandhas), though in differing ways. There are two significant points to be observed in this regard: the first is (as Gethin goes on to state) that

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“the early abhidhamma texts also state that r¯upakkhandha is always considered to be with a¯ savas and subject to grasping” (38), while the other four mental khandhas may or may not be. This again tends to confirm the subjectively embodied site of r¯upa (as generally conceived in the P¯ali literature; see Gethin 1986, 36) as always identified with these ‘influxes’20 and as the particular object of the primordial grasping of the khandhas (up¯ad¯ana-khandha) that throughout the Nik¯ayas is identified with suffering (dukkha) as such. That is, where one or other of the a¯ savas, such as ignorance and its related wrong views, is peculiarly intense, the living body itself will inevitably function as an object of profound ‘grasping’ or fixation for the person. The physical body (r¯upak¯aya) could be described as the passive captive to such grasping, and not its agent. There are three modes of grasping of the khandhas elucidated in the early Abhidhamma: active grasping (up¯ad¯ana), subject to grasping (up¯ad¯aniya), and the product of grasping (up¯adin.n.a) (Vibh. 67). The second significant point is that “up¯ad¯ana as an active force is confined to sam . kh¯arakkhandha” (Gethin 38) where (again) the r¯upakhandha is necessarily ‘subject to grasping’ (up¯ad¯aniya). That is, the r¯upakhandha is in all cases the object of a form of deep-psychological and mentalaffective contestation by both constitutively primordial grasping as well as the volitional forces of the conditioned-and-conditioning function of cetan¯a, operative in the sam . kh¯arakhandha. Again it appears inevitable that it is the r¯upakhandha that suffers from being the phenomenal nexus between these forces that might be (in the positive case of the Arhat or Buddha) finally subdued, but in the much less positive case of the assutavant puthujjano (ignorant worldling) fatefully, and often fatally, enmeshed. At the same time, the volitional formations of the sam . kh¯arakhandha are intrinsically pre-embodied properties of the conative or ‘construction consciousness’21 (the abhisa˙nkh¯ara-viññ¯an.a), and the purely mental properties (of whatever kind) it subsequently generates, and not of the r¯upa-k¯aya per se. If the mental states of n¯ama—such as the complex of cetan¯a and dosa, the unwholesome ‘root’ (akusalam¯ula) of hatred—that explicitly signal the subsequent conditions requisite for killing are developmentally subsequent to the volitional formations (sa˙nkh¯aras), then the r¯upak¯aya is the only immediately available existential nexus with regard to the objectcomplex of the person for an unconscious effort of appropriation of that person’s volitional formations (sa˙nkh¯aras). That is, an agent can only ‘get at’ noumenal volitions through the phenomenal medium of their physical representation, inasmuch as he cannot purely mentally modify the other living being’s volitional substructure. Inasmuch as Buddhist ontogeny of the person posits the pre-natal existence of the sa˙nkh¯arakhandha as the originary site of volition (in the active sense noted above) as well as being the ‘reservoir’ for uniquely individuated accumulations of volitional acts (in the passive sense noted above), then by that posit the sa˙nkh¯arakhandha could 20 The a ¯ savas are four: of sense-desire (k¯am¯asava), of (desiring eternal) existence (bhav¯asava), of (wrong) views (dit..th¯asava), and of ignorance (avijj¯asava). 21 See Collins (1982, 205ff .).

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theoretically function as the primordially primary but unconscious locus for lethal acts that seek to disable, compromise or terminate the volitions of persons. This theorization of the potential dynamics of killing as a form of regressive double-bind between the i) structurally valid recognition of volitional aetiology in the pre-n¯amar¯upa sa˙nkh¯aras, and ii) an unconscious attempt to modify volitionality via the mediation of the material body (r¯upak¯aya) in the lethal act, is obviously speculative. It is raised here as a possible implication of the early Buddhist account of the causal bases for volitions, and of the sa˙nkh¯arakhandha itself as one of the major n¯ama aggregates of the person, in their relation to the intentionality and objects of at least a large class of, if not all, lethal acts. We will return to this theme of the volitions again at the end of this chapter and, exhaustively, in Chap. 8.

3 Dependent Conditions: Functional Interactionism of N¯amarupa ¯ We noted above that the Buddha distinguishes between name and form, but asserts their mutual dependency and inseparability.22 The Abhidhamma Pat..th¯ana lists a number of conditions constituting the mutual dependency of mental and physical properties or events. Buddhaghosa (e.g., Vism. XI 112) more fully explicates these as of four kinds: (i) conascent (sahaj¯ata) condition, where n¯ama and r¯upa events mutually support each other in their simultaneous arising (ii) mutuality (aññamañña) condition, where they stimulate and consolidate each other (like the sticks of a tripod) (iii) support (nissaya) condition, where they are foundational for each other (as earth is to tree) (iv) presence (atthi) and non-disappearance (avigata) conditions, where each constituting state must initially arise and remain for the other. Consciousness (viññ¯ana or citta)23 importantly illustrates (iv) as the presence condition, where a moment of conscious awareness “is dependent on concurrent [and persisting] physical states, but also on previous states of consciousness and other mental states.” (Harvey 1993, 33) Presence and non-disappearance conditions thus allow for the ongoing possibility of acts of perception, introspection (including 22

This refers to normal human functioning. The formless rebirths and states of cessation are anomalous conditions of ‘mind-without-body,’ or ‘body-without-mind,’ that represent potential or actual aporiae in the Buddhist-soteriological project. 23 In the Abhidhamma citta is generally employed to refer to different classes of consciousness distinguished by their concomitants, reifying the qualitative objects that viññ¯ana as the active awareness of states and events knows as a mental continuity. This echoes the passive and active senses of sam . kh¯ar¯a, citta (formed of the same P¯ali verbal root as the active terms meaning ‘to will’) being closely related to volition generally: the kind of mind (citta) that perdures depends largely on the kind of intention (cetan¯a) by which it is motivated.

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memory), and further moments of consciousness that sustain, for example, personal identity as this embodied person. This is consistent with the Buddha’s thesis that consciousness is itself a dependentarising, and undermines the attribution of a substance dualism to Buddhist thought: neither n¯ama nor r¯upa are self-caused and intrinsically independent substances24 ; rather, they co-exist in virtue of the differing causes (hetu), conditions (pratyaya) and elements which they severally enact. At Vism. 537 Buddhaghosa asserts that these conditional relations have temporal extension: mental events or states contribute to the maintenance of physical states already established. Buddhaghosa asserts the impotence of n¯ama and r¯upa as isolated functions: the former lacks motive power insofar as it lacks nutritive, vocal or mobile capacities. R¯upa wholly lacks the conception or motivation to pursue these and other ends, it is volitionally inert. Buddhaghosa also offers a simile of their relation as that of a blind man (r¯upa) who carries a motionless cripple (n¯ama) on his shoulders (Vism. 596). We know that in Abhidhammic terms these factors reduce to constitutive dhammas (property-particulars or tropes; the Vaibh¯as.ika-Abhidharma includes dharmas that are neither mental nor physical) whereby their fundamental ontological unlikeness is parsed in terms of how they are experienced and so what kind of phenomenological function they perform for perceiving consciousness. Griffiths writes, It is not that each mental event (or physical event) is a property of a substance […] Instead, the substantiality of each event, physical or mental, is definable in terms of its functions. What a given event is, is (usually) reducible to what it does. On this model, then, the broad overarching distinction […] between physical and mental is constructed phenomenologically and refers to different kinds of function. (1986, 56–57)

Griffiths point to the notion, implicit in much early Buddhist discourse, that the five khandhas are expressions of distinct functions and capacities rather than the component ens of a person.25 On an Abhidhamma view mental and material events are mutually dependent: psychophysically distinct dhammas function in mutual concordance, each requiring the other to exist or to effect larger change. While they constitute the macroscopic person, n¯ama and r¯upa dhammas also make possible and sustain microstate functions of sensation and cognition. Capacities such as feeling register the phenomenal experience of pain or pleasure; the grasping of characteristics (nimitta) by the discriminative function of saññ¯a is able to distinguish between them and their 24

Rather than being self-caused or the bearers of essential properties, dhammas/dharmas are discrete property-particulars causally dependent on other such property-particulars. They are thus not the full-blown substantive entities of rival Indian metaphysics (or their Western analogues) (see also Harvey 1993, 39; Hamilton 1996, xxix). 25 Confirmed in Gethin’s qualification of a purely mereological analysis of the person. For him “the khandhas are presented as one way of defining what is dukkha” (1986, 41); (cf. Hamilton 2000 passim). Their multiple correspondences with other modes of embodied existence “represent different ways of characterizing the given data of experience or conditioned existence, and are also seen as drawing attention to the structure and the sustaining forces behind it all […] the khandhas begin to take on something of a wider significance than is perhaps appreciated when they are seen merely as a breaking down of the human individual into constituent parts.” (42) The person qua khandhas is then a synecdoche for all suffering existence.

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objects; the introspective mental consciousness (manoviññ¯ana) unifies psychological and somatic contents that together constitute experience thereby made comparatively discrete. Psychophysical integrity is thus experienced on the one hand as somatic well-being and on the other as cognitive-psychological sanity. There is then an unambiguous non-identity of mental and physical factors of the person, where nonetheless a close relation obtains between them, and early Buddhist formulations of n¯amar¯upa appear to assert some form of non-substantialist or trope-theoretic mind–body dualism.26 Griffiths (1986), Harvey (1993, 29ff ), Hamilton (1996, 2000) among others27 emphasize the ‘intimate, organic unity’ of physical and mental states in the context of Abhidhamma and broader Buddhist metaphysics. Harvey (1993) disengages a Buddhist account of the person from the familiar polarities of physicalism (and/or materialism) and idealism that historically polarize Western theorization of the relation (or its absence) between body and mind. Other accounts of Buddhist theories of the person have followed a similar course (Hamilton 1996, 169–170).28 Nonetheless, since ‘body/form’ (r¯upa) or ‘mind/name’ (n¯ama), which seem to express independent entities, are conceptual designators (paññatti/prajñapti) for conceptually constructed entities that (in both Abhidhamma and Madhyamaka contexts) lack intrinsic existence, they are an analytic means only, not a claim about what exists mind-independently.29 For instance, we’ve seen that r¯upa secondarily refers to the perceptible form of the living body, rather than an amorphous mass; form is also to be distinguished from the corporeality or substance (Gk. hyle) of the body (k¯aya). These related but distinct conceptions of the physical are imputed properties of r¯upa, but the conceptual representations of, for example, ‘form’ and ‘corporeality’ are themselves propositional acts of n¯ama: it is only in virtue of such categorization that the meaningfulness of those distinctions, for its epistemic agent, can arise. Being conceptual, such representations are not intrinsic to the non-conceptual objects they mediate. On the (especially yukty¯anuy¯ay¯ı, or pram¯an.a or reasoning-following) Sautr¯antika and Pram¯an.av¯ada views derived from canonical Nik¯aya and Abhidhammic categories of the person, human cognition attempts to designate (vijñapti) the ultimately true nature of irreducible properties, which as ontological reals (vi´ses.a laks.an.a) with ultimate existence (param¯arthasat) transcend that project of conceptual (kalpan¯a, and so ultimately false) appropriation of the object. Hence, the very existence of

26

See Siderits (1997), Goodman (2004), Ganeri (2012), MacKenzie (2019), Tillemans (2020), for applications of trope-theory to the Buddhist-philosophical context. 27 See Lin (2013), Spackman (2012), MacKenzie (2019). 28 Griffiths’ formulation of the relation is of “a non-substantivist event-based interactionist psychophysical dualism.” (1986, 112) 29 Indeed, the Abhidhamma describes a taxonomy by which its analyses divide and classify all the permutations of the nominal designations of the khandhas, thereby providing “hundreds of different sets of divisions for each of the five khandhas and a comprehensive analysis, by which any given conditioned dhamma can be categorized under one of the khandhas.” (Ronkin 2005, 44)

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r¯upa qua ‘r¯upa’ is dependent on (if not reducible to30 ) its valid designation by n¯ama (here in terms of consciousness as sam . veda or perceptual awareness), and the same applies for ‘n¯ama,’ which so understands ‘itself’ (or its properties of the cognizance of mental objects). The attempt to mentally impose or reify a substantive dualism on these conceptualanalytic categories fails to recognize how the very act of doing so requires the precondition of their interdependence as ‘n¯amar¯upa’, itself a designation by ‘n¯ama’ and so also a conceptual imputation.31 The ‘person’ (puggala/pudgala) too is a universal (s¯am¯anya) conceptually imputed upon the individuated continuum of psychophysical events, and not a particular or a substance.32 Neither puggala/pudgala nor n¯amar¯upa signify the self (att¯a), the wholly autonomous existence of which all Buddhist schools deny ultimately and conventionally. N¯ama and r¯upa properties cohere in or as the imputed person only because of the causal properties of each that in being functionally differentiated allow them to cohere. It is just that cohesion that is destroyed in the lethal act, to a broad ontological account of which we now turn.

3.1 Making Sense of Killing: An Explanation from Interdependence ´ avakay¯ana Buddhism characterizes mental and In the foregoing we surveyed how Sr¯ material factors as the mutually determining, independently necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the existence of the person as a living being. This has been important to establish inasmuch as the Buddhist-metaphysical constitution of the person can now be juxtaposed with the pretheoretical understanding of the person that undergirds—however non-thematically or even unconsciously—the pretheoretical sense-making of lethal acts. The question this section answers is: why might it make sense in general for agents to kill given an intuitive grasp both of psychophysical interdependence, and of the life of the person construed in some pre-theoretical sense as valuable? Having established an answer to that question, we will go on to interrogate whether this most general metaphysical sense-making is sufficient to withstand accounts of Buddhist badmakers in each of the classes of intentional killing to follow in the analyses of Part II. 30

Only the Yog¯ac¯ara tenet system asserts mind as an ultimate truth and entity. The Sautr¯antika, while holding (unlike the Vaibh¯as.ika-Sarv¯astiv¯ada) a representationalist rather than direct theory of perception, with the Madhyamaka accepts the existence of external objects (bahy¯artha). 31 This is also in part the thesis of P. Strawson in the third chapter of Individuals (1959). If, like that thesis, the differentiation of mind and body is parasitic on the notion of the person then the Buddhist qualification would be that, unlike that thesis, the person is not a substance as a particular, but a conceptual construction (either on its constitutive dhammas, or for the Madhyamaka as imputed of whatever identity-conditions conventionally constitute ‘person’). 32 On the Abhidhammic view, the dhammas to which the khandhas reduce define the ultimate ontology of what the person is, whereas for the Mah¯ay¯ana even these are conceptually constructed. Hence, the property of ‘personhood’ is only conceptually or conventionally real in each case.

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We can now consider the cognitive bases for killing as understood in the context of the foregoing Buddhist theory of the person. These condition any intrahuman lethal act. As I noted above, lethal agents do not conceive killing as ending someone’s life simpliciter, just for its own sake. Rather, agents engage more or less coherent reasons for doing so. These reasons are analytically but not psychologically separable from the intention to kill. Such reasons for lethal acts (even if erroneous) generally make reference to putative psychological-mental features of their objects. These in turn largely map onto the n¯ama properties of persons. For example, the intention to extirpate some intrinsic and volitional properties of persons (such as, for example, their presumed evil nature and propensity to act upon it) plausibly motivates many lethal acts, though not every intention to kill necessarily entails this metaphysical kind of intention. Rather, a lethal agent may just seek to disable volition, by taking a person’s life, for a very wide range of transactionally practical reasons (such as counter-terroristic or military measures for purposes of collective defence). It’s equally evident that lethal action in these cases succeeds in its transactional aim of immobilising its victims, irrespective of its normative status, and so also represents a generic causal congruence between its cognitive and intentional content, and its overt effect. Given this apparent congruence between cognitive intention and concrete effect, we can also ask why there is in some cases a dramatic incongruence between what agents pretheoretically take themselves to achieve in lethal acts, and their actual effect. For example, a psychotic agent might fully succeed in a transactional lethal act—he too intends to take life—but for wholly spurious reasons: he believes his victim is a hundred-armed extra-terrestrial invader.33 The psychotic killer then is very right about one intention while being very wrong about another. His being right is because there must be some fundamental metaphysical condition(s) for why killing makes sense to so many different human agents, with such different purposes and reasons for engaging it. The intentional object of human killing is the person. While the person is a conceptual imputation on the basis of the khandhas/skandhas, killing the person cannot be achieved through non-physical means. Nonetheless, while the person’s body is the obvious intended object for lethal acts, it is only a mediating and not intrinsic object for volitional acts that also, and perhaps fundamentally, intend (act toward) something non-material about the person, identified in the n¯ama-skandhas. Given the thesis of n¯amar¯upa interdependence detailed above, a generic Buddhist-metaphysical account of the doxastic rationale for killing can be stated formally as: P1 P2 P3

33

Lethal acts intend to eliminate persons. Persons are constituted by psychophysical properties. Properties of n¯ama are interdependent with properties of r¯upa.

This fictive example can of course be multiplied with the substitution of different real-world agents and their various more or less spurious reasons, from Nazi genocidal agents to indigenous elders or mediaeval Christian priests lethally punishing the sin of witchcraft, and so on.

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P4

These properties instantiate physical, dispositional, psychological, or ideological-symbolic objects with reference to which the lethal act is in every intentional case engaged. As a modification of r¯upa properties, the lethal act also modifies dependent n¯ama properties of the person. The property of life of the person is instantiated in the interdependent function of the relevant r¯upa and n¯ama properties of that person (namely vitality,34 heat, and consciousness).35 As the disaggregation of the n¯ama and r¯upa properties of the person, killing entails the cessation of the interdependent function of the relevant n¯ama and r¯upa properties of the person. The cessation of the interdependent function of the relevant n¯ama and r¯upa properties of the person entails the cessation of life. Therefore the intention to eliminate persons is ontologically consistent with ending the life of that person.

E1 P5

E2

E3 C

Thus, on this Buddhist account, killing persons may appear prima facie to be rational. However, this Buddhist account is not an attempt to justify killing. Rather, it is presented as a descriptive account of what human agents pretheoretically take themselves to achieve in killing. The living body is, by definition, the primary object of the lethal act, failing which there is no person thereby embodied who, lacking the embodied state, could be killed. However, if living human bodies are in the general case by definition persons (in however minimal a sense) then the intentional object is necessarily the embodied person; hence, P1. P2 and P3 have been surveyed in the preceding sections and are accepted by all Buddhist philosophers of mind.36 E1 concludes that if the material aggregates (r¯upak¯aya) of persons are irrevocably modified in such acts, then so too, in some indeterminate sense, are their mental aggregates. P4 claims that reasons for lethal acts refer to properties of object-persons, by which persons thereby become their intentional objects.37 P4 thus emphasises that 34 Recall that the Abhidhamma specifies vitality (¯ ayu) as consisting of one physical and one mental life-faculty (j¯ıvitindriya). In the MN-a Buddhaghosa stresses the identity of vitality with the lifefaculty and heat with the energy generated by action (kammajateja), where each is a necessary condition for the existence of the other. 35 Harvey writes: “the life-principle accepted by the Suttas is a complex of vitality, heat and consciousness. Heat is a physical process, vitality consists, according to the Abhidhamma, of one life-faculty which is physical, and one which is mental, and consciousness is mental. This complex consists of conditionally arisen changing processes, which are not identical with the mortal body (except for heat and the physical life-faculty), nor totally different from it, but partly dependent on it.” (1993, 31) One of many Nik¯aya expressions of this formulation is at DN II 334–335. 36 Harvey summarises: “Neither the two sets [of processes of n¯ ama and r¯upa], or the processes they comprise, are independent substances, for they are streams of momentary events which could not occur without the interactions which condition their arising.” (1993, 40) 37 The question of what kind of objects intentional objects are in this case can be for the moment suspended: we’re concerned just to delineate their intentionality, not whether they are substantively, inexistently, or nominally real or non-existent. ‘Intentional objects’ signifies whatever it is that directed consciousness is about. They might be things, properties, events, qualities or thoughts, or

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there is, in every intentional case of killing, cognitively encoded in the person as its intentional object personal descriptions in virtue of which the act is undertaken. Hence, it is never the ‘person’ simpliciter, or even the ‘life of’ the person, that is in the first instance the justificatory basis for the reason to so act. The taking of life (as per E3) rather must always entail a notion of the ending of something about the person which renders the consequences of that taking of life significant to its agent. If so, and we’ve seen that persons are in ontological terms constituted exclusively by psychophysical properties, we can ask whether it is primarily physical or primarily mental properties of persons which answer to what it is about persons that for its agent justifies their being killed. Physical, Mental and Intentional Properties Relevant to the Intention to Kill First, a merely physical sense of human killing is unthinkable because the person is not merely physical. For instance, when a clinician makes the decision to shut down the life-support of a brain-dead patient, life is not thereby deprived of a lump of matter, but rather of a person who has suffered inoperable brain damage; even a corpse is not a lump of matter, but a dead body. (An animal of prey, perhaps, takes sheer physical life, but the notion that the human taking of human life is equivalent in any sense to a sheer animal taking of life is implausible.) Second, intrahuman killing is always motivated by the meaning which its intentionality discloses,38 e.g., that this person is a terrorist, a murderer, a drug trafficker, a Communist, a traitor, a Royalist, a triple-offender, an infidel, an apostate, a latestage cancer patient, a witch, and so on. To take an overtly physical example, a late-stage embryo manifesting profound organic deformity might be aborted on the basis of that biological property. Organic deformity is a pathological condition that might produce inevitable biological deterioration, but is also understood in manifold senses; in contemporary rural India, for instance, a baby born with eight limbs is perceived as a divine emanation of a Hindu deity (for example a multi-limbed Shiva) and worshipped in the village and beyond accordingly (see Nelson 2015; National Geographic 2008). There is no doubting the facticity of the biological case, but there is no intrinsic relation between that case and its suitability as an object for the termination of life. The purely physiological fact is only justificatory when it is given meaning. Hence, the deformed foetus is aborted because the suffering that degenerative disease is believed to visit upon its living bearer is deemed unacceptable by the clinical killer,

mental objects, though the term ‘property’ is typically used here to denote that element or object x predicated of a broader element or object y (ie. not a broader construal of x. For example, water is a property of the sea, which could be understood as an extension of water. But the sense of property meant here is that object which is not a necessary or sufficient condition for the existence of y). Given a Buddhist rejection of universals we can construe talk of properties here nominally. 38 There may be rare dissociative psychotic states relevant to a ‘meaningless version’ of the lethal act, that might belie this claim; but even ‘meaninglessness’ could be said to be meaningful in its deprivation of meaning. In any case it is those acts characterized by broadly familiar rational motivations with which we are here concerned.

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his professional fraternity, and the broader society in which those meanings find their necessary context. Moreover, that belief is a property of the lethal agent, not the object of his act. Hence, the relevant property of the object-person is itself mediated from the side of the agent by a sense or intension, under which the target person is conceived as an intentional object of killing. In Buddhist terms, both mental properties themselves, but also the intentional phenomena mediating their evaluation as apt objects for killing, fall under n¯ama rubrics of conscious, affective-cognitive contents, and volitional formations. If we seek to establish universal Buddhist badmakers for killing, our task is then to describe the distinct senses in which, on a Buddhist metaphysical account and thus for its lifeworld, rational claims for justified killing within and outside its lifeworld are incoherent. In order to do so, we need to consider how the intentional structure of lethal acts can be characterized as a cognitive relation between the agent and the person conceived as a conventionally real, intersubjectively constructed, social entity.

4 Selves Engaging Others: Agents as Actors and as Thinkers 4.1 Reification as a Global Badmaker for Intentional Killing The foregoing offered an ontological account, in Buddhist terms, of what human epistemic agents broadly take themselves to be doing, and causally enabling, in the intentional lethal act. Its purpose was thus to also draw attention to the sense in which the intentionality constituting lethal acts is a cognitive activity such that subjectivity is itself constituted by it. As we’ve seen, for a generic Buddhist account there is no substantive subject above and beyond the various intentional acts and contents that constitute experience. Garfield’s commentary on N¯ag¯arjuna’s refutation of the reified subject in M¯ulamadhyamakak¯arik¯a (MMK) is pertinent: By “appropriation,” N¯ag¯arjuna indicates any cognitive act by means of which one takes an attribute or entity as one’s own, or as part of one’s self. That includes the grasping of the aggregates as the self or of one’s mental states as part of one’s identity or of one’s possessions as central to one’s being. Appropriation in this broad sense is, hence, a central object of concern for Buddhist philosophy and psychology, and the relation between the appropriator and the act of appropriation is an important object of analysis. For in many ways the self that is constructed through appropriation presents itself as the subject of appropriation. But it is merely constructed, and its substantial reality is illusory. (1995, 182)

The subject, lacking substantial existence, just is those acts of appropriation whereby a mental or material object is mentally taken within the putative domain of the self. The same process of appropriation applies for those mental acts, also ‘owned’ by and thereby constituting the subject, regarding properties ascribed to others: I conceive the other as the intrinsic bearer of, for example, ‘mental states as part of

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their identity.’ Yet (as N¯ag¯arjuna reiterates throughout the MMK) the subject—and the other vis-à-vis the subject—does not possess such acts as their autonomous and substantial bearer39 ; the conventional subject of predication just is her ‘appropriated’ constructions, ultimately empty of intrinsic existence, of substantial self, world and other. It is for this reason that we can speak in the Buddhist case of a cognitive phenomenology, in which phenomenology is far more than a matter of subjective qualia. It rather concerns how subjects simultaneously cognize and experience the intentional contents conceptually constructed by them, vis-à-vis whatever they impute as outside the phenomenal sphere of the self. Different subjects (different predicated ‘I’s’) appropriate different psychophysical objects to their selfconstruction. What they necessarily share, however, is the feature that the other is, definitionally but still more phenomenologically, precisely what is not the self in its subjective self-experience. This cognitive reification of self, and of other, thus gives rise to a dualistic field of experience in which killing, for example, is enabled as an act causally relating two (or more) putatively real selves, and which produces suffering that is held, in Buddhist-psychological terms, to be its universal effect. In this global Buddhist sense, then, the reification of self and other is also a global badmaker for killing. This however requires an obvious caveat: there are of course similarly reified phenomena, and acts pertaining to them, which while ultimately mistaken are not necessarily conventionally ethically unwholesome. For instance, cognitive reification shows up when some scientific endeavour conceives its own theory as metaphysically substantive in the representation of objective reality, or when creationist theologies claim a historical mythology as equally real; or when groups of people identify as essentially belonging to one or another ethnic and cultural heritage, or when professional athletes compete on the basis of nationality. These are all, usually, benign human phenomena, though they evidence a pretheoretical confidence in the intrinsic reality of their various claims. But killing is not benign, and is prohibited as such: hence, we require an account of its badmakers that does not rely on an analysis of the ultimate nature of its agents and objects. Thus, the intentional object of killing is most broadly the person, instantiating a mistakenly reified duality between the subject and its intentional object: the object of killing is believed to be wholly distinct from its agent even though intentional features wholly imputed to the other are cognitively constitutive of the subject. Intentionality (among other psychological functions) thus formally sustains a self—a ‘me’ as well as an ‘us’—for whom others appear represented on a spectrum of more or less hyperbolic malign import, vis-à-vis the subject and its extensions. The other is made, by the reifying/reified self, that much more ‘other’ to the subject than it actually is. Where these cognitive-affective, intentional and projective relata of subject, reified self, and other, exist in sufficient intensity the conditions for killing are present, and it might well occur. On a Buddhist account (as noted above) the causes and conditions for the intentional commission of the act lie at an extreme of requiring a full course of 39

See MMK; Chaps. 3, 4, 8, 9, 12–14, 17 and 18.

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unwholesome intention. In otherwise like circumstances the lethal act, perhaps only adventitiously, fails to occur; we’ve seen that for atypical subjects, such as arhats, it cannot occur, but this is despite the ambient presence of the typical conditions for its arising. The reification of self and other, which characterizes the cognition of normal lethal agents in focus here, prompts two preliminary, but nonetheless central, claims.

4.2 Two Claims About Killing as a Function of the Reified Self/Selves It’s important at this point to clarify the concealed relation between two facts about killing as an effect and function of the reified and reifying self, who kills others visà-vis that putatively real self. The first concerns that sense in which the intentional lethal act indubitably achieves one desired outcome, with reference to its agent as actor; the second concerns how it does so at the cost of a delusion built into its very enaction, with regard to the agent as thinker. The first fact, noted above, is obvious: in the lethal act life is successfully taken and a person dies. Inasmuch as this effect is clearly intended, the act surely succeeds in its aim.40 The second fact is almost wholly occluded by the first: what does not necessarily occur thereby is the amelioration of the causes ostensibly justifying lethal action—a metaphysical rather than empirical point. This is because, on a Buddhist account of the person, the cognitive causes (as opposed to more or less justified and articulable reasons) for killing always already entail fundamental misconceptions of the person, the self, and the other, as cognitively imputed psychophysical entities. An ethics of killing grounded on those misconceptions is at best deeply flawed if not incoherent, and can, for Buddhist-philosophical purposes, be theoretically revised within the sphere of the conventional understanding of the person. In this context we can recall the possibility already signalled (in Chap. 5, above) in Tillemans’ reference to Dharmak¯ırti and the Pram¯an.av¯adan commitment to prescriptive epistemological argument that seeks “largely to change what the world thinks in order to better conform to entities.” (2010/2011, 364) We’ve seen that the lethal agent takes himself to kill a propertied person. We’ve also noted the sense in which an Abhidhamma/Abhidharma account of the ontology of the act qualifies that truth: what occurs on the level of the fundamental ontology of the relevant dhammas is distinct from what the agent (who is not thinking of constitutive dhammas) conceives. Simply, on this account there is an ontological distinction entailed between what the agent believes is occurring and what really is occurring, even when the commission of his intention adventitiously, and as we have seen explicably, results in its expected effect. 40

Note, however, that the cessation of life again necessarily signifies something much more than the mere fact of death, for its agent and his social milieu. The taking of life ineliminably, and in the first instance, represents any number of intensional states, such as the relief of subjective suffering, the vindication of revenge, the removal of an obstacle, the vanquishing of an enemy, and so on.

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This marks an important formal Buddhist distinction between a veridical description of the cognitive phenomenology of the agent and the ontology of the act, whereby a Pram¯an.av¯adin, for example, who distinguishes between these two objects of truth claims, would conceive the former as at best only conventionally true, and the latter as an ultimately true description of the same event. According to the Pram¯an.av¯adin, then, the conventionally true rationale for killing in the pretheoretical sense described in the previous section, is based on doxastic premises that in being ultimately false express a fundamental ignorance of the epistemic status of their own presuppositions. But there is still another, more significant, Buddhist qualification to make. First, we can briefly consider a major aspect of the former obvious sense of ‘successful killing’.

4.3 The Cessation of Volition We’ve noted above that lethal agents frequently take life purely for the purpose of disabling volitional activity. There are of course innumerable reasons why such agents seek to immobilise or prevent bodily and verbal (and possibly even mental) volitions in others. This is a large intentional category which informs the full spectrum of normativity: from the altruistic purpose of protecting innocents to the malign one of disabling them. It’s equally evident that lethal action in these cases succeeds in its aim of immobilising its victims, irrespective of its normative status, and so also represents a causal congruence between its cognitive and intentional content, and its effect. For that reason, the intent to achieve the cessation of volition in others as such can be analytically distinguished from the reasons such cessation is desired. While the Buddhist-ontological account above has confirmed the evident efficacy of this basis for lethal action, it can in doing so also critically consider the primary reasons, motivations and intentions giving rise to the agential volition to disable others’ volitions (some among them are addressed in Part II). If those reasons are possibly limitless, and represent distinct loci of critical enquiry, this need not stop us focussing more fundamentally on the cessation of volition per se. Moreover, in Sect. 2 we’ve considered the sense in which the sa˙nkh¯arakhandha of the person is a deep-psychological and even unconscious causal basis for the production of the sense of self (attabh¯ava) that gives rise to the myriad cognitive-affective afflictions constitutive of the self’s suffering. In this function as the depth-psychological ‘reservoir’ for individual and even social-collective volitional complexes of action, the sa˙nkh¯arakhandha—the ontogenetic effect of primal ignorance (avijj¯a/avidy¯a) and the cause for consciousness (viññ¯an.a/vijñ¯ana)—goes far beyond its local case in the volitions of the individual. In Sect. 2.1 we saw that the volitional formations are both passive and active, already formed by, and forming, further such volitions which causally consolidate

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an ongoing series of karmically fruitful habitual dispositions (v¯asan¯as). This selfperpetuating ‘construction’ of cognitive habit is itself conditioned by primal ignorance. Where ignorance of the true nature of the self is for Buddhism the case, as it definitionally is for all unenlightened beings, then the volitional formations of mental continua continue to be determined by the self-constructive activity of previous intended actions of body, speech and mind that produce kammic consequences (vip¯aka). Collins summarizes the canonical diachronic description of sa˙nkh¯ara in its broader soteriological sense: the technical term ‘formation’ (sam . kh¯ara) is explained as ‘(people) form a construction, thus they are “formations”’ (sam . khatam abhisam . kharot¯ıti tasm¯a sam . kh¯ar¯a). Similarly, those who ‘take delight in formations’ are said to ‘construct further formations which conduce to rebirth’. […] ‘If an ignorant person performs (such) a meritorious, demeritorious or neutral act, (his) consciousness is on its way to merit, demerit (or) neither. […] Whatever a man wills, intends, and is obsessed [unconsciously determined] by, that becomes an object for the persistence of consciousness […] It is only when ‘consciousness is not persisting, not growing, not forming constructions’, that there comes to be release. (1982, 202–203)41

That is, for as long as primordially ignorant self-construction constitutes the mental continuum and conscious volitions that are its active expression, then causal bases exist for the pre- and post-mortem continuity of that mind, and the unsatisfactory state of sam . s¯ara that is ineluctably its issue. Only Buddhist nibb¯ana, achieved through the extirpation of the causes of ignorance, can permanently end the causalconstructive process (sabba-sa˙nkh¯ara-nirodha) that underwrites mental continuity in the usual sense. If on any Buddhist account this is so, then we need to examine how it is relevant to the lethal extirpation of persons’ volitions, and their causal capacity for the production of further volitional activity constituting the mental continuum (sant¯ana) of the person killed. This enquiry can also form a preliminary analysis of the nature of the act as such, detailed in depth in Part II.

41

Collins’ paraphrase contains quotes from SN and Vism.

Part II

Constructions: The Nature of the Act

Chapter 8

Critique of the Conventional: The Cessation of Volition and Buddhist Dualism of the Person

Abstract This chapter focusses in depth on the Buddhist trope-theoretic dualism of the person, especially as this interactionist account pertains to the properties of persons salient for killing, in particular the obviation of hostile volitions. The account provides an overview of Buddhist anti-physicalism of the person, especially with regard to soteriology and the post-mortem continuity of the mental, in which volitional formations (sam . sk¯aras) are directly implicated in the perpetuation of illusory views of self and so the karmic propensity for rebirth. These views are contrasted with consensus physicalist views that underwrite contemporary secular and scientific materialism. Buddhist post-mortem continuity is described especially as it pertains to the bearer of volitions. Having examined the causal dualism obtaining between psychophysical tropes (dhammas/dharmas), a Buddhist objection is raised against the possibility of the final extirpation, if not local obviation, of hostile volitions as the inherently mental objects of lethal acts. This determines this generic case of killing as partially deluded, which along with its epistemic failure is considered in more broadly normative terms. This Buddhist critique of the ‘doxastic account’ of killing given in Chap. 7 therefore highlights a concern for the epistemic adequacy between reasons and the causal efficacy of acts serving the Buddhist telos of the awakening from conventional (as well as ultimate) ignorance. A failure of this larger project, moreover, marks a failure of moral progress insofar as karma obtains only between mental causal functions, and not the physical ones entailed in the killing of otherwise innocent sentient bodies. Keywords Psychophysical property dualism · Materialism and physicalism · Buddhist dualism of the person · Trope-theoretic metaphysics · Post-mortem mental continuity · Mental causation · Karma and rebirth · Lethal volition

1 Introduction: Materialism, Mental Continuity, Volition Chapter 7 concluded by drawing attention to the Buddhist view of the perdurance of the mental, central to Buddhist causal, psychological and soteriological thought in general, and with which any Buddhist account of lethality must, in theory, reckon. There’s an obvious sense in which when a person is killed everything concretely © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_8

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pertaining to that individual is rendered inoperative, including actionable volitions. But the Buddhist account, while agreeing with the claim that an individual’s volitional capacity is thereby ended, theorises that the lethal agent does not, contrary to appearances, succeed in extirpating the volitional bases of the mental continuum per se, which perdures beyond its embodiment in the individual person. This claim can be developed from a series of related components: Nik¯aya theorisation of the twelve links of dependent origination, ontological claims for passive modes of consciousness (bhava˙nga-citta) and ‘construction consciousness’ (abhisa˙nkh¯araviññ¯an.a) in the Therav¯ada,1 the Sautr¯antika theorisation of mental dharmas called ‘seeds’ (b¯ıjas) causally informing the “the problem of explaining continuities among our dispositions in the absence of an enduring mind” (Siderits 2007, 18), which theorisation historically develops into the Yog¯ac¯ara ‘storehouse consciousness’ (¯alayavijñ¯ana).2 Such seeds are held on this account to fuel the constructive activities of the 3 4 sam . sk¯aras which provide the causal basis (ie. as kamma/karman) for the ‘rebirth’ of a mental continuum in a subsequent sentient being. The post-mortem perdurance of the mental is thus basic to a foundational body of Indian Buddhist thought, its theoretical status ineliminable. Because this central function of the sam . sk¯aras ´ avakay¯ana and Yog¯ac¯ara (and many non-Indian is maintained by the theorists of Sr¯ Mah¯ay¯ana) schools and traditions, the general question arises as to whether the lethal act succeeds in extirpating the volitional formations causally implicated in and as persons’ mental continua. For the Buddhist to maintain a notion of some form of post-mortem mental continuity, she cannot also maintain that killing a person succeeds in destroying these causal bases, for then no ground remains (beyond bare avidy¯a itself) for consciousness to perdure as some karmically-determinate mental content. The causal bases for intentional action must ‘survive’ the death of the individual person, in order to reconstitute the volitional formations and deep predispositions (v¯asan¯as) of a subsequent embodied person. However, this also means the Buddhist is philosophically required to provide a causal explanation for how and why the lethal act would fail to effect their extirpation. Naturally, non-Buddhist agents indifferent to Buddhist-soteriological concerns might remain unmoved by speculations irrelevant to their purpose of taking life. On the Buddhist account, however, that purpose entails error if it also assumes that death results in the total erasure of everything psychologically constituting the person: an assumption that might be unconsciously entailed in the intentional structure of the lethal act. The Buddha forcefully rejected any rival Indian materialist school, such 1 See Gethin (und. p.20ff .) for discussion of the bhava˙ nga consciousness in the process of death and rebirth. Also Collins (1982, 205–208). 2 See Waldron (2003) passim, and 220–221 (n.27) for the abhisankh¯ ara-viññ¯an.a. 3 Sanskrit is used with general reference to the Abhidharma and Sautr¯ antika contexts and their appropriations of and responses to relevant Abhidhammic doctrine already surveyed, above. 4 This term is misleading, but unfortunately ubiquitous. There is nothing to be re- ‘born’ when the relevant mental continuity is defined by its process of momentary but constitutive transformation. Rather, ‘rebirth’ signifies that an authentically new entity (n¯amar¯upa) comes into existence on its basis.

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as that of the C¯arvakas, who held this ‘annihilationist’ view. For a parallel reason, the Buddha explicitly condemns (e.g., at Vin. III 72–73) the notion that obviating suffering could be achieved by simply killing the suffering person,5 and so render the entire Buddhist path redundant. The very purpose of that path is to extirpate suffering at its global root, not merely in its local effect, which latter act would only make the root of delusion (moha), and grasping to an illusory (and suffering-producing) self-view (sakkaya-dit..thi/satk¯ayadr.s..ti), that much stronger. An agent might maintain a belief in post-mortem mental continuity, but theoretically argue that because a subsequent ‘rebirth’ will be a different person, with a different set of aggregates, then her reasons for killing the present person might be justified, since it is solely that person who supervenes on these skandhas, and disabling those aggregates clearly disenables his or her actionable volitions. But this remains a problem for the Buddhist, who maintains the aforementioned commitments, because he recognizes (1) that the actionable volitions of persons disenabled in the lethal act still causally depend on the sam . sk¯aras constituting the sam sk¯ a raskandha, and which perdure post-mortem, and hence (2) that where action. able volitions are neutralised in killing any given person, their ontological bases and causes will not be eliminated, and so continue to function as the cause for subsequent volitions: the pre-emptive elimination of which the agent has sought as her very aim in killing. Logically, one would be required to kill the bearer of such volitions in a repetitive cycle of ultimately ineffectual, karmically-unfruitful intentional action. Obviating volitions in any given person is thus not equivalent to extirpating volitional dispositions. Hence, the Buddhist recognizes that while the person as the object of killing in this case is volitionally neutralised, the elimination of the relevant dispositions is not effected, and that this (among other problems, addressed below) compromises its theoretical justification for the potential Buddhist agent. Killing on this basis for the Buddhist disregards the very point sustaining the premise of Buddhist rebirth: that it is the sam . sk¯aras that causally sustain ignorant mental continuity, provide the kammic impetus behind future cetan¯as, including lethal ones, and much of the psychological dispositions that subtend morally valenced behaviours. Whether it is this or another person who is killed is entirely arbitrary when the problem at issue, for the Buddhist, is constitutive malign volitions, not persons driven by them, per se. At issue in this chapter, then, is killing with the broad intention to eliminate malign volitions inasmuch as they are predicated of persons as their putative bearer— germane to cases concerning public security, counter-terrorism, policing or preemptive military measures in general. It thus engages the question of in what sense, and with what qualification, that intention is on a Buddhist view effected. Three points should be noted in this context. First, the following discussion refers to kamma as constituting the production of the sam . sk¯aras. But this reference to kamma does not rely on its instantiating radically inaccessible facts (atyantaparoks.a) that stipulatively justify epistemic or normative Buddhist truth-claims (see Chap. 5). Rather, 5

See Kovan (2018, 647–648) for a range of canonical examples of euthanasia rejected by the Buddha.

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kamma here discursively serves as a heuristic principle unifying mental and axiological causal categories (for example in cetan¯a). It functions conceptually in this discussion as a metaphysical posit rather than as dogmatic justification for an (in practice) unknowable fact. Similarly, the metaphysical posit of post-mortem mental continuity (and thence, ‘rebirth’) is embedded within a wide range of Buddhist causal-soteriological reasoning about mind. Because it is so embedded, it cannot readily be jettisoned as negligible to a Buddhist account. It should also not be sustained as a truth regarding which a Buddhist reasoner can merely have faith but not exercise some rational examination. Rather, reference to kamma as a causal principle, and to post-mortem mental continuity, are both treated as metaphysical posits sustaining some degree of cogency within their conceptual contexts. Finally, as with many areas of scholastic concern to Buddhist Studies, mapping the historical and conceptual development of major terms and categories is complex and frequently recondite. The variations in conceptual and taxonomical descriptions (and debates therein) of the protean nature of the sa˙nkh¯aras/sam . sk¯aras (as well as the dhammas/dharmas) traversing non-Buddhist doctrines, Buddhist tenet systems, and their historical schools, is a case in point.6 Charting even the relevant parts of this complex domain would divert from the task of understanding to what use the hitherto mentioned Buddhist schools and tenet systems could put their claims concerning the causal function of the sam . sk¯aras noted above. The argument of this chapter engages a syncretic account, pursuing a philosophical rather than exegetical goal. To provide background to that end, we need first to consider how the Buddhist posit of post-mortem continuity might feature in a contemporary non-Buddhist philosophical landscape.

1.1 The Post-mortem State In the first decades of the twenty-first century, many members of secular and scientific society, as well as atheist or agnostic philosophers, conceive of the post-mortem condition as a state lacking all content, as not-conscious and so not experienceable by a subject.7 On this view, there is no conscious state of being dead. It would follow from this that where there is sentience in the living state, this will simply cease upon the advent of death. We must, however, distinguish between un-conscious states, which have mental content (dreams, etc.), and not-conscious states, which definitionally do not. The states with which we are concerned here are theoretically not unconscious, but not-conscious; they are not states of subjects, as those subjects no longer exist.

6

See Jaini (1959/2001, 239ff .) for a study of the description of sam . sk¯aras across the Therav¯adaAbhidhamma and Sarv¯astiv¯ada-Abhidharma, and other, classificatory systems. 7 Jacquette (1994, 156) for example, writes that “at the moment of death there is only oblivion”.

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It is, however, possible that the post-mortem condition is otherwise; hence, the assumption of post-mortem oblivion cannot be presumed to be true without argument. I won’t rehearse here the many reasons informing this argument in either (neuro-) scientific or philosophical terms; to do so would be orthogonal to the task of the chapter, which is to elucidate the Buddhist position for mental continuity in the context of the elimination of volitions, rather than for why it may or may not be plausible with respect to some reductive and physicalist accounts of mind.8 Briefly, however, on the one hand, if a materialist account of consciousness is true, and mental facts are both fixed and explicable by physical ones, then we ought in theory to be able to have full explanation of all mental phenomena in virtue of having third-personal access to and knowledge of all the physical facts pertaining to the subject of such mental experience. But the resistance of many mental facts to such explanation gives rise to an “explanatory gap” between explanandum and explanans. The problematic of this gap can be found expressed in the Western philosophical context at least as early as by Leibniz in the Monadology (§17) of 1714, who conceives of it in terms of a distinction between physical facts as expressing the structure and function of entities, and a range of mental facts (now often summarised as phenomenal experience) which resist physical or mechanistic explanation because they do not entail structure or function. When I am deeply moved by Mozart’s music, for example, there are modes of sensory, emotive, aesthetic, intellectual, and even quasi-religious experience that are not captured, or capturable, by physical explanations. On the other hand, if such mental facts cannot be explained by their apparent physical causes identified in experimental neuroscience, then another gap results, an ontological-causal one, between physical and mental explanations for the same phenomenon. The dualist holds that the mental explanation refers to an event ontologically distinct from that described by the physical explanation. This view renders physical explanation irrelevant to that mental event, a result which appears on its face epistemically and scientifically implausible inasmuch as there are clearly some physical causes at work in most mental phenomena. If mental causation is ontologically distinct in this way, it also renders the mind powerless to causally affect the physical universe science is otherwise impressively able to explain without assuming the existence of mental causation. While the Buddhist view, as we’ve seen in Chap. 7, is closer to the dualist view, it also presupposes only a restricted non-supervenience of a very subtle dimension of consciousness, recognising as it does an otherwise high degree of mutual determination between psychophysical processes. While on the one hand neuroscientific theory and experiment increasingly maps the neural activity corresponding to sensory and related cognitive experience, it lacks the conceptual and experimental means to neurologically account for such experience as first-personally and consciously experienced. Some theorists, such as McGinn (2004, 72), argue that these means will always in principle be inaccessible to us. Bitbol similarly writes that: 8

Stoljar (2010) and Pereboom (2011) engage the state of physicalism in recent decades. Arnold (2015) discusses the “hard problem” of consciousness in the context of Buddhist idealism.

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Scientists who believe that solving many such “easy problems” [neural correlates to cognition] about consciousness will finally clear up the harder problem of its physical origin, look like somebody who believes one can finally reach the horizon by walking far enough. In the same way as the walker ignores the category gap between a line in space and an apparent line seen through space, these scientists ignore the category gap between the exclusively structural connections provided by science and the absolute of experience analyzed through a structured framework. (2008, 10; italics original)

The “hard problem” of the origin and location of consciousness shows little sign of resolution. The 20th-century near-consensus regarding an ontological supervenience of all mental on material phenomena, in the 21st evidences a wide range of divergence from that hitherto physicalist orthodoxy.9 In brief, neither the biological sciences nor research on the neural bases for consciousness, nor arguments in the philosophy of mind, provide certainty that consciousness in some form, however restricted, does not exist after the dissolution of the body (Restak 18). The best neuroscientific evidence for the neural bases of consciousness describes plausible correlations, but an incomplete account of the dependency, obtaining between some mental and neural functions in a living nervous system (Bitbol 12ff .). Having plausible evidence for some relations of dependence is still not yet an explanation of the ontogenetic or phylogenetic origin of consciousness: we can as yet only assume its absolute termination with the biological death of the conscious organism. Buddhist views of post-mortem continuity offer an alternative perspective. While Buddhist soteriology asserts that there is a post-mortem continuity of consciousness, this thesis as well is only a possibility for which there is little or no empirical evidence. In assuming the Buddhist view of continuity in what follows, I presuppose no partisan position: philosophically engaging its posit does not require that it be believed as true or even probable. My purpose is rather to clarify, for Buddhist-philosophical reasons, the position that must unequivocally inform the Buddhist understanding of killing the person as the agent of volitions.10

1.2 Killing the Bearer of Volitions We’ve seen in Chap. 7 that on a generic Buddhist account of reification, the person qua person is ontologically nothing other than a conceptual imputation.11 The person can be killed only because personhood supervenes on the ultimate reals of aggregate psychophysical dharmas, and we saw in the previous chapter that ‘killing’

9

Among others, see Chalmers (1996), Crane (2001), McGinn (2004), Bitbol (2008), Brogaard (2015), Nagel (2012) and Strawson (2006, 2017). 10 This account will also be significant for the argument of Chapter 11, concerned with killing for the purpose of ending suffering. 11 Hence, the lethal agent only ‘kills a person’ in a nominal sense, just as ‘demolishing Melbourne University’ requires that the separate buildings and administrative apparatus comprising it be dismantled, where there is no discrete existent ‘Melbourne University’.

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denotes the permanent disruption of their coordinate function as n¯amar¯upa: in Abhidhammic/Abhidharmic terms the ultimately true account of the state of affairs the agent (among others) describes as ‘killing someone’. In terms of cognitive phenomenology, however, the agent does not thematically conceive killing either a merely ‘nominal’ or ‘reified’ person as the intentional object of his act. The person is the object for any intrahuman lethal act, simply because to kill any human being entails that that sentient being be a person (given varying senses of personhood, e.g., embryonic, normal, vegetative, etc.). The imputed property of personhood is orthogonal to the intentional object of killing, and being invariable between persons does not distinguish different classes of the lethal act if, as we’ve seen, lethal agents only kill because of determinate claims about persons, or attitudes towards them, rather than their personhood as such. The feature of the person that is determinative for the lethal act is thus some property of the person, even where the person remains its intentional object. We saw that this object is aspectually nuanced or shaped by intensional and other cognitive content that evaluates the person. We also saw in Chap. 7 that in cases where physiological properties are what putatively justify agents’ reasons for killing, these reasons reduce to judgements regarding those properties, deeming the person worthy (or unworthy) of being killed. But again, the only reason the person is killed in the case at issue is in order to put out of action their relevant volitions, and as members of the sam . sk¯araskandha (a member of the set of n¯ama-skandhas) volitions are, on any Buddhist account, mental phenomena.

1.3 Volitional Formations (Sam . sk¯aras) as Mental Properties We noted above that the sam . sk¯araskandha collects mental dispositions (cittasam . sk¯aras) which as conditioned compound states ontologically reduce to mental dharmas. As reals they possess, for post-canonical Abhidhamma exegesis, the fundamental causal efficacy pertaining to their respective intrinsic natures (sabh¯ava/svabh¯ava).12 Our concern is not so much with these distinct causal capacities, than with the ontological and causal conditions for their continuity or cessation, and their susceptibility to change or ability to effect it, particularly where these concern their ontological counterpart in the r¯upa-dharmas with which they’re functionally imbricated. Ronkin writes that both the Sarv¯astiv¯ada and the Therav¯ada theories of causal conditioning are based on the notions that dharmas are psycho-physical events that perform specific functions, and that to define what a dhamma is requires one to determine what it does […]. It turns out, then, that the relative positioning of each dharma within a network of causes and conditions is, first and foremost, a means for its individuation. Only in a subsidiary sense is this network an analysis of causal efficacy. What reappears here is the categorial dimension of the dharma analysis qua a metaphysical theory of mental events in terms of sameness of conditional relations. (2018 §5) 12

See e.g., Vism. VIII 246; Dhs-a 39–40; Pat.is-a I 18.

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On this view there just is mental and physical tropic events in various states of causal dependence relations, structured in terms of homogeneous as well as heterogeneous series of relations with other such events. If the person just is causal networks of psychophysical properties, then the causal series constituting discrete volitions can be analytically reduced to mental tropes or dharmas. But if the person as such is by Buddhist posit already reified as really-existing (rather than perceived as merely conceptually imputed) then similarly a corresponding propensity of the reifying mind reifies mental properties as physical ones, in terms of both cognitive phenomenology and objective philosophical and scientific discourse. In that latter case, a person just is a physical substance or aggregate of (ultimately) physical properties. Indeed, this is arguably a pretheoretical and theoretical default understanding of the ontology of the person for a large portion of contemporary scientific (and scientistic secular-rational) society. If this default plausibly characterises the cognitive pre-conditions undergirding the agent’s act, then it makes sense to that agent to kill: destruction of the (reified) person entails destruction of his constitutive properties, including apparently mental ones.13 But it’s important to note that this physicalist default is one that all Buddhist doctrine unanimously rejects (a stance we’ve already noted in the Buddha’s rejection of annihilationist theories of the person as expressing a major instance of wrong view). Arnold confirms that: Buddhist philosophers are emphatically not physicalists. Indeed, it is important to understand that exemplars of the Buddhist philosophical tradition—including, in Dharmak¯ırti, one of the most influential of all Indian philosophers—elaborated an eminently dualist account of the person. […] the traditionally transmitted utterances of the Buddha include passages to the effect that physicalism is finally a more pernicious error even than self-grasping. (2014, 4–5; italics in original)

In light of this claim, we need to clarify how early Buddhist traditions conceive psychophysical relations in non-physicalist terms.

2 N¯amarupa ¯ and Trope-Dualism of the Person A generic Buddhist resistance to physicalism could approach its critique from different potential directions, appealing to a range of conceptions of consciousness, inasmuch as what classical Buddhist philosophers “have in common is the idea that

13

Note that this modifies the doxastic picture of Chap. 7 only by theoretically attenuating what otherwise remains the given folk sense of a nominal dualism of the person.

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consciousness is both non-physical and fully natural.” (MacKenzie 2019, 132).14 MacKenzie notes that they rejected materialism on philosophical, not merely dogmatic, grounds. In contemporary terms, Buddhist philosophers saw that phenomenal consciousness, intentionality, and mental causation present serious problems for materialism. (ibid.)

Similarly, Griffiths reports of the Therav¯ada that to uphold “the thesis that mental events can be caused by physical events, [is] something that […] the tradition is not willing to do.” (1986, 37) For him this evidences a profound dualism in regard to mental and physical events, a dualism which perceives these as different in kind, capable of interaction of various kinds but not of acting as direct efficient causes of one another. (41)

Every dependent-arising definitionally requires a discrete set of causes and conditions for its occurrence, including those analytically irreducible events defined as physical or mental dharmas.15 As noted in the conditional theory of the twelve links of dependent origination, volitional formations are a conative cause for those conditioned mental events (citta-sam . sk¯aras) that successively produce the capacity for consciousness, name-and-form, sensation, desire, as well as cognitive acts of discrimination, conceptualisation and representation. Some of these arise in contiguity to or conjunction with those physical events (r¯upadharmas) from which they are functionally (and very often phenomenologically) differentiated.16 A paradigmatic case, already prominent in the Nik¯ayas, is of psychophysical causation in perception, where causal dependency involves a series of events inclusive of physical and mental processes (noted in square brackets, below). Consider visual perception first thing on waking, where visual consciousness has for some time been dormant. Granting the precondition of a mental continuum, ´ antaraks.ita demonstrates some MacKenzie’s reconstruction of arguments from Dharmak¯ırti and S¯ of these directions, respecting their alignment in some senses and non-alignment in others. He suggests in view of a “neo-Dharmakirtian dualist” account that “The naturalistic trope dualist need not deny supervenience, but rather should deny metaphysical supervenience in favour of natural, nomological supervenience. That is, mental and physical tropes are systematically correlated in the natural world as we observe and try to explain it, but mental tropes are not metaphysically necessitated by physical tropes.” (op. cit. 139). 15 McGinn (2004, Chap. 6) postulates an atomic (or trope-theoretic) model of mind or consciousness, entirely independent of Buddhist dharma theory yet sharing many of its hallmarks (including a compatibility with psychophysical dualism). He aligns his schema with aspects of physical atomism, in which “Conceivably, the correct atomic theory of consciousness might make the psychophysical divide look even more unbridgeable, and some quite new conceptual framework be needed in order to get a unified picture.” (133) Moreover, McGinn (apparently unaware of the over two-millennium history of such a theory in the Buddhist Abhidhamma) is confident that an atomic theory of mind “is the best bet in the current state of knowledge” (117) and that “it seems like a theory-form that might actually be true.” (135) Cf. Brogaard (2015) for a similar prospective tropic theory of mind. 16 The defining characteristics (svalaksana) of physical events are extension, spatio-temporal loca. . tion and a felt resistance (pat.igha; Sk. pratigha) to objects of form. Recall that r¯upa itself derives from the root rup- meaning ‘to strike, break, injure,’ so that this etymology with its semantic links with ‘resistance’ is concretised in the centrality of r¯upa to killing. 14

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Dependent on the eye and forms [r¯upa], eye-consciousness [n¯ama] arises. The meeting of the three is ‘contact.’ [n¯amar¯upa] With contact as condition there is feeling [n¯ama]. What one feels, that one perceives [n¯ama]. What one perceives, that one thinks about [n¯ama]. What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates [n¯ama]. (MN I 111–112; ѯan.amoli and Bodhi 1995, 203)

This canonical sequence evidences a causal dependence between physical and mental functions, where visual consciousness arises from interaction between material causes (including visual organs) and a prior moment of consciousness, but not directly from physical elements themselves. Visual (and other sensory) capacity and its objects are necessary but not sufficient causes for visual consciousness, which requires a former moment of (visual or other) consciousness as its primary causal antecedent, expressing an essential connection of natures (svabh¯avapratibandha) between the cause and its effect. Tillemans notes that, in subsequent Dharmakirtian terms, “this connection will guarantee that there is a “nexus where [the effect] will not be without [the cause]” (avin¯abh¯avaniyama)”. (2020, Sect. 1.4) As Griffiths notes of the Therav¯ada, the Sautr¯antika view of Dharmak¯ırti also makes the direct causal incommensurability of n¯ama and r¯upa explicit.17 MacKenzie writes: The primary cause of an effect must be sufficient to produce it and there must be something about the very nature of a primary cause that accounts for its power (´sakti) or fitness (yogyat¯a) under the right circumstances to produce the effect. A secondary cause can condition or modulate an effect but is not sufficient to produce it. Thus, Dharmak¯ırti’s view seems to be that mental and physical tropes cannot be the primary causes of the other, but that they can be secondary causes. (2019, 137)

Both non-reductive physicalist and non-physicalist claims could broadly align with a naturalistic Buddhist theorization of mental causation.18 For the former, there is on this account no concern about physical to mental secondary causation, and if mental acts are taken non-reductively to be causally relevant for physical ones, vice versa. But distinguishing between primary causes and secondary causes also redefines what is causally possible on a Buddhist-dualist account, and constrains what kinds of effects are possible given certain acts. Moreover, this neo-Dharmakirtian account of psychophysical interactionism refines the broadly Abhidhamma account of Chap. 7 that theorised a pretheoretical or folk understanding of the person, and hence a doxastic sense of justified killing. There are many acts, such as killing, which demand an aggregate causal function of volitions with r¯upa-dharmas in order to effect the change intended. If 17

Including, by extension, r¯upa and axiological causal incommensurability, as we’ll see below. Of course, as kamma, mental cetan¯a and moral value are explicitly equivalent. 18 This is because the denial of the identity of physical and mental properties does not entail the denial of mental properties as ultimately inclusive in the ‘physical’ in a manner natural science does not yet understand, but might in a future physics. As Crane (2001, 62ff .) theorizes, a view of mental causation in an emergentist ‘downward causation’ conceives mental events as distinct and independent causal operators only contingently supervenient on neural states. Cf. MacKenzie (2019, 140–141).

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a Buddhist dualist holds that r¯upa-dharmas cannot in themselves produce, or cause the cessation of, mental tropes, and what is implicitly intended in the lethal act is, in some cognitively opaque but intentionally significant sense, the cessation of volitions constituting the sam . sk¯aras of the person, is that act able to effect it?

3 A Causal Objection: An Account of the Non-cessation of Sam . sk¯aras The Buddhist dualist rejects the annihilationist view that death produces a total erasure of everything constituting the person. One dimension of this claim, on a broadly Sautr¯antika account, lies with a view of the momentariness of dharmas. A conceptual purpose of positing dharmas is to explain changes in persisting macroscopic entities of which they form the microscopic constituents. On this view, it is of their own nature (svabh¯ava) that dharmas go out of existence as soon as they arise; the indivisible ‘moment’ (ks.an.a) they thus express measures the ontological unit of a real existent, as much as a primordial unit of time (Westerhoff 2011; Ronkin 2018). If in this process constitutive dharmas reproduced themselves exactly, the perduring aggregate object (among other such objects) would remain eternally the same and change would be impossible: frozen bodies in a frozen world. But as Vasubandhu notes: “everything that is produced through causes, i.e., conditioned things, presents the character of “transformation” (sthityanyath¯atva); this is the nature of conditioned things” (AKBh IX 1344) just because they ineluctably undergo change. Characterising the svabh¯ava of a dharma (say, of water/wetness) is the causal efficacy (arthakriy¯asamartha) it has to reproduce another such trope, causally determined by its precedent, but altered however subtly by some other kind of dharma (say, of fire or its derivatives) exerting its own causal efficacy, becoming an auxiliary condition (pratyaya) for the transforming continuation of the prior causal series (becoming boiling water). Newly-inflected causal series of related dharmas come to differ qualitatively (as steam) from their precedents: a new kind of existent that remains causally related to but distinct from those which formerly characterised the series of which it forms a part. In this way, the transformation of the larger entity (a unit of water) is explained not by virtue of a persisting macroscopic entity itself changing, but by qualitative differences between earlier and subsequent dharmas within its constitutive causal series. The doctrines of the constitutive momentariness and causal efficacy of dharmas apply to lethal acts inasmuch as only their causal properties and momentariness enable their effects. As conceptually constructed and unreal universals (s¯am¯anya), persons and properties are in themselves causally inert and so cannot effect the transformations enacted by taking life. On the Sautr¯antika account then, persons undergo macroscopic change by virtue of the introduction of novel microscopic causes which, on the ontologically real level of dharmas modify the existing arrangement of dharmas pertaining to the mutual

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functioning of heat, vitality and consciousness, leaving subsequent aggregates of dharmas in now modified causal series of psychophysical aggregates. Only individual dharmas that constitutively cease at the moment of their arising, are thereby literally ‘destroyed’, but not by an other-cause. However, the intersecting causal series of which they form a part have in the lethal case undergone irrevocable modification. It is clear that in killing, the introduction of one set of a causal series of r¯upadharmas of various possible aggregate kinds (whether these constitute a hard implement, or chemical solution, or sharp surface, etc.) into another set of the causal series of r¯upa-dharmas substantially forming the r¯upa-skandha of the person, is able to effect some alteration of the latter set, to the extent of disabling the subset of the set of dharmas that sustains life. Von Rospatt describes it this way: Not only the transformation of series but also their cessation (that is, what is ordinarily conceived of as the utter annihilation of temporally extended objects), is caused by an external agent, which affects the process of reproduction of the object exposed to it in such a way that this process comes to a complete standstill. Hence, in the case of murder, the victim dies because the murderer affects the final moment of the breath of life (pr¯an.a), that is, the vital principle accounting for the body’s animation, in such a way that it fails to reproduce itself. Since the final moment (like all preceding ones) passes out of existence automatically, murder is, microscopically speaking, not destruction but the interception of the process of reproduction. In this way the teaching that all entities pass out of existence spontaneously without depending for this upon any external cause is reconciled with the observation on a macroscopic level that wood is burnt by fire, or that one dies when knifed by a murderer. (2018 §1, my italics)

The person imputed on the skandhas has also been modified by the same process, but only because the same psychophysical arrangement suited to that imputation is now not available as such. But how has it been modified? If it has been literally destroyed, that must require a cause (say, the thrust of a knife). If so, that cause would have as an effect the absence of the person. But on this account, absences are not real, and nothing can be a cause that does not have a real effect.19 Nothing could be the cause of the destruction of the person qua person, but the knife-wounds might be the cause of the coming into existence of real effects such as newly-compromised skandhas. Yet the person has surely gone out of concrete existence. What is conceived as ‘the destruction of the person’ is in ultimately real terms the process of the causal modification of dharma-series, with some of its elements functionally ceasing (such as the j¯ıvitindriya) while others continue in new causal series—for example, in relation to the r¯upa-dharmas, their new constitution as elements in the ‘decomposition process’ of what was not long before a living complex of psychophysical aggregates. This explains the global cessation of the mutually-dependent function of the skandhas individuating the macroscopic person, now permanently dis-aggregated. But it does not answer to what effect occurs, in that same causal event, in the series of dharmas constituting the n¯ama-skandhas of the same psychophysical complex. The primary cause (up¯ad¯ana) of a mental event or property (ie. the aggregate of a set 19

Siderits (2016, 155 & n.16) notes Dharmak¯ırti’s rejection of absences as reals.

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of causal series of mental dharmas) is of the same kind as (samam) and immediately antecedent to (¯an¯antaram, lacking all temporal or spatial interval) its effect. The theorist of that view might ask of the putative effect of killing on the n¯ama-skandhas: what is its ‘immediately antecedent and similar condition’ (sam¯an¯antara-pratyaya)? Clearly, it’s impossible to kill a living being with a thought or feeling process. The primary causes of that effect are thus more or less aggressive, spatio-temporally enacted bodily actions subsequent to mental-affective volitions. The primary cause of the nominal ‘destruction of the person’ is thus the causal series of physical events actualising the mental intention to kill the person, and their primary effect is the disruption of the function of the life-faculty (j¯ıvitindriya) by means of the disaggregation of the relevant psychophysical properties of the person, including importantly consciousness. The sam¯an¯antara-pratyaya in the case of killing is thus explicitly not a mental event, and it does not directly entail, being a r¯upa-dharma causal condition, a mental event as its primary effect. But because, as just noted, its primary effect involves a mental dharma in citta, then consciousness as a non-physical function (ie., causal series of mental dharmas) is secondarily modulated in the novel causal series attending the lethal act. However, it is not thereby destroyed; on the momentariness account nothing composite is actually destroyed, though it can cease to function as that composite by lacking the necessary causes and conditions to do so. Hence, the mental continuum (sant¯ana) of the causal complex of skandhas is dis-aggregated from that former complex, which has ceased to be conscious as such. Consciousness itself, not being a thing but a function, doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere; lacking its requisite pratyaya, it just ceases to function as part of that assemblage. This explains the nominal ‘destruction’ of consciousness vis-à-vis that individuated causal complex, and hence the ‘destruction’ of that nominal unit of psychophysical aggregates and all the various functions of its integrated properties (sensory, hedonic, mental, conceptual, intentional, etc.). The causal series of the citta-sam . sk¯aras (again, recall the Twelve Links) that subtend the production of consciousness have also, as a secondary mental effect of the primary physical cause of killing, been similarly disaggregated from the causal complex that was the nominal person.20 And for the typical lethal agent that is disaggregation enough, and killing has succeeded on those terms. But for the Buddhist theorist the secondary effect only goes that far, and lacks the primary mental cause to effect a primary alteration of the mental series of citta-sam . sk¯aras itself. And it is the primary alteration of the citta-sam . sk¯aras that is crucial for the Buddhist concerned to authentically extirpate malign volitions. While mental events are clearly temporally implicated (antecedently, as preparatory mental volitions of the agent) in the primary physical cause, and, indirectly, in the effect (as just noted, the mental series of the object-person), it appears that mental properties of the object-person are not directly modified in themselves, and that by virtue of the absence of the sam¯an¯antara-pratyaya required for primary causation, an absence (lacking reality) 20

Note though that while the causal series enabling individuated consciousness is disaggregated, a theoretical mental substrate, perhaps non-conscious, need not be.

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cannot be the cause of a real effect: either of a new entity or the modification of an existing (here, mental) one. Hence, post-mortem secondary causes (concerning the mental tropes of the killed person) have effected some degree of change as noted above, mainly in terms of functional disaggregation. This includes, with regard to the sam . sk¯aras as such, their disaggregation from the continuum of the newly-dead person. Those volitional formations are authentically disaggregated from that specific continuum, itself now dispersed into otherwise modified causal series of psychophysical tropes (empirically evident for example in the corpse, still undergoing trope-level transformation). But it is at that point too late for the primary modification (beyond this secondary one) of the victim’s causal series of sam . sk¯ara-dharmas itself, inasmuch as the primary cause of such change—the causal series of mental tropes, especially as cetan¯a-dharmas, of the victim’s own mental continuum—has itself been irreversibly modified in the very event of the person’s death, some moments before. Counter-factually, other possible pre-mortem events, including mental events of the agent (expressed physically in language, writing or other semiotic systems) might have exerted indirect causal effect on the victim’s mental continuum by that continuum itself being able to modify its own causal series, had they had sufficient compelling force as, for example, moral or conceptual phenomena. For instance, the killer may have threatened the victim with death unless the victim surrendered, desisted, or otherwise modified his volitional dispositions via mental-intentional acts, and this may have been sufficient for the desired modification of mental events (and their constitutive tropes) of the victim.21 But it is precisely not the causal implications of the lethal act that have effected those possibilities, even though, in this case of the disenabling of sam . sk¯aras, that is why the act has been, at least implicitly, undertaken. Instead, the potential volitions of the victim have been neutralised not by means of primary mental causation, but by the locally effective physical means of secondary causation, sufficient to disrupt the life-faculty and thence the psychophysical function of the complex causal aggregate upon which the person is conceptually imputed. Hence, it is true that one clear intention, to take life, has succeeded, and along with it potential volitional states and acts associated with that psychophysical continuum. But the extirpation of the causal continuum of sam . sk¯ara-dharmas has not, on this account, been effected thereby,22 the failure of which effect a Buddhist at least is required to take seriously, not just metaphysically but also normatively. 21

Torture clearly presents the case of the exertion of degrees of physical force as a means to effect mental change on its object-person. It potentially succeeds, unlike lethal action, just to the degree that by stopping short of killing it sustains the possibility of mental events being so affected by virtue of primary physical causes in tandem with their secondary mental effects. There would be no causal basis for torture were this possibility not the case. Whether this translates into its normative recommendation is another question. See Jenkins (2010) for discussion of compassionate Buddhist torture in the Mah¯ay¯ana record. 22 What becomes of the causal series of samsk¯ . aras is a question for the theories concerning the mental substrate that encodes the kammic content of the sam . sk¯aras (in terms of b¯ıjas and v¯asan¯as), but their rehearsal is logically not required for the present argument (see e.g., Brewster 2020; Prueitt 2018; Kuan 2013; Gethin n.d.; Griffiths 1986; Jaini 1959/2010, 219ff .).

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3.1 Normative Considerations The foregoing described why the constitutive citta-sam . sk¯aras of the killed person are not eliminated in that act, even while the capacity of the person to act on such volitions has been neutralised, of course, in death. In providing metaphysical reasons for that failure of cessation, it didn’t overtly explain why that failure, with regard to the intention to eliminate malign volitions, is on the same Buddhist account wrong. Killing a person, and so annulling that person’s ability to act, is easily enough achieved. But for an agent who maintains a belief in Buddhist rebirth, mere efficacy as a justification for killing is undermined by the soteriological import of its consequences: indeed, for both its object and agent. This is twofold: first, because a Buddhist by definition is ultimately concerned about globally extirpating suffering at its root, including her own, and hence cares about future states of mental continua, a Buddhist is not justified to intentionally kill when killing persons fails to achieve that extirpation. Second, the non-Buddhist, who doesn’t share the same soteriological concern, might feel justified in killing, but on the Buddhist view is misguided on that account irrespective of its immediate efficacy. It’s highly relevant to the Buddhist if, in intending to eliminate malign volitions by killing persons, doing so does not achieve the authentic amelioration (and even cessation) of the ongoing constructive activity of primordially ignorant mental continuity, generated by and manifest in unskilful acts of body, speech and mind, but rather perpetuates them. The deep-causal function of the citta-sam . sk¯aras is left untouched and pre-natally conditions the arising of another local volitional complex of n¯amar¯upa—or the person regarding which further volitional, transactional and ethical behaviours, including killing itself, is concerned. The killer of persons with malign volitions seeks to eliminate them, but perpetuates them and their potential effects thereby. But it is the negative consequences of volition (akusala-kamma) with which a Buddhist is ultimately and proximally concerned, inasmuch as merely local action, by solving a local volitional problem, only perpetuates the global one. Moreover, and importantly, this occurs in two senses: the original volition is ‘moved elsewhere’ to create ongoing ill-effect, and the act of such (lethal) removal itself enacts the very act of volitional hostility (inherently an akusala-kamma-patha).23 The Buddhist point is that by so acting this doubling effect can only incur unskilful consequence, inasmuch as it reproduces twice over just that which it seeks to avert (meant in heuristic rather than exact terms). The focal problem at issue does not lie with persons per se, whose volitional dispositions can in theory be reformed or improved; rather, it lies with malign volitions and the possibility of their true cessation, which for the Buddhist is only possible by other, non-lethal, means. A non-Buddhist, rejecting the Buddhist-metaphysical and soteriological premises on which this account is grounded, can choose to kill persons in order to conveniently eliminate undesirable volitions and their potential effects. But on this account, a 23

See the discussion of aversion and killing in Chaps. 6 and 10. The discussion to this point logically overlaps with the intention to kill in self-defense, for which see Chap. 13.

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Buddhist is not entitled to kill persons for this reason and will, by virtue of its implications, judge such homicidal acts as unskilful. Moreover, her judgement will implicitly involve a particular sense of the error she regards the agent of such killing to have committed.

4 Knowledge Acquisition and Buddhist-Telic Implications We’ve seen that the function of mental trope-events with respect to physical tropeevents is determined by their mutual causal efficacy, whereby some of their conjunctions achieve intended effects, and others fail to. In light of the foregoing analysis, we can then re-consider the epistemic status of the intention to kill with a view to the cessation of volitions of the individual person. If a pram¯an.a is, as Dharmak¯ırti claims (PV 2, v1a–c), that non-contradictory knowledge (avisam . v¯adijñ¯anam) that conventionally subserves the “fulfillment of a human purpose (arthakriy¯asthiti)” then the intentional lethal act in this case appears to be sanctioned by such knowledge. Tillemans, however, sounds a caution: It is important to emphasise, against a simplistic pragmatic interpretation of Dharmak¯ırti’s position, that a reliable cognition is not one that just happens to be right and works to enable one to obtain what one seeks. It must also be a cognition that came about via a reliable route, ie., an appropriate causal pathway or a set of good reasons. (2020, §2.1)

This caution does not preclude the lethal agent having engaged reliable cognition inasmuch as it succeeds in its goal of killing the person. But we’ve seen that if killing is intended to eliminate volitions then on a normative Buddhist account this reason for killing is not in itself sufficiently justificatory. In light of the concerns noted above, if that success also generates a failure of not only the cessation of the volitional formations, but also knowledge of the fact, then it needs to be qualified, at least on a Buddhist account. This qualification essentially concerns the relation between the intentional basis for the agent so acting and the assumed metaphysics of the person that for that agent warrants such action. To understand this Buddhist qualification, we can shift analytic focus on the intentional basis for killing in this case from an objective concern with the metaphysics and ontology of the victim, to the cognitive phenomenology of the agent, whereby agents cognize and engage intentional acts predicating the achievement of certain concrete effects. In Chap. 7 we noted that, while recognising an implicit but unspecific relatedness between physical and mental phenomena, in lived life most epistemic agents don’t question an ontological seamlessness between mental and physical functions: as a reified construct and taken as such as a whole, all acts pertaining to the person are taken to act on that whole entity. For such agents, there is no existential problem inherent in psychophysical-dualistic existence and, like the lethal agent, they act accordingly.

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The foregoing discussion, however, has shown that that doesn’t make the pretheoretical assumption of ontological seamlessness between mental and physical functions a genuine form of knowledge (pram¯an.a). Agents may be deceived by their cognitive phenomenology in some cases, as in the context of the person and dualist causation we’ve considered above. Rationally engaging the lethal act also raises an epistemic concern around how action is mediated by knowledge-acquisition generally: some acts, as we’ve noted, can be more or less conventionally deluded (see again the discussion of Chap. 7, Sect. 4.1). For the Buddhist epistemologist such as Dharmak¯ırti it is crucial to distinguish between conventional truth and falsehood in order to engage that action which engenders best epistemic, and thence best ethical, practice, which are not unrelated domains: Buddhists seek to engage valid cognition precisely in order to efficiently extirpate suffering. Hence, understanding how, for example, the psychophysical relation is conceived in any given case, inasmuch as it cognitively conditions any intentional act engaging persons is, for a rational Buddhist critic, crucial in evaluating a putatively rational basis for killing. That is what the foregoing, in a metaphysical register, sought to do, in order to arrive at the normative conclusions subsequently noted. What, though, is the real purpose, for the Buddhist, of doing so? Answering this question allows us to spell out the metaphysical distinction noted with respect to the cognitive phenomenology of the agent, and why an epistemic focus is central to the larger Buddhist-soteriological project, and thus has a telic purpose. On any Buddhist account ignorant agents already primordially reify properties. Moreover, if mental functions (or series of mental tropes) were in fact physical their reification as intrinsically physical entities would be ontologically overdetermined. But as we’ve seen above, on an Abhidhamma/Abhidharma, or Mah¯ay¯ana, account, that is not how mental properties conventionally or ultimately exist. Yet according to both broad traditions ordinary agents perceive/conceive (sam . jñ¯a) their aggregates as existing in substantively real terms.24 Hence, if mental properties are theoretically not conceived in that way, but rather veridically as mental propertyparticulars or tropes (Abhidharma) (or as merely ‘conventionally mental’ imputations in the Mah¯ay¯ana), then from the cognitive bias of the primordially ignorant epistemic agent mental properties must be understood to be lacking reality. Why is such perceived irreality of the mental unsatisfactory for physicalists? Because if every existent only has existence inasmuch as it functions to explain events in a closed causal order of observable physical events, then the mental can only instantiate a deficient reality. The apparent ‘irreality’ (for the global reifier) of mental properties is itself another conceptual imputation (courtesy of that reifier) made of that (natural) kind of non-substantial existence conventionally designated ‘mental’. By the same token, on a Pram¯an.av¯ada-Sautr¯antika account of ontological reals in the particulars of svalaks.an.as, what endows those properties conceptually 24

This is to be distinguished from the Abhidharma posit of the dravyasat of dharmas, which refers to the intrinsic qualitative characteristic (svalaks.an.a) they ipso facto instantiate (where, example, the qualitative solidity of a r¯upa-dharma is the index for its veridical essential nature).

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designated ‘the mental’ or ‘the physical’ with essential being (svabh¯ava) is, again, their capacity to function as “causal properties, that is, powers (´sakti)” with the fitness (yogyat¯a) to produce such and such results, in that they will produce those results when the right “complete collections” (s¯amagr¯ı) of circumstances and other properties are united. And what makes any property what it is consists in the contribution it makes to the potential causal behaviour of what has it. (Tillemans 2020, 11)

Essential being (svabh¯ava) on this account just is inherently efficacious causal being. With this causal warrant for existence, mental properties clearly enable the wide range of practical, phenomenal, conceptual, inferential, aesthetic, imaginative and associated purposes they subserve in human experience. Engaging them actualizes multiple potential purposes in the conventional manifold of intentional experience, in which context such purposes are intersubjectively enacted: intentional killing is just one class of them. For Buddhist telic purposes, however, of prime importance among mental properties are the epistemic objects (prameya), valid cognitions (pram¯an.as) and reasoning therefrom, contemplative praxes (sam¯adhi) and moral excellence (´s¯ıla) of the Buddhist path itself.25 The ‘real’—or, causally efficacious—distinction underwriting the Buddhist ontological dualism of n¯ama and r¯upa thus entails the cognitive grasp of the natural fact of functionally dualistic psychophysical existence.26 Understanding how psychophysical properties are causally differentiated yet interdependent is what allows for not maintaining mistakenly that they are either identical (as in eliminative materialism or idealism) or substantially distinct (as in Cartesian substance dualism): insight (prajñ¯a) regarding that veridical causal nature of n¯amar¯upa, is its effect. The arbiter of reality or truth (satya) regarding the intentional content of cognition is just the degree to which it engages that reality-transforming epistemic access to non-delusion (a-moha), or fails to,27 just as much as it engages non-illusory epistemic objects (prameyas). This transformation of the perceived real by virtue of valid cognition is what ultimately sanctions the Buddhist critique of intentional killing in the case here engaged, and this is a properly telic project, not an objectively epistemic one alone.28 In light of this conclusion, three final points should be made. First, the dialectical argument between Chaps. 7 and 8 is thus not the simplistically dualist one that might hold that mental properties are inherently immaterial, thus ‘unkillable’ (even though on the Buddhist account there is still a robust trope-theoretic distinction to be made between mental and physical properties). That claim would be only the other side of the same bias of intrinsicality already familiar in the physicalist reduction, but here claimed for the mental. 25

The mental factor of nibb¯ana is of course another, limit point, of them. MacKenzie notes that “For a trope dualist, the most basic form of event is the occurrence of a trope. At the fundamental level mental and physical events are distinct just because mental and physical tropes are distinct.” (2019, 141). 27 We’ve seen in Chapter 6 the sense in which hostile affect, and the cognitive misrepresentations attending it in killing, precisely fails that same process. 28 Further chapters will revisit this point in different epistemic contexts of intentional killing. 26

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Rather, second, the Pram¯an.av¯adin wants to say that mental and physical tropic events must be veridically distinguished on the level of causal function. They’re differentiated as much on the epistemic as on the metaphysical grounds which Buddhist-theoretical analysis properly serves: among other things, the knowledge of how persons veridically exist. With that epistemic acquisition, the now finergrained and qualified causal interdependence of n¯ama and r¯upa—as opposed to the partially mistaken, coarser-grained conventionalism of the ordinary epistemic agent described in Chap. 7—becomes comparatively transparent. Thirdly, more speculatively, it’s perhaps partly for this reason also that the act of intrahuman killing registers an intrinsic, yet cognitively opaque, sense of mistakenness across a near-universal cultural-historical spectrum: what is felt as its inherent wrongness in virtually all cases is an empirical-psychological indicator of cognitive delusion regarding the actual conditions of human embodiment. Otherwise, there would be no pre-theoretical reason for thinking killing is ultimately an unalloyed wrong. If killing were metaphysically defensible, agents would naturally kill others with a more or less clear conscience, but never a sense of its fundamental wrongness: an idea which would naturally appear misplaced to human agents, constitutively able to kill with unthinking moral impunity (much as they ingest food, or procreate). But there is a further reason why on a Buddhist account that is implausible, which aligns the previous causal objection with an axiological one to which it is functionally related.

5 A Causal-Axiological Objection ´ avakay¯ana We’ve seen that one crucial causal function of mind, according to the Sr¯ traditions, concerns its capacity to effect degrees of morally-valenced action. We’ve noted this as central to the theorisation of cetan¯a and the kammic consequences it’s supposed to effect. Griffiths writes: Physical and mental dharmas […] have different functions, different kinds of effect. Perhaps most notable here is the connection of mind and the mental with action-theory and ethics. According to […] (most Buddhist theory on such matters), only dharmas classified as mental can have morally qualified effects upon the future of the continuum in which they originally occurred. Indeed, only mental dharmas can be morally qualified. (1986, 56, my italics)29

Hence, on this broad view, the only morally salient object modified by the intentional lethal act, apart from its victim per se, is the mental continuum of its agent, and not that of its object. This can be illustrated by the case of killing presumptively malign actors (such as terrorists) in order to obviate their dispositions to commit hostile acts. Given its causal origin in ignorance and aversion the (counter-terroristic)

29

Griffiths is discussing the distribution of dharmas in the Vaibh¯as.ika tradition, but his remarks translate without conflict into the Therav¯ada Abhidhamma and Sautr¯antika.

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lethal act will effect subsequent akusala morally-valenced cognitive-affective dispositions in its agent, inasmuch as Buddhist psychology holds that a lethal intention and its commission incurs such effects in ordinary agents (see Part I passim). This is clearly not the intention of the lethal agent in this case, but on the Buddhist account is sufficient reason for not engaging such acts. The sole site of causal transformation for the acquisition of truth and moral-affective skilfulness over the malign effects of aversion, lies with the mental continuum of the agent himself, not that of another. On this Buddhist account both causal and axiological objections demand the revision of the doxastic rationale for killing given in Chap. 7, which revision would form only one dimension of the broader analysis of persons as apt objects for such acts, the focus of the following chapter.

Chapter 9

Constituting the Other: The Conventional Identity of Persons

Abstract This chapter is a brief transitional discussion between the universal Buddhist-metaphysical features of personhood relevant to generic features of killing (such as volition, psychophysical constitution, and the causal relations between tropeparticulars) and more specifically constituted features of personhood that determine distinct intentional classes of, and reasons for, killing. It deepens the claims of Chap. 7, as a preliminary to their engagement in the argument of Chaps. 10 through to 13, and entails a transition from the broader religious concerns of Buddhist soteriology, to this-worldly conceptions of criterial norms and values for the rational evaluation of acts. The argument thus turns to the social-cognitive construction of persons qua propertied persons: that understanding of persons prompting rational claims for the justification of intentional acts. These preconditions involve socioculturallyspecific claims about persons, and how they are represented by cognitive agents depending on their interests. This introduces the problematic of the a/symmetrical representation of intentional content as an intersubjective field of contesting claims about persons as such, the evaluation of their imputed properties, and the normative status of claims concerning them. Having established this background for the predication of persons as pertaining to one or another class of persons as apt for killing, these can be summarised in four generic classes: as apt for lethal punishment, for the lethal termination of suffering, for the representation of symbolic (ideological, religious, political) identity attacked in lethal acts, and as the literal objects of lethal self-defence. Keywords Personhood and property-predication · Personal identity · Representation and intentional mental content · Intersubjectivity and cognition · Persons as apt for killing · Lethal punishment · Mercy killing · Ideological and religious violence · Lethal self-defence

1 From the Soteriological to the Mundane Chapter 8 focussed on how, given a Buddhist view of psychophysical dualism and post-mortem perdurance of the mental, a general class of intentional killing exemplifies an inherent, if partial, delusiveness. This concern is not marginal to Buddhist © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_9

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´ avakay¯ana and Mah¯ay¯ana explicitly discourse; all Buddhist schools across the Sr¯ accept the post-mortem continuity of the deep-volitional substructure of consciousness, as well as its ethical implications. We saw on a broadly Sautr¯antika account that the primary causation of like dharmas and secondary interdependence between unlike ones must be distinguished. That distinction marks the difference between a veridical and a mistaken understanding of the n¯amar¯upa aggregates on which the person is imputed. However, ignorance of that causal distinction is in part due to the fact that mental properties do function interdependently with the physical properties of the person from whom life is taken. That chapter thus described the double sense in which, on a Buddhist-dualist account, killing successfully obviates actionable volitions of its victim, while ultimately failing to effect the cessation of the sam . sk¯aras of the mental continuum subserving them. Moreover, the arguably unconscious nature1 of that conventionally mistaken apprehension of the person conduces to its opacity for the epistemic agent of lethal action, who remains unaware of a cognitive blind-spot. Most importantly, we noted that the intention to end a life is in every case premised on reasons. As argued in Chap. 7, lethal agents do not conceive killing as ending someone’s life simpliciter, just for its own sake. That hwould be an untenable abstraction from the cognitive case, and (usually if not always) false as a true description of the agent’s mental state. Rather, agents engage more or less coherent reasons distinguished by their respective intentional contexts, to rationally justify their acts. Those reasons are analytically, but not psychologically, separable from the intention to kill, and in part cognitively constitute that intentional datum. We’ve seen that such reasons for lethal acts (even if objectively mistaken) make reference to putative psychological-mental features of their objects: ‘something about’ the volitional states, psychological dispositions, beliefs, or identity of the person to be killed. The intention to obviate volitional properties of persons plausibly motivates many lethal acts. The causal argument of Chap. 8 relied on the metaphysical possibility that a specific volitional form of mental continuity, despite the termination of life, isn’t ruled out. But this Buddhist posit isn’t negligible for the analysis of intentional killing; if true, it wins the greater ‘war of wisdom’ regarding the wrongness of killing, and provides additional epistemic justification for the first precept. But the merely possible metaphysical claim of the Buddhist account is unable to refute the killer’s actual and pragmatic one, and so loses the lesser battle against what remains indubitably efficacious for the latter: taking life as a convenient means to many kinds of ends. The dialectical argument between Chaps. 7 and 8 sought to clarify the error of that intention; but it neither claimed that killing was thereby globally wrong, nor that every intention to kill necessarily entails the intention to extirpate volitional properties. I conceded that the cessation or extirpation of deep-volitional formations might not be the intention, or even implicit basis, for intentional lethal acts; rather, a killer may simply seek to disable volition, by taking a person’s life, for a very wide range of ostensibly practical reasons (such as counter-terroristic, policing, or 1

Thematized in Chap. 7, Sect. 2.1 in the ontogenetic model of the person.

2 Social-Cognitive Construction of the Person as Apt for Killing

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military measures). The killer might remain unaware of the possible metaphysical conditions his act entails, and so in that sense acts in virtue of specifically Buddhist forms of ignorance only. Again, this does not refer to the primal ignorance (avidy¯a) of global reification, but only knowledge of the causal properties of psychophysical constitution in particular. And because this ignorance concerns a metaphysical rather than a practical error, and there remain a myriad of other intentionalities informing lethal acts, for purposes of normative argument we still need conventionally-established grounds upon which to sustain a robust Buddhist account of conventional bad-makers for intentional killing. These follow in successive chapters from Chaps. 10 to 13, which interrogate those cognitive constructions of the person specific to each major ‘family of reasons’ for killing. Thus, the analytic focus by which to continue the interrogation of the intentional presuppositions of killing lies with the social-cognitive construction of the person, in a shared lifeworld. Buddhist philosophical and normative claims constitute only one subset of ‘world’ subsisting within that larger lifeworld. Our task is to describe the distinct senses in which, on a Buddhist account and thus for its lifeworld, rational claims for justified killing are incoherent. In order to do so, we need to consider how the intentionality defining lethal acts can be characterized as a cognitive relation between its agents and objects as conventionally real and propertied socialcultural entities, and not merely the comparatively reductive metaphysical entity (as n¯amar¯upa) considered analytically in Chaps. 7 and 8.

2 Social-Cognitive Construction of the Person as Apt for Killing In general Buddhist terms avidy¯a or primal confusion denotes a deep misapprehension of the world, perceived as a totality of reified objects relative to an illusory reified self. One of these objects is the person that is the material object of killing, which as that person engages a range of worldly roles. The other person is, to me (or to us) a traitor, a terrorist, a trafficker, a resistance fighter, an enemy of one or another kind, who I am thereby justified in killing. In other words, social and cultural sanction reifies the normative status of the person as the embodiment of those roles in a more or less consensual, and more or less putatively humane, ethics of killing.2 On the foregoing Buddhist account, all persons are experienced as persons just because the person is so conventionally designated. Hence, all intentional acts pertaining to persons and lacking insight into the ontological emptiness of persons are conditioned by ultimately deluded cognition. Moreover, there are also conventional cases of acts which are entirely mistaken even on the conventional level of justification. If so, it will be important to identify when and how that is the case. Nonetheless,

2

This condition of reification is again addressed with respect to Buddhist and other cases in Chap. 12, below.

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some such acts are less conventionally delusive, and more compassionate, than others, as are those who commit them. For example, we might assume that most acts of euthanasia or abortion are less irrational, and more compassionate, than indiscriminate murderous homicide. It is in this sense that the empirical spectrum of lethal acts evidences conventional degrees of the two foundational Buddhist values of wisdom and compassion. While for these reasons different kinds of intentional object will entail different epistemic and ethical judgments regarding killing, they all require at least a robust degree of rational, and rationally cognisable, relations to be sufficiently justified. For instance, the irrational ascription of malevolence to a non-aggressor is not a rational justification for killing in any sense, but a real and proven terrorist threat may be. A Buddhist account of killing needs to evaluate not merely the normative justification of lethal acts but also the cognitive content that renders a particular kind of person a putatively apt object for killing in the first place. In the following I consider the conventional status of the person as the object for the apt ascription of properties pertaining to the very different intentional objects of lethal acts. Again, we need to consider, not the Buddhist-metaphysical universal features of the socially-constructed person qua person prioritised hitherto, but the person’s social-empirical conventional status, inasmuch as all ascriptions of identity are contingently made of persons, by other persons, in dependence on culture-specific norms and values.

3 Anthropological Conditions for the Conventional Social Constitution of the Person We’ve seen that according to Buddhist metaphysics conventionally-existent persons are the referents of proper names and descriptions. We’ve also noted that the person is a unity of psychophysical properties, and that it is persons who are intentionally killed. It is also evident that ascriptions of personhood, in some Asian Buddhist contexts as elsewhere, are often socially determined in ways that violate Buddhist metaphysical theory. We can identify one infamous example in the Thai Therav¯ada monk Kittivud.d.ho who in 1976 denounced Communists as non-persons, ostensibly thereby incurring only negligible or no negative kamma for their just assassination (Harvey 2000, 260–261). That claim has textual precedent in a Mah¯ay¯ana source such as the Mah¯aparinirv¯an.a-s¯utra which describes the murder of the irredeemably morally depraved (icch¯antika) as having less karmic effect than killing an ant (138; 3 also notoriously echoed in the non-canonical Mah¯avam . sa, 256–257). 3

Even in dependence on that source an unlikely case is at best assumed for the sub-bestial moral depravity of all Communists merely in virtue of being Communist (which assumption amounts to a travesty of the kammic intuition of embodied virtue). Moreover, if an ignorant worldling is not qualified to infallibly distinguish the genuinely irredeemable icch¯antika from the morally-depraved but still reformable agent, what authorizes their permissible homicide?

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These variations in the spectrum of what is and is not robustly a real or full person are clearly less metaphysically and more anthropologically determined. Where the metaphysics of the person in the same Buddhist traditions4 has not over centuries undergone conceptual modification, the cultural-anthropological conceptions of norms and judgements of kinds of personhood held by most Buddhists would reject the claims of sub-personhood just noted (as well as Kittivud.d.ho’s modern throwback to them). Yet these moribund cultural resonances around the apt extensions of personhood continue to inflect pretheoretical norms of what is and what isn’t, by virtue of that Buddhist and other (often ethnocentric) bias, fit to qualify for it. Similarly, and beyond the Buddhist context, most men, women or children are human persons; nonetheless, some of those persons (whether they are clinicians, bioethicists, or political ideologues) also maintain that among them are sub-persons; still others hold that yet another class of human sentient beings lack personhood altogether. Judgements about personhood can extend across human and nonhuman, and even real and fictional referents. Agar notes for example that “Fictional Daleks and Vulcans seem to count as nonhuman persons, and anencephalic babies are good candidates for human nonpersons.” (2001, 15) All three ascriptions of person, sub-person and non-person, are sustained across a spectrum of the conventional and contingent construction of the person qua person. Therefore, persons can also get it conventionally right or wrong about personhood: for example, most would arguably agree that a neonate with Down’s Syndrome is not less a person than an otherwise normal patient suffering brain death, and hence no more suitable a candidate for euthanasia than the latter. We’ve seen in Part I that Buddhist ethics is concerned with intention as determining the ethical status of acts. We also saw that intention entails an epistemic dimension, as much as affective and volitional ones, and that the adequate acquisition of knowledge concerning the intentional object of any act is as significant a factor in its moral adjudication. We saw this was the case as much with Buddhaghosa’s moral exemplars as with those of the Mah¯ay¯ana whose very excellence is dependent on the possession of super-normal knowledge; if so, a normal epistemic competence would seem all the more pertinent in determining the ethical status of acts. Affectively wholesome intention is thus in itself not sufficient as an ethical goodmaker for acts. We need to consider the intentional constitution of different kinds or classes of the killing of persons in terms of their respective truth-claims, and how they are represented by their intentional agents. These varying kinds in turn rely on specific constructions of persons (as, for instance, deserving punishment for heinous crime, as a malign threat, as ethnically intolerable etc.). To this end, from Chaps. 10 to 13 we will evaluate whether those differing constructions of person entail conventionally valid objects (prameyas) of the act or not, and so render the relevant cognitions (pram¯an.as) putatively justifying killing them also valid.

4

At least since the demise of the Pudgalav¯ada school, but that historical point is orthogonal to the present discussion.

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What then are the conventional constructions of the person that putatively justify lethal acts? If these constructions differ, does that difference entail different forms of justification? If such justifications rely on a notion of kinds of persons, is it something about the constructedness of persons, and thus what they represent, that determines the conventional bad-makers for killing? That is, if persons are the persons they are inasmuch as they represent something other than their bodily facticity, how or do they validly represent it? To engage these questions in more depth in area-specific cases, we first need to review the nature and function of representation in the intersubjective construction of the person as the epistemically, socially and morally apt object for lethal acts.

4 The Place of Representation: Intentional Content in the Intersubjective Field of the Lethal Act To call something a person is to make an evaluative judgement, often driven by a specific ideology; it is to ascribe both normative and psychological properties to the being so described. The metaphysical account in Chap. 7 of a universal cognitive basis for killing considered how some of the properties by which persons are described are physical, others mental, but all are symbolic. Moreover, these symbolic properties are often relational: for a Muslim, I (as a non-Muslim) may be an infidel; to a Christian or atheist I am not. A champion of secular rights, I may thereby be a moral terrorist in terms of the values held by a religious fundamentalist, who from his perspective fights for a truth still greater than mine. For the French resistance, as a collaborator I am the enemy; for my Nazi colleague, I am a valuable ally, and vice versa. If persons ostensibly possess or are identified by relational properties in this way, their identity-conditions depend on the determinations of different epistemic agents. This means that their relational properties are not intrinsic to the person, and that the person is at all times the nexus of intersecting sets of identity-conditions that subtend the interests of ascriptive agents as much as persons themselves. The distinction between the body and the properties that determine personhood may be occluded in many contexts. When considering properly biological properties relevant to justifying killing (such as pathological pre-natal or other conditions) we saw that the decisive object of such judgement frequently pertained to the personal suffering that its bearers (or indeed their carers) are believed likely to experience postnatally.5 Other normative agents, such as the Hindu villagers who conceive neonate abnormality as an auspicious boon of the gods, conceive the same phenomenon in diametrically opposite terms. Neither of these evaluative conceptions is strictly right nor wrong, because there is no ultimately objective judgement against which they can be measured.

5

Relevant to arguments for and against many cases of abortion, and pertaining to the discussion of Chap. 11.

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That is, they are just conventionally determined imputations signifying the polarised normative valences of abject suffering and divine manifestation, respectively. Suffering is conceived in the former case as necessarily concomitant to certain biological properties, and so the termination of those physical states (in death) as able to achieve the pre-emptive termination of that prospective suffering. However, as we have seen, the ascription of suffering to the body and person of the other is an intentional mental content of the ascriptive agent, just as the judgment of abnormality or of divinity are aesthetic-normative mental senses (or intensions) that refer to the same physiological condition or referent. Whether or not each ascriptive agent is justified to hold their respective views is a logically distinct question—whatever that question turns on, each is as likely to be perplexed by that of the other! Hence, the normative judgment that probable future suffering should be obviated in lethal acts refers stricto sensu to what a physical property represents (a grievous pathology) not to what it is (a physiological condition). Even an ostensibly intrinsically undesirable physiological property such as pain is not ontologically equivalent to suffering, which requires a subject to represent it as such: because I am in pain, I suffer. Other ‘I’s might experience the same pain-stimulus in such incongruent ways (compare say child and adult responses to the same minor injury) that the state of pain per se is unable to explain or justify them: something quite other than biological stimulus alone renders pain a state of suffering. Moreover, while the ascription of suffering generally relies on perceiving apparent signs of pain in others, perception alone is not a certain means of gauging degrees of suffering. A state of pain might well be universally an inherently undesirable biological datum, but the ascription of some quotient of suffering to another in pain is again stricto sensu presumptuous. The point here is not that the ascriptive agent may not have good reasons to so ascribe suffering; such ascription might be more or less defensible, especially when corroborated by subjective report of the person in pain. But that is not what is at issue here, which is that the ascription of suffering nonetheless remains an intentional act of the agent, in a sense that is not by that very fact necessarily justified, even where it might be informed by otherwise good reasons. It is, rather, justified at best only by the person who claims that their experience of suffering has, for example, become intolerable to them. For this reason, for example, we identify a crucial moral distinction between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia as the terminal relief of suffering, whereby the latter is unjustified as morally aligned with intentional homicide, inasmuch as it is not sanctioned by the subjective representation of subject-relative suffering. Otherwise, the reasonable ascription of intolerable suffering to a person would be morally sufficient to justify killing them.6 Whether the person to be killed actually suffers, or whether such suffering itself warrants euthanasia, and other related questions, are ´ avakay¯ana Buddhism makes the transcendence of personal suffering, As noted in Kovan (2018), Sr¯ even despite states of pain, a sure sign of spiritual accomplishment. The Milindapañha (44–5) “insists that terminally-ill arhats do not suicide because they are indifferent to both the pain of continued life and the putative pleasure of release from it in death.” (637, n. 4) However inherently undesirable, pain in this context provides a basis for transcending, rather than guaranteeing, states of suffering.

6

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analytically distinct from identifying the intentional basis for action, which is again something pertaining to the intentional-normative contents of the agent’s mind. For example, we have noted the case where the lethal agent might kill (as in the common case of psychotic derangement) on the basis of the ascription of a property (e.g., of a person being an alien invader) which does not pick out a real property even conventionally. An imputed malign terrorist might be a real physical threat or, on the other hand, a harmless prankster with a rubber knife or fake bomb. In all three of these cases, the imputation of mortal threat, an intentional act of the ascriptive lethal agent, is the decisive mental cause for the intention to kill its intended object, yet they all express quite distinct intentional states with radically varying epistemic status. Hence, not only can such agents be corrigible in terms of those states and their cognitive contents; as noted above, their construction of the person as apt for killing might get it conventionally wrong (as, arguably, did the Thai monk Kittivud.d.ho). Understanding agential intention also allows us to explain why agents kill at all, moving our analytic concern from the objective metaphysical and ontological conditions for killing, surveyed above, to the cognitive phenomenology of intentional acts. If we seek to know what their intentional structure tells us about the person as a putatively apt object of killing, then each such structure requires analytic attention. None of this, however, implies that some imputed intentional properties are not conventionally real: the identity-conditions of persons might well veridically include the properties ascribed to them for various purposes of conventional categorization. Hence, the point here is not that there is no physical suffering, or biological pathologies, or that physical properties ontologically reduce to mental ones. Rather, these data are always and ineliminably mediated by the intentionalities that render their status as physical properties the more or less apt basis for intentional killing. We have seen that a physical property is rarely ‘physical’ simpliciter; those associated especially with human embodiment usually come endowed, as do mental properties, with valuations and interpretations. In examining the various intentional constructions of the person, we need then to focus on the representational mediation of persons’ properties, rather than the properties per se. Having surveyed these basic representational conditions for the intentional construction of the person as the apt object of lethal acts, we can now consider the distinct groups into which those constructions appear to fall. Distinguishing these is meant heuristically, ordered in terms of family resemblance among a very wide range of unique acts, many of which might and do overlap in terms of their intentional structure. The aim here is not to be taxonomically exhaustive. It is to provide a schematic map of the territory by which intentional lethality is justified as rational, cogent, and so, in some presumptively philosophical sense, justified. In surveying this terrain in the following chapters, the analytic task is to demonstrate the ways in which each intentional category, on a Buddhist-epistemological, metaphysical and normative account, is in fact mistaken. Where we have up to now considered ontological, metaphysical,

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and universal necessary conditions undergirding the rationality of intentional killing in general, from hereon we consider the forms of error unique to distinct senses of person underwriting its commission.

5 Four Intentional Groupings of Person as Object of the Act The person, despite being conceptually constructed, is conventionally real. The conventional existence enjoyed by persons thus presents us as persons with social constructions of other persons. These are constructed inasmuch as descriptive and behavioural properties are picked out, from a wide possible range, that define this person as male or female, a mother, a teacher, a criminal, a soldier, a President, and so on. Hence, properties determine personhood, not the other way around. A street crowd, for example, does not present merely a sum of persons in the conceptual abstract, but rather individuals whose determinate properties conventionally satisfy current identity-conditions for personhood. Apart from this conventional designation, there is no person. Persons, then, are the more or less apt objects for lethal acts because of their conventional identity with some among the properties they instantiate or are held to instantiate. A taxonomy of such properties is theoretically limitless, but major discriminations can be identified between them. For analytic purposes they can be categorised in four main ways. They constitute persons: (i) Who have committed heinous crime and so deserve retributive punishment; (ii) Who seek to die at their own or another’s hand because they are unwilling to, or should not, endure intolerable psychological or physical suffering, including that due to painful terminal illness; or they are embryonic persons whose continued existence is undesired by their parent; (iii) Who, identified racially, or who in maintaining ideological or religious principles represent complexes of political, religious, ethnocentric, or ideological belief that are judged an existential threat, warrant extermination. A final (less symbolically mediated) category concerns those persons: (iv) Conceived as an immediate mortal threat, and so killed in the context of self-defence. All these constructions of the person as apt for killing (including the derivative notion of a sub-person with reference to embryonic or vegetative persons relevant to ii, above) are in their different senses considered justificatory of the lethal act to which the persons so represented are subject. That is, these constructions of person encode the reasons by which intentional lethal action is given sense, and thereby

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made putatively rational. Persons as the objects of lethal acts can thus be broadly classed as relevant objects of punishment (preventive, deterrent and retributive), of existential-compassionate decision, of ideological-symbolic representation, and of apparent mortal threat. The following chapters consider each of these in turn.

Chapter 10

Persons as the Objects of Lethal Justice

Abstract This chapter engages an in-depth comparative analysis of theories of preventive and neo-Kantian retributivist lethal punishment and their Buddhist critique, taking in metaphysical, psychological and normative grounds. After distinguishing legal lethal punishment in its preventive and deterrent senses of justification, a representative neo-Kantian argument for capital punishment is surveyed in detail. This account is then contextualised with respect to Buddhist normative considerations around suffering and moral consequence, relating these to the Buddhist heuristics analysed in Chap. 3. Buddhist metaphysical and psychological analyses of the bases of and justification for capital punishment are engaged to refute the putatively rational grounds brought to its defence, thereby presenting an alternative account of punishment seeking to honour legitimate grievances. A Buddhist theorisation of restorative justice thus addresses the epistemic and normative dimensions of judging heinous crime and its appropriate punishment, as well as the value of the dignity of persons originally brought to the defence of retributive killing. On the Buddhist account, lethal punishment can only succeed in perpetuating the moral-psychological preconditions for crime such punishment is intended to justly punish. Keywords Capital punishment and Buddhism · Capital punishment and deterrence · Capital punishment and retribution · Kantian and neo-Kantian retributivism · Just requital · Moral psychology and lethality · Restorative justice and Buddhism

1 Introduction In Chap. 9 I noted that Buddhist philosophical and normative claims constitute only one moral world within the broader lifeworld. If we seek to establish universal Buddhist badmakers for killing, our task requires describing the distinct senses in which, on a Buddhist account, rational claims for justified killing are mistaken whether or not they are advanced by Buddhists. This chapter thus engages the social construction of the person as an object of lethal punishment as understood both by Buddhists and non-Buddhists. It identifies the reasons Buddhists can offer for the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_10

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wrongness of capital punishment and how they can be addressed to Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike. A classical Indian Buddhist attitude towards lethal punishment is textually evident in the R¯aja-parikath¯a-ratnam¯al¯a, in which the second century C. E. Mah¯ay¯ana philosopher N¯ag¯arjuna advises king Udayi with regard to the death penalty: Once you have analysed the angry Murderers and recognised them well, You should banish them without Killing or tormenting them. (v. 337; cited in Harvey 2009, 54)

N¯ag¯arjuna describes at some length (verses 330–336) how “punishment should be enforced with compassion” (v. 336); indeed, he counsels to “[e]specially generate compassion/For those murderers, whose sins are horrible” (v. 332). N¯ag¯arjuna presents a view that underlines the general ethic of ahim . s¯a characterizing the inception and growth of Buddhism, and confirms the first precept in its prohibition of ¯ harmful acts. Echoing texts such as the Arya-bodhisattva-gocara, N¯ag¯arjuna’s view typifies the Mah¯ay¯ana extension of care (karun.a¯ ) in the context of punishment to a degree that, for proponents of capital punishment, might be seen as unreasonably charitable and misjudged for the worst crimes. While an appeal to a superlative compassion is laudable in a Buddhist context, it does not present obvious grounds for the exercise “[o]f compassion from those whose nature is great” (v. 332) beyond the cultivation of the bodhisattva norms N¯ag¯arjuna would endorse. There is thus reason to look for additional arguments to N¯ag¯arjuna’s advice to the king. I intend to offer philosophical ballast to his claim by assessing a range of arguments for capital punishment, with special reference to one prominent justification: lethal retributivism (hereafter LR). The justificatory claims of LR rely centrally on the principle of just requital (or desert) for lethal crime, and the death penalty as the proportionate satisfaction of requital. Both claims feature in recent Western as well as Buddhist-ethical accounts (Bedau 2005; Fink 2012; Glover 1990; Harvey 2009, 2018; Loy 2000b; Sitze 2009) of retributive (including lethal) punishment. After distinguishing between forms of preventive punishment—that is, as deterrent and obstructive—below, in section 2 I examine the claims by which proponents of lethal retribution, on the other hand, defend its case, considering a plausible neo-Kantian retributivist defence (Sorell 1987) of capital punishment as justified punishment. From Sect. 3, engaging sources in the canon, their commentaries and recent secondary scholarship, I contextualise and criticize retributivist claims on generic Buddhist grounds. That discussion converges in conclusion with a common concern for a Kantian emphasis on the moral-legal sovereignty of the just state, as well as with the Buddhist qualification that, in N¯ag¯arjuna’s words, “unworthy sons are punished/Out of a wish to make them worthy/So punishment should be enforced with compassion.” (v. 336, cited in Harvey 2009, 54).

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1.1 The Legal Sanction of State Execution Killing by sanction of the state (as punishment, war-combat, or for other purposes) is not legally or ethically equivalent to criminal killing. The first honours and enforces state law, the second disregards or repudiates it. The first aims to redress or deter crime and so uphold the good of justice while the second defies justice by wrongful misadventure. Both lethal acts fully intend, despite these differing conditions, to take life, yet one is punished while the other is not. This appears on its face to present at least an axiological tension; how is it that one and the same act of the deprivation of the primary good of life is condemned in the one case, but sanctioned in the other? Firstly, only the legally-constituted government of a legal state can sanction capital punishment in the name of the citizens it governs. The state exercises power to prosecute capital punishment by means of a legal proxy whose individual lethal actions are thereby legal acts of state justice. Secondly, the state legislature, which passes statutory law recommending capital punishment for some crimes, must justify that legislation. Capital punishment is irreversible and so requires a degree and kind of justification not necessary for non-lethal punishment. The claim that capital punishment is justified as a means for the prevention of crime is defended on some or all of the following grounds (among possible others): 1. 2. 3.

That a heinous wrongdoing has been committed by the agent to be punished That this wrongdoing should not be committed by this or any other agent That capital punishment will prevent or discourage in others its recurrence.

These premises are central to the notion of capital punishment as a form of social deterrence. The first two also contribute to justifying punishment as retribution, inasmuch as the latter takes itself to be an appropriate response to such a wrong, irrespective of its deterrent effect.1 In especially deterrent but also retributive cases, the wrongdoer is punished not merely because of the commission of the relevant act, but because it is in the interests of society that neither that agent, nor any other, should repeat it. Bentham expresses a general preventive justification of punishment in a classically utilitarian sense, that also denies a positive valence to punishment per se, and thus its retributive form: General prevention ought to be the chief end of punishment as it is its real justification. If we could consider an offence which has been committed as an isolated fact, the like of which would never recur, punishment would be useless. It would only be adding one evil to another. (Honderich, citing Bentham, 1976, 51–52)

1 See Sorell (30 ff .) for summary discussion of the claims that are frequently brought to bear in support of capital punishment as deterrence and retribution. The empirical content of these reasons may vary between cultures, often very widely (for instance, lethal punishment for the “wrong” of witchcraft is still common in the Papuan highlands). However, it is unlikely that the intentional structure pertaining to and between these reasons, as detailed above, significantly varies.

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1.2 Punishment as Prevention: “Reformative” and “Obstructive” Preventive punishment thus presupposes the possibility that the agent, or other agents who may be aware of it, might perform similar punishable acts in the future. Deterrent punishment hence also presupposes that actors respond to acts of punishment. Capital punishment, however, removes the possibility of the recurrence of the wrongdoing which warranted punishment in the first place, and this gives rise to an important distinction between two concepts of prevention. It is the first sense, which I will call its reformative sense, wherein (as Bentham suggests) punishment is made meaningful as reforming the agent’s own character, and thus obviating repeat crime. But that sense can only refer to non-lethal punishment, applicable to actual and potential agents. Absent that reformative meaning, capital punishment can be meaningfully preventive only in a second, purely instrumental sense—as terminally obstructive, to simply stop an actual or potential agent from acting in any way at all. That is still prevention, no doubt. But prevention as reformation and as obstruction are not intentionally equivalent: a person or committee is prevented from acting; a boulder or a building is obstructed from falling.2 In obstructive prevention, the inculcation of the self-directedness of responsibility on the part of the offender which constitutes the social meaning of reformative punishment is denied by a purely instrumental sense of preventive “punishment” as destruction: a denial of punishment’s putatively social and inculcative purpose. The point here is not that prevention as obstruction lacks all justification: a terrorist gunman is lethally obstructed from shooting, in order to prevent further carnage. If, however, the ethical priority is to sustain the possibility of moral reform, then the gunman should be taken alive. If that possibility is not at issue, as is only ambiguously the case with lethal prevention, then the counterfactual is irrelevant and the gunman accordingly killed without scruple; but this is neither reformation nor punishment.

1.3 Prevention as Deterrence Lethal punishment can, then, still be conceived as intended to reform behaviour only as deterrence. In this case, the witness to capital punishment is expected to be deterred from committing similar acts. The claim that capital punishment is justified as deterrence can therefore only be verified empirically. At best, however, empirical findings suggest an indirect and minimal contribution of capital punishment to psychological effects of deterrence, against which counter-examples always co-exist. Research and theoretical literature consistently tend to a negative appraisal of the causal efficacy of deterrence, and even conclude that there is no determinate means of securing or 2

Of course, in general usage “prevention” can apply to all these instances. But this distinction is to identify the contrasting forms of intentionality that remain opaque in that usage.

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replicating efficacy in such a way as would render lethal punishment deterrent in every case.3 Sorell, a neo-Kantian (and so non-utilitarian) defender of capital punishment, concludes: “I do not see how utilitarian arguments in favour of the death penalty can be completely detached from a deterrence argument, and it seems to me that no one knows how to make such an argument conclusive” (1987, 99).4 I am not concerned here to decisively refute the case for deterrence, understood as a means to influencing the behaviour of the witness to lethal punishment, insofar as the onus is on that case to make its claim indubitable. Its problem is that a consensus of empirical research concurs in the conclusion that it cannot be decisive in every, or even any, given case (Bedau 2005, 706). This raises a deeper problem, which involves two related points. First, the intention of deterrence is necessarily projected into a future in which it may achieve its intended result, but it has been strongly suggested it might not, and in any case cannot guarantee that it will.5 It follows, second, that if the empirical claim regarding ends cannot in principle be determined, then nor can the means be justified. The claim for deterrence is then a weak moral wager, which intends to potentially deter (or even reform) its witness precisely by not intending to deter (or reform) its actual and certain object. A merely potential deterrence succeeds only at the absolute cost of that object—one demanding the highest grade of epistemic warrant, which by empirical reckoning it cannot secure. Moreover, it is undeniable that the crime that putatively deserves capital punishment could be punished by non-lethal means, and thereby sustain a potential for reform of the criminal agent and witness, without paying the heavy price of both life and uncertainty incurred in the lethal case. The moral onus then lies on the proponent of capital punishment as deterrence to demonstrate that taking the risk of its failure is still justified even at the cost of taking life. If doing so cannot guarantee even the probability of deterrence of crime by potential agents, it can at best only claim the prevention of further crime by its actual agents. The proponent could then suggest that the potential recidivism of perpetrators should be lethally prevented irrespective of deterrent effect, but then that is already a different normative claim, suggesting that the absolute obviation of repeat heinous crime serves an end in itself, perhaps of utility, whatever the cost. If this latter justification does not still rely on deterrence, it approaches but is not yet explicitly that of lethal retribution. This is because the absolute obviation of repeat crime emphasises the putatively absolute intolerability of its repetition, rather than its punishment per se. However, to separate these justificatory emphases (pragmatic and ethical, respectively) appears arbitrary; what is the moral difference between a response to a crime that demands its lethal prevention, and one which demands its lethal punishment? 3

See ABC News “Fact Check” (2015), Donohue (2015). Cf . Nagin and Pepper (2012); also Donohue and Wolfers (2009). 4 For a still stronger general statement, cf. Honderich (ed.) (1995, 120–121). 5 Nor is infallibility per se a sufficient condition for permissibility; the point here is that the evidence does not support even a fallible claim for deterrence.

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The moral significance of both is that they hold a normative premise in common— some crimes are morally grave enough to demand an equally grave response. Thus, the case for capital punishment is often justified on the grounds that the state holds the right to respond to such crime as a matter of legal (or religious-legal) justice. Accordingly, we can turn to an examination of fundamental reasons often presented for capital punishment as the just retribution for such crime.6

2 Lethal Punishment as Retribution: A Neo-Kantian Defence Capital punishment as retribution is conceived as the fulfillment of justice: The [retributivist] appeal to justice usually takes the following form: people deserve to suffer for wrongdoing. In the case of criminal wrongdoing the suffering takes the form of legal punishment; and justice requires that the most severe crimes, especially murder, be punished with the severest penalty—death. (Honderich 1995, 120)

The claim that capital punishment is justified just because it is a legal act under statutory law is not a justification for lethal retribution. State legislation is only the means of judicial authorization for the reasons underwriting LR, where those reasons justify capital punishment. Note again that we are concerned here specifically with lethal retribution and what justifies it7 ; the right to retributive punishment is not at issue.8 Two fundamental features of lethal retributivism (LR) follow. First, according to LR lethal punishment is an appropriate or just desert for certain crimes. But it is in fact only one option for appropriate punishment. So, a rational principle must determine when lethal punishment is appropriate. As Sorell (consciously echoing J. S. Mill before him) puts it: “retributivist arguments [...] depend on the principle that the punishment should match or be proportional to the crime” (1987, 106). Hence also, for instance, in The Metaphysics of Morals Kant suggests the punishment for the crime is determinable under a “principle of equality” where:

6

Again, these reasons can take varying form across cultures, but it could be argued that they philosophically translate into those examined below, or that where subsidiary reasons support them, or could be substituted by others, these do not in themselves undermine the critique that I make of the arguably universal primary reasons. 7 Note also that while lex talionis, or the law of “an eye for an eye” is popularly understood as a form of retributive justice (central for instance to Kant’s theory of punishment), its reasoning is more narrowly distinct from the broader sense of retribution given here. 8 There are of course strong conceptual links between any justification of non-lethal and of lethal retribution, but the discussion and refutation of the former, with reference to a Buddhist theory of punishment, would shift the focus of the present discussion. However, some of the following argument will apply to retributivism more broadly, as there specified, even while the target of its critique is the lethal dimension of LR and only secondarily retributivism per se.

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no possible substitute can satisfy justice. For there is no parallel between death [in the course of crime] and even the most miserable life, so that there is no equality of crime and retribution unless the perpetrator is judicially put to death. (1991, 156)9

Second, LR also implies the normative claim that it is a social good to legally exact proportional retribution. Sorell writes, “Retributivism, by way of its Principle of Just Requital, says that it is right for suffering to be returned for suffering, that this is how things ought to be” (157). This claim underwrites the cogency of LR. But before returning to it we need to consider which agents of lethal crime, in virtue of the determination of the Kantian principle of equality (hereafter the PE), are fit to be punished by death. Kant states the principle as follows: But what kind and what degree of punishment does public justice take as its principle and norm? None other than the principle of equality in the movement of the pointer on the scales of justice, the principle of not inclining to one side more than to the other. Thus any undeserved evil which you do to someone else [...] is an evil done to yourself [...] if you kill him, you kill yourself. (1991, 155)10

Sorell summarizes Kant: “According to the principle of equality the punishment should consist in a loss to the criminal equal to or in keeping with the loss to the victims; a relation other than equality would be arbitrary” (1987, 138). Hence, according to Kant, lex talionis appears to apply in the case of murder, and he has arguably in some cases good reason to think so: many might not question that the heinous rape and murder of a minor, for instance, is proportionally punished by capital punishment. But on inspection the PE11 requires modification once it’s applied to lethal crimes, and on modern accounts is finally only applicable to a single, sui generis case. Hence, contemporary retributivist commentators on Kant tend to restrict proportional lethal punishment to aggravated murder, in order to recognize different degrees of severity or intention, and thus culpability. Sorell writes: If there is any crime which the death penalty fits uncontroversially, it is more likely to be what Mill calls aggravated murder than murder plain and simple. Kant’s theory is not changed drastically if one restricts the murders that automatically receive the death penalty to first degree or perhaps aggravated first degree murders. (142)

9

It is thus also by virtue of this self-understanding of retribution, that any crime inequivalent to murder, and however grave, is not susceptible to lethal retributive, but rather only to non-lethal, punishment. Kant’s apparent uncertainty regarding the relevant identity-conditions of murder for retribution in its borderline cases (such as infanticide and duels) tends to confirm the same; see Sorell 142. Hence, all non-lethal (such as religious, ideological or political) crimes to which capital punishment is sometimes applied, including by Kant, are not relevant to this analysis of LR. 10 This statement also informs the equivalent Kantian principle that in committing intended murder, the murderer forfeits the right to (his own) life. All three principles (of Just Requital, of Equality or just proportionality between crime and punishment, and the forfeiture of life) can be understood as related aspects of the same general doctrine of right requital, and they are so taken in what follows. 11 Note that the determinative function of the PE in cases of proportional punishment in general, relevant to jurisprudential theory and practice, is not at issue here. As noted above, the distinction is ethically salient when we’re concerned to identity what LR deems, via the PE, to be lethally punishable.

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The restriction to (aggravated) first-degree murder would thus for Sorell represent the very best case for LR, where “different murders seem to display different degrees of seriousness” (151). If aggravated first-degree murder is the sole crime “uncontroversially” eligible for lethal punishment, then its seriousness is what makes it so: a judgment not only of rightness (of just proportion), but also comprising another criterion. That is, whatever is required for a murder to meet the identity-conditions for aggravatedness now requires a secondary principle: ‘seriousness’ as expressing the degree of intention to inflict suffering. It’s on these jointly necessary but not individually sufficient bases that murder is properly proportional to lethal punishment, where intentional severity qualifies proportionality. But if the justification of lethal retribution does not rely solely on the PE as formally sufficient, there must be another reason that justifies capital punishment. Sorell offers the following: Kant’s principle of equality between crime and punishment [...] when it is taken together with certain assumptions about the value of life and the harm involved in murder [...] gives a reason for punishing murder with death. The assumptions are that life itself, whatever its quality, is a good, and that the harm in murder consists at least of the loss of this good to the victim. (139)

That is, if life itself is a good, then its loss in murder is punishable because it deprives its victim of this good. And if suffering ought to be returned for suffering, then the murderer should suffer the same loss his victim has. But this does not yet explain why suffering should be exacted for suffering. Nor can the answer to that, and the case for LR, rest essentially on its exemplary case of heinous lethal crime: the identity-conditions for heinousness are vague and can only be stipulated (Bedau 710), and could indeed apply to the death penalty itself (frequently botched and often torturous). Hence, what LR ultimately appears to hold as the condition that uncontroversially justifies lethal punishment is the severity of the intention to inflict the worst kind of suffering, and not the deprivation of the good of life alone. On that basis, it demands that the criminal expression of that intention be punished by the legal infliction of not more than an equal degree of suffering on its agent. These constitutive claims of LR can now be considered in their Buddhist contextualisation.

3 A Buddhist Contextualization of Lethal Retributivism There are at least two main reasons why no Buddhist interlocutor accepts the principle of just requital. First, it contravenes the principle of obviating dukkha or suffering (PD) we have seen informing the first precept: that no act should wilfully intend to cause harm or suffering to another. Second, it entails the generation of malign moral effects consequent on the intention to act lethally, the principle of kamma (PK) invoked here underlining the Buddhist norm that action engendering malign effects for its actor should be avoided. We can first consider what it means, on a Buddhist account and in dialogue with Western accounts of capital punishment, to intend to return suffering for suffering.

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3.1 Returning Suffering for Suffering: The Contravention of PD 3.1.1

Surfeit and Consequences

If suffering is returned for suffering, as the principle of just requital requires, then it implies prima facie a doubling of the sum of human suffering. Glover writes that: This view [i.e., Kant’s] of punishment, according to which it has a value independent of its contribution to reducing the crime rate, is open to the objection that acting on it leads to […] pointless suffering. To impose suffering or deprivation on someone, or to take his life, is something that […] needs very strong justification in terms of benefits, either to the person concerned or to other people. The retributivist has to say either that the claims of justice can make it right to harm someone where no one benefits, or else to cite the curiously ‘metaphysical’ benefits of justice being done. […] there is already enough misery in the world […] adding to it requires a justification in terms of non-metaphysical benefits to people. (1990, 229; my italics)

We can leave the question of a ‘metaphysical’ benefit aside for the moment. But first, if dukkha is precisely what a Buddhist seeks to obviate, she must agree with Glover that the intentional doubling of suffering cannot be justified in the absence of putative benefits. However, what might appear to be gratuitous (‘pointless’) suffering is rather, for the proponent of LR, what ultimately serves the end of securing the respect for human life that has been abused in lethal crime, and further risks becoming more common failing its proper punishment. Indeed, for the proponent, the social preservation of justice as a function of categorical moral duty itself confers value on human life. Kant makes the point clear in the Philosophy of Law: “The Penal Law is a Categorical Imperative; […] For if Justice and Righteousness perish, human life would no longer have any value … Whoever has committed murder must die.” (cited in Glover 228) Moreover, overlooking a single just case of capital punishment is already one too many; Kant in the Metaphysics of Morals notoriously illustrates this concern in the hypothetical event of a civil society that in a state of consensual dissolution is required to execute beforehand “the last Murderer lying in the prison […] in order that […] blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice” (cited in Glover 229). Thus, the proponent is able to object to the charge of gratuitous suffering on the ground of a non-metaphysical benefit framed in terms of the socially concrete significance of justice. The social and moral loss incumbent on the failure of justice, and potential erosion of civil law thereby, could globally outweigh in seriousness the comparatively uncommon local suffering of a life deservedly taken. (A parallel justification for the intentional loss of enemy and friendly life in war is not far away.) This justification might seem to run into, but is importantly distinct from, the purely deterrent concern to prevent the commission of violent crime, in which the death

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penalty is a putatively important factor in controlling criminals to the end of civil security.12 Rather, the proponent of LR has the broader moral concern of the good at heart; he wants to preserve the good of justice for all by the sacrifice of the few willing to defy it and so, as Kant asserts, secure the inviolability of the value of just human life, if not mere life itself. Compared to the perspective of private individuals concerned with mitigating personal suffering, the proponent has an arguable claim to a greater moral responsibility, as well as greater utility thereby. Canonical Buddhist sources express the same concern for the maintenance of justice. There are numerous instances of warning against a failure or even laxity of punishment. The Cakkavati-s¯ıhan¯ada Sutta (D III 67) criticizes the soft treatment of ¯ thieves; the early Mah¯ay¯ana Arya-satyaka-parivarta similarly says that “[i]f a ruler is too compassionate, he will not chastise the wicked people of his kingdom which will lead to lawlessness and, as a result, the king will be unable to remove the harm done by robbers and thieves” (Harvey 2000, 347). Rather, “A righteous ruler ‘with compassion should root out wicked people just as a father disciplines a son’” (348). The Suvarn.a-bh¯asottama S¯utra urges that the king “must not knowingly without examination overlook a lawless act. No other destruction in his region is so terrible” (cited in Harvey 2009, 56). The Buddhist then is also clearly attentive to the maintenance of justice, as well as to the primary value of life. Nonetheless, the Buddhist must also ask how a surfeit of suffering guarantees justice in a way that serious but non-lethal punishment cannot. After asking this question, N¯ag¯arjuna writes, “once you have analyzed the angry/ Murderers and recognised them well/You should banish them without/ Killing or tormenting them” (v. 337, cited in Harvey 2009, 54). But if the Buddhist rejects the notion of a return of suffering for suffering, this might not only be because a second quotient of suffering ostensibly equals and so unacceptably doubles the first. Another way of conceiving the notion of surfeit it entails is to ask what it means to say that a unique event of suffering, suffered by one person, is qualitatively equivalent to an event suffered by another.

3.1.2

Qualitative Considerations

Each event of suffering is unquestionably suffered by someone, but if the subjective conditions of each such event differ, and none can occupy others’ experiences, then they are for that very reason not qualitatively commensurable. Most obviously, is the kind of suffering of the murder victim even broadly like the suffering of the condemned killer? Glover suggests the difference is one not merely of degree but of kind: 12

It should be noted in this context that in thus ostensibly serving the protection of state subjects, LR also serves the end of state control, including by authoritarian or totalitarian power. This arguably informs why China consistently executes more people on average than all other countries combined. Enforcement of efficient crime-control does not ipso facto guarantee the robustness of civil freedoms and rights under protection of the state.

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What seems peculiarly cruel and horrible about capital punishment is that the condemned man has the period of waiting, knowing how and when he is to be killed. Many of us would rather die suddenly than linger for weeks and months knowing we were fatally ill, and the condemned man’s position is several degrees worse than that of the person given a few months to live by doctors. He has the additional horror of knowing exactly when he will die, and of knowing that his death will be in a ritualised killing by other people, symbolising his ultimate rejection by the members of his community. The whole of his life may seem to have a different and horrible meaning when he sees it leading up to this end. (1990, 231–232)

In comparing events of suffering, Glover claims that LR entails a unique kind of moral pain qualitatively inequivalent to that which might characterise sudden or unexpected death, plausibly suggesting that many would prefer to suffer the latter sooner than the former. If so, LR appears to stretch its warrant for a proportional suffering between lethal crime and its punishment in a way that undermines its own equitable principle. On the other hand, one might argue this is a virtue, not a problem, for LR: that a greater moral and not merely hedonic suffering is in fact what is justly deserved for lethal crime. If so, this raises another problem, which returns to Glover’s point regarding the pointlessness of such suffering, above. At this juncture we need to recall the Buddha’s clear rejection (at MN II 140) ¯ ıvika ‘annihilationism’: an a-kammic doctrine of causeless and meaningless of Aj¯ suffering that denies a telos to the recognition and gradual surmounting of suffering states. A fundamental, if instrumental, meaning, and meaningfulness, of suffering in Indian Buddhism thus lies in prompting its extirpation in the moral-psychological program of the cultivation of insight and virtue, conducive to acts expressive and productive of kusala mental states. Hence, in general Buddhist terms, if a (gratuitous) suffering is effectively intended by its constitutive conditions to be suffered just for suffering’s sake, it is for that very reason, as Glover suggests, pointless or futile. The suffering intended by LR as a finite but extreme punishment consequently registers nothing more than itself, pending a putatively just death. The condemned, kept in secure and isolated confinement, can merely suffer privately until the moment of forced demise (Loy 2000b, 146), with no anticipatory incentive of the exercise of moral value, rendering his suffering empty even of that minimal meaning. If, however, on a charitable reading, LR in its extreme degree of suffering even minimally allows for the redeeming of the sufferer’s criminal character in the period prior to death, what opportunity does the condemned have to enact that moral redemption, in his person and relations with a social context, knowing only that he is imminently to die? Even, still further, granting the kammic reasoning that reflection and remorse in this life might provide for a better rebirth in a subsequent one, and so provide for some redeeming of this-life suffering in the dead time of waiting for execution, a Buddhist objection could hold that the reflection does not have to necessarily end in execution: the core claim of LR. Any substantial period of life-preserving punishment might provide the context for such repentance, so LR is not justified on these hypothetical Buddhist grounds, and still requires a justification that makes its form of punishment exclusively necessary.

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In sum, the value that a redemptive meaning extreme suffering might bestow on LR, but that its formal commitment to objective desert doesn’t actually require, is not conditional on a penalty of death. This renders lethal retributive punishment, but still worse the suffering that is its object, morally gratuitous at best. For a Buddhist, this amounts to a denial of the fundamental moral-causal telos of kamma inherent in intention and the possibly redemptive intersubjective acts engendered by it. Offending against PK, this denial presents to the Buddhist not merely a moral-psychological vacuum, or positive evil, but in broader terms an error of wrong view that denies the very means of potential liberation from the nihilistic construal of morality it implies.

3.2 That Suffering Ought to Be Returned: The Contravention of PK There are two main issues that arise for a Buddhist account with regard to this denial. One of these pertains to the kammic consequence for the criminal person as the object of LR; the other pertains to its agent, whereby the incentive to lethally punish is also kammically laden and so productive of further (negative) consequence for the intentional actor. In the first case, the denial of kammic causation puts the work of securing appropriate desert for lethal crime into the hands of the state and its proxies, rather than the natural law of moral consequence attending intentional acts. In the second, the moral-psychological conditions of anger or indignation that give rise to the putative necessity for just requital in LR generate not only further kammic consequence but also reproduce those conditions in its commission. Where LR purports to close the circle of intentional lethal action by resolving retribution in a legally justified form, it also reiterates the moral-intentional grounds that on its view makes LR imperative: namely, that grievous suffering ought to be inflicted on the intentional inflictor of grievous suffering. By construing grievous suffering as gratuitous and rejecting the intention to inflict it, the Buddhist seeks to break this economy of the exchange of suffering at its justificatory point of lethal requital.

3.2.1

Assuming the Moral Work of Kamma

If someone has intentionally committed lethal harm, its negative kammic consequence is ineluctably incurred, irrespective of the justice or kind of its proportionate punishment, including by death. On this view, the proponent of LR gratuitously determines and bestows the apparent moral consequence of murder, thus over-determining its natural effect and incurring the negative kammic consequence of his own action.13 13

We can note here a possible quandary given a Buddhist claim for post-mortem kamma, which might theoretically hold that capital punishment serves the cause of moral reform of the rebirth of the same consciousness. The most obvious problem with this claim is one of epistemic access

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The proponent has an obvious objection to this claim: the legal consequence as a social effect of crime must be distinguished from the personal ethical consequence of ill-action. The latter secures the internal or private justice of the moral law, arguably pertaining to individual salvation alone, while the former secures the public social-cultural determinations of penal law, pertaining to all those who live under its jurisdiction. Does the proponent of LR over-determine the moral or kammic law by taking criminal life, and isn’t its penal function to be importantly distinguished from the moral one? A Buddhist might be tempted to think that the exercise of penal justice is itself only another form of kamma—in this case socially hypostatised and institutionalized as the law. Harvey notes that: One could see execution as simply a karmic result of a past bad deed—but in principle this might even be the case if the person executed were actually innocent of the specific action for which he was being “punished”—so this does not help us with the question of the justice of capital punishment. (2009, 50)

In identifying an epistemic distinction between kammic result and judicial justification for punishment, Harvey rightly suggests that the moral law of kamma and the criminal law do not serve the same social interests: the former universally explains and ineluctably functions in causal distinction from the local social–historical reasons and reasoning that justify the latter. Hence, kamma can only provide ostensible explanation of some causes for, and effects of, the commission of punition; it can’t justify penal law on its own terms. The Buddhist objection to LR in this instance thus proves unfounded but doesn’t exclude at least one kammic dimension, noted above. The Buddhist argues that, by intending to punish lethally, the agent of LR does two misguided things: he actively engages the constitutive kamma of lethal intention that leads to LR, and by actually enacting that intention generates constituting kamma as its inevitable effect.14 The Buddhist might concede that the purely judicial sanction of LR can’t be challenged on its own terms, but that the commission of LR cannot thereby neutralize its kammic effects—not a penal concomitant but a moral-psychological causal one. This conclusion is not undermined by the legal authority of the death penalty; indeed, this is especially the case where, as Harvey suggests, the fallible means of human which, failing a Buddha’s omniscience, remains indeterminable. But there are two other, related, problems. First, it’s unclear whether, given kamma as constituting impersonal, a-subjective causal processes, the subjective comprehension of current life wrong-doing would be translated into a next life personal appropriation of such fault, and thence a possible commitment to reform in that life. Rather, second, any subjective apprehension (as “mine”) of being imminently executed for wrongdoing could more plausibly result (via impersonal kammic imprints) in a subsequent ego-centred resentment and thirst for vengeance (and so more intended violence). As an index of ignorance, kamma is functionally understood as habitual willed action. It is difficult to see where grounds for even minimal insight (and so reform) lies in this conditioned series: such insight, for Buddhist soterics, is not a product of lethal coercion, but of incremental self-understanding. 14 Compare this to the constitutive-constituting function of the samsk¯ . araskandha which, in constructively engaging its cognitive-affective volitions, creates the conditions for the experience of the self and its suffering states (see Chaps. 7 and 8, above).

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justice is mistaken and a would-be criminal is wrongly executed for a misattributed crime. Kamma is supposed, in such cases, to deliver a ‘higher justice’ attending intentional action, including where that action is unjustified but still legally sanctioned. In the same way, the Buddhist might object that the entire judicial apparatus of legal sanction in the case of LR at a deeper level expresses a morally unskilful motivation. To make that point, the Buddhist returns to a focus on the moral-psychological conditions of possibility for the will to just requital.

3.2.2

Moral-Psychological Preconditions for Just Requital

What explains the putative necessity for LR? This question turns analytic focus from the justification of the punitive act per se, to what undergirds Kant’s inflexible conviction that “if Justice and Righteousness perish, then human life would have no more value in the world”, such that “the murderer must die.” This is a statement concerning something about the moral-psychological constitution of the proponent of LR, rather than the criminal, or even his crime. As we’ve seen, Kant’s conviction appears to express the axiological claim that the value of human life in general is necessarily secured by the sacrifice of human life in the particular criminal case. But what else might it express? In a discussion of reconciliation (pat.is¯aran.iya) in the Buddhist ethics of punishment, Fink suggestively highlights the role of resentment in the motivation to punish: The [reconciliation] model assumes not only that it is appropriate for offenders to be remorseful for their crimes, but that it is appropriate for victims to resent offenders. Resentment is recognised as appropriate, first, because it is an expression of self-respect. (389)

The resentment of abuse is a plausible element of what might prompt the positively valenced indignation of the Kantian moral agent on behalf of the deceased victim of lethal crime. That is, the proponent of LR psychologically presumes that indignation or righteous resentment of lethal abuse justifies taking life. Resentment and indignation could arguably be conceived as modes of anger, and the rectitude of a justified anger is frequently summoned to the cause of LR (Bedau 717). But Bedau sees an important distinction between the former and latter: The feeling and expression of resentment—seeing oneself as an undeserving victim of another’s immoral conduct and objecting to it—is understandable. So is moral indignation—seeing another as an undeserving victim of someone’s immoral conduct and objecting to it. But both resentment and indignation are moral emotions—that is, they are regulated by moral considerations, in contrast to anger and revenge. These latter know no bounds; thus it might be said that they are always inappropriate, even if they are often excusable. (717)

We’ve seen (in Chap. 6) that anger (P. pat.igha) is, with hatred (P. dosa), unequivocally identified in Buddhist sources as one of the most morally destructive of emotions, and counter-indicated in the Buddhist program of aretaic mental-affective cultivation. Cozort writes that:

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Among the six root afflictive emotions (kle´sa) identified in the Buddhist Abhidharma literature as the causes for episodes or entire lifetimes of suffering, anger (Skt: pratigha) holds a singular place. It is one of a few mental states that not only establish “seeds” or “roots” of non-virtue, but also nullify the seeds or roots of individual virtue planted by exemplary actions such as giving and patience. Among these states, anger is uniquely destructive. (1995, 1)

On the Buddhist’s, and Bedau’s, and even his own, terms the proponent of LR needs to preserve the moral valence of justified indignation in order to avoid a charge of basely emotive revenge, something that the proponent explicitly denies as a justificatory motivation for LR. How might he do so? A plausible reason for indignation on Fink’s account lies with the multiply harmful and immoral reduction of the dignity of the victim to an instrumental means for criminal purposes. He writes: To be victimized by crime is to be treated as a thing rather than a person. Crime can and typically does inflict physical or emotional suffering upon the victim, but it is also a communicative act. It communicates to the victim that he or she is not a person but a thing to be used or abused. To resent the offender is to counter this communication with an affirmation of one’s inherent worth as a person. (390)

The victim’s right to autonomy and to life are each violated by lethal crime, in virtue of their absolute subordination to the will of the lethal agent. The abuse of the crime therefore consists not only in the base physical heinousness of taking life, but crucially for the proponent of LR the moral heinousness of the dehumanisation of the victim. The agent of LR thus seeks restitution for that moral abuse and, in order to avoid a like abuse of the moral worth of the criminal person, not the base instinct for revenge. In explicitly rejecting revenge as justificatory, the proponent requires that LR be morally and affectively motivated only by disinterested indignation, grounded in a recognition of injustice and a motivation to virtue. We have seen Kant insist that LR (and only LR) necessarily succeeds in actualising these latter values in the punishment of heinous crime, just because it preserves the moral value of the criminal person in his execution. But how does it do so? Sitze paraphrases Kant: If a person is, as Kant will say, “a subject whose actions can be imputed to him” […] then the death penalty is an apparatus for treating the criminal like a human: it imputes to the criminal a faculty for pure reason, a capacity for freedom and autonomy in the strict and purely human sense, and therefore, on this same basis—out of respect for the criminal personified as a human, out of respect for what the pure reason “in” the criminal will have willed—it ends his life. (234)

Hence, the agent of crime, recognising the categorical moral duty of the punitive restitution of abuse, must will his own punishment thereby. But what, for the Kantian retributivist, allows a criminal-moral agent to simultaneously value his own inherent worth as a person, as his status as a moral agent of the categorical imperative requires, and to will the sacrifice of his life as the ontological basis for that very worth? We will address these questions, below. However, even if the Buddhist charitably grants the proponent the best case of justified indignation and not anger on behalf of

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the killed victim, problems remain. These above all concern how the proponent of LR ensures the moral sovereignty of the criminal person, as LR itself insists it must. The first main Buddhist objection to this sense of the person (in §3.3, below) concerns whether the Kantian person and moral agent so understood can withstand Buddhist analysis. A second main objection (in §3.4) concerns the qualitative nature of moral indignation as disinterested, and interrogates whether its putative function in enacting justice preserves the affectively and intentionally neutral valence it presupposes. Taken together, these Buddhist objections to these constitutive elements of LR refute its best-case assumption of indignation as adequate justification.

3.3 The Kantian Division of the Person Quoting Kant in The Metaphysics of Morals, Sitze notes the distinction he draws between the homo noumenon (the “moral personality” who is the locus of “pure reason within me”) […] and the homo phaenomenon (the “sensuous being” who is the locus of my desire to preserve myself in my “animal being”) […] When I consent to suffer the penalty of death at the hands of the sovereign […] It is that “I” am the locus of two distinct beings, a person (the homo noumenon) and a living being (the homo phaenomenon) and that the person within me (which is to say, the nameless force of pure reason, which “desires” nothing other than universality and necessity itself) dictates a perfectly consistent set of penal laws to which I then subject my own living being. (233)

By subordinating his animal living being to his purely rational moral person, the condemned corroborates the moral law of duty and the civil law of appropriate punishment for lethal crime. But this subordination is in turn predicated upon another Kantian premise: Kant considers the right of self-preservation to be a merely conditional duty—a duty, in other words, that is grounded not in the necessity of pure reason, but merely in inclination, in a desire to avoid pain and achieve happiness. As such, the duty of self-preservation possesses less dignity and necessity than does the unconditional duty of conformity to the categorical imperative. To the extent that we are governed by our desire for self-preservation, we are not “persons” (which is the name Kant gives in the Groundwork to “rational beings”), but merely “things” […] In cases where our conditional duty of self-preservation comes into conflict with our unconditional duty of preserving the state […], the latter thus easily prevails over the former. (Sitze 232)

Hence, the neo-Kantian can logically justify the preservation of the inherent worth of the criminal person by virtue of the sacrifice of animal life that he willingly submits to the maximal punishment of its deprivation. This justification is also predicated on the moral acumen and will of the criminal agent in general, and his valorisation of noumenal moral being over sensuous animal being, in particular. Even if the first of these is granted, on a Buddhist account the metaphysical division of the sentient being between noumenal and phenomenal existence is incompatible with its own understanding of the person.

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If so, the Kantian distinction between conditional and unconditional duties with regard to oneself as a person, or to the state, is not for the Buddhist tenable as an account of moral obligation. First, we’ve seen that Buddhist metaphysics of the person (see Chap. 7) does not entail that a moral agent is an entity ontologically distinct from the psychophysical properties of the living body on the basis of which personhood is conceptually imputed (Chap. 9). Moreover, cetan¯a as intention is not ontologically equivalent to a sovereign will or self which would contradict the Buddhist doctrine of no-self. Cetan¯a is not—as Wille is on Kant’s view—a faculty distinct from embodied existence: rather, cetan¯a is a constitutive function of that very existence. As Dunne notes of the wrong view of satk¯ayadr.s..ti, according to which there exists an […] absolute self that, while fully autonomous, is somehow related to or residing within the constituents of the mind and body. All Buddhist philosophers seek to eliminate satk¯ayadr.s..ti and any beliefs, such as the notion of a whole, that are corollaries of it. Hence, this level of description is never accepted, even provisionally, by any South Asian Buddhist philosopher. It is mentioned only so as to refute it. (Dunne 57)

Rather than a noumenal Kantian moral agent, the mental-volitional bases for moral action are engaged as cetan¯a, the intention volitionally directing the action of the conventionally real person, but which direction does not require a really-existing self. The singular noumenal personality that for Kant reigns supreme over all other elements of volition is distributed in the Buddhist case across multiple properties that cohere to functionally endow personhood with moral agency, including its governing ethical conditions, affects, kinds of consciousness and its mental factors, and their moral valence on a range between ku´sala and aku´sala qualities. In the case of the moral exercise of justice, Loy makes explicit the psychological connection between intention as kamma and its mediation in and by the sam . sk¯araskandha: Intention is also the most important factor in the operation of the law of karma, which […] is created by volitional action. Karma is essential to the Buddhist understanding of justice […] One modern approach to karma is to understand it in terms of what Buddhism calls sa˙nkh¯aras, our “mental formations,” especially habitual tendencies. These are best understood not as tendencies we have, but as tendencies we are: instead of being “my” habits, their interaction is what constitutes my sense of “me.” But that does not mean that they are ineradicable: unwholesome sa˙nkh¯aras are to be differentiated from the liberatory possibilities that are available […] if we follow the path of replacing them with more wholesome mental tendencies. (Loy 2000b, 156–157; sa˙nkh¯aras = sam . sk¯aras)

This Buddhist project can be highlighted in a psychologically more plausible best case of punishment than the ideal Kantian one: the criminal agent, by acknowledging his abuse of his victim, recognises his own moral humanity, and seeks to atone for wrongdoing. The proponent cannot easily object in this case that LR better sustains the inherent worth of the person in virtue of its would-be metaphysical benefit of absolute justice, when the condemned seeks as an autonomous person to preserve his life in order to repent of his crime thereby. If the proponent fails to honour this claim this only compromises the personhood— i.e., constitutive reason, freedom, autonomy—of the condemned, especially with

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regard to his moral agency. Yet it is this agency that is explicitly recognised by LR in its expectation of the criminal’s recognition of moral duty, and which exploits his life to the end of a metaphysical benefit of absolute justice which many a moral witness, such as the Buddhist, might not recognise. Moreover, to putatively preserve its moral integrity, LR must in its own terms explicitly avoid treating the condemned as an object rather than a person, by affirming in its commission his inherent worth as a person.15 Is it plausible to hold that LR necessarily secures these required features in the commission of capital punishment?

3.4 Lethal Intention and the Infliction of Harm Recall that the proponent of LR justifies this exploitation of life on the affective basis of his own moral indignation and supposes that such indignation is sufficiently justificatory for returning suffering for suffering. But even if this claim were on a charitable view defensible, there is for the Buddhist a final concomitant to it that, on top of the objections already surveyed, renders disinterested indignation as an affective justification for LR otiose. The Buddhist objection undermines the plausibility of the claim that indignation, as a morally appropriate spur to the greater end of justice, can justify LR, by focussing again on the nature of moral-affective intention. Fink writes of retributive punishment more generally: Punishment involves the infliction of harm—typically some form of suffering. This by itself is morally problematic [as discussed above], but what renders punishment especially problematic is that it involves the intentional infliction of harm. The retributivist, for example, believes that offenders should be punished simply because they deserve to suffer, as an end in itself […] For a form of treatment to count as punishment, it must not only be harmful, it must be intended as harm; it is in this sense that punishment involves the intentional infliction of harm. (2012, 374)

That is, LR intends an absolute punishment in the loss of life, and so intends a maximal infliction of harm and the suffering of it. Intention as the primary Buddhist criterion of ethical evaluation also signifies that identifying how the agent acts, and not merely what she does or why, confers a normative force on action. Intended action is not merely something which its agent believes ought to be done; Buddhist ethical evaluation attends to the affect or motivation of the “ought”. In weighing the moral valence of intention in both criminal and retributivist senses, it is certainly possible to see these as different. A passionate murderer kills in desire or rage; a cold-bloodedly moral retributivist kills ostensibly for the sake of an affect-free

15

Sitze notes Kant’s agreement with Beccaria whereby “the rights of the person are inviolable (or, to be precise, that liberty ends and tyranny starts at that point when law begins to treat the man no longer as a person but now as a thing […])” (234).

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conviction in upholding absolute justice, disclaiming the anger of revenge as a personal expression of grievance.16 On the other hand, it is plausible to hold that a prime motivation for LR lies with the justified moral outrage provoked by murder, genocide, war crimes, heinous abuses of innocents and similar cases. While such outrage need not be driven by anger, as indignation it also entails an affect the moral valence of which is equivocal. Even with respect to cases of arguably justified and sober retribution—such as the 1945– 46 Nuremburg trials and executions of Nazi enablers of genocide—it is plausible to describe moral outrage as affectively multivalent as well as tacitly motivated by a desire to restore an abused moral-juridical power of the state or governing body, as much as the moral dignity of the deceased on whose behalf it prompts action.17 It is hard to conceive how such cases could ever be divorced from some degree of rationalised revenge. But let us be clear about the case for LR to this point. The proponent, we have seen, claims that in order to dignify legal killing as a form of justified punishment, it must not be motivated by the base emotion of revenge (and so, morally and legally, amount to a homicidal act). Hence, on its own account lethal retribution is not an act of anger; to the degree that it is, then it fails its own conditions for justification. Now, whether any given case of LR in fact does implicate anger as one of its decisive causes (as it surely does in at least some cases) is an empirical question that requires empirical means of answering. But, even apart from this question, what morally decides the case on the Buddhist view developed here is not an empirical datum, but the a priori ethical status of any case of LR. In taking life, the proponent we consider here, who advocates judicial killing in some circumstances, holds that LR is justified when the deliberate infliction of such harm is in principle disinterested, and so in some broad sense equanimous. This will not, however, save the case for LR. In Chap. 6 we’ve seen that equanimity affectively implicated in the intention to kill is according to the Buddhist Abhidhamma only possible in association with causally distal delusion-rooted mental states or consciousness, and is not otherwise countenanced as a sole affectivecausal condition for it, as LR requires. Moreover, we’ve seen that the possibility of dispassionately-willed killing entirely lacking hatred is not entertained in the Abhidhamma literature: any and every ordinary agent of killing is constitutively incapable

16

Sorell (for our purposes somewhat ironically) notes that, “Surely the reason for making murder a crime is some reason for punishing murderers, and surely the reason for making murder a crime can be the evil of violent loss of life, whether or not the violent loss of life is attended by feelings of grievance.” (158, my italics). 17 Much subsequent criticism of the prosecution of the Nuremberg trials focused on the degree to which due process was a function of the exercise of political power rather than justice per se. Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, for example, claimed that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled […] Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.” (in Thompson, Jr. and Strutz 1983).

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of the intention to take life without some degree of hatred or aversion as a causal factor in that intention.18 For the Buddhist, as we saw in Chap. 5, and this is true only of the Mah¯ay¯ana, the only agent at best theoretically capable of taking life without hatred is a bodhisattva or Buddha. And, apart from the esoteric and antinomian nature of that possibility, it is untenable to hold that any Buddhist agent would take life on the normative basis of the intention to lethally punish from a sense of disinterested justice. Indeed, we have at the outset of this chapter seen N¯ag¯arjuna explicitly repudiate the very idea. The unequivocal intention to inflict the greatest harm cannot on the Buddhist view be separated from some constitutive degree of aversion. But let us for argument’s sake grant that there are cases where the collective intentions giving rise to LR are in fact relatively free of hatred, and consciously motivated by equanimous volitions to kill with a view to the proper execution of justice. The notion that such cases of the commission of lethal action with equanimous affect could conceivably be understood as determined by skilful or wholesome consciousness is belied by the fact, as noted already, that killing (both prompted and unprompted) is taken as a paradigmatic example of unwholesome consciousness throughout all iterations of the Abhidhamma/Abhidharma; note that in Chap. 6 we also saw Vasubandhu indicate the same in the Abhidharmako´sa. We have in Chap. 6 also seen that according to the Abhidhamma typology of unwholesome cittas or consciousnesses, and putting aside those consciousnesses rooted in greed (which appear in any case, and again by its own lights, irrelevant to the case of LR), there are only two other consciousnesses accompanied by equanimity: the two rooted in sheer delusion (moham¯ulacitt¯ani). Thus, on an Abhidhamma account, were a consciousness engaging the intention to kill accompanied exclusively by equanimous affect, as LR itself requires in its minimal best case, then that consciousness must be characterised by delusion also. If so, in what cognitions would such delusion consist in the case of LR? I have described them, and argued for their normative valence, above. They amount to the cognitive errors of assuming: (1) that returning suffering for suffering can ever be morally justified; (2) that the surfeit of suffering that results from such a payback has morally edifying, rather than morally deleterious, effects; (3) that the infliction of the greatest harm as a punishment can have positive (kusala) moral effect; and (4) that, in the case of the (neo)Kantian justification for LR, the philosophical understanding of the moral agent is metaphysically congruent with the true nature of the conventionally 18

This raises a curious question. It could be plausibly held that the consciousness of the executioner, who as the proxy of the state does the actual killing, is not obviously characterised by hatred in the commission of the efficient cause of death. But on the Buddhist causal account developed above, the primary cause(s) for the execution are collective intentions in the form of the volitional deliberations of a judge and jury (and antecedently a state legislature that authorises the legal right to exercise those intentions). Hence, the Buddhist claim of constitutive hatred in the intention to kill refers to this primary, rather than efficient, cause of killing, of the individually given case of LR. Inasmuch as the agent of the efficient cause is causally linked to the (here collective) intention of other decision-makers, he is not exonerated from the moral (kammic) effects of his individual action determined by those prior decisions.

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real person, who lacks an ontologically independent faculty of the will, as described above. The moral wrongness of LR does not hinge on a single datum. These aggregate instances of mistaken cognition are en groupe the badmakers of LR on the Buddhist account, and it is clear that they represent cognitive rather than affective error alone, and so confirm the Abhidhamma posit that minds engaging intentional action in this case are rooted in delusion. This conclusion rings intuitively true in a broader sense, insofar as other hypothetical cases of the equanimous motivation for lethal action—notoriously in some cases of gun massacre or psychotic homicide—where the agent expresses a disingenuousness or unawareness of the wrongness of his action, similarly neatly fit the Abhidhammic psychological model of the alignment of equanimous affect with delusion in the unskilful consciousnesses. Despite an overt intention to preserve an apparent absolute justice (to what ultimate end is not clear), LR, in seeking to inflict the greatest harm on deluded grounds, on a Buddhist account fails a fundamentally rational and so justified intention. The Buddhist account thus views the indignant, and even disinterested, intention to inflict a maximal harm and suffering as morally wrong, and so rejects the premise that execution is the sole appropriate response to some worst cases of lethal crime.

4 Civilising Norms: Restorative Justice and Aretaic Cultivation In virtue of this rejection, a Buddhist might instead propose that the most severe punishment for the most severe intentional killing is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) (Bedau 2005, 706).19 Using this potential Buddhist claim as a plausible premise, we can consider the following argument: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

19

Agents of lethal crime deserve to be punished. Execution, justified by lethal retributivism (LR), is a possible punishment of lethal crime. LWOP is another possible punishment of lethal crime. Hence, execution is a contingent punitive response to lethal crime. A Buddhist categorically rejects the intention to kill as punishment. But LR serves to uniquely express a (metaphysical) benefit unavailable in nonlethal forms of punishment: lethal just requital as the expression of absolute justice. If so, the lethal element of LR necessarily serves the expression of that (metaphysical) benefit.

In practice LWOP would in this most severe Buddhist case of punishment be conceived as life imprisonment that allows for interpersonal relationships, productive work, and reformative opportunities: that is, a life in prison that actively engages the means and effects of personal rehabilitation.

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8. 9. 10.

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If so, execution serves an end supplementary to punishment per se, which could (by 4) have been otherwise. A Buddhist accepts LWOP as sufficient punishment of lethal crime. Hence, for the Buddhist, execution justified by LR is a gratuitous punishment for lethal crime.

This conclusion is in accord with the premises of what Bedau describes as “the best argument for abolition.” (728) The first of these is that “Governments ought to use the least restrictive means—that is, the least severe, intrusive, violent methods of interference with personal liberty, privacy, and autonomy—sufficient to achieve compelling state interests” (ibid.). If reducing lethal criminal violence is a compelling state interest (Bedau’s premise 2), and LWOP is a less severe and restrictive penalty than penalty by death (his premise 4) and “sufficient to accomplish (2)” (his premise 5), then on both Bedau’s and Buddhist grounds, “therefore, the death penalty— more restrictive, invasive, and severe than imprisonment—is unnecessary; it violates premise (1).” (ibid.) Thus, both Bedau and the Buddhist argue primarily against LR as justifying a gratuitous punishment. But this argument is not exclusive of the moral value that LR in the first place rightfully recognized as having been abused in lethal crime: the inherent worth of the person. The agent of LR reasoned that the best and truly proportionate means to seek restitution for the abuse of the inherent worth of the victim, was to take the criminal’s life. But the Buddhist wants to ask: is another act of lethal aggression the best or only means to affirm the inherent worth of the person? She might revise the motivation of the agent of LR, by addressing the criminal in these terms: ‘I could kill you as punishment. Instead, I’ll affirm your inherent worth, the very thing you failed to honour in your victim by taking his life, and by so doing resist repeating your error.’ By affirming the inherent worth of the criminal in resisting his execution, the Buddhist retroactively affirms, in the person of the criminal, the original worth that was abused in his victim—just as the agent of LR retroactively assumes the moral injury of that abuse of the person as victim. In essence, the proponent of LR existentially emphasises the privation of worth, while the Buddhist emphasises its preservation, or restoration, with respect to the very same event. Failing this affirmation of the sovereign worth of the moral autonomy of the person as an individual (as detailed in §3.3, above), lethal aggression again objectifies the individual as a generic member of that heterogeneous class of persons who deserve at all costs (recall Kant) to be killed. In Buddhist terms this is a moral-psychological intention that in itself inevitably results in a predisposition to ill-motivated action. Loy writes: The state’s violence reinforces the belief that violence works. When the state uses violence against those who do things that it does not permit, we should not be surprised when some of its citizens feel entitled to do the same. […] The emphasis on nonviolence within so much of the Buddhist tradition is not because of some otherworldly preoccupations; it is based upon the psychological insight that violence breeds violence. This is a clear example, if anything is, of the maxim that our means cannot be divorced from our ends. […] If the state is not exempt from this truth, we must find some way to incorporate it into our judicial systems. (2000b, 153–154)

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There is, moreover, a specifically Buddhist concern built into its preference for an ideally restorative rather than retributive justice. I argued in Chap. 7 that the foundational value inherent in the person as a person lies in an implicit eligibility for the telic program of the Buddhist cultivation of compassion, wisdom, and ultimate awakening from ignorance. As noted at the outset of this chapter, unlike all other forms of reparative punishment which entail the deprivation of one or another good, LR uniquely intends the absolute foreclosure of the possibility of those goods, and even the possibility of possibility, and ostensibly does so on behalf of its object person, in their name as a member of the state. The absolute deprivation of life has central relevance to the Buddhist (especially Mah¯ay¯ana) soteriological project. Its concern is with a universal liberation from suffering, for which as we have seen all sentient beings possess the intrinsic potential. It aims to achieve that end via interconnected modes of rational, affective, intentional, and social life that together cultivate its possibility. On this basis it becomes clear that, as Fink describes (387ff .), a Buddhist conception of punishment can only be predicated on a basis of restorative and not retributive justice. The maintenance of any ethic that prioritizes the deprivation of life can only be one that, in presuming to preserve the inherent worth of persons, problematises that value and repudiates the intentional cultivation of virtue at its core. When N¯ag¯arjuna speaks of “banishing angry murderers” we might in the twenty-first century take him to refer to judiciously excluding such agents from the economy of grievous harm, for their own and others’ sakes alike—but not in order to perpetuate, in other terms, that same economy.

Chapter 11

Killing and Oblivion: The Obviation of Suffering

Abstract This chapter focusses on the generic class of killing that intends to terminate intolerable (actual or possible) states of suffering, thus in general terms pertaining to relevant acts of euthanasia, suicide, and abortion. This intention again confronts, in the Buddhist context, the thesis of post-mortem mental continuity, and with it possible states of post-mortem suffering. The discussion compares the Buddhist view with the ‘consensus view’ of post-mortem oblivion, in terms of soteriology, the metaphysics of mental causation, and the philosophy of mind which theorises the subject, mental states, states of suffering, and their possible ending. A Buddhist prudential argument for resisting lethal mercy gathers these themes to refute the possibility of post-mortem oblivion and the necessary relief of suffering in death. Nonetheless, a possible analogue to the oblivion thesis is explored in the Buddhist ‘state of cessation’ empirically resembling oblivion: if theoretically also available to the ‘subject’ of lethal mercy, then it might justify the latter in that rare case. However, this possibility too is refuted, leaving only the prudential conclusion that acts of lethal mercy are unable to reliably produce a final release from suffering for their subjects, by comparison to the Buddhist and other means available for its potential amelioration in the living state. Keywords Mercy-killing and Buddhism · Post-mortem oblivion · Euthanasia · Suicide · Subjectivity and suffering · Buddhism and death · Buddhist property dualism · Trope-theoretic dualism · Mental causation · Mental states and consciousness

1 Introduction: Suffering and the Post-mortem State The person as apt for lethal retribution (LR) entailed an intentional feature also true of the conception of the person as apt for killing to the end of mercifully terminating suffering. That is, both punitive and compassionate lethal acts conceive of the life of the person as something of value that is at the same time the object of willed termination. There are intentional lethal acts that can be ambiguous between these: suicide is not obviously compassionate, and can also act as a form of selfpunishment, although the sense in which self-terminated life is valued can widely © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_11

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vary (for example, unlike typical suicide, in political or altruistic religious suicide the radical selflessness constitutive of the sacrifice bestows a putative moral value on act and life alike.1 ) This chapter focuses on the feature many such cases most broadly share, irrespective of their compassionate valence: killing with the fundamental intention to end the life of oneself or another on the grounds that certain conscious states, entailing more or less acute physical or psychological suffering, justify its ending. Two truthand value-claims undergird this general intentional structure. In brief, the intentional basis for existential decisions involving euthanasia, suicide, assisted-suicide, and many cases of abortion (vis-à-vis both object and agent) rests on the claims that: (1) (2)

certain degrees of psychophysical suffering are intolerable to their subjects, and that in ending a life, such states of suffering are ended also, and that this termination of suffering is preferable to that life continuing.

I will argue that, in the context of a Buddhist account, the second of these claims cannot be justified, confirming the Buddhist prohibition of these intentional acts. As in Chap. 10, our task requires describing the distinct senses in which, on the Buddhist account, rational claims for justified killing within and outside its own lifeworld are mistaken. I will thus interrogate both non-Buddhist folk claims concerning the post-mortem state, as well as some ostensibly Buddhist-ethical claims concerning the permissibility of mercy-killing, to the end of advancing a Buddhist-theoretic argument. I will defend a Buddhist position that, though possibly implausible for a non-Buddhist audience, might nonetheless refute other ostensibly Buddhist views. I will set aside much recent Buddhist textual and religious studies research concerning the culture-specific and regional norms around euthanasia, abortion and suicide (for which see references in Chap. 1). Unlike the great majority of those studies (including my own), here I’m concerned with fundamental and universal metaphysical conditions for the Buddhist-philosophical coherence of mercy-killing, and only secondarily the normative conclusions that might emerge from that enquiry. We’ve already noted cases in which Buddhist cultural and religious beliefs may not be in accord with some Buddhist philosophical commitments. It’s not surprising that philosophical reasoning is not always the basis for more contingently and popularly determined norms (noted for example in the case of Buddhist-cultural understandings of sentience, or personhood), though both forms of justification and explanation may on occasion converge (as they do, for example, in a common-sense concern to obviate suffering). While popular religiously-inspired bases for normative beliefs can provide the context for cultural practices, I’m here concerned only with the comparatively restricted context of probative argument, grounded on classical sources, and the primary and secondary commentary associated with them. Secondary Buddhist ethics sources often express a lack of consensus. For instance, the view of Keown and other scholars (e.g., Florida 2000; Koike 2006; Ratanakul 1

See Kovan (2014) for argument defending the intrinsic moral value of altruistic self-immolation in the contemporary Tibetan Buddhist context.

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2000, 2009) is that a Buddhist-normative position does not permit (for example) passive or active euthanasia, though not all theorists share it (Becker 1990; and, more ambiguously, Perrett 1996; Hayes 1994). Keown (2018a) articulates a Buddhist view of euthanasia which nuances existing medical practice with the Buddhist desideratum of an explicit resistance to any intention to cause (as opposed to allow) death, even where such an outcome is inevitably foreseen.2 Keown’s conclusion in this case accords with my own in this chapter, but I offer substantially different reasons for it. Beyond corroborating Keown’s emphasis that euthanasia contravenes the first precept, I’m concerned to offer a broader argument for why the precept itself is justified in this case. Parallel points can be made regarding abortion and suicide, as well, in their respectively distinct senses, but I do not elaborate them here. Similarly, I do not here engage or dispute Buddhist-bioethical justifications for clinical practice in which the withdrawal of artificial life-support is commonly undertaken (again excluding cases of passive euthanasia, where such withdrawal intends the death of a terminally-ill patient).3 While the following argument variably grants Keown (2018a), Barnhart (2018), Kovan (2018) to have argued persuasively for what best Buddhist-bioethical theory or practice might amount to in the contexts of euthanasia, abortion and suicide, respectively,4 it also provides philosophical enhancement, and perhaps some revision, of the reasons for their conclusions. The relevant general distinction here is essentially between the exoneration and prescription of intentional acts. That is, I understand best practice in these contexts to refer to the optimal, and to that degree only pragmatically justified, conditions in which autonomous people and clinicians theoretically or actually engage intentional lethal acts in their differing psychological, social and clinical dimensions. But the pragmatic exoneration of such acts is not equivalent to their ethical prescription, i.e., a claim that on these grounds they should be committed, even when they appear a best recourse. The context-specific reasons for exonerating some cases of compassionate killing (abortion is perhaps the most prominent case in point) are to be distinguished from the universal philosophical grounds examined below, which generate metaphysical rather than pragmatic forms of justification, and so distinct ethical norms regarding such acts—notably the claim that, ultimately, they should not be committed at all. I will therefore philosophically question some of the presuppositions informing bioethical and medical understandings of the permissibility and practice of mercy-killing in these varying forms.

2

The principle of ‘double effect’ (Cavanaugh 2006) where death is foreseen but not intended, relevant to medical and military ethics, and the law. 3 Keown argues against a Buddhist permissibility of any form of euthanasia, while recognising therapeutic rather than homicidal acts whereby “the refusal or withdrawal of medical treatment […] incidentally leads to the patient’s death […] within the normal parameters of his medical care.” (2018a, 613). 4 Schlieter (2014) also considers all three domains of abortion, euthanasia and suicide, with an emphasis on the Buddhist sense of the mitigation of suffering. His discussion, too, largely engages applied Buddhist-bioethical questions and concerns, rather than the metaphysical ones of the present chapter, and on which the former supervene.

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In brief, Buddhist bioethical accounts concerning lethality tend to leave crucial philosophical ground under-explored by not usually distinguishing ending suffering from ending a life. Here I focus on the theoretical question of what it means, in the context of Buddhist philosophy of mind, to claim that a life can end in a state of oblivion, thereby ending subjective suffering, and that choosing to end individual suffering could be a moral priority. Schlieter notes that: claiming the existence of suffering [in the first noble truth], Buddhist texts emphasize that the overall, long-term goal can be neither to mitigate nor to endure (or adapt to) suffering, but instead to accept it—in order to enter the path of Buddhist practice, which is intended to fully overcome suffering. Pursuing strategies to prevent a priori any kind of anticipated suffering for sentient beings would—assuming that these strategies would work—preclude the motivation to search for efficient ways out of the “ocean of suffering.” (2014, 314)

This consideration is germane for Buddhist soteriology as well as practice, because if Buddhist-metaphysical claims for post-mortem continuity are true then Buddhists have no choice but to accept, rather than evade, suffering in the sense Schlieter highlights. Nonetheless, the following argument does no more than assume the possibility of post-mortem sentient states, though it builds on the discussion of this theme in Chap. 8 Sect. 1 (and to which the reader is advised to refer). The more probative part of the discussion engages the rational analysis of Buddhist claims concerning the metaphysics of mental causation, to arrive at a conclusion consistent with Buddhist commitments. After first considering the relation of Buddhism to the consensus view of oblivion, in Sect. 2 I focus on the nature of mental states with respect to suffering mental states, the suffering subject and the evaluation of these states, and present a Buddhist account of the relation between suffering states and post-mortem continuity. I then consider in Sect. 3 the putative ending of suffering in a widely-assumed (folk-theoretical, as well as philosophical) belief that death entails a ‘permanent’ state of oblivion (as oblivion it is atemporal) and on Buddhist grounds argue (in Sect. 3.2) against its possibility. As noted in earlier chapters, canonical and subsequent traditions of Buddhism prima facie reject the possibility of this post-mortem state.5 However, it is theoretically possible that, on its own terms, it might be wrong to do so. This is because a sole Buddhist candidate for a very similar state of oblivion is available, inasmuch as the state of cessation (nirodhasam¯apatti) is a non-conscious state of non-suffering. If this state is unequivocally possible for Buddhist philosophy of mind, then perhaps a Buddhist account of post-mortem oblivion is also. If the Buddhist state of cessation meets on its own terms all the conditions for a postmortem state of oblivion, this may raise a problem for some Buddhist ethical theory. Hence, we must assess whether this state meets all the conditions for a post-mortem state of oblivion, and so suffices to theoretically justify some potential cases of mercy-killing.

5

Such a materialist view is described at length (and later rejected) at DN I 55. Westerhoff (2017) provides a recent philosophical discussion of the canonical rejection of materialist nihilism, in favour of a non-naturalised Buddhist account of mental continuity, such as is the one offered here.

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Having considered (in Sect. 3.1) the thesis of oblivion with respect to an analysis of the Buddhist state of cessation, I consider (in Sect. 3.3) the conceptual relations of both with the unconditioned state of nibb¯ana, and argue that while the state of cessation satisfies the condition for non-suffering, it only partially satisfies the requirements for post-mortem oblivion, and is insufficient for a soteriologically valuable ending of suffering (Sect. 4). The aim of the chapter is to decide whether mercykilling in the Buddhist-philosophical context is ultimately justified, in the case that it produces a post-mortem state of oblivion in which all possibility of suffering is annulled.

1.1 Buddhism and the Consensus View Where contemporary Buddhist scholarship has engaged the question of voluntary euthanasia and other relevant forms of supposedly beneficent killing, it has often tacitly presumed the consensus view that ending a life relieves intolerable suffering. The ethical theorist then asks which cases of such suffering qualify for killing on this basis, if not all cases do, and why. This approach is reasonable inasmuch as its presuppositions in large part cohere with those held by the secular society for which the ethical question is pertinent. However, in this case, the Buddhist view of mental continuity ought to be neither simply assumed, nor side-stepped, but rather critically engaged. Why is this required? If intentionally killing people were, from some Buddhist perspective, a solution to the problem of their suffering, then euthanasia—as well as suicide and abortion—might be consistent with or even enjoined by the Eightfold Path.6 Yet the Buddha forcefully castigates the very idea,7 and on only three overt occasions suggests that the suicide of a¯ rya-beings is a lethal act that does not incur negative moral consequence (Delhey 2006; Kovan 2018). Is it nevertheless reasonable to hold that there might be other cases where the lethal relief of suffering is permissible?8 And if there are such cases, however exceptional, what is the principle that in their case overrides the more fundamental principle of not-killing? Moreover, if there is such a principle, is the first precept still fundamental if it can be justifiably over-ridden for reasons of this principle, if not for others? In other words, is intentional killing prohibited for some general Buddhistjustificatory reasons (such as its malign effects in kammic demerit, bad consequences

6

See again Westerhoff (2017) for discussion of this theme. See for example the mass-suicide of monks at Vin. III 65 and SN V 320. 8 Reasons for bypassing the prohibition importantly differ in the varied contexts of euthanasia, abortion and suicide; Harvey (2000) summarises these with respect to the Buddhist-textual and anthropological record. However, a discussion of the modal status of post-mortem suffering remains globally relevant to all of these. 7

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for rebirth, or ill intention) and the first precept essentially a heuristic to be negotiated by the more or less intolerable individual case—as indicated by some advisory statements of H.H. the Dalai Lama (Bainbridge and Baines 66–69)9 and Kalu Rinpoche (Sogyal Rinpoche 374), and in other terms, by Harvey (2000, 319ff .) and Perrett (2000, 112) among others? Or, does Buddhist thought imply other reasons that make the prohibition in theory non-negotiable, so that a maximally ‘natural death’ is preferable just because it is prudential in this, as well as any possible future, existence. I will defend the latter view. Again, this defence doesn’t imply that medical practice fails in its duty of care by rightly desisting from futile palliative treatment. But it does question some of the presuppositions that might inform the justification for positive acts (including acts of omission) that appear to constitute lethal mercy. My argument focusses on the problems that arise when the consensus view meets with Buddhist conceptions of the necessary conditions for the ending of suffering, grounded in a theory of mental causation. Buddhists dispute the consensus view not only because of differences regarding the transcendental status of the post-mortem state, but more importantly because they theorize different immanent conditions of possibility for the ending of suffering, and of conscious experience itself. Because these conditions imply that from a Buddhist perspective post-mortem oblivion is theoretically impossible, many popular conclusions regarding the post-mortem termination of suffering can’t be unproblematically assumed.

1.2 The Person as the Object of States of Suffering We’ve seen that Buddhist philosophy of mind conceives of the mental continuum of the ordinary person as determined by deep-volitional formations. For most Indian Buddhist schools, these collect mental functions which ontologically reduce to mental dharmas which (for Therav¯ada and Sarv¯astiv¯ada accounts alike) along with r¯upa-dharmas are the loci of causal efficacy. Our concern here is with the ontological and causal conditions for their continuity or cessation, and their susceptibility to change or ability to effect it, particularly where these involve the r¯upa-dharmas with which, as we’ve seen, they’re causally imbricated. If the person just is a unitary nexus of causal networks of psychophysical properties as a generic Buddhist view would have it, then the relevant causal series constituting discrete mental states can be analytically reduced to mental tropes or dharmas. Moreover, ‘persons’ exist only in virtue of their unconscious reification of these sequences as persons; and (as discussed in Chap. 8) we typically reify the mental properties of persons as ultimately physical, both spontaneously and in philosophical and scientific discourse. This is thus a pretheoretical and theoretical default understanding of the 9

Hughes also reports that “The Dalai Lama has argued, for instance, that although abortion is generally inappropriate, it may be permissible in cases of severely handicapped foetuses that may suffer in life” (2007, 129).

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ontology of the mind and mental states for much of scientific, and scientistic secularrational, society. Hence, if this plausibly characterises the cognitive preconditions undergirding an agent’s acts vis-à-vis the person, then it makes sense to that agent to kill in order to relieve suffering, just because destruction of the person entails destruction of his constitutive properties, including seemingly mental ones. But again, this default position is one that we’ve already noted, in the Buddha’s rejection of annihilationist theories of the person, as expressing a central instance of wrong view. That is, for as long as primordially ignorant self-construction constitutes the mental continuum, the causal bases also exist for the pre- and post-mortem continuity of that mind, and the unsatisfactory state of sam . s¯ara that is ineluctably its issue. Only nibb¯ana, achieved through the extirpation of the causes of ignorance, can permanently end the causal-constructive process that underwrites mental continuity in the usual sense, and the conscious mental states of suffering it comprises.

2 Conscious Mental States and Events A conscious mental state is a part of a causally determined process of cognitive events, identifiable by the subject of that mental experience (and itself a mental experience), conditioned by preceding such states, and conditioning future ones. Not all mental states are introspectable; many subpersonal mental states and events cannot ever be subjectively conscious. Nonetheless, those that constitute mental suffering are in theory accessible inasmuch as the given state instantiates suffering for someone, so is ipso facto an intentional conscious state. Coseru claims of canonical and subsequent Indian Buddhist conceptions of conscious mental states that: Abhidharma traditions […] operate with the assumption that all cognitions are inherently intentional. Indeed, […] all types of consciousness are intentional: they are about an object that must necessarily exist. However, a detailed account of intentionality is only found in later philosophical developments associated with the Buddhist logico-epistemological school of Dign¯aga and Dharmak¯ırti (2017b).

We’re here concerned with conscious mental states identified by their subjects as states of suffering; that is, that take as their intentional object the cognized experience of suffering.

2.1 Mental States as States of Suffering Despite being conditioned, neither mental states of suffering nor of non-suffering have uniform causes, and what makes a mental state a cause of suffering importantly includes the manifold ways it is experienced. For example, while there are clear causes of pain, they are not thereby causes of the various kinds and degrees of suffering of painful mental states: the very same cause, especially of moralpsychological pain, can and does produce widely divergent, even contradictory,

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reports of suffering in different subjects (compare child and adult responses to a common experience of pain). Two implications of this will bear on subsequent argument. First, the removal of the causes of physical pain does not in itself guarantee the alleviation of suffering, though it may certainly contribute to it. This is because the experience of suffering involves a complex of psychologically reflexive feelings regarding the subject who suffers, many of which might have an only limited basis in pain states per se.10 Second, suffering is properly a mental state of a subject, and not of a biological organism per se. Without the subject-who-suffers it is impossible to speak of the suffering of the person, or its variable and putative causes. The cognitive process both (unconsciously) constructing and (consciously) witnessing such experience, phenomenologically construed as ‘me’ and ‘mine’ (Garfield 2015, 92–94), consists in causal relations temporally obtaining between causally efficacious mental states. These relations determine how mental states arise, their distribution over time, and what allows them to continue in pre- and potential post-mortem conditions alike—a generic Buddhist account of which I will detail, below, to refute the possibility of post-mortem oblivion. On this Buddhist account, a subject of suffering need not require, or be coterminous with, the ontological substrate of a substantive self . The empirical subject just is that subjective locus of present conscious experience, or causal series of mental events which as conscious registers the felt and cognized qualities of contentful psychophysical states. If there are contentless mental states—such as those theorised of deep sleep, coma, brain-death, and the Buddhist nirodhasam¯apatti—they could neither be known nor experienced as such, nor be constituted by some content by which they could be positively characterized, including an absence-of-content. They wouldn’t be about anything, for anyone. Such non-intentional states would not be the mental states of a non-conscious subject, and certainly not states of suffering. The same would necessarily be true of the hypothetical state of death as oblivion, lacking as it would all and any mental states per se.

2.2 The Buddhist Case for Post-mortem Mental States and the Freedom from Suffering We can summarize the Buddhist position for continuity in the following terms. Postmortem sentient states may relieve pre-mortem suffering; but they also may not (for example, they may involve involuntary experience of one of the hell realms). Hence, post-mortem relief is uncertain in this first basic sense. Moreover, the Buddhist commitment to post-mortem continuity entails a causal basis for post-mortem states in pre-mortem mental states, so that even where the post-mortem relief of suffering

10

One of the signs of a growing maturity in Buddhist discipline is the ability to experience pain without disproportionate attendant suffering (see Miln. 445).

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is possible, it must have a causal basis in pre-mortem relief. But even where postmortem relief is in theory independently possible, this may be compromised by other factors. Buddhist soteriology speculates on intermediate states in which mental agency is more or less determined by conditioned mental factors that lie outside the potential for agency. It proposes that post-mortem continuity is in most cases determined by wholly unconscious mental structures that can only be qualified by rare achievements of mental discipline, a reflexive control typically instantiating the mental continua of highly-realized bodhisattvas, a¯ rya-beings, or, ultimately, Buddhas.11 Given this twofold uncertainty regarding post-mortem mental agency, the premortem relief of suffering, where this is possible, is the most reliable route to postmortem relief, and a fortiori, the relief of pre-mortem suffering. Hence, the preservation of conscious mental states, where these are possible in the course of a natural lifetime, is preferable to their radical interruption through mercy-killing. That is, suffering can be most reliably relieved through the conscious cultivation of relief. Prior to death, and despite the presence of physical pain, the experience of suffering itself may be more or less within the voluntary control of its subject.12 Taking that subject’s life, however, takes mental control out of her hands.13 Moreover, for the Buddhist, the state of mind at the moment of death is causally significant in determining the quality of subsequent states and the succeeding embodiment of life. We can formalise this account, as: 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

11

On this account, killing a person does not result in the non-existence of any states whatsoever; rather, the post-mortem condition is characterized by potential sentient states, including conscious mental states. Post-mortem mental states might include mental states of suffering, and states of non-suffering. Killing a person on this account cannot determine which of these states characterizes his/her post-mortem mental states. Hence, on this account, killing a person cannot be guaranteed to obviate his/her states of suffering. Hence, his/her post-mortem mental states might be states of suffering. Hence, killing a person to alleviate suffering might fail to do so. The best way to guarantee the alleviation of pre-mortem suffering if there is post-mortem consciousness is to do so while a sufferer is alive.

See Harvey (1995, 102–104) for early Buddhist context. Moreover, the alleviation of even intractable physical pain does not require euthanasia. Ratanakul (2009) notes, “The Buddhist objection to the experience of unbearable pain as the reason for euthanasia is justified. The hospice movement has shown that we already possess the means to control [physical] suffering and the knowledge to maintain people without severe pain.” 13 This of course assumes a minimal degree of voluntary control and cognitive capacity. Where these are lacking, it is not clear that the relevant suffering is of a kind that the subject could identify as apt for mercy-killing. 12

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Hence, refraining from killing a suffering person is a more effective way than killing him/her to alleviate suffering, providing that there are post-mortem conscious states.

This argument demonstrates that on a Buddhist view only pre-mortem mental states can most reliably secure the cessation of suffering, and thereby serve the central Buddhist purpose of the cultivation of mental states free from suffering. We now turn to situating these claims for post-mortem continuity in their broader philosophical context so that we can see how Buddhist philosophy of mind entails that neither death, nor any other state of oblivion, can serve this purpose.

3 Buddhist-Philosophical Refutation of the Possibility of Oblivion We know that Buddhism rejects the oblivion account of death. But it is not clear whether it is entitled to do so. If Buddhist theorists presuppose post-mortem continuity, why might that continuity not be characterized by a potential oblivious state if, in living conditions, we empirically observe some persons’ minds effectively lost in coma or catatonic states from which they do not emerge? If there are Buddhist grounds for a notion of post-mortem oblivion as a state that plausibly ends suffering, then a Buddhist argument against post-mortem oblivion will need to show why this option is untenable also. Accordingly, Sect. 3.1 examines the closest theoretical candidate for a Buddhist correlate to the state of oblivion, which state Buddhist theorists themselves already propose as near-identical to their own understanding of biological death. This section elucidates how nirodhasam¯apatti could be analytically aligned with the purported state of oblivion and thus be a candidate for a state of post-mortem oblivion. In Sect. 3.2 I consider how the purported state of oblivion could be theorised as the possible culmination of a sequence of mental causes preceding death, and whether, given the Buddhist understanding of mental causation, post-mortem oblivion could be said to relieve suffering. In Sect. 3.3 I ask whether the state of cessation is a state that can relieve suffering in Buddhist terms, concluding that even the state that Buddhists consider nearest to death cannot be mobilised to support the idea that post-mortem oblivion could constitute the obviation of suffering.

3.1 Post-mortem Oblivion, Cessation (Nirodhasam¯apatti) and the Buddhist Understanding of Death While Buddhism rejects the claim that death is oblivion, by examining the Buddhist understanding of death we can differentiate it from significantly similar states,

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including purported oblivion. The most basic, and among the earliest, of canonical definitions of death is that: The physical [k¯aya-], verbal [vac¯ı-] and mental [citta-] functions [-sankh¯ar¯a] of the dead person […] have ceased and subsided; his vitality [¯ayu] is destroyed, his heat [usm¯a] is extinguished and his sense organs are scattered. (MN 1 296.11–23)

This definition would appear to be compatible with an empirical notion of death as a state of oblivion. In order to see why this is not so, we need to identify a more accurate Buddhist understanding of death and of states that approximate oblivion. In the continuation of the passage quoted, the Buddhist understanding of death is contrasted with a state in which all sensory, verbal and mental functions have entirely ceased: nirodhasam¯apatti. Harvey explains: This is an anomalous state that, by the combination of profound meditative calming, and of meditative insight, all mental states come to a complete halt. The mind totally shuts down, devoid of even subtle feeling and cognition […] In this state, the heart and breathing stop (MN I 301–02), but a residual metabolism keeps the body alive for up to seven days. (1993, 38)

Hence, in both death and the state of cessation “the physical, verbal and mental functions […] have ceased and subsided.” (ibid.) Only the autonomic maintenance of vitality (¯ayu), heat (usm¯a) and ‘purified’ and intact sense-organs (¯ayatana), preserves the possibility of re-emergence from this living but non-conscious state into the conscious living state. On the Buddhist view, death is that condition in which the disaggregation of these latter three conditions entails the impossibility of such emergence (for the same person, or psychophysical organism). Note also that the reference to seven days applies to cessation as a living state, whereas we are theorising a possibility, given the continuity thesis, of cessation occurring or being sustained (with modified criteria) in a post-mortem state. However, putative oblivion and nirodhasam¯apatti are similar in another respect: they are each contentless, subject-less, non-intentional and devoid of conscious experience. The contentlessness of the state of cessation is emphasized by Buddhaghosa, in his commentary14 on the Nik¯aya passage quoted above. Harvey continues: In the Therav¯adin view, as expressed by Buddhaghosa in chapter 23 of Vism., cessation is ‘the non-occurrence of citta and mental states as a result of their successive cessation’. A person in this state is ‘without citta’. Not even the latent form of mind present in dreamless sleep, bhava˙nga, is said to be present. A person in this state is seen as only a body, with no mental states whatever. (38)

The state of cessation is an important state for Buddhist philosophy of mind because it is the only available state in the very extensive Buddhist taxonomy of mental phenomena that could constitute a state of oblivion. If there is a Buddhist postmortem state of oblivion capable of absolutely relieving suffering, this might constitute a potential Buddhist justification for mercy-killing, provided that it could reliably 14

MN-a II 351.14—352.4. Note that the canonical account of death does not ever appear to be contradicted by that of any later body of Buddhist literature. While discussion of nirodhasam¯apatti is marginal, the basic conditions for it and for death (as the end of the continuum of the organism) remain consistent throughout the relevant theoretical discussion.

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be attained. Moreover, the state of cessation is the only state which completely lacks (even unconscious) mental-intentional content. This is why it is so similar to the purported state of oblivion, and why it is important to ask whether the achievement of this state could be a legitimate soteriological goal. Indeed, Buddhaghosa claims that the state of cessation is not merely contentless, but intrinsically non-mental. He implicitly suggests—and it is hard to disagree—that the intentions of the canonical text’s description of the attainment of cessation are clearly to state that nothing mental exists in this condition, and that the use of the term ‘mental functions’ is therefore meant to exclude not only mental activity but also mind itself, if indeed this is to be considered as something other than its activities. […] For the Buddhist the attainment of cessation suggests not only that there is no reaction to stimuli and no initiation of action, but also that there is no internal mental life of any kind. (Griffiths 1986, 8;11)

Griffiths’ reading of Buddhaghosa’s account of the canon corroborates an alignment of the Buddhist analysis of a definitionally non-mental state with the notion of death-as-oblivion.15 However, it’s important to note a significant difference between the accounts of the arising of these states. As suggested by Harvey following Buddhaghosa above, nirodhasam¯apatti is a state that arises only following a sequence 15

A caveat needs to be noted in the context of Buddhist discussion of the state of cessation. The theorization of nirodhasam¯apatti requires explaining how mental continuity is possible following immersion in cessation, if it is characterized by an absence of all mental phenomena and if mental continuity requires contiguous temporal-causal relations between mental events and episodes of the same psychophysical continuum. This was a problem for the classical theorists of cessation, who had to consider whether it was plausible to conceive of a non-conscious but nevertheless mental substratum that could qualify as the causal link between pre- and post-cessation mental processes. The theorization of unconscious mentation or nonintentional consciousnesses (notably the bhava˙nga-citta and a¯ laya-vijñ¯ana) arose to account for post-cessation mental continuity in the absence of direct mental causation during cessation. The classical discussion of this problem, among Buddhist theorists of different schools, is complex and contentious, but its details need not detain us here. Our problem might however be that permitting the existence of such a mental substratum in the state of cessation would appear, if the state of oblivion is utterly non-mental, to threaten its analytic alignment with that of cessation. However, a non-conscious but causally efficacious mental substrate that allows mental function to re-occur explains the emergence of post-cessation mentality, not the state of cessation as such and how it occurs, which is our sole concern here. The theory of subliminal mental continuity does not qualify our discussion of a synchronic state of mindlessness (even if cessation is not in the living case permanent, and inasmuch as the state itself disallows diachronicity). For purposes of conceiving death-as-oblivion in Buddhist terms, we need not be concerned with the post-cessation continuity problems of nirodhasam¯apatti that ancient commentary and modern scholarship articulates. As Griffiths notes of the wider Buddhist context: if consciousness is identified with empirically perceptible mental events, and if all mental events must be intentional in the sense of possessing an object—which is, in essence, the canonical view—then there are clearly many states in which there are no mental events. (1986, 38, my italics) If an intentional model of mind is the Buddhist canonical view of the mental (the view also of Arnold 2014; Coseru 2012) then we can take it, as Griffiths does, that these many non-intentional states must uncontroversially include at least the state of cessation. If there is no sense in which cessation allows for intentionality then the theoretical posit of quasi-mental continuity during cessation (arguably entailed by the theorization of post-cessation continuity) can be safely put aside without compromising what follows.

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of increasingly rarefied stages of absorption in which intentional content is progressively withdrawn from conscious experience.16 The state of cessation is the final (eighth or ninth, depending on the account) culminating stage, no longer a properly mental state, and cannot be attained otherwise. Before returning to these causes of nirodhasam¯apatti, we need to ask what the causal bases for death-as-oblivion might be in the hypothetical case. That is, we already know that sheer oblivion is rejected given the posit of post-mortem continuity, but we have not yet determined why Buddhists reject it. It is only by understanding how pre-mortem events might hypothetically cause oblivion that we can understand why this is impossible in Buddhist terms. We will then be able to ask whether nirodhasam¯apatti is a possible post-mortem state for the permanent relief of suffering, and so whether mercy-killing could be potentially justified on its basis. Finally, we can ask whether that relief of suffering is of a kind that Buddhism considers soteriologically valuable. We turn now to the first of these considerations.

3.2 The Temporal-Causal Constitution of Mental States Approaching Death and the Termination of Suffering On a Buddhist view, each psychological state is caused by a precedent complex of mental-affective states, and gives rise to a subsequent complex of such states. As the Buddhist view assumes post-mortem continuity, then the immediate postmortem state cannot be one of oblivion, but must entail some degree of continuity between conscious pre-mortem and post-mortem mental (and even some physical) states. If this Buddhist view of mind conceives of a possible, if uncertain, state of the post-mortem relief of suffering, how could this in theory occur? Coseru summarizes the background to an understanding of the causal function of consciousness: cognitive awareness (vijñ¯ana) plays a double role: it is both the stream of conscious episodes that characterize the life of the mind and, at the same time, the principle of continuity of awareness, by virtue of which some sense of identity is maintained over time […] Thus cognitive awareness provides the basis for further cognitive activity, while also supporting the formative karmic activities (sam . sk¯aras) of sensation, perception, volition, etc. that perpetuate the life cycle. The double function of this cognitive awareness as a conditioned and conditioning factor within the overall dynamics of the five aggregates is explained in causal terms by means of an analysis of the underlying factors that play a role in the arising of each cognitive event. The lists of the types of causes, conditions, and results in the Abhidharma discourse of causality vary only slightly from school to school. (2012) 16

These stages are most typically classified as the nine successive abodes (anupubbavih¯ara) or attainments (anupubbanirodha), or alternately, the eight liberations (vimokkha). The former includes the four jh¯anas of form plus the four of formlessness ending with the final state of cessation. The latter replaces the first set of four jh¯anas with a threefold set of meditative visualisations (see DN II 71; Walshe 229–30).

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In the theoretical case of the ending of pre-mortem suffering states at the moment of death, the first of the dual functions Coseru notes consists in momentary cittas subtending those cognitive-affective factors that instantiate afflicted mental tendencies (Sk. klis..ta-manas). These tendencies, and the states they constitute, are the mental objects of the sense of suffering: they are what the subject is aware (in the second sense of vijñ¯ana) of . These states are conditioned by previous such states. Nonetheless, the mental objects constitutive of this occurrent experience of suffering are modifiable in their subsequent appropriation by the agency of the second of the dual functions identified by Coseru (an active dimension of the mental). This relation between constituted and constituting functions of consciousness enables the causally incremental revision of the subjective registration of a series of mental states. The afflicted tendencies are, somewhat ironically, the mental objects that form the cognitive-affective basis for a possible extirpation of the suffering they instantiate. A causal account of the termination of suffering mental states might thus run as follows: first, the afflicted tendencies can be identified by higher-order states of awareness that take them as their objects; second, a combined awareness of them as afflictive and the conscious cultivation of their antidotes in self-correcting subsequent mental states could attenuate the suffering these former states produce. The oblivion thesis instead holds that purely physical causes (the cessation of respiration, heartbeat and brain-function) cause death-as-oblivion, and thus the termination of states of suffering through the complete elimination of the possibility of mental states. Buddhist philosophy of mind rejects the possibility of the causal series of all mental processes bluntly ending, in a moment following a terminal moment of consciousness, except for the immanent occurrence of nirodhasam¯apatti.17 But we have seen that the attainment of the state of cessation can only interrupt the constructive process of conscious mental continuity by virtue of extraordinarily skilled psychophysical control, and so to that degree eliminate the conditions for suffering to arise. Although nibb¯ana also ends the constructive activity of the sam . kh¯arakhandha and all possible further causes for the mind to suffer, if not consciousness per se, the state of cessation ends the function of conscious mentation, and so only the possibility of occurrent suffering. It does not in itself eliminate the sam . kh¯aras that cause the conscious mind to re-emerge from immersion in non-consciousness, and so does not eliminate the possibility of future suffering.18 As Coseru notes, “on the model of the homogeneous and immediately antecedent condition […] a particular dharma conditions that arising of a dharma of a similar type: a moment of joy, therefore, may only give rise to another moment of joy.” (2012, 19) Hence, on a Buddhist view of mental causation, the homogeneous and immediately antecedent condition (samanantarapratyaya) for the continuity of mental states determines the possibility of radical mental privation leading to, ultimately, 17

The attainment of nibb¯ana cannot be understood as a possible analogue of this immanent causal process, as it (both with and without ‘remainder’) is unique in being a state by definition transcendental to the conditioned field of causality. 18 However, according to Vism. (XXIII, 18; p. 735) the attainment of cessation is such that its subject is either an Arhat or near to one, so is only minimally conditioned by volitional formations of an unwholesome kind.

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the cessation of all mental phenomena, and not purely physical causes, as the oblivion thesis holds. This has an interesting parallel in the context of contemporary Western philosophical discussion of the person and personal identity. McMahan (2002) describes in highly similar terms two necessary and sufficient conditions for personal mental-psychological continuity: The concept of a psychological connection […] is usually held to set two criteria that a later mental state must satisfy in order to form a psychological connection with an earlier mental state. One is that the later state must be causally dependent on the earlier one. The other is that the later state must have the phenomenological character and behavioral consequences appropriate for a normal successor state. The characterization of what is appropriate may differ from one type of psychological state to another. […] I will use the general term “qualitative similarity” to express this second requirement. Thus the usual view is that, for example, a later belief forms a psychological connection with an earlier one if the later one is qualitatively similar to and causally dependent on the earlier one. (60)

These are criteria for psychological and causal connectedness between mental states that clearly agree with the Buddhist one of the homogeneous and immediately antecedent condition for mental continuity. The difference between McMahan’s account and the Buddhist model of psychological continuity is that the Buddhist holds that the purported state of death-as-oblivion is impossible as an effect of immediately precedent states of pre-mortem suffering.

3.3 Oblivion, Cessation and Nibb¯ana If nirodhasam¯apatti is a state of occurrent non-suffering, could this state be achieved post-mortem, and be a permanent relief of suffering? We’ve seen that in nirodhasam¯apatti the three vital functions of heat, life-principle, and the sense-faculties are still present in the living body of the (non-)‘subject’ of cessation, and that the ‘dispersal’ of these three functions is what defines a person as having died. Indeed, Buddhaghosa claims (at Vism. XXIII, 42d; p. 740) that the subject of cessation must, in order to successfully attain it, ascertain that he will not die during immersion in the state: The monk should consider very carefully the limit of his life’s duration. He should attain [cessation] only after thinking: Will my vital functions continue for seven days [ie. the standard length of time that a practitioner remains in the attainment of cessation] or not? For if he attains [cessation] without thinking whether the vital functions will cease within seven days, then since the attainment of cessation is not able to prevent death and, because there is no death within the attainment of cessation, he then emerges from the attainment of cessation. (Griffiths, 39–40)

Cessation can’t prevent death, should it be near, but also ends on its occurrence: they are occurrently mutually exclusive. Clearly nirodhasam¯apatti is not an effect of death, or permanent, in the sense that the oblivion thesis holds post-mortem oblivion to be, although its impermanence is explicitly predicated on the limit at which the

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living body can remain alive in that state. Buddhaghosa claims, without explanation, that it does not last much beyond seven days, and is not contradicted in other accounts. In the living state cessation is thus an impermanent state of non-mental non-suffering, so fails the condition for a permanent state of oblivion. However, it remains unclear whether a purely ‘mental’ cessation is theoretically re-attainable after death, given the post-mortem continuity thesis, and given that Buddhaghosa only claims that death cannot occur within it. We can assume some significant modification of the mental continuum in the event of ‘Buddhist’ death (most obviously, inter alia, in terms of sensory cognitions and embodied sources of memory), but cessation is in any case a suspension of all possible mentation, so whatever constitutes mentality post-mortem is not directly at issue. Could the arcane possibility of a (highly trained) consciousness voluntarily ceasing post-mortem be theoretically granted? If so, the case for mercykilling has at this point become abstrusely theoretical and, practically, negligible to this-worldly ethical concerns. But could cessation be equivalent to the relief from suffering denoted by nibb¯ana? Answering this question addresses the third and final condition for a candidate Buddhist state of oblivion which might conceivably justify (rare) cases of mercy-killing. We know that, according to Buddhists, to assert the equivalence of nibb¯ana with oblivion is to commit the grave error of annihilationism: it would be to assert that when at death psychophysical processes disperse, so too does all possibility of mental continuity (cittav¯ıthi), and hence also the possibility of achieving a permanent freedom from the primordial causes of suffering. Early canonical discussion of nirodhasam¯apatti, and subsequent commentary, however, often suggested its qualitative equivalence with nibb¯ana. Buddhaghosa argues that as the state of cessation necessarily lacks “the occurrence and dissolution of formations” (Vism. XXIII, 30; p. 738) which are both caused and impermanent, then it also lacks the mental bases for suffering (given also that purely physical causes of pain might be assumed to be insensible to the person in cessation). Buddhaghosa asserts that cessation utterly obviates occurrent causes of suffering and so entails, while the person immersed in it is still alive, a state of mindless happiness which he likens to nibb¯ana. Unsurprisingly, this apparent aligning of nirodhasam¯apatti with nibb¯ana was also vulnerable to charges of annihilationism because of the potential correlation of ‘mindless non-suffering’ with the purported state of post-mortem oblivion, noted above. Hence, Buddhaghosa’s commentator Dhammap¯ala qualifies Buddhaghosa’s claim by suggesting that ‘happiness’ in this context signifies only a mere absence of suffering,19 and not a psychological affect the positive content of which by definition distinguishes nibb¯ana from all other possible mental or non-mental states. Griffiths (1986, 29) too recognizes that the state of cessation is not psychologically identical with nibb¯ana, or any kind of cognitive-affective states at all, including happiness, but rather their radical absence. Dhammap¯ala also pointedly qualifies Buddhaghosa’s claim by observing that cessation could at best only approximate to post-mortem nibb¯ana (without 19

Sukham . ti niddukkham . (Vism-t.. 1673.22).

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remainder) rather than pre-mortem nibb¯ana (with remainder) because the latter is also characterized by an arhat’s or Buddha’s mental and physical activity. According to Dhammap¯ala, if cessation can only be likened to nibb¯ana without remainder, and this only refers to a post-mortem enlightened state, then the equivalence between cessation and nibb¯ana cannot be literal. For him, Buddhagosa’s likening of cessation to nibb¯ana can only be metaphoric, as though (viya) they were the same state, not that they are. Dhammap¯ala’s qualification of Buddhaghosa clearly suggests both that a post-mortem state of cessation is untenable, even if one were to hold a nibb¯ana-cessation equivalence, and that such equivalence could not be literal. Even though cessation and nibb¯ana each constitute an extinction of occurrent suffering, three uncontroversial criteria disqualify their equivalence. Nibb¯ana is permanent, conscious and soteriologically absolute. Cessation, on the other hand, is an impermanent, non-conscious and soteriologically limited (if remarkable) state. Apart from the fact that they are states of non-suffering, they have nothing else in common, especially the predicate of obliviousness.

4 Conclusion: Cessation of the Mental, and the Cessation of Suffering Despite this failure of cessation as a potential Buddhist candidate for a post-mortem relief of suffering, some implications emerge from the preceding discussion that bear on reasons for exceptions to the prohibition of killing. We noted that the only reason nirodhasam¯apatti can be a contentless state at all is because the virtuoso meditator, who alone is able to achieve it, has already attained those mental states characteristic not of ordinary people but of those who to a very high degree have already extirpated the mental causes for suffering, before entering into cessation. As Griffiths writes: Buddhaghosa’s answer [to the question why an increase in depth of analytic knowledge of Buddhist truth-claims leads to the attainment of cessation] is that the necessary conditions for entering the attainment of cessation are […] first, that one has reached one of the two highest stages on the Buddhist path […] the idea here is that anyone less spiritually advanced than this would be hindered by the continued existence within the mental continuum […] of various passions and defilements. Second, that one be fully adept at the cultivation of both insight and tranquillity, which is to say that one must be master of both the enstatic and the analytic methods of meditative practice and that one must therefore have eradicated all passion and all ignorance or intellectual misapprehension. (24)

Three consequences are noteworthy. First, Buddhaghosa’s description of the necessary conditions for entering cessation confirms that only the mental continua of very highly-attained meditative practitioners qualify for it. Failing the highmeditative qualifications Buddhaghosa identifies, cessation is untenable for those ordinary beings who seek the alleviation of suffering in death, confirming the significant causal and soteric differences between nirodhasam¯apatti and the purported state of death-as-oblivion, and despite their functional similarities. Second,

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Buddhaghosa’s response confirms the prominent function of subjective introspection in the identification and amelioration of suffering mental states, and thence the centrality of cetan¯a for Buddhist normativity in general. We know that significantly different kinds and degrees of subjective intention, and the mental qualities that inform them, for Buddhist ethics morally qualifies the normative status and culpability of lethal acts, including acts of suicide, euthanasia and abortion, committed with a view to ending individual suffering. Third, both these points recall my argument elsewhere regarding a¯ rya-suicide, where a similar soteriological qualification theoretically exonerates the autothanasia of arhats, but thereby excludes ordinary suicide from that exceptionalism (Kovan 2018, 646–648). The canonical record expressly prohibits the euthanasia or assisted suicide of any sentient beings (see Vin III 68ff., 71–72, 79, 85–86), including of those incurably ill monk-meditators who are initially discouraged from suicide by intermediaries of the Buddha. While suicidal arhats might themselves in theory be exonerated, they aren’t by the same token eligible as objects of permissible acts of euthanasia or assisted suicide. The only persons qualified to know that they are in fact a¯ rya-beings are by definition themselves as a¯ rya-beings, not those who do not possess that status, and who would be presuming wilfully to cause or assist at the death of beings who by definition transcend their incapacity to kill without moral demerit.20 Acts of lethal mercy prove misguided, on this Buddhist view, inasmuch as they presuppose that it’s possible by virtue of the lethal act alone to produce a complete cessation of all possible mental states. We cannot—or do not yet—know the facts of post-mortem continuity; however, given Buddhist theorisations of consciousness, mental states, their continuity, and causal and qualitative constitution, there can be no philosophically justified Buddhist grounds for mercy-killing with a view to permanently ending the mental states that cause suffering. Choosing to engage such acts requires that Buddhist (or other) agents elide this philosophical consideration, and justify other reasons as ethically, and existentially, primary. All of these intentional lethal acts would, however, necessarily remain prey to a fundamental uncertainty as to whether suffering is thereby ended.

20

Could not then arhats themselves commit permissible lethal acts of mercy? If so, they could at best only mercifully kill other arhats, and contradict the canonical record on arhat homicide (see DN III 133).

Chapter 12

Representational Persons: Identity as the Object of Killing

Abstract This chapter turns to a penultimate intentional class of killing which takes persons as representations of comparatively abstract or symbolic (religious, ethnic, political, ideological) identity, and so worthy of attack. It analyses the metaphysical and cognitive differences between this and prior classes of killing, and how these make it as an intentional act prey to ontological illusion and cognitive error. Buddhist arguments account for these epistemic, as well as normative, failures of justification. Nonetheless, that Buddhist critique has to concede the bare efficacy of ‘representational killing’ (RK) as a causal operator, despite its failing Buddhist justification, thus introducing the distinction between conventionally true justification, in a Buddhistepistemic register, and conventional worldly practice, in an extra-Buddhist one. Yet this concession to the sociohistorical convention of killing (as RK) as a practice for resolving conflict is seen to also fail a larger Buddhist telos of civilisational progress: the difference between a more or less enlightened human order. In this case, universal human rights are construed, in a Buddhist sense, as based on the dignity of persons not by virtue of deontological reasoning but rather the universal compassion of Buddhist philosophical ethics. Only an ethics of rights which registers the normative dimension of cognitive insight along with compassionate affect, is able to undermine the kind of pervasive reification of persons that gives rise, on a depth-psychological level, to the ongoing possibility of representational killing—a problem which obtains as much in the Buddhist, as the non-Buddhist, lifeworld. Keywords Identity and representation · Social identity ascription · Symbolisation and killing · Reification of the universal · Lethality and the exploitation of the body · Ideological killing · Political killing · Religious killing · Terrorism · Genocide · Human rights and Buddhism · Kantian sovereignty of persons · Personal dignity · Buddhist social ethics

1 Introduction: The Ascription of Identity In this chapter I turn to a third major category of the person as the intentional object of killing: cases where, in professing or putatively instantiating determinate properties, persons represent ethnic, political, religious, or ideological identities. On this basis, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_12

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these persons are judged an existential threat, intrinsically bad, or otherwise unworthy of staying alive, and so warrant being killed. These reasons for killing are more abstract than those we considered earlier. They appealed to comparatively more concrete causal relations between reasons for killing and the physical body per se: as the object of hostile somatic affect or hatred (Chap. 6), as the agent of malign volitions (Chap. 8), as the object of retributive punishment (Chap. 10) and of intolerable suffering (Chap. 11).1 Unlike those classes of killing, in what I will call cases of representational killing (hereafter RK) persons stand in for any number of abstract values and goods, beliefs, symbolic objects and properties, or ideological and religious truth- and value-claims. They represent an abstract property that can be summarized under one or other racial, ethnic, religious or political-ideological identity. For instance, a person represents being Caucasian, Buddhist, atheist, anarchist and so on. This sense of representation informs Thomas Nagel’s broad claim for the justified grounds of lethal war-combat in endorsing the principle that hostile treatment of any person must be justified in terms of something about that person which makes the treatment appropriate. Hostility is a personal relation, and it must be suited to its target. One consequence of this condition will be that certain persons may not be subject to hostile treatment in war at all, since nothing about them justifies such treatment. (1979, 64; italics original).2

Nagel claims a property-predication (“something about”) of the person as the justified basis for hostile treatment of that person. Any number of beliefs, desires, intentions, hopes and other intentional modes might be constitutive of identity. Only persons can represent these, but because identity as such is an abstract property it requires qua person association with something perceptible, specifically that person’s perceptible body, to be represented concretely to concrete others. The person’s body thus functions as a concrete token in a cognitive act of symbolic substitution for one or more of these abstract objects. In the remainder of Sect. 1, I first explain the object of RK; second, how the lethal exploitation of the living body is RK’s causal nexus; and third, how the co-ascription of identity is the social-cognitive context for RK’s putative achievement. In Sect. 2 I consider these cognitive features of RK in terms again of a mainstream Buddhist-philosophical account3 and develop a critique of RK as a whole into Sect. 3. 1

The first and second of these categories entail predominantly negative or unskilful, the third ostensibly neutral, the fourth compassionate or positive, intentional affect, en groupe representing a sliding scale of highly negative and determined towards (in theory) positive and voluntary psychological-affective motivation. However, we saw that the latter two intentional categories were also compromised in Buddhist terms by essentially unskilful intention. 2 Nagel’s claim is mediated by the conceptual apparatus of just-war theory and the international law of war, but its observation of a fundamental principle holds across the intentional range of RK, particularly as it bears on the notion of justification. 3 As earlier, this account takes in foundational canonical and Sr¯ ´ avakay¯ana tenets; their extension in the psychological and phenomenological accounts of the Abhidhamma, and commentarial elaboration in Therav¯ada and Sarv¯astiv¯ada schools and exegetes such as Buddhaghosa and Vasubandhu; the specifically epistemological emphasis of the Pram¯an.av¯ada in Dharmak¯ırti; and where these otherwise intersect with Mah¯ay¯ana tenets in the Madhyamaka. What is then largely excluded from this

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1.1 Abstract Objects and Persons Abstract aspects of identity bear a transactional or instrumental, and not intrinsic, relation to the person who, as the body-that-represents, represents them to the wider cultural-symbolic order. Different persons can instantiate an identity (being Australian, an Officer of the 5th Regiment, an Anzac) in order to serve the various kinds of abstract function (such as citizenship, or military and historical status) that persons, in their various kinds of lifeworld, happen to enact. Bearing this identity is not metaphysically sanctioned by something intrinsic to psychophysical properties of the person4 ; it is imaginatively endowed, or ascribed, to given persons fulfilling the relevant roles (political-cultural, military, historical) it designates, and the concrete serving of these abstract roles can be and is substituted between persons and contexts, through time and place, depending on the time-relative state of affairs. Many of these abstract functions of persons depend on the context of larger abstract objects (a nation, an army, a history). Those things are constituted or populated by persons but are not themselves concrete, and if there is no concrete object denoted by the nouns nation, army, or history, then the identities of persons that themselves represent or constitute these abstract nouns are similarly not concrete. In the Buddhist analyses of the person we’ve considered above, we’ve also seen that persons qua persons are not concrete, but imputed upon the aggregates of n¯amar¯upa (another abstract object) that heuristically designates the living being in terms of its physical and sentient properties. Ascribed beliefs or identities conceived as universals are thus ontologically encoded in and as the embodied person in a newly symbolic sense. This ascription of symbolic identity is explicit for example in lethal acts of war, terrorism, and counter-terrorism, where offensive action is engaged on the basis of such universals unilaterally or mutually ascribed to persons. Peculiar to RK however is that even before such action is inaugurated, existential threat is predicated of the relevant persons merely because of the identity they represent and not always because of prior offensive actions their constitutive beliefs and values may have prompted. This causal and justificatory point distinguishes RK from lethal acts of self-defence: in RK symbolic representation alone is in theory sufficient as a reason to engage and thence kill the (often mutual) enemy, even where individual persons so representing the enemy may not have acted aggressively to justify offensive action. Hence, the person as the object of killing in these cases is cognitively engaged as an individual qua instance of a universal. But universals are ontologically separable from this or that person who contingently represents them at any given place and time. account are specific doctrines that mark out the Vaibh¯as.ika Abhidharma (and to which Sautr¯antika is opposed), as well as idealist claims of the Yog¯ac¯ara (despite their variable presence in aspects of some works, among others, of Vasubandhu and Dharmak¯ırti). This account is thus representative of a central body of Indian Buddhist doctrine, and hence of a ‘mainstream’ Buddhist account of intentional lethality as described. 4 Chapter 7 in Sect. 3.1 and Chap. 8 in Sect. 1.2 discuss the attribution of would-be purely physical properties to persons.

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By killing the individual person, what happens to the abstract object so represented? As causally inefficacious cognitive phenomena that can only conceptually function as universals by not being susceptible to modification or change,5 the abstract objects of identity implicated in lethal acts cannot themselves be killed or causally modified, but the concrete persons who represent them can be. Despite the causal bases for successful predication, the relation of representation between (the bodies of) persons and the relevant belief or value ascribed to them that is exploited in RK, is itself contingent: it is not ontologically necessary that beliefs and values take the concrete human body itself as their proxy. They could conceivably exist as purely abstract objects, and be contested via other symbolic means of negotiation—as with the identities constitutive of ritual, drama, or games. Identity is thus identified with persons’ bodies in lethal conflict in something like the way words of natural languages linguistically represent things: the relata of representation might have been otherwise than they are. (We will have reason, below, to qualify this claim.) In Buddhist terms this is understood as a contingent semiotic convention (sam . keta) of the symbolic order of significatory systems. As it is, however, human cultures are willing to exploit the living body as such as a performative means of symbolic contestation: the cognitive and existential feature that uniquely defines RK.

1.2 Exploiting the Living Body Neither party to any grave dispute would have reason to feel coerced by the beliefs and values of the antithetical other if they didn’t also mutually value something neither wants threatened: being alive itself. While this valorisation of life is the mutuallyheld value by means of which the symbolic dispute of RK is mortally engaged, it is nevertheless as that value subordinate to those abstract beliefs and values in virtue of which it is sacrificed. As argued in Chap. 7, in a Buddhist context that value of life takes the soteriological form of an inherent potential for the extirpation of ignorance and suffering. Hence, it is also the primary value that on a Buddhist account is sacrificed in RK, a fact that prima facie contravenes the first precept prohibiting taking life. While it might seem obvious that, in representing abstract objects, persons cannot already be what they represent, there are many cases of representation that are not so straightforward. Persons can change their religion, political beliefs, even ethnic affiliation, and even some biological properties—from hair colour to hearts to gender, via cosmetic and medical technologies. Non-intrinsic ascriptions are by definition

5

Dharmak¯ırti (at PVSV ad PV 1.144a) discusses how universals cannot change reference because direct reference to them allows thought and language to indirectly refer to the individuals instantiating them.

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mutable, and this is still more true of properties determined by mental or psychological criteria, by their nature more amenable to change than physical ones usually are. But ascriptions of self-identity, or those made of other persons, can also be thought to supervene on a more primary conception of personal properties. For example, many normative representations of persons’ identity pertaining to race or ethnicity depend upon biological-genetic properties that might be thought to be intrinsic to their bearers. These are of a kind that implicit bias theory, for instance, recognizes as frequently informing cognitive constructions of the person as inherently other to the self.6 Are some represented properties intrinsically physical so that, for example, ethnic or associated religious identity can arguably be claimed to be inseparable from racial identity? In Chap. 7 I argued that all intentional objects of the lethal act are directly or indirectly mediated by mental contents which serve as motivating grounds for those acts. This includes cases where their objects exhibit overtly physiological, racial, or biological properties, understood as significant for killing because they instantiate claims entailing propositional attitudes, not unlike those we’ve encountered earlier: for instance, that criminals of a certain murderous kind are inherently worthy of execution, that intolerable suffering is inherently unacceptable, and so on. In a case of identity-predication such as ‘being congenitally disabled’, for instance, we saw (in Chap. 7 in Sect. 3.1) that the intentional object of killing entails a normative re-constitution such that being congenitally disabled is inherently undesirable. Without taking physical properties to be at the same time normatively valenced, there would be no basis for the reasons agents have (in this case) for intentional lethal acts. While the intentional object of RK can entail reference to a person’s physical properties, these are in every case re-constituted by intentional attitudes, such as evaluative judgement, which are cognitive and normative functions of the ascriptive agent not intrinsically entailed by their ascriptive referents. These attitudes might and do differ considerably among ascriptive agents, including in the synchronic sense whereby a single person represents multiply for different agents at the same time.

1.3 Co-ascriptive Asymmetry The ascription of personhood requires determinations on the basis of which beings are understood to be persons. As we’ve seen, minimal Buddhist identity-conditions for personhood include the five skandhas functioning as a (usually conscious) sentient being. Likewise, the intentional object of RK is variously constituted by ‘something about’ its object-person, and necessarily entails the sense in which the person is in every case conceived as this particular person for this particular agent of ascription. The ascription of identity is thus a relation between ascriptor and object of ascription, and this relation can also be reflexive. To be who I am in the intersubjective context 6

For an ethical discussion see Appiah (2005).

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of RK requires that my identity be co-ascribed by myself and by others, and for those ascriptions to mutually agree at least in some cases to retain conventional validity. Some identity ascriptions, however, are simply false or inaccurate (I just may not be the collaborator I am believed by my persecutors to be). This reflects the Buddhist-epistemological distinction between the referent as the entity (bh¯ava) external to the mind, its ‘engaged’ object, and to which it is intentionally directed, and its status as the intentional object of thought (¯alambana), or ‘appearing’ object. Different epistemic agents will refer to the same object under different descriptions, or engage the same object by means of different appearances. RK thus ineliminably involves cognitive features determined by reflexive ascriptions of the self and extrinsic ascriptions of others, with regard to the same referent of self or other. This entails a potential inconsistency between intentional ascriptions and their value-assignments, implicated in the wider social construction of the person-object of RK as a necessarily public abstract and concrete entity. Intensions co-constituting the intentional object cognised by the agent-subject of RK are thus potentially and actually constitutive of the agent’s reasons for killing. But this latter implication of the intensional object might falsely constitute the person as apt for killing, contrary to the sense in which that object is taken by the ascriptive agent to correctly represent who the person ‘really’ is. This dissonance between what is thought to be and actually is the case about the person, is significant for a critical Buddhist account of RK. The following provides a fuller explanation of how the universal that represents in RK is to be best understood in its cognitive function.

2 Relativisation and the Reification of Identity The ascription of identity serves as a more or less successful means to various social ends. As we have seen, however, the person whose identity is ascribed thereby may be taken to represent various and conflicting identities. It does not follow from the fact that the person represents one or more of those identities that those identities are actually instantiated in the person. That is, as noted, representation is not a relation of intrinsic inherence between the represented and representer, even if a given property might be an identity-condition for the person instantiating it. This is a claim about the ontology of any person: that it is not the case that the person as a concrete individual (vyakti) occupying a portion of space-time in reality is or can be all of the intentional-intensional ascriptions predicated of her. Rather, they exist as cognitive superimpositions on the person and are only mistakenly reified as the person, who as their referent is merely their intentional nexus, not their ontological substrate. For example, the person designated a Taliban fighter will represent properties mutually ascribed by any number of ascriptive agents (such as being Muslim, bearded, male, mid-aged, of medium height and so on). But only some of these agents will ascribe the property being an enemy to the same referent, where others won’t, and might rather ascribe the property of being a friend to the

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same person. That is, there is nothing about the person that makes him inherently ‘an enemy’, and thus inherently worthy of being killed as one. Buddhist nominalists argue that the universal (s¯am¯anya-laks.an.a), such as being a person, is a conceptually constructed entity which has no real existence beyond its function as a linguistic convention: my being a Democrat is a purely conceptual posit and the inference I can draw from it that I am also a person is similarly purely conceptual. The degree to which universals conceptually engage reality at all is the degree to which they depend ontologically on the exclusively real particulars (svalaks.an.a) that constitute the individual. But there is a cost to be paid in terms of the ontological occlusion of the real. The 11th-century commentator Manorathanandin paraphrases Dharmak¯ırti to describe what this is: Existents that are intrinsically distinct appear as though non-distinct, with some form [not really their own. This is because] their plurality is obscured by that veil (sam . vr.ti) which is thought—which is based on distinct existents, but whose phenomenal content (pratibh¯asa) is a unitary object—that obscures with its own form a form that is other than it. Based on the intention (abhipr¯aya) of that [thought], a generality (s¯am¯anyam) is said to exist; but that [general form] ultimately doesn’t exist in the way imagined by that thought. (in Arnold 2014, 134)

Universals are not only ontologically unreal, they also occlude the true existence of the particulars which alone provide them epistemic warrant.7 The case of lethal action in RK, which founds its putative justification in the conventional relation between the person and the person-representing-a-universal, specifically entails this distinction between real particular and unreal universal by exploiting the particular for the sake of the universal. But that exploitation is also problematized by the same distinction, inasmuch as RK extends beyond a mere representation of the universal to actually destroy the individual on whose behalf the former can even be posited. Manorathanandin’s somewhat obscure point is that cognition of the object only seems to engage real particulars, leading the perceiver-cogniser to believe that the real object exists as it appears to as perceived. This mistaken cognitive substructure forms the condition of possibility for even being able to perceive persons as those abstract identities which, as we have seen, form the crucial part of the intentional objects of RK. Moreover, despite seeming in this way to perceive an individual qua individual in the mental cognition of what is actually a universal concept, this cognitively entrenched imputation of the universal leads the subject to conceive of its real object as similarly unified, constant, and enduring (Prueitt 320). Taking up Manorathanandin’s image of a veil (in Arnold’s translation), we could analogically imagine the referent person as simultaneously wearing multiple 7

The constructedness, and so ultimate unreality, of universals need not for that reason be epistemologically impotent. Dharmak¯ırti (in his Sautr¯antika guise) accepts that there can be more or less non-deceptive conceptual constructions on the basis of paradigmatically true perceptions of an externally existent supporting-condition (¯alambana pratyaya), in virtue of its real perceptual representations (¯ak¯aras). It is in virtue of this degree of the reality of representations that human cognition is for Dharmak¯ırti able to engage and manipulate worldly items with a commensurate degree of success. But this might not be the case in all worldly transactions, involving the assumption of universals, in causal operations with real objects.

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costumes representing multiple different identities, depending on differing ascriptions of identity. However, the ascriptive agent does not perceive all the costumes perceived by all other ascriptive agents, or perceive the referent person as merely costumed by that identity in an agent-relative or merely conventional sense; that would require the epistemic recognition that one’s social identity is just the sum of contingent abstract properties putatively instantiated in or as one’s singular personhood. Similarly, to perceive someone I take to be my enemy correctly, as merely relatively my enemy, does not characterise the sense in which in RK the person is ascribed that identity. For the ascriptive agent the ‘costume’ of identity determines the person not in properly agent-relative terms but rather as ontologically instantiating that identity as something inherent to the person as such. In other words, the ontological fiction, enabled by the imputation of the universal, of merely conventional identity is not for the ascriptive agent of RK in any sense fictive. Rather, killing the concrete individual on the sole basis of the abstract property ascribed to him, explicitly and even performatively emphasised in RK, demonstrates a cognition of the spuriously real, or reified, and not merely relative instantiation of the universal in the object-person of RK. Who a person ‘really is’ is relevant if we are concerned with the veridical and not spurious ascription of even conventional identity. Valid ascriptions of identity must satisfy the objective criteria that epistemically warrant, for example, that ‘person p has red hair’. But perhaps an epistemic agent has always held the superstitious belief that red hair has extra-terrestrial origins. In that case, the property-predication ‘p is a redhead’, the associated premise that ‘redheads are aliens’, and the resultant inferential ascription of p’s identity as alien, have differing truth-values. The agent’s correct ascription to p of an actual property gives rise to an inferential ascription that is false: p is not an alien because redheads are not aliens. Holding p to be a redhead is not an example of erroneous awareness when p has red hair, but holding p to be therefore an alien is a cognitive error. On a Pram¯an.av¯ada account knowing whether cognitions engage or refer to causally efficacious objects makes a difference to knowing whether an intentional act is predicated on a sound cognitive basis, and its effects congruent with what is intended thereby, so that if for example I intend to kill p I will thereby rationally kill a conventionally-existent person rather than a non-existent alien. Identity-ascription must also usually join with an attitude, feeling, and normative judgement, to provide some reason for the commission of RK. Indeed, it is generally by virtue of the normative ascription of identity that RK is given sense and enters into the space of reasons: the agent of RK so acts just because its object represents something he judges ought to be threatened or attacked, which normative judgement other agents do not entertain. In sum, to impute the universal to an individual for purposes of the ascription of identity, which ascription then renders that individual person apt for killing, the agent of RK does three main things: (1)

ontologically reduces the individual to the ascriptive identity relevant purely for purposes of RK (equivalent to reifying the individual as the universal) and thereby

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(3)

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valorises the conventional existence of the universal over the ultimate reality of particulars by which any individual is constituted. By killing the individual the agent of RK absolutely subordinates the person ethically to a social-cognitive project of reifying some other universal as a dominator value.

These can be taken en groupe as Buddhist badmakers of RK, at least in a metaphysical register. As noted, all three elements are in prima facie tension with primary Buddhist claims concerning the real and unreal, the true and erroneous, the morally skilful and unskilful. However, the cognitive reification of the intentional object of identity-ascription is not limited to RK; it explicitly occurs in many areas of human endeavour (for example, in sports competition, politics, and bureaucratic organisations involving fixed hierarches of power and thus systemic control over others). In the sense purely of the reification of identity, RK is not altogether unique. We could even grant that an agent of RK is potentially cognisant of the ontological and epistemic caveats summarised above, but commits acts of RK despite this awareness. What then makes RK properly unique in terms of its cognitive grounds for enaction8 is that, unlike these other comparatively non-violent cases, the reification of identity serves the specific end of killing persons purely because of that identity. In the context of the Buddhist project of the extirpation of suffering, whatever value RK putatively represents in killing the individual-qua-universal cannot, however, be seen to be ethically commensurable with the person’s capacity to engage this liberating project—Buddhism’s very raison d’être—as a person-qua-individual. In light of these claims, why does the proponent of RK in this way valorise the conventional existence of the universal over and above the unique and real existence of the individual? We can answer this question by considering more broadly what the proponent intends to achieve in the commission of RK.

3 Valorising the Universal Over the Individual 3.1 What RK Intends: Social Power and Its Reconfiguration Mediated by the beliefs, values and other abstract objects the identities of both agent and victim signify, agents of RK kill persons for purposes that we might identify in three related senses. First, they kill in response to a belief that certain identities (or their properties) are intrinsically bad or evil, and so must be attacked in the form of the living persons who represent them; second, in order to demonstrate thereby that the ascribed identity is weaker or inferior to their own; third, to persuade, coerce 8

For example in the intentional structure of ideological warfare. This differs intentionally from war waged as national defence, which does not necessarily entail conflict over antithetical ideological identities. (In practice these can overlap or merge so that, for example, the Second World War was fought defensively against German territorial ambitions, but also against Nazi ideology as anathema to liberal-democratic values.) Defensive war in a Buddhist context is briefly considered in Chap. 13.

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or blackmail living witnesses into thinking, believing or behaving as the agent wills they should (for which the example of ideological terrorism is salient). The end that summarizes all these, and so can provide a working global answer to the prior question, is that RK serves the purpose of social domination by its representation of identity, by means of securing power, and by representing others who the agent represents as other. That is, RK is the putative means to secure social dominance over those whose identities, beliefs and values are presumed incompatible, irreconcilable or otherwise in intractable conflict with their own.9 RK is an attempt to resolve such conflict by reducing the dominated party to a degraded status, or indeed by exterminating it in toto. Unlike other forms of social-cultural contestation (e.g. debate, democratic process, deliberative discourse) RK functions by realising its claims in lethal action. RK engages homicide in order to achieve a cultural-symbolic domination by virtue of its exercise of brute power, and typically within fascist or totalitarian political formations, but not exclusively those. Killing relevant persons is the specific means by which agents of RK seek to both interrupt a social status quo, and having done so, reconfigure power relations in their own favour. Hence, in RK normative conflict seeks to engender 1. 2. 3.

the social dominator status of its agent, and by extension, the domination of the value, belief, or ideology represented in the identity of the agent, vis-à-vis the absolutely dominated identity represented by the victim of RK.

Clearly, it is often the case that the contexts for RK are occasions in which a radical shift of existential affairs has without question occurred: hence, they usually register serious, rapid and often disturbing modifications of the personal and collective lebenswelt. This is also a pronounced difference of RK from the representational strategies and lengthier processes of linguistic, cultural, aesthetic and other comparatively abstract forms of social-symbolic discourse. We can also grant that RK sometimes represents an acceptable value. Nonetheless, this capacity to represent such values does not ipso facto justify RK: as we’ve seen above, RK represents only to achieve the non-representational ends just identified, so that RK is itself teleologically superseded by them, its justification at best hanging on the evaluation of its ends. However, it is the means to these ends that, in all cases of RK, remain on their face unacceptable to a Buddhist ethics (and erroneous for its metaphysics), and so render the substantive ends immaterial. The following considers in more depth why this is so.

9

If in some cases of RK, such as that instantiated in ideological warfare (e.g., the Vietnam War), lethal agency is intentionally mutual, then this structure is symmetrical. In others, such as those pertaining to coercive colonialism or genocide, it is not. I will for convenience assume in what follows an asymmetrical relation that can be applied from either side of the dual structure.

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3.2 Normative Reasons and a Buddhist Global Objection On a Buddhist account, even where resort to RK might have a laudable end in view (such as the self-determination of an oppressed people) the very means it exploits to attain it is indefensible. A Buddhist might concur that opposing a tyrannical state is justified, but would hold that doing so by means of RK is not. While the present analysis of RK could continue to pursue a philosophical understanding of its causes in a complex of cognitive-affective and possibly unconscious psychological conditions, and conceivably account for its wrongness thereby, it is implausible that causal description alone suffices to explain the normative status of RK on a Buddhist view. This is because, in addition, RK intentionally offends against a fundamental Buddhist value of life in a sense other modes of intentional lethality do not, and so exemplifies a paradigmatic case of the violation of a right to that life, as much in Buddhist as non-Buddhist contexts. The most appropriate register for ethically interrogating RK is then by recourse to the language and theory of human rights, evidently pertinent to the lethal exploitation of persons that explicitly defines RK. For this reason, we need to engage a Buddhist-ethical discussion of the notion of a human right to life, with reference to its violation in RK.

3.3 A Kantian Caveat? There is, however, another reason we can first consider, in preliminary terms, as the basis for a global objection to RK, concerning the independent value of the person otherwise explicitly misused in its commission. This is the familiar Kantian categorical imperative that persons ought not to be exploited as mere means to agential ends, but should be conceived as instantiating the autonomous value of being ends in themselves (Kant 2010, 38–39). This would make persons unavailable to the kind of exploitation upon which RK explicitly trades: that the individual as such is irrelevant to his capacity to represent a universal, which alone determines his demise.10 Buddhist ethics does not explicitly theorise or valorise a moral imperative that recognizes an inviolable value of personal autonomy. Much traditional Buddhist discourse has rather tended to attenuate the notion of personal sovereignty both psychologically and socio-culturally, conceivably grounded in its pivotal posit of noself. A great deal of commentary on the cross-cultural philosophical analysis of the Western understanding of the freedom of the will with respect to Buddhist contexts has in recent years appeared, resulting in a large range of more or less unreconciled

10

Yet we’ve also seen, in Chap. 10, how Kant was willing to conceive of the agent of lethal crime as qualifying for being the representational means of a transaction of justice intrinsic to the ends of the authority of the state. So even for Kant there were cases where the autonomy of the person qua particular (however apparently self-legislating) must bow before an abstract universal value enacted, and represented, in the putatively just taking of life.

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views.11 Some of this scholarship has however provided valuable accounts of how volition, psychological and causal determinism, and moral intention and consequence is to be best understood in Buddhist-emic terms (see especially Meyers 2010; Devdas 2008; Heim 2014). However, that discussion is orthogonal to the present account, because the denial of the value of autonomy just noted in RK is not associated with an implicit question regarding the putative existence of a unitary and self-willed self, or even the empirical ego that might in purely prudential terms desire to stay alive rather than be lethally exploited for the purposes of RK. The Buddhist posit of an¯atman neither condones nor undermines the Kantian imperative with respect to its repudiation in RK. This is because a Buddhist could agree that the autonomy of the person ought to be respected, but for reasons different from those offered by Kant. In Chap. 10, for example, I addressed the significant differences between Kantian and Buddhist metaphysical conceptions of the person, and mobilised those in a Buddhist critique of the presuppositions informing neo-Kantian justifications for lethal retributivism (LR). There I was concerned to highlight the constitutive features of personhood that for a Kantian account metaphysically and morally sanction a sovereign will to sacrifice one dimension of the person (the phenomenal) to that noumenal part that both cognises and actualises moral (and legal) justice through intentional action. The Buddhist objection turned on its distinct account of personhood and moral agency, and on a Buddhist critique of Kant’s account of autonomy. In the present context, however, we must ask what it is about the person qua person that determines how moral dignity accrues to persons, and demands recognition from others. Kant’s moral philosophy is of course one of the most prominent progenitors of the modern Western conception of human rights, grounded in particular on a notion of the inherent dignity (Würde) of persons. But the metaphysical and metaethical bases for the Kantian derivation of dignity can’t be simply correlated with whatever allows a comparable moral function in the Buddhist context, though we see at least one Buddhist ethics theorist attempting just that.12 Kelley (2017), for example, argues that there is a metaphysical (and psychological) compatibility, rather than tension, between the Buddhist emptiness of persons and their inherent dignity and inalienable rights, effectively seeking to appropriate these Lockean and Kantian natural-right claims for all human beings, and the human capacity to discern them as such (302), to a classical Madhyamaka two-truths epistemology (299, 303) that distinguishes globally between conventional and ultimate truth-clams. However, Kelley’s Madhyamaka conclusion (via Tsongkhapa) for the “conventional intrinsic existence but not an ultimate intrinsic existence” (301–311) of human rights is true of many conventional phenomena and thus adds nothing new 11

See Repetti (2016), Davis (2017), Dasti and Bryant (2014); see also Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Special Issue 25, 2018. 12 Hershock (2000, 13ff .) however has useful discussion of the assimilation of Kantian moral epistemology and its effects in modern human rights discourse to a Buddhist or non-Western paradigm.

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to a Buddhist-conventional theorisation of the conventional status of the dignity of persons. That is, beyond refitting Western rights claims for dignity to a Madhyamaka epistemology, a Buddhist account would require internally examining from where or what such dignity is derived, how it entails universal rights, and how it is to be rationalised with respect to the very real conventional-evaluative sliding-scale pertaining to different kinds of real persons in the real, if ‘conventional’, world. According to Kelley, in that world Significance or meaning exists only in relation to a host of public frameworks. In the context of human rights, the UDHR [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] represents one such framework. Thus rights, albeit devoid of intrinsic nature, can be said to have meaning and significance within that particular veridical framework. (308)

This formulation, and the essay in which it features, offers no further interpretation of a specifically Buddhist-conventional construal of that framework beyond the refutation of reified phenomena all Madhyamaka ultimate analysis entails. Kelley does not explain what endows the UDHR framework with meaning with respect to a properly Buddhist conception of persons, nor how it does, nor what it is about it that renders it conventionally veridical. The shortcomings of Kelley’s appropriation of Western human rights discourse to the theoretical Buddhist case by means of Madhyamaka epistemology are significant because, beyond their putatively universal status as the objects of an equal and inviolable dignity, persons are also, as we have seen with respect to the Buddhist lifeworld itself, individuals importantly distinguishable from others. We’ve seen throughout how a consistent feature of the Buddhist conception of empirical (rather than metaphysical) personhood is that persons are qualitatively or axiologically distinct between the so-called ordinary puthujjana, believing layperson, aspirant monk, awakened Arhat, bodhisattva Buddha-to-be, and Buddha, from which many moral and normative effects ensue. It is not at all clear that, in a Buddhist-emic sense, they possess an equal birthright in human dignity, either due to or despite these differences. In Chap. 4 we noted how each of these kinds of person is situated on an axiological scale explicitly entailing value-claims, where different kinds of person are qualified by virtuous and physical quality (gun.a), determining differing degrees of moral consequence (kamma) concerning, for example, their being intentionally killed. As Adam notes: According to Buddhist teachings, there is a natural hierarchy—a hierarchy that is not socially defined, but rather based on spiritual development or purity. […] Simply put, some people are more virtuous and wise than others. And in this respect they stand closer to the end-goal of liberation from suffering, which is to say to the goal of spiritual freedom. One’s possession of these qualities corresponds to the level of one’s inner purity, measured in terms of one’s freedom from mental defilements. (2013, 434)

If it is true that all persons are ultimately empty of self, this metaphysical datum in no way qualifies their putatively conventional-objective status as such. Rather, Buddhist religious norms traditionally position persons as the objects of value- and truth-claims in terms that calibrate much of canonical Buddhist ethics. In this case,

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more hermeneutic work is required to ground Buddhist human rights in conventional and universalist claims for a birth-right in dignity, and they need to be firmly situated, at least in the first instance, in norms and claims around the status and soteriological nature of persons, given the Buddhist world-view, of the kind examined in Part I, above. To be clear, we are here concerned principally with identifying the plausible feature of conventionally-construed persons that can function as a basis for a Buddhist to take them as possessing dignity. The aim is not to present a full-blown Buddhist account of the autonomy and political liberty of empty persons, a distinct if related task that would require a separate study.13 Clarifying the Buddhist basis for the dignity of persons is then preliminary to its mobilisation in a Buddhist theorisation of human rights, below.

4 Buddhist Human Rights: The Dignity of Persons In this section I (1) contextualise a basis for Buddhist human rights in dignity, (2) confirm a grounding for dignity in the potential in persons for Buddhist awakening (discussed in Chap. 7), and (3) consider the relation of the Buddhist lifeworld to non-Buddhist conditions for theorising human rights. This theoretical and empirical context provides the background to subsequently consider (in Sects. 4.1 and 4.2) what might constitute a robust Buddhist theorisation of human rights as such. Buddhist Studies scholarship of recent decades has increasingly addressed the question of providing philosophical grounds for human rights in Buddhism, given the lack of their explicit theorisation in classical and orthodox sources14 (among many others Abe 1986; Adam 2013; Perera 1991; Inada 1982, 1998; Hershock, 2000; Keown 2000, 2018b; Keown, Prebish and Husted 1998; Garfield 2002; Sevilla 2010; Meinert and Zöllner 2010; Likhitpreechakul 2013). Keown suggests that one possible reason for the absence of a Buddhist notion of human rights, but also for its potential positive basis, is that: Buddhism originated in a caste society, and the Asian societies where it has flourished have for the most part been hierarchically structured […] The preconditions for the emergence of the concept of rights would seem to be egalitarianism and democracy, neither of which have been notable features of Asian polity before the modern era. On the other hand, a justification for the rejection of hierarchical social structures is not hard to find in Buddhism—one need look only at the Buddha’s critique of caste. (2000, 64)

Seeking a basis for human rights in a specifically Buddhist notion of dignity, Keown rejects this basis with respect to either metaphysical, existential, or affective, 13

For a Madhyamaka-theoretic account see Mendelson (2013). At least until, for example, the 1993 Declaration towards a Global Ethic, emerging from the Chicago Parliament of the World’s Religions, which included Buddhist commitments to human rights and prompted discourse from Buddhist figures such as H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama (see his 1993 Vienna statement in Keown, Prebish and Husted 1998, xviiff .).

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considerations (Inada 1982, 1998) or prudential-hedonic ones (Perera 29), and instead locates it in a Buddhist vision of the good summarised in the third and fourth noble truths (that an end to suffering is possible and the means for its achievement lying in the Noble Eightfold Path). He writes: Human rights cannot be derived from any factual non-evaluative analysis of human nature, whether in terms of its psycho-physical constitution (the five aggregates which lack a self), its biological nature (needs, urges, drives), or the deep structure of interdependency (pat.iccasamupp¯ada). Instead the most promising approach will be one which locates human rights and dignity within a comprehensive account of human goodness, and which sees basic rights and freedoms as integrally related to human flourishing and self-realization. This is because the source of human dignity in Buddhism lies nowhere else than in the literally infinite capacity of human nature for participation in goodness. (Keown 2000, 70–71, 78)15

Keown’s grounding of human dignity in a valorisation of the potential for human awakening in Buddhahood, corroborates my own argument for an Ur-value in this potential: in Chap. 7 I contextualised this claim as a metaphysical conclusion from preceding analyses of fundamental criteria for the first precept.16 Here we consider two more hermeneutic features that give credence to Keown’s, and my own, proposal for a Buddhist foundation for human dignity. The first concerns the qualitative nature of dignity. It is clear that there is no being conceived in Buddhist terms that attracts more veneration and respect than an awak´ avakay¯ana ened a¯ rya-being, or Buddha, and by association a bodhisattva. Both in Sr¯ and Mah¯ay¯ana terms, the potential awakening of the prospective a¯ rya-being and bodhisattva, themselves mortal human beings, makes them archetypes of human dignity, worth, and value. The historical Buddha represents the superlative human achievement, embodying the perfected state of sentient existence. Although this state may be merely ideal, its symbolic function does not undermine its value as an aspirational basis for human dignity. Secondly, all sentient beings are regarded as having the potential for awakening. Thus, by definition, all sentient beings partake in dignity, as dignity derives from this potential. The basis for human dignity implicit in Buddhism, then, is in fact universal. It is present in all human, as well as non-human, sentient beings.17 At the same time, of course, these two claims entail a profoundly different origin for the concept of human rights as it has developed in the modern European era (Junger 1998), in the historical intersection between “foundations in Christianity, 15

In a footnote (55, p. 78) Keown summarises this: “A more familiar way of making the same point in Buddhist terminology would be to say that all beings are potential Buddhas or possess the Buddha-nature.” 16 Cf. Perera (1991, 24) and again Keown (2018b, 545–547). Junger (1998, 61) also appeals to this ground, as does Sevilla (2010) in a Zen account. Some among these writers however appear confident of founding a notion of rights within Buddhism directly on an appeal to a universal Buddha-nature as an assumed posit concerning all human beings. My own claim is different: that a plausible basis for human dignity, but not directly for human rights, lies in an immanently universal potential for liberation from suffering central to the Buddhist traditions, rather than in a positively assumed transcendental nature as such. 17 Adam (2013) focusses in particular on the non-anthropomorphic feature of a Buddhist theorisation of equality and rights.

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Stoicism and Roman law with its jus gentium, but which gains force and direction only with the contractual and pluralist nature of European feudalism, church struggles, the rise of Protestantism and of cities.” (Kamenka 1978, cited in Junger 53) If it seems plausible to suggest a fundamental Buddhist basis for human dignity in its moral-soteriological telos, this is not to imply that this can be plausibly aligned with anything grounding the Euro-American development of the norm of the inviolability of such dignity as a right absolutely beholden to its bearer. The latter entails a legal and contractual imperative quite distinct from a Buddhist sensus communis dedicated to the mutual cultivation of virtues and modes of understanding that potentially undermine rather than reify, as a legally actionable right does, the moral and extra-moral entitlements of the individual. But is it unreasonable to suppose that Buddhist ethics is able to or should recognise such an entitlement as a legitimate mode of respect for persons—however ultimately empty of self and intrinsic identity, however embedded in causal networks variably subsuming individuality, and however ontologically determined by impermanent causes and conditions? It is I think appropriate to situate the question of how the dignity of the Buddhist person is to be understood with reference to a contemporary Buddhist context in which such a conventional universal value has gone egregiously unrecognised. Nominally Buddhist actors have in recent years been responsible for the gravest genocidal event so far of the twenty-first century.18 Constituting lethal acts against civil noncombatants on the basis of religious and racial identity, this series of tragic events can be squarely classed as a case of RK at its most heinous.19 In light of this worst case, is it plausible to sustain the notion that the dignity of the person, requiring the moral-legal protection a right affords, is somehow attenuated or negligible in the Buddhist case due to some uniquely Buddhist moral-philosophical consideration? It is disingenuous to suggest20 that because a Buddhist cultural context has not originarily enjoyed the same cultural-philosophical roots that inform the Euroamerican theory and practice of human rights, that such rights are in some sense inapposite to the Buddhist case, alongside or in a complementary relation to those local moral norms already relevant to it.21 18

In northern Rakhine state, Myanmar, beginning in 2012 but especially through 2016–2017, perpetrated by Buddhist Bamar and Rakhine military and civilian actors against civilian Muslim Rohingya unrecognized citizens of that state. The ethical and legal ramifications of widespread heinous rights violations are ongoing, likely to culminate at the International Criminal Court in convictions of members of the Myanmar military, and some of its state enablers, of the crime of ethnic cleansing. 19 This claim draws on background detailed in two documents reporting ethnic-cleansing in Rakhine state: Flash Report of the OHCHR Mission to Bangladesh, 3rd February 2017 provided by the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner; and “They Gave Them Long Swords”: Preparations for Genocide… (July 2018), prepared by Fortify Rights. 20 See for example Ihara in Keown, Prebish and Husted (eds.) (1998, 51, n. 21); cf . Junger (56, 60–61) in the same volume. 21 A substantial historical catalogue of Buddhist abuses includes Japanese military atrocities in the Second World War, Sinhalese Buddhist abuses against Tamils during the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009) and since, and Burmese military atrocities against political actors and minority religious and other ethnicities during periods of dictatorship (from 1962 to 2012, and in 2021).

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That claim might at best form part of an explanation for why an explicit recognition of human rights is historically lacking in those Buddhist cultures. But that historical datum alone does not answer to why that recognition is not as germane to the Buddhist as to any other case of the violation of some construal of human dignity, and as such requires properly Buddhist philosophical and social inculcation.22 As noted by Keown, “Incorporating human rights more formally within Buddhism, however, will require some doctrinal expansion and reconfiguration.” (2018b, 547) To that end, we need to identify appropriate conceptual or other resources from within its own textual, pedagogic, and praxiological traditions to avoid the imposition of a conceptually alien justification for an equally alien set of norms and propositions.23 We can take our cue from how Garfield (2002) pursues this end, by locating such a resource in the affective roots of Buddhist practice in a universal value and norm of compassion (karun.a¯ ).

4.1 Buddhist Human Rights: A Basis in Compassion Having considered a Buddhist basis for the dignity of the person, and its associated requirements, we can now turn to considering a possible Buddhist theory of human rights given that theorisation of dignity as the universal human value enshrined therein. Our aim is to ascertain on what basis a Buddhist critique of RK, given a recent Buddhist case of grave human rights violations, could also appeal to an inviolability of the human right to “life, liberty and security of person” enshrined, most representatively, in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). That is, such an appeal would be required to function as a political-legal means ideally for the prevention of grievous abuses of the kind we’ve seen agents of RK perpetrate, or failing prevention, the inculcation of a moral status quo whereby such abuses would be unequivocally condemned in theory and undermined in practice. However, to be clear, this and the following section engage only the theoretical dimension of this task; analysing the empirical case in order to suggest how the theory might most practically succeed in that work of prevention, in differing cultural conditions, would require a separate enquiry.

Human rights abuses notably continue unabated in China (Tibet), Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Cambodia. 22 Keown (2018b, 531) points out that a number of traditionally Buddhist states or polities (including those of Cambodia, Thailand, and Tibet) have initiated institutions dedicated to human rights, alongside those ASEAN members (Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) signatory to the Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) founded in 2009. However, the aspiration to engage human rights, at least in some cases, has not always translated into robust implementation. 23 See Hershock (2000, 15ff .) for an account of some of the still-relevant ill-effects of the same imposition.

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As it stands, Buddhist morality or s´¯ıla clearly does not accept the commission of RK for the broad reasons noted above: its repudiation of human dignity, contravention of the principles of dukkha (PD) and kamma-niy¯ama (moral causation) (PK) underwriting the first precept, and for instantiating a malign intention. These can be understood more fully by considering the Buddhist value of compassion conceptually imbricated in them. Accordingly, this discussion engages one normative account for why, as Garfield claims, despite “the prima facie tension between liberal and compassion-based approaches to morality […they] are in fact not incompatible, but that fusing them into a coherent whole requires a particular ordering: compassion must be taken as fundamental.” (2002, 189) More recently Keown, responding to Garfield, questions the moral primacy of compassion in a Buddhist theory of human rights inasmuch as “individual teachings may be unnecessarily exclusive: approaches that emphasise compassion, for example, have little to say about wisdom.” (2018b, 547) Discussion will therefore be steered towards elucidating how Garfield’s claim for a universal ground for human rights in compassion is theoretically adequate to engender a Buddhist human rights that can encompass a range of moral and epistemic concerns. Garfield is concerned to engage the criticism that regards liberal moral theories focussed on rights and duties as both inadequate to much of “our morally most important circumstances—matters of interpersonal relations where sentiments, attitudes and behaviours are of moral significance” (188) as well as incompatible with those sentimentalist theories grounded in “compassion and attention to interpersonal relations” (ibid.), a combination of which views H.H. the Dalai Lama espouses in frequent public statement and moral writings over decades (for example, in Gyatso 1992, 6–7). Garfield’s broad view is that: Rights can be coherently formulated and advanced in the context of a moral vision incorporating compassion only if they are grounded in compassion. It is when we attempt to subordinate compassion to rights and duties, or to give these considerations equal status that incoherence looms. (189)

The means of bridging the two, and thus averting incoherence, is by way of the “fundamental Buddhist insight that compassion is the foundation of moral life as well as the liberal vision of human rights as universal.” (ibid.) Hence, according to Garfield, not only Buddhist s´¯ıla but non-Buddhist morality as such, as well as the universalist aims of liberal theories of rights, are all dependent on a proper recognition of the primacy of compassion in human life.

4.2 That Which is Violated in RK: Values, Rights, Relations It’s uncontroversially true that RK can be characterised as a case in which “individuals or groups are threatened with abuse or actually abused […]—when people are hurt physically.” (Garfield 2002, 189) We’ve already noted a central Buddhist value violated in RK as being the inherent dignity of the person qua the potential agent and

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realiser of the Buddhist-soteriological project. But does such offense yet amount, in the Buddhist-theoretic case, to a right abused? Garfield writes that “just what rights are […] is best answered by noting when they are asserted. That, of course, is when they are violated or threatened with violation.” (189). However, if a right is identified by cases of its imminent or actual abuse, this does not explain what it is about the abuse that warrants the expression of a putative right thereby infringed upon, which infringement can be of many kinds: deprivation of some cherished value, commission of some undesired act, omission of some expected intervention or provision, and so on. Rather, each case of a potentially abused right relies upon a specific loss, deprivation, commission, omission, and so on, which in the case of RK is the deprivation of a primary good in the value of life, which then warrants a protest against its actual or potential deprivation, rather than the violation of a pre-existing and presumptive right as such. It is primary deprivation (etc.), and then resentment of the fact, that warrants protest, and only then, more formally, recognition of a right violated. Only once the deprivation is mutually recognised (by subjects and agents of action) can the resentment expressed signal, as Garfield says of rights, an implicit demand that “can hence be seen as fundamentally protective” (189) against any such further deprivation (etc.). Crucially, the protest borne by the witness to such deprivation, or a survivor of its attempt, entails an expectation that it be taken seriously by morally-significant others. Only then can it function, given that recognition, as a right properly-speaking: a relation of recognised obligation between person and other, individual and society, subject and state, that when abused incurs legal penalty. Hence, Garfield correctly concludes, They [rights] protect individuals against interference. Rights such as this can be called “negative.” The right to life is such a right. It is a right not to be killed. Fundamental rights typically have this character […] Fundamental negative rights are rights against everybody. […] my right to life is satisfied by all who do not kill me and can be violated by any assailant. (189–190)

It is thus evident that acts of RK, waged for whatever reason, fall within those that violate the fundamental negative right not to be killed. Moreover, inasmuch as protest against life unjustly taken pertains to all human beings, irrespective of race, religion, or ideological creed, such a demand registers a universally human right, another feature that, as Garfield notes, defines “the discourse of rights” inasmuch as it “presents itself as a universal discourse in an important sense. It makes claims that transcend cultural difference” so that “a social structure that abrogates them is […] morally wrong.” (192). The question that remains, for Garfield and a Buddhist account of a Buddhist “social structure that abrogates” that right, is how such a universal right might be parsed in the Buddhist context, qua universal and qua right, both of which can at best (as Kelley argues) have only conventionally-warranted existence, lacking putative metaphysical or axiological foundation in an absolute or intrinsically selfjustificatory posit. Even where such a right pertains to all human subjects and entails

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both the universality and responsibility so often articulated by H.H. the Dalai Lama,24 in what precisely are both to be grounded? This is where Garfield’s contextualisation of compassion dialectically enters his account: compassion has as a defining characteristic an intention and aspiration to benefit even those to whom we have no particular duties, and who have no particular rights against us. We act compassionately […] precisely when we act not from duty, and precisely when we do not simply respect the rights of others, but when we positively benefit or refrain from harming where there are no rights and duties. (192–193)

In disengaging a moral focus on duty, and in this way raising compassion to a seemingly supererogatory suspension of duty’s binding moral force, Garfield reconfigures the typical basis for liberal rights theory altogether: he identifies a moral basis for action (or its omission) precisely where rights and duties are absent from or not relevant to the given moral domain. He situates his account of compassion as a ground for human rights with the straightforward observation that: Speaking in terms of compassion significantly broadens the sphere of morality to encompass more of what we pretheoretically place in that domain, and more of what is recognisably foundational even to issues that liberalism locates at center stage. (196)

On this view, the pretheoretical terms of compassion represent a larger class of moral discourse than that of liberal rights theory, which rather supervenes upon the former as a larger field for the personal and social inculcation of values informing and shaping respect for self and others, virtues and the exercise of duty. Garfield uncontroversially locates these in a familial and social conditioning inseparable from a private as much as public context of the intersubjective formation of virtuous character: For children learn modes of interaction and attitudes to which they are exposed in childhood. Those brought up compassionately learn to be compassionate. And it is these children who grow to moral maturity by any standards. They are precisely the individuals who respect the rights of others and who discharge their duties. Grounding that moral maturity in their compassion makes moral development comprehensible. (197)

On this view, a transition between moral inculcation in the terms of a sociallylearned compassion, and its extension to respecting others’ rights, functions as the bridge between existing Buddhist cultural norms and the possibility of a universalist human rights in the Buddhist context. This transition in turn provides for an understanding of human rights as naturally emergent from practices in which private preferences are not in conflict with those of the public realm because, at least in terms of their evaluative status, they are understood to be largely coterminous. As Garfield summarises: once one regards one’s character, attitudes, and relations to others as topics of moral discourse, one allows morality and moral criticism to intrude into the most intimate realm of personal life; once one subjects one’s view of the good to moral evaluation, there is no sphere of thought and action protected from such scrutiny by a demarcation zone of privacy. (202–203) 24

Among other statements, see again his 1993 Vienna statement “Human Rights and Universal Responsibility” (in Keown et al. 1998, p. xviiff .).

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This observation of the sense in which a Buddhist grounding of human rights in compassion undermines the public-private distinction at the heart of liberal rights theory also has a prudential dimension, but in a different sense. This is that, to the degree that a society committed to human rights fails the cultivation of compassion towards others, then the sense of individual entitlement the expectation of rights otherwise induces generates an egotism likely to exacerbate the negative imperative for rights in the first place: the protection from others from whom respect or compassion is otherwise not forthcoming. Garfield describes the consequences of a tightly atomistic moral realm in which intense loyalty, and the limitation of compassion to those immediately related to the circle of one’s own self-centric concerns, ultimately undermine a more intelligently prudential self-interest. Thus, the exercise of universal compassion here entails an epistemic dimension, failing which We perpetuate an unstable and dangerous hostility that keeps all of us in a state of peril. But moreover, it runs against both reason and another component of human nature—our capacity for imaginative exchange of our own situation for that of others. For reason urges that drawing distinctions in the absence of genuine difference is arbitrary, and that doing so in ways detrimental to the interests of all concerned is downright stupid. And that is precisely what the narrow limitation of compassion does. For this reason compassion must be deliberately given a public, social face. (199)

The commission of RK clearly represents a particular extremity of the “unstable and dangerous hostility” to which Garfield points, as well as frequently a justification derived from an overriding concern for one interest group over another. As Garfield emphasises, this represents a properly epistemic failure, compounding on a socialcultural level the fundamental cognitive error described above. On this view, it makes little sense to ground an effective human rights, as liberal rights theory does, on a concern for the protection of the sovereign individual when the respect for self constitutive of that concern is not made universal, not merely in theory but in social practice. Moreover, the compounded error of a limited prudential concern for the self and its private interests, manifest at its most pathological in acts of RK, reflects a larger socio-cultural and historical dysfunction. In the following section, I theorise this constitutive dysfunctionality of RK more broadly with reference to a Buddhist understanding of society in and as history, and its guiding soteriological norms, thus describing a final badmaker for its commission.

5 The Dichotomy Between RK and the Normative Buddhist Lifeworld The problem with RK more generally for the Buddhist anti-realist about selves and persons is that RK can only succeed in entrenching the illusory dualism of self and other, reified identity and its enemy, that inevitably gives rise to the socialcognitive conditions that allow RK to recur, and hence perpetuate that same nescient

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but dynamic structure as detailed above. It is only the illusorily reified self that can assume that the causal efficacy of RK has any basis in truly-existing conditions of the self and its identity, but that is precisely its hubris. If Buddhist thought and ethics were concerned to keep the status quo of the falsely conventional in place, then there would be no need for its exhaustively described eightfold path, and its philosophical bases, at all. RK is just the kind of conventional human practice which that path is in the same conventional context intended to contest and ideally extirpate. The cognitive competence to disabuse those ‘trulyexisting conditions’ of any true existence would necessarily undermine the efforts of RK to (unconsciously) reinforce them precisely through its resort of killing living beings as a form of conventional-symbolic, but ultimately spurious, causation. Hence, for example, a theoretical Buddhist justification for ideological warfare, as a larger social case of RK as the representation of group identity, could only at best amount to the pragmatic but regretted acknowledgement of the lack of any other option if a tolerable peace is to be secured. To claim a putatively Buddhist philosophical justification for such war as in any sense more robust than this purely pragmatic one would compromise the truth-apt Buddhist analysis of RK I’ve elaborated above; whatever ideological or other justification for RK as warfare that might be sufficient for the cowherd, or Burmese nationalist, or a Stalin or a Churchill, is still not philosophically sufficient for the reflective and authentic Buddhist. Thus, the Buddhist response to the status quo regarding which RK has a contestatory function, is that if the cessation of social conflict by means of RK appears to ensue from the defeat of one side and victory of the other, then this also entails other probable effects: the hatred and resentment of the former for the latter, and (echoing Garfield) an unstable sense of security of the identity of both, inasmuch as each can easily function to provoke further conflict.25 Where RK presumes a decisive resolution of its causes of contestation, this presumption must be in large part illusory if acts engaged in hatred and ignorance (as RK typically is) on the Buddhist account inevitably entail like effects. Constitutively essential to RK, as we’ve seen, is the sense that the belief, reason or value sustained by the self which resorts to RK is as non-trivial as it must be to justify taking others’ lives, essentially for the sake of the fortification or power of the self vis-à-vis the other; the lethal agency of RK thus represents itself as having its very identity contingent on the social supremacy of represented values in any given socio-cultural context. This surely, in most if not all cases, amounts to a Pyrrhic victory at best, not merely for the agent of RK but also the society at large which must inevitably resort to it. For the Buddhist two things—the fortification of the identity of the self by lethal means, and the social dominance of its constitutive identity by that means of force— entrenches and perpetuates the very problem Buddhist thought and practice seeks to deconstruct: the reified identity of the self, and the social hegemony of one universalist 25

It is of course a hermeneutic truism, claimed even by historical actors themselves, that the causal seeds of World War Two were planted in the conditions of the end of World War One. (However, the same effect has not obviously applied for the end of the former war.)

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view over and against another. That desideratum is built into not merely the Buddhist metaphysics of non-self and emptiness, but also the Buddhist commitment to the idea that such propositional assertion (pratijñ¯a) as a putatively veridical concordance with the real is globally mistaken.26 Similarly, the implicit basis of RK that asserts that its represented normative view ought to prevail by the existential aggrandizement of its power through killing its enemy, manifests just the failure of right view commonly identified by all Buddhist tenet schools: that psychologically aggrandizing the wouldbe power of that self reifying itself by its constitutive wrong view, is just what is at global fault. We’ve earlier seen that other forms of intentional killing are not cognitively structured in this way: mercy-killing, for instance, concerns a sentient person being willing to end intolerable physiological-mental suffering. That individual is not representing a view or abstract value ontologically other to its own condition. Its aversion is not of the kind evident in the active reification of self we’ve observed in RK. The supposed beneficiary of RK, on the other hand, is that self whose identity is psychologically fortified thereby. The crucial point here is that even where the value or belief constitutive of that identity is in itself a more or less acceptable or even laudable one (see for example Burmese Buddhists, otherwise driven by ethno-nationalist fervour), it cannot ultimately justify its symbolic aggrandizement in the self’s identity. It simply remains of more or less conventional value and utility in an intersubjective economy of values, of which the presumed existence of a self so constituted is not an indispensable part. Persons can function freely in this symbolic economy without the gratuitous superimposition of selves who so aggrandize those values; that gratuitousness is what Buddhist anti-essentialism seeks to expose. If there is no metaphysical necessity in the resort to RK, then it is essentially a willed habit, conditioned volition (sam . sk¯ara), or dysfunctional cognitive state (kle´sa), not an imperative function of the conventionally-existent person who happens to sustain this or another belief or value in a normative lifeworld of conventionallyexistent others. RK can only temporarily and not conclusively resolve the problem of the conflict of values that by that very resolution it considerably contributes to sustaining as an ongoing tension inherent in selves and their constructions of personal identity vis-à-vis other selves. The reified but illusory self must perpetuate reificatory acts in order to falsely assure itself that its ongoing existence, in its privileged identity, might be existentially secured beyond its (otherwise non-harming) conventional needs of self-representation.

26

It’s also true of M¯adhyamikas who see their own global anti-realist thesis not as a view that stands outside, or at the foundations of, the constructedness of views, but is itself just that view which allows all views (including its own) to comprehend their foundationless nature—its epistemic advantage being that the M¯adhyamika specializes in reflexively demonstrating just how that is the case. For M¯adhyamikas and Pram¯an.av¯adins whatever fails even conventional validity manifests a deceptiveness or irreality (alokasam . vr.tisatya) that cannot be taken as real in any sense, or only as a sheer falsehood.

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6 Conclusion: From the Conventionally True to the Merely Conventional While a Buddhist account of lethal acts in RK proscribes them in terms of conventional Buddhist cognitive-affective norms, it tacitly acknowledges the symbolically potent intersubjective construction of reality in which such acts function successfully: as transactional means to an end, and mistakenly, in an implicit ignorance of their metaphysical gratuitousness. The foregoing analysis has identified the merely transactional efficacy of killing in RK as instantiating moral ignorance with regard to the Buddhist understanding of the conventionally real conditions productive of an authentically coherent and compassionately-constituted lifeworld. While that Buddhist position follows from its metaphysical critique and project of moral reform, it remains an ideal aspiration: moral agents (including Buddhist ones) of course continue to engage gratuitous and ethically counter-productive lethal acts as a form of coercive blackmail and leverage of power, in pursuing religious, political, and ideological ends. The civilizing task of resisting the expedience of lethal exploitation, by cultivating the non-lethal amelioration of its cognitive-affective causes, raises a deeper, ethico-religious question. Do individuals and social groups, in their social-symbolic forms of identification, ultimately freely will to resort to RK to gain leverage over perceived enemies, if they’re not entirely determined by prior cognitive-volitional causes of irrationally hostile action? This question goes to the heart of Buddhist ethical thought and practice as a means of addressing the primal confusion of which RK is perhaps most visibly emblematic. A pragmatic objection to the Buddhist critique of RK might yet persist with the claim that, despite its rational and axiological objections, killing indisputably succeeds in removing from the field of consensual symbolic contestation its various abstract objects qua volitional persons, and so is to that degree efficacious.27 In that case a historical consensus renders RK justified as an empirically conventional, even if in Buddhist terms conventionally mistaken, practice for the resolution of conflict. It thus appears that even though philosophical and moral error (in a Buddhistconventional sense) informs killing in RK, a Buddhist analysis must concede that in the sam . s¯aric lifeworld whereby intentional lethality sustains a conventional symbolic order of abstract means and ends, killing might in its instrumental function have an arguable necessity in the sui generis case of killing in self-defence. This category of lethal action is sui generis because it is neither an effect of hostile intention (in the first instance), nor of symbolically-constituted cognition, but rather of instinctual self-preservation. If self-preservation, and hence the right to self-defence, is a nonerroneous reason to kill and so arguably morally permissible, and demonstrates the most obviously reliable means of protection from the depredations of hostile (representational or other) lethal assault, then this suggests an important ethical distinction between gratuitously unnecessary, and appropriately imperative, lethal acts.

27

Consider again the decisive Allied victory over Nazi actors and ideology of World War Two.

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With respect to the foregoing analyses of Part Two, then, the prudential utility of lethal self-defence inaugurates, for this generic Buddhist account, a uniquely rational reason for killing that might be implicated in the Buddhist’s relation with the conventionally-constituted lifeworld—at least for those agents Buddhism considers exclusively capable of acting lethally, with intention, but without consequent moral fault or ill-effect. It’s to this final class of putatively rational intentional killing that we turn in the concluding chapter.

Chapter 13

Conclusion: Buddhist Violence, Self-defence, and the End of Life

Abstract This chapter considers a final class of intentional killing, serving the purpose of self-defence. Its discussion is backgrounded by the broader discursive context, examining violence in Buddhism and Buddhist cultures, recently developed in Buddhist Studies scholarship. A tension arises between the descriptive claims of such scholarship, and the normative claims of ethical discourse, not merely with regard to existing Buddhist norms, but those for which new conditions require new forms of justification. Even the most apparently justified of ethical norms, such as that of violent or lethal self-defence, figures in a Buddhist distinction between genuine conventional justification, and the merely conventionally prevalent, which distinction is blurred in much scholarship. A Buddhist analysis of lethal self-defence demonstrates that it can only be positively justified (in a sole class of such justification in the entire spectrum of ‘Buddhist killing’) in rare cases, which themselves entail soteriological consequence and so answer to properly religious and not prudential justification alone. To the degree that a would-be Buddhist ethics of killing fails to consider all such distinctions, between Buddhist-conventional and merely ‘conventionalist’ justification, and between soteriologically justified and prudential lethal self-defence, then it will fail properly Buddhist concerns for the dual realisation of (conventional and ultimate) wisdom regarding the self and other, and transcendental compassion for all sentient beings, including both agents and objects of lethal self-defence. Keywords Buddhist violence · Descriptive and normative ethics · Instrumentality and killing · Conventionality and Buddhist ethics · Lethal self-defence · Justified killing · Buddhist soteriology and martyrdom

1 Generic Buddhist Violence: Descriptive and Normative At the end of Chap. 12 I noted that a Buddhist response to unprovoked and mortally threatening attack, such as that evident in cases of representational killing (RK), might entail purely defensive lethal measures. If this is so in the Buddhist case, as it is in the non-Buddhist case of justified self-defence (see for example McMahan 2002, 236), we need to ask whether or not, contra the prohibition in the first precept, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Kovan, A Buddhist Theory of Killing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_13

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intentional killing in these cases is permissible on a Buddhist view, and why. I address this question as preliminary to a possible theory of sanctioned Buddhist violence, lethal or otherwise. Inasmuch as fully addressing it takes us into the domains of applied ethics, political and punitive theory, and the ethics of war1 among others, I have no space to develop such a theory here. It is however important to again engage the topos of Buddhist violence inasmuch as it has in recent years received intense disciplinary attention, that yet suggests some theoretical opacity. As surveyed in Chap. 1, extensive scholarly attention has focussed on Buddhist engagement in military, religious and structural violence, whether offensive or defensive, in historical and contemporary, empirical and theoretical contexts (see Jerryson and Juergensmeyer 2010; Tikhonov and Brekke 2013; Zimmerman 2006; Deegalle 2006; Harvey 2000; Keown 2014, 2016, 2021; Jerryson 2011, 2018a, b; Dalton 2011; Jenkins 2010; King 2009; Nelson 2009; Victoria 2006; Bartholomeusz 2002; Schmithausen 1999; Demiéville 2010). As Jerryson notes of these contexts, “It would be a Herculean task to present Buddhist-inspired conflicts, wars, and the ethical debates and decisions surrounding them […] This historiography is meant to show that the phenomena of Buddhist decisions to go to wars and engage in conflict are not anomalies, but part of a historical continuity.” (2018a, 454). However, the project of demonstrating a ‘Buddhist-inspired’ propensity to violence in its historical agents—or perhaps just violent acts committed by people who are Buddhist but not necessarily inspired by Buddhism to commit them—has tended to incur hermeneutic and normative conflations. Jerryson claims he approaches the subject of Buddhist ethics not from the basis of scriptural analysis and the subsequent hermeneutical exercises. Instead, [he…] examines Buddhist ethics from the wider field of lived choices, and the doctrine that relates to those choices. Ethics pertains to the choices that people make. In the past, Buddhists have made choices to go to war and commit various acts of violence. It is important to explore their decisions and the relative material on which they based their decisions. (ibid.)

This is an important task, and it’s right to ask how some Buddhist agents have engaged Buddhist doctrine in violent or lethal acts. Whether or not these agents have accurately or successfully engaged such doctrine is a separate and often ignored question; that they engage it is often conflated with an implicit claim that they’re sometimes justified in the manner that they do. For example, as noted in Chap. 5, a first conflation arises when a generic notion of ‘Buddhist violence’ subsumes the morally salient distinction between forceful restraint, which is generally permissible (we have seen for example N¯ag¯arjuna claim as much), and intentional killing, which is not. Clearly, richly descriptive accounts represent valuable contributions to religious studies, Buddhist studies, historical and historiographical studies, and the anthropology of violence in general. Jerryson and Jenkins, however, implicitly claim that descriptive textual or historical accounts, in all their variety and heterogeneity, represent a substantive examination of normative Buddhist claims concerning the ethics 1

Schmithausen (1999), Keown (2014, 2016, 2021), Jerryson (2016, 2018a), Jenkins (2010), engage this terrain with respect to Buddhist historical and textual precedent, but do not elaborate theories of a Buddhist ethics of killing in war comparable to non-Buddhist theories (such as McMahan 2009).

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of violence, killing and war. This occludes the familiar Humean dichotomy between the is and the ought: that what moral actors do and what they ought to do are distinct analytic categories, and to conflate them causes us to lose focus in each domain. The first enquiry seeks to know the extent and variety of Buddhist engagement in violence; the second to know what Buddhists should do given their philosophical and normative commitments. The raw data of historical choices made by nominally Buddhist agents cannot provide the basis for a normative account. There are a range of reasons for this. First, there is a preliminary issue of setting parameters for the appropriate data set: how are universal norms to be extracted from a body of empirical data that is neither wholly documented historically, nor determinable by reference to future extrapolations from the past? Second, even if the empirical record were exhaustively determinable, what is it about the record per se that compels normative persuasion? On what principle can it be claimed that the choices actors make, no matter how many of them or how consistent, thereby recommends those choices as the ones they should have made in those circumstances, and that others should emulate? No amount of evidence of Buddhist violence can ipso facto demonstrate a normative basis for violence in Buddhist doctrine, or that such violence is thus Buddhistinspired. Moreover, the normative context for intentional violence established in the P¯ali canon and subsequent theoretical discussion (evident in commentaries of ¯ ´ antideva among others) overtly belies the N¯ag¯arjuna, Buddhaghosa, Aryadeva, and S¯ claim that there is a robust basis for intentional lethality in the foundational and classical texts of the various traditions, and the tenets and norms expressed in them. Jerryson, among others, does not develop a Buddhist ethics of killing, but rather provides a history of Buddhist-cultural violence. It’s probable that the large catalogue of Buddhist violence to which Jerryson refers will grow into the future, and has in recent years evidenced a moral nadir. But that does not compromise otherwise unequivocal normative Buddhist teachings on intentional lethality. Rather than extend Jerryson’s program of descriptive ethics, I have in the foregoing been concerned to ascertain Buddhist-normative positions on the basis of ethical choices Buddhist actors should make given the global Buddhist metaphysical, normative and soteriological doctrines and principles theorised throughout this study. I’ve argued that psychological-affective, preventive, judicial-retributive, compassionate, and ideological-representational, classes of killing all entail distinct intentional modes engendering subsequent moral and other ill-effects. We can similarly proceed in ascertaining the moral status of personal self-defence, and whether it demands lethal extension in those cases where no other possibility of selfpreservation appears possible. To do so, we need to consider briefly the broader frame for that discussion, by clarifying the conventional status of potentially justified lethal Buddhist practice given the critique of its intentional forms in foregoing chapters.

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2 The Conventionalist Objection: Instrumental Efficacy At the end of Chap. 12 I noted that the conventional construction of the person in lethal acts, and misconceptions generated thereby, is ubiquitous among human communities. However, we’ve also seen how this also suggests that the causal efficacy of killing may function with respect to differing, or opposed, quotients of cognitive competence and so moral confidence. This is reflected in the empirical fact that some national legislatures popularly sanction intentional killing (such as the death penalty and euthanasia) where others just as keenly don’t.2 Moreover, where judiciaries potentially and actually resort to legal killing, its function often serves very different moral ends (compare for example a zero-tolerance war on drugs or homosexuality with liberal euthanasia laws). Despite these differences, the ubiquity of legal killing across a normative spectrum amounts to what might be called a ‘conventionalist’ paradigm of killing whereby its efficacy is variably justificatory across a range of cases. For example, few modern polities or ethicists question the philosophical and ethical validity of killing in warfare, including some among its otherwise revisionist critics (see for example McMahan 2009). Conventionalist thus here signifies the conventional in its doxastic rather than Buddhist-epistemic sense: i.e., the stance that few normative agents and even theorists see any fundamental reason to question, even where it is, as we’ve seen in Buddhist-conventional terms, at best mistakenly and not rationally or ethically justified (as each of Chaps. 8 through 12 have variously demonstrated given their focal philosophical concerns). Terrorists, for instance, identify their acts as serving any number of conventionally legitimate political or other goals, to be publicly understood as such. Their antagonists in government-sanctioned counter-terrorism operatives do the same and ground their justification in a public consensus that largely concurs with their reasons and goals for so doing. Moreover, even if the goals of such killing can be understood in Buddhist terms (as in Chap. 12) to entail fundamental constitutive error, the lethal terrorist remains to all practical purposes a pernicious menace. The Buddhist might object that, by the same token, it appears indubitable that legally executing numberless terrorists does not eradicate the human propensity to RK, or ensure that human agents cease engaging terrorism. We’ve seen that states of belief, and the volitions and acts motivated by them, are not intrinsic to persons in their material or mental existence. Beliefs and the propositional attitudes associated with them as it were inhere, rather, in processes of cognitive reification which transmit collective linguistic-symbolic phenomena: identities and structures of self and meaning. These cognitive processes can be not only qualified and transformed with respect to other views and beliefs, but in terms of Buddhist theory and practice, also divested of their hitherto falsely reified status. Killing is thus au fond an instrument of power. From a Buddhist perspective, it can be justified neither ultimately nor conventionally. Ultimately, properties typically 2

See The Economist (2015) and Death Penalty… (2022) for global comparative statistics for capital punishment; see ProCon.org (2022) for euthanasia and PAS.

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represented in killing do not ontologically inhere in those killed; conventionally, they emerge only in relation to the more or less mistaken cognitive states of those who ascribe them. But the Buddhist has not yet adequately addressed the fact of the sheerly instrumental efficacy of killing as opposed to its rational justification. Hence, the ‘conventionalist’ in this case might legitimately press the purely instrumental point: if, for example, an armed assailant is about to murder one’s family before one’s eyes, what response is appropriate for a Buddhist? The Buddhist answer will again presuppose a distinction between appropriate and justified response, where appropriateness does not necessarily entail justification. As we’ve seen, whatever makes an act morally appropriate or skilful (kusala) is at all times framed within an open field of possibility marked by conscious intention, and its constitutive psychology.

3 The Person as Imminent Lethal Threat: Killing in Self-defence Self-defence is plausibly motivated by a biological instinct for survival, and thus an expression of the desire to extend life. On any Buddhist account, however, in all sentient beings apart from a¯ rya-beings such a biological desire also implicates the psychological desire to preserve the self, perceived as threatened along with the threat against physical life, just because ordinary beings by Buddhist definition are constituted as reified selves which seek to preserve that sense of self just as they do their nature as a living organism. This is not yet a Buddhist argument against lethal self-defence, but it is a crucial aspect of any Buddhist description of it. It follows that it’s impossible for an unawakened individual to act to the end of self-preservation in non-reified terms (only an arhat, bodhisattva or Buddha is capable of that). The unawakened person by definition reifies his existence as a self , which seeks to survive to further its own interests in the world, whatever they may be. If so, the self-defence of ordinary persons is always a defence of a self, which he intends to preserve, against the aggressor other—also, of course, a reified self. Killing in self-defence thus evidences a reciprocal volitional dynamic between its agent and object: it is more or less justifiably predicated on a pre-emptive incapacitation of the threat of an intentionally congruent volition to kill the other. That is, the initial volition to aggression (in the aggressor) triggers a secondary volition to aggression (in the prospective victim). The Buddhist wants to note that the volitional nature of the would-be victim of attack ineliminably enters into a Buddhist psychological analysis of the ethics of lethal self-defence. Hence, the psychological state of the wrongfully attacked becomes as significant an evaluative factor in determining the wrongness of lethal self-defence, as is that of the attacker. In earlier chapters we observed that cognition is conditioned by deep-volitional structures, as well as by affect. We also saw that intentional consciousness is not

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a neutral lens, but rather the conditioned medium by which any event is disclosed: the lethal act no less than any other. Moreover, that kind of intentional action is also constituted by the combined effect of endogenous mental-psychological contents such as the a¯ savas, kle´sas and sam . sk¯aras we’ve considered above, as well as by the kinds of cittas and cetasikas/caittas that sub-personally mediate these in action. Such contents are not unique to killing per se. An acute imagining, including a dreamevent, of murder could be theorised as psychologically comparable to the real, waking case.3 But when these mental contents provide the psychological impetus for agency, including in putatively rational acts of self-defence, and especially with regard to the mental factors of hostility, delusion, conceit, shamelessness, and lack of moral dread, these causes of action acquire a specific moral valence. The Buddhist ethical doctrine that insists on the absence of hatred or anger4 as a necessary condition of justified violence, is germane to this enmeshed intentional structure of self-defence. As noted in Chap. 10, one of the problems with the intentional structure of retributive lethality is that in enacting retribution for a prior lethal act, such retribution might itself be generated by degrees of conscious or unconscious aggression in the retributivist motivated by anger or aversion, as well as by justified indignation. If so, the psychological causes of lethal aggression, apart from its putative justification, remain not pacified but fortified. The same potentially applies to self-defence. As we’ve seen in Chap. 6, the Abhidhamma/Abhidharma doesn’t countenance the possibility that lethal acts committed by ordinary persons can lack some degree of hatred, even if other mental afflictions (such as fear or greed) might be absent. Hence, on this view no such lethal act, even of comparatively justified self-defence, lacks a degree of aversion. Hence, the defensive killing of an aggressor by an ordinary lethal agent is at best a purely pragmatic measure that is in every case to be regretted because it is ineluctably determined by unskilful intention and its concomitant negative kammic consequence. Of course, an ordinary agent might quite naturally obey his impulse to selfpreservation, but on the Buddhist view that will accrue effects which militate against a Buddhist justification of lethal self-defence. Here we can recall Gethin’s Abhidhamma account which suggests that engaging such an impulse implicates selfdirected psychological insight, rather than prescription or proscription, where the rightness or wrongness of action is not justified by rational argument but rather determined by self-understanding in situ irrespective of such judgement, and so in that sense an essentially subjective datum. Gethin asks: “Are you sure that some subtle aversion and delusion have not surfaced in the mind? In the end ethical principles cannot solve the problem of how to act in the world. If we want to know how to act in accordance with Dhamma, we must know our own minds.” (2004a, 190)

3

Some Tibetan Buddhist traditions theorise the notion of depth-psychological agency, and Tsongkhapa follows Candrak¯ırti by including dream-conduct in the full spectrum of s´¯ıla. 4 E.g., Dhp. 42; AN IV 94; Vism. 300; S¯ ´ antideva’s Bodhicary¯avat¯ara is a locus classicus in the Mah¯ay¯ana context.

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This is where the rubber of Buddhist psychological-ethical theory hits the road of Buddhist practice, and there is no other definitive moral argument with reference to which lethal self-defence can be adjudicated. In the context of a very wide spectrum of possible intentional grounds for such action, the only justified Buddhist case for lethal self-defence requires that a recipient of unprovoked violence is not motivated by any degree of hostility and aversion, and that mental states characterised by those affects do not at all factor in the psychological causes of a responsive lethal act: in other words, an agent of justified lethal self-defence must be a Buddha, bodhisattva or a¯ rya-being. Given this very high and unrealistic Buddhist-psychological standard determining a potentially justified act of lethal self-defence, let’s for argument’s sake assume that an ordinary agent sufficiently lacks even a minimal quotient of aversion, and so in this sense at least is virtually indistinguishable from the ideal bodhisattva agent. Killing in this very best case of ordinary self-defence still does not escape a second Buddhist concern. This is that the very instinct to even aversion-less self-preservation evidences an attachment to ongoing existence, which in ordinary beings extends to a desire for its permanence (bhav¯asava), noted in Chap. 4. As conditioned propensities for the mental defilements of sensual pleasure (k¯am¯asava), the craving for existence (bhav¯asava), and ignorance (avijj¯asava), the a¯ savas perpetuate the beginningless kammic cycle of rebirth and suffering: they “defile, bring renewal of existence, give trouble, ripen in suffering, and lead to future birth, aging and death.” (MN 36.47; I 250; tr. Bodhi 2005, 229) Inasmuch as the a¯ savas are also definitively ended only with the achievement of Arhathood, the affectively best-case act of ordinary self-defence falls short of precluding the bhav¯asava. Again, the ordinary agent of lethal self-defence might engage the defensive volition to kill in order to preserve his or her own life, but will generate thereby both subjective and objective causes and conditions for further suffering. And inasmuch as extirpating the fundamental causes of suffering is the raison d’être of Buddhism, and killing engages some of the most morally grave such causes (see again discussion of the PD, or principle of dukkha, in Chap. 3), then lethal self-defence in this second case also fails robust Buddhist justification. Finally, both these Buddhist concerns for the constitutive role of kle´sas, and suffering-perpetuating a¯ savas, including the bhav¯asava, entail that it is always preferable to intend to neutralise a dangerous threat by non-lethal means, instead of lethal ones. Hence, the Buddhist desideratum in this intentional case is to disable real threat, not to end a life. On that basis, a Buddhist will be justified in seeking the effective restraint of an aggressor by means of, for example, injury to the means of mobility. Practically speaking, inasmuch as the attacked party might be in a position to respond lethally at all (with a firearm or other weapon) then by the same token they’re also in a position to respond with force, which may indeed injure but not kill the aggressor. Hence, H. H. the 14th Dalai Lama, for instance, has spoken of shooting at the legs, not the vital parts, of an aggressor, in self-defence (Bernton 2001). That intention is prudential, whereby varying degrees of restraint might achieve what is required,

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and no more. On the basis of all of the foregoing argument, there is otherwise no justifiably Buddhist reason to intend to kill to the end of preserving one’s life. The early Buddhist ideal of non-reactive and non-harming action—action not characterized by impulsive aggression—might also imply passivity in the face of ´ avakay¯ana context the Arhat is hostile aggression. Indeed, I’ve noted that in the Sr¯ paradigmatically incapable of intentionally killing a sentient other. Whether a nonArhat agent is capable of the same incapacity is moot, even where he does not kill in self-defence. The Mah¯ay¯ana however, as we’ve seen, in this context expresses the realization of selflessness otherwise, in the case of bodhisattva agents who, like the Arhat, are free of the a¯ savas, kle´sas and volitional dispositions typical of ordinary agents. This theoretically allows bodhisattvas to positively exercise lethal self-defence, but more often the defence of others, just because they’re not so motivated. This appears to underwrite the Buddhist exceptionalism, noted in Chap. 5, in which bodhisattvas are, at the least, exonerated from blame in killing from purely compassionate, yet still defensive, motives: only they can act lethally with positive moral impunity. This re-confirms the principles of kamma, gun.a (quality) and prajñ¯a (wisdom) discussed in Part I as justificatory of—in this case rare exceptions to—the first precept prohibiting killing.

4 A Coda: Buddhist Ethics and the Soteriological Value of Life Given the foregoing, it’s unsurprising that the highest value in the Buddhist lifeworld attaches itself to the figure of the awakened Buddha: that sentient being which has transcended any experience of suffering, all nescience, and any lack of unconditional and universal compassion (bodhicitta). Hence also, the primordial value identified in terms of the fundamental valorisation of kusala-cetan¯a and kusala-kamma-path¯a (all courses of action informed by wholesome intention) is confirmed: that intention is wholesome which expresses and bears witness to the metaphysical Ur-value inherent ´akyamuni Buddha. in sentient being, epitomized in the awakening of the historical S¯ However, the proper basis for this value should be emphasized: the Buddha only is the awakened Buddha because of the properties of consciousness that render him awakened and that are only conventionally predicated of this body and person and not another. It is not the Buddha’s body or person as such that guarantees their ´ akyamuni asserts that absolute value, but the consciousness they mediate; Buddha S¯ as anatt¯a he is not his body at all. Body, person, and their value are conventional posits metaphysically empty of inherent value, just as their ontology is empty of inherent existence or svabh¯ava. Hence, the absolute value predicated of a Buddha as the exemplar of absolutely achieved wisdom and bodhicitta, is only relative to those comparatively less-enlightened minds which predicate it.

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This means there is in this framework no absolute value because all value depends ontologically on the conventional posits of ordinary sentient beings. The value posited of the historical Buddha is the ne plus ultra of the conventional lifeworld of sam . vr.tisatya; causally identified in kusala-cetan¯a it inaugurates the potential for the transcendental value of Buddhahood or nirv¯an.a as such, immanently manifesting insight and compassion as evidence of the fruition of the Buddhist path. On the Buddhist view, to be born human means to possess the great and extremely rare good fortune of that potential gaining, and its ultimate realisation in awakening; the Buddhist path is the means to its achievement. But not all persons have yet recognised that good fortune; hence, taking human life absolutely forecloses their rare potential as individual human births. While individual life remains, other obstacles to the gaining of the path can be potentially overcome; but death uniquely cannot be overcome in the conventional context of sam . vr.tisatya. Those who are Buddhists but not yet Buddhas might already conceive that in terms of transcendental param¯arthasat there is ultimately no gaining, no value, and no Buddha, but that to realize that ultimate truth crucially requires an absolute respect towards the means of its realization: embodied existence in a unique, living and sentient human body. This, also, is why the first Buddhist precept is a proscription, perhaps above all, against the abuse of that absolute respect. This also means that instead of justifying pacifist non-violence by appeal to transcendental values, Buddhist soteriology points to the cognitive-affective causes that enable a respect for and full recognition of the inherent potential for absolute freedom—that is, the absolute extirpation of suffering—that is its telos as nirv¯an.a (confirming the theorisation of human dignity in Chap. 12). That recognition includes the realisation that the efficacious site for such extirpation is absolutely not the eradication of external threat. Rather, it lies with the realisation that intersubjective conflict is ultimately, and fundamentally, engendered by the mind that misperceives the self and other, cognitively constructs intrinsically real Ur-values as absolute, and thereby justifies killing in the service of those values. Hence, Buddhist martyrdom is not an exercise in self-abnegation expressed by a Christian turning of the other cheek, or the salvific faith expressed in Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase that “unearned suffering is redemptive.” (1986, 18) Rather, the Buddhist martyr dies not only in the terms of unconditional compassion for his aggressor, but also, and primarily, with attention to her own mind at its deepest levels of ignorance. The critical aim for the Buddhist adept is to focus on whatever insight, even on the level of transcendental wisdom, is available in a situation of possibly terminal crisis—as, indeed, embodied existence already is. Rather than kill in a state of confusion or mere reactivity, the Buddhist adept seeks either non-lethal self-defence or, in extremis, surrenders willingly to death. In doing so she maximizes her will to insight, compassion for the other, and the amelioration of further suffering, which suffering being self-willed inevitably continues for her aggressor, but in her own will to liberation and its certain happiness not herself. In potentially accessing states of superlative wisdom and compassion, she renders still more acute her exemplary status: in such a gracious death, she could

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not be a more noble being, and the human as such never reaches higher. Its archetypes are, of course, as much Christic as Buddhist, if for symbolically different reasons. A Zen Buddhist might rhetorically ask, ‘Why survive?’ when life is impermanent and death certain. A Buddhist high-adept might perceive that should his end be near, the surest mental action embodying the culmination of a lifetime of Buddhist practice, is to greet death—in all its guises—without reserve, knowing that in any circumstance it is the unknown and the means of dying arbitrary. Life then is not something that can be held onto; a greater part of its value, and wonder, derives from the knowledge of that fact. Were it otherwise we also would not, paradoxically, have the power of life and death—and much else inbetween—in our hands.

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