Mahāyāna Exceptionalism and the Lethal Act

Abstract

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This chapter turns to the development in the Mahāyāna 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 (prajñā) 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 Pramāṇavāda exegete Dharmakīrti, 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.