In the following thesis I outline Schopenhauer’s ethics in its metaphysical context and in contrast to ethics based on egoism. I look at criticisms of Schopenhauer’s philosophy which have emerged quite recently, and some of which (if valid) would undermine Schopenhauer’s compassion-based moral theory. I have explained these criticisms and offered a defence of Schopenhauer. In order to take up Schopenhauer’s claim of affinity with Buddhist philosophy, I outline first of all early Buddhist then Mahāyāna ethics focusing on the latter’s central idea of compassion. It has been suggested by some scholars that there are specific problems in Buddhist ethics which undermine the idea of compassion and I explain, then attempt to counter, these claims with specific reference to Śāntideva and his rejection of egoism as a means of acting in a moral way or of finding liberation from suffering. I then address recent criticisms of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, especially the idea that the specific role of compassion in his ethics and its soteriological role are illogical – an idea which I argue against. Finally I compare the core ideas of Schopenhauer’s solution to the problem of suffering with what seems similar in Śāntideva. In doing this, I examine whether or not Schopenhauer is right in claiming convergence between Buddhism and his own philosophy, especially in the area of soteriology as it relates to ethics.

Background: The influence of religion on demographic behaviors has been extensively studied mainly for Abrahamic religions. Although Buddhism is the world´s fourth largest religion and is dominant in several Asian nations experiencing very low fertility, the impact of Buddhism on childbearing has received comparatively little research attention. Objective: This paper draws upon a variety of data sources in different countries in Asia in order to test our hypothesis that Buddhism is related to low fertility. Methods: Religious differentials in terms of period fertility in three nations (India, Cambodia and Nepal) and cohort fertility in three case studies (Mongolia, Thailand and Japan) are analyzed. The analyses are divided into two parts: descriptive and multivariate analyses. Results: Our results suggest that Buddhist affiliation tends to be negatively or not associated with childbearing outcomes, controlling for education, region of residence, age and marital status. Although the results vary between the highly diverse contextual and institutional settings investigated, we find evidence that Buddhist affiliation or devotion is not related to elevated fertility across these very different cultural settings. Conclusions: Across the highly diverse cultural and developmental contexts under which the different strains of Buddhism dominate, the effect of Buddhism is consistently negatively or insignificantly related to fertility. These findings stand in contrast to studies of Abrahamic religions that tend to identify a positive link between religiosity and fertility.

The dissertation examines the life narrative of Tsongkhapa Losang Dragpa (1357-1419), the influential founder of the Ganden school of Tibetan Buddhism, primarily through the lens of the bodhisattva path to enlightenment, a topic that animates much of Indian Buddhist literature and Tsongkhapa’s own writings. Over the course of five chapters, the dissertation (1) contextualizes Tsongkhapa’s social, political, and historical circumstances, the limiting factors for that narrative; (2) explores the social nature of life narratives themselves, particularly Tibetan Buddhist ones, and the many sources on which Tsongkhapa drew in creating a self in relation to the bodhisattva ideal; (3) analyses the topic of asceticism as a constellation of practices that embody traditional ideals, which the dissertation uniquely relates to both monastic and, perhaps surprisingly, tantric discipline in the construction of a bodhisattva/would-be buddha self; (4) synthesizes several themes within Tsongkhapa’s oeuvre in relation to the bodhisattva path to enlightenment, highlighting the irreducibly social nature of embodied enlightenment; and (5) proposes that Tsongkhapa’s social activities, specifically his so-called Four Great Deeds, instantiate the ideal of the enlightened self’s acting within society, specifically his context of fifteenth-century Central Tibet. The dissertation relies primarily on Tsongkhapa’s brief intellectual autobiography, Excellent Presence, his earliest biography, Haven of Faith, a number of Tsongkhapa’s systematic writings, and a variety of primary and secondary sources that contextualize elements of the historical, sociological, religious, and theoretical analyses presented throughout the five chapters. In biographies of Tibetan Buddhist figures, emphasis on the hagiographic tends to obscure the social, political, and historical contexts in which their subjects act, which in turn tends to reinforce the Weberian notion of Buddhism as an individualist path. Emphasis on individual achievement (simultaneously including yet excluding lineages, practices, philosophical positions, and so on) tends to reinforce the inverse, Foucauldian notion that this is a deliberate attempt to obscure various power struggles that actually define religious actors and institutions. In the case of Tsongkhapa, modern scholarship has tended to present the remarkable success of his Ganden school either to his individual genius in advancing (allegedly) unique philosophical positions or to social facts (e.g., his efforts at monastic reform), political facts (e.g., Phagdru dominance over rival Sakya), and historical facts (e.g., Mongol allegiance to his successors) largely unrelated to his personal charisma, erudite scholarship, or social impact. As a sort of middle way between these extremes, it is possible to locate within these contexts the specific achievements of the individual who is—according to both general Buddhist understanding and contemporary theorists in philosophy, psychology, literary studies, and sociology—deeply socialized. As social documents, life narratives, inclusive of biography and hagiography, function as indices of tradition, just as do practices of monastic and tantric asceticism, all with goals of embodying the principles articulated in the systematic literature within the social, political, and historical contexts to be transcended. This ideal, then, proves to be fully situated within social contexts, and Tsongkhapa’s Four Great Deeds instantiate it in relation to both individual achievements of asceticism and the institutionalization of communal and educational capacities to replicate the processes engendering this ideal, buddhahood. In sum, Tsongkhapa’s life narrative expresses the expectations and ideals of Tibetan Buddhist culture in a way that proves complementary to systematic presentations and to “lived” practices of monastic and tantric asceticism.

Mipam ('ju mi pham rgya mtsho, 1846-1912), an architect of the Nyingma (rnying ma) tradition of Tibet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, articulates two distinct models of the two truths that are respectively reflected in Madhyamaka and Yogācāra Buddhist traditions. The way he positions these two models sheds light on how levels of description are at play in his integration of these traditions. Mipam positions one kind of two-truth model as the product of an ontological analysis while another model can be seen as resulting from a phenomenological reduction. He accommodates both models into his systematic interpretation, and for him, each one has an important role to play in coming to understand the nature of the Buddhist truths of emptiness and Buddha-nature. Since each model reflects a different style of analysis, or a different perspective on truth, his presentation reveals how neither model alone has the last word on the nature of what is and how it is experienced. This paper analyzes the means by which he lays out these two models of the two truths, and explores the implications of their integration in his philosophical works. A primary concern for Mipam, and a factor that guides his attempt to integrate these two approaches to truth, is his aim to both induce authentic experience and true knowledge on the one hand, and represent reality and the experience of it on the other. These competing and complimentary objectives are a central focus around which both styles of critical reflection, and both models of the two truths, revolve.

In Tibet, the negative dialectics of Madhyamaka are typically identified with Candrakīrti's interpretation of Nāgārjuna, and systematic epistemology is associated with Dharmakīrti. These two figures are also held to be authoritative commentators on a univocal doctrine of Buddhism. Despite Candrakīrti's explicit criticism of Buddhist epistemologists in his Prasannapadā, Buddhists in Tibet have integrated the theories of Candrakīrti and Dharmakīrti in unique ways. Within this integration, there is a tension between the epistemological system-building on the one hand, and "deconstructive" negative dialectics on the other. The integration of an epistemological system within Madhyamaka is an important part of Mipam's ('ju mi pham rgya mtsho, 1846-1912) philosophical edifice, and is an important part of understanding the place of Yogācāra in his tradition. This paper explores the way that Mipam preserves a meaningful Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika distinction while claiming both Yogācāra and Prāsaṅgika as legitimate expressions of Madhyamaka. Mipam represents Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka as a discourse that emphasizes what transcends conceptuality. As such, he portrays Prāsaṅgika as a radical discourse of denial. Since the mind cannot conceive the "content" of nonconceptual meditative equipoise, Prāsaṅgika, as the representative discourse of meditative equipoise, negates any formulation of that state. In contrast, he positions Yogācāra as a discourse that situates the nonconceptual within a systematic (conceptual) structure. Rather than a discourse that re-presents the nonconceptual by enacting it (like Prāsaṅgika), the discourse of Yogācāra represents the nonconceptual within an overarching system, a system (unlike Prāsaṅgika) that distinguishes between the conceptual and the nonconceptual.

Emptiness (śūnyatā) is one of the most important topics in Buddhist thought and also is one of the most perplexing. Buddhists in Tibet have developed a sophisticated tradition of philosophical discourse on emptiness and ineffability. This paper discusses the meaning(s) of emptiness within three prominent traditions in Tibet: the Geluk (dge lugs), Jonang (jo nang), and Nyingma (rnying ma). I give a concise presentation of each tradition's interpretation of emptiness and show how each interpretation represents a distinctive aspect of its meaning. Given that Buddhist traditions (1) accept an extra-linguistic reality and (2) maintain a strong tradition of suspicion of language with the belief that language both constructs and distorts reality, this paper responds to an issue that is not so much whether or not an inexpressible reality can be expressed, but rather how it is best articulated.

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This thesis is a study of religion in movement through retellings of stories from members of the Vietnamese-Canadian immigrant community in Montreal, Québec. It aims to demonstrate that religion, specifically Buddhism, plays an important role in processes of homemaking. The thesis maps Vietnamese Buddhism as a complex system of shifting beliefs and practices, highly contingent on its encounters with different environments and people. It aims to show that the tradition is strongly anchored in members of the community’s everyday life given that it is tightly intertwined with cultural ways to interact, eat, care, and treat their family members, alive and dead. This thesis, following North American Religions scholars, aims to challenge the assumption that the modern world, due to its post-Enlightenment disenchantment with the superstitious in the move toward the rational and scientific, has been “secularized,” that is, emptied of religion, which has declined and become privatized. It argues that religion still has much to do with the way everyday life is lived. The research thus takes up a “lived religion” approach to enquire into the ordinary religious subject’s everyday practices in new, often non- religious, and profane spaces, rather than the explicit and exclusive religious life of the unambiguously religious individual. It aims to demonstrate that studying religion constitutes a generative avenue to understanding societies today. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This thesis is interested in constructions of religion and of religious identity in the diaspora, specifically the making of Vietnamese Buddhism in Montreal, Québec. It both attempts to understand Vietnamese Buddhism in Montreal as constructed by those who experience it, and religion’s role in the creation of a Canadian and Vietnamese identity. How is Vietnamese Buddhism lived in Montreal? In what ways does Buddhism shape Vietnamese-Canadians’ interactions? How might Buddhism play into marking them as different?

This dissertation is a study of the concept of etiquette in the monastic law codes of early Indian Buddhism. This category of texts, called vinaya, is considered within and outside of the tradition to be based on Buddhist ethical ideals. However, vinaya texts also contain a great deal of material that appears to be inherited from pre-Buddhist cultural habits, and is not uniquely Buddhist. That material is useful to us in reconstructing the world of early Buddhists, as literary examples of the kinds of interaction Buddhists portrayed themselves having with Brāhmaṇas, Kṣatriyas, and various political and kinship groups in premodern India. The degree to which this body of literature is representative of actual historical situations is open to debate, but the texts arguably illustrate an ideal of behaviour in social relationships. Etiquette in general manifests as a kind of public performance involving respect for boundaries and acknowledgment of social roles. The various rituals that are considered to embody etiquette in any particular culture often look arbitrary from the outside, yet there is always an internal logic that helps to determine which behaviours are considered appropriate and which are “impolite.” I argue here that the etiquette rituals of early Indian Buddhist monastics are modeled on a conception of disgust that Buddhists shared with various other Sanskritic cultures of premodern northern India. I employ some of the ideas from linguistic politeness and from contemporary theories of disgust to help in my analysis of these premodern law codes. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation is a study of the concept of etiquette in the monastic law codes of early Indian Buddhism. This category of texts, called vinaya, is considered within and outside of the tradition to be based on Buddhist ethical ideals. However, vinaya texts also contain a great deal of material that appears to be inherited from pre-Buddhist cultural habits, and is not uniquely Buddhist. That material is useful to us in reconstructing the world of early Buddhists, as literary examples of the kinds of interaction Buddhists portrayed themselves having with Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, and various political and kinship groups in premodern India. The degree to which this body of literature is representative of actual historical situations is open to debate, but the texts arguably illustrate an ideal of behaviour in social relationships. Etiquette in general manifests as a kind of public performance involving respect for boundaries and acknowledgment of social roles. The various rituals that are considered to embody etiquette in any particular culture often look arbitrary from the outside, yet there is always an internal logic that helps to determine which behaviours are considered appropriate and which are “impolite.” I argue here that the etiquette rituals of early Indian Buddhist monastics are modeled on a conception of disgust that Buddhists shared with various other Sanskritic cultures of premodern northern India. I employ some of the ideas from linguistic politeness and from contemporary theories of disgust to help in my analysis of these premodern law codes.

No description available.