Zen Buddhism and the Space of Ethics

This essay discusses Buddhist ethics from Zen and Huayan Buddhist perspectives. It proposes that Zen Buddhist ethics underlines the importance of the ethical agent’s awareness of the fundamental gap between the reality of the world and the agent’s capacity to fully understand the total reality, and this gap inevitably creates a tension in the ethical agent’s mind. This tension is a positive guideline that demands of the ethical agent a constant and consistent self-reflection when making ethical decisions. Moral norms can offer a contour of our ethical life, but, from the Zen and Huayan perspectives, crucial to ethical reasoning is one’s capacity to be aware of multifaceted causes and conditions that generate an event and the venerability of the ethical agent’s hermeneutic capacity to fully grasp the total realty. Ethics emerges in the space of this tension when the tension is positively channeled through the moral agent’s self-cultivation.