Расцвет буддийских этических исследований в англоязычных странах

Abstract

From the second half of the 20th century, Buddhist texts have been attracting close attention of English-speaking philosophers, in particular, the interest has been drawn to the ethical teaching contained in the texts. The purpose of this review paper is to describe the history of the emergence and development of an interest in the ethical aspect of Buddhist teachings in the West. The author notes the Buddhist sources containing the ethical elements and identi­fies possible reasons for the absence of a developed ethical theory in classical Buddhism. Hav­ing analyzed the place of ethics in traditional Buddhism, the author proposes to distinguish three periods of research, of which the last began in the 90s of the 20th century and was marked by the formation of Buddhist ethics as an independent discipline: thematic academic journals appear and a philosophical community is formed around them, which in a new way inter­prets the traditional provisions of Buddhism from the perspective of problems characteristic of Western philosophy. The last part of the paper describes the main topics developed within the discipline of Buddhist ethics. One of the research areas is related to the systematization and understanding of ethical positions within Buddhism through their comparison with Western normative ethical theories such as virtue ethics, deontology and consequentialism. Within the framework of another approach, Buddhist ethical theory is constructed through the study of the questions of determinism and free will, agency and moral responsibility. The third sig­nificant approach to studying the ethical aspect of Buddhism focuses on looking at the modern theoretical and practical problems in the light of Buddhist teaching. In the end it is concluded that, despite the great success of the development of the discipline of Buddhist ethics, it has not yet acquired integrity, and that many important advances remain to be made.