How Does Madhyamaka Approach Ethics? Emptiness, Liberation, and Living Well

How do we live well together? Answering this question is one of the most important tasks for philosophy, both East and West. At the end of the preceding part of our introduction, I said that ethics is central to madhyamaka. How can relentlessly proving a lack of svabhava produce positive guides to behaviour? This piece will demonstrate how sunyata clears away abstract rules and trades them for a soteriology that promotes discernment, experiential transformation, and other-centredness.

What Should a Madhyamaka Ethic Avoid?

The madhyamaka account of ethics begins with identifying some extremes to avoid, normative ethics and relativist ethics.

• Normative ethics claim some kind of universality or pre-configured ethic that humans should find and follow. The three most popular Western ethical theories each begin with an abstract methodology that anchors its ensuing ideas**: for deontologists, it is rules, for utilitarians, it is a calculus, for virtue ethicists, it is flourishing**. At some stage in each of these ethical theories, they will claim some timeless, axiomatic, naturally self-evident or unchanging component of their methods. The madhyamaka response hopefully feels familiar: any ethical theory, claim, or judgement that relies on (or implies) a fixed, unchanging, substantial anything (svabhava) is not tenable. Madhyamaka ethics cannot posit unchanging, normative, or self-evident anything. So we avoid the cliff of normative ethics.

• Relativists are, in some sense, the opposite. There is a slough of individual relativism, where what is ethical can be left to each person to decide. The madhyamaka asks: how can a contingent self in a contingent reality arrive at any moral claim that holds over time? This self is an illusion, so cannot be the origin of moral claims, nor bound by future moral claims. Also, how can disputes between individual ethical claims be judged? As by definition, each individual decides, there is no way to adjudicate whose moral claim is justified beyond pure subjectivity. Further still, individual relativism does not answer the question of living together… ‘let each person decide their own rules’ is not a satisfactory account of ethics, it is neo-liberalism in dress-up. In reply, relativists have a softer view called cultural relativism, where what is ethical is a social custom. This answers these critiques about contingent selves making moral claims, about adjudicating disputes and importantly how we live together. Madhyamaka might seem closer aligned to this rendering, but we will learn below that madhyamaka ethics are capable of much more than simply explaining behaviour by reference to groups. The takeaway is that ethics is not some free-for-all, nor bound only by group convention. Thus, we have avoided cliffs of relativism too.

Instead of positing essences, a madhyamaka ethic has a different goal: assist in removing the illusion of svabhava. Thus we could call it soteriological, oriented towards liberation. Instead of explaining ethics as ‘being good for its own sake’ or ‘following the rules of the human social game’ or ‘maximising the happiness of others’, we have: does this continue to bind me to ignorance, or further unknot me toward freedom?

What Does a Soteriological Ethic Involve?

Individual discernment. The lack of fixed absolutes combined with a personal motivation for liberation results in you being the arbiter, and you experiencing the consequences. This shift places individual discernment in the driving seat. All ethical thought is thus seen as instructive, not dogmatic or final. The resonance of anti-foundationalism rings out: there is no foundation of ethical life for you to anchor onto. Instead there are methods that bring our awareness greater freedom, joy and ease, and there are methods and behaviours that bind us to ignorance, to suffering, and to more of the same. To learn the difference, you experience it first hand…. But you can also incorporate other’s experience as ethical guides. When someone well-practiced describes the benefits and drawbacks of certain behaviours for individual and group liberation, we are well-positioned to take their advice to test for ourselves. Another advantage of incorporating others into ethical thinking is it opens a way to adjudicate ethical claims. If the goal is liberation, and certain people’s actions result in that liberation while others do not, we have a great causal justification for ethical behaviour.

Moral phenomenology. The way we assess the ethical status of our actions is therefore deeply personal, one that requires a degree of honest introspection to penetrate. This becomes a practice, and when continually applied, both the methods and the impacts on our awareness begin to change. This positive spiral is a ‘moral phenomenology’; an ethic is something to be experienced, to be lived. And as dependent origination demonstrates, our experience of ethics as a living being will be both contextual and never fixed or absolute. Thus, the central way we answer ‘does this bind me to ignorance, or unknot me toward freedom?’ is not isolated to texts, or in opinions of others. You must be honest with yourself, begin to find liberation in your own experience, and practice in a community of likeminded ethical practitioners.

Other-centredness. Taken to its logical conclusion, this ethic is intimately concerned with other people. What could better assist our forgetting a permanent self than assisting others? Here ethics becomes a further cause for liberation. Once you begin to see the illusion of a substantially existing self, placing it at the centre of a moral equation becomes truly nonsensical. Instead, you look out and see other people lost in their own ignorance… under a spell, in a dream, not attuned to the reality of dependent origination and sunyata. Thus to be ethical is to help them. Not just help them with food, clothing, company and polite manners, but to help them wake up from the dream, to extinguish their ignorance. This is why the whole motivation for liberation in the mahayana is to benefit others. Which perfectly answers the question at the start of this piece: we live together by orienting towards liberation, one that benefits others.

Isn’t This Just Buddhist Ethics?

Short answer: yes, with an ‘if’… if you narrow the entire field to the Buddhists that also claim that ethics is sunyata and without fixed practices. The long answer: no, with a ‘but’… but they draw from the same well, and quench the same thirst… yet they are not the same buckets. Throughout my writing, I want to demonstrate that madhyamaka has unique answers to questions of human behaviour. It uses the same tools as its ancestors to make points that are different from the ones before it.

Thus…

We can see that the sunyata of ethics does not reject, abandon or tokenise ethical thought and behaviour. Quite the opposite, it places ethics squarely in the madhyamaka’s sphere of concerns, as it directly assists in liberation. It preserves the importance of human judgement. It requires you to observe your mind, sensitive to nuance and context. And most importantly, it calls for caring for others as much as our relative, contingent, empty selves.

A final dose of sunyata is needed now. Madhyamaka ethics must not be saddled with conceptions of inherently existing ‘giver; gift; receiver’. This insight is directly from the prajnaparamita, which tells us that even if you save countless beings, in reality none have been saved. Not that the cause and effect was false. But that there is no svabhava to the ethical agent, the act, or the recipient. This final icing of sunyata removes any possibility of being attached to your ethical behaviour. Ethics, like all things, is contingent; what is contingent is sunyata.

If You Made It Through All Three Pieces…

Well done!

I wrote this introduction so you are better equipped to understand what someone means when they say madhyamaka. I wish I had this when I was starting out. How good that you can have it, and share it with someone who might need it.

You can start from the beginning with the historical context, or revisit the claims, proofs, and consequences.

Joseph