ABSTRACT
Buddhist studies has witnessed a growing interest in the field of Buddhist ethics in the last three decades, and particularly since 1994, when the first journal devoted solely to the study of Buddhist ethics appeared (namely the Journal of Buddhist Ethics). The aim of scholars working in this area is to offer a comprehensive description of the ethical thought and moral practices of Buddhism, in order to understand the role of ethics in Buddhist soteriology and Buddhist societies, and to situate this ethical tradition (or traditions) in a global context. Despite the fact that there are two major “schools” or branches of Buddhism, the Theravada and Mahayana,1 the vast majority of research completed thus far has been directed toward understanding the ethics of Theravada Buddhism, and to analyzing the Pali textual sources of this tradition. As a result, a number of substantial studies of Buddhist moral thought based on Theravada sources have been done (e.g. Tachibana 1926; King 1964; Saddhatissa 1970; Keown 1992; Harvey 2000), but relatively little research has been focused on ethics in the Mahayana tradition. Further, although texts in Sanskrit provide a major primary source for understanding Indian Buddhism, from which the Theravada and Mahayana traditions arose, very few studies have explicitly examined the moral content of any of the (mainly Mahayana) Buddhist scriptures available in Sanskrit.2 It is clear that our grasp of the Buddhist moral tradition will be significantly deficient without a better understanding of Mahayana ethics, and that aspect of Buddhist ethics represented in the substantial and important body of Indian Buddhist Sanskrit literature.
