ABSTRACT
The idea of upāya, usually translated as skillful means, plays a large role in Mahāyāna Buddhist ethics and epistemology, where it is used to motivate hermeneutic practice, to sort out ethical conundrums, and to defend a particular approach to moral psychology and phenomenology. It comes to provide an overarching conception of what it is to live well, to live a virtuoso life of skilled perceptual and ethical engagement, and so can be seen as providing one vision of the nature of awakening, particularly in the context of a nondual understanding of samsara and nirvana—an understanding according to which there is no ontological difference between them. We discuss how upāya is treated as a skill in the Indian Madhyamaka and Yogācāra Buddhist traditions. We then consider the way skill is treated in the Chinese Daoist tradition. This sets the stage for an examination of how these conceptions of skill inform the martial arts traditions of East Asia which emerge from this philosophical matrix. Finally, we turn to a treatment of the larger picture of skill as underlying an ethical life, as understood from these Asian perspectives.
