ABSTRACT
Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra employs a multiplicity of ethical strategies.1 It contains elements comparable to virtue ethics, consequentialism, and stoicism. With Levinas, Śāntideva shares a concern for the moral dimension of the self-subversion of conceptual reification. My purpose in this chapter is to show that Levinas’s ethics, in addition to traditional moral theories, can provide resources for sketching the contours of some Indian Buddhist texts, such as the Bodhicaryāvatāra. Because this project runs the risk of displacing Śāntideva’s own thought, by way of introduction, I defend a limited use of Western moral categories in the interpretation of Indian Buddhist ethics.
