To view the diacritics on this page, you must install the
Indic Times font on your machine and have a browser capable of
displaying the Unicode (utf-8) character set.
ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 16, 2009
Violence and (Non-)resistance:
Buddhist Ahiṃsā and its Existential Aporias
Martin Kovan
School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics University of Queensland martinkovan@hotmail.com
Abstract
This essay considers a paradigmatic example in Buddhist ethics of the injunction
(in the five precepts and five heinous crimes) against killing. It
also considers Western ethical concerns in the post-phenomenological
thinking of Derrida and Levinas, particularly the latter’s “ethics of responsibility.”
It goes on to analyze in-depth an episode drawn from Alan
Clements’s experience in 1990 as a Buddhist non-violent, non-combatant
in war-torn Burma. It explores Clements’s ethical predicament as he
faced an imminent need to act, perhaps even kill and thereby repudiate
his Buddhist inculcation. It finds a wealth of common (yet divergent)
ground in Levinasian and Mahāyāna ethics, a site pregnant for Buddhist ethical
self-interrogation.
