Buddhist Ethics and Global Justice

Nitze Leadership Seminar II
Thailand 2006

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This seminar will explore traditional and contemporary Buddhist views on the relationship between Buddhist wisdom and social justice, and will culminate in a two-week study tour to Thailand. The seminar will focus on the early philosophical discourses of the historical Buddha --as well as contemporary Eastern and Western interpretations of these discourses—and will examine how the ideals of Buddhist leadership and social justice are practiced by contemporary Buddhists across the globe.

The first sections of the class will focus on an in-depth textual analysis of Buddhist doctrine and the various ways Buddhists conceive of leadership, justice and morality. We will examine early discourses of the historical Buddha and later commentaries on his teachings, and we will analyze the nature of ethics, wisdom, and leadership in various classical Buddhist texts. The latter sections of the course will examine an important tradition that calls itself “Engaged Buddhism,” a tradition that emphasizes the social and political nature of Buddha’s teachings, and which applies its interpretations of Buddhism to issues of poverty, globalization, environmental destruction, war, feminism, and so on. We will read thinkers such as, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, the famous Indian Buddhist Ambedkar, the Thai activist Sulak Sivaraksa, the Myanmar Buddhist activist Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Cambodian peace activist Ghosananda.