Yogācāra ethics remains a surprisingly underexplored area in Buddhist studies, especially when compared to the extensive scholarship on Madhyamaka ethics and its philosophical foundations. Yet Yogācāra’s distinctive doctrines and texts offer rich and potentially transformative resources for ethical reflection. This panel aims to help remedy this imbalance by examining how Yogācāra philosophical commitments shape, ground, and reconfigure ethical thought and practice. The three papers explore how Yogācāra ethics articulates and enacts the bodhisattva ideal across doctrinal, experiential, and political domains. Each demonstrates how distinctively Yogācāra frameworks—whether in theories of altruism, interpretations of illness, or practices of healing and governance—construe ethics in ways that emphasize its progressive and socially transformative dimensions. The presentations will be followed by a response that engages both the broader theme of Yogācāra ethics and the papers of the panel.
One way to define the complex movement of Mahāyāna Buddhism is to identify its shared teleology: becoming an altruistic bodhisattva. The Yogācārabhūmi (YBh) has long been considered the foundational text for Yogācārin ethics. But does it present a different theory of ethics, especially on altruism, compared to non-Yogācāra Mahāyāna texts? Comparing the Śīla chapter in the Bodhisattvabhūmi of the YBh etc. with the Contemplation on Sentient Beings chapter in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa etc., this paper argues that Yogācāra indeed developed a unique progressive approach to ethics. The YBh ethical scheme is defined by the threefold bodhisattva precepts. Vinaya precepts are included in the first division of saṃvaraśīla. The second division, kuśaladharmasaṃgrāhakaśīla, provides a modified version to virtue ethics based on an early model. Attention is drawn to the third division, sattvārthakriyāśīla, through which the altruistic imperative is taken to several “extreme cases” compared with the supramundane tendency found in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa.
This presentation explores a Yogācāra approach to sickness by drawing from Kuiji’s Commentary of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa. Reading the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa as a manual for bodhisattvas’ practice, Kuiji extends the Yogācāra theory of body to the embodiment of sickness. Instead of reducing sickness to a malfunction of material corporeality, Kuiji analyzes this embodiment to elucidate how illness for a person is karmically cohered into the saṃsāric cosmology of degeneration. When sickness is contextualized in the shared lifeworld of ignorance, a teleological life-trajectory becomes habitually indoctrinated to naturalize health and happiness as the social norms while stigmatizing sickness as a deviation or an inability. The transformation of ignorance to awakening recontextualizes the lived experience of sickness, through which bodhisattvas rehabitualize themselves to embody impermanence as a skillful means for criticizing and correcting social stigmas. It follows that the cultivation of compassion on the bodhisattvas’ path informs a critical-transformative social ethics.
This paper reconsiders the Nara-period Yogācāra monk Dōkyō (d. 772), who has long been portrayed as a corrupt monk who attempted to seize imperial power through Empress Shōtoku. Recent Japanese scholarship has begun to challenge this narrative. Building on this reassessment, the paper argues that Dōkyō may be better understood as an ethical agent operating within Yogācāra and bodhisattva frameworks. It examines his healing practices and use of esoteric Buddhist texts in attempts to cure the empress. Situating Dōkyō within a broader culture of Nara-period “bodhisattva monks,” the paper asks how Yogācāra ethics functioned as a lived moral system expressed through compassion, ritual efficacy, and skillful means. From this perspective, Dōkyō’s activities reveal how bodhisattva ethics could both support and destabilize the moral authority of the ritsuryō state.
| Javier Hidalgo | jhidalgo@richmond.edu | View |