Does it matter whether something is or isn’t Buddhist? Or whether it is “distinctively” Buddhist? I was asked these related questions in two blog discussions from last year, both involving Justin Whitaker. Justin raised the latter question here in response to my replies to David Chapman; Jayarava Attwood raised the former on Justin’s blog.

Regarding what is “distinctively” Buddhist I want to start with what I said to Chapman himself: I don’t think there’s much value in looking for that which is found in Buddhism and nowhere else. Many Buddhist tenets (including the rejection of righteous anger, at issue there) can be found in Jainism too, for example. But that wasn’t what I meant when I had asked, at the beginning of that post, “what might be distinctively Buddhist about a modern Buddhist ethics.”

Rather, I was asking: what difference does it make (within a modern context) that your ethics, or for that matter your way of life, is Buddhist? In Chapman’s context this meant “not already understood by (say) a non-Buddhist college-educated left-leaning Californian.” Suppose you already are a college-educated left-leaning Californian or Bostonian or New Yorker or Vancouverite. Does it then mean anything if you add the descriptor Buddhist? If we describe a person as a Buddhist college-educated left-leaning Bostonian, are we saying anything whatsoever that is different about that person than if we describe the same person as a college-educated left-leaning Bostonian and we leave out the adjective Buddhist? Continue reading →