In the past decade or so there has been a surge of monographs on the nature of “Buddhist Ethics.” For the most part, authors are concerned with developing and defending explications of Buddhism as a normative ethical theory with an apparent aim of putting Buddhist thought directly in dialogue with contemporary Western philosophical debates in ethics. Despite disagreement among Buddhist ethicists concerning which contemporary normative ethical theory a Buddhist ethic would most closely resemble (if any), 1 it is arguable that all Buddhist ethicists (like all Buddhists) embrace and endorse the Four Noble Truths as a framing assumption. That is, a Buddhist ethic will (1) typically assume that we fallible human beings are in trouble—that is, that there is suffering (Skt. duhkha /Tib. sdug bsngal ); (2) diagnose the trouble; (3) posit a strategy for overcoming the trouble (for example, the Eightfold Path); and (often) (4) indicate what life would be like when one has overcome the trouble. Significantly, for any ethical theory that is “progressive” in the sense of positing a strategy or pathway toward a desired teleological end, there will be a symmetric relation of dependence between the teleological end and the strategy employed to achieve that end. That is, not only will the stages of the pathway posited for overcoming the trouble be justified in relation to their role in constituting or producing the teleological end, but the teleological end itself will be determined by this process. Arguably, the Four Noble Truths are also a framing assumption for the Indian and Tibetan tradition of Buddhist logic and epistemology that stems from the thought of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. According to this tradition, one major cause of our trouble is our employment of universals.
