Zen Buddhism has traditionally focused on promoting spiritual transformation and expressing it artistically, but has paid little explicit attention to social ethics. Certain Zen teachers have even admonished their students to avoid such "mundane" arenas as politics, often while stressing trans-rational insight and a transcendence of good and evil. As a result, many observers consider Zen ethically weak, or even subversive of ethical action in society. In this dissertation, however, I argue that Zen practice does bear ethically significant fruits and that by clarifying and reformulating certain key facets of Zen we can lay a foundation for a Zen social ethic. After laying that foundation, I offer a Zen approach to responsibility, justice, rights, nonviolence, economics, and the environment. In conclusion, I contend that this construction of a Zen social ethic deepens Zen as part of the evolution of a new, socially engaged form of the tradition.
Following a brief introductory overview of Buddhist ethics, I turn in Chapter Two to an examination of Zen practice, Awakening, and emptiness (Sanskrit, shunyata), and offer a rearticulation of emptiness as the "dynamism of non-dual relationality." In Chapters Three and Four I outline wisdom (Skt., prajna) and compassion (Skt., karuna), traditionally said to accompany Awakening. In Chapter Five I sketch how Kitaro Nishida, Shin'ichi Hisamatsu, and Masao Abe, three key thinkers in the Kyoto School, grasp the relationship between Zen and ethics. In Chapter Six I highlight factors that have given the impression that Zen cannot offer a social ethic. In Chapter Seven I clarify and reformulate ethically significant facets of Zen, arguing for "informed prajna," "active compassion," and a linkage of religious practice and social praxis. In the final two chapters I set forth "participatory justice," an economic approach of sustainable "enoughness," and cosmocentric "being-in-nature."
