Abstract
This chapter, a general introduction to the book as a whole, provides a broad summary of its aims, methodology and structure. Firstly, it considers its purpose in engaging the question of the Buddhist prohibition of killing, with respect to existing secondary literature (provided in some detail), and how that question is generally contextualised within existing studies. Secondly, in describing the methodology developed in the text, it highlights the distinction between it and preceding general or area-specific studies of the subject, and explains the sense in which its own philosophical focus has not yet been attempted, and what it adds in terms of a new level of systematisation and overall conceptual enquiry to existing studies. It engages the senses of the difference and complementarity between textual and religious studies approaches in Buddhist hermeneutics, and the philosophically and conceptually driven approach of the book. Thirdly, it provides a broad overview of the structure and content of the book, before, fourthly and finally, summarising its essential aims and noting terminological conventions in use throughout the text.
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Notes
- 1.
See for example, SN IV 308-9; SN I 183; Dhp. 201. Many other such examples will be thematized in Chap. 3, and passim.
- 2.
I have discussed the Pāli canonical and related early Buddhist context for suicide, and its Mahāyāna correspondences in altruistic suicide, most recently in Kovan (2018). Further references for research in Buddhist suicide are given below.
- 3.
Damien Keown (in 2005, 2017) has frequently made a similar, more general point with regard to the absence of an explicit normative theory of Buddhist ethics.
- 4.
Harvey (2018, 401) references multiple Buddhist polities such as Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore, and to a lesser extent Thailand, where the death penalty is extant. Singapore, a secular state with in 2020 a substantial Buddhist religious majority, has the highest rate per capita in the world.
- 5.
The term Śrāvakayāna (or “vehicle of hearers”) is used for referential convenience in the same sense as the better known (but pejorative) appellation Hīnayāna (following Harvey (2013, 113), in a comparable usage). I take this reference to invoke philosophical claims of the Pāli canon and its commentaries and, secondarily, their extensions in the Abhidhamma and subsequent Theravāda syntheses and commentaries on these. (Sanskrit Abhidharma and Sarvāstivāda sources are of course to be doctrinally differentiated from the former sources, though they often share the same or similar claims regarding killing.).
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Kovan, M. (2022). General Introduction. In: A Buddhist Theory of Killing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_1
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