Video Available! Eviatar Shulman: "The Buddhist Ethic of Equanimity"

Everyone seems to agree that the main goal of Buddhism is to put an end to suffering. However, the picture may not be so simple, since suffering is not such an evident quality – does it, for example, relate to the reality of death and ominous rebirth or to the regular quotidian feeling of discomfort? There are good reasons to assume that different strands of Buddhism are more interested in shaping a positive, ethical mindset, than in reaching the total annihilation of suffering. This talk will employ a web of concepts from the early discourses and from Theravāda Abhidhamma to suggest that such a conception that aims to produce a thoroughly moralized mind, embodied in equanimity – upekkhā – fits the logic of the path. Among the ideas we will survey are that fact that three main schemes for advanced samādhi consciousness – the 4 jhānas, the 7 limbs of enlightenment (bojjhaṅga), and the 4 brahma-vihāras­ – are coalesce in a movement to generate upekkhā. In fact, upekkhā may not be only a seemingly neutral “equanimity,” but a subtle form of care that emerges through brahma-vihāra practice. This approach also connects to a more positive theorization of selflessness than the reductive one that is popular in contemporary literature, one that emphasizes the dense dynamics of mental continuity over the breaking up of the illusory self to its parts.  

Bio:

Eviatar Shulman is Gail Levin de Nur Chair for Comparative Religion and Head of the Institute for the Study of History, Religion and Culture, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is member of the Departments of Comparative Religion and Asian Studies, where he teaches and studies Buddhist and Indian philosophy and religion. He has authored Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Visions of the Buddha: Creative Dimensions of Early Buddhist Scripture (OUP, 2021), as well as many articles in leading scholarly journals. The latter monograph outlines a new approach to the composition of the early discourses (Suttas, Sūtras) attributed to the Buddha.