Śāntideva and the Invisible Hand of Nonviolence: Buddhist Studies Workshop with Douglas Duckworth

In eighth-century India, Śāntideva articulated a Buddhist ethic of altruism as an extension of nonviolence. Śāntideva was a Buddhist monk and author of the Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvatāra), a classic of Mahāyāna Buddhist ethics. In this text he argues for a Buddhist ethic of altruism as an extension of nonviolence by articulating how to cultivate moral virtue to avoid the reactive patterns of violence. He shows how the underlining cause of violence is confusion and anger, and that a result of violence is unavoidable without undoing the pathology that is its cause. Further, he offers a way to train ordinary reactive habits in order that they be expressed rationally for the mutual welfare of all beings.

This paper shows how Śāntideva’s insights prefigure central ideas of the Scottish sentimentalist, Adam Smith, and in particular his notion of “the impartial spectator.” In his 1759 work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith proposed a method to deal with passions like anger by imagining an “impartial spectator” who is not involved in a situation in a biased way but affords an ideal perspective from which one can reframe a scenario in such a way that attention is shifted to include everyone involved, not just the one supposedly wronged. Like Smith, Śāntideva argues for an embodied, rational basis of altruism that draws upon both affect and reason, and thereby lays the groundwork for nonviolence and for compassion as the most rational response to the world.