This chapter considers a final class of intentional killing, serving the purpose of self-defence. Its discussion is backgrounded by the broader discursive context, examining violence in Buddhism and Buddhist cultures, recently developed in Buddhist Studies scholarship. A tension arises between the descriptive claims of such scholarship, and the normative claims of ethical discourse, not merely with regard to existing Buddhist norms, but those for which new conditions require new forms of justification. Even the most apparently justified of ethical norms, such as that of violent or lethal self-defence, figures in a Buddhist distinction between genuine conventional justification, and the merely conventionally prevalent, which distinction is blurred in much scholarship. A Buddhist analysis of lethal self-defence demonstrates that it can only be positively justified (in a sole class of such justification in the entire spectrum of ‘Buddhist killing’) in rare cases, which themselves entail soteriological consequence and so answer to properly religious and not prudential justification alone. To the degree that a would-be Buddhist ethics of killing fails to consider all such distinctions, between Buddhist-conventional and merely ‘conventionalist’ justification, and between soteriologically justified and prudential lethal self-defence, then it will fail properly Buddhist concerns for the dual realisation of (conventional and ultimate) wisdom regarding the self and other, and transcendental compassion for all sentient beings, including both agents and objects of lethal self-defence.

1. 1.

   Schmithausen (1999), Keown (2014, 2016, 2021), Jerryson (2016, 2018a), Jenkins (2010), engage this terrain with respect to Buddhist historical and textual precedent, but do not elaborate theories of a Buddhist ethics of killing in war comparable to non-Buddhist theories (such as McMahan 2009).

2. 2.

   See The Economist (2015) and Death Penalty… (2022) for global comparative statistics for capital punishment; see ProCon.org (2022) for euthanasia and PAS.

3. 3.

   Some Tibetan Buddhist traditions theorise the notion of depth-psychological agency, and Tsongkhapa follows Candrakīrti by including dream-conduct in the full spectrum ofśīla.

4. 4.

   E.g., Dhp. 42; AN IV 94; Vism. 300; Śāntideva’sBodhicaryāvatāra is alocus classicus in the Mahāyāna context.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Sydney, NSW, Australia

   Martin Kovan

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