<\/span>\u201cI am examining the underlying structure, philosophically speaking, of Buddhist<\/a> ethics. I seek first to understand the Buddhist worldview or cosmology -based roughly in the dualism of samsara and nirvana- and then spell out the various injunctions found in the texts that purport to lead one from the former to the latter.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cThat doesn\u2019t seem to have much to do with people\u2019s lives\u2026 or ethics,\u201d he replied, obviously a bit disappointed.
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<\/span><\/p>\n
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<\/span><\/p>\nI realized then that my doctoral thesis will leave out a potentially significant source of Buddhist ethics, namely narrative<\/span>.<\/span> If I had said something like, \u201cI\u2019m going to study why Buddhists in Sri Lanka justify war or what the stories of the Jatakas tell us about morality,\u201d I have a feeling he would have been more satisfied. This snippit from a recent BBC article about politics<\/a> helps show why:<\/span>
\n<\/p>\n<\/b><\/p>\n
\nStories not facts<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n
In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side. <\/span><\/p>\n
He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off: <\/span><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/7907151-7074837984382098234?l=americanbuddhist.blogspot.com\")
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