Paper short abstract:

This presentation uses historical sources from medieval Tibet to ask about the resources that people draw upon to make ethical decisions, and why they might prefer examples, narratives, and metaphors to legalistic rules.

Paper long abstract:

What resources do people draw upon to make ethical decisions? And to what extent do rules and other resources demand, or make possible, different kinds of decision and judgement?

This presentation uses historical sources from medieval Tibet to describe a moral world in which ethical behaviour was not primarily referred to codes of behaviour. Buddhism presented Tibetans with the Vinaya, a treatise on monastic conduct imported from India, containing detailed rules for behaviour. The idea that ethical behaviour should consist in following religious and moral prescriptions did then seem to acquire some purchase in the region, and over a number of centuries a series of writers attempted to elaborate moral rules for the conduct of the laity. However, alongside these texts they created others, which presented ethical issues in very different ways, using stories, proverbs, metaphors, and aphorisms. These texts contained a very different style of writing, which embodied their moral ideas in concrete examples and stories or expressed ethical principles through abstract and elusive proverbs. These must have demanded reflection, interpretation, and judgement, rather than obedience to categorical and simplifying rules. The lives of most individuals from this period have, of course, been lost in the mists of time, but a study of the texts they might have read and the ideas that must have circulated, indicates the parameters of the ethical world in which they lived.