Dear list members,
Our next seminar will be at 6:15-7:45pm on Thursday April 13 in the
Rogers Room (N397) of the John Woolley Building, University of
Sydney.
We hope you can attend.
Kind regards,
AABS Executive
Michel Foucault Approach to the Vinaya
While some studies have used Foucault’s ideas to understand western
monasticism, no postmodern or post structuralist scholars have used
Foucault’s ideas to understand the Vinaya. This presentation will
demonstrate it has been problematic to call the Vinaya ‘a system of law’,
or a ‘system of codes’ as this approach has been based on western
understandings of law.
Firstly, rules should be seen as more than prohibitions. Rules also imply
‘transgressions’. In other words, if we examine the relationship between
the taboo (for example the Vinaya rule against sexual intercourse) and
the transgression of the rule on the prohibition of sex, I suggest we may
find that the taboo is not an absolute phenomenon. In fact, ‘prohibition’
and ‘transgression’ form an ensemble that defines social life.
Secondly, the Vinaya ‘rules’ were one of the techniques where subjects
were obliged to ‘produce truth and oblige individuals to give an account
of themselves’. The effect of ‘telling all’, Foucault tells us, was
‘displacement, intensification, reorientation and the modification of
desire itself’.
Lastly, this paper considers the recent debate over the nature of
Buddhist ethics largely conducted by scholars who have argued in
different ways that Buddhist ethics may be assimilated or may correspond
with different forms of western ethical theory. What I call ‘Buddhist
aesthetics-ethics’ link with a range of ‘Buddhist hermeneutical issues’,
include the testing of personal experience, the degree that ethics or
rules should be followed, the role of transgressions and the way that
moral acts assume a form of inner and outer beauty in the process of
development.
Malcolm Voyce (LLB (Auck), MA,
PhD (Lond), PhD (Macq)) is an Associate Professor of Law at Macquarie
University. He completed a doctorate on the Vinaya at SOAS, University of
London, in 1982 and a second doctorate on Foucault at Macquarie
University in 2001. Dr Voyce has published widely on Buddhism and
has utilised the work of Foucault and other postmodern writers in his
studies. He recently published in Law
& Critique, Journal
of Legal Pluralism, Journal
of Law and Religion and Australian
Review of Religious Studies. Foucault and Buddhism (Routledge) was
published in January 2017. He is the holder of a Macquarie University
Outstanding Teachers Award. Email: Malcolm.voyce@gmail.com.
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Gold leaf covered schist reliquary in
the form of a stupa. Kusana period, North Western India. National
Museum, Karachi, Pakistan. Copyright: Huntington, John C. and Susan L.Huntington Archive
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