For my World Religion’s café this year I presented to the community a summary of my research from my MDiv senior thesis entitled “Advancing the Prospects for a Global Ethic: Critical reflections on the 1993 Parliament’s Declaration Towards a Global Ethic through the lens of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist contribution.” My own interest in global ethics began when I lived as a Buddhist nun with Thich Nhat Hanh and assisted in a project to rethink and rewrite the Buddhist five lay precepts or as Thich Nhat Hanh rephrases as the Five Mindfulness Trainings, as a secular ethic. In 2012 Thich Nhat Hanh published the book, Good Citizens: Creating an Enlightened Society, in which he uses the framework of mindfulness meditation, the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and the five lay precepts, to present a Buddhist secular global ethic. In order to understand the context in which Thich Nhat Hanh is presenting his global ethic I focused my research on the history of the global ethic movement, which led me to the Parliament of the World’s Religions and the 1993 Declaration Towards a Global Ethic.
The main focus of the paper and presentation is centered on the need to find a truly universal language when engaging in interfaith dialogue, which avoids one religious tradition inadvertently “managing” moral discourse in regards to what is discussed and how it is discussed. Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist contribution provides a critical lens with which to examine the 1993 Declaration Towards a Global Ethic, which has been criticized as being too Western and Christian, too vague and ineffective, and not truly universal as it assumes certain understandings of human personhood and what it means to live a good moral life which are rooted in primary Western philosophy and Christianity. Both the Declaration and Nhat Hanh’s contribution however, bring to the surface the question of what is the effect of secularizing and universalizing moral discourse and taking normative ethics as a starting point for global transformation? What other ways or methods could we use to construct a global ethic, which is more inclusive in nature, or do we need to completely reframe the global ethic project and re-examine the desire to construct one in the first place?
—By Leslie Hubbard