Are There Seventeen Mahāyāna Ethics?

The article opens with the problem that Mahāyāna ethics has received surprisingly limited attention in Western scholarship, despite the centrality of compassion in Mahāyāna rhetoric and the numerical prominence of Mahāyāna Buddhists. Chappell explains several reasons for this gap, including the difficulty of accessing untranslated Chinese sources, the complexity of the textual corpus, the idealized nature of many Mahāyāna ethical visions, and the historical restrictions placed on Buddhist social activity in East Asian societies. The discussion then turns to Ono Hōdō’s classification of 200 Indian Mahāyāna ethical texts preserved in Chinese, organized into seventeen textual families. Chappell treats this classification as a crucial starting point but not as a sufficient ethical map. He shows that some groups are thematically coherent, while others are based on ritual function, textual history, or miscellaneous association. The article argues that ethical analysis must distinguish between rules and the interpretive frameworks that guide action, especially when values such as purity, compassion, wisdom, nonattachment, and social responsibility come into tension. Chappell further develops the argument by analyzing the diversity of compassion in Buddhist traditions: compassion can function differently depending on whether it is framed by early Buddhist liberation, Brahmanical rebirth goals, Perfection of Wisdom emptiness, lay bodhisattva activism, monastic discipline, or contemplative vision. On this basis, the article proposes four major Mahāyāna ethical frameworks—retreat, social involvement, balance, and meditative trance—offering a more analytically precise model than simply counting textual families. The conclusion calls for future research that integrates Indian Mahāyāna sources with East Asian and Tibetan developments, as well as contemporary Mahāyāna movements.