Training the Mind and Transforming Your World: Moral Phenomenology in the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong Tradition

Moral phenomenology, as interpreted through Jay Garfield's reading of Buddhist ethics, requires transforming the deep structures of subjectivity that shape experience, not just changing deliberate actions. This makes it an especially ambitious ethical project. The Tibetan Buddhist lojong ("Mind Training") tradition exemplifies such a project by using meditation and contemplation to disrupt habitual, affective responses rooted in conventional experience and replace them with imagined responses of radically compassionate altruism. This process aims to transform the phenomenological structures underlying both ethical action and conscious experience, thereby fulfilling the goal of moral phenomenology.

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Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the moral-psychological stakes of Jay Garfield's reading of Buddhist ethics as moral phenomenology and applies that thesis to the pedagogical mechanisms of the Tibetan Buddhist lojong (“Mind Training”) tradition. I argue that moral phenomenology requires that the practitioner work on a part of her subjectivity not ordinarily accessible to agential action: the phenomenological structures that condition experience. This makes moral phenomenology a highly ambitious ethical project. I turn to lojong as an example of a Buddhist practice that claims to accomplish this ambitious task. As a training toward the ethical ideal of bodhicitta (“awakening mind”), lojong utilizes practices of meditation and contemplation to disrupt the habitual, affective responses that arise from the conventional phenomenological orientation to the world, replacing them with imagined responses of radically compassionate altruism. This ultimately inculcates a transformation of the phenomenological structures that underlie both ethical action and conscious experience, fulfilling the aim of moral phenomenology.