Practice Research: Secular Buddhist Ethics in Art and Design Education

This paper investigates whether a contemporary ethics of practice in an art and design educational context might be informed by a Buddhist ethics, in one particular way; embodied in the role of an artist-practitioner. This raises the immediate question, without a short answer, as to what kinds of practices are contributed by Buddhism from historical sources to forms of secularity within changing Buddhist cultures that make contemporary practitioners who enact their Buddhism in secular modalities, and who may well be regarded as post-Buddhist per-se, ‘different’, to those enacting normative ethics in traditional Buddhist cultures and contexts. I conclude that a Buddhist-inspired ‘ethical-aesthetic-making’ is akin to a definition of the ‘educative’ in a secular Buddhist ethics of practice; but this is not a definition of making as production. Rather, artists will be cited for whom a concept of making can equally, if not moreso in this context, mean a subtractive process, an organizing, an aligning and a joining as a form of praxis. Certainly, this proposes a realist, pluralist and natural ethic, a form of pre-ontological self-cultivation, whose agrarian character may be both necessary and contingent and only ‘animated’, enacted, if realized non-dualistically. A Self cannot be made if not unmade, understood, in order to be dispensed with; which assumes in Buddhist parlance thereby, it is also constituted by aggregated parts; the notion of anattā, provides a methodological commitment to enable such an educative-ethics.

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