Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the connection between nonviolence, Buddhist emptiness teachings, and religion as such.I have limited my treatment of Buddhist theory to certain core doctrines originally formulated in India and attributed by the tradition to the Buddha.The study proceeds by exploring some non-Buddhist perspectives (Jainism, Gandhi) that I believe help to bring out the relevant features of the Buddha's teachings.Buddhism and Nonviolence I n 1998, while studying at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Samath, India, I had the opportunity to attend a question and answer session on Buddhism, presided over by the Institute's director, the Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche.At one point a young American student asked Rinpoche, "If you had to sum up the essence of the Buddha's teachings in just a few words, what would you say?"The reply was immediate: "Ahimsa."Nonviolence.One word.I was genuinely surprised at this reply.The student, it seemed to me, was asking for some explanation as to that which is distinctively Buddhist.The doctrine of nonviolence, by contrast, is common to many religious traditions; it is today associated with Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. every bit as much as with the Buddha.The response didn't add up.On the other hand, Samdhong Rinpoche was well known as an advocate of nonviolent Gandhian methods of civil disobedience (satyagraha), especially in the context of the struggle for Tibet's liberation.This suggested the possibility of a connection which I was missing.Upon deeper reflection I began to suspect that there was a problem with the original question.After all, wasn't Buddhism opposed to the very idea of "essence"?Isn't lack of "essence" or "nature" (nihsvabhava)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".