The big idea: The guide opens Buddhist ethical practice with two words: karuna — compassion for all — and ahimsa, non-violence, which it singles out from the Five Precepts.
The first Precept is the one everything else is measured against.
The guide's phrasing is worth reading closely: the Five Precepts — especially ahimsa (non-violence) — and the practice of the Noble Eightfold Path as a response to war and conflict**.
So the syllabus itself frames Buddhist ethics through conflict. That is where a Paper 2 question is most likely to go.
What karuna asks
- Compassion for all beings, not only humans
- Paired with panna, wisdom — compassion without wisdom is held to misfire
- In Mahayana it is the bodhisattva's defining motive
- In Vajrayana the Dalai Lama is described as an Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion
What ahimsa asks
- The first Precept: refrain from harming living beings
- Vegetarianism for many Buddhists, though not for all
- Livelihoods involving killing are avoided — right livelihood is a factor of the Path
- And it is what makes war so difficult a question for the tradition
Compassion and wisdom together: Buddhist writers almost always pair karuna with panna — compassion with wisdom.
Writing "Buddhist ethics is about compassion" is half the answer. Writing "compassion guided by wisdom, since compassion alone can do harm" is the whole of it, and the pairing is the tradition's own.
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Why this is the hardest case: Buddhism has no just-war doctrine of the kind Christianity or Hinduism developed.
The first Precept and karuna both point one way; history points several. The guide asks you to face that, not to resolve it.
Four Buddhist positions on violence. The tradition argues with itself here, and the argument is the content.
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Do not idealise, and do not condemn: A student who writes "Buddhism is a religion of peace" has flattened both the texts and the history. A student who writes "Buddhists are hypocrites" has delivered a verdict nobody asked for.
The accurate sentence names the teaching, names the history, and names the Buddhists who criticise that history using the teaching.
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The guide names two more items under ethical practice, and they sit oddly together until you see that both are about what a community does when its rules are broken.
The guide's own two
Attempts to reclaim Tibet from China
A contemporary case study: occupation, exile, and a religious leader whose authority is moral rather than political. The Dalai Lama has maintained a non-violent position, and younger Tibetans have argued against it — a live disagreement about what compassion requires when it appears to be failing.
Transgression, in the monastery
The guide's answer is specific: receiving bad kamma and being expelled from the monastery. The two consequences are of different kinds — one automatic and impersonal, one a community decision — and naming both shows how Buddhist sanction actually works.
And the vinaya behind both
The guide names the different vinaya — rules of the monastery for both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists. Each tradition has its own rule, so what counts as transgression, and what follows, is not identical across the Buddhist world.
Kamma is automatic; expulsion is a decision; and the rule differs by branch.
The caste point, and its limit: The guide records the abolition of the caste system by Siddhartha Gotama — the sangha admitted people regardless of varna, which was radical in its setting.
And it adds, in the same breath, that little is said on the role or treatment of women. State both. A tradition can be radical on one axis and silent on another, and saying so is analysis rather than criticism.
How this is tested. Theme 5 is taught through no more than three case studies on contemporary issues. For Buddhism, war and conflict is the one the guide steers towards.
“Ahimsa (non-violence) is the most important of the Five Precepts.” To what extent do you agree?
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