Forest of desires and desire of forests: a way to the Buddhist ethics

Abstract

This paper aims at highlighting one of the pivotal points of the ancient Indian culture: the relationship between the ethics of Vedic ritualism and the ethics of Early Buddhism. As it is well known, the Vedic culture is considered one the most ancient stages of the Indian civilization, being traced back to the 2nd millennium B.C. c.a. Such a culture is primarily characterized by ritualism, or more precisely, it is known mainly through a repertoire of texts – belonging to the priestly- -brāhmaṇa tradition – that are eminently ritualistic. Such a Vedic textual corpus depicts the image of a society founded on a sacrificial taxonomy that defines and structures the world as “cosmos” through a meticulous recurring combination of gesture and sacred formula. The cosmic order is founded on the sacrificial action and maintained through it, that is through the orthopraxis par excellence. The Hindu orthodoxy – dharma – derives from such a Vedic orthopraxis.