"My Dharma…Was That of the Householder": "Ethic of the Householder" in Oxherding Tale

Abstract

ABSTRACT:A distinctive feature of Charles Johnson's "platform work" Oxherding Tale is his deliberate adoption of Eastern religions including Hinduism, Taoism and especially Zen Buddhism. While many studies have been made about the presence of Buddhism in the novel, it is still necessary to make further efforts to understand, and hence to justify, Johnson's adoption of Zen Buddhism as a source of moral enlightenment for promoting "the Buddhist way of seeing the world" and a new understanding of the lives of the people of color. For Johnson, Zen Buddhism is not only important for its religious wisdom and philosophical depth, but more essentially for its moral teachings which are tentatively summarized as "ethic of the householder" in this essay. In the first three sections, I explain what the main points of the Buddhist laymen ethics are and how they are dramatized by Johnson in Oxherding Tale, so as to explicate in what sense performing the ethic of the householder is one kind of civic engagement in itself. In the final section, I identify the ethic of the householder as a recurrent motif in many of Johnson's works, as well as a moral code he incorporates into his real life as a layman. By doing so, I hope to cast new light on the scholarship about Johnson's novel's ethics.