What is the Buddhist view of abortion? Do they believe life begins at conception? Birth? In between?
by 
2old2dieyoung
ANSWERS: 1
-
There's no "official Buddhist view". One aspect of Buddhism is that individuals are expected to think for themselves, not merely parrot the group's official position. While the leaders of some sects have expressed their opinions about abortion, that does not constitute formal dogma. One issue that is relevant, however, is that Buddhism challenges the black-and-white thinking which underlies most of the abortion debate -- e.g. a fetus is either human life or it's not, mothers have absolute rights to choice or not, all human life has an absolute right to life or not, etc. That sort of binary / dualistic thinking is at the heart of the mind's confusion. Reality simply isn't like that: reality does not divide itself up into neat little categories with labels, that's something we do with our thoughts and definitions. Buddhism is in large part about learning to tell the difference between reality and our concepts about it. Since the argument about when life begins is really an argument about absolutist semantics, if you drop the delusions which underly that thinking, the entire question goes away.
RELATED QUESTIONS
Copyright 2023, Wired Ivy, LLC