"Conversations Greek and Indian: comparative work on Plato's Republic and Shantideva's Bodhicarayavatara"

In this talk, I compare the overall projects of the Republic and Shantideva's 8th Century treatise on Buddhist virtue ethics. Some of the themes I will touch on include how transmigration figures into eudaemonist ethics for each work, the relationship between virtue and wisdom and the construal of wisdom together with its objects in both texts. This paper is the result of an ongoing international collaboration between scholars of Platonism and scholars of Buddhism, sponsored by the National University of Singapore and including scholars from Michigan, Vancouver, Cornell, New Mexico, Paris, Mexico, and Singapore.