Integrating Buddhism into moral and value education : ideas and practice of developing Buddhist teaching materials for Hong Kong primary and secondary students

Abstract

The thesis is a cross-disciplinary research work in the areas of Buddhist studies and educational studies. It examines how to integrate the Buddhist ethnical elements into the moral and value education in a modern school system based on the case studies of compiling Buddhist teaching/reading materials for primary and secondary school students in Hong Kong.

Unlike many other religious teachers, the Buddha did not claim divinity, nor did he attribute his teaching to a higher metaphysical source. This is one of the most distinctive characteristics of Buddhism. In fact, the Buddha was a human being who attained enlightenment through supreme human effort. In the Pāli discourses the Buddha is often referred to as Satthā, which means “teacher”. Therefore, in a way it is more appropriate to describe “what the Buddha said” as a body of teachings rather than as a set of religious sermons. For example, the Buddha taught the Five Precepts and Ten Good Deeds and the Noble Eightfold Path which represents the Buddhist value including generosity, non-attachment, lovingkindness, compassion, and wisdom, in the sense of clearly seeing the nature of life and the absence of delusion or mis-orientation. These Buddhist ethics largely conform to the universal values or common good characters in a modern society. Apart from this, the emphasis of the actions in Buddhism, based on the Buddhist philosophy of the Law of Cause and Effect, or Kamma, is accordant with the “formation of moral habits” or “growing morally”, the effective method of moral education. The comprehensive review and a theoretical analysis of the literature on both Buddhist ethics and moral education in chapters 2 and 3 lead to such a finding. That is to say, understanding the common characteristics of the Buddhist ethics and moral education, we suppose it theoretically feasible that the traditional Buddhist ethics can be well integrated into the moral and value education.

However, to make primary or secondary school students understand and willing to practice those conventional Buddhist philosophies is not an easy task. In chapters 4 and 5, the researcher tries to test the effectiveness of a pedagogical method—compiling Buddhist teaching or reading materials—in achieving the goals of teaching the conventional Buddhist ethics to primary and secondary school students and guide their practice in a modern school system and in a society with diverse cultures. The research result of chapters 4 and 5 indicates that the compilation projects could achieve not only the purpose of moral and value education but also the goals set by the governmental education authority in developing the generic skills of students. Chapters 4 and 5, including the very detailed description and explanation about the goal-setting, layout-designing, and contents (main text, text B, case studies and checkbox questions, extended reading and critical thinking, etc.) arrangement, clearly show the theoretical and practical significance of the pedagogical method from the above-mentioned two perspectives. The case studies in the two chapters provide as a basis for the possible further research or future practice of the similar kind of projects.

In conclusion, this research theoretically and practically proves that the traditional Buddhist ethics can be integrated into the moral and value education in a modern school system. Compiling teaching and reading materials, a pedagogical methodology, can bridge between the traditional Buddhist ethics and the modern school system, achieving the goals of developing both morality and generic skills of the primary and secondary school students.