The Buddhist and Christian Perspectives on Business Ethics in Leading Chinese Business Practices

Abstract

The religious practices of ethnic Chinese business leaders make an interesting debate for exploring how leadership, ethics and perspective are seen because of the sharp distinction made between 'before' and 'after'. Business ethics applied to economics and business has a long tradition. While Buddhism focuses on experientially based ethical consciousness to develop the business with self-responsibility, Christian faith and reason intertwine to bring about principles, criteria, and guidelines for action and a set of virtues with relevance for business activity. Therefore, we then examine how such religious practices in both Buddhist and Christian improve their business leadership with related human values embedded strongly in terms of an old (conservative) and new (rebirth/born again) personhood and they do so within a challenging, highly corrupt and business context. This article introduces Buddhist and Christian ethics to show how these religious practices discursively deconstruct their 'old' identities and construct their 'new' aspirational identities to expand ethical understanding and practice in Chinese business. Since research on ethnic Chinese business typically investigates the dominance attributed to specific 'Chinese' cultural values and strong intra-ethnic network, this paper provides different perspectives in order to make its contribution to the developments of both Buddhist and Christian ethics in the leading Chinese business practices as an 'enhancer' to increase expression in good business conduct.

Business Ethics: A Review of Important Values in the Buddhist Perspective

“…Business ethics become individual. In that case, so-called business ethics can be seen as nothing more than a moral movement, which requires public opinion to be effective (Roy et al, 2023;Yew & Tan, 2023) Buddhist teachers from various traditions have demonstrated what is called a Buddhist moral phenomenological approach to ethics, but explicit identification does not emerge until the attainment of Bodhisattva hood. The philosophy of business ethics looks at how ethics centered on enological phenomena plays a role in various Buddhist traditions.…”

“…(Simonds, 2021) From this, a person's speech becomes improved, and thus his or her action. Once he or she is working on right action, it becomes natural to incline towards a virtuous livelihood (Harvey, n.d.;Yew & Tan, 2023) Humanistic Buddhism's Approach to Ethics Kammavāda (Pāli ) (Nucci, 2008), recognition that there is a causal correlation. between what we do and what we get as a result; Kiriyavāda (Pāli): awareness of the need to perform morally wholesome actions and refrain from morally unwholesome actions; Viriyavāda (Pāli): recognition and provision of the role of human effort in the pursuit of the moral life.…”