Specificity of Buddhist Morality within the Framework of Vietnamese Culture

Buddhist morality has asserted a profound influence on the life of the Vietnamese people. Buddhism is one of the vital cultural resources of the Vietnamese nation (along with Taoism and Confucianism), which has been creating history together with it and has simultaneously become a condition for promoting national values in the present-day circumstances. Regarding Buddhism as a way of spiritual and moral improvement, the authors analyze the value-based elements of Buddhist morality, connecting them with the objective of creating the image of a modern Vietnamese endowed with spiritual and ethical merits. The authors reveal ethical specificity of Buddhism, which consists in the fact that this teaching does not aim to identify the true and the false by means of connecting morality with a set of metaphysical dogmas in order to subsequently deduce divine commandments and prohibitions from them. In its essence, Buddhism is existential, yet its humanism is non-metaphysical, as it is based on the concept of nirvana instead of that of a theistic Absolute. On the one hand, Buddhism acknowledges scientific rationality standards; on the other hand, it emphasizes moral and e