There are two ways in which we can see how interpreting nirvana and śūnyatā the basis for Buddhist life and not its end leads to a more socially engaged form of Buddhism. First, we saw that interpreting the nirvanic experience as the goal of the individual Buddhist's practice led away from Buddhist involvement in the samsaric world of social reality. However, once nirvana is taken as the basis for Buddhist action and not its goal, we get a much different picture of the social implications of nirvana and śūnyatā. The important thing to see here is that the existential experience of nirvana should not be taken as the end-point of Buddhist life, which after all would merely result in a substantializing of nirvana itself, but is the awakening that allows the Buddhist to truly begin to act creatively in the world "without becoming entangled in the duality of pleasure and suffering."(31) The Buddhist point here would then be that as long as one is still caught up in self-attachments and the substantializing of things one can never act truly constructively in the social sphere, for "this absolutization entails a serious problem, because in practice it always is accompanied by an emotional attachment to the event and the people involved."(32) Only by completely freeing ourselves from such attachments can we offer social critique and work for social reform in a manner devoid of the kind of self-interest that is ultimately destructive of our attempts to alleviate social ills.

Similarly, when we take nirvana and śūnyatā as the ground and not the end of Buddhist life, we come to see that the attainment of nirvana and the realization of śūnyatā cannot represent an abandonment of the world of saṃsāra, but instead entails a new form of involvement within the world of saṃsāra. The world of saṃsāra is not overcome, rather as Abe puts it, "everything without exception is realized as it is in its suchness . . . this does not, however, indicate that in Sunyata the distinctiveness of everything is eliminated."(33) Nirvana does not lead to a rejection of the everyday social world, but to a new way of viewing that world that allows one to act within it in transfigured ways. In terms of our theme of the possibility of a Buddhist social ethic this means that in experiencing nirvana we do not reject the everyday social world in which we live. Rather, in realizing its unsubstantiality we come to see that any particular social configuration is merely a contingent state of affairs and by no means necessary.

However, even if following Abe we take nirvana and śūnyatā as the ground and not the goal of Buddhist life and on that basis come to see that this allows for the possibility of a way of acting creatively in the world without self-interest and attachment, we still need to provide some criteria on which such activity can be carried out. Before we noted that in giving up all substantial distinctions, critics charged that Buddhists had no grounds on which to judge one state of affairs or type of action more valuable than any other. What we need to see is how Buddhists might provide social critique and work for social reform without depending upon the usual types of ethical criteria. This is perhaps the most crucial issue in the development of any Buddhist social ethic, and Abe provides what I think is a suggestive and feasible response.

What criteria can the Buddhist provide for developing a positive social ethic? Abe notes that for the Buddhist śūnyatā provides:

the ultimate criterion of value judgment. This judgment is to be made in terms of whether or not a thing or action in question does make . . . one's self and other awakened. If a thing or action accords with the vow and act realized in the dynamism of Sunyata it is regarded as valuable, whereas if it does not, as "antivaluable."(34)

Here, it may sound as if Abe is contradicting his previous assertion that nirvana and śūnyatā are not to be taken as the goal or end of Buddhist life but as its ground. However, Abe is not here asserting that the realization of śūnyatā be considered as the end of the Buddhist's life, rather he is stating that it provides the criteria on which Buddhists are to judge their actions. As Abe puts it, the value of our actions is to be discerned on the basis of the extent to which they promote further awakening and enlightenment. In order to see how this criteria can function in concrete social situations, I will next turn to an examination of Abe's third interpretative strategy.

In discussing how enlightenment might function as the criteria for our concrete judgments, Abe introduces a crucial distinction between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of experience:

My understanding of human existence consists of two dimensions: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal dimension refers to the sociohistorical aspect of human existence, conditioned by time and space, whereas the vertical dimension indicates the metaphysical or religious aspect of human existence, trans-spatial and trans-temporal. The former is the realm of immanence whereas the latter is the realm of transcendence. These two realms are essentially and qualitatively different from one another and yet are inseparably connected with one another in the living reality of human existence.(35)