The Garden and the Necropolis: Ethics as Pilgrimage from the Buddha to the Posthuman

Humans inherit an ethical condition shaped by suffering: biological, historical, and relational. Buddhism begins by diagnosing this suffering as inherent to embodied life, while Western theology situates suffering and morality as consequences of the Fall. Levinas reframes suffering not as a problem to be extinguished but as the very site of ethical awakening: the Other’s vulnerability commands an infinite responsibility. Maria Dimitrova’s comparative work on Levinas and Buddhist thought reveals how compassion and responsibility illuminate one another and how both exceed purely ontological frameworks. This paper weaves these traditions into a single genealogy of ethics—from Edenic innocence to the historical moral burden of exile, from biological interdependence to the modern “Necropolis,” and finally toward a speculative future in which technology may allow a reconfiguration of suffering itself. The result is a proposal that ethics is neither eternal nor arbitrary but a pilgrimage arising from suffering and oriented toward a horizon of grace made possible not by divine restoration but by human and post-human agency.