Abstract
This paper is an attempt to explore the possibility of constructing a new bio-ethics from the perspective of the history of religions. First, this article will reexamine the meaning of life and death from contemporary viewpoints of religious studies, and later discuss the possibility of constructing a new bio-ethics with reference to the framework of Toshihiko Izutsu's "Oriental Philosophy." What is fundamentally important in constructing a new bio-ethics is to place the individual being in the context of the whole. As the French historian Philippe Aries pointed out, modern people tend to grasp human life only at the individual level and forget the nature of a human as a mortal being. As Izutsu's discussion about Hua-yen philosophy shows, Oriental thought provides a perspective of human life that is characterized by the inseparability of life and death from the dimensions of deep consciousness. When one recognizes the life of an individual being living in the context of the whole, one can obtain a new horizon of knowledge that the life world as a whole is alive even through the death of an individual. Thus, a possibility toward a new bio-ethics can be found, based upon the viewpoint of "eternal life," "immortality," and "the continuity of life and death."
