What is good and evil in Zen?

What’s the Zen take on good and evil?

My favorite question.

Uh oh. Why?

Cause I get to tell funny stories. Like this first one, a classic koan from the Blue Cliff Record:

A monk asked Toshi, “Is it true that ‘All sounds are the voice of Buddha’?”
Toshi said, “Yes.”
The monk said, “Don’t fart.”
Toshi hit him.

Another question was, “Is it true that ‘Coarse words and fine speech all end up in ultimate truth’?”
Toshi said, “Yes.”
The monk said, “Can I call you an ass?”
Toshi hit him.*1

Here’s another story from the Thai forest monk, Ajahn Chah:

There was once a monk I met who told me he was a real meditator. He asked for permission to stay with me here and inquired about the schedule and standard of monastic discipline. I explained to him that in this monastery we live according to the Vinaya, the Buddha's code of monastic discipline, and if he wanted to come and train with me he'd have to renounce his money and private supplies of goods. He told me his practice was “non-attachment to all conventions.” I told him I didn't know what he was talking about. “How about if I stay here,” he asked, “and keep all my money but don't attach to it. Money's just a convention.” I said sure, no problem. “If you can eat salt and not find it salty, then you can use money and not be attached to it.”

He was just speaking gibberish. Actually he was just too lazy to follow the details of the Vinaya. I'm telling you, it's difficult. “When you can eat salt and honestly assure me it's not salty, then I'll take you seriously. And if you tell me it's not salty then I'll give you a whole sack to eat. Just try it. Will it really not taste salty? Non-attachment to conventions isn't just a matter of clever speech. If you're going to talk like this, you can't stay with me.” So he left.*2

So the conclusion is there’s no good and evil and there is good and evil?

Yes.

Don’t you need a higher word count for this?

Would be nice.

Want me to help you?

That’s very kind of you. One might even be so bold as to say, conventionally good.

It’s like sugar, then, not salt?

Yes.

Well then, care to explain more?

Yes, sir. To make sense of these stories, we have to return to the concept of the Two Truths. The Two Truths capture the paradoxical nature of reality. The first truth is that there’s only the one. The second truth is that there’s the ten-thousand things. In Zen, we also throw around the phrase the absolute and the relative. The first truth, the absolute, is the undivided, complete, perfect unity that is the entire universe. In the one, there’s no right or wrong, good or bad, gain or loss, pleasure or pain, heaven or hell, self or other. It’s just one undivided whole with no separate thing in it. This oneness is, in fact, present in experience all the time, like space. The essence of practice is directly realizing oneness via insight and then integrating that into daily life. Most folks, even seasoned practitioners, have never realized pure oneness directly and only catch glimpses of it in daily life.

The second truth, the relative, is the confusing world of diversity that we’re all familiar with. In the relative, there’s right and wrong, self and other, pleasure and pain, enlightened and ignorant, gain and loss, birth and death, heaven and hell, cause and effect. There’s no absolute basis for any of this stuff. If we try to find a solid foundation for a self or even heaven and hell, we’ll come up with nothing. But even though it’s delusional, it’s practically real. If we humans experience the delusion of a body, then it’s useful to think of ourselves as a body with needs, a future that must be planned, retirement savings to put away, etc. So that means that not all actions and views are equal.

The point the clever Western meditator was trying to make was that since money’s just a convention, if he’s unattached to it, there’s no problem. The cheeky Chinese monk also pushed the same line. If there’s no difference between “master” and “ass,” why not call him an ass, right?

But the Two Truths say this is “gibberish.” Absolutely, there’s no such thing as money, but there’s also no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, and no mind. It’s a bit convenient that he wiped away money but held onto his effort to attain enlightenment. After all, if he really understood the absolute, why go through the trouble to find a teacher and spend time with him in the first place? Those are just conventions, duh.

Ajahn Chah handled this rascal brilliantly. If the meditator really saw the world through the absolute, wolfing down handfuls of salt should be no problem, but who can? At best, in ordinary consciousness, oneness will fragrance the salt, not replace it completely. Completely eclipsing relative experience would be stupid. Imagine living in a world where you experienced absolutely zero differentiation, zero sense input, zero deliberation, and zero choice. As Bhikkhu Bodhi’s mother used to mock her son, “it’s a religion dedicated to becoming a potato.”

Relatively, salt is salt. Doesn’t matter if your black, Asian, born in the 12th century, woman, man, child, manchild, Buddha, or just regular old me. And none of those folks needed someone to sit ‘em down and tell them, “Ok, there’s this thing out there, son, called salt. It tastes like this. It makes you thirsty if you drink too much. Your body also needs a bit every day to function properly.” No one can explain what salt tastes like. There’s only one way to know: eat it and there it is.

But doesn’t that seem universal?

In Zen, no. The problem is when most folks say universal, what they really mean is universal to humans and, more-often-than-not, universal to humans who’ve lived within the last 50 years in the same country as them. Humans are a myopic, self-serving bunch with goldfish-like memories. Just joking, that’s just this generation. Other generations have been myopic, self-serving, and carried grudges to their graves.

What’s universal is universal. It applies to rocks, stars, plankton, and even lifeforms on other planets. Taste isn’t universal. In fact, none of our experience is universal save for oneness.

So there’s no universal morality?

Yes because the only universal is oneness, which is without right or wrong, action, effect, self, and other. Notta. Buuuuuuuuut there’s still salt. At its base, the universe is just one, but that’s just a half of the equation. The other half is that we’re here now with our unique set of experiences in our unique cultural moment with our unique values. That’s the relative, the world of the ten-thousand things. It’s both-and, not either-or.

On the relative side of things, salt’s salt for everyone. And this intrinsic aspect of human experience extends to morality for humans. For 99.999999% of humans, salt tastes like salt, is a necessary mineral for the body, and wreaks havoc when taken in excess. Same goes for the fundamentals of morality. If I take a knife and cut off someone’s ears as they plead for mercy, that’s gonna be salty. Likewise, if I, unprovoked, steal your wife and send you clips of us making love to enrage you, that’s salty. If I try to bring you down via rumors, that’s salty.

But what about a psychopath, for example? They can’t empathize, so does it mean they’re incapable of morality?

Psychopaths can empathize, but only marginally. However, just as there are some people who can’t taste food, like people who’ve had their tongues removed due to cancer, statistically there have to be some humans who can’t empathize. But empathy’s not a pre-requisite for morality. Morality’s a complex process that relies on many different parts of the brain. Some psychopaths, for instance, are capable of living, by human standards, moral lives despite their callousness and selfishness.

What I think you’re trying to get at is do our standards of morality apply to someone who’s fundamentally different from us, correct?

Correct.

Just as it’s ridiculous to apply human ethics to stones, stars, butterflies, rabbits, and bears, so too is it to apply them to humans built biologically differently. They have their own morality. That doesn’t mean that society should accept them and their actions, just as we don’t accept it when coyotes try to eat a child. Society must manage wild animals, but the coyote isn’t evil for pursuing its instincts to find food and survive. Likewise, those biologically without empathy aren’t morally evil for lacking a moral compass.

That’s a controversial take. In traditional Buddhism, even Zen, some will cry heresy. Actions for sentient creatures carry consequences, whether they’re aware of those consequences or not. A tiger, for example, which survives by killing, creates bad karma for itself by repeatedly taking life and is going straight to the lower realms after it dies. The same would be true of a psychopath or someone with low empathy and morality. I don’t buy this.

Not only do I doubt the whole next-life thing, but I also question whether human ideas of ethics apply to creatures different from humans. One example that comes to mind is soldiers. While it’s true that killing scars many soldiers, many of them also never lose a wink of sleep over lodging a bullet in an enemy’s head. Some of them, like Jocko Willink or many of the soldiers that returned from Vietnam or WWII, lived normal lives relatively untouched by the horrors they saw. If it was true that killing was intrinsically wrong and necessarily produced a negative mind state, as many traditional Buddhist schools believe, how can they explain this?
From this verifiable human experience, it’s reasonable to infer that animals, like cheetahs or bears, which must kill to live might feel indifferent to their actions. Some might even enjoy the thrill of it. It’s just business.

But I think we’re getting lost a bit in the weeds here. These are the fringes of morality. Returning to normal folks, the 99.9999% of ‘em, certain actions have an intrinsic sting and saltiness to them. The Five Precepts summarize those salty actions quite nicely: killing, cheating, gossiping, lying, and stealing. These are all salt for the human mind and culture. Thus, they’re wrong.

That seems petty to me. The entire Zen ethical system’s built around how people feel?

When you say it like that, it looks pretty petty, but there’s more to it. What the salt metaphor points out is that moralizing is a human activity. Moralizing is something we humans do a priori based on the principle of non-harm. Non-harm measures the costs/benefits of an action in terms of pleasure and pain when making decisions. That can be the pleasure or pain felt in thirty seconds, thirty years, or thirty millennia.

The non-harm principle is the honey and salt that shapes our experience and view of the world. However, it’s not how the world objectively is. It’s simply a useful and natural means of navigating it both personally and socially. As such, humans must live according to that if we want to have fulfilled, meaningful lives.  Just as we need a certain set of micro- and macro-nutrients to thrive, so too do we need a certain set of moral standards to live by.

You mentioned, though, that stealing was salty. But is this always so? If a friend of mine nicks my wallet from me while I’m asleep in my home, don’t I have the right to steal it back from them? Is that really wrong? Or what if you’re a Ukranian living in Russian-occupied territories. You can’t fight the occupiers, but you might be able to steal a few boxes of vodka and rations at midnight. And no killing sounds good in the abstract, but what, again, if a bunch of Russian soldiers break down your door and threaten to rape your mother and wife and murder you and your children? How is any of this wrong?

I don’t think it is wrong. But these moral quandaries show precisely why the relative is relative. On the one hand, there are actions that are morally reprehensible wherever and whenever you’re born, like raping a child, torturing animals, or ruining a marriage for a few moments of pleasure. There are also actions which are morally commendable wherever and whenever you’re born, like caring for the elderly, being generous with friends, and educating others. However, within those there’s a lot of gray area. If an enemy occupies your homeland is killing justified? Is stealing from them justified? Is lying to them about enemy troop positions justified? Those are gray questions.

It depends who you ask and when. A hard line Buddhist would tell you that lying or stealing under any circumstances is wrong. Most people would disagree and allow for some circumstances and not others. The answer depends on the ethos of the moment and, thus, there’s no clear right-or-wrong set of values. That’s why Zen shies away from absolute moral proscriptions. There are, instead, guidelines.
The Five Precepts are the moral foundations of Buddhism and are worth trying to stick to save for exceptional circumstances. They are:

1. Not killing.
2. Not stealing.
3. Not cheating (romantically).
4. Not lying.
5. Not taking intoxicants.

Although this isn't common in Zen, I suggest every human being chant the Five Precepts every morning and use them as basic guidelines for their life. No need to take them as absolute moral rules, but they’re solid pillars of a moral life and society. Instead of offering concrete moral prescriptions, Zen focuses on general suggestions, like be kind, truthful, and generous. The specifics, however, are for each person to navigate for themselves within their own lives and informed by the dual principle of non-harm and oneness.

References:

1. Cleary, Thomas, trans. The Blue Cliff Record. Massachusetts: Shambhala Publications, 2000.
2. The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah. Northumberland, Aruna Publications, 2011.