A More Enlightened Way
of Being
Seth Zuiho Segall
WINTER 2016 tricycle
The entrance of Buddhist ethics into the
modern world.
Buddhism generously provides us with an
embarrassment of ethical riches—the precepts, the paramitas and
brahmaviharas, the Vinaya and Jatakas, the Abhidharma, and the path
elements of right speech, action, and livelihood. These diverse
resources offer various forms of ethical guidance, including rules
for ethical behavior along with accompanying commentary, a catalog
of wholesome and unwholesome states of mind, lists of virtues along
with methods for their cultivation, and narrative illustrations of
moral conduct. The underlying conceptual scheme tying these
resources together is simple and clear: our thoughts and actions
can be deemed either “skillful” or “unskillful” depending on
whether they assist or hinder better conditions for the future,
especially for future rebirth or, ideally, an awakening that brings
release from the wheel of rebirth entirely. This conceptual
scheme—whether expressed in terms of the arhat ideal of attaining
nirvana or the bodhisattva ideal of achieving buddhahood for the
benefit of all—functions as an effective motivation for ethical
behavior when rebirth is of genuine existential concern. For many
contemporary Buddhists, however, rebirth is not a compelling basis
for their spiritual and moral lives. In the West, even those who
accept the possibility of rebirth rarely feel that the idea of
ending future lives holds deep personal meaning for them in the
conduct of their daily living.
It’s not so much that the idea of rebirth has
been disproved; no strong empirical evidence can be mustered either
for or against it. It’s that the idea of rebirth is swimming
against the tide of contemporary materialism and
naturalism—metaphysical propositions that play an important role as
core assumptions in science and thus significantly shape our modern
cultural worldview. These propositions assert that our best
knowledge of the world is achieved by analyzing phenomena as the
outcome of processes of physical causation and posit that there’s
no world behind or beyond the material world of physics, chemistry,
and biology. It follows from this that because consciousness can be
fully accounted for by reducing it to material processes, it ceases
to exist at death. It’s hard to reconcile rebirth with this
outlook, which—regardless of whether one consciously accepts or
rejects it—is absorbed by cultural osmosis into one’s modern sense
of the world.
Many spiritual seekers—especially in the West,
where rebirth has never been widely believed—don’t become Buddhists
because they want to end the cycle of rebirth; they’re motivated by
some other inner disquiet. As an experiment, take a moment now to
check out your own motivation. When was the last time you caught
yourself thinking, “I’d really like to end rebirth?” More likely
what you’ve been thinking is “I wish I were happier” or “I wish I
were a better person” or “What’s the best and most meaningful use I
can make of my life?” In other words, you’ve been motivated by
concerns about this life here and now. While “rebirth” can still
play a useful role as a metaphor for how one moment conditions the
next, for many contemporary Buddhists it has lost whatever
motivational potency it might once have possessed.
As a consequence, many modern
Buddhists—especially those shaped by the assumptions of Western
culture—find traditional Buddhist ethics in need of some kind of
glue to hold it together. Most recent reinterpreters of Buddhism
find that glue in some version of the Aristotelian notion of
eudaimonia, or human flourishing—an idea so pervasive in Western
culture that Westerners are often unaware of its source. Aristotle
thought that the telos, or ultimate purpose of human life, was to
live well and flourish, and his conception of human flourishing
emphasized developing one’s virtues, behaving ethically toward
others, and contemplating truth. When transplanted into Buddhism,
this Aristotelian ideal shifts the end point of Buddhist practice
from ending rebirth to living the best kind of life one possibly
can—a best kind of life that combines wisdom, ethics, and
contemplation to engender a profound sense of well-being. This is a
reinterpretation of the Buddhist enlightenment ideal stripped of
any connection to the framework of rebirth. We might label it
eudaimonic enlightenment to distinguish it from its more
traditional cousins.
To be clear, it isn’t the whole of Aristotelian
eudaimonia that gets imported into Buddhism but just its general
outlines. The fit between eudaimonia in all its specificity and
Buddhist philosophy isn’t sufficiently harmonious to allow
wholesale importation of the former. There are notable differences
between Aristotle’s list of virtues (for example, wittiness and
magnanimity) and the Buddhist list (compassion and lovingkindness).
Aristotle’s wisdom (sophia) is a combination of scientific
knowledge and critical reason, while Buddhist wisdom (prajna) is
insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and the absence of
self-nature. Aristotelian happiness is partly contingent on good
fortune, whereas Buddhist well-being is largely construed as
nonattachment to life’s vicissitudes.
Furthermore, Aristotle saw civic engagement as
essential to flourishing, while the Buddha, having left his
father’s palace never to return, encouraged withdrawal from the
agora (the marketplace) and the polis (the “city,” the hub of
political life). As a consequence, Buddhism has remarkably little
to say about fairness and justice. The Buddha preached a gospel of
personal virtue rather than one of collective political
participation and social action, and although he treated persons
from all castes equably and abjured violence, he never advocated
the abolition of the caste system or the disbanding of armies.
Early Buddhism took a dim view of quotidian existence, urging us to
find surcease in a transcendent nirvana. The world was inevitably a
realm of suffering, and our contemporary notion of civic progress,
which takes as given that the world is something to be improved
upon, is one the Buddha never would have recognized.
The modern project of constructing a more
socially oriented Buddhism requires our importing Western ideas of
fairness, liberty, and justice—ideas forged in the American and
French revolutions, the Paris Commune, and the abolitionist and
suffragette movements—into a religious tradition that, more often
than not, historically supported and was supported by the ruling
elites of the countries in which it flourished. Our modern idea of
justice is part of a lengthy conversation rooted in Greek
philosophy and Hebraic law. This conversation is one aspect of the
thoroughgoing transformation wrought by modernity, which was
initiated in the West but which has profoundly impacted Asia over
the past two centuries. It is a conversation that has inspired
Gandhi and Nehru, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, Cory Aquino and Aung
San Suu Kyi, Sulak Sivaraksa, and Thich Nhat Hanh. The idea of
justice is now so deeply a part of our consciousnesses, East and
West, that we’re hardly aware we’re importing something new into
Buddhism and in the process subtly changing what it means to be a
bodhisattva—to work toward the liberation of all beings—in the
process.
Despite the specific differences between
Aristotelian and Buddhist conceptions of virtue, wisdom, and
well-being, the more general Aristotelian notion that a life
dedicated to the cultivation of virtue and the contemplation of
wisdom is the best and happiest kind of human life is one that has
been readily transplanted into Buddhism in a way that resonates
deeply with modernity. When I attended a public college in the
1960s, its motto was “Let each become all he is capable of being,”
an Aristotelian sentiment if ever there was one. Modified versions
of Aristotelian eudaimonia are so deeply embedded in modern
humanistic and positive psychology that they’ve become part of what
passes broadly for common sense.
As different as they are, Aristotelian and
traditional Buddhist ethics are in agreement on one thing: the
unity of the virtues. Both view each virtue as compatible with all
the others. For Buddhists, there is no conflict between wisdom and
compassion. All the paramitas reinforce one another, and each
virtue requires its companions for complete practice. Similarly,
each step of the noble eightfold path reinforces every other step,
with ethics, wisdom, and meditation integrating seamlessly
together. That’s why the Buddhist approach is sometimes described
as holographic, with each practice contained in every other. The
dharmachakra iconography symbolizes this unity—the eight spokes
each representing the eight steps of the path, but joined in the
middle and radiating outward to form a wheel, or circle of
wholeness.
The ancient Greek tragedians, however, did not
hold to this unitary vision. In Sophocles’s Antigone, the eponymous
heroine is torn between conflicting moral obligations to her
brother and her king. The king orders her brother’s body to remain
unburied, but Antigone defies him, placing duty to family above
duty to king. The tragedians understood that moral dilemmas seldom
if ever have perfect solutions. Whichever choice Antigone makes is
right in one respect and wrong in another. As polytheists, the
Greek tragedians knew that pleasing Zeus risked offending Hera;
tragedy was intrinsic to human existence. Zeus implies just that in
the Iliad when he says, “there is nothing alive more agonized than
man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.” Human nobility
lay in choosing between conflicting ethical imperatives and facing
one’s fate with courage and equanimity. While sharing a superficial
similarity with the Buddha’s first noble truth of suffering, this
tragic view differs from it in one fundamental way: Buddhism is, at
its core, an optimistic philosophy that posits the fourth noble
truth, a path out of suffering. Buddhism claims that it’s possible
to achieve a state of ultimate well-being and peace. The Greek
tragedians envisioned no such off-ramp; life could be noble, but it
was never unreservedly happy.
There are ways in which our modern outlook is
closer to that of the Greek tragedians than to that of either
Aristotle or the Buddha. For one thing, we live in an age when the
unity of the good and the virtues seems irretrievably shattered.
The long-term Western philosophical project of seeking a logical
basis for ethics—the one best exemplified by the philosophies of
Spinoza, Kant, and Mill—came to an unsuccessful conclusion, unable
to withstand the scrutiny and objections of Hume, Nietzsche, and
Kierkegaard. At the same time, modernity has put us cheek by jowl
with the wisdom traditions of countless cultures past and present,
so that we’re acutely aware of the historically conditioned nature
of our own conception of the good as just one of many possible
competing visions. Lastly, since the publication of Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents, we’ve become increasingly
familiar with the conflicts and disjunctions inherent in our triune
nature as mammalian predators, social animals, and rational
beings.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the
signature ethical dilemmas of our time reflect a conflict and
disjunction between differing moral intuitions, often a conflict
between opposing “rights” or “goods”: a woman’s right to control
her body versus an embryo’s right to life; a gay person’s right to
marry versus a fundamentalist’s right to withhold recognition; a
rich person’s right to property versus a poor person’s right to
escape the ills of poverty; a pacifist’s conviction that war is
never justified versus an interventionist’s fear that pacifism
abets the triumph of evil.
Each party in these intractable disputes
believes that his or her own view trumps the other’s; no logical
arguments can convince the other that any errors exist. Each party
operates from a separate set of fundamental premises and
assumptions about the nature of the good and of human flourishing,
premises that are nonrational at their core and grounded in some
mix of sentiment, preference, tribal belongings, ideology, and
religious revelation. We don’t choose our side on strictly logical
grounds, just as we don’t fall in love by making lists of pros and
cons about potential suitors. We owe our allegiances to one camp or
another based on a set of historical contingencies: what part of
the country we were born in, what religion we were raised in, which
social class we belong to, and our unique personal journeys and
encounters. When people “convert” from one side to another, the
conversion, gradual or sudden, is never solely logical in nature.
Like Paul on the road to Damascus, we have a revelation. Or, often
enough, it’s not so much that our former beliefs are proved
erroneous as that we simply move on, jettisoning older beliefs for
newer, more useful ones. The key point is that ethical disputes—the
ones that really trouble us—aren’t usually disputes between good
and evil; more commonly they are disjunctions between rival
“goods,” and ultimately there’s no logical basis for their
resolution. Often enough they reflect cultural dialogues that need
to run their historical course.
How do these two themes just outlined—the
modernist substitution of eudaimonia for rebirth, and the
acknowledgment of the tension between incompatible and often
incommensurable goods—affect Buddhist ethics?
Let’s consider the first Buddhist precept—the
precept against taking life—as a paradigmatic case. You and I, no
doubt, agree that we’re against killing, at least for the most part
and as a general principle. We may disagree, however, over
particulars and specifics. Are we categorically opposed to all
killing, or do we admit to certain exceptions? Can we use
antibiotics to kill disease-causing bacteria? Can we use pesticides
to kill malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes? Can we use lethal
force, if necessary, to protect family members from rape or murder?
Can we defend our country from invaders? Can we forcefully
intervene to prevent genocide in a foreign land? All of these
questions pit one good—not acting cruelly—against
another—preserving the well-being of ourselves and
others.
But let’s set these potential exceptions aside
and focus on why we’re against killing, at least in general and for
the most part. Are we genuinely fearful of rebirth in an animal,
hungry ghost, or hell realm? For most modern Westerners, the answer
is “Probably not,” despite the fact that this has been the
traditional Buddhist rationale. Are we afraid of the wrath of a
monotheistic God? For those raised in the Abrahamic faiths,
perhaps. Is it because we believe in some version of the Golden
Rule—Don’t do unto others what you would not have them do unto you?
Maybe. It’s one of our culture’s more enduring ideas.
I suspect, however, that our moral and ethical
judgments are actually based on a multiplicity of contingencies.
We’re members of the animal kingdom, and as such we have
biologically rooted capacities for attachment, befriending, caring,
shame, social group formation, protectiveness, revulsion, and
disgust that are the raw materials out of which our moral judgments
are formed. Our cultures and traditions then mold these
proclivities into more or less widely shared notions of compassion,
fairness, loyalty, purity, respect, and autonomy. Our final moral
judgments reflect the complex interplay of these biological and
social factors with our personal faculties of judgment and
reason.
Returning to the first precept, our moral
opposition to killing probably reflects a multiplicity of factors:
a natural revulsion against the spilling of blood, an empathy for
others’ pain, rational calculations about fairness and advantage,
hopes that others will not kill us or our loved ones, fears of
shame, retribution, and punishment, and decades of familiarity with
the teachings of our culture and its ethical traditions. If we also
happen to be given to moral reflection, we’ve cobbled these
together as best we can into our own personal system, all the while
realizing that the result is, at best, a curious mixture of reason,
practical judgment, intuition, feeling, and instinct. That’s why
we’re against killing, in general and for the most part, and why we
give this moral opposition serious weight when considering the
circumstances under which we might resort to it.
Does the Buddhist ethical tradition have
something important and unique to add to this mélange? This is an
especially meaningful question for convert Buddhists who, having
been raised in another tradition, come to Buddhism with their moral
intuitions already fully formed. Critics like the writer and
blogger David Chapman suggest that most convert Buddhists simply
bypass traditional Buddhist ethics altogether, pouring their
preexisting liberal secular humanist ethics into newer bottles
bearing, somewhat disingenuously, a “Buddhist” label. The question
one might ask is, why bother with Buddhist ethics at
all?
The answer to “why bother?” is that Buddhism
contains a number of significant ethical ideas that still retain
their usefulness even after severance from the framework of
rebirth. The first is the idea of karma, or moral cause and effect.
According to the rule of karma, we are the authors of our future
selves, including our future selves in this lifetime: Our thoughts
and actions mold the person we’re about to become. Our repeated
actions and thoughts become our habits, and our habits become our
character. They shape our perceptions, dispositions, and future
possibilities. The effects of our actions extend through space and
time like ripples on a pond, influencing not only our future selves
but also the others we interact with and our surroundings. If we
wish to be a certain kind of person and live in a certain kind of
world, we need to be heedful about the seeds we
cultivate.
Karma and dependent origination constitute
Buddhism’s earliest formulations of causality. Later Buddhist
thinkers elaborated on these concepts to develop the Mahayana idea
of the mutual interdependence of all dharmas, or phenomena, and the
Huayan idea of their interpenetration. These elaborations enabled
East Asian Buddhists to place a more positive spin on
interconnectivity. Initially, the idea that dharmas lacked
self-nature was offered as one more reason not to cling to them.
Later, the idea that things were mutually interdependent gave
phenomena a positive value as indispensable jewels in Indra’s web.
This positive version of interconnectivity resonates with both
19th-century Western Romanticism and 20th century ecological
science, and as a consequence is widely endorsed by Buddhist
modernists of all stripes. Its view that “we’re all in the stew
together,” partners in the seamless fabric of existence, has
profound ethical implications. Many of our most intractable ethical
dilemmas are the result of our cultural denial of or obliviousness
to the reality of interconnectivity, including the terrible damage
we’re inflicting on our biosphere and the schisms that tragically
divide ethnicities, social classes, religions, and regions. The
Buddhist view of interdependence affects ethical considerations, as
we replace considerations of how our actions affect “the other”
with a more radical awareness that there is no other. While some
moralities distinguish between in-groups to whom we owe duties and
out-groups to whom we do not, Buddhist interconnectivity denies the
existence of out-groups.
If the law of karma tells us that we must act a
certain way if we wish to become a certain kind of person, the
Buddhist enlightenment ideal defines that kind of person we wish to
become. As Buddhists, we intend to “develop” or “uncover” a more
enlightened way of being. Even though differing strands of
traditionalist and modernist Buddhism disagree on enlightenment’s
precise characterization, there is an unforced consensus concerning
some of its key elements: non-clinging, non-harming, non-hatred,
non-greed, compassion, lovingkindness, equanimity, sympathetic joy,
insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, the absence of
self-nature, and a less self-preoccupied, more fluid and
interconnected sense of ourselves.
If we combine moral cause and effect with the
end goal of eudaimonic enlightened being, we have a motivation for
ethical behavior that both is compatible with modernity and adds
something to ethics above and beyond the Golden Rule. Returning to
our discussion of the first precept, killing moves us away from the
kind of person we wish to be. Killing reinforces our greed and
hatred and diminishes our compassion. Killing feeds the delusion
that we are separate from others. It hardens and coarsens us.
Killing triggers recursive spirals of retribution and unintended
consequences that diminish the odds of experiencing well-being for
ourselves and others. The basic Buddhist injunctions against
killing, stealing, lying, sexual misbehavior, and heedless
intoxication are all aids to move us further along the path toward
enlightenment. They’re vehicles for developing character and
planting the seeds of future wellbeing. The flip side to this
understanding is that breaking the precepts is not so much a matter
of breaking deontological “rules” as it is a matter of breaking our
deepest commitments to being the kind of person we intend to
be.
As Buddhists, we also bring to the table a
traditional distrust of fixed views, along with an attitude of open
inquiry that aims at preventing our thoughts from becoming stuck in
stale and rigid categories. We’re always attempting to listen
freshly to our own experience and to other voices as well, always
willing to learn and change, always interested in discovering what
being moral means in this particular moment and situation. While we
affirm the values of enlightenment, we’ve learned to distrust the
conceptions we construct surrounding it. We understand that every
specific ethical dilemma, if properly attended to, reveals a
greater degree of intricate complexity than any rule can possibly
allow for.
We also realize that in setting up any ideal, we
introduce certain dangers: the danger that we’ll delude ourselves,
pretending that we’re further along the path than we are; the
danger that we’ll deny, repress, minimize, project, or otherwise
underestimate our persistent natures as predatory, competitive,
territorial, dominance-seeking, and sexual animals; the danger that
we’ll develop an aversion to those parts of ourselves that fall
short of the ideal or disparage or punish others who seem to us to
fall short. Every ideal also creates tensions between being and
becoming, between moving toward the ideal and realizing that the
ideal has been, in some way, manifest all along. It also creates
tensions between aspirations to a kind of purity and aspirations
toward wholeness and integration. The dangers are real, but ethics
always involves establishing some ideal, whether it’s one of
enlightenment, holiness, or simply civility.
To what degree does this modernist Buddhist
ethics with its moral cause and effect, interconnectivity,
eudaimonic enlightenment, acknowledgment of rival incommensurate
goods, and suspicion of rigid, inflexible rules help us—especially
convert Buddhists—in resolving our everyday ethical dilemmas? The
answer is that it only helps a little. We still have all the
biological, cultural, and rational considerations that shaped our
everyday moral intuitions before we became Buddhists. Added to
those considerations, however, we now also have an ideal we’ve
established with the ultimate goal of helping ourselves and others
achieve a Buddhist kind of well-being—a virtuous life consistent
with Buddhist principles that speak to our modern lived
experience—along with the knowledge that if we are ever to approach
that goal, our actions need to be concordant with it. It’s one more
consideration, a thumb on the scale that informs our
decisions.
Let’s return once more to our paradigmatic first
precept against killing. Despite our moral objection to killing,
it’s still an issue that arises for us again and again, requiring
us to make real choices. Should we be vegetarians? Should abortion
or assisted suicide be legalized? Should we pay taxes that support
the military? Should we put ailing, suffering pets to sleep? Should
we slap at the fly that’s annoying us as we sit trying to
meditate?
A fixed rule-based approach to the first precept
would tell us that killing is categorically wrong in each and every
circumstance. On the other hand, a morality based on our desire to
move toward a more enlightened way of being would, it seems to me,
be more nuanced. An enlightened being’s prime concern would be the
reduction of another’s suffering as best as one could determine how
to accomplish it, using all of one’s experience, empathy, respect,
reason, and judgment, along with an awareness of possible shadow
motivations and unintended consequences—in other words, a melding
of Aristotelian practical judgment with Buddhist mindfulness and
discernment. It requires that when we decide to cause a certain
degree of harm in the pursuit of what we discern to be the wisest
good, that we do so with full awareness—without minimization or
disengagement—of the extent of the suffering we’re about to become
the cause of. It requires that we listen fully and openly to each
moment as it speaks to us in all of its intricate complexity. Like
the famed Zen monk who carries the young woman across the stream in
violation of the Vinaya rules, it sometimes involves breaking one
precept to honor another. It recognizes precepts as koans rather
than inviolate rules, and that we must struggle with them as Jacob
wrestled with his angel, discerning what each moment calls for as
we continue our endless journey toward an enlightenment we only
dimly understand.
Some traditionalists might contend that this
modernist ethics fails the test of being authentically Buddhist.
That is an argument that closes the door on those unable to believe
in rebirth, leaving them out of the fold. I would argue, instead,
that the coexistence of a plurality of Buddhisms—both
traditionalist and modern—is evidence of Buddhism’s vibrant health,
offering different dharma doors for people with diverse needs. Just
as genetic diversity is healthy for breeding populations,
ideological diversity helps Buddhism thrive through the
cross-fertilization of ideas.
Let’s not forget that many of today’s
traditional Buddhisms are themselves the product of ongoing
dialogues with neighboring traditions: East Asian Buddhism with
Confucianism and Daoism; Tibetan Buddhism with Bon; Japanese
Buddhism with kami worship; and Indian Mahayana with emerging forms
of Hindu and Tantric practice. History teaches us that religions
are ever-developing traditions rather than the final, complete,
unalterable word of their originators—traditions that endure or
wither according to their ability to address the vital concerns of
particular times and places. As religions adapt to conditions, some
practitioners argue for the continued relevance of venerable ideas,
while others reformulate them to meet the exigencies of the moment.
Religions that endure successfully manage the tension between these
extremes. The foremost principle of Buddhism is that everything
changes. It is a law that governs Buddhism, too.