If There Is No Absolute Good or Evil, May We Live Any Way We Please?
So far I have spoken about “I am a frog in a well,” “There was no such thing,” the idea that phenomena are empty, skepticism, removing the beam from my own eye, and breaking the shell of my views. The concepts of good, evil, and justice are also conditioned constructs made by human beings. They change with time and place, and they can be ambiguous. Ancient myths and religions have invoked God, reincarnation, and karma to say that wrongdoing will be judged and that accumulating merit will take us to heaven. Yet because I have said that there is no absolute good or evil and no being or standard that judges our actions absolutely, an objection follows immediately: “Then may I live however I please? Does it not matter if I act recklessly?” It can sound as though there is no standard at all.
This is where Buddhism diverges most sharply from other religions. The Buddha does not determine how we should live by appealing to divine commands or invisible judgment. The following four stories show where the standard lies.
The Mother Who Searched for a House Untouched by Death
The first story concerns a mother who came carrying her dead baby. When she begged the Buddha to revive the child, he told her to visit ten households and ask whether no one in any of their families had ever died. If she found such a house, he would revive the baby. She went from house to house, but in one a grandfather had died, while in others an uncle, child, father, mother, or ancestor had died. All ten households were alike. When she returned, the Buddha asked, “Was there a house in which no one had died?” She answered that there was not.
The Buddha’s Dharma takes seeing reality as its standard. Before covering it in learned terminology, it means seeing directly. I have also kept saying that human beings are frogs in a well and cannot know all absolute truth. If the mother had actually found an exception the Buddha had not seen, the realities observed by the two would have differed, and there would have been no reason to retain his conclusion unchanged. Yet when a phenomenon that I and others can observe together has recurred in the past and continues now, we can draw the provisional conclusion that it may continue in the future. Based on the observation that everyone born so far has died, I judge that my child and I will also die one day. This is not an absolute proclamation but a conclusion grounded in reality we can examine together.
We leave an unobservable afterlife and whatever the instruments of the Buddha’s day could not reveal as unknown. We do not claim to have seen everything. But neither do we overturn through imagination and opinion what you and I can see together now. Buddhism is a religion of observing things as they are, and its attitude is to leave what is unknown as unknown.
Can Prayer Make a Rock Rise from a Riverbed?
In the second story, a woman worries that a parent who committed many bad deeds while alive will fall into a bad place, and she asks whether her prayer can send the parent to a good place. The scripture containing this story presupposes karma and reincarnation, but I reject that premise itself. Even so, the point of the story is clear. The Buddha tells her to throw a rock into the river. It sinks. He then tells her to pray for it to rise. However much she prays, it does not float.
The Buddha asks, “Did the rock rise because you prayed?” It did not. In the same way, the result of a parent’s wrongful action does not vanish because the child prays on the parent’s behalf. Once again, the standard is a fact that can be observed together. The person asking and the person answering both see that a rock sinks and that prayer cannot make it rise. The Buddha did not compel belief in an invisible authority. He made her look at the phenomenon before her and understand, “It is just like that.”
If the River Were Sacred, the Fish Would Awaken First
The third story concerns a brahmin and a sacred river. When the brahmin asks whether the old claim that bathing in the river brings awakening is true, the Buddha offers a very simple and rather funny counterexample. If the river truly possessed sacred power and awakened the creatures entering it, would not the fish that live there constantly awaken before a person who enters only occasionally? The brahmin also knows that this is not so.
See things as they are. A river is not sacred in a way that makes us awaken merely by washing the body. The story is sharp because it presents an observation the other person cannot deny instead of a complicated doctrine. It also makes clear what must be corrected when religious imagination collides with observed fact.
A Rule Changed in the Face of Rahula’s Hunger
The fourth story is about a monastic rule changed in response to reality. Suppose the Buddha decided that his ordained disciples, who did not perform physical labor, should eat only one meal a day. He judged that an ordained adult could remain healthy on that one meal. But one day his son Rahula, who had been ordained as a monk, was hungry and cried. A growing child cannot eat a great quantity at once and needs to eat more often. Seeing that reality, the Buddha changed the rule so that older people and children could eat enough to preserve their health.
The Buddha did not awaken to absolute truth, foresee Rahula’s future arrival, and complete every exception in advance. He looked at reality as circumstances arose and changed the rule. A rule is a human law saying that things must be this way or that, a convenient agreement fitted to its time and place. In India a person might live with a single layer of clothing, but in a Korean winter one would freeze to death dressed that way. If the Buddha spoke to a monk living in Korea today, would he not say to wear thick clothes and rest indoors when the cold is severe?
Provisional Standards Built through Agreement and Promise
Therefore, our standard for how to live emerges from facts we can examine together at this time and in this place, and from observation and reflection on reality. It is not absolute truth. Yet if there is a result that you and I can both observe and share, we can gather opinions and say, “This is how our community will act.” Through agreement and promise we establish provisional standards of good, evil, and justice. The absence of absolute good and evil does not mean making no judgment and living foolishly as though anything whatsoever were acceptable. If we understand Buddhism that way, it is not Buddhism.
The Shared Method of Buddhism and Science: Revision
Buddhist thought proceeds in the same way as scientific thought. At the level of what can presently be observed, we form a hypothesis, predict that the same may happen again, and hold it as a provisional truth. If a telescope later lets us see farther and new observations show the old explanation to be wrong, we must change it. That is science, and Buddhism works the same way. We can accept many things the Buddha said 2,500 years ago not because of his authority but because we can still observe the same phenomena now.
People asked questions in that age, and the Buddha spoke about what he could observe in that time and place. Those who asked looked for themselves, found the same phenomena, and could therefore awaken to the thought, “I was mistaken.” The Buddha said that the world is connected and follows causality, and is therefore dependently arisen; that everything changes and is therefore impermanent; and that nothing has an independent quality that can be called a self, and is therefore not-self. We in the twenty-first century can also look at the world and verify dependent origination, impermanence, and not-self.
Awakening does not occur automatically because some Buddha-nature is lodged inside me. It happens because I can observe how what is in my mind collides with external circumstances, gives rise to affliction, and makes a human being rejoice and grieve while moving through the real heavens and hells of life. As a frog in a well, I cannot be certain that this is one-hundred-percent absolute truth. I can only say that the Buddha discovered it, later people confirmed it, and it also appears so when I look now.
In a Dependently Arisen Life, I Cannot Be Happy Alone
Because breaking the shell of my views and removing the beam from my eye are terribly difficult, a practitioner must begin by observing oneself. Yet human beings live in connection with one another. I cannot awaken alone and then be happy alone. Even if nothing troubles my own mind, my wife’s poverty and suffering affect me. Suppose the Korean War had broken out in Korea. Could I say, “I am happy,” regardless of whether my parents and siblings die? When family, society, and country suffer, I suffer as well. We are not isolated substances.
That is why, after looking at reality, we again establish provisional moral standards that say war must be stopped and our families must be kept from dying. We criticize and participate in society. Buddhists, awakened people, and intellectuals must criticize society and take part in it. If society’s laws are wrong, we ultimately suffer the harm. We cannot call the private soothing of one mind awakening while turning away from society.
The Interconnection Revealed by COVID
COVID made that interconnection exceptionally easy to see. The coronavirus emerged in China one day and spread through South Korea and across the world. Would it disappear merely because Koreans avoided infection? Even if wealthy countries vaccinate their populations and control transmission, a virus continuing to circulate in countries without money for vaccines or medical facilities will again affect the world. If it circulates endlessly and produces variants, new vaccines and costs will continue to be required.
May we neglect disease circulating somewhere in Africa because the people there lack money and power? States and citizens with resources must work together so that vulnerable people also receive vaccines and medical care and no part of the world is left with a gap in health care. The fact that I am not infected now does not by itself make me safe. If others remain infected, I may be infected again. I am not an independent individual but a being affected within the connections of society and nature. A Buddhist who knows this becomes a citizen of the world who does not abandon people on the other side of the planet as strangers.
One Health, Drug-Resistant Bacteria, and Microplastics
Medicine calls this One Health. What is true of viruses is also true of drug-resistant bacteria. Even if I use antibiotics cautiously, careless use elsewhere produces resistant bacteria that can circulate back to me one day. This does not mean that they and I are one identical thing. Their infection does not infect me instantly, but because we cannot be separated into two completely unrelated entities, it can eventually affect me.
Plastic is the same. I may not immediately eat the plastic I throw away, but it enters someone’s mouth, and plastic thrown away by someone else eventually enters mine. We now live in an age when even microplastics in our blood can be observed. In the past, we could not confirm matter too small to see, but now we can. Once we know that waste discarded into the sea ultimately returns to us, it is not enough for one person or one country to be careful. The whole world must stop discarding it recklessly, and even if we cannot halt all production at once, we must reduce it and seek alternatives that decompose naturally.
Criticize on the Premise That I, Too, May Be Wrong
Buddhists and intellectuals who know that the world is interconnected must raise their voices and say, “This is what we should do.” Today’s actions return to us as consequences in the next moment through causality. A society without criticism can never be a good or healthy society. Just as the rule changed when Rahula entered the community, we must look at reality each time and propose new alternatives. In society and in my own life, I must continually observe things as they are, criticize, and revise.
Yet I must not claim possession of absolute truth. I, too, may be wrong. Seeking a better path under that premise is difficult, but the person who always searches for and walks a new path is a Buddhist practitioner and an awakened person. The standard of this path is not to abandon judgment, but to observe, agree, and act while submitting one’s own judgment again to observation and criticism.
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