Unique Buddhist Response to Hitler

[Bento]

This is an article that develops a Tiantai Buddhist approach to the most vexing problem in ethics–the question of Hitler and Nazism:

redorbit.com/news/health/148 … index.html

What’s interesting about this article, I think, is that it attempts to avoid any moral dualism or absolutism–i.e., simply condemning Nazism as radical evil, and vowing, as John McCain said, “to eradicate it”–but at the same time claims to provide an effective means of combatting it which doesn’t reduce to simple relativism. The premise is the Tiantai Buddhist doctrine of the ineradicable presence of evil in all possible states, including Buddhahood. This doctrine seems to raise questions about how to respond to evil in the world, since evil is “part of the absolute” anyway–to some extent the same problem is faced by any naturalistic or pantheistic doctrine that seeks to assert the value of the existing universe without introducing any metaphysical realm of goodness opposed to the actual world. I think Ziporyn does a pretty good job of making the case here, and also of how inadequate the other options are as responses to Hitler. I’d be interested to know how the rest of you feel about this.

A few paragraphs have dropped off the end of this online version, which I’ll provide here from another (restricted) source, for the sake of fairness and completeness:

“Now we might also imagine a case where someone is thinking, Gee, I’d really like to do these things–rape, pillage, massacre–but I have to restrain myself because I know these things are evil. Here it would seem that the belief in the dichotomy between good and evil is the strongest bulwark against the commission of evils. But the problem once again is the lack of thoroughgoingness in the application of the principle. Such a person has not one set of values, but two conflicting sets of values. He believes in one sense that it is good to rape, pillage and massacre–this is entailed in his “wanting” to do them–and in another sense that it is good to refrain from doing so. If he believes in the value dichotomy applying to one of these sets, he will believe in it for the other as well. It would of course be disastrous if the principle of non-duality of good and evil were applied only to the second set and not the first. But education in Tiantai principles would entail that the same principle be applied for both sets. He would learn to see not only that “doing the good of refraining from murder is really no different from the evil of not refraining from murder” but also “doing the good of murdering is really no different from the evil of not-murdering.” Once again we must ask what the alternatives are. Maintenance of the dichotomy of good and evil, for either or both of these sets of conflicting values, will maintain their coexistence and conflict within him. If we can accept the premise that such a conflict causes him pain, and moreover that the doomed attempt to escape such pain can lead to all sorts of rash and desperate behaviors, this protracted struggle with himself is arguably one of the strongest possible motivations for the eventual commission of these and other evil acts, as alternating frenzies of self-righteous persecution of oneself and others on the one hand, and of defiant self-indulgence on the other, in a futile attempt to break the deadlock. As Nietzsche remarked, the sting of conscience teaches one to sting.
The Tiantai moral theory, with its insistence that the most horrible evils are ineradicable, built into the absolute unchangeable nature of all existence, and fully and eternally present even in Buddhahood, may appear gloomy and discouragingly pessimistic, or from the other side, in that it affirms the utilizability of these ineradicable evils, absurdly optimistic. But after considering the alternatives, we may feel inclined to say of it what Churchill said of democracy, namely, that Tiantai ethics is indeed the worst possible response to the Holocaust–with the exception of all the others. It may be disheartening to know that Hitler, rabid racism, genocidal rage and the Holocaust are eternally with us, and can never be extirpated from the nature of reality. But this discouragement derives, I think, from a misunderstanding of what “eternally present” means in a Tiantai context. For to say of the Holocaust “Never Again,” vigilantly and unceasingly, is itself a form of this eternal presence, and in the best case scenario, this would be the mode in which these evils are forever with us.”

(The book under discussion in this article is:
Brook Ziporyn, Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought )

[krossie]

I know very little about Buddhism but I have to say this analysis of evil being absolutely inscribed into the order of everything seems, unfortunately, to be spot on from my experience!
Maybe it can be lessened somewhat - but to eradicate it would be to eradicate us as humans…

Anyone read Adi ophir? - he seems to hold a theory of evil being both social and political and, potentially I guess, reducable - here’s a blurb on his 2005 book:

[i]The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals

What remains of moral judgment when truth itself is mistrusted, when the validity of every belief system depends on its context, when power and knowledge are inextricably entangled? Is a viable moral theory still possible in the wake of the postmodern criticism of modern philosophy? “The Order of Evils” responds directly to these questions and dilemmas with one simple and brilliant change of focus. Rather than concentrating on the age-old themes of justice and freedom, Adi Ophir offers a moral theory that emphasizes the existential and political nature of evil. Ophir’s main contention is that evil is neither a diabolical element residing in the hearts of men nor a meaningless absence of the good. Rather, it is the socially structured order of “superfluous evils.” Evils, like pain, suffering, loss, and humiliation, are superfluous when they could have been – but were not – prevented. Through close analysis of seminal works by modern and postmodern philosophers – from Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Sartre, and Arendt to Foucault, Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard – Ophir forges a new perspective for thinking about what it means to be a moral being: to be moral, he argues, is to care for others, and to be committed to preventing, at all costs, their suffering and distress. A theoretically sophisticated work, “The Order of Evils” also bears the traces of Ophir’s own political and personal experiences as an Israeli philosopher and activist. Two major events in recent Jewish history have profoundly influenced his thinking: the Holocaust and the prolonged Israeli domination of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Ophir does not compare the two events. Instead, he introduces a typology of disastersthat allows them to be located within the wide spectrum of humanly generated calamities whose specificity and general patterns emerge clearly and distinctly as what they are and are not.[/i]

(emphasis mine!)

[anon]

(Skip to my last sentence for my summary, if the bulk of my post seems kind of esoteric.)

Do you have a link to David Loy’s review? I’m not familiar with Tientai philosophy, but having read maybe 1/3 of this linked article I’m a little bit puzzled by some of the assertions made. This might reflect the author’s understanding or writing skills more then Tientai philosophy. I didn’t even hardly get to the stuff about Hitler yet, I’m still hung up on the author’s specific interpretation of Mahayana philosophy.

A proper understanding of the relationship between “provisional truth” and “ultimate truth” is a complex and subtle process in Mahayana philosophy, and there’s not necessarily “correct” answers, even given the conservatism of most Mahayana (Tibetan, for example) exposition. Still though, the author here makes some strange assertions that seem to me to be based on a misunderstanding of what traditional Mahayanist claims actually entail.

For instance, the author states:

“Lower” truth, in other words, includes both Hitler’s worldview (where good might be defined as, say, the dominance of the Master Race and the extermination of the Jews) and Sakyamuni’s (where good might be defined as wisdom, compassion, and liberation for all beings), without denying a possible hierarchy between them when viewed relative to some particular goals or situations.

It is possible of course to redefine the “good” as whatever serves a particular goal, but it is difficult to see how this truism is relevant to Buddhist philosophy other than to realize that one can define the “good” as whatever serves a particular goal - in other words, and quite ironically in this context, the point I might take from this is that the world is indeed an “evil” place. Is this really the Buddhist view? I don’t think so.

The author also states:

Rather, the point is that Hitler’s and Sakyamuni’s value systems, qua determinate value systems, both belong in the realm of conventional truths, as relevant to particular situations. Both can be harmful, both can be helpful.

It is certainly the Buddhist view to concede that particular words, particular expressions, are always context-bound, and always need to be re-examined in order to remain relevant. Thus, Buddhist words can be harmful. Any fixed system of beliefs can be harmful in a given context, and any helpful activity must take place within an awareness of and as an expression of context. As is commonly said by Buddhist teachers, “right speech” is ideally both “true” and “helpful”. This is Sakyamuni’s value system. So to say that Sakyamuni’s value system is sometimes harmful is to say that it is sometimes necessary to fixate on deluded understandings of reality. But this fixation and delusion is never helpful from a Buddhist point of view - it is the very thing Buddhists set out to understand and eradicate.

Also:

According to this view, to see this object as a cup and to see it as Empty are merely two among an infinite number of ways in which it insists on being seen.

But this strikes me, at least at first glance, as a striking error in understanding what “emptiness” means. Seeing the cup as “empty” is not one way among the many ways to see the cup. It is an understanding of the fact of the many ways to see the cup, and an actual experiential relationship to the cup - it is not fixating on the cup as having some fixed essence, and it is to have a felt experience of all of the contingencies involved, the context both historical and spacial that create its cup-ness, the entire scientific/functional spectrum of cause and effect that bring the “cup” into being (that is its being), and the entire psychological spectrum underlying the historical fact of the existence of “cups” and the individual emotional and behavioral complex we each bring with us in relation to each particular “cup”. It’s difficult to understand what more there is to seeing an object as a “cup” than this. In other words, what does an “empty” cup mean to the author, that it would be one view of the cup out of the many possible views?

The article is long, and I seem to have too much to say about it. So I’ll stop there.

If this is overly philosophical, or somewhat beside the point given your intentions, I apologize. I could sum up what I’m getting at with something much more simple: the author seems to fixate on “good” and “evil” even while going to such great lengths to do something about them. There is a common Buddhist saying, “when the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of bodhi”. The saying implies that what we see as “evil” - or a big deal - is only such a big deal because of egoistic fixation. “Evil” is a threat to the ego, perhaps even by definition. To the extent that we can reduce our egoistic preoccupations, to that extent we are able to make an “evil” situation workable. Transforming an “evil” into a “mishap” is a skillful first step in that process.

Understanding all of the causes and conditions involved in any given world situtation is the best way to understand how to proceed in a helpful manner. My brief overview here of how to go about analysing a “cup” is also appropriate to how to go about analysing the Nazi phenomenon. The author states…

So it will not do to understand this Buddhist doctrine as meaning simply, “Each thing is what it is, but they are made so by their interdependence, such that what happens to one affects all the others”-a commonplace platitude, in fact, of all consistent materialist and naturalist theories, both European and Asian.

…but it is not a valid criticism merely to say that a Buddhist doctrine is shared by other intelligent theories from around the world. And it is only a platitude when it is only shallow strings of words. The Buddhist path is to discover what is true about reality, and to integrate the import of those truths into the fabric of our being. Reality is not Buddhist reality, and truths about that reality are accessible to anyone participating in that same reality.

God, I’m so wordy today. To sum up the summing up: “Evil” is workable, and fixating on the good-evil dichotomy in fact tends to fuel evil. This is a helpful thing to realize.

[Bento]

Anon:

Thanks for the interesting response. I agree there are a lot of tricky issues here, and I think it’s entirely appropriate to apply all our philosophical tools to trying to get to the heart of the matter here. Here’s a link to Loy’s original review:

docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cach … l=en&gl=jp

There might be some restrictions on accessing it, let me know if you can get it.

From your remarks here, I’m guessing you might agree more with Loy than Ziporyn. Loy takes the more standard Mahayana position on the Two Truths. But this is really a conflict between Tiantai and general Mahayana. Tiantai is distinctive, as I understand it, for rejecting the adequacy of the Two Truths. It offers instead the Three Truths: Conventional, Ultimate and the Center. The first two are basically the same as in Nagarjuna: there “Emptiness” is Ultimate truth, but for Tiantai this is still a particular view, and is not the final word. (This gets complicated when we have to deal with “emptiness” as a concept, and the standard “emptiness of emptiness” clarification, as opposed to the experience of emptiness, which also leaves behind the concept of emptiness–but as I understand it in Tiantai both of these are still particular limited perspectives, rather than revelations of final truth). I’m not sure I can recapitaluate the reasons for the move to the Three Truths in Tiantai, why it feels Two Truths is misleading or inadequate. Ziporyn says something about it in this article, but maybe I can find another where he or someone else explains it more clearly. My understanding though is that the realization of Emptiness still privileges Ultimate Truth over conventional truth, so that there is a hierarchy between them, and also a relation of means and ends: Convenional Truth is a (necessary) means by which to achieve Ultimate Truth (realization of Emptiness), which can then be discarded, since Ultimate Truth is somehow “more” true. Tiantai, following the Lotus Sutra, denies that Ultimate Truth is more true than conventional truth (which is not just a means but the actual content of a Bodhisattva’s realization, and the basis of his ability to save living beings: to realize Emptiness is simultaneously to realize Conventional Truth, and to gain mastery of all sorts of different conventional truths). They are means and ends to one another. More importantly, to me, is the Tiantai idea that all propositions are Conventional Truths–there is really no falsehood, anything that can lead to liberation–that is, lead beyond itself, as in the parable of the Raft–is a conventional truth in some contexts. In Two Truths theory, I believe, some things might be excluded from conventional truth–things like Nazism, and also metaphysical claims of various religions. Conventional Truth originally seems to include only ordinary speech and Buddhist terminology. I think the problem with this, for Tiantai, is that when we are faced with something like Nazism, which is not included as a conventional truth, we have to start using typical dualistic true/false attitudes to it. I’m sorry I can’t be more clear about this, but my sense is that your objections stem from this issue–am I misreading you?

[Bento]

Krossie:

Thanks for the Ophir reference–I will check this out!

[anon]

Bento. Good to have you here! and you’re not misreading me. When I have more time I’ll try to respond more fully.