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 )