To Avoid
Evil
- Sensei Sevan Ross
“All
evil actions committed by me since time immemorial,
Stemming
from greed, anger, and ignorance,
Arising
from body, speech, and mind,
I now
repent having committed.”
Repentance Gatha
“She
wouldn’t shut up and stop crying,
So I put a
couple more caps in her head.
She shut
up then.”
Man testifying at murder trial.
As Buddhists, we may not spend much energy
examining evil, the nature of evil, and the relationship we have to it. We
may speak of “harmful actions.” It is more likely we will
mention “unskillful actions.” Buddhists do not speak of a
progenitor of evil, an agent outside us, a Satan. Christians do.
They speak of a fallen angel, one who was
unified with God but now lives apart from God and suffers the rejection and absence of God. That God and Satan have somehow become estranged
can be a point of concern and confusion to Buddhists as they struggle to understand the Christian mind. It can also be so for Christians. We may ask, why doesn’t God bridge
the gap between them and pull Satan back into the fold? Maybe he
can, but that may actually not serve the tradition in its attempt to come to grips with the horrendous actions of humans when under the
spell of evil. Let us here not concern ourselves so much with the
circumstances of God’s and Satan’s relationship, but instead turn our attention to the anguish inside the Fallen Angel, since his
anguish is really our own.
Satan is separated from God. He is estranged, alienated, apart. He comes across as childish in his complaint -- a teenage boy who has
discovered that he cannot simply do whatever he pleases and so rebels, only to suffer inevitable punishment and confinement.
Each new attempt to foil, manipulate, or even
destroy God or some part of God’s Creation only throws Satan farther into the Abyss. He feels that he has no alternative except continued rebellion,
distraction, subversion. He goes to ever greater lengths to destroy
God’s image and Creation. Satan comes to delight in the wholesale
ruin of God’s creatures, especially Humankind.
Satan’s main subversion is in the manipulation
of the human mind -- the ego. It is through encouraging the acting
out of the most deadly sins that he operates. And the acting out of
these destructive tendencies is always done by women and men themselves -- never by Satan as any real entity. His role is that of the ego’s own voice in the head: advisement, misinformation, suggestion, judgment, innuendo. He plants the seeds of our evil actions in the rich soil of the deluded
ego. We do the rest.
As a young Catholic I was taught to watch for
Satan, lookout for him, be on guard. “He will appear to you as
yourself, “ they would repeat in Catechism. He will look like
ourselves, our own voice, our most trusted advisor, our closest confidant.
He will always be the voice of self-fulfillment, one leading us toward apparent happiness, power, satisfaction, fame, immortality,
bliss. If only we can bring ourselves to do that which is clearly
unskilled, harmful, destructive of the “other” around us -- if we can manifest evil.
Only much later in life did it become clear to
me that Satan, the agent of evil, was unnecessary for the existence of evil.
After all, he never does anything anyway; he only
works with our obsessions and egos to cause us to give birth to real evil.
If we turn around to look for him in the flesh (often after the evil act has been performed and we regard it with disbelieving eyes,
our hands at our side), we find only a shadow, a dim memory of a suggestion made by no one to no one else. What could we have been thinking? Where was our head? Where was our heart? Couldn’t we see what the result would be?
The idea of a Satan only serves to make tangible
that twisted set of habit-instincts in us that allow us to engage in behavior that starts at “harmful” and progresses to
“unspeakable.” We as Buddhists might say that he is our own twisted karma itself put into a form we may come to externalize. To declare that we do not recognize the creature Satan as Buddhists is
all well and good, but that twisted karma is still operating in each of us at some level. Given the right circumstances, it can come to fruition as evil actions. It has its own life, its own potential, even without a Satan-like agent. After all, do we need Kannon herself as an agent for us to manifest our
innate compassion? Do we not find ourselves saying to our
non-Buddhist friends in explanation of Kannon something like, “She embodies our infinite compassion?”
So what, then, is the nature of evil itself? Personally, I see it as volitional actions that are beyond
“unskillful” or simply “harmful.” Unskillful actions are
blunders of practice compared to true evil. They are perpetrated in
spite of our awareness of more healthy, more compassionate actions. We
are able to call unskillful actions unskillful because we still can recall what skillful really is -- we have not yet lost all perspective
on our own twisted karma. Unskillful actions are regrettable to us
because we have come to understand, to whatever degree, that the “other” that we are trying to harm or manipulate for our own ends, is
none other than ourselves.
But when there is no trace of recognition of the
other as self, then we can produce evil. The man acting in the
second quote above is completely dis-identified with the woman he shot. When
the solution to the problem of “self and other” presents itself as the premeditated, or even progressive automatic, harming of, abuse
of, or outright destruction of that which is seen as “other,” then
we have evil.
Evil acts lead to a progressive isolation and
separation. No matter how close we may appear to be to others, we
are alone. Stalin stayed completely alone in what was once the
servants’ quarters in one of the palaces of the Kremlin. He had
no pictures on the wall, no real furniture, an army cot for a bed. Reduced
to living alone in a bare room while he was one of the most powerful men in the world, he embodied Satan. Stalin murdered twenty million peasants in the 1930’s, largely because
he himself was once one, in an attempt to solve “self and other” by simply eliminating the “other.” Mussolini never took his clothes off while having sex with his many
mistresses. Hitler did not eat meat, but only because he believed
it to be a source of germs from others. Personal isolation is a
hallmark of great evil. Consider the Unabomber. His was not the isolation of spiritual quest, the isolation designed to
bridge the gap between self and other.
Evil has in it the feature of sowing the seeds
of future actions -- not only in the classic karmic sense of cause and effect, but also in the rather quick laying down of response and
reaction patterns. Once performed, a truly evil act can quickly
lead to the next evil act, whereas the simply unskillful act may often have in its completion the element of reflection, regret, even shame. Someone who is in an evil state is dismissive of the feelings, concerns,
well-being of others. There is no pause to reflect on the damage
done. There is only the next action, always born out of deep self
absorption. It is possible in this way to actually become an
evil person, one for whom the reflection and regret aspects have truly faded away.
The loneliness born of the karmic seeds of evil
actions throws us deeper and deeper into the pit of separation and alienation.
This descent is so steep that only by heroic efforts can it be arrested.
These efforts take great spiritual and psychological strength -- and few may have it in sufficient measure. Witness the rate of recidivism suffered in the realms of prisons and
drugs.
As we reach the lowest levels of our new hell we
find ourselves ever more desperate and separated, and we may come to resent anything and anyone having any trace of commectedness. So we try all the more to destroy the “other.” On and on the process goes. The Wheel turns, and new karmic seeds are planted. We may come to discover that we have embodied Satan.
All this is initially born out of our habit to
distinguish, then to prefer, then to judge -- to buy into the delusion of a
self vs. an other. While this delusion is in itself a miserable
state filled with the suffering of birth and death, when we reach for the radical solution of destruction to end the pain, we enter on the
evil path.
If there ever were a more tangible reason to
practice sincerely -- ever a more concrete fear to fix in the mind in order to fuel our efforts -- it is that by doing so we can avoid evil. By proceeding always from the oneness of all things, even if only
intellectually or shallowly realized at present, we can avoid that little voice inside that whispers, “You know, all you have to do is . . . . “
Reprinted
with permission of Rochester Zen Center
First
appearing in Zen Bow, Spring 2002