[Buddha-l] Barbaric not Buddhist

[Peter D. Junger]

"Richard P. Hayes" writes:

: On Sat, 2005-07-23 at 13:23 -0400, SJZiobro at cs.com wrote:
: 
: > The events relayed by your Burman acquaintance were beyond barbaric.
: > Evil is not too strong a word here. 
: 
: Perhaps not, but it is the wrong word to use in a Buddhist context.
: Moreover, it is a worse than useless word to use in any context. Let us
: stick to Buddhist concepts to describe what goes on in Buddhist
: contexts, lest we confuse the children. The actions described in the
: message that Joanna forwarded were unskilful and not worthy of
: emulation. But calling them evil is quite unnecessary. (I realize that
: as an admirer of President Bush you like to talk as he does, but if you
: persist in such unseemly vocabularical behavior, we will be forced to
: burn incense for you and pray for your speedy recovery from delusion.)

Of course, calling those unskillful actions "unskilful" is also
unnecessary.

It is my impression that the Shin teachers in the US, who are 
mostly associated with the Buddhist Churches in America, gloss
the word "evil" when it appears in English translations of
Buddhists texts as meaning "unskillful."

In that context it is unskillful to call any being "evil," but 
it is not necessarily unskillful to call an action, such as 
killing, "evil."

This does not mean, of course, that the President is being skillful
when he calls those whom he dislikes "evil."  Quite the contrary.

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
 EMAIL: junger at samsara.law.cwru.edu    URL:  http://samsara.law.cwru.edu