[Buddha-l] Barbaric not Buddhist

[Stanley J. Ziobro II]

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005, Richard P. Hayes wrote:

> 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.

Although I see you point and agree with you inasmuch as the General
described in Joanna's message was in part lacking in skill, still, this
lack comprised (1) killing people (2) for the purpose of intimidating and
subjugating the local populace.  From this perspective his deed was evil.
I suppose one might prefer to use such terms as bad, wrong, wicked, harmful,
injurious, ill-omened, as well as unskilful to conceive of this General's
action, but these are conceptually, all of them, different connotations to
the notion of evil.  I am going to do the unpardonable, but the Japanese
Buddhist dictionaries I have -- Nakamura Hajime's "Bukkyougo Daijiten" for
instance -- indicate that the notion of evil is not a foreign Buddhist
concept and is used to describe what goes on in Buddhist contexts.  If I
had an objection to the use of the word "evil" in a Buddhist (con)text it
would be based on a notion that this term only carried with it (or simply
implied) a Judeo-Christian worldview.  Unfortunately, I have no such
objection because there are certain philosophical notions of evil in the
West that clearly predate Christianity and arose without the context of a
Jewish worldview.  To illustrate my point, one need only consider the
writings of the Greek tragedians, or the Platonic or Aristotlian notions
of evil as the absence of a due good.  As to whether these notions are
compatible with Buddhist concepts I don't know, but I would surmise they
are at least analogous.

> (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.)

I took it as a given that you are already in the habit of burning incense
and praying for all sentient being for the speedy recovery from delusion.
I hadn't the least idea that my remarks have engendered in you such feats
of altruism.  But I can't take the credit here; that probably goes to
George W. Bush.  Amazing what that man does.

Stan Ziobro