Book Reviews

Beyond Good and Evil: Commentary on Living with the Devil: a meditation on good and evil, by Stephen Bachelor.
Judith Johnson

In this book Bachelor does a nice job of elucidating the role of Mara in Buddhism. He develops the idea that the Buddhist Mara is that aspect of self that blocks the stream of life, promoting stasis and preventing spiritual development. He brings out the parallels between Mara and the Christian Devil, including the necessity of accepting and even welcoming their existence as part of maturing spiritually in both religions. Since I tend to think of the hell fire and brimstone Devil of the fundamentalists it was refreshing to read Batchelor quoting the Church father Origen of Alexandraia who said “The destruction of this last enemy will not be its nonexistence, but its ceasing to be an enemy and death.” Although this may work for some Christians, there is another popular Christian view of the Devil as the personification of Evil and God as the personification of Good. Even when Christians locate these concepts internally as aspects of our personalities, it seems that there are differences. Mara is not usually identified as “bad” itself. God is not usually conceived of as promoting flow. The Buddhist refusal to accept fixed views, the emphasis on “encounter[ing] the raw, unfiltered contingency of life itself” as Batchelor puts it, is not the focus of Christian practice as I have encountered it, so I don’t quite buy equating Mara with the Christian Devil as closely as Batchelor does. It is possible that if Christians made their monastic practices more freely available I might have a different view – that’s “contingency” for you. If I cling to the idea that my relationship to Christianity could have been different, well, that hankering after different realities is already Mara. There I agree with Batchelor.

Batchelor starts with the old story where Mara is tempting Gotama: “Long is the span of human beings, one should live like a milk sucking baby.” But Gotama refuses to be an infant. He replies, “Short is the span of human beings, one should live as if one’s head is on fire.” Looking at how Batchelor handled good and evil from this point helped me focus a reexamination of my own ideas, particularly those related to spiritual development.

There is a point in Buddhist development where you start to see and hear Buddhist concepts all around you. At this point you are no longer clinging to Buddhism. You have freed yourself enough to see the elements of human spiritual development no matter what form they take. Buddhism seems to be unique in having this as a goal of practice. As one of our Zen chants says, “Don’t attach to anything, not even Buddhism.” Batchelor looks in many directions, showing how we can learn about Mara and Buddha from William Blake, Montaigne, and Pascal, as well as from Buddhists. In Buddhism, one does not even cling to “divine union.” The last words of one of Zen’s abbots included “Always direct yourself….to the place beyond knowing, reach it, master it, don’t attach to it.”

In this book Batchelor emphasizes “don’t attach to it.” He describes “buddhanature” as “that open perspective whence one is free to respond to the call of others” and “maranature” as “fixed positions that prompt one to react.” This is a good understanding, but how to practice it? Most of us still need to “reach it.” Reaching it is usually done by following a particular tradition. As many teachers remind us: if we keep changing paths, we will just keep circling the base of the mountain instead of climbing it.

People may utter well chosen words without reaching divine union. In fact Buddhism teaches us that everyone utters well said words some of the time. We need to listen to everyone, but that does not mean there is no point in staying on a path. I benefited from my teacher’s guidance on this. I said I thought it was possible to do what I was setting out to do through Christianity, and my teacher did not attack the idea at all. He just said, “Yes, but you would have to do it.” I confess I shuddered as I thought of becoming a Christian monastic, and I buckled right back down to the Zen. Buckling down to Buddhist practice involved facing a lot of things including my aversion to Christianity, but it also meant staying on the very narrow Buddhist path that works for me.

As I read and reread this book and discussed it with people, I found myself engaged in a struggle between buddhanature and maranature. I found myself torn between my need to stay on my path and the need to not cling to fixed ideas. Batchelor is inviting us to explore how Buddhism can adapt itself to North America. Clearly it is doing so, and its leaders must develop a good understanding of Christianity to do so. Sasaki Roshi (the senior Rinzai Zen leader in North America), faced with a student who was fixated with the idea of “dying” in meditation, asked, “How do you resurrect?” I can imagine how during intensive meditation this would loosen a fixation on death and refocus on life. The student is benefiting from the teacher’s expert adaptation of Zen to Christianity, not thrashing around off the path by themselves. The teachers expertise and the foolishness of students thrashing around off the path on their own, is the crux of my struggle with Batchelor’s book.

This is an exciting time in Buddhism. Adaptation to the west is in full swing with many forms of Buddhism adapting themselves to the needs of western students. There is also a tendency for people to dabble with a variety of traditions, and to teach without the kind of careful prolonged training and attention to lineage that older traditions insist on. Here is what I was reacting to. Here is what I need to respond to now.

It takes a very long time to produce a mature Buddhist teacher. Actually it takes a very long time to produce a mature teacher in any tradition, Buddhist or otherwise. When I, and another student who has visited Japanese monasteries, challenged our Zen teacher on some of the seeming excesses of those institutions, we were told we would have to be in a Japanese monastery for 20 or 30 years before understanding why those techniques work for them. I am just starting to really appreciate how this tradition is working for me. Maybe in another 20-30 years I’ll be ready to contribute some modification of my own. The teacher who pointed out our ignorance trained first as a lay person, then spent 4 years in a monastery (that was considered exceptionally quick acheivement), and then was sent out to support a Zen group. After three years, during which he repeatedly returned for more monastic training, he was recognized as an Osho. After 15 years of teaching he still returns to the monastery, accepts their decisions on many issues, and is not considered ready to be a Roshi. Batchelor seem to have abandoned this sort of patience. At the end of his book he invites us to “wander along the gaps” between traditions, but life is short, my head is on fire, I am suffering and hunger for the means to end it, I can’t follow every path and if I bushwhack I am liable to reach the end of my span facing an impassable obstacle. This invitation is premature for me.

Obviously this book was worth a read. It helped me focus an examination of myself and my own attitudes to good and evil. I would like to share my current understanding of the problem of good and evil, and work from there to say more about why “the gaps between traditions” is not the most fruitful place to found what Batchelor calls “a contemporary culture of awakening.”

It is fundamental to Buddhism that nothing is separate from anything else. We are part of everything else. We always have been and we always will be. All we have to do is realize it. In Buddhism there is no split between a good God and a bad Devil. In fact there is no such thing as good and bad. These concepts are fictions that are needed to socialize children, but as adults we need to get rid of them. As the Affirming Faith Mind sutra (sometimes called trust in mind) says, “Gain and loss, right and wrong, once and for all, get rid of them.”

Good is what children are rewarded for; bad is what they are punished for. In any sane society we reward helpful behavior and we punish harmful behavior. In a crude sense good is helpful and evil is harmful. If we are correctly socialized, then bad behavior will cause us guilt. When we see that our actions have caused harm, then we suffer immense amounts of anguish.

People fundamentally want to avoid causing harm. Actually it is not just being socialized in a particular way that causes this desire for good: we are a social species and our biology won’t let us create a culture where we really desire anything except good. Even in criminal subcultures there is honor among thieves. Our biology dictates that we desire good for members of our own community. (Natural selection operates, if you mess up the community you depend on your reproduction fails and your dysfunctional genes die out.) We desire good. We expect the same of others and are outraged when we don’t always get it.

Although people fundamentally want to do only good, this is not possible. Our biology ensures that we have a capacity for violence of all degrees. Even plants live. We always kill to eat. This is reflected in a Buddhist mealtime prayer that includes the phrase “every morsel is a sacrifice of life.” We need to eat, we need affection, we need a lot of things and this neediness leads to greed. As Gotama found, ascetic practice lets you control greed, but it does not remove it.

Sometimes we need to kill animals to eat or to protect our crops. Worse, we must defend ourselves and members of our own community. We may have to physically harm other people to do this. Our biology insists. To be capable of killing we avoid identifying with the things we must kill. We develop hatred. Even worse, when greed and hatred are not getting us into trouble, our best intentions are not enough to stop us being bad. All actions have some harmful effects, and we must act.

Now we are caught in a dilemma. We desperately want to be good, but we are stuck with greed and hatred and mistakes, and that makes us bad. When we are very young, we just don’t notice the dilemma. Then a small part of ourselves, the intellectual part, notices the problem. It wants to fix things. It wants to be good, but it does not know how. It can’t fix the problem with intellect because there is no intellectual solution. The small intellectual part can’t fix things, so it starts trying to hide the problem. We get in the habit of interpreting or framing things in a self-serving way, in a way that denies that we are motivated by greed or hatred. We also deny that we ever make mistakes. Now we have added delusion to our problems.

We are really in a mess: we can live in delusion, but then we suffer from being alienated from reality; we can see that we are bad, but then we suffer from the anguish of guilt. Either way we suffer. (It is this suffering that is meant by the first noble truth of Buddhism, often phrased as “life is suffering.”) What happens when, driven by suffering, we combine our capacity for violence with delusion is terrible indeed. Here is where we get holocausts and self-righteous wars.

What we really need at this point is an effective spiritual tradition (religion) to help us out of the trap of oscillating between delusion and guilt. There is an old Buddhist teaching: “He who has not abandoned greed, hatred and delusion, is called Mara's prisoner, captured in Mara's snare, subject to the Evil One's will and pleasure.” The use of the term “Evil One” here can be deceptive to those with a western Christian background. Life requires us to develop greed, hatred and delusion, then to abandon them if we live long enough to undertake the process. Mara is what blocks the stream of life. Mara is anything that prevents us from abandoning our childish view of good and bad.

It is necessary to try to avoid harm. Even though it is impossible, we must make the effort. Christians frame this as a struggle between God and the Devil. In Buddhist practice avoiding harm is just that, avoiding harm.

Because the problem of good and evil cannot be solved intellectually, any religion must contain paradoxes. In Christianity the paradox is that God is omnipotent good but evil is allowed to exist. Christians solve this by accepting that “God moves in mysterious ways." One accepts the will of god without expecting to understand it. To a mature Christian expecting to understand the will of God is childish. Having accepted the existence of evil as a manifestation of the will of an omnipotent and good God Christians can then accept that they have sinned, ask for forgiveness, and accept that they are forgiven. Then they can face their dark side without projecting it onto an external Devil and recognize that “the Kingdom of God is within.” In its original form the concept of sin meant having missed the mark, not on purpose out of evil intentions, but because it was impossible to do otherwise. The concept of original sin is meant to be liberating. We are not bad, we contain the Kingdom of God, we just can’t help missing the mark.

In Buddhism the paradox is ourselves. When we cut through delusion and see ourselves as part of everything else, then we accept “things as they are.” Then we can see that our small self is just a bundle of conditioned reflexes. A reflexive running from pain is interfering with our functioning. Our small self can’t help the way it is. It thinks that it is us. It thinks that it is bad. It is wrong about both things. When we see this, we stop wanting to fix ourselves, and we realize that life is wonderful. We also see clearly what we need to do to fulfill our role in the matrix of things, and we want to do it. As Shunryu Suzuki said, when we see what we need to do and we do it, we are expressing ourselves fully, and this is freedom. That is one of the uses of strict form in Zen. With fixed roles and definite customs, we can practice finding our freedom in what needs to be done. There is a teaching in the Rinzai Zen lineage of Joshu Sasaki: “As for turning back the wheel of karma, no thought is to be wasted on it.” Wasting thought on it is childish. One accepts ones mistakes and having done so is free to do exactly what is needed now, creatively seeking a balance between avoiding harm and living fully.

In both Christian and Buddhist cases it is not enough to realize the solution to the paradox intellectually. Actually, that can’t be done. One will waste thoughts on regrets until a deeper realization is achieved. To achieve this there has to be repeated opening, listening and surrender. Enduring physical pain in silence or with ritual sound assists so powerfully with all these elements that it is used in any spiritual tradition I can think of. It can take many forms: sitting in prolonged meditation or kneeling in prayer, enduring heat in a sweat lodge or doing a Sundance with rawhide threaded through a newly cut flap of flesh, stretching the joints in yoga, dancing for hours as Muslim dervishes do. When we endure pain in silence, the small self has stopped running, and it can open and listen. If it does so consistently in spite of the emotional pain which adds itself to the physical, it will see and surrender to things as they are.

Surrender takes many forms. Buddhists are often instructed to “die on the cushion.” In yoga one surrenders on the out breath while stretching a little further. Christians surrender to God. Hindus engage in Guru worship where they surrender to the teacher. Perhaps for some people old age will do. When we are crippled with arthritis and unable to move about and socialize, there is pain and life leaves us nothing except to accept things as they are.

If it is to do us any good, this process must carry over into everyday life. A therapist friend once told me that when she does something effective with a client, she often does not know what she is going to do until she does it. Then she acts very fast, much faster than she could think through the “psychobabble.” She is opening and listening, and doing freely what needs to be done. She says there is a lot of mystery that happens in therapy. (This is not my experience.)

However it is done, repeated opening, listening and surrender help bring the deluded intellectual part of ourselves into submission. This intellectual part, our small self as some Buddhist teachers call it, is like an overdeveloped muscle that thinks it is the whole body. Perhaps if you live your whole life as a hunter gatherer, this part develops more naturally in service to the rest of the body, I don’t know. However development progresses in a hunting and gathering setting, the rest of us must bring our overly intellectualized small selves into submission by doing things that seem not just intellectually counterintuitive, but outright crazy. It is not very intelligent, from a western perspective, to spend week after week sitting on a small round cushion with sore knees and tired back, or to kneel for hours in prayer, or to Sundance, or to Guru worship. It is not intelligence that ends our suffering. What ends it is dropping the idea that the world could or should be other than it is. If we want to enjoy the wonder, we must accept and submit to all of it: pain, evil, old age, death, paradoxes, suffering itself. Each tradition is its own path for bringing us to this point.

Batchelor is aware of the importance of path, and he says, “The survival of a path is achieved by walking it – even when you have no clear idea of where it will lead,” so I’m puzzled by his invitation to “wander in the gaps.” When he says that in the gaps we will ask anew the old questions “for which each tradition claims to have the answers.” he seems to misunderstand and undervalue the old Buddhist traditions. There are no answers as such in Buddhism, just methods for achieving realization. Each tradition does have its own methods, its own map of the mountain, its own narrow routes past the inevitable obstacles. In other religions, particularly among monotheistic fundamentalists, some do claim to have answers, but fundamentalism isn’t what is under discussion here. If we want to see clearly what works for human beings in general, surely we will find it in the overlaps, in the things that religions have in common. In fact Batchelor says himself that “In … encounters between traditions are the seeds of a contemporary culture of awakening likely to germinate.”

Westerners tend to be impatient with both repetition and pain. At one point Batchelor points out that you can tire of the repetitive practice in both Buddhism and Christianity. True enough, but western attempts to come up with paths that avoid the common features of ancient traditions (which include repeating repetition ad nauseum) have failed before. This is why psychiatrists have largely given up on Jung's ideas and now resort to medication as much as to talking. Jung thought he could manage a more extreme form of what Batchelor seems to recommend, he examined Zen then tried to cobble together something more palatable for people used to instant gratification and committed to the idea of rapid “progress”. We would like it if this worked, realization without pain or repetition, I would go for that if I thought it was possible! But life is not like that. If you don’t repeatedly use pain to open, listen and surrender then you will continue your old thought patterns. With your old thought patterns you will repeatedly suffer the pain of guilt and delusion and you will constantly make decisions that are more harmful than they need to be because you can’t look at the way things are. This is the problem of good and evil.

Talking is not enough. Talking can easily reinforce the small self in its self serving delusions. A good therapist must see and call those delusions repeatedly. A person must cycle through their pain until opening, listening and surrender occur or nothing will change. If change occurs the process must be continued for decades before it is irreversible. Most people simply can’t afford the cost or are not prepared to pay big bucks to have someone repeatedly see through their pet ideas about themselves. It is a spiritual teacher’s job to insult the student, over and over again. Spiritual teachers have the mystic and promise of religion to help students endure this. Zen students (and disciples in other religions) repeatedly tolerate going through stages where they are outraged at the teacher. Outrage develops because they are being shown things the small self does not want to see. At this point, in spite of the promise of religion, many western students find a reason to leave their teacher, or find a reason to stop their practice, or find a reason to switch traditions, or find a reason to strike out on their own without a guide. The small self is very good at finding reasons to do what it wants. It wants to hide its dark side. It reminds me of Eve and Adam hiding them selves in Eden. It also reminds me of my baby brother who set the house on fire, then locked himself in the bathroom to hide from the consequences. The small self is intellectual, but it’s not very intelligent.

Talking therapy can help people see enough of the truth to cope, and we must cope. Talk is an important starting point. That is why Buddhists have the concept of right (or complete) speech, and we have invented therapy. The limited insights achievable though talk can be very helpful for spiritual development if they are incorporated into a more complete spiritual practice. Therapists are right that therapy should not become a way of life. Talking everything through in detail is something that needs to be grown out of. This is a second benefit of silence in spiritual practice. People reach the point where they can accept things as they are, without talking through the details. This is essential because things as they are is so big, we would never stop talking if we had to talk about it all. Actually some people are so tormented they never do stop talking. We all know people who babble incessantly. They are in a lot of pain. A mature spiritual practitioner wastes few words. Jung was right that healing the psyche is a spiritual process, but only a small part of the process can be fit into a university/academic/clinical model.

In my experience, both unskillful therapy and unskilled spiritual guidance prop up people’s illusions, so they can cope. This is not just destructive: it is disrespectful. We know the truth already, but we are afraid of its brightness. When we are anguished enough to seek help we are begging to be pulled into its light. Of course to cut through a delusion you must see it, and you must see when and how the recipient of your services is ready to see it. How do you see these things? You open and you listen, then you respond freely. If you cannot do this consistently, you have no business trying to help people in this way, you are not qualified. Unskilled spiritual and therapeutic work can easily reinforce “Maranature”. Propping up people's delusions promotes stasis and causes continuation of unnecessary harm and suffering.

A true healer does more than listen. They are not kind in the way we usually think of kindness. Our delusions support a distorted self image that we are very attached to. Ending delusion always hurts. We are insulted and outraged by the destruction of self image even when we knowingly worked hard to facilitate that destruction. The amazing thing about the human spirit is that we so badly want to be seen as the essentially good being that we are, that we will return repeatedly to the insults of a skilled teacher. Deep inside us buddhanature knows that this is what we need. In fact a skilled teacher frequently makes direct appeals to our buddhanature, and frequently responds to our maranature with a resounding silence in which we truly hear ourselves.

Talking is not enough, listening is not enough, drugs are not enough: a cup of tea, alcohol, prozac, etc: these will help you feel better for a while, and people with a lot of anguish may need these things to function. There is nothing wrong with this, except that if you avoid your psychic pain too much there is no opportunity to alter your thinking patterns. There really isn’t any way out of repetition, or pain, any more than there is a way to have a human life without first believing in the fiction of good and evil, then if life permits it, seeing through that initially essential delusion.

Western attempts to provide answers that are easy and safe, answers that can be administered as a pill or in a series of sessions with a counselor or as a fast or comfortable spiritual practice: these are doomed to failure because they miss the point. Spiritual development is difficult, repetitive and uncomfortable because it has to be. Really seeing that you contain both good and evil, seeing this deeply, then releasing these concepts because life really is beyond them: this is more difficult, more uncomfortable, and much scarier than climbing mountains to exercise our physical muscles. Like physical exercise spiritual practice must become a way of life. Effort must be ongoing if we are to develop.

At the start of his book Batchelor identifies his religions as Buddhism (he has been a monk in both Tibetan and Zen traditions), Christianity (he was raised in a Christian culture), and science (which he correctly identifies as filling some of the functions of a religion.) He does a great job of using these perspectives to stimulate thought about good and evil, but when he suggests finding a path in the “gaps between traditions” he seems to have missed the point.

If the new forms of Buddhism that are arising are to be effective, the modifications of ancient traditions will be made by older, skilled and seasoned practitioners. Effective spirirtual practices will not drop the common elements of repetition, pain, opening, listening and surrender. They will be guided by teachers who will train for an indefinite period, committing their whole lives to repetitive practice, at least as long as they teach. Teachers will not expect to be released from the supervision of their teachers, unless their teachers decide they are ready. A practitioner who thinks they are fully enlightened so they don’t need repetitive practice or correction, is liable to wander off the path and become one of the corpses of the spiritual and therapeutic worlds: a scandal. But teachers who return repeatedly to repetitive practice seeing through their own delusions as they arise, will not get caught up in self image or desire and their example will inspire their students to stick with it when the going gets tough, accepting feeling insulted as part of the path. As they mature over decades of exploring the depths of a single path and student’s responses to it, the new teachers will be free to modify practice to suit culturally different students. That way the depth and subtlety of the ancient traditions will be preserved. We need to tread a middle way that avoids both stasis and the lure that so easily tempts westerners off any path, the do it yourself quick fix.

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