Nothing Wrong with Right & Wrong

There’s an old question in ethics as to whether an action should be judged by the motivation behind it or by the results it gives. This basically comes from the perspective of judgment as the judgment of a judge in court trying to decide whether you’re guilty or not, or if there are mitigating circumstances. But from the Buddha’s point of view, that’s the wrong image to keep in mind. His is more the image of a craftsperson. You have an intention to create something, and your intention is to get the results to come out well.

When the Buddha was judging his own thoughts, he judged them both by where they came from and by where they led. If the thoughts came from sensuality, ill-will, or harmfulness, they were to be abandoned. That’s because they gave bad results, unskillful results. They led you to do bad things. If they were based on renunciation, goodwill—or non-ill-will—and harmlessness, then they were okay. But again, the judgment also involved what kind of actions these thoughts would result in.

When the Buddha told Rāhula to look at his actions, first he had to judge them as to the intention behind them, and then also by the results that came out at the end. We’re looking at life as a skill. And the skill is determined both by your intentions behind your actions and by the results of the actions.

Say you intend to make a chair. As you’re planing the wood, the plane digs a little bit deeper than you intended it to. You’re judging a work in progress, so you figure out what can you do to bring it closer to what you wanted, and what adjustments you have to make so that still get satisfactory results, even though they’re not quite the way you envisioned them. So there’s nothing harsh and penal about how you judge yourself. It’s necessary and helpful. It’s all pretty matter-of-fact.

This question came up the other day about whether the factors of the path, rather than being called right or wrong, should be called wise or unwise, as if “right” and “wrong” were a hard set of concepts to bear. Too many people in the world seem to think that the worst thing you can do to somebody else is to judge them. But the real question is, what is your purpose in judging? When the Buddha judged his own actions, it was because he wanted to figure out how to put an end to suffering. And there’s a right and a wrong way to do it. He tried many wrong ways, ways that were not working. So, when he taught others, he had to clearly teach that the wrong ways are wrong, and explain how the right ways are right. There’s right view, right resolve, all the way down through right concentration. But those factors are also paired with wrong view, wrong resolve, wrong concentration: “right” in the sense that they lead to the results you want, the end of suffering; “wrong” in the sense that they don’t lead to those results. So there’s nothing wrong with right and wrong. It’s just having the right attitude toward them.

As the Buddha said, one of the factors that would enable someone to gain awakening while listening to a Dhamma talk is that they found joy in the Dhamma. Now, sometimes the Dhamma is very demanding. It teaches that you have to be responsible for your actions. You have to exercise your agency and you have to be responsible for the results of your actions. You have to admit the times when you’ve made mistakes, all so that you can learn. It’s a compassionate way of judging.

That’s why the Buddha said that shame is an important part of the practice. Shame is basically knowing that your actions don’t look good in the eyes of people you would like to impress. Now, sometimes you want to impress the wrong people, in which case shame can be unskillful, but in this case, you want to impress the wise. Remember, the wise are judging you not because they want to dismiss you or throw you in jail. They’re judging you because they want you to find the way to the end of suffering, just as they did. So their judgment is compassionate. In fact, they tend to have more compassion for you than you have for yourself.

In that context, judgment is not harsh. It’s not a heavy burden. And shame is not a horrible or debilitating emotion. It’s a guide as you realize that you want your actions to look good in the eyes of the wise—those who mean you well; those who have compassion for you but also have a very strong sense of what’s right and wrong, because they’ve seen for themselves what leads to dead ends and what doesn’t.

So a teaching that points this out clearly, out of compassionate motives, is a source of joy. When you learn to take joy in that, take joy in your sense of agency. joy in a sense of responsibility, that’s when you have the right attitude.

The idea that the issues of life should be left as a mystery—there was a secular Buddhist teacher who claimed he didn’t like the teachings on karma and rebirth because it set things out as if they were clear and settled, whereas he preferred to have a world in which things were not clear and unsettled—well, that was the world before the Buddha. Think of the people who listened to the Buddha teach and then would say it was like someone who’d carried a light into the darkness so they could see; someone who’d take something that had been turned upside down and turned it right side up; someone who made the Dhamma clear—because when it’s clear, then you can use it as a guide. A reliable guide. It’s not fuzzy.

As for the people who don’t like to be told what to do, the Buddha probably wouldn’t have much use for them. As he said, he was the teacher of those fit to be tamed. And people who don’t want to be tamed—well, he didn’t have time to waste on them.

So we should take joy in the fact that the Dhamma is clear. It sets things out as to what’s right and what’s wrong. But it’s not oppressively detailed about that, in the sense that there’s a lot that you have to notice for yourself. The Buddha gives you standards. And he points you to the questions you have to figure out for yourself. That’s not because he’s trying to be coy. It’s because certain things will depend on circumstances and you have to develop your discernment to read those circumstances.

Remember, there are only certain teachings that are categorical, i.e., true and beneficial across the board. There are other teachings that are true across the board but not always beneficial. Those are the ones where you have to use your own powers of observation to see when you should use them, when you shouldn’t.

For example, there are areas where the Buddha tells you to explore potentials inside you. He goes down the list of the factors for awakening. There’s the potential for mindfulness; there’s a potential for each of the factors. He’ll give you a name in some cases. In other cases, he’ll just say, well, there’s a potential for rapture. There’s a potential for calm. But you have to find where those potentials are within you and how to develop them. That’s where you get to exercise your own ingenuity, exercise your own independent judgment.

So it’s not that the Buddha’s laying down a rule for everything. Even the Vinaya, with its many thousands of rules, has lots of wiggle room. When you try to live by the rules, you’ll notice that.

So the Buddha, in pointing out right and wrong, gives you some room to use your own powers of observation. After all, you’re here to develop your discernment, and that’s how discernment gets developed: by using it independently. Not just doing what you’re told, but by learning to observe what questions to ask, what questions not to ask, how to look for the answers. The Buddha gives you whatever help he can, but he points out that there are a lot of things that you have to figure out for yourself if you want to develop your own discernment.

He gives long lists of the possible connections in the mind that cause suffering. And the lists, it’s really interesting, are not always the same. There is a standard common list for, say, the factors of dependent co-arising. But not every time the Buddha mentions that does he mention the same factors. He adds a few in some cases, takes away a few away in others. So there’s wiggle room in a lot of these teachings. But the basic framework was always there: the four noble truths.

There are some people for whom even just that much is too specific. There’s one teacher who says, “They should just be called ‘the four,’” because the Buddha was too sophisticated to think that anything could be an objective truth. And as for the idea of their being noble, well, everybody says their teachings are noble.

But the Buddha valued truths that were objective, i.e., true across the board. He treated them with utmost respect. After all, after he gained his awakening, he realized that if you live without respect, you’re miserable. You have to have something you respect. In his case, he respected the Dhamma, the truth he had discovered. And he taught the four noble truths as truths that lead reliably to a noble goal, i.e., a goal that was unconditioned, a goal that was not subject to death. That’s what he meant by “noble.” The truths are both noble and true in that they reliable set out the right duties for getting to a dimension that doesn’t die.

Those truths are true and beneficial across the board, as is the principle that skillful actions should be developed and unskillful ones should be abandoned. Everything else the Buddha said is either an elaboration of those points — in which case, those elaborations are also true and beneficial across the board — or a teaching that might be right for certain times and places and not for others. In those cases, you have to learn how to use your own sensitivity. Gaining a sense of time and place for truths like that is one of the ways in which you exercise your discernment. And it’s in exercising your discernment in areas like this that you develop the discernment that you need to look deeper inside.

That’s the problem with communication: knowing what’s true for everyone and what’s true only in certain cases. There was a philosopher in Germany years back who said each of us is a “monad.” We each live inside the walls of our own monad and we have no windows. In other words, we can’t see into other people’s monads. We can’t see what’s going on in their minds. The Buddha was wise enough to be able to extrapolate from his experience as to what things were true across the board for everybody, realizing there are also other cases where the way you put together your suffering is going to differ in some of the details from the way other people put together their suffering, in which cases you need to know what truths are right for you right now.

For example, in dependent co-arising, the Buddha said to earn to focus on any one of the connections. He’s setting out a range of possibilities. You’ll find that once you get one connection that hits home for you, everything else opens up.

So in some cases he’s saying, “Okay, this is right; this is wrong.” In other cases he’s saying, “Make your choice among these alternatives.” He’s treating you like an adult—someone who doesn’t feel wounded by other people’s judgments, doesn’t feel wounded about having your actions judged as to being right or wrong. Someone who’s wise enough to realize that’s good guidance.

In this world where everything is so blurry, the Buddha brings clarity. Where everything is so dark, he brings light. And the clarity and the light revolve around: What’s the right way to try to put an end to suffering? What are all the wrong ways that are not going to take you to the end of suffering?

So we should respond to his teachings, respond to the clarity, in the same way that the wise people who were listening to his talks in those days responded: with joy.