seventh world of chan buddhism - Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun

to doing a particularly odious job so we absolve ourselves of guilt by dumping the job onto
someone else.
A person who goes to work every day makes choices and compromises. So complex
is the network of commerce, industry, and professional services that it is often impossible to
draw any line of demarcation between acceptable and unacceptable occupations. A Chan
man must live in society and what is legal in society is legal for a Chan man. If he doesn't
like the law, he can try by legal means to alter it. If he finds an occupation personally
repugnant, he should abstain from it; but he should not chastise or condemn someone else
whose views differ from his. There simply is no other realistic way of complying with Right
Livelihood.
In all the world there is nothing more repugnant than a morally superior religious
leader who will take money from those whose occupations he finds reprehensible, who likes
fine leather gloves which, he supposes, come from leather trees, who demands a well ordered
society while denigrating the hands that do the dirty work of maintaining it, who richly lives
where there are no rats but who forbids the poor to rid themselves even of this scourge, and
so on.
Such a cleric is a professional hypocrite, a livelihood many stations below the more
conservative forms of prostitution.
CHAPTER 15 RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM
164