Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

86 Edward S. Ragsdale
K. Venkata Ramanan (1966) contrasts this incomplete morality with Great
Compassion.
The highest kind of moral conduct, its perfection, consists in the non-clinging way,
not clinging to sin or merit as absolute and unconditioned. The bodhisattva that
enters deep into the truth of things, cultivating the contemplation of their sunyanature,
beholds with his eye of wisdom that sin and merit are not absolute and
unconditioned. The excellence of moral conduct does not permit any attitude of
despising the sinner nor any attitude of taking pride with regard to the merited.
It is the non-clinging way imbued with the right understanding of things that gives
perfection to morality. (p. 283)
Here we see that the moral categories (good and bad, right and wrong) that
now sustain our sense of moral value, neither exist inherently, nor differ from
each other absolutely. (If they did exist in absolute, mutually exclusive duality,
they would be useless – even meaningless – to us, for we would be unable to
relate to them.) Realization of the emptiness of inherent existence of these designations
permits the moral sensibility that they can only imperfectly represent to
shed the limits of its reifications, in a new and deepened tolerance for relationality.
This awakening of consciousness, its transformation of ignorance into wisdom,
is possible only because ignorance and wisdom do not inherently differ. Nor
for that matter do samsara and nirvana. In this regard, enlightenment may be said
to be, as Zen practitioners remind us, “nothing special.” It is only when one sees
through the illusion of real or absolute difference between ignorance and enlightenment,
or between samsara and enlightenment, that liberation is possible. To
think otherwise is eventually to chase in circles reified and thus deluded images.
In sum, we find that Buddha taught many things, in accord with people’s
varied capacities. This includes a foundation of absolutist, dualist ethics, which
provides the needed concreteness to rescue minds that are unable to see beyond
their own absolutizing distortions. Yet as persons grow in moral restraint, meditative
stabilization, and insight, they need not rely so heavily upon concrete, restrictive
rules to maintain and deepen their moral consciousness. And as insight into
emptiness increases, there grows awareness that moral precepts themselves – like
all other phenomena – lack absolute existence. One practical consequence of this
is that there are times when an enlightened response would not accord with the
precepts. Thus Thurman (1981) notes a discussion by the Eighth Century Saint
Atisa that in exceptional situations, a bodhisattva may “kill, or steal or commit
adultery, or lie, if his motivation is to benefit sentient beings, and if his causal
awareness is such that he can prevent a greater amount of suffering on the part of
his victim in future lives by thus depriving him of his present life ...” (1981,
p. 21). Of course we need to remember that such departures from the precepts
assume great beings at high levels of realization. Those of us not utterly free of
hatred and bad motivation would pay mightily in karmic consequences for such