Zen And The Art Of…Obeying The Rules?

Zen And The Art Of…Obeying The Rules? March 27, 2017

Image via Wikipedia, public domain

At his blog Hardcore Zen, Zen teacher Brad Warner recently wrote about the idea of obeying rules as an ethical precept:

In Nishijima Roshi’s version of the Universal Precepts, the very first one is, “I vow to observe the rules of society.” (FYI, the other two are vows to observe the moral law of the universe, and to work for the salvation of all living beings.)

Nishijima Roshi’s version of the Universal Precepts is based on Dogen’s essay “Jukai” or “Receiving the Precepts.” In the translation Nishijima did with Mike Cross, he calls these the Pure Precepts rather than Universal Precepts. The first of these is given in that translation as, “The precept of observing rules.”…

When Nishijima was asked what we should do if the rules of society were clearly morally wrong, he said that our duty as Buddhists was to work to change those rules. But he believed it was always best to try to change the rules by working within the rules themselves. If you’re living in North Korea or someplace like that this might not be possible. But you can’t read this blog in places like North Korea, so I’m gonna go ahead and assume that most of my readership is living in places where this is still possible. And, yes, that goes for my readers in the United States too. [Brad Warner, “I Vow Not to Destabilize Society”]

Now, Brad goes on to say “One of the dangers that occurs when one works for social progress is that, in trying to make positive changes you risk destabilizing society as a whole….And chaotic societies are much more vulnerable to being taken over by power hungry dictators.”

That’s a point I agree with and that history bears out. When social structures completely fail, that sets the stage for authoritarians to take power. The title of Brad’s post is “I Vow Not to Destabilize Society”; I agree that not destabilizing society is a good rule of thumb. Though if your society is, say, Nazi Germany, or the so-called “Confederate States of America”, maybe you ought to do all you can to hasten its fall, so I’m not comfortable with making that a vow.

But even short of that extreme, the idea that if the rules are bad we are still constrained to work within them is problematic. Most authoritarian societies are not as obvious as North Korea about making change impossible. They often feature some fake political process, which serves to placate the people with an illusion of control but is disconnected from the levers of power — the political equivalent of a nothing button.

Sure, we still have elections here in the US, with much pomp and ceremony — but as political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page reported in 2014,”The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” [Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”]

The ruling class is well isolated. You and I can’t change the rules by acting within them. That’s not a call for violent revolution (not yet, at least), but we need to get outside the box in order to remake the box.

To some extent, “stability” means “resistance to change”. To change an unjust system you may need to create some instability — some holy chaos.

The Rule-Breaking Buddha

Strict adherence to society’s rules is an odd idea for a Buddhist to advance, as the Buddha broke many important rules of his society.

According to the mythology the Buddha was a prince who abandoned his station — and his wife and child — to go off on a spiritual quest. Sexism being what it is perhaps lighting out on his wife and son was permitted in his society; but abandoning his parents and his station, sneaking out of the palace, and cutting off his hair (the equivalent, relative to his society, of a man rebelliously growing his hair long in 1950s America), not so much.

When he started his own spiritual community he violated one of the prime rules of his society: he welcomed people of all castes. This is such a basic premise of Indian society that caste-fueled violence has continued into the 21st century. He also violated his culture’s rules about gender by allowing women to study his teachings and join his community.

The Big B did not beat his head against his society’s rules about caste or about sexism. He did not try to convince priests and kings to change the rules. He ignored them, bypassed them, and went about setting up his own social system.

Zen, according to its mythology, was founded by a guy who failed to pay proper subservience to the Emperor of China. And its history is marked with a number of radicals and reformers who violated rules, both of their surrounding societies and of Buddhist, even Zen Buddhist, institutions. Indeed, a recent book about them, Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers, bears on its cover praise from Brad: “These guys are my heroes…I really like this book.”

(Contradiction, too, is part of Zen.)

Zen also has a root in Taoism, a philosophy that often speaks about the limitations of moral rules (often contrasting itself with the Confucian emphasis on moral and ritual rules). The Tao Te Ching says “The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be….Therefore the Master says: I let go of the law, and people become honest.” [S. Mitchell translation]

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Thoreau, the man who gave us the concept of civil disobedience, is also regarded by many as the first American Buddhist.

Rules for Preserving Power

Brad claims that “In broad terms, honesty, integrity, reliability and so forth are the rules of society.” But a hard look at any actual society makes this a dubious claim. Much of any society’s rulebase, both its institutionalized laws and its less formal mores and folkways, is devoted to preserving the status quo power structure.

Institutional Zen is not innocent here. It played a role in the militant nationalism that lead to Japanese imperialism and World War II, from promoting a perverted version of bushido as a national value to helping raise money to build bombers. The rebel Buddha and Zen lunatic rule-breakers like Ikkyu would have been appalled.

In post-war Japan, formal Zen training has been part of orientation for new hires in some companies — not because they want enlightened compassionate bodhisattvas on the payroll, but because institutional Japanese Zen is good at instilling obedience and conformity. As Soto Zen priest Brain Daizen Victoria notes, “Senior monks act much like drill sergeants, and novice monks are their recruits.” [Daizen Victoria, “Japanese Corporate Zen”]

Higher Rules?

Image via Wikipedia, public domain
Image via Wikipedia, public domain

In response to this dichotomy between a vision of obedience to social rules as a reliable ethical guide and the disappointing reality, people often invoke some notion of “higher law”. The classic example is Sophocles’s Antigone, where the heroine appeals to a heavenly law to justify acting against the rules to give her criminal brother Polynices a decent burial.

But it’s noteworthy that this appeal to heavenly law can also be used by those defending authoritarianism. Years ago I was in an on-line debate with a cop who justified jailing cannabis users because, regardless of any other factors, it was Against The Law. When I brought up the example of Martin Luther King and other civil rights protesters doing things that were Against The Law, my interlocutor claimed that those fine people were following God’s Law, so it was okay. In his mind, dirty pot-smoking hippies couldn’t make that claim — an idea which Rastafarians, Coptic Christians, and many mystery cults over the centuries might dispute.

In other words, while social rules and laws can easily be distinguished, the existence and nature of any “higher” or “heavenly” laws is a matter for debate.

Such “higher” laws as may be cited are either found externally, in which case they are just social laws attributed to a divine author to lend them extra weight; or they emerge from the inside, from the individual’s own moral sense.

So when we realize that the moral authority of our politicians and priests and preachers of politesse — including the rules about how to change the rules — is an unreliable guide to ethical behavior and we cannot pledge allegiance to it, we are left with only our own ethical sense to guide us.

And so it behooves us to ask, what can we do to develop that sense? An excellent question which I shall save for another post.


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