Flash Flash Revolution - Hi, please read this article.

This article is pretty good but it's going to make me go on a Buddhism rant because I repeatedly see people misinterpret Zen Buddhism as a way to attack people doing meritorious actions.

The author falls into a pattern I see repeatedly when people try to leverage Zen Buddhism to make arguments about what actions have merit. Zen is the wrong tool. The goal of Zen is experiential; you shut up and sit. A lot of koans themselves are absurd simply to try to drive the point home that if you're talking instead of sitting you're doing it wrong. Why are you doing meritorious acts? What is the "you" that is doing meritorious acts? This questioning of "self" is the goal of the original koan that the author links to but poorly paraphrases. He omits the most important section at the end that drives the point of no-self home, so he instead ends up thinking the koan has something to do with virtue signaling:

Here's the author:

Quote:

The Emperor: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”

Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.

The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why.

Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”

The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”

And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”

Here's the koan he poorly paraphrases:

Quote:

Emperor Wu: "I have built many temples, copied innumerable Sutras and ordained many monks since becoming Emperor. Therefore, I ask you, what is my merit?"

Bodhidharma: "None whatsoever!" answered Bodhidharma.

Emperor Wu: "Why no merit?"

Bodhidharma:: "Doing things for merit has an impure motive and will only bare the puny fruit of rebirth."

Emperor Wu, a little put out: "What then is the most important principle of Buddhism?"

Bodhidharma: "Vast emptiness. Nothing sacred."

Emperor Wu, by now bewildered, and not a little indignant: "Who is this that stands before me?"

Bodhidharma: "I do not know."

The last line in the original koan is the important one. Who is the emperor that is accruing merit if "self" is nothing but a dependently arising phenomenon?

Because the author grounds their argument in Zen and misses the entire no-self point of the koan, they have no alternative explanation for why people do meritorious acts than to accrue "Virtue Points". Other schools, such as Mahayana Buddhism have a direct answer for this: bodhicitta. This is the desire to become enlightened to help free others from suffering. Here is a foundational explanation from one of the original meditations on Mahayana Buddhism, In Praise of the Awakening Mind, by Santideva:

Quote:

Even in cyclic existence great fruit comes from the Mind resolved on Awakening, but nothing like the uninterrupted merit that comes from that resolve when put into action....

From that moment on, though he may doze off or be distracted many times, uninterrupted streams of merit like the bursting sky continuously pour forth....

Immeasurable merit took hold of the well-intentioned person who thought 'Let me dispel the headaches of beings'.

What then of the person who longs to remove the unequalled agony of every single being and make their virtue infinite?...

Worship of the Buddha is surpassed merely by the desire for the welfare of others; how much more so by the persistent effort for the complete happiness of every being?

Hoping to escape suffering, it is to suffering that they run. In the desire for happiness, out of delusion, they destroy their own happiness, like an enemy.

It satisfies with every happiness those starved of happiness, and cuts away oppressions from those oppressed in many ways."

S., Crosby, K., & Skilton, A. (1998). The Bodhicaryāvatāra. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (p. 6-7)

Compare this with how the author views doing meritorious acts:

Quote:

We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.

The author has misinterpreted this koan in at least two ways:

1) The point of the koan is not about accruing merit, it's about identifying what a "self" that doesn't even exist is.

2) The author seems to think that helping people that you don't like would suddenly actually be meritorious. Bodhidharma would disagree because that is a distraction from meditating on emptiness.

The author has misinterpreted a Zen koan to excuse his way into accusing the "Blue Team" as he calls them of only caring about others as a way to signal their virtues. By creating this tribe and stuffing everyone that cares about others into it, he has effectively created a straw tribe that he can place himself in opposition against. He even admits this toward the end of his piece, but he never stops to consider why people care about others: bodhicitta.

That being said, I do think the author has tuned into an issue that many people have, especially those who focus on meritorious acts: They lack forbearance. They become impatient and ostracize instead of seeking genuine connection. Once again, Santideva covers this in his Meditation on the Perfection of Forbearance, and here I think he has an extremely important message for the author's "Blue Team":

Quote:

Therefore, even if one sees a friend or an enemy behaving badly, one can reflect that there are specific conditioning factors that determine this, and thereby remain happy....

If it is their very nature to cause others distress, my anger towards those fools is as inappropriate as it would be towards fire for its nature to burn. In fact, this fault is adventitious. Beings are by nature pleasant. So anger towards them is as inappropriate as it would be towards the sky if full of acrid smoke.

p. 53

If we want to talk about how and why we develop compassion toward others, and we want to use Buddhist arguments as our foundation, we should be looking at Mahayana Buddhism. It gives us a rich set of vocabulary that lets us move beyond oversimplifying the "Blue Team" as a bunch of selfish brats vying for "Virtue Points" as the author incorrectly (and admittedly) does. It also helps us paint a clearer picture on where the Blue Team (and many other tribes) fail: They lack patience, and this is a different trait than "tolerance" as the author defines it.