Dharma Message from Rev. Patti Usuki

 

“ Taking Responsibility”

A member of our sangha recently shared with me a television program examining the psychology of “evil.” Under what condition do ordinary “good” people do things that might be considered unspeakably cruel under normal circumstances? Take, for example, atrocities committed in times of war. How valid is the excuse that one was compelled to follow order? Or that desperate times call for desperate measures? Or that one was caught up in the insanity of the moment?

With such excuse, it seems that the cause of a person’s objectionable and aberrant behaviour is external to the person. “Someone else forced me to do it.” “Someone else said it was all right to carry on, despite my hesitation.” “We had no other choice.” “Crazy things were happening – it began to seem normal.” Then, are we merely puppets of unseen forces.” Does it have anything to do with whether we are good or evil?

History is full of such sad stories of humanity, or lack thereof. Even today, the newspapers and other media are rife with instances of the shocking brutality that people unleash upon on another, whether officially at war or in daily life. Perhaps we read about it and shake our heads, wondering how others could commit such heinous acts, but remain oblivious to our own complicity. Every day, dozens of innocents are massacred to terrorized or threatened in faraway places. It may be happening in Baghdad or Darfur. Maybe it is no further away than South L.A., across the great divide. Does that mean that those happenings have nothing to do with us? It’s easy to say such events do not intersect our lives, but they do. Through our action or inaction, whether we consider ourselves good or evil, various wheels are set in motion. War and the cause of war doesn’t just happen out of the blue. Neither do genocides, gangs, or poverty.

We can rationalize all we want about why human beings come to do the things they do, but in the end, each of us has a hand in our own karmic consequences, for better or worse. And because we are all interrelated, what we think, say, and do also effects someone on the other side of the world, and vice-versa. We do have a choice in everything we do. Moreover, we must never discount the karmic conditions that involves us in the past for what we are today; nor those we engage or create now that will inform our future outcomes.

Thus, say Shinran, “Know that every evil act done – even as slight as a particle on the tip of a strand of rabbit’s fur or sheep’s wool – has its cause in past karma … you should realize that if we could always act as we wished, then when I told you to kill a thousand people … you should have immediately done so. But since you lack the karmic cause inducing you to kill even a single person, you do not kill. It is not that you do not kill because your heart is good. In the same way, a person may wish not to harm anyone and end up killing a hundred or a thousand people.”

In the big picture, we can’t know good from evil. It is all the more reason to be grateful for the ever-present Wisdom and Compassion of life that embraces us just as we are, without our ignorance and our karmic baggage. So don’t blame anyone else for your actions. A little mindfulness will go a long way, in more ways than one.

Gassho,

Rev. Patti Usuki

Rev. Usuki is the Head Minister of San Fernando Valley Hongwanji Buddhist Temple

 

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