Theos-Talk Archives (March 1995 Message tl00037)

Our ideas on Evil.  Evil has no existence per se and is but the
absence of good and exists but for him who is made its victim.
It proceeds from 2 causes, and no more than good is it an
independent cause in nature.  Nature is destitute of goodness or
malice; she follows only immutable laws when she either gives
life & joy, or sends suffering & death, and destroys what she has
created.  Nature has an antidote for every poisn and her laws, a
reward for every suffering.  The butterfly devoured by a bird
becomes that bird, and the little bird killed by an animal goes
into a higher form.  It is the blind law of necessity and the
eternal fitness of things, and hence cannot be called Evil in
Nature.  Humanity then alone is the true source of evil.  Evil is
the exaggeration of good, the progeny of human selfishness and
greediness.  Think porofoundly and you will find that save death
- which is no evil but a necessary law, & accidents which will
always find their reward in a future life- the origin of every
evil whether smalll or great is in human action, in man whose
intelligence makes him the one free agent in Nature.  It is not
nature that creates disease, but man.  The latter's mission and
destiny in the economy of nature is to die his natural death
brought by old age; save accident, neither a savage nor a wild
(free) animal die of disease.  Food, sexual relations, drink, are
all necessities of life; yet excess in them brings on disease,
misery, suffering, mental & physical, and the latter are
transmitted as the greatesst evils to future generations, the
progeny of the culprits.  Ambition, the desire of securing
happiness & comfort for those we love, by obtaining honors and
riches, are praiseworthy natural feelings but when they transform
man into an ambitious, cruel tyrant.  a miser, a selfish egotist
they bring untold misery, on those around him; on nations as well
as on individuals.  All, this then- food, wealth, ambition, & a
thousand other things we have to leave unmentioned, becomes the
source and cause of evil whether in itst abundance or through its
absence.  Become a glutton, a debauchee, a tyrant, and you become
the originator of disease, of human suffering and misery.  Lack
all this and you starve, you are despised as a nobody and the
majority of the herd, your fellow men, make of you a sufferer
your whole life.  Therefore it is neither nature no an imaginary
Deity that has to be blamed, but human nature made vile by
selfishness.  Think well over these few words; work out every
cause of evil you can think of and trace it to its origin and you
willl have solved one-third of the problem of evil.  And now,
after making due allowanace for evils that are natural and cannot
be avoided,- and so few are they that I challenge the whole host
of Western metaphysicans to call them evil or to trace them
directly to an independent cause- I will point out the greatest,
the chief cause of nearly two thirds of the evils that pursue
humanity ever since that cause became a power.  It is religion
under whatever form and in whatsoever nation.  It is the
saceredotal caste, the priesthood and the churches; it is in
those illusions that man looks upon as sacred, that he has to
search out the source of that multitude of evils which is the
great curse of humanity and that almost overwhelms mankind.
Ignorance created Gods and cunnng took advantage of the
opportunity.  Look at India and look at Christendom and Islam, at
Judaism and Fetichism.  It is priestly imposture that rendered
these Gods so terrible to man; it is religion that makes of him
the selfish bigot, the fanatic that hates all mankind out of his
own sect without rendering him any better or more moral for it.
It is belief iin God and Gods that makes 2/3 of humanity the
slaves of a handful of those who deceive them under the false
pretense of saving them.  Is not man every ready to commit any
kind of evil if told that his God or Gods demand the crime?;
voluntary victim of an illusionary God, the abject slave of his
crafty ministers.  The Irish, Italian, and Slavonian peasant will
starve himself and see his family starving and naked to feed &
clothe his padre and pope.  For 2,000 years India groaned under
the weight of caste, Brahmins alone feeding on the fat of the
land, and today the followers of Christ and those of Mahomet are
cutting each other's throats in the names of and for the greater
glory of their respective myths.  Remember, the sum of human
misery will never be diminished unto that day when the better
portion of humanity destroys in the name of Truth, morality, and
universal charity, the altars of their false gods.

If it is objected that we too have temples, we too have priests
and that our lamas also live on charity ...  let them know that
the objects above named have in common with their Western
equivalents, but the name.  Thus in our temples there is neither
a god nor gods worshipped , only the thrice sacred memory of the
greatest as the holiest man that ever lived.  If our lamas to
honour the fraternity of the Bhikkhus established by our blessed
master himself, go out to be fed and taken care of by the Samgha
(the fraternity of lamaic monks) the lamassery providing for the
wants of the poor, the sick, the afflicted.  Our lamas accept
food, never money, and it is in those temples that the origin of
evil is preached and impressed upon the people.  There they are
taught the 4 noble truths - ariya sakka, and the chain of
causation (the 12 nidanas) gives them a solution of the problem
of the origin & destruction of suffering.

Read the Mahavagga & try to understand not with the prejudiced
Western mind but the spirit of intuition & truth what the Fully
Enlightened one says in the 1st Khandhaka.  Allow me to translate
it for you.

"At the time the blessed Buddha was at Uruvella on the shores of
the river Nerovigara as he rested under the Boddhi tree of wisdom
after he had become Sambuddha, at the end of the 7th dady having
his mind fixed on the chain of causation he spake thus: 'from
Ignorance spring the samkharas of threefold nature - productions
of body,of speech, of thought.  From the samkharas springs
consciousness, from consciousness springs name & form, fron this
spring ,the 6 regions (of the 6 senses the 7th being the property
of but the enlightened); from these springs contact from this
sensation'; from this springs thirst (or desire, Kama, tanha)
from thirst attachment, existence, birth, old age, and death,
grief.  lamentation,suffering., dejection, and despair.  Again by
the destruction of ignorance, the sankharas are destroyed, and
their consciousness name & form, the 6 regions contact,sensation,
thirst, attachment (selfishness), existence, birth, old age,
death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection, and despair are
destroyed.  Such is the cesstion of this whole mass of
suffering."

Knowing this the blessed one uttered this solemn utterance.
"When the real nature of things becomes clear to the meditating
Bikshu, them all his doubts fade away since he has learned what
is that nature and what its cause.  From ignorance spring all the
evils.  From knowledge come the cessastion of this mass of
misery, and then the mediatating Brahmana stands dispelling the
hosts of Mara like the sun that illuminates the sky,"

Meditation here means the superhuman (not supernatural)
qualities, or arhatship in its highest of spiritual powers