WHY DOES GOD PERMIT EVIL?

Evil is the opposite of good and occurs in the same way that all mutually arising opposites occur, according to Buddhism. You cannot have one without the other. They are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have solid without space, light without dark, or an inside without an outside. Nothing can be known without its opposite. In this way, good cannot be known without the possibility at least of evil. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, "Good derives it's virtue from evil."

Alan Watts adds, "In our present state of consciousness we are standing, as it were, with our eyes right against the painting, so that only one small, meaningless patch of color can be seen at a time. But in our eternal state we stand with the whole canvas in view. From this standpoint evil is not evil as we now know it; it is shadow harmonizing with light."

In the words of Buddhist Matthieu Picard, "evil is not a demonic power external to ourselves, and good is not an absolute principle independent of us. Everything occurs in our minds. Love and compassion are reflections of the true nature of all living beings--what we have called basic goodness. Evil is a deviation from this basic goodness which can be remedied."

Vedanta has a different view of it completely. The question "why does God permit evil?" is, to a Vedantist, as meaningless as "why does God permit good?" Brahman is neither kind nor cruel. Brahman does not intervene in the world's affairs. The extent to which one experiences evil, or for that matter good, is the result of karma operating in his or her life, karma being the effect of one's deeds in life. Meritorious deeds are those which move one closer to union with the divine, the ultimate purpose of human existence, while demeritorious deeds are those which move one away.

AS ALL OTHERS GO

"People suffer at every moment and throughout the world," Tibetan Buddhist Matthieu Ricard explains. "Some die when they've just been born; some when they've just given birth. Every second people are murdered, tortured, beaten, maimed, separated from their loved ones. Others are abandoned, betrayed, expelled, rejected. Some are killed out of hatred, greed, ignorance, ambition, pride, or envy. Mothers lose their children, children lose their parents. The ill pass in never-ending procession through hospitals. Some suffer with no hope of being treated; others are treated with no hope of being cured. The dying endure their pain, and the survivors their mourning. Some die of hunger, cold, exhaustion; others are charred by fire, crushed by rock, or swept away by the waters.

"This is true not only for human beings. Animals devour each other in the forests, the savannahs, the oceans, and the skies. At any given moment tens of thousands of them are being killed by humans, torn to pieces, and canned. Others suffer endless torments at the hands of their owners, bearing heavy burdens, in chains their entire lives; still others are hunted, fished, trapped between teeth of steel, strangled in snares, smothered under nets, tortured for their flesh, their musk, their ivory, their bones, their fur, their skin, thrown into boiling water or flayed alive.

"There is an interconnectedness spiritually, among all living things. As a human being it is my responsibility to realize this and to know that as all other living things go, so go I."

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The dramatis personae is the list of characters in a play. The Latin word personae is from "per" meaning "through" and "sonare" meaning "to sound," i.e. that through which sound is produced. Early Greek and Roman actors wore masks representing various characters which contained a built-in megaphone so that the audience could hear what they were saying. From personae is derived the modern words person and persona. Persona has come to mean the social self, experienced as a kind of mask, not the true self.

But the true self so-called, is a mask too. It is a conditioned phenomenon based upon one's memory of the past, one's anticipation of the future, and one's present consciousness. Thinking and communicating using symbols is also part of it. There is nothing reliable about this true self since it is time bound and constantly changing. Vedanta views it as a mask of the Atman, or soul.

Dramatis personae has another meaning in Vedanta, however. There are, to begin with, three models of the universe. The view of western religions is that the universe is an artifact, something that is made, like a pot. In this model, man, for example, is fashioned from a ball of clay into which the divine plows the breath of life. In China, there is the organic model where the universe is seen as a living organism. What affects one part of it affects the whole of it. In India, the universe is conceived as a drama which is being acted out by Brahman, the Ground of Being. Brahman plays all the parts and all the elements, and is so convincing at it that even it forgets that it is doing so. Eventually, though, Brahman awakens, whereupon the universe ends. A new drama, cycle, begins again in time, with a new dramatis personae.

INTERDEPENDENCE

Ji-ji muge in Buddhism refers to the interdependence, the mutual, unimpeded, interpenetration of all things and events. It is likened to a spider’s web, as Alan Watts describes: "Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so on ad infinitum. This is the Buddhist image of the universe."

A net of jewels is another description of it, called Indra's net. Another term for it is dharma datu.

Speaking for Vedanta, Christopher Isherwood explains how human egotism prevents us from seeing this interdependence. "Every time you desire, or fear, or hate; every time you boast or indulge your vanity; every time you struggle to get something for yourself, you are really asserting: I am a separate, unique individual. I stand apart from everything else in this universe. But you don't, you know. The scientist will agree with me that you don't. Every living creature and every object are interrelated, biologically, psychologically, physically, politically, economically. They are all of a piece." This is to say nothing of the spiritual connection, in that everyone and everything is Brahman.

Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Picard says of interdependence, "The world of appearances is created by the coming together of an in infinite number of ever-changing causes and conditions. Like a rainbow that forms when the sun shines across a curtain of rain and then vanishes when any factor contributing to its formation disappears, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no autonomous and enduring existence. Everything is relation; nothing exists in and of itself, immune to the forces of cause and effect."

With this comes the Buddhist principle of Dependent Origination, cause and effect. If this is, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises; if this is not, that does not come to be; from the stopping of this, that stops. There is a consequence to our actions, remembering that even inaction is action, making all the more imperative what is called mindfulness in Buddhism. We must pay attention to our behavior. What we do and do not do affects what everything else in the universe does and does not do, whether or not we are immediately aware of it, or whether we are ever aware of it.