A friend recently busted my chops for a post not being in keeping with my claim to be Mr. Zen. After a good laugh, I thought it was a good opportunity for reflection on how to be both a good Buddhist and a vocal liberal advocate against lying selfish MoFos.
There are many schools of Buddhism. The highest level division is between Mahayana and Theravada branches. Within Mahayana are Zen and Tibetan (among others), which are the best known practices in this country. My practice is Vipassana, which is within the Theravada branch and common to Thailand and Sri Lanka, and I am practicing but not claiming to be especially accomplished so in a couple of ways I deny claiming to be Mr. Zen.
More substantively, all branches share a belief in the Eightfold Path, one of the tenets of which is Right Speech, a short definition of which: abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter. But Right Speech also exists downstream from Right View and Right Intention, and Buddhism is full of offbeat and sometimes off-putting analogies. Further, in Burma, for instance, even the Buddhist monks have gotten fed up and marched in the streets protesting the regime there. Practicing Buddhism doesn't mean lying down and accepting whatever happens to one's self or the rest of humanity or life on the planet. But taking action in a kind and mindful way can be quite challenging at times, and people like Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn really push me in a lot of ways.
It is Right Speech to be unpleasant or disagreeable if and only if to do so is factual, truthful, and helpful. The other virtues don’t magically disappear, though – kindness, compassion, are still important.
A couple of years ago I posted a link about Sharron Angle, comparing her to Pol Pot. The link itself and my prefatory comment may not qualify as Right Speech. But it might. Analogies are very interesting and slippery. I am analogous to a frog, for instance, in that I have four legs, but I am not a frog. However, a frog is a vertebrate, and so am I. We are equally vertebrates - not an analogy, but an equivalence. If I say "Sarah Palin is like the Khmer Rouge in not trusting or valuing science, knowledge or expertise and wanting to remove all experts from the corridors of power," that is an analogy. But like Tom Coburn, I am counting on other people to extend the analogy beyond my explicit comparison to murderous, ruinous, genocidal mania - extensions which I don't believe and wouldn't use as analogies, and deny intending. However, I DO intend those strong negative emotional associations to be evoked. So in this regard I am equivalent to Coburn, not analogous-using false, divisive, abusive speech in a fairly sophisticated way.
So my question, which I think about a lot, is, How to best respond to Wrong Speech from others? How best to counteract it? There are many, many Buddhist parables about Boddhisatvas and Sadhus mirroring behavior that strays from the Eightfold Path to illustrate to those who stray exactly what the problem is. I am not reaching Coburn or Palin, of course, but I do have contact with people who find them credible. So I keep working on the best ways to respond to Wrong Speech. My results are not entirely consistent, as you see :-)