The problem with judging others is that we can’t even judge our own selves. The fourteenth-century Japanese Zen master Muso Kokushi had this to say about it:
It is said that people who are truly on the Way do not discuss judgments of others. This does not It is said that people who are truly on the Way do not discuss judgments of others. This does not mean that they make judgments but suppress them; it means they do not see people in terms of self and other. The third patriarch of Zen said, “In the realm of being as is, there is no other and no self.” A scripture says, “The nature of reality is like an ocean; you should not say there is right or wrong.If people view the world in terms of distinctions between others and self, they will inevitably make judgments of right and wrong. If they entertain views of right and wrong, they are not true practitioners of the Way, even if they refrain from expressing their views.
Rather than try to refrain from discussing judgments of others, therefore, students of Buddhism should turn around and reflect, “Who is it that speaks of others’ right and wrong?”
A scripture says that people “take the physical constitution to be their own body and take the reflections of sense data to be their own mind.” What this scriptural saying means is that what ordinary people think to be their self is not the true self. And if you do not know what your true self is, you cannot see others as they really are either.
So if your ideas of self and of others are both untrue, how can you judge right and wrong?
Ordinarily, people who assume they are on the Way and do not talk about others’ right or wrong still define good and bad in their minds and make distinctions of sharpness and dullness in people.
Conceptualizing shallowness and depth of understanding, they contrast error and correctness of practice. Such people cannot proceed directly toward supreme enlightenment, so they are encouraged not to pay attention to judgments of right and wrong.
What did Christ say? “First remove the beam from your own eye.”
Muso Kokushi, Dream Conversations on Buddhism and Zen, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambala, 1996), 40-41.
[...] kept getting this nagging feeling that I’m wrong about my judgment… Then, again, I read Contemplator’s latest and felt all base and unenlightened that I was judging people, criticizing. So I will do as [...]
With all due respect Mr. Kokushi, in pointing out the fault of those judge right and wrong, are you not proposing that their view is wrong and yours is right?
I just did a post on this. (You’re always spot on for me.) Enlightening others, as Kokushi does, about the ways in which their judgments are unenlightened creates a bit of a conundrum doesn’t it? I think I’m probably splitting hairs. No one thinks of Christ as judgmental when he says, “First remove…” The point, I suppose is to just look at your self first, as they have done. Don’t be a hypo[-]crite- don’t “play-act” as someone you’re not.