It doesn’t sit very properly with many trendy readers, together with myself, to place a excessive worth on disgrace. We regularly discover disgrace to be one thing that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a approach that inhibits our doing good. Too typically I look to some minor misdeed of mine, typically even only a joke that didn’t land, and instinctively beat myself up for it. But detailed introductions to Pali Buddhist texts will typically be aware that these texts prize the psychological states of hiri and ottappa, two Pali phrases that are each typically translated “disgrace”. You will need to take note of the components of a convention we disagree with, particularly if it’s our personal custom; they are often those we be taught from essentially the most. So I don’t need to dismiss the texts’ valuation of what appears to be like like disgrace.
And but in the future whereas wanting by the suttas for one thing unrelated, I chanced upon one thing that’s a lot much less generally remarked on: the Pali texts additionally include a critique of disgrace. Or no less than of one thing that could possibly be translated as “disgrace” simply as fairly as hiri and ottappa might be. That one thing is kukkucca.
Pali texts often discuss with a conventional listing of 5 “hindrances” (nivaraṇa), issues that get in the way in which of your progress on the trail, together with issues like sensual want and sloth. However the final of those 5 is a rare compound, uddhacca-kukkucca. Uddhacca is agitation or fear, “like water whipped by the wind”, a turmoil the place the thoughts isn’t equanimous – a sense all too acquainted to me. However much more acquainted to me is kukkucca, which Buddhaghosa describes as follows: “It has subsequent remorse as its attribute. Its perform is to sorrow about what has and what has not been finished. It’s manifested as regret. Its proximate trigger is what has and what has not been finished. It needs to be considered slavery.” (Vism 470)
That’s disgrace! You are feeling sorrow on the unhealthy deeds you remorse and repent – and it’s a state of slavery or bondage, a state that holds you again. I really feel such a state a lot, mentally punishing myself for deeds which have gone incorrect, and I used to be frightened that classical Buddhism had no option to criticize such a problematic emotional state. It seems it does!
This critique of disgrace is sadly missed in most translations. Maurice Walshe renders uddhacca-kukkucca as “worry-and-flurry”. “Fear” is correct for uddhacca, however “flurry” is a horrible translation of kukkucca: it reveals nothing of the truth that kukkucca is about previous errors. Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli is not any higher, rendering kukkucca itself as “fear” in his translation of the Visuddhimagga even in rendering the passage I simply quoted. “Disgrace” isn’t the one phrase that would plausibly render kukkucca in English, however alternate options would must be one thing like “guilt” or “regret” – phrases that convey that what’s being criticized is a unhealthy feeling about previous errors. As a result of the translations miss this sense of kukkucca, they lead us to not see the methods wherein Buddhism tells us to not be weighed down by previous errors.
But when Pali Buddhism does certainly criticize disgrace in the way in which I’ve mentioned right here, then what’s the cope with hiri and ottappa: these Pali ideas that are so typically translated “disgrace” and but handled nearly as good? Maria Heim has a beautiful dialogue of the matter in her chapter “Disgrace and apprehension” (which accommodates many additional stunning subtleties I can’t go into right here).
As Heim rightly notes: “the Pali remedy of hiri and ottappa emphasizes not emotions of anguish after committing a incorrect deed or omitting a superb one, however of anticipating emotions that test incorrect deeds earlier than they could happen. Their worth lies in what they hold us from doing, not in wretched anguish when reflecting on wrongs already commited.” (245) That “wretched anguish” is kukkucca, and it’s what I consider as disgrace. Thus, as Heim factors out additional, Buddhaghosa says that “since one can’t undo a nasty deed nor do a superb deed that was uncared for, returning once more [to it] in kukkucca is ugly”; kukkucca “scratches the thoughts like the purpose of an axe on a steel bowl.” (Aṭṭhasālinī 384) The great states hiri and ottappa cease us from doing unhealthy issues within the future; they don’t relive them up to now.
It’s not loopy to render hiri or ottappa as “disgrace” in a way of modesty (“Have you ever no disgrace?”) Thus Heim herself interprets hiri particularly as “disgrace”, as a result of, as she rightly factors out, hiri can discuss with the form of “nonmoral embarrassment” that we really feel when seen bare; so too it’s linked to disgust, as disgrace might be. (For kukkucca she fairly makes use of “regret”.) However I feel “disgrace” can nonetheless be a considerably complicated translation, as a result of “feeling ashamed” most frequently tends to have a way of issues we have finished up to now, as guilt and regret do – and that’s not the sense that hiri and ottappa have in Buddhaghosa.
Heim, quoting Bernard Williams’s Disgrace and Necessity, notes:
The place guilt is a matter of feeling anguish in regards to the penalties of an motion or its sufferer, disgrace calls into query one’s complete self. Guilt appears to be like to the incorrect dedicated or its sufferer, whereas “disgrace appears to be like to what I’m.” (Heim 248)
So, citing the developmental psychologists June Worth Tagney and Ronda Dearing, Heim notes that “Guilt can result in confession and restitution for the motion or omission that produced it, whereas disgrace can’t or needn’t present the way in which to reparation and renewal.” (249) Disgrace on this sense is a beating-oneself-up that I really feel all too incessantly. All for this reason I nonetheless desire to render kukkucca and never hiri as “disgrace”.
Thus Sarah Shaw, in her glorious historical past of mindfulness, interprets hiri and ottappa as an alternative as “self-respect” and “scrupulousness”. These don’t catch among the nuances that Heim notices, it’s true, so that they’re not excellent translations both. However I desire to render them this fashion, and kukkucca as “disgrace” – to make it clearer that the ideas of hiri and ottappa are not really praising the way in which that we really feel horrible about ourselves after a nasty motion we are able to now not change. That feeling is one thing Buddhaghosa and different Pali Buddhists criticize, beneath the title kukkucca. We damage ourselves by feeling ashamed of the unhealthy issues we’ve finished; we do higher by seeking to the long run and ensuring we don’t do them once more.
