The Trouble With The Elephant, I

I am starting a series titled The Trouble With The Elephant. In this series, I am reporting actual correspondance with a friend, Gloria, why I left Buddhism for Christianity.

Dear Gloria:
Regarding the concept behind Yin and Yang. First, I am oversimplifying in my response. The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao.

Second, it represents not only the concept of "balance" we can all agree with, e.g., balancing work and fun, family and private time, food and exercise, etc., but it also represents a basic monistic view of the world/nature/existence.

Tao produced the One. The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things. Tao produced the One. The ten thousand things carry the yin and embrace the yang, and through the blending of the material force they achieve harmony. Tao Te Ching, Chpt 42.

Ultimately when you boil things down to their essence, this view teaches, and the Yin Yang symbolizes, all positive and negative, creative and destructive, moral and immoral are just opposite sides of the same coin. In fact, the positive even has some of the negative inherent in it, and the negative has some of the positive inherent in it too. Hence the white "eye" in the black part, and the black "eye" in the white part of the Yin Yang symbol.

It teaches that, in reality, good and evil are opposite sides of the same coin, they are both co-equal and co-eternal, and the only real difference between them is our perception. This view teaches that the real problem lies with our perception, not with the existence of evil, because, after all (as the cliche' goes): "how could you know good without evil?", "how could you have good without evil?", etc.

Please note that I am not talking about what humans might have perverted the view to hold, but what the view itself (as expressed in the I-Ching, Tao Te Ching, and Taoist/Budhhist scholars) actually does teach. Morality and immorality, good and evil, and not fundamentally different, but actually different aspects of the same thing and it is our perception that makes them different. All is illusion, our individual minds are illusion, we are all just splinters of the one and a monistic view of the universe is supposed to be the ultimate reality.

I also want to be very clear that I am not saying Buddhists or Taoist are somehow immoral or believe it is acceptable to behave in an evil fashion. This is not the case. A classic example are the Tibetan's patient and gentle suffering, exemplified by the Dalai Lama's life, under the oppression of a foreign conqueror, the Communist Chinese government. Would only the mainline Christian world take their cue from the Tibetans.

I eventually reached the point where I did not believe good and evil are only different in perception, nor co-equal and co-eternal. The torture and murder of 6 million Jews, or the torture and murder of your or my child is not only different because of perception. I do not believe good and evil are opposite sides of the same thing.

If you are interested in more (I hope you are), I will explain. But I don't want to bore you too much.

Dear Jarrod,
I am definitely interested in more. Growing up, my parents left religion in our hands. Religious beliefs and scripts were up to us to investigate and decide what we believed in and what faith we chose for ourselves. I feel the most "at home" with the buddhist religion and my brother feels at home with christianity. My parents are fine with both. It wasn't until after we had made our choices that my parents told us that our family was indeed buddhist. So what you told me was little of what I already knew and a little enlightening as well. I don't remember where I first heard it, but it made sense. Anything else you want to share, I welcome.....Please....continue....