Shame & Compunction

There’s a famous passage in the Kālāma Sutta where the Buddha says that if you see somebody acting on greed, aversion, and delusion, breaking the precepts, you know that it leads to harm—harm for them or harm for others. You notice that it’s criticized by the wise. So you should abandon that kind of behavior in yourself.

There are three things that are not usually noticed about this passage, though.

One is that phrase “criticized by the wise,” or “criticized by the observant.” That usually gets dropped out of the quotation, which makes it seem as if the Buddha is simply asking you just to use your own powers of observation and nothing else. He’s really telling you, though, to take into consideration the opinion of the wise: people who have conviction in the principle of karma, people who are generous, virtuous. Listen to what they have to say.

The second thing that’s not noticed is that the Buddha is not saying just to observe your own behavior. There are passages where he says you test the Dhamma on your own by putting it into practice and seeing what results. He’s also asking here, though, to look at the behavior of others—because it’s easier to see the harm caused by others than it is to see the harm you cause to yourself or to others.

The principle here being that if you can see that someone else’s behavior is harmful, then the same behavior would be harmful in you. You have to be fair. Judge yourself by the same standards you would use to judge others. Don’t make excuses. You don’t like to be lied to, but it’s all too easy to say, “When I lie, it’s with good reason. It’s understandable”—and the same with the other precepts, the same with your own greed, aversion, and delusion. So try to be fair. When other people do something that’s harmful, know that if you did it, it would be harmful, too.

And finally, the third thing that’s not noticed is the Buddha is basically teaching you to act on two emotions: one is shame, and the other is compunction.

Shame—a healthy sense of shame, which is the opposite of shamelessness—is basically when you want to look good in the eyes of others. Here the Buddha is saying, “Choose good eyes to be your judges”: in other words, the eyes of the wise. People who hold you to a high standard, not to be harsh with you, but out of compassion.

The other emotion is ottappa, which we translate as compunction in the American sense of the word. You think about doing something wrong, something that would be harmful, and you just don’t feel right about it. It’s a sense of conscience.

As the Buddha said, these two emotions, shame and compunction, are guardians of the world. They protect you from doing things that will be harmful. And they’re also treasures inside.

With shame, as I said, we’re talking about healthy shame. Unhealthy shame would be the opposite of pride. But think about the Buddha teaching Rāhula, his son. He says that if you see that you’ve done something that’s been harmful, have a sense of shame around that. Now, he’s not saying to feel bad about yourself, because he wants you to develop skill. He’s also talking within the context of their being noble warriors. Noble warriors were a very proud caste. Their sense of shame was based on the idea that certain things were beneath them. That’s an attitude you really want to cultivate actively: Harmful behavior is beneath you because of your self-esteem.

So try to develop that kind of self-esteem. There’s too much of the rock-star gold stars that teachers put on papers when you give just an ordinary performance. That kind of self-esteem doesn’t have any foundation. You want the self-esteem that comes from looking at your behavior and seeing that you haven’t harmed anybody, that you’ve actually developed a skill.

So choose the right people to be your judges. There is so much said about not wanting to be judged by others, but that’s a childish attitude. Now, it’s true that there are a lot of people out there whose opinions are really not worth listening to. An important part of the practice is learning whose eyes you want to look good in, and whose eyes really don’t matter. There are people out there who are proud of the fact that they can act in a cruel way and get away with it. Their eyes don’t matter. What matters are those who’ve trained themselves. They’ve had the compassion for themselves to abandon unskillful behavior. They can see that it can be done.

In other words, we’re talking about admirable friends. Try to look good in their eyes. That kind of shame is really helpful. It is a treasure.

As for compunction, again, you see that certain behavior in general is bad. So you actively want to cultivate a fear of causing harm. This kind of fear, the Buddha said, is useful. Quite a few psychotherapists of have asked me, “Why doesn’t the Buddha list fear as one of the roots of unskillful behavior?” And the reason is because not all fear is bad. Fear that’s bound up in greed, bound up in aversion, bound up in delusion: That’s bad. And all too often that’s where fear comes in. But there is the fear of causing harm. That kind of fear the Buddha actually says you should develop.

There are people who say that being good out of fear is a childish attitude. But what’s childish about it? It’s the kind of fear that comes with a sense of power. You realize that you can make a difference in the world through your actions and you’re afraid of making a bad difference. That’s the mature fear that comes with a sense of power. The fear that comes with a sense of powerlessness can lead to all kinds of bad things. A lot of the evil that’s done in the world comes from people who are fearful because they feel they don’t have enough power. But here the Buddha is saying that the important things in life are the things that you have some control over. So use that control wisely.

Be careful not to give in to the parts of the mind that are careless or apathetic. After all, that’s what compunction comes down to: It’s the opposite of apathy, the opposite of the attitude, “I don’t care.” You want to care. It’s wise to care about the results of your actions. Wise to care about what wise people think.

So when the Buddha is teaching the Kālāmas, he’s not simply saying, “Do your calculations of right and wrong in an unfeeling way.” Feel a sense of shame and compunction around your actions. When you see that the wise people criticize certain behavior, feel a sense of shame at the thought of behaving in that way, so that you don’t behave in that way. That’s when shame becomes a guardian of the world.

The same with compunction: When you can see that other people behave in ways that are harmful, look at your own behavior. You see the harm that they do; you can do that same kind of harm. So take care. That, too, is a guardian of the world.

When we can understand these emotions, then we can use them properly, and they become an important part of our practice. As the Buddha said, in a world where there’s no shame and compunction, all kinds of horrible things can happen. In fact, we look at the world around us right now: It’s becoming a shameless world, and we can see the devastation that’s being caused.

So make sure you take that harm to heart. You don’t have to fall in line with that kind of harm. You don’t have to fall in line with the general way of the world. Remember, we’re here to take admirable friends as our guides. We’re here to develop appropriate attention, attending to how our behavior can impact the world, to the fact that our actions are real and they have an impact. And the impact is based on the quality of the mind.

As the Buddha said, the two factors of admirable friendship and appropriate attention are the most beneficial things outside and inside for gaining stream-entry. And they’re coupled with those emotions of shame and compunction: shame in that you want to look good in the eyes of your admirable friends, and compunction in that you take seriously the fact that your actions do have consequences, so you want to be careful and attentive in an appropriate way. Those two emotions put you safely on the path and they help keep you there.