It doesn’t sit very properly with many fashionable readers, together with myself, to place a excessive worth on disgrace. We frequently discover disgrace to be one thing that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a means that inhibits our doing good. Too usually I look to some minor misdeed of mine, generally even only a joke that didn’t land, and instinctively beat myself up for it. But detailed introductions to Pali Buddhist texts will usually observe that these texts prize the psychological states of hiri and ottappa, two Pali phrases that are each usually translated “disgrace”. It is very important 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 probably the most. So I don’t need to dismiss the texts’ valuation of what appears to be like like disgrace.
And but someday whereas wanting via the suttas for one thing unrelated, I chanced upon one thing that’s a lot much less generally remarked on: the Pali texts additionally comprise a critique of disgrace. Or at the least of one thing that might be translated as “disgrace” simply as moderately as hiri and ottappa might be. That one thing is kukkucca.
Pali texts commonly confer with a standard checklist of 5 “hindrances” (nivaraṇa), issues that get in the best way of your progress on the trail, together with issues like sensual need 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 will not be 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 operate is to sorrow about what has and what has not been carried out. It’s manifested as regret. Its proximate trigger is what has and what has not been carried out. It needs to be considered slavery.” (Vism 470)
That’s disgrace! You’re feeling sorrow on the dangerous 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 flawed, and I used to be fearful that classical Buddhism had no approach 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 isn’t any higher, rendering kukkucca itself as “fear” in his translation of the Visuddhimagga even in rendering the passage I simply quoted. “Disgrace” will not be 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 dangerous feeling about previous errors. As a result of the translations miss this sense of kukkucca, they lead us to not see the methods through which Buddhism tells us to not be weighed down by previous errors.
But when Pali Buddhism does certainly criticize disgrace in the best way I’ve mentioned right here, then what’s the take care of hiri and ottappa: these Pali ideas that are so usually translated “disgrace” and but handled nearly as good? Maria Heim has a beautiful dialogue of the matter in her chapter “Disgrace and apprehension” (which incorporates many additional stunning subtleties I can’t go into right here).
As Heim rightly notes: “the Pali therapy of hiri and ottappa emphasizes not emotions of anguish after committing a flawed deed or omitting one, however of anticipating emotions that examine flawed deeds earlier than they could happen. Their worth lies in what they preserve 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 not undo a nasty deed nor do 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 dangerous issues within the future; they don’t relive them previously.
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 confer with the sort of “nonmoral embarrassment” that we really feel when seen bare; so too it’s linked to disgust, as disgrace might be. (For kukkucca she moderately 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 carried out previously, 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 concerning the penalties of an motion or its sufferer, disgrace calls into query one’s entire self. Guilt appears to be like to the flawed 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 not or needn’t present the best way to reparation and renewal.” (249) Disgrace on this sense is a beating-oneself-up that I really feel all too regularly. All that is why I nonetheless choose to render kukkucca and never hiri as “disgrace”.
Thus Sarah Shaw, in her wonderful 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 choose to render them this manner, and kukkucca as “disgrace” – to make it clearer that the ideas of hiri and ottappa are not truly praising the best way that we really feel horrible about ourselves after a nasty motion we will not change. That feeling is one thing Buddhaghosa and different Pali Buddhists criticize, below the title kukkucca. We damage ourselves by feeling ashamed of the dangerous issues we’ve carried out; we do higher by trying to the long run and ensuring we don’t do them once more.
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