right speech

True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,

Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind

~ Mercutio (from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet)

There are several internet conversations going on right now on the subject of Buddhist morality, specifically on the subject of “right speech”.  These conversations have been sparked by an apparently growing divisiveness over the behaviour of certain Buddhist teachers, their ethics and/or misconduct, and how this relates to “the dharma”.

The details of various instances of misconduct are unimportant (and so apparently are the facts, which seem to hold little sway over personal allegiance to our teachers or institutions of choice). That is because the current debate is not over the truth, whatever that turns out to be, but about being right and especially about speaking right.

While the offender is almost always accused of having spoken too loudly, too soon, too much, in the wrong place or at the wrong time, the right speaker, gagging on such a liberal passing of wind, calls prudishly for sila, trumping the bodhisattva vow to speak truth, sacca, with saccharine verbal continence. 

The irony of course is that, in telling others what to say and how to say it, right speakers elevate themselves above their wrong-speaking interlocutors yet fail to see how their moral condescension is itself an exercise of power in basic violation of the parity between two human beings just talking.  

What gets me most, however, is when the moralist’s plug for “right speech” is additionally sweetened with the salutation gassho or metta, a pledge of kindness toward the person they’ve just hushed that is as effective at hiding their hostility as a spritz of perfume is at covering up a fart.