Buddhist teachings in relation to white lies

 

An interesting subject came up recently, whether it's ok to tell white lies in relation to Buddhist precepts or teachings in relation to being truthful.  It seems like that would depend on interpretation, wouldn't it, with lots of context required for which branch or school one is referring to, and the situation?  

Just as Christian teachings and end-point positions on specifics can vary a lot depending on context, the frame of reference (how teachings are taken in a specific group), and per individual it all can vary a lot within Buddhism.  The general question seems to reduce to whether or not Buddhist teachings would tend to be more literal.  Prior to that one might question if the application of Buddhist teachings is all one thing, somewhat uniform across different schools, or even prior to that if all branches and schools are working from the same set of core teachings.  

They're not the same.  The Pali Canon is an older collected set of core teachings, taken up by the Theravada tradition (a broad branch of individual schools, not one unified thing), which to some extent would apply to the other later forms, the other two main broad branches and schools (Mahayana and Vajrayana).  I have pretty deep background in all that related to a good bit of personal study and academic review, getting two degrees in religion and philosophy, after my initial degree in Industrial Engineering, but for the most part I want to set all that aside here.  I suppose I can spare a few sentences on the history and broad forms, because it's interesting, but it has nothing to do with this answer, since I'm not going to move towards some mapped-out breakdown at any point.  

My input draws on common sense, so this isn't really all that closely related to Buddhism.  In a different sense I think that it is, it just doesn't tie back to a specific teaching.

I'm working towards how this question came up: it was asked in a Reddit Buddhism sub-Reddit (group).  That group stays a little more on-topic than Facebook groups tend to, just leaning towards people who participate in foreign traditions, often advocating very narrow perspectives and approaches based on what their own "religion" teaches them.  Buddhism is most conventionally a religion, although it can also work as a philosophy (just not as well), and to me even better as a practical guide to introspection and perspective shift.  To me at its core that's really what Buddhism is.  Mapping that to modern forms of teachings, references, and guidance it can be a little hard to place; it's not exactly psychology, and probably as close to self-help content as anything else.  But then the form is completely different.

Buddhism background

The oldest school of Buddhism relates to a first wave of developed references, teachings, and religious traditions.  Buddhism originated in Northern India, with the Buddha himself actually from a location that's now in Nepal (with all this from memory; I studied Buddhism as philosophy and also religion, and people in history or religion programs actually covered this in classes, while I didn't).  That broad school is called Theravada, or if memory serves in the later Mahayana tradition they renamed it as Hinayana, or "small vehicle."  That's not a reference to it being lower or less important; the idea was that later on, in that second wave, practitioners supposedly focused on attaining enlightenment for all beings instead of only themselves, the Bhodisattva ideal, with "small vehicle" a reference to people only trying to become enlightened for themselves. 

It's not as much a divide as it seems, put that way, more just a difference in emphasis and approach.  Those waves were historical periods of different forms of teachings being spread; Buddhism was popular, then less, then renewed in broad uptake, in different places at different times.  The older tradition started in India and also rooted in Sri Lanka, and now it remains the main religion in Thailand.  As we have visited ancient temples throughout South East Asia, in places like Cambodia, and also in Thailand, this history is filled in with more detail as temples converted from one type to another, and art forms changed over time, official state religions did, and so on.  I'm not the best personal reference for that side of Buddhism; my memory doesn't hold matrices of ideas as it did back in my 20s and 30s.

Mahayana spread to become Chinese Buddhism (Chan Buddhism), which merged with Taoist teaching to become Japanese Zen.  Or maybe that's an oversimplification, as many of these points must be.

Then the third main branch or wave is the one based mainly in Tibet, Vajrayana.  I studied from this branch as philosophy in a grad school course, and oddly the official core teachings background seemed completely separate from my informal and limited understanding of what the religious practices are really all about (which is normal, oddly).  This is the branch that Richard Gere was into, the one that relates to unconventional sexually oriented practices.

All of this doesn't relate much to where I'm going with the final answer, just filling that in because it might be interesting.

The Reddit starting point and initial answers there

The question was this:  Your friend cooks you a meal. The food is bad. He asks you whether the food was good. What do you say?

Additional clarification [part of the same post]:  Actual experience I had leading to a question of how I should respond in keeping the precepts.

Most people commented that telling a white lie would be fine, saying that the food is good, and others suggested saying something positive about what was ok about the meal.  At least when I first commented no one mentioned telling the truth, saying that the food is bad.  Looking back to cite a reference from the comments that input all shifted; later on most people recommend either saying the food is bad or that it's good in some ways and could be better in others.

Basically that's what I suggested, being honest, just framing that as complimenting the meal in relation to some part being ok, then not avoiding saying that the overall effect is negative, and why.  

It amounts to doxing myself but this was my comment (it's not really an anonymous profile anyway, as those tend to be):

If someone is learning to cook they need that feedback; you have to tell them. It's possible to mix together a compliment about what part of the cooking outcome worked (something had to) and which part didn't. Then you can honestly say that your experience is mixed, and that there is room for improvement, and pass on to them what it is.

Once you are close enough with someone you can tell them the complete and honest truth. If my wife makes food that's bad I can say that it's bad, and why, and we can usually even laugh about it. Her cooking was awful for quite awhile, and it got better and better over time, and now when I say that's really good that's exactly what I mean, and she is satisfied in an important way. It's a part of life to learn by starting at the beginning.

When you have kids this pattern repeats, over and over. You can keep telling them you are truly awful at this one thing you are only considering doing, but you need to work through that, taking these steps in practice, and you won't be then. You need to nudge them, to say not to give up, or to not even start, but encourage them to move on to working through it. That's why when you tell your friend they've ruined the meal including things that went well and suggestions for changes can help them see the path forward, and you can say that you want to try the next version that's better. Presented in the right way you could even cook them the same dish and point out the small differences, and if your approach is from the heart they won't feel like you are one-upping them. At that point you need to ask them to prepare a better version for you, to ask them to try again.

Absolute and complete honesty can set you free, really. You just need to know how to use it to help people.

One person cited part of core teaching reference, which I thought was a good answer; this lists the first 3 of 6 points of guidance on truthfulness:

[1] In the case of words that the Tathāgata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial [or: not connected with the goal], unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them.

[2] In the case of words that the Tathāgata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them.

[3] In the case of words that the Tathāgata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, but unendearing & disagreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them.

You get the point; it takes some reading and thought to sort that out, and it's more interesting when you do.  Someone else cited a parable that was described as relating, as an external source link, but I didn't read through that.

What is the lesson here?  It's not about patterns of Reddit comments shifting, or even related to how different schools of Buddhism would vary on lying about telling your friend the meal he made is bad.

As I see it the lesson is that we need to turn things around and look at what is being discussed from the other person's perspective.  Your friend intends to cook you another meal later on, most likely, and to go on practicing cooking for the rest of his or her life.  It's nice for them to hear back that the meal is delicious but it's important for them to get good feedback, to know what you think.

Then related to lying in general, to white lies, I think we can often respond to others and clarify the context and broader meaning in what we say, and typically not really lie.  Using another random example, if someone gets a relatively bad haircut no matter what you say or don't say if they're not going to get another haircut to correct for it that's just how they're going to look for a few weeks, so at first it may seem best if they ask about that to say that they look fine.  

The same problems come up though.  They could get the results fixed a bit, trimmed and adjusted further, and if they go back in three weeks and get another bad haircut, and ask you again, it's a recurring cycle that should've been cut off the first time.  The same approach might have worked; compliment the length being suitable, but actual style leaving room for improvement, or the opposite.  

My wife has taken to cutting my son's hair and he looks flat-out awful every time, and I go ahead and tell him that every time; she butchered you.  He already knows it; saying anything else is clearly ingenuine.  Then that stings a little but if we can have a laugh about it when he goes to school and his friends have the same reaction he can play it off with honesty; my Mom took a course in cutting hair--she really did--and she's still terrible at it, and she butchered me.  He's not done with looking like that but it's out in the open, accepted; everyone can move on.  It's very healthy to not be insecure when part of what you experience is a limitation of sorts, like a bad haircut, or an inability to cook well.

the closest photo example I could find; this is after his local barber fixed it

Even at work, where everyone can't really use the complete truth in expressing opinions, for obvious reasons, I think this kind of general strategy still works.  You never need to express a complete lie; you can always mix quite a bit of your real opinion with background context and some other scope from an opposing view to communicate more of what you think, if not all of it.  Ok, maybe sometimes a relatively complete lie is in order, if your supervisor tells you to do something that you completely disagree with, and it's just not the time or place to press the point, and then they ask a specific question.  Usually I would go with that other approach, mixing two opposing answers, but sometimes you can't, or it just doesn't make sense to.

A bit of tangent can help place that, related to part of how I see work themes.  To me at work if something doesn't matter then it doesn't matter; if two opposing choices or plans lead to essentially the exact same place then picking the one that you favor is a battle that you don't need to fight.  Unfortunately plenty of things framed as important don't really matter, a good bit of the time.  Then when things really do make a difference, and a negative outcome seems likely to come up based on a bad choice, that's the time to change communication approach.  

All this could seem off the subject of white lies, but if your work manager asks if a dumb idea seems dumb, and the context is set up in one particular way, then the most honest answer may not be best.  If there's no harm in it you can say that's fine.  Then if your judgment is off everything won't be fine, and you can learn from that mistake.

I think people often get too comfortable with adjusting how they communicate about reality in terms of lying to others.  The white lie theme seems to naturally come up more and more often, and drift or morph into telling people whatever works best instead of what is actually accurate, a lot of the time.  People catch on to how you communicate, and it's soon clear as day that you don't really mean what you say.  Beyond that it can be more positive to be genuine for your own sake, to take communication and representing your own perspective differently.  

There's the old idea that if you don't lie there less to remember, but I mean beyond that.  There is a purity in communicating the truth.  It's harder, in a sense, because you need to adjust for how others take what you say, which takes some practice.  

In the original example, asking about that prepared meal, it's the simplest thing in the world to say "it's good."  Then if you want to instead say "it's bad," without just being rude and thoughtless, you need to add words and layers of concepts, about how it's your intention to be completely honest, and some aspects are fine (citing a couple), and some aren't (referencing those), and then summarizing that in general there's lots of room for improvement, but that it shows cooking skill in some areas.  It could seem tiresome.  That friend definitely wants to hear "it's good" instead, but the feedback will help them.

Getting all of this communication approach wrong is a big problem, and without practice in being fully honest one would botch it.  It's like cooking, or cutting hair; no one is born good at it.  But as with those other things it's important to stick with it.  Maybe not the cutting hair; people can skip doing that.  

One of my kids picked up this pattern of trying to be as honest as possible all of the time from me, and the other picked up the more conventional form from his mother, lying when it's more convenient to.  I don't blame him when I catch him doing it, but we often pause to run through how the whole cycle works, how people can only trust you to the extent that they recognize that you typically tell the truth.

Then an odd secondary theme enters in:  if you ask Keoni if he is lying his poker face fails him, badly, and he ends up making a weird series of shifting expressions that Kalani and I refer to as a "melting face."  She can stone-cold lie, if she wants to; she just chooses not to, almost all the time.  Maybe there is some connection?

that's something else; a Gigachad impression

Whether there is or isn't I teach them not to lie, ever, if possible, for the reasons expressed here.  They seem to get it, and they're both now good at seeing how interpersonal relations and communication styles work out on that deeper level, and how approaches and outcomes can vary.