Does the dueling notion of good and evil exist in non-Abrahamic (Eastern) philosophies as it does in the Western tradition?

Question

I am looking for discussions about good and evil in non-Abrahamic philosophies (meaning traditionally Eastern schools of thought, such as those from India and China). The reason being, good and evil are quite central topics in both the Bible and the Quran and have consequently been a great influence upon philosophers in the region where they are prevalent. So, I am interested in examining discussions of such concepts that lie outside such influences.

To phrase my question more succinctly: Did Eastern, non-Abrahamic philosophers come up with analogous concepts for good and evil?

Answer 1

An alternate manner of approaching this question is to drill into the idiosyncratic manner that Abrahamic religions, and subsequently Occidental thought, has dealt with the purported problem of "Good and Evil(g/e)"

The commonly understood conception of g/e, and the conception that is embedded in the texts of each religion has brought to bear a mentality that views g/e as independent entities. The Occident has a concept of g/e whereby persons embody one or the other. For instance, if one were to try to attempt an argument with a Westerner that Hitler was not, in fact evil (embodied, incarnate, etc), and rather that his actions were evil, then the argument would likely be met with hostility. The repulsion any sane person has for any genocide turns for explanation not first to mental stability, psychopathy, or any other empirical basis; sane people frequently turn first to evil. Evil, in particular, seems to have a sense of being simulataneously some possessing substance and an inexhaustible repository for actions. It is not precisely (in the g/e spectrum) an eleven or fifteen on some scale of 1-10 where 10 is bad; it has an unquantifiable measure to it.

The point here being, good and evil are not merits of a person when thinking of the "Good and Evil" in your question. The problem of evil is a metaphysical one for many Westerners. As much as a person I know angers me, I personally know no one who is evil. There are always exigencies to explain their behavior. When we reach out to affect a trend and understand something beyond our scope of experience (these are always harder to find out; i.e. you didn't know that your boss was a psychopath, but it sure does explain a lot), we are less prone to seek out the actual exigencies and more apt to generalize and appeal to some Deus Ex Machina... like evil.

• THE TAKEAWAY, Buddhism does not particularly have some corporeal concept for "Evil"; neither does Hinduism, Shintoism, Taoism, Bon, Shintoism, nor does fetishism, totemism, or animism facilitate such a concept. They explanations for why bad things happen, and what isn't particularly ideal, but not in the Occidental formulation of "Good and Evil."

Answer 2

I think the question is somewhat problematic in that there are many different views outside of the Abrahamic monotheisms which don't all sit well together as an "Eastern bloc." I cannot answer for the different views within Indian philosophy (and religion) at all. Moreover, I'm going to limit this answer to just Chinese philosophy.

The Chinese language has had words for good and evil since far before any encounter with Western thought - 善 shan and 悪 e respectively.

Within Chinese philosophy, in the Confucian school, a central question is a dispute between Xunzi and Mengzi ("Mencius") about whether human beings are innately good or evil. Mencius takes the view that all humans have a root of goodness in them (2A2 for the four roots, 6A2, 6A6 for the claim they are good), i.e. the tendency if not stifled for people to wind up as good (read more at the SEP article Mencius). For Xunzi, human nature is evil and only made good by strict discipline (see Wm Theodore DeBary's translation).

The SEP article suggests that the Daoist text Zhuangzi is written by people who have read Mencius and consciously reject the four roots and the notion that goodness has a well and tidied definition. This can be interpreted as inspired as either a rejection of categories in general or a rejection that rejects the "Confucian" / general definition of these categories.

This particular interpretive issue reminds me of one faced by the interpreters of Nietzsche -- if you take Nietzsche to be against all morality, then the higher men parts don't make any sense; if you take him to be against just a type of supposedly Judeo-Christian slavish morality, then what's he's proposing is an alternative view that has its own concepts of good and evil (see SEP: Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy). In other words "Beyond Good and Evil" is either no more rules or beyond good and evil as they define it. So then the question is whether the Daoists (or at least some of them) are merely rejecting the Confucian good/evil understanding or any understanding of good/evil. The inner chapters of the Zhuangzi seem to suggest they have ideals about how people should interact with nature which if memory serves get called "good" (51 different paragraphs according to ctext).

What about yin/yang? Doesn't that say there's light in darkness and darkness in light? One of the main original sources of this in Chinese thought is the I Ching (book of changes), which also contains a bunch of hexagram patterns and their interpretations. This text is not mentioned in the Analects, Mengzi, etc. It does feature prominently in Neo-Confucianism (starting from around 1100 CE) as part of their need to have a metaphysic to combat the one coming from Buddhist competitors at the time).

Moreover, even yin/yang does not clearly negate the idea of good / evil. Instead, it shifts it somewhat in a similar direction to the Zhuangzi. Rather than seeking a pure idealized good, it makes it so that the goal is to be in touch with this not inherently moral nature (here nature under the meaning of the world around us rather than essence).

There's some really interesting reading on whether this has anything like the Western notion of a "problem of evil" in Franklin Perkins book, Heaven and Earth are not Humane. The book looks at both Confucian and Daoist responses to the fact of evil in the world.

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One part of your question that I didn't address in very much detail was the "dueling notion" part. A major impetus is that I'm not sure I understand what is being asked on that particular front. If the question is, does Chinese thought put good in conflict with evil? Then, my answer would be yes. Is there a high God who is at war with Satan and evil? Then, in general (with the possible exception of some interpretation of 天 tian), the answer is no.

Is there a world where we need to marshall resources to keep the good alive? Then, for the Confucian school, yes. For the Daoists, then sort of kind of, but with "good" needing to be understood in a very distinct light that should not be confused with say traditional morality or being a part of normalish Chinese society. Instead, it's a type of convergence with 道 Dao (whether understood as 然 zi (nature) or something distinct), that does not get confused with the "good" dictated by society.

Answer 3

There is no ultimate good or evil in Eastern philosophy. There is only relative good and evil. "All undertakings are beset with imperfections, as fire with smoke" (Gita 18.48). In the symbol Yin and Yang, you will notice that there is the element of each in the other. Fire burns, when it is used for cooking we think it is good, when it burns our hand, we think it is bad, but fire is neither good or evil. Light shines on both the thief and the policeman, but the light is neither good or evil. Different societies in different places and times have considered different things good or evil. In one society to marry your first cousin is considered good, in another evil. God is neither good or evil. Good and evil exist only in the relative world of our perception. We can, however, use good to go be rid if evil and then to go beyond good. The early Persians were the original instigators of the concept of ultimate good God and evil God that developed more fully in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The evil god became the Devil. There is no devil in the eastern tradition, there is a minor mention in a early Hindu scripture, but was later rejected as the concept waas never developed further in any subsequent Hindu scriptures.

Answer 4

To answer the question:

Of course every mythology feels the need to explain the good/evil difference. As I see, most mythologies in the world explain it by bipolarity (e.g. the North and South in a magnet cannot be set apart, so the good and evil are both necessary parts of every individual -- of course not so balanced as the simpler magnetic analogy, but they can't be isolated as well). Monotheisms explain it by dualism (like Platonic reality/ideality, good and evil are isolated things, so one person may be 100% good, and another 100% evil. That's the basis of maniqueism, and also a root for the melodrama that stains most of our cultural production, instead of the richer Greek tradition of tragedy, as illustrated by Sophocles' Oedipus). You can read more about this distinction in Marc Halévy's Lecture du Tao: une sagesse qui nous attend... (2012).

Now some more detail, about the question itself and about virmaior's answer:

I doubt that "shan" alone may represent our word "good", as well as "e" alone our word "evil". That's because hao 好, liang 良, jia 佳, guai 乖, mei 美, jia 嘉, as well as lianghao 良好, youliang 优良, nashou 拿手, bulai 不赖... all mean "good". So the translation here is far from direct or simple. If "to know" may be translated by more than 10 different characters, then we're probably "out of words". Both Confucius' Analects and Orwell's 1984 have taught us about the importance of the right words, but the West doesn't seem to be listening (or reading).

Also, this methodology brings its own problems: guai 乖 is also "perverse", "contrary to reason", "abnormal". A similar problem in translation is chang 常, which may be translated as "common", "usual" and at the same time "eternal", "unchanging". This simple character interfered with centuries of Western translations of the Chinese texts (most translators, saturated with monotheism, choose the latter meaning of chang, although the former is more significant in the light of both the remaining text and the findings in animal behavior or physics).

That being said, primitive Daoism apparently agrees with Mengzi's vision in virmaior's 3rd paragraph. The Dao De Jing (57) says "I do nothing and the people are reformed of themselves. I love quietude and the people are righteous of themselves. I deal in no business and the people grow rich by themselves. I have no desires and the people are simple and honest by themselves." [Lin Yutang 1955 http://web.archive.org/web/20110514203735/http://home.pages.at/onkellotus/TTK/English_Yutang_TTK.html#Kap57] That's a great definition of "good" to me, though the character shan 善 is absent.

In a modern, scientific world-view, biology says that any social species will know how to tell good from evil. That's illustrated in Jane Goodall's book "Through a Window", when the group of Gombe chimpanzees isolates an old female who kills an infant.

This Daoist point of view is also exemplified in the movie K-PAX (2001), where Kevin Spacey's character replies to his restless, frustrated doctor, who is asking about his "other-worldly society", which is described as having no rules or government. The doctor asks "How do you know right from wrong?", to which the "alien" answers the obvious: "Every being in the Universe knows right from wrong, Mark." That's a great movie about Daoist thinking. Remembering that the society described by the "alien" is strikingly similar to those existent all over America, which were unmercifully destroyed by so-called Christians "devoted to good".

So, to conclude: yes, Eastern philosophies are well aware of the good/evil problem, but no, they don't posit this two concepts as "dueling", but are able to recognize their "complementarity", opposed to those who, trying to bring us "100% good" actually brought some of us "100% evil"...

Answer 5

The answer to your question, is the 2600 year old Ancient Persian religion called, Zoroastrianism.

The religion of Zoroastrianism was founded by a Persian Prophet named, Zoroaster-(this is the Greek translation of the original Persian name, "Zarathustra"). And just as The Bible is the Holy Book for both Jews and Christians, The Avesta, was and is still, the Holy Text for Zoroastrians in India-(known as, "Parsis") and Iran-(whereby a tiny minority of Zoroastrians reside), as well as other parts of the world.

The Metaphysical or Supernatural dualism that is found within The Koran and in parts of The New Testament, actually originated with the Zoroastrian Avesta and predate both The New Testament and The Koran by many centuries. And although Supernatural dualism can be found as far back as the Book of Genesis in The Old Testament, the constant warring of Good versus Evil-(i.e. Metaphysical/ Supernatural Dualism), is not necessarily a Central theme within the many Books of The Old Testament, whereas the constant War between the Supernatural Good and Evil, is a Central theme within The Zoroastrian Avesta and Zoroastrian Theology. In fact, it is the Metaphysical/Supernatural Duality that is the Foundation for Zoroastrianism, whereas such Supernatural dualities are not necessarily the Foundation for the above mentioned faiths.

Interestingly, the mighty and vast Ancient Persian Empire-(600 BC/BCE-330 BC/BCE), which spanned from Northern India, to Western Anatolia-(present-day Turkey), never proselytized or converted its imperial subjects. Zoroastrianism and its dualistic ethical teachings, were pretty much confined to the ethnic Persian populations of Iran and Uzbekistan. Imperial subjects retained their respective religious faiths, though some Ancient Greek Philosophers, especially, Heraclitus of Ephesus, were probably influenced by some of the (Pre-Dialectical/Dualistic) teachings of Zoroastrianism.

Christianity never came to Persia/Iran, though Persian Zoroastrianism did influence and impact some of the Early Church Teachings, particularly, Manicheanism and appears to have had a great influence on The Western Church, during its early years. And Persian Zoroastrianism had a significant influence on Islam as well.

So when looking at the origins of Metaphysical/Supernatural Dualism, one can see that Zoroastrianism helped to pioneer such concepts and influences around the world for over 2500 years.