Question
I am currently discovering the Zen precepts and reading Master Deshimaru’s “Zen and Everyday Life.” One of the precepts is not to kill, but killing a person can be “tolerated” if that person has deliberately and knowingly killed—thus a form of approval for the death penalty.
I am deeply opposed to the idea of humans killing one another. If Zen is living here and now, am I right to think that Zen can evolve and adapt here and now, and that what Master Deshimaru wrote reflects the thinking and era in which he wrote it? Or must we understand that, yes, killing is possible in certain cases?
Anonymous
Answer from Master Kosen
If we had been able to kill Hitler, for example, we would have saved many lives.
That is not difficult to understand.
But of course we must promote life, not death.
Do not kill life; protect life, love, and freedom, even beyond death. Life transcends death itself. We must kill death and live eternally, and to kill death we must love life enough to die alive. That is the passion of Christ.
The way of life and values offered to us in this modern society actually belong to the kingdom of death. Death is taboo; we are made to believe we are protected from it by all sorts of laws that actually deprive us of our right to live. Death in this society is all-powerful and always has the last word, even for those who are ideologically opposed to the death penalty.
But we are forbidden to speak about it openly or challenge its supremacy by putting it in its place.
We live under the dictatorship of death, but those who are free of it understand that the precept “do not kill”
means granting ourselves the right to live and think freely.
It means granting ourselves the right to die when and as we wish.
It means granting ourselves the right to believe that death is not inevitable and that we are never obliged to die.
That death exists only and exclusively in the kingdom of those who are already dead.
Kosen