There Is No Evil Or Good, There Is Only Action

The underlying premise . . . is that something called evil exists. We don't know what exactly evil is. It's often personified as Satan, an intelligent and powerful supernatural being who is purely evil and makes people do bad things, just as God is a supernatural being who is purely good and makes people do good things.

But even people who don't believe in Satan or God tend to believe in the existence of evil and good. Reading this chapter makes it apparent that Asian Buddhists who knew nothing of the Judeo-Christian God or Satan nevertheless had similar ideas about the existence of something called "evil" and something called "good."

Dogen takes an entirely different approach. He says that there is no evil or good as absolutes or as personified supernatural beings. There is only action. Sometime you do the right thing, and sometimes you act like a jerk.

This is a much more straightforward explanation. In terms of Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation accounting for the facts must be the right one, Dogen's position makes tons more sense than theories about supernatural entities or about a kind of evil and good that sort of sit around waiting for people to do them.

---Brad Warner, in his commentary on Master Dogen's Shoaku Makusa---