Chapter Two

Natural Morality

In every society, we find a set of moral behaviour which helps to keep society in good order. Morality in the fundamental sense is self-restraint for the purpose of social order. When the standard of morality has become low in society, law and order has to be imposed. Whilst morality is a self-restraint, laws are an enforcement. Therefore, the society which has more laws, in fact, has failed to keep up its moral standard. The members of that society do not succeed in controlling themselves and this is just the beginning of social problems.

We are now living in a consuming world which adores and worships wealth, status and power. Being rich and famous has become the supreme ideal for most people. This is also the time when the younger generation chooses to join in with the alcohol and drugs culture as well as having pop stars as their role models. This kind of society has created more greed, dissatisfaction, envy, anger, hatred and violence.

As a result, moral standards have been diminishing drastically and shockingly. In the past, this was the time when the prophets or the knowers, such as Abraham, Moses, Christ, The Buddha and Mohammed came forward and destroyed all the wrong values and amoral conduct in society and put things right again. Nowadays, we leave this job in the hands of politicians, bankers, merchants, rich and famous people to predict, plan and dictate our future. Famous people who don't know much about moral values, come out to voice their opinion about social issues, such as legalising drugs, sexuality and so on.

All these reasons make it extremely difficult for individuals to be at peace, let alone talk about world peace. The world is facing a very serious and critical moral dilemma which has never happened before in the history of mankind.

The moral crisis is a consequence of the decline in religious belief. There are more people becoming atheist and not believing in God anymore. God is the only reason for people to stick to their moral principals. Without Him, there is no need to aim for heaven or fear hell. People do not feel obliged to observe the Ten commandments and it is much easier to answer to their feelings and emotions: I will do whatever I feel like doing. It is this attitude which rapidly changes the world into a less pleasant place to live in.

It is this turning point that we have to put right. In reality, it looks almost impossible to bring God back into people's hearts as He used to be in the past. I come from a Buddhist background where I can also look at God from another angle which is rather different from the Christians. It is at this point that I will try my best to explain why we always need to observe moral behaviour. As for the devout Christian, it is very important to read this concept with an open mind.

In my Tai chi class at the University of Birmingham, I make it very clear that Tai chi is part of the Buddhist and the Taoist culture. My Tai chi teaching is based on making people understand this oriental concept through a set of movements. Tai chi movement is only one of the means which assist people to reach their religious goal which is Nibbana in Buddhism or Tao in Taoism. According to Lao Tzu and The Buddha, Nibbana or Tao is the ultimate reason for us to be in this world. Therefore, entering Nibbana or living in harmony with Tao is the supreme goal of our lives. The Buddhists still have this very distinctive idealism and understand that everyone must try to achieve that ultimate goal of life but whether they can do it or not is another matter.

Those who come from a Christian background will find it rather alien to adopt the Buddhist concepts. To make it easier for my students to approach, I explain that Nibbana and Tao has everything to do with individual peace of mind. As a matter of fact, this is also the approach which has to be used among young Buddhists too because Nibbana sounds too remote and irrelevant to them. So do the Christians, the younger generation cannot relate to God because HE sounds too remote. But in fact, knowing God has everything to do with our inner peace too. I have a very strong belief that the state of individual inner peace can be the centre point where all organised religious believers can meet. Inner peace is a universal feeling just like sadness and joy. These feelings have no boundary among mankind. If we put black, white and yellow babies in the same room, shut the door and listen to their crying and giggling, there is no way we would know which cries and giggles belong to which baby. They all sound the same. This should make God, Nibbana and Tao share the same ground. All these different names could be just symbols for the same thing. We shall put all those different names aside for the moment and focus on this universal feeling of inner peace first.

If the state of inner peace is to be the goal of life, most people can identify with it and can begin to see that this is an immediate goal, not something so far away after life at all. This objective indeed has everything to do with our modern lives here and now. When we agree with this objective, only then can we begin to talk about morality.

It is moral principals which are the means to help people achieve their own inner peace. That's why in every organised religion, observing moral behaviour is always a significant part of their religious practice. What people don't always realise is that moral conduct can truly help people to feel happier and at peace. We can all remember our innocent childhood feeling when we did something good, kind and charitable, we felt good and proud of ourselves. Adults' feelings are not that different from children's. Somehow, we feel worthwhile and have hope in living. When people don't believe in God, heaven or hell, a lot of people see no reason to do good and be good. If we change the word around and say instead that: heaven is peace of mind and hell is mental turmoil, we can see it a bit clearer and closer right away, can't we ? The Thai people have a saying: Heaven is in our chests, hell is in our minds. In this way people can see the reason to stand on their moral ground and stand by it because it means their very own peace of mind.

From this understanding, it will become much easier to live a moral life because the majority of people in the world naturally have moral sense. Natural morality is, in fact, our conscience and we all have it in different degrees. Some have more than others. Our guilty conscience is the one which will help us to distinguish right from wrong. This is why most of us cannot go out to slit the throat of a chicken or stab a cow or a pig to make a meal for our dinner tables. Unless one is trained to kill all these animals for food, it is unnatural for most people to do so because we cannot get through the barrier of our guilty conscience. If people had to slaughter animals for food by themselves, I have no doubt that the majority of people in the world would turn vegetarian overnight. The advantage of living in society is that, for a small price, we can ask Sainsbury, Tesco, Safeway and so on to kill those animals for us instead.

We have all had the experience of feeling awful when we do something terribly bad and wrong. If we just look at all the basic moral precepts such as not killing, not lying, not stealing, not committing adultery, not intoxicating ourselves, we can easily link this with the mental turmoil we have to go through when we cross the line. How many of us could truly be happy and at peace if we had to kill, lie, cheat, have affairs, and get ourselves drunk or hooked on drugs. Normal people would suffer terribly with their guilty conscience and wish that they could turn the clock back and undo the harm.

Those who have a good moral conscience even know that anger, hatred and jealousy are harmful to their inner peace too. When we are envious or angry at someone, we are the first person who gets hurt, not the one we hate or are jealous of. When anger and jealousy cannot be stopped, destructive action will be carried out. People hurt one another because of resentment and anger. War is the end result of all individual anger, hatred and ignorance put together.

People who are ready to be good parents all have natural morality in them. No selfish people can be good parents. Bringing up a family takes a lot of courage, sacrifice and indeed a great deal of natural loving and kindness. All mothers are privileged to know the overwhelming love flooding their hearts the minute their babies are born. That special feeling is truly the gift of God, a reward for the hard work all mothers give to bring their babies up. I would like to think that this is God's way to make sure that humans as well as animals will carry on living. Without mother love, humanity won't survive.

That's why it is also important that children appreciate what the parents have given. In the East, the term filial duty is often used and mentioned in everyday life conversation. If someone does not know how to love and care for their own parents, who else can he love ? That person will be no good to anyone. Those who ill treat their parents will definitely go to hell. This is what Thai people believe. Only when I moved to the West, did I find out that this term (filial duty) is not used at all and therefore westerners do not quite grasp the full meaning. There were a few occasions when I raised this issue and tried to explain the meaning. I was quite surprised to hear people come to the conclusion that parents want something in return for bringing up their children. That makes the parents seem rather selfish because they should not expect anything in return. It isn't like that at all.

In fact, there is a much deeper sense which is closely link to the spiritual journey too. Apart from the natural instinct that children should care for their own parents, the term filial duty is also the direct influence of Buddhism. The Buddha said that if we put our mother on one shoulder and our father on the other and let them do their business on our shoulders for the rest of their lives, that is still not enough for us to give back what our parents have given us. This parable just shows how important parents are to us, children. In Buddhist terms, being born as a human being is the most fortunate event because it means another further step forward to the ultimate enlightenment. The ones who make this birth possible are our parents. Without them, we stand no chance of fulfilling our spiritual duty. This is the paramount role which most people do not realise if they do not understand Buddhism right to the core. The Buddha also talked about the dreadful consequence of the worst kamma anyone could commit and one of them was killing one's own parents. In the religious sense, those who can fulfil their filial duty are moving a step nearer to ultimate enlightenment. This is why children in the Eastern culture are brought up to have high respect for their elders and have unconditional love, loyalty and responsibility for their parents.

As a result, our extended family has become our social security, everyone looks after one another and there is a deep bond in our family relationship. Children grow up in the warm and secure atmosphere of a big family. Eastern children feel deeply responsible for their parents' well-being. We naturally know that we have a duty to look after our parents especially when they reach their vulnerable age. This is the feeling which makes them feel the need to fulfil their filial duty. Whatever income they have, they will make sure that some, if not all, will go to their parents. The poorer they are, the more responsible they feel. Poverty has forced many Eastern girls to work in the sex industry so that they can support their parents and younger siblings. Oriental girls who marry Western husbands, at times, are labelled as money grabbers because they only want economic stability, not love. Behind that notorious label, those girls have rather high moral conscience. They do their best to look after their husband and family here but they can never forget and neglect their parents and family back home. The nice thing that comes out of this is that people in Eastern culture do not feel lonely and depressed.

Children in Western society do not have the financial and social responsibility to their parents because social security takes care of them. As a result, there is not much bonding between parents and children. Once children grow up, they have their own lives and the relationship between parents and children drifts apart. That's why old people in the West are often left to fend for themselves. Their children can be in another city or another country. However, this is just a generalisation. Of course, there are people in the East who don't care for their parents at all and there are people in the West who take very good care of their parents.

In retrospect, the world has been through periods of time when members of some society have badly crossed the moral line. Hitler could mobilise a great number of Nazis to kill six million Jews without feeling anything wrong. This is a horrifying act and we thought that this page of history could never repeat itself ever again. We were wrong; those kind of atrocities keep on repeating themselves even nowadays from Russia, to Cambodia, Timor, Bosnia and Africa. How many governments in the world are there which have nothing to do with torturing human-beings for political reasons ? In Africa, young children are trained to be professional killers and they find nothing wrong in doing so. When mothers lose their instinct of loving and protecting their own children and kill or abandon them, it also proves that the society has become very sick.

Apart from killing which some people can do without any guilt, lying, cheating, committing adultery, drinking alcohol and taking drugs have also become acceptable norms and even become part of our culture. It means that this is our modern way of life. This is the time when all individuals who cherish their inner peace have to try even harder to understand this concept of natural morality because collective disaster is imminent. I truly believe that it is down to the individual to try their best to restore their inner peace. We cannot wait for a government to bestow this gift on us because it will never happen. We would like to think that once we have a government of our favourite party, we shall be happier because things will go our way. The government can turn out to be a reason to take away people's inner peace even more. Most poor people in Britain had high hopes for their children to go to higher education without much struggling when the Labour government came into power and look what happened. Indeed, the government is a key issue to help or to take away people's happiness. This is another big topic I will talk about in another chapter.

We need to understand a bit more that doing good is good in itself and doing bad is bad in itself. This means that when we do good deeds, we feel good right away and when we do bad deeds, we feel awful right away. The result of either the good or bad deed is simultaneous. People misunderstand this moral concept because we like to think in a materialistic way. We can't help thinking that when we do something really good, we should have something good in return. We seem to think that good results have to link with objects, in other words, wealth, status and power. We would like to think that we deserve to win the national lottery because we are not bad people and God should help us. That's why most people, especially older people who have done good things all their lives, feel that they haven't yet received anything back at all. They haven't yet become rich or well recognised. On the contrary, they feel that they are still poor and have to get by with their small pension fund and probably have to suffer from ill health too. They can't help thinking that life is unfair and feel totally let down by God who said: God will help those who help themselves. People are literally waiting for God to give them something back after they have done something really good. Deep down, we are yearning for ten minutes standing ovation from the rest of the world or even to win a ticket to the Garden of Eden so that people can single us out as someone who is truly special because we have done something so good.

It is a shame that all these misunderstandings have let us down so badly. In fact, God has done his bit. He never betrays anyone who does good. As he has promised, he will help anyone who helps themselves. We do good, then we feel good. If we replace the word feel good into feel God, this equation about God will help those who help themselves can be solved right away. Do good, feel God.

If people can truly value their peace of mind and sincerely want to maintain it, their moral behaviour will become natural and innocent. It isn't the kind of conduct that we feel obliged to do. In other words, we don't have to bend over backwards to be good and to be noticed. We don't give with one hand and take away with the other. We all know that very young children cannot lie. That is exactly what I mean by natural morality. The person might not even know that it is a very good thing to do. They only know that this is the kind of conduct which does not upset the balance of their minds. When they happen to know that they are good, it isn't good anymore. They have lost their innocence. Children are loveable because they can maintain their innocence. They do good things without knowing that they are good. Once they grow up a bit more and learn worldly values, they gradually lose their innocence and their behaviour changes. They begin to expect something back after they do something good. In this respect, it is adults who pass on this concept to our children. We like to tell our children that if they behave themselves or do some work for mum and dad, they will be praised and rewarded. However, it is the innocent acts that we must bring back to people's hearts.

Most people would agree that it isn't at all easy to do good work without being acknowledged. This kind of moral concept does need a great deal of bravery and self-encouragement especially in society where there is moral resistance everywhere. Teenagers find it easier to accept a bottle of alcopop, a cigarette or an Ecstasy pill than to resist it. Well, it is quite true but it isn't at all impossible. It means that people have to value their inner peace a bit more. The Buddhist practice which is called vipassana-bhavana can actually bring this innocent moral conduct back to mankind.