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Bernard Williams, Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, Buddhaghosa, June Price Tagney, Maria Heim, Maurice Walshe, Pali suttas, Ronda Dearing, Sarah Shaw
It doesn’t sit very well with many modern readers, including myself, to put a high value on shame. We often find shame to be something that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a way that inhibits our doing good. Too often I look to some minor misdeed of mine, sometimes even just a joke that failed to land, and instinctively beat myself up for it. Yet detailed introductions to Pali Buddhist texts will often note that these texts prize the mental states of hiri and ottappa, two Pali terms which are both often translated “shame”. It is important to pay attention to the parts of a tradition we disagree with, especially if it’s our own tradition; they can be the ones we learn from the most. So I don’t want to dismiss the texts’ valuation of what looks like shame.
And yet one day while looking through the suttas for something unrelated, I chanced upon something that is much less commonly remarked on: the Pali texts also contain a critique of shame. Or at least of something that could be translated as “shame” just as reasonably as hiri and ottappa can be. That something is kukkucca.
Pali texts regularly refer to a traditional list of five “hindrances” (nivaraṇa), things that get in the way of your progress on the path, including things like sensual desire and sloth. But the last of these five is an extraordinary compound, uddhacca-kukkucca. Uddhacca is agitation or worry, “like water whipped by the wind”, a turmoil where the mind is not equanimous – a feeling all too familiar to me. But even more familiar to me is kukkucca, which Buddhaghosa describes as follows: “It has subsequent regret as its characteristic. Its function is to sorrow about what has and what has not been done. It is manifested as remorse. Its proximate cause is what has and what has not been done. It should be regarded as slavery.” (Vism 470)
That is shame! You feel sorrow at the bad deeds you regret and repent – and it is a state of slavery or bondage, a state that holds you back. I feel such a state a lot, mentally punishing myself for deeds that have gone wrong, and I was worried that classical Buddhism had no way to criticize such a problematic emotional state. It turns out it does!
This critique of shame is unfortunately missed in most translations. Maurice Walshe renders uddhacca-kukkucca as “worry-and-flurry”. “Worry” is accurate for uddhacca, but “flurry” is a terrible translation of kukkucca: it reveals nothing of the fact that kukkucca is about past mistakes. Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli is no better, rendering kukkucca itself as “worry” in his translation of the Visuddhimagga even in rendering the passage I just quoted. “Shame” is not the only word that could plausibly render kukkucca in English, but alternatives would need to be something like “guilt” or “remorse” – terms that convey that what’s being criticized is a bad feeling about past mistakes. Because the translations miss this sense of kukkucca, they lead us not to see the ways in which Buddhism tells us not to be weighed down by past mistakes.
But if Pali Buddhism does indeed criticize shame in the way I’ve discussed here, then what’s the deal with hiri and ottappa: those Pali concepts which are so often translated “shame” and yet treated as good? Maria Heim has a wonderful discussion of the matter in her chapter “Shame and apprehension” (which contains many further beautiful subtleties I can’t go into here).
As Heim rightly notes: “the Pali treatment of hiri and ottappa emphasizes not feelings of anguish after committing a wrong deed or omitting a good one, but of anticipating feelings that check wrong deeds before they may occur. Their value lies in what they keep us from doing, not in wretched anguish when reflecting on wrongs already commited.” (245) That “wretched anguish” is kukkucca, and it is what I think of as shame. Thus, as Heim points out further, Buddhaghosa says that “since one cannot undo a bad deed nor do a good deed that was neglected, returning again [to it] in kukkucca is ugly”; kukkucca “scratches the mind like the point of an awl on a metal bowl.” (Aṭṭhasālinī 384) The good states hiri and ottappa stop us from doing bad things in the future; they don’t relive them in the past.
It’s not crazy to render hiri or ottappa as “shame” in a sense of modesty (“Have you no shame?”) Thus Heim herself translates hiri specifically as “shame”, because, as she rightly points out, hiri can refer to the kind of “nonmoral embarrassment” that we feel when seen naked; so too it is connected to disgust, as shame can be. (For kukkucca she reasonably uses “remorse”.) But I think “shame” can still be a somewhat confusing translation, because “feeling ashamed” most often tends to have a sense of things we have done in the past, as guilt and remorse do – and that is not the sense that hiri and ottappa have in Buddhaghosa.
Heim, quoting Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity, notes:
Where guilt is a matter of feeling anguish about the consequences of an action or its victim, shame calls into question one’s whole self. Guilt looks to the wrong committed or its victim, while “shame looks to what I am.” (Heim 248)
So, citing the developmental psychologists June Price Tagney and Ronda Dearing, Heim notes that “Guilt can lead to confession and restitution for the action or omission that produced it, while shame cannot or need not show the way to reparation and renewal.” (249) Shame in this sense is a beating-oneself-up that I feel all too frequently. All this is why I still prefer to render kukkucca and not hiri as “shame”.
Thus Sarah Shaw, in her excellent history of mindfulness, translates hiri and ottappa instead as “self-respect” and “scrupulousness”. These don’t catch some of the nuances that Heim notices, it’s true, so they’re not perfect translations either. But I prefer to render them this way, and kukkucca as “shame” – to make it clearer that the concepts of hiri and ottappa are not actually praising the way that we feel terrible about ourselves after a bad action we can no longer change. That feeling is something Buddhaghosa and other Pali Buddhists criticize, under the name kukkucca. We hurt ourselves by feeling ashamed of the bad things we’ve done; we do better by looking to the future and making sure we don’t do them again.
Thanks for this post about a topic—shame—that I haven’t thought about deeply recently. And thanks for pointing to Maria Heim’s relevant work, which I now want to read.
Much of this post refers to wrongdoing as the cause of shame, but elsewhere it has been posited that the core of shame can be stated more generally as social devaluation (including our anticipation of devaluation, or internalization of devaluation, etc.). Wrongdoing can be the cause of the devaluation that triggers the emotional response of shame, but there can be other causes (for example, think of some time when you felt shame at performing poorly in some situation even when you didn’t do anything wrong). Here’s a relevant quote from a summary of cross-cultural research on shame published in 2018 (from: Andrea Estrada, “The universality of shame”, UC Santa Barbara News, summarizing an article in PNAS by Daniel Sznycer et al.):
I did some Google searching just now and discovered that the popular consumer health information websites WebMD and Healthline both have articles on “toxic shame”, which may be a good term for the kind of shame that this post critiques in a Buddhist way. The WebMD article begins:
The “toxicity” seems to refer to an unhelpfully permanent attitude of self-devaluation.
In the Tibetan Buddhist traditions there’s a formulation called the “four powers” or “four strengths” (Wyl. bshags pa’i stobs bzhi) that summarizes Buddhist wisdom on how to respond to one’s own wrongdoing in a healthy way. Here’s Alexander Berzin’s summary of the four powers (from Introduction to the Kalachakra Initiation); he is explicit about how they differ from “toxic” guilt and shame:
Yeah, these are important points. I probably should have done a bit more to emphasize that shame isn’t just about bad deeds or doing wrong, at least not in the moral sense that those phrasings tend to indicate: as I noted, I often feel it myself when I think back on telling a joke that bombed. I only “did wrong” in the sense that with hindsight I know that that was not the best action to have taken under the circumstances. Which is another strong point against taking shame too seriously.
regardless of definition of shame, what it is and what not, you are feeding your own thoughts into definition to yield a desirable outcome; a classical pitfall. It would help your argument to support it with a few contextual examples where they have indeed been used in the sense that you desire, not just a reference to another researcher.
Anyhow, shame is a built in mechanism of humans and eradicating it is defacing human being of its most natural senses. It is normally done by those who commit or like to commit something that they are shameful of.
This is like trying achieving peace not through actions but by redefining peace so that it would be equal to war.
Going against human nature is a basic yet effective means to test one’s assumptions.
Shame is an alarm as many other mechanisms like pain. I suggest that instead of denying it altogether, try to understand and refine it.
Best
Man, your last sentence says, “I suggest that instead of denying it altogether, try to understand and refine it.” I assume this is a statement of principle about shame and not a criticism of the Buddhist attitude toward shame summarized in the post above; if it were the latter, it would be incorrect, because there is nothing in the post that denies shame altogether, and the point indeed seems to be the importance of understanding and refining emotions and their regulation and transmutation.
A comparison of the Buddhist critique of anger with that of shame would be interesting and perhaps a good topic for a future post. Anger, like shame, can be considered an alarm signal, but Buddhist teachings and psychology advise that these alarm signals can be very problematic and even “toxic”, with frequent false alarms and failures to stop signalling, thereby contaminating our mental processes and causing delusion and suffering.
As for being too “shameless”: this too can lead to its own kind of suffering (not to mention harms to others), because people who are too shameless expose themselves to social punishment that perhaps could have been avoided if they had been more concerned about others and about devaluation by others. But in such people the shame that is lacking is the adaptive “shame” (hiri and ottappa) that the Buddhist texts praise, not the maladaptive “toxic shame” (kukkucca) that the Buddhist texts critique. The distinction between those two kinds of “shame” was, of course, the subject of this post.
I do not subscribe to any faith, nor do I “worship” privately. I like to compare, though that is not a compelling interest either. My youth was confusing when it came to questions and discussions of a higher power. I have, mostly, resolved those difficulties and am fondly reminded of prayer, learned in my early twenties. That ritualized psalm was titled The Remover of Difficulties. Some readers here may know it. During early worship and teachings, I learned something of shame that I have not forgotten. It was a tool, akin to prohibitions such as those seven deadly sins proscribed in Christianity, and, perhaps elsewhere. Laying forth the shame proscription was roughly equivalent to condemning adultery or gluttony, lust, averice (sp?), etc. There was a huge effort made to save impetuous youth from themselves. So, shaming, in this sense, was part of the elders’ toolkit, though they seldom, if ever, would admit it—not until younger people were much older, anyway. Just another view, see, on a time of confusion and difficulty.
Amod, your analysis of shame reminds me of Martha Nussbaum’s analysis of anger—that it is useful when future-focused in terms of actions that prevent future harm or build the conditions for the amelioration of future harm, and counterproductive when backward-looking and focused on our satisfaction from the punishment of evil doers. Remorse that offers guidance for future growth and impovement is healthy, whereas remorse that makes us suffer endlessly for our past transgressions does nothing to reduce the suffering of the world, which is our primary job as bodhisattvas. With this understanding, I am appalled at recommendations that call for the elimination of all shame. One of Donald Trump’s most grevious faults is his apparent shamelessness—if only he was cabable of becoming ashamed of his lies, greed, and need for dominance and learning and growing from a sense of remorse…
I have some good news, I think, had you not yet heard. The prospective appointee for U$ Attorney General withdrew. Nothing further, save it is a small crack in the authoritarian’s armor…we shall see.
“…this critique of shame is missing, in most translations.” That revelation haunts me a bit. Why was there lack of such critique? I cannot give more than a speculative answer: translators did not care to incur unnecessary wrath or criticism, of, you guessed it, their interests, motives and preferences. My IMPish friends. Context is everything, even when attention to honesty would better serve credibility. How’s that for integral thinking? So, par exemple, did Jesus really turn water into wine? I don’t know—I was not there. How about his ressurection? Same answer. Or, blasphemer that I may be, Moses and the Red Sea incident? No. Faith is not what honesty is about—faith is about unquestioning trust. Loyalty. Honesty took a different boat, or train, out of town. This is not so hard, if one casts aside contextual reality. Which is what my contrarian view advises, in the first place.