The Buddhist critique of shame

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)

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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.

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