Values; Religious Beliefs; Judaism; Roman Catholicism; 禪宗=Zen Buddhism=Zazen Buddhism; Adulthood; Human; Adult
摘要
The purpose of this dissertation is to present a phenomenological approach to the experience of evil. The experience of evil is described both in the historical writing of Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism and in the interviews of three individuals who were connected to each of these three religious traditions.
In order to emphasize that this researcher's own background and interests have shaped the way he sees the phenomenon of evil, he tells of his own experiences of evil and states his own assumptions about the phenomenon of evil.
The review of the literature begins by describing various viewpoints concerning evil in the Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist traditions; also included in the review are the writings upon evil by scholars (such as Rudolf Otto and Paul Ricoeur), psychologists (such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung), and literary figures (such as the Marquis de Sade, William Blake, and Herman Melville).
After summarizing the nine tape-recorded interviews, themes are extracted from each of the interviews and there is a comparison of the themes that emerged from the Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist interviews. One significant finding was that the Buddhists who were interviewed showed a much greater degree of homogeneity in their themes relating to evil than did either the interviewed Jews or Christians--all three Buddhists shared the theme that there is "no evil from the vantage point of absolute reality." Since this theme did not emerge from any of the Jewish or Christian interviews, a second significant finding was that the Buddhists' themes differed noticeably from those of the Jews and Christians.
Lastly, a description is given of how Edmund Husserl's method of "free phantasy variation" (the "ph" being intentional) was used in an attempt to determine what are the essential elements in the experience of evil. After working with this method, this researcher arrived at the following conclusion: The experience of evil from the viewpoint of the experiencer is a real experience of that which is radically opposed to what the experiencer considers sacred. The experiencer may later explain or interpret what happened, but accepts that in the last analysis the experience is beyond rational comprehension.
