Erik Van Alstine

Erik Van Alstine

Author. Leadership strategist. Expert in Perceptual IntelligenceTM.

Zen Master: Bad Things from Good Things

For several posts now I’ve been taking angles on this Zen Master story. Today’s post explores the tragic angle.

Here’s the story again to refresh your memory:

A boy in a village gets a horse for his birthday. All the people in the village said, “How wonderful! The boy got a horse.”

But the zen master said, “We’ll see.”

Then several years later the boy falls off his horse and breaks his leg. The people in the village said, “How terrible.”

But the zen master said, “We’ll see.”

Then a war breaks out and all the young men are called up to fight, but the boy can’t go because his leg is all messed up. And the people said, “How wonderful.”

But the zen master said, “We’ll see.”

In my first zen master post, I explored the idea that bad things can lead to good things, so we should hope for good even when things look bad.

In my second and third zen master posts, I departed from the zen master’s point to explore a general principle in cause-and-effect, the idea that like follows like, meaning, good things tend to lead to good things, and bad things tend to lead to bad things.

As a general rule, we reap what we sow. Our sins eventually find us out. Justice is served and people get what’s coming to them, good and bad. Most twentieth-century American films follow this story line, where the villain dies and the hero lives happily ever after.

The world is a complex place, but not complex or capricious enough to buy into the zen master’s philosophy of life, where good and bad are only illusions. We live in a moral universe, where cause and effect run by the general principle, like follows like.

Here in my fourth post we explore the tragic side of the zen master story, where good things lead to bad things.

  • The boy got a horse, which was a good thing, but then fell off and broke his leg, which was a bad thing.
  • Back in 2007 I helped a Harvard Business School professor build a consulting practice. It started out fantastic. But a couple years later one of the partners wronged another partner, and I wound up in a six-year lawsuit. If I hadn’t helped the professor and introduced certain people into the mix, that lawsuit would never have happened. A good thing led directly to a bad thing. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been better if I had never met that professor.
  • There are thousands of parents in the world who have lost a child to SIDS. The injustice of it rips them apart. There is perhaps no greater good than this newborn baby, and no greater tragedy than to lose that newborn. I’m reminded of one of the world’s shortest stories, commonly (but falsely) attributed to Ernest Hemingway, just six words long: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Bad things happen, despite our good intentions. Bad things happen as a direct consequence of good things. This is an indisputable fact of life. It doesn’t happen nearly as often as the general rule (like follows like) but to deny that it happens is to deny reality.

In a talk just a couple weeks ago, I spoke about the many dimensions of human suffering. Some suffering is self-imposed. Some suffering is imposed by other people’s choices. Some suffering leads to greater good. Some suffering is simply tragic and inexplicable. To say things like “there must be a good purpose in it” is one-dimensional, and doesn’t help those struggling with tragedy. We must recognize the many facets of suffering, and not treat it simplistically.

My posture here is acceptance, courage, and wisdom, in line with the Serenity Prayer, which reads, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

 
AI_FreeIntroChapter_Blog

Share this post