The Koan of Non-Hypocrisy

As a writer on Zen practice, and more generally on ending suffering, I often need to express the concept of not-being-a-hypocrite. And therein lies a quandary: we have no word for that in English. Try it: finish the following sentence with any of the fourteen suggested antonyms in my online thesaurus: "The behaviour of an enlightened person is..."

• forthright
• frank
• genuine
• honest
• humble
• open
• real
• truthful
• actual
• authentic
• just
• reliable
• righteous
• sincere

Not one of those attributes, laudable though they be, means "not hypocritical".

Let's try again. Given that "hypocrisy is the opposite of faith", its essence must therefore be:

• fairness
• frankness
• honesty
• openness
• trustworthiness
• truth
• truthfulness
• uprightness
• forthrightness
• righteousness
• sincerity

Again, none of those means "the character trait of not doing the opposite of what one insists others do."

And finally: "A true man of no rank is first and foremost not a hypocrite." He is therefore… a what? My online thesaurus refuses even to try on this one; it doesn't list a single antonym for "hypocrite", weak or otherwise.

I smack into this wall every day. I can exhort the reader (and much more often, myself) not to be a hypocrite, but "Be a… uh… person who reflexively and instinctively monitors his or her behaviour and speech for consistency with the teachings he or she espouses!" does not fit on a rubber bracelet. In English, there is no positive exhortation; we can only condemn. And you know what that makes us. (Hint: "ironic" is only the beginning.)

This is a serious problem, not just for our language, but for our minds and souls. Even etymology abandons us here; hypocrite literally means "one who criticises (him- or herself) too little", but the opposite ("hypercrite") would mean "one who criticises others all the time," as in the adjective hypercritical.

And that isn't the opposite of hypocrite. It's a synonym.


Wu Ya's commentary: "Solve for X."

(Bandage of Faith [artwork] courtesy of Danny Sillada [artist], Wikimedia Commons, and a generous photographer.)