COLUMNS: Tom Armstrong

WE BUDDHISTS TELL EACH OTHER we should not be judgmental. And, well, I am sure we shouldn’t. But what does it mean not to be judgmental?

I was in the drugstore yesterday wanting to buy toothpaste. There are a lot of choices these days: tartar control, minty, popular brands, store brands, whitening formulas, tubes of many sizes, pumps.There is nothing that a person can do that avoids the necessity of making a judgment of some kind. Clearly, avoiding judgments is not a warning to avoid decisions.

So what, then, would a judgment be? It seems to me that it must certainly be a value judgment based upon a good-vs.-evil --- or worthy-vs-unworthy --- continuum. When we judge that someone is evil, we lose sympathy with that person and create a separation between an imagined “us” and “them.” But so long as we think in ways that do not evaluate others (or things) on a good/evil continuum then our thinking is an evaluation and not a judgment.

None of the toothpaste products in the drugstore yesterday evening caused so much as a synapse to spark as to a thought of good/evil. So I bought a large tube of Crest and smiled on my way out the store.

My “narrow” take on what constitutes what a judgment is makes me a pretty free-thinking Buddhist dude. Indeed, I have gotten into the habit of thinking all the time.

This morning I took a crowded No. 38 Geary bus to work, per usual. I stood near the back. Having nothing in particular to read or do, I started thinking and people watching. Since I was facing forward, I could see a lot of bored-looking faces on the people holding onto the silver poles. Then, I started noticing people’s ears.

I SUPPOSE THAT noticing ears began when I was intrigued by this young man with bleach-dyed hair who had about six studs in his ears. He was a happy young fellow of about 17 who was clean, clear-skinned, upright and fit. But what set him apart -- making him strikingly handsome -- were his mismatched, curiously crumpled, sticking out, chewed-up looking ears. It was an odd thing, and all day I have seen people as ear-bearing creatures.

When you spend a day paying constant attention to people’s ears, you gain a new perspective on the world. There are some people who have big flapping, fat-lobed ears while others have these cute, bold little ears shaped like a capital on one side of their head and a backwards-capital on the other: “C.” And some have spritely C-shaped ears in an italicized Arial font: C

When you go on an “ear intensive” as I have, you begin to think at first that people look an awful lot like hamsters. You have a radically altered sense of people’s appearances.

Now, it may be that I lack an erotic charge that others may get from the look, nibbliness and mouth-feel of human ears. [Note: I was only looking at ears, not tasting.] But despite my extra attentiveness to some ears that were curious or oversized, floppy or cauliflower, I seemed to find all the ears to be charming, with the possible exception of a few men’s furry ears.

It may be that ears are pretty much exempted from the human disposition to be highly critical of each other’s body parts, with all those sexual overtones. Or, it may just be that our earflaps are unremittingly ugly such that they assume a kind of ironic charm -- like dachshunds and Bosc pears. (Ears are, after all, just a few square inches of crumpled, stiffened flesh.)

To my mind, my day of ear evaluations was not bad Buddhism. I was not judging individuals’ worth based on ear shapes. (I thought well of everyone!) I was just being observant and experimentally mindful.

Using my definition of what it is to be judgmental, people who are in the sad habit of looking at the world as a depository of good-vs.-bad dualities are easy to detect. They have an “attitude” that they assume when they confront the world such that one can easily see that there is a strategy of ego protection that is being deployed.

A judgmental person experiences the world as a place full of threats and impositions. A judgmental person is likely to be whinny and to exaggerate or twist facts. A judgmental person is likely to be either someone who feels himself to be perpetually victimized or thinks himself to be incapable of making a mistake. Often, too, there are people who think they are both: victimized and free from the fault of committing errors.