zenunbound: Humans are perfect, but could use improvement

This from the conclusion of an article titled “Why Do People Behave Nicely?” and subtitled ‘No one may ever know unless social psychologists shake off their fascination with jerks’ by Ethan Watters in the December, 2005, issue of Discover magazine:

[Says Joachim Krueger, associate professor of psychology at Brown and co-author of a 2004 brain-science journal article titled “Toward a Balanced Social Psychology”], “I think the next wave of research will take us to a place of greater balance and acceptance. If we come to a more realistic and accurate self-understanding, we may be better able to forgive ourselves and others.”

Of course, nothing will stop us from categorizing behavior as right, wrong, good or evil. But understanding behavior and judging it are two different tasks; the first is scientific, the second is not. When it comes to understanding, it might be more fruitful to approach ourselves with wonderment instead of disappointment.

“I watch my kids,” Krueger says, “and even when they are doing something that annoys me, I’m thinking that they are acting just the way they should, as the highly evolved mammal that they are. There is a Zen master who said something like ‘Humans are perfect, but they could use a little improvement.’ To the Aristotelian mind, that would be a contradiction; it would be gibberish. To me, it has great appeal.

Though it may not matter, BuddhaWatch is trying to hunt down the Zen master and the exact text of the quote Krueger cites.

11/25 Update: Dr. Krueger tells us "I am positive that I read it somewhere. My best bet is that it was in one of Alan Watts's book."

While BuddhaWatch hasn't found the quote, we did find sentiments of Watts's that line up with the quote in his book Still Mind, pages ~45-48.