Q: I would like to ask about repentance in Zen. I was raised a Catholic, and so I am used to a very sacramental form of seeking forgiveness through confession and reconciliation. Is there a similar process in Zen?
A: You could say it’s confession and reconciliation within one’s own relative self. No one else is going to do it for you. One aspect of this is to endeavour to not make the same mistake again. It might require reaching out to others – to apologise, to make amends in some way. This ideally would come from awareness, and also a place of wanting to do it for the good of all beings, as opposed to just to make yourself feel better. Even if it does make you feel better – and that is not a bad thing – it’s got to be with the spirit of ‘for the good of all beings’: oneself, the people who maybe one needs to engage with perhaps because they were hurt, but also for the wider cosmos.
My wife, Ilsa, spent a year living in Dharamsala before we met, before she started practicing Zen. She was teaching English in a Tibetan nunnery. The nuns were teenage girls. She said to me that when she spoke with the Tibetans, they couldn’t understand Western guilt. They had a real sense of shame, of shame in front of others, but they didn’t understand guilt. So I think we have a slightly different relationship to this inner sense of guilt. For them, shame was a failing in front of the community, and so repentance was done within the community.
The Buddha recognized this. As part of the practice from the beginning, there has been a repentance ceremony, traditionally held on full moon days. We use it as part of our precepts and ordination ceremonies. It is an act of remembering our mistakes together with others and then letting them pass. I guess it may be a bit like Catholic confession in a way – but you do it internally, alongside others who are doing the same. It is a community act. We sometimes do this in our sangha – and I know some people find it very helpful. This is known as ‘repentance with form’.. In Zen, this is only half of the process.
In the West, guilt tends to be more of an inner thing. From a Buddhist point of view, guilt is just another emotion. Like all the emotions, it performs a certain function from a relative point of view, such as glueing society together, glueing community together. But in the end, it’s something one should let go of and not cling to unhelpfully, such that it disturbs the mind.
Zen practice itself is known as ‘repentance without form’. Over time, the arising and letting go of thoughts and emotions during Zazen naturally processes emotions such as guilt. Things come up at their own pace and are revisited again and again. Arising into awareness and letting go. It can take time – a long time. I have seen this in myself. Guilty emotions, and stories connected with them, embedded deeply within me in my teenage years, are looser and less powerful now. They are not gone entirely, but are less powerful. This slow composting process is repentance without form. It is a deep, inner process.
Q: I have a question about individuality, about being an individual. I struggle with the conforming bit in Zen. I know that’s my own psychological thing – the harmonising, I don’t know, it just seems a bit mindless. We do this and that, and then it’s mindful. But, rules and regulations and things like that… they worry me.
A: Well, I think you’re right to be worried. But you should also be worried about extreme individuality. The conformity can be used to promote cult-like tendencies. It can be used to control people. We know that Eastern spiritual traditions have been used in that way, and will be used that way. A person who has a position of power in the group can take advantage of that position. We should be very careful about that.
But on the other hand, when it’s time to bow to the meditation cushion, then bow to the meditation cushion.
The conformity provokes harmony, and that’s not a bad thing. But you shouldn’t use that as a reason for your relative self to abandon its judgment – particularly in the face of inappropriate behaviour and the abuse of power. It is really good for Westerners to conform, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon our critical thinking.
Our co-founder, Nancy Amphoux, certainly never abandoned her questioning. But at the same time, she was quite keen on the value of conformity. She wanted practice to be ‘exact’, and so would conform wholeheartedly to the forms of Zen. But she was definitely not a conformist.
I remember a senior Japanese nun, Yusho-san, visiting us for a UK sesshin. She spoke about how conforming to mindless rituals are a great reflection on the self – a ‘test’, in a way. They shine a light on our own minds, and also on how we relate to each other. We might get irritated by the smallest things that other people do, or fall into pride and arrogance, or feel that we’re not good enough. All these feelings can arise through following small acts of conformity to the form – even though the form itself is ultimately pointless.
For this reason, following the forms of Zen wholeheartedly is part of our practice. But it shouldn’t be used as a means of absolving oneself from thinking, or of giving over one’s critical thinking to others.