by Tom
A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of driver inattention, I ran over a wild duck.
Immediately I felt both regret for what I had done and anger at myself for having done it. There was no way to undo the damage and no way I could ask for or receive forgiveness.
My attention soon turned to the ‘purification’ verse we recite before our sutra service:
All the harm and suffering ever created by me since of old,
On account of my beginningless greed, hatred and ignorance,
Born of my actions, speech and thought,
I now acknowledge openly and fully.
Unlike the ritual of confession in some religious traditions, in this verse we do not ask for anything, we simply acknowledge our mistakes. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, to acknowledge is ‘to accept, admit, or recognize something, or the truth or existence of something’.. At the same time, the verse also points to their cause: the Three Poisons of Greed, Hatred and Ignorance, or, as I sometimes prefer to call them, the Three A’s: Attachment, Aversion and Apathy.
I have made countless mistakes in my life, some very serious. Perhaps the death of a single duck pales into insignificance beside these acts. Is recitation of a short verse in any way restitution for my actions?
Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi, retired abbot of the San Francisco Zen Centre, points to the importance of the verse, indicating ‘Confession of wrongdoing is an act of awakening’. Our lives are riddled with acts of wrongdoing, conscious or unconscious, all driven by these Three Poisons. Acknowledging them is a necessary step in reducing their grip on us. It is a beginning in our practice, not an end in itself.
Pat Phelan Roshi, one of Anderson’s students and Abbess of the Chapel Hill Zen Centre, points out that In Zen, there are two kinds of repentance, formal and formless. In formal repentance, she states that:
In Buddhism feeling regret or remorse is considered an important dharma or factor of mind, but this shouldn’t be confused with the added burden of guilt. Guilt keeps us stuck in the past due to the story we have created about what happened, and we keep replaying the story in our head unable to whole-heartedly enter the present. This reinforces a self-image – a negative self-image that strengthens our sense of self. Instead, we want to recognize and acknowledge what we have done and then return to the present, to meet what’s right here.’
Formless repentance, she adds, ‘refers to the absolute or non-dual nature of ultimate reality. In formless repentance, we repent activity that has a self-centered focus or egocentric motivation, whether the activity in itself is good or bad.’
In summing up these complementary practices, Lana Berrington, a Soto teacher in London, concludes, We need both kinds of repentance in order to move forward in each instance. Formal repentance cleans the slate, and softens the consequences of our self-centred actions of body, speech, and thought. Formless repentance deals with the roots of these actions. Formal repentance prepares us for zazen. Formless repentance is zazen itself.