Failure as Redemption
by Busshin, Resident Novice Priest
In an oft-quoted passage from the Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, cited by Dōgen in the chapter Inmo or “Being So” from his Shōbōgenzō, there’s a curious moment when Brahmā, the king of the gods, offers a verse to Māra, the king of demons, to try to convert him. The verse goes like this:
若因地倒
If you trip and fall on the ground
還因地起
Then you have to use that ground to get back again.
離地求起
If you’re looking for something other than the ground to get back up with—
終無其理
In the end, it’s impossible.
I think this is fascinating exchange for several reasons, but what I want to focus on here today is the way this verse points to the redemptive power of our failures, especially in the realms of meditation and ethics. I’m interested in this for a couple of reasons. First, because, try as I might, I can’t seem to get entirely away from these kinds of failures in my own life. In fact, failure often seems like the most reliable constant: failure to live up to my own ideals, meet deadlines, drop the habits I notice are unhelpful, and cultivate the ones that I know to be more helpful. Second, in light of this ubiquity of failure, I have a sneaking (albeit conflicted) suspicion that these failures are a necessary and perhaps even enabling feature of human contemplative life. So, when I said earlier that I think failure might be “redemptive,” that’s the sense in which I’m using the word. In meditation and ethical practice, we’re not just tolerating, acknowledging, or even ‘radically accepting’ failure—we’re depending on it. Let me explain:
Let’s start by narrowing the domain of failure to the experience of meditation. I don’t know about you, but my experience with meditation is that it often feels like an exercise in continuous failure—failure to follow or even notice my breath, failure to sit still, sometimes failure to show up and sit down at all. We’ve all heard the familiar instruction: “whenever you notice you’ve wandered away from the breath, gently let go of the distraction and resettle your attention back on it.” And that’s all well and good, except for the fact that I live in a culture that tends to moralize failure. So, try as I might, I can’t help but get a little frustrated with myself whenever I notice that my mindfulness has failed, causing my awareness to lapse into some sort of memory or daydream, especially when it happens over and over again (most days). But think about that verse again: “If you fall on the ground, then you have to use that ground to get back up again.” Applying this to breath practice, we might say that if you become aware of having wandered away from the breath, then you have to “use” that very moment of distraction (i.e., let go of it) in order to resume your practice. In fact, that noticing and letting go of distraction is practice at that moment: the “golden” moment of meditation that confirms both the presence of introspective vigilance (sampajañña) and mindfulness (sati). After all, how could you ever become aware of having wandered off if you weren’t already aware of the movements of your mind (i.e., sampajañña)? And why would it ever occur to you to settle your awareness back on breath if you weren’t actively recalling your intention to meditate (i.e., sati)? The verse seems to be giving us a very different vision of what failure means and what it’s good for: one that is practical, not moralizing, and inclusive, not exclusive, of failure as an inevitable and enabling feature of contemplative training.
Ok—if I haven’t lost you yet—then you may be thinking: that’s all well and good for me and my private practice of meditating on my breath, but what redemptive role could failure possibly play in my ethical life? That is, in my relationships with others?
A professor of mine once said something that I’ll never forget: the whole point of ethics is to set the bar of our ideals as high as it will go. The way I understand that is something like this: if our ideals were something we could easily attain, then they would cease to be our ideals; they would instead become just another vague accomplishment. Think about the Buddha’s ‘simile of the saw’ or Jesus’s ‘turn the other cheek.’ Much of what we tend to find inspiring about these examples is the provocation of their impossibility: they give us something to aim for—like a horizon line, or a sea bearing—not a feather in our cap, or even robe around our shoulders. The point is not that we arrive but that we continue in that direction. Thus, to live an ethical life according to these examples is in some sense to live in a state of perpetual short-coming, of non-arrival—of failure. However, like our discovery during meditation of having wandered away from the breath, those failures are not wasted. In fact, the moments when we notice we’ve fallen short of our ideals are the ‘golden’ moments of our ethical life that ironically confirms the presence of our ideals because, as we just saw, that gap is what it means to hold such an ideal in the first place. In other words, the final observation that real ethical life comes from accepting the inevitability of distance, rather than the dream of proximity to our ideals is itself what redeems the moral struggles our lives.
In Japanese Buddhist culture, this gap or distance is sometimes referred to as the “slender sadness” (mono no aware). In my experience, this mood of impermanence, non-arrival, and wistfulness can instill a tremendous sense of poignancy and beauty into our lives, shot through as they are with failure.
(Readers in good faith will quickly realize that this is a far cry from advocating self-conscious enactment of unwholesome actions or harming others. That wouldn’t be ‘using the ground to get back up again;’ that would be more like falling down and digging a hole for yourself to “stand” in.)
And the whole reason this works, I think—and one of the most striking contributions of Buddhist thought— is that the vision of failure that we’re being offered here is one that is free of the moral and teleological baggage that we tend to otherwise load it with, consciously or not. I’ll have more to say on this another time but, for now, suffice it to say that the thorough atheism of Buddhist thought in general and the deep nondualism of Zen in particular opens up all sorts of fascinating possibilities when it comes to pursuing “the Good”—not as a singular, unified, or even self-conscious ideal, but rather as an infinitely iterative process that is spacious enough to include its apparent opposite. Basically, if failure is inevitable, and there is no God to forgive us or adjudicate our moral progress, then the only goodness to be had is in contrition and the determination to stay in the struggle—to resign ourselves to failure. There is nothing else. Perhaps more on the Great Asymmetry in practice next time.
Before I wrap this up, think back to the context of the verse: Brahmā is speaking to Marā in an effort to convert Marā to the Buddhist Path. This is the same Marā who keeps us trapped in samsara by luring us again and again into acting on greed, hate, and delusion. In fact, we might even say that Marā’s voice sounds a lot like the one in our own heads which whispers to us, when we fail, that of course we did, that it’s our fault, and that there’s really no point in trying at all because failure is all we are and ever will be. Sound familiar? But Brahmā flips that script. In reciting this verse, he makes space for our failure—redeeming it— not as a sign of defeat or deficiency, but instead as the very ground from which we rise again to face this suffering world and our inevitable failures within it.
Finally, putting all of this together, we’re presented here with a vision of failure that is compatible and co-extensive with our deepest aspirations—not as their enemy, but as the only means we have to cultivate them with. From this vantage, we’re invited to regard our failures not with dejection or remorse, but with gratitude and enthusiasm for the affirmations of our place on the Path that they are. As Dōgen writes elsewhere,
“Great awakening and not awakening, reverting to delusion and losing delusion;
obstructed by awakening and obstructed by delusion —
these are all the principle that one who falls to the ground gets up by the ground.”
We don’t have to just tolerate our failures, nor do we need someone holy to forgive us. We need our failures because they redeem our struggle. They are the only thing that can.
