Godless Contrition & Non-dual Confession

The following is something of an addendum to my previous “Failure as Redemption” post. It is an attempt to understand and reverse-engineer a new and peculiar experience I’ve been having lately—one of spontaneous feelings of contrition and the subsequent yearning for personal integrity through the act of confession.

As I’ve been bearing witness via the media this week to yet more eruptions of violence around the world, I find myself overwhelmed by the banal observation that our species simply isn’t learning from its mistakes. Hundreds of thousands of years of deprivation and struggle seem not to have made so much as a dent in our collective capacity and willingness to murder and subjugate one another. We seem to have a taste for it.

This is the apparent source of my recent experience: I feel implicated. I feel, in some small, yet haunting way, that my personal ethical failures partake of the same insatiable, inchoate hunger that drives us to predate upon one another and the world around us. This sense of complicity robs me of any sense of personal integrity and I am longing for a way to get it back, assuming that I had anything to begin with. I actually want to be responsible to the suffering of the world because I sense that the integrity that I long for is somewhere on the other side of that responsibility. I am all-too-aware that it is precisely my avoidance of this responsibility that keeps integrity out of my reach.

And I feel ashamed that, for all my awareness of this dynamic, I continue to abdicate this responsibility. What gives? Am I really so indolent as all that? Perhaps. I’m open to it. But given that this individual I feel myself to be is completely made up of impersonal causes and conditions (Thanks, Buddha!), I am also aware that something deeply collective is playing out here in my supposedly private existential melodrama. Perhaps liberalism through out the proverbial baby with the bathwater when it began condemning the phenomenon of moral shame as a vestige of dark-age patriarchy. Conservatism certainly fares no better in celebrating the reservation of this responsibility to people who look like us, think like us, and pledge allegiance to the same flag as ourselves. Most basically, perhaps the endless project of self-fashioning and healing is categorically incapable of delivering on its promise of making us into integrous, trustworthy people. Perhaps only reconciling oneself to one’s responsibility has something more to do with that.

As I ponder all of this, I find myself longing to confess my personal contributions and complicity in these heinous cycles of violence.

But that’s odd, isn’t it? As a Zen Buddhist, I don’t believe in God, much less an individual capable of taking something on like a “responsibility”, collective or otherwise. In fact, I not only reject God, my metaphysics are in fact about as close as any major world religion has gotten to the opposite of God: an absolutely purposeless emptiness that mindlessly produces all things. There is no locus of responsibility to be found here.

So, either I’m an unconscious monotheist, or there is such a thing as Godless contrition. And that raises a question: If not from God, then where does this perception of judgement come from? And if not to God, then to whom shall I direct this confession? And finally, who takes responsibility, and for what?

Doing my Buddhist homework:

In the Early Buddhist context, we find two distinct mental factors that correspond with moral shame in English: hiri and ottappa. Basically, the distinction between the two has to do with the source of perceived judgement. In the case of hiri, the sense of moral shame is motivated by an inner knowing or conscientiousness, whereas with ottappa, it is motivated by an awareness of what others consider reproachable. Importantly, in the case of ottappa, what counts as “other” is not God, but rather one’s peers within a particular community—in this case, the sangha. Thus, in these Early Buddhist examples, even when contrition is defined as a function of alterity, it is never exclusively defined in such terms (see hiri), nor with respect to any ultimate God. Thus, contrition remains Godless.

In the Mahāyāna Buddhist context, we find a much more supplicatory mood. That is, verses related to moral shame in the this tradition tend to be directed at audiences of buddhas and bodhisattvas, rather than the monastic community in general. We find, for instance, numerous examples of practitioners experiencing moral shame who opt to plead with various realized beings in the hopes that they might intercede on their behalf and ameliorate the consequences of their transgressions by continuing to offer refuge. Consider, for example, the following verses from Shantideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra:

The wrongs that I have done

Through ignorant stupidity:

All actions evil by their nature

And transgressions of the precepts,

Fearing all the pains to come

I join my palms and ceaselessly prostrate,

And everything I will confess

Directly in the sight of my protectors.

I pray you, guides and guardians of the world,

To take me as I am, a sinful person.

And all these actions, evil as they are,

I promise I will never do again.

[6.63-65]

As might seem obvious, in practice, the Mahāyāna mood can often sound a lot like monotheism. Some of this has to do with translators’ decisions, but I don’t think swapping out ‘sin’ with ‘transgressions’ or ‘evil’ with ‘unwholesomeness’ is enough to smooth out this crease. Thus, I think it’s essential to remember that buddhas and bodhisattvas are not creator deities. They started out in the same position as we did: benighted by primal confusion about the nature of reality and riddled with maladaptive coping strategies and related habits of body, speech, and mind. These realized beings are thus much more akin to what Brook Ziporyn calls “Promethean Counter-Gods” in the sense that they have voluntarily vowed to remain in this world—warts and all—in an effort to deliver wisdom to us poor fools despite any teleological assurances to the contrary that such efforts will ever bear fruit. Unlike monotheistic traditions, Mahāyāna Buddhism offers no eschatological vision of history; time and space are seen as retrospectively and prospectively infinite, and thus bodhisattva activity unfolds without resolution. The bodhisattva’s commitment to radically selfless altruism for the benefit of all beings is grounded in the recognition of massive, global suffering, not by any assurance of a happy ending, but by the spontaneous care that arises through recognition of total and inescapable enmeshment within that great mass.

Finally, in Dōgen’s Sōtō Zen context, the monotheistic mood is raised yet again because, according to him, confessing one’s personal shortcomings before buddhas is not only necessary for “pure” belief and practice, such a confession is itself the verification of buddhahood [證仏の承當]. But, again, there’s an important caveat here: as a Zen Buddhist, Dōgen is committed to the fundamental view that sentient beings and buddhas are identical. Thus, whereas in previous examples, the contrition-confession-redemption/refuge circuit is grounded in a fundamental alterity between penitents and bodhisattvas/God, in the Dōgen’s Zen Buddhist context this same circuit is enacted in the context of a non-dual identity between sentient beings and buddhas.

With that in mind, consider the following description from Hee-Jin Kim’s “Eihei Dōgen: Mystical Realist:”

“Zen Buddhists are as acutely aware of the finitude and ambiguity of human existence as any other Buddhists or any other religious persons. Their sorrow for their sins is as profound as that of any other religionists’. Yet, the metaphysical and religious context of confession in Dōgen’s case is radically different from that of others. These acts of repentance and confession are performed in the context of the nondualism of the I who confesses and the Buddhas who receive the confession…[t]he purity of a contrite heart in its confession is identical with the confession of Buddha-nature in its purity. The act of confession is the disclosure of original purity. For this reason, the guilt intrinsic to Buddha-nature becomes “guiltless'“ and “pure” (一職の)” (Kim, 206).

Putting all of this Buddhist homework together, we start to see how Dōgen’s conception of confession is a radical development of hiri and ottappa that collapses the apparent distinction between self-consciousness and other-consciousness. This development results in a practice of non-dual confession motivated by a spirit of godless contrition that turns out to be nothing but the expression of buddha-nature. Finally, purity isn’t so much earned or cultivated as it is revealed and disclosed through the experiences of contrition and confession.

Ok—so, practically, where does this leave us? Perhaps all I’m saying here is that insofar as acts of confessions compel one to take responsibility for the suffering of the world, then perhaps it’s worth cultivating contrition—akin to something like a divine abode (brahmavihārā).

To spell that out a bit: ethical failure and the contrition felt as a result are genuine doorways to experiencing what Roshi Bernie Glassman called “the oneness of life.” My point being that perhaps we do ourselves a disservice by assuming that glimpses of emptiness, or self-nature, or whatever fundamental realities we are aspiring to encounter in our spiritual lives will necessarily come in the form of pleasant peak experiences. Sometimes, if not often, I reckon, such insights come from sincere acknowledgement of limitation, contingency, and the spontaneous conviction to spare others the harmful effects of our compulsive denial of such things. Finally, in admitting such features of our lives, perhaps we begin to sense the necessity of being responsible to the world—not as a sentimental, guilty individual, but as a sober, temporary, and irrevocably embedded “part” of the whole.

In the words of my teacher, Sensei Joshin Byrnes:

“…[W]hat we see in the world is the outcome of systems we’ve created. And I am not outside those systems. I am—that is, my own mind and actions are—the first leverage point I have within the system; I have to discipline myself to come back to this point over and over again.”

Or maybe I’m just writing as a way to cope with my own burgeoning sense of inadequacy. I’m not sure. I can’t help but feel that our culture is in desperate need of moral ideals that don’t ground out in self-loathing matyrdom and narcissistic messianism. My conviction is that the radical atheism and non-dudalism of Zen Buddhism have important contributions to make here. I hope something in here has been helpful to you too.

I’ll finish with the verse that we recite in my Zen order before recommitting to our vows each full-moon day:

All my ancient, twisted karma,

我昔所造諸悪業（がしゃくしょぞうしょあくごう）

from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion

皆由無始貪瞋痴（かいゆうむしとんじんち）

born of body, speech, and mind

従身口意之所生（じゅうしんくいししょしょう）

I now fully atone

一切我今皆懺悔（いっさいがこんかいさんげ）