First Do No Harm

Want to put an end to the suffering in your life? The Buddhapointed to a path. He had an idea on how to get there. Coming back to the Day of Reflection liturgy, reading it as if for the first time, I am startled. The Precepts are guideposts on the path to peace. Not just the Grave Prohibitory Precepts: there were also the Three Pure Precepts.

The first Pure Precept is traditionally translated, “Cease from Evil.” I prefer the Hippocratic formula, “First, do no harm.” I recall an adage from my community mental health days. “When you come home and find the kitchen sink overflowing, turn off the water before you start mopping?” Working in one of the poorest, most disenfranchised communities in the city, we needed to address the issues which contributed to mental illness – poverty and racism, bad housing and bad education, bad medicine and bad food. We couldn’t just treat the symptoms.

That’s the first Pure Precept. You can’t just jump to Doing Good and Doing Good for Others. You need to turn off the water, to stop creating jagged karma. How do we stop creating jagged karma? The Ten Grave Prohibitory Precepts are the guideposts: Do these things and you’ll create less jagged karma. You’ll stop seeding the ground for future suffering.

In the traditional community practice of the Day of Reflection, practitioners confessed their failures to follow the precepts in the belief that confession lightened the karmic debt. Perhaps they only said, “I failed in this; I’m sorry,” perhaps they only thought it to themselves. In my Peacemaker practice, I didn’t do this. Maybe some people were thinking of the harm they’d done since the last Day of Reflection. I wasn’t. The words went by so fast.

The practice always seemed a bit empty.  Promising to be “a good boy” didn’t do the trick. Should we try confession? Can a contemporary Zen group, any spiritual group, handle the intimacy involved in sharing our transgressions? Maybe we can. We have some other ingredients beyond ancient Buddhism in our lives, beyond what we received from Japan. Twelve-step programs are everywhere. We all – at least most of us – have an acquaintance with, “My name is Ken and I am an alcoholic,” even if we’ve never been to an AA meeting.

Can we try it? This is more intimacy than our group is used to, but we can learn from AA. Can we simply offer the opportunity to bear witness to our transgressions? No one is compelled to speak. Maybe it helps to think our confession without saying it aloud. Can I commit to a specific change for the coming month? Can I begin to turn off the water? Say it out loud? Say it to myself? We can check in together at next month’s Day of Reflection.

I am excited by this prospect, but our dive into the Gatha of Atonement raised a challenge which remains. We’ll have to get to that next week.