What About the Trauma?

I still have a problem. How do I go beyond the first-do-no-harm practice of the Day of Reflection? What about the other sources of suffering in our lives? What about the trauma in our lives? There can be no end to our suffering without becoming one with these as well.

In our revised version of the Gatha of Atonement, I am vowing to be one with all the ingredients of my life, not just the jagged karma I’ve created. And yet the Day of Reflection practices work only with the jagged karma I’m creating and address only the suffering that’s arising from my current actions. Happily, the Buddha didn’t stop with one Pure Precept. There’s two more, Doing Good and Doing Good for Others.

Aha! Until this moment, I’ve never understood what doing good was if not doing good for others. And now I see a light. Maybe to do good is to heal myself, to become one with the traumas which I carry. But how? Where are the Zen guidelines for dealing with trauma? Can we somehow expand the Day of Reflection to include bearing witness to our traumas? Should we ask sangha members to share monthly the arising of their traumas? This feels like more intimacy than it’s reasonable to ask. It sounds like group therapy.

But if we say we are offering a pathway to the end of suffering and so much of modern suffering is trauma, what do we do? In the uncanny way it often has, the Universe points a direction. I recall a line read years ago in the introduction to The Gateless Gate, the first collection of koans that we worked through. Wumen, the compiler of the collection, suggests that working with a koan is like having a red-hot musket ball lodged in our throats. We are unable to swallow it, and we are unable to spit it out.

Aha! Hasn’t Wumen described exactly the experience of trauma? Maybe we do have a Zen way of working with trauma, only I’ve never recognized it, never called it by that name. Maybe koan practice is our way of working with trauma. Maybe I’ve been working toward this insight for a while. For the last year, I’ve been saying that we work our way through 300 or more koans not to master or pass them but to find the koans to which we return again and again.

But I haven't asked why “our koans” are our koans. Until now, it was enough to recognize them. Maybe “our koans” are the ones which touch our traumas. In becoming one with our koans, we become one with our traumas, with ourselves. Becoming one, we heal.  As we embrace our suffering and bear witness to it – isn’t that what Zen teachers tell us as we present our koan, “Don’t tell me about your koan, show me”? – we put an end to suffering. If that's not doing good, what is it?

Maybe Koan practice and the Day of Reflection practice are complementary sides of our pathway to the cessation of suffering.  Wonderful! But the Buddha has more in mind. There is Doing Good for Others. We’ll have to take that up next week.