Talk Notes:
It's been fascinating and powerful learning more about the 12 steps and how clear it is that this is a spiritual practice. I don't think I would have understood that if Juriki hadn't brought this forward so whole heartedly - and so vulnerably in how he's been sharing his own life's journey with us. If someone had just told me, and I'm sure they have, that 12 steps is a power spiritual practice with the same depth and subtlety as the Dharma I would have said "yeah, yeah yeah" but to really work through it carefully and with the powerful example of his journey now it's not just "yeah, yeah, yeah" - it's "yes, that's true."
As with Buddhism, 12 step is a response to deep suffering. A path of healing and transformation with the root idea that the main thing we need to do really is learn to see and understanding reality in a different way than we did. That the root of the problem isn't anything "out there" like alcohol, difficult childhoods and a very uneven world, not the root of the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of how things really are.
I thought it'd be interesting to look at the descriptions of each of 12 steps from the perspective of the Buddhism of our school. For one thing broadening references to addiction and alcohol replaced with the word "clinging" since that's the key ingredient in the Buddhist 4 steps - the 4 noble truths that help us see that suffering is something we create, how we create it, that not creating it anymore is possible, and that there's a path, a method, for doing so.
The 12 steps in the essays Juriki has been sharing are all expressed in the past tense and with what they call "elliptical" phrasing - or it could be called "testimonial imperative" where the subject of the sentence isn't specified but of course it's us. So I'll try to stick with that format too.
You may well have different ways you might phrase Buddhist "translations" but here are mine as an offering.
Step 1 original: “Admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Step 1 Buddhism: Admitted the incredible power of our ignorance and conditioning and our lives lived in the shadow of that ignorance are inherently unsatisfactory and painful.
Step 2 original: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
Step 2 Buddhism: Came to understand that a Way greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Step 3 original: Made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Step 3 Buddhism: Made a decision to turn our will and our life over to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Step 4 original: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Step 4 Buddhism: Studied and practiced the precepts to see and understand our skillful and unskillful actions of body, speech, and mind.
Step 5 original: Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Step 5 Buddhism: Admitted to Buddha, to our teachers, to ourselves and to a trusted other the exact nature of our confusion.
Steps 6 & 7 original: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Steps 6 & 7: Chose to devote ourselves fully to the practice. With faith in the Way of Buddha, willingness to enter the path of Dharma, humbly devoted ourselves to Sangha life.
Steps 8, 9, & 10 original: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
Steps 8, 9, & 10 Buddhism: Understood our unskillful actions as violations of precepts, made amends to those we have harmed (wherever possible and appropriate) and continued to practice precepts with the guidance of teacher and sangha with humility and dedication.
Step 11 original: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Step 11 Buddhism: Practiced meditation deeply to clarify our own conditioning. Studied the Buddha-Dharma to understand the nature of suffering, the causes of suffering, and the path of freedom.
Step 12 original: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Step 12 Buddhism: Having realized the true nature of being, committed to lives as bodhisattvas, devoted to saving all beings.
Sounds like two intertwined paths of practice to me.
The deepest connection can be the hardest for us to see. Alcohol can be seen and tasted. You can know if you've been drinking or not drinking.
But if we see our root addiction/illness as our rigid sense of self. Our right-ness. Our me-ness. Our persistent belief in the separateness of "me" and the inviolability of "me" and how our "me" is so often threatened and needs to be protected - or we may have the wrinkle of condition where we think this "me" is useless and horribly, while other "me"'s are the wise ones.
If we see it that way, which is what Mahayana Buddhism is saying, it's very hard for us to set this down and to stop being blinded by it because we can't see it. We are it, we are in the middle of it, we think our perspective to the one perspective whether we assume our view to be wrong or right we think that it's our view.
The Buddhist path to freedom, like the 12 steps, is to release from the idea that our freedom and happiness could ever be through improving and enhancing and treasuring the self. That true freedom and happiness lies in letting it fall away - letting it go - seeing through it. Understanding it as just a convenient kind of surface description of a deep multi-dimensional inconceivable reality of our lives as Buddha.
The teachings about "will" in the 12 steps I find particularly interesting. The the person in recover has to realize they can't sort of force their way into recovery. That the call of alcohol or whatever the substance is is just to strong. And so the solution is to open to trust in something larger, or higher, in the 12 step language expressed as "god" or a "higher power."
As we ponder that we can maybe hear Dōgen whispering in our ears:
Dōgen's Genjo Koan
To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. [read 2x]
"Actualized" is maybe a little clunky here as is "myriad."
How about: to forget the self is to wake up with everything and everyone, continuously and infinitely.
Or how about just:
Being completely free from clinging to our self is continuous awakening.
This isn't so mystical. We all have experiences of getting out of our own way. We all have experiences where we aren't frightened, when we show up fully and openly. When being with others is comfortable, loving, and illuminating. When being with nature, with the world, with whatever we're with is open and joyful.
Dōgen like all great Buddhist teachers is encouraging us to not settle for touching that once in a blue moon when we happen to be well resourced and in a safe space: but to see our potential for this to be how we normally are. How we always are as that is the nature of how we actually truly are.
And this isn't a technique. Sometimes people ask me for a practice to work with this or work with that.
It's not about learning a method to free yourself from yourself. It's the process of seeing there never was a solid self there in the first place. Of opening to that.
As you know I've taken up studies of the 8th century Indian Buddhist monk Shantideva. His famous long poem - the Guiding to the Way of the Bodhisattva - Bodhicaryāvatāra in Sanskrit is amazing and I'm going to do a series of talks on if in the new year. But he is also credited with putting together a collection of commentaries on the sutras called The Training Anthology - the Śikșā Samuccaya in Sanskrit. It's hundreds of pages with brief comments by Shantideva and longish quotations from about 78 different Sutras - this guy did a LOT of studying.
I haven't gotten very far into it yet but I'm fascinated to share what he brings up first and foremost as important on the path of practice. And that's a quality that's also associated strongly with Christianity and deity-based religions: faith.
Having faith in the practice, faith in the process, faith in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Having faith that the 12 steps work. Having faith that if you let go of self-based striving and pushing and forcing it'll still work out - that it'll work out much better actually.
Steps 2 and 3 are especially clear as statements of faith.
After admitting the depth of the problem whether it's addiction or clinging to the self in the first step here is the 12-step wording and my version of steps 2 and 3.
Step 2 original: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
Step 2 Nomon's Buddhist version: Came to understand that a Way greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Step 3 original: Made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Step 3 Nomon's Buddhist version: Made a decision to turn our will and our life over to Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Anyway, Shantideva as he opens this long work on how to practice deeply and learn how to forget the self and awaken with teachings on faith and I'd like to share that. Like many traditional Buddhist sources there's a long list with some repetition.
First Shantideva shares a verse he wrote:
Śikșā Samuccaya chapter 1 (The Perfection of Generosity), p. 2
Someone who wishes to end suffering And go to the utmost limit of happiness Should securely plant the root of faith, And then fix the mind unwaveringly on Awakening.
Then he quotes a sutra called the Precious Lamp Dhāranī which I looked up and the summary of the sutra is that it "presents the dramatic events in the life of the Buddha when Mara attempts to destroy the Buddha, break up the Sangha, and annihilate the Dharma, a struggle from which the Buddha eventually emerges victorious." Mara you know is the embodiment of our addicted clinging narrow minded selves. Mara doubts. Mara undermines. Mara tries to discourage practice: why bother, it's not that bad, life's comfortable enough, practice is way too much trouble.
There are just so so so so many Buddhist texts out there. This one has been fully translated if you're interested there will be a link in the talk notes: The Ratnaketu Dharani - Rigpa Wiki
One note before I read this long excerpt. Mahayana Buddhism did use the language of military struggle. Our defilements and confusions and unskillful traits are portrayed as enemies that we do battle with and when we practice well we emerge victorious. I don't find that mind set - fighting yourself - that helpful - so we have to kind of translate it into whatever feels skillful to us. I've heard Kanho Chris actually using kind of the reverse of this saying her goal is to "stop being in a battle with reality." The traditional Buddhist view as to be in a battle with delusion which leads to clear seeing of reality.
In this excerpt there are several mentions of the Victorious Ones which I will leave in. The Victorious Ones are the awakened ones, the ones who have completely the steps and let go into freedom, joy, and the total love for all beings that comes with having dropped all clinging.
Please just relax into this and see what lands in your heart. [read The Training Anthology of Shantideva p. 3-5.]
