By Jonathan Landaw

As many of you will remember, before its present incarnation as a rather slick newsmagazine, Mandala was a modest newsletter. At that time I contributed an occasional column addressing Dharma questions commonly raised at meditation courses or specifically sent in by readers of that newsletter. Although “The Passing Scene” was not meant to adhere to the same format as those earlier pieces, I still occasionally receive Dharma-related questions from readers of the new, improved Mandala magazine and I would like to address one of them in this month’s column.  (To those of you indulgent readers who turn to this page for your bi-monthly fix of American sports references, Lewis Carroll quotations and the like, I offer my apologies. But do not despair: I am sure future columns will be filled with enough pedantic and/or fatuous references to satisfy even the most perverse tastes.)

Ms. N.R. of Watsonville, California writes, “Recently a Jewish friend of mine told me the thing she liked about Buddhism was the ‘no guilt’ [attitude]. This was a new concept for me, and I am having trouble understanding what it means. Someone tried to explain it to me briefly by referring to the distinction between ‘guilt’ and ‘regret’, but I have not been able to see the differences. Maybe this is something you might talk about in a future column.

Thank you for this opportunity of addressing a most intriguing topic. Critics of sham piety have often remarked that the main function of organized religion is to instill fear and guilt in its practitioners. Unfortunately, when we look at the assaults on the human spirit mounted by religious authorities in the past and present, we discover good reasons for holding such a cynical attitude. During the Colonial Period in America, for example, European settlers were regularly harangued by a succession of preachers known as the Puritan Divines who took every opportunity of reminding their captive listeners just how sinful they were. I vividly recall the terror experienced by my classmates and myself when a secondary school teacher of ours read aloud, with great feeling from one of the most eloquent of these Divines, Jonathan Edwards (after whom I was not named). In one of his most famous sermons he declared: “The God who dangles you like a loathsome spider over the pit of Hell despises you!” And while 40 years may have blurred in my memory the exact wording of this quotation, my emotional response to its impassioned condemnations was vivid enough to provide me with insight into the religious hysteria attending everything from the Salem Witch Trials to the Bible-banging of present day televangelists.

This guilt-ridden attitude has seeped into our shared culture from many different courses. The questioner specifically refers to “a Jewish friend” of hers, but Woody Allen movies notwithstanding, no one religious group has a monopoly on guilt, and this debilitating attitude affects even those who claim no religious affiliation whatsoever. What, finally, is this guilt we have been examining? Nothing other than a particularly harmful manifestation of the root cause of all suffering: ego-grasping. In this case, the “ego-identity” or “self” we are grasping onto is conceived of wholly in negative terms. “I am bad. I am a sinner. I am the worst of all. I am unworthy of love, unworthy of happiness, unworthy of salvation.” The common belief in a separate, independent “I”: a solid, unchanging entity lying at the core of our being, unaffected by causes and circumstances, that is truly bad. So wrapped up are we in this “negative narcissism” that we are blind to the multitude of mental and physical events making up the ever-changing base upon which our sense of self is constructed. Worse than that, as long as we grasp strongly on to this solid conception of self, we remain unaware of the essentially pure nature of our mind: our potential for full enlightenment.

Burdened with such guilt, we may easily come to believe that we are powerless, that our only chance for salvation comes from a source completely outside ourselves. Time and again Lama Yeshe would mock this self-pitying attitude: “I am so low and you are so high. Please save me, God; please save me, Buddha!” Yet as Shakyamuni Buddha said in his last recorded teaching, our duty as spiritual practitioners is to “work out [our] own salvation with diligence.” And a key element in achieving this salvation is the practice known as purification, whereby we can cleanse ourselves of the stains of whatever harmful actions we may have committed in the past.

Purification works because, essentially, we are already pure. According to a well-known analogy, the radiant, sun-like nature of our mind may currently be obscured by the clouds of ignorance, delusion and negative actions, but its radiance is still there, undiminished, waiting only to be uncovered. To uncover this essential purity we must be totally honest with ourselves. We need to recognize that, under the influence of ignorance, we have created harm for ourselves and others, and must cultivate an attitude of regret towards all such destructive actions of body, speech and mind. But this regret is very different from the guilt we have described earlier, despite their superficial similarities. When we realize we have consumed some contaminated food, for example, there clearly is no reason to feel guilty: “Eating that food proves I am a bad person; I deserve to be poisoned.” Instead, we regret what we have done simply because we know, from the workings of cause and effect, that it can make us sick. Similarly, admitting that we have done something regretful, such as harming someone, does not mean that we are a bad person, a hopeless sinner worthy of eternal damnation. Instead, it is a recognition that actions done under the influence of ignorance automatically create the cause for future suffering. If we are sincere about wishing to avoid such suffering, then we should apply the opponent forces that can counter-balance these causes and even uproot them from the field of our mind.

In short, guilt traps us in a narrow conception of who we are and what we can become; it paralyzes us and prevents us from acting. But regret, properly applied, helps us discriminate between those actions to be followed and those to be avoided so that we can free ourselves from negativity, uncover our basic purity and fulfill our highest potential for spiritual awakening and giving benefit to others.

Lastly, a brief advertisement. Although the exact dates and locations are still to be determined, a teaching tour is currently being planned for this autumn that will allow me to visit England, France, Spain, Germany and perhaps one or two other European countries for the first time in over eight years. I very much look forward to visiting with many old friends and the opportunity of making new ones. Contact your local Dharma center and read Mandala for more information as it becomes available. Thank you.