Rendering Harmless Doctrine: A Compassionate Response to Aggession

by Charles Day*

The Rendering Harmless Doctrine advocates responding to aggression with understanding and compassion and offers a way to honor and reconcile the duty to defend oneself, family, nation, and world with the religious, spiritual, and humanitarian principles of compassion, forgiveness, non-violence, and pacifism.

All responses to aggression by individuals, groups, and nations should be motivated by understanding and compassion—not anger, revenge, or retaliation—with the intention of rendering aggressors harmless—not to harm or punish them. Motives, methods, and goals should aim at ending the suffering that both causes and results from aggression and restoring peace and harmony for all concerned, perpetrators as well as victims.

The Rendering Harmless Doctrine is based on three assumptions. First, individuals—not gangs, mobs, cells, or nations—are responsible for aggression, assault, mayhem, terrorism, atrocities, genocide, and war. Second, these individuals, acting alone, as group members, or as leaders of nations, can cause such horrific harm that reasonable persons are morally obligated to stop them, using peaceful means and legal authority whenever possible. And third, history reveals, religions teach, and social and psychological studies confirm that anger begets anger, aggression begets aggression, and war begets war. Responding with anger and aggression only causes, aggravates, and perpetuates the cycle of anger and aggression, either immediately or in the long run.........

Click here to read, print, or download this entire essay. The implications and applications of the Doctrine are discussed in the rest of the article. This is an expanded version of a previous essay.

"The Beginner" by Dick Allen

Because he's read about it in a book on Zen
and there are lilies-of-the-valley on the table
in a thin white vase, he takes all morning
to look at them and only them—to concentrate
his sole attention on the lilies-of-the-valley.

Each bell-blossom on each stem is Zen,
he thinks, and the three now fallen on the table,
also Zen—as each leaf and crease, each morning,
and the way the seconds and the minutes concentrate
before they separate ... and lilies-of-the-valley.

Suspended in its bubble-universe of Zen
the sun casts window-shadows on the table.
An old refrigerator hums away the morning,
as if it, too, has vowed to concentrate
on being and not being lilies-of-the-valley.

Puns flash across his mind: Now and Zen,
Zen Commandments, Mice and Zen. At the table,
head in hands, he scarcely moves all morning.
Images distill, dissolving like a concentrate.
I must stay focused on the lilies-of-the-valley.

But politics kill Calm ... and war and Zen
keep leaping up and leaping on and leaping off the table,
like a cat let loose will leap into the morning,
then start its stalking, tensing, and will concentrate
on anything that sways the lilies-of-the-valley.

"What takes your mind off Zen is also Zen,
dumplings and spring rolls, a vase upon a table,
blossoms, petals, stems ... " The April morning
continues floating in Time's concentrate,
and lovely, lovely are the lilies-of-the-valley.

Dick Allen

New England Review
Volume 30, Number 2 / 2009

Reprinted from www.poems.com

Charlie's Note: Everything is Zen. Zen is everything. God is everything. Everything is God. What is is. This is it. See "Living in the Kingdom of Heaven Now".

Ikkya: Skeletons Speak

15th Century Zen Master Ikkya visits an old temple surrounded by graves. The resident skeletons share with him their insights on living, dying, and death. And Ikkya shares those insights with us in a series of poems that are the subject of the August Edition of The DailyZen Journal. Here are a couple of my favorites.

The vagaries of life
Though painful,
Teach us
Not to cling
To this fleeting world.

No one really knows
The nature of birth
Nor the true dwelling place:
We return to the source,
And turn to dust.

Many paths lead from
The foot of the mountain
But at the peak
We all gaze at the
Single bright moon.

More poems and commentary can be read here.

Spirtual Poetry Selected by Jane Hirshfield

(Photo Credit: Brian Gauvin)

Spiritual Poetry: Nine Gates
Twenty-two poems about spirituality and enlightenment
by Jane Hirshfield

Gate 1. Permeability

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu (Japan, 974?-1034?)

[translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani]

Izumi Shikibu, “Although the wind . . . ,” translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, from The Ink Dark Moon. Copyright 1990 by Jane Hirshfield. Reprinted with the permission of Vintage Classics and Jane Hirshfield.

The moon in Japanese poetry is always the moon; often it is also the image of Buddhist awakening. This poem reminds that if a house is walled so tightly that it lets in no wind or rain, if a life is walled so tightly that it lets in no pain, grief, anger, or longing, it will also be closed to the entrance of what is most wanted.

The poem, by the greatest woman poet of classical-era Japan, is one I first encountered in 1986 while working with Mariko Aratani, my co-translator for The Ink Dark Moon. At first, I had the poem’s words, I had the poem’s grammar, but its meaning eluded. Once it clarified, this became for me a life-altering poem, transforming my relationship to safety, permeability, awakening, and the mouth of the lion.

Gate 2. The Great Yes

Che Fece… Il Gran Refiuto

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
drags him down all his life.

C.P. Cavafy (Alexandria, 1863-1933)

[translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]

Constantine Cavafy, “Che Fece… Il Gran Refiuto,” translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Copyright 1975 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reprinted with the permission of Princeton University Press.

Cavafy is not generally thought of as a spiritual poet. This early poem's precipitating title comes from a story about a pope, as told by Dante, but that is not the reason it is here. Nor can I say I even fully understand the poem—the phrase "the right no" has been, for me, a decades-long riddle and harvest. But Cavafy’s basic proposal, that a person carries within himself or herself a great Yes or great No, requiring declaration—this surely is one gate to the spiritual dimension.

Gate 3. Issa’s Cricket

On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.

Issa (Japan, 1763-1827)

[translated by Jane Hirshfield]

Reprinted with the permission of Jane Hirshfield.

Issa's singing cricket is Cavafy's “great Yes” in action. The haiku offers a portrait of the circumstances of all our lives. Carried by capricious currents, certain to die, we nonetheless fully live. The poem can be read, I realize, with different comprehensions. It could, for instance, be understood in the spirit of Beckett and Camus. Mostly, that is not how I feel it—but, as with many great poems, the versatility of the image is part of its enlarging meaning.

Gate 9. Realization

Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Li Po (China, 701-762)

[translated by Sam Hamill]

Li Po, “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain,” translated by Sam Hamill, from Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Copyright 2000 by Sam Hamill. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.

Click on Spiritual Poetry: Nine Gates to read the entire article and all twenty-two poems selected by Jane Hirshfield (poet, translator, and Zen Buddhist) on the www.poetryfoundation.org website, from which the above excerpts are taken. Thanks to meditator Art Dunbar, Des Moines, IA, for sending this link.

Present Moment Liberation

by Ron Porter

Personal preferences are so diverse. I recently realized that one of my personal preferences is new food. Actually, I can not call it a preference. If it is, fine; if not, that’s fine too. But new food is something I enjoy. By new food I mean, not something I’ve never tried before, but food I bought at one of the local fruit stands, grocery store, or farmer’s market. Many years ago my diet was quite different. After returning home from grocery shopping, I used to enjoy cracking open a fresh box of Frosted Flakes and pouring over them a freshly opened carton of milk. More than the food, this was a statement to the world, an affirmation, a declaration that I am a guy and can shop for food! Ha!

Now I have come to understand that what I was enjoying was only a symptom of something that ran much deeper. I have seen this symptom in others as they look for the next fresh new thing to bring enjoyment. The something much greater is to see every moment of every day with a fresh new perspective, a perspective that isn’t personal, a perspective that knows that each and every moment is beautiful in its own way. This perspective is not filtered through the personal assumptions and past experiences that lead us so often to evaluate, examine, and criticize situations, others, and ourselves. You may have noticed this symptom of enjoying the present moment when you’re on vacation, visit small towns you’ve never seen before, explore a shopping mall for the first time, or gaze into the eyes of one you love. Everything is candy!

Not long ago my wife and I were driving north of San Francisco close to the coast. We got lost among the woods in the two lane twisted country roads. For a short time there were no other cars. We knew nothing too bad could happen; after all, we had our cell phones. Ha! Not knowing where we were or where we were going was in a very real way quite liberating. The undiscovered country invited us to come, to take a look, to get lost for a while. But be careful – this perspective is habit forming! It doesn’t take long until you find delight in the present moment, what ever it may be, continuously.

These days my diet has changed. I avoid many things, among them processed foods and dairy products. The peanut butter I eat has no additives. And the bread is baked locally with whole grains without processed flour. These are a couple of new foods I now enjoy, but this may change someday. Everything does. And that’s OK. Living in the present moment, living in the now, makes every moment enjoyable.

Charlie’s note: Ron had a “radical” transformation several years ago that continues to this day and is reflected in this essay. His transformation is discussed in the article Experiencing Enlightenment which contains another essay by Ron entitled “Who Accomplishes What?” Ron can be contacted at ron@leejen.com.