Step Four

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves

Many recovery programs include “taking an inventory” as part of their process. In addition to a twelve-step program, I also participate in the Buddhist-inspired program called Recovery Dharma. Recovery Dharma offers a wide range of Inquiry Questions that

can be used as part of a formal process of self-investigation or inventory with a mentor […] as tools to explore a specific life situation; as guides for a daily self-inquiry practice; as meeting discussion topics; or any other way you may find helpful on your path of awakening and freedom from addiction and habitual behavior.

The italics are mine, and I share this sentence as part of an effort to impress upon you that there is no single, correct way to engage in self-investigation or take your own inventory.

When I started practicing zazen (sitting meditation) in a consistent and dedicated way, I did so under the guidance of my first teacher Koan Gary Janka Sensei. Koan Sensei directed me to breath practice, first to count my breaths on the inhale and exhale. After practicing that way for a while, he asked me to count only on the inhale; later it changed to counting only on the exhale. I remember sitting across from him in dōkusan one Sunday morning—dōkusan, by the way, is a private meeting with a teacher to discuss your practice—and just as he was about to explain the next method of breath counting I interrupted him. “Koan!” I said “Just how many ways to count the breath are there?!” I was frustrated with breath counting and wanted something “cooler”—meaning more mystical, sophisticated and, I thought, traditionally Zen. “Ten” he replied “and they’re all correct.”

And they’re all correct. Each method was (and still is) correct because we’re not concerned with what is pleasurable or painful; we’re not focused on what is more or less efficient for satisfying some desire; it’s not about what is “cool” and will impress other practitioners in the zendo (meditation hall) when you share about your practice; and it’s certainly not about becoming famous—or trying to remain obscure, for that matter. It’s about what is correct—we could also say “appropriate”—for you, as you are, and at this time.

The same is the case for personal inventories too. What is appropriate for you, right now, and in these circumstances? Whatever it may be, I assure you that it will change the next time you feel a need to “check in and see what condition your condition is in.” As we read above, the inventory process can be either formal or informal, done yearly or daily or whenever the need arises—see Step Ten, for example—and either solo or with others. It’s flexible and it should be—nothing whatsoever in life is solid and unchanging.

What I want to say a bit about, then, is the spirit in which one might engage in the process of taking an inventory. Step Four reads:

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Fearless. We can, if we choose, come to the inventory process with fearlessness.

Fearlessness shows up throughout Buddhist teachings. For instance, one of the Six Pāramitās (Perfections of Character) is Dāna, often translated as “Generosity.” While generosity can be expressed in many ways, the teachings identify three general categories. First, generosity by way of material gifts: offering non-perishable food to the local food bank and donating gently-used clothing to shelters for the unhoused are two examples. Second, generosity by way of spiritual gifts. Traditionally, this type of generosity is found in the activities of spiritual teachers who serve their communities. Third, generosity by way of fearlessness. The Zen teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer describes this gift as giving others “the sense that they matter; that they are respected, cared for, secure within a loving reality, and therefore ultimately protected.”

I offer this last because it can help with a significant obstacle to the inventory process. The purpose of taking an inventory is not to put down on paper how terrible of a person you are—terrible because you hold so many resentments, terrible because you are afraid of so many things, terrible because your sexual history is filled with encounters that, when called to mind, immediately cause your body to recoil. It’s not intended to crush your spirit, leaving you sitting dejectedly in a puddle of your own tears. Indeed, my first sponsor Jim P. instructed me to write a “good qualities of character” inventory along with the others. He said at the time, “it’s not all bad, Michael, and you need to remember that—there’s a lot of good swimming in this mess too. Don’t lose sight of it.”

Photo by Adam Jang on Unsplash

That said, the process of investigation, whether done solo, with a sponsor or other spiritual friend, is painful—period. In the Dharma talk I offered during O-An Zendo’s Rōhatsu sesshin—an extended meditation retreat commemorating Shakyamuni Buddha’s awakening—I said that as Siddhartha was sitting for seven days under the Bo Tree, some versions of the story report that hundreds of arrows flew with great speed in his direction. But just before contact, they were transformed into flower petals, and fell to the ground in their own time. It doesn’t matter whether this actually happened; what does, I continued,

is how you feel when you return home [sit zazen] to your attachments and aversions, to those times when pride “got the best of you” and fear had its day. When ignorance took many shapes and played its integral part in the creation of suffering, for you and others, including those you love. Sitting with all of that is difficult, it is uncomfortable, it hurts—as though your flesh were about to be pierced by hundreds of arrows.

And it’s no different in the process of taking an inventory, in which every stone is turned over and no corner remains dark. That’s why it is so important to be fearless—to feel with great conviction that you are loved—and why some say it’s essential that a trusted companion walk beside you through the process. Others might say, borrowing imagery from the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, that we must put on the great armor and ride the great vehicle as we set out on the great path, for only then are we mahasattvas—a term “first applied not to humans but to lions and only later to those who had the courage of the king of beasts,” writes the Buddhist scholar Red Pine.

Fearlessness is not about doing away with fear; we’re never asked to do away with anything. It’s about remaining upright in the midst of fear—and all of us are capable of this. Why? Because wherever we are, whenever we are, we’re never alone. Our friends and family, the great Earth and the sky, trees, flowers, animals, and the stars far away—all of it is with us, offering support and encouragement. Sometimes that support shows itself as a fortuitously-timed breeze or the appearance of a robin. Other times it is the lion’s roar. And all of this because we are not fundamentally separate from anything. You are the entire universe as it manifests in this particular spot.

The quotation about Inquiries is taken from the second edition of “Recovery Dharma: How to Use Buddhist Practices and Principles to Heal the Suffering of Addiction.”

The quotation of Zoketsu Norman Fischer is from his book “The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path.”

The quotation of Red Pine is from his translation and commentary on the Diamond Sutra.