Seiu Hannah offers reflections on navigating current times through everyday vowing at the first Red Cedar Zen Community's Women's Retreat.
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“As we navigate this world of confusion and suffering, how do we live our bodhisattva vows?”
Good morning! I’m so glad to see you here, in person and on Zoom. This might be a good time to welcome our Zoom folks.
I need to comment before any formal dharma offering based on texts on our present state. This is a time of great suffering! Worldwide turbulence, food shortages, stampedes at religious festivals resulting in death, people being torn from their homes and families, wars known and unknown. Closer to home, a growing threat of suppression and dramatic upheaval from our new administration. I’m reminded of Edward R Murrow, a journalistic hero of mine, who lived in the time of Joseph McCarthy, redbaiting and blacklisting. In the film about him, “Good Night and Good Luck”, he sat in a room of fellow broadcasters trying to decide about whether to speak out. The line that brought me to my knees was, “it’s right here in this room”. Who in that room did not have a family member or close friend who was impacted by the crackdowns being imposed by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. They went ahead with the broadcast.
I think many of us feel this to be true right now. The troubles are right here in our rooms. We wonder what we can do. We are overwhelmed. We vacillate between turning toward and away. I find I am forgetting things, dropping into reactive thoughts. Hate feels like a good option. So what do we do? I think we have to take very good care of ourselves, recommit to our practice, and be open to action. Whether you haven taken formal vows, you are a child of Buddha, and you chose to attend this day themed on vows.
I want to say a few things about vowing and vows in general before focusing on one of our central vows, the vow of repentance.
I had a conversation with my teacher, Kathie Fischer, who I can always count on for a fresh look. She says, "vow is who we already are. To make a vow, following a Judeo-Christian path, is making a Santa Claus god, who sees us when we’re sleeping, etc. we match ourselves up against perfection, vowing to become better, to lose whatever stands in the way of achieving perfection.
That is not vow in our sense. Best vow: to become ourselves. To “avow” is to acknowledge. I am everything “from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion” and I am still a child of Buddha.
It occurred to me that the first breath of life is a vow to live.
Not like we have to make a promise. It's a reflex. In us.
Cellular.
Later, choice becomes more involved.
But I think we have to be careful and differentiate that our vowing is not wishing upon a star, or promising and then setting ourselves up for failure. Instead, it’s committing to a way of life where we consider others and their wellbeing as important as our own. In Ruth Ozeki’s book A Tale For the Timebeing, her young character explaining the bodhisattva vow says, “It’s like letting other people get on the elevator first”.
And because our basic tenet of emptiness can be understood as “empty of a separate sense of self”, their need to get on that elevator is no less important than mine, I relieve myself of the need to push and shove, in any venue.
“Beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
Delusions are inexhaustible.
I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless.
I vow to enter them.
Buddhas way is unsurpassable.
I vow to become it.
That’s our bodhisattva vow, and it is at the helm of all our vowing. We take a stand, knowing that, like the precepts we so depend upon for our ethical framework, we may not be able to live up to it 24/7. Like a marriage vow, we name it. I will consider you and your well-being and I will walk through the dharma gates to learn how to uncover anything stopping or standing in the way of my being able to do that.
Someone said, “Saving all beings, beginning with myself”.
It’s formalized when the bodhisattva vow is sewn into each stitch of a rakusu. Silently we chant “namu kie butsu”(Buddha Dharma Sangha), including the group of people around us. We’re doing this for ourselves but also for everyone we meet.
On the back of my first rakusu, my teacher Peter Levitt wrote “Awake or asleep,in grass hut, I vow to bring others across before myself.”
How do I live with this now?
We need to realize how much input comes our way each moment. And choose how much and when to immerse in it.
Every minute we can access the latest insult to our sensibilities if we just turn on our phone, walk through a room where a TV screen is sharing really scary stuff.
We have to find a way to live with, work with this.
Know when to walk away or shut off the phone or radio.
Take that hike to your favorite lake and get out of breath climbing up there.
Get yourself down to the seashore. Watch the water make patterns.
Play with your dog or cat. We just lost our cat, Kenji, and as I recovered from ankle surgery in her Last month of life, she would crawl up and put her head right into my neck, giving me a healing.
Talk with someone you trust. Give and take. Hug.
In these ways we are able to tackle the challenge of living our vows.
Here’s what Suzuki Roshi had to say about vowing:
To be a Buddhist, moment by moment, we take vows.
It is not necessary to think about whether this is possible or not. When you take a vow and think about whether it is possible, your way is not a Buddhist way. You are falling into a superficial practice of “you should do” or “you should not” or “you should take a vow” or “you shouldn’t take a vow”. To take a vow is to observe our way. So this, like zazen practice, is one of the many ways to practice our way.
Vow of Repentance
All my ancient twisted karma
From beginningless greed, hate and delusion
Born through body, speech, and mind
I now fully avow.
I took this statement as a prayer the first time I heard it, in a Buddhist recovery group. This was a long time ago.
It just seared itself into my brain.
As I combined my long standing yoga practice with zen,
I’ve recited it in the morning each day as I (when I’m able!) do prostrations before sitting.
But the sense it made!
I picked it apart with my friend and teacher Peter Levitt in a heart to heart dokusan, where I was no doubt wrestling with my worthiness, and came to some freeing conclusions, as follows:
My ancient twisted karma was given to me. It comes from beginningless time. I did not invent it. I did embellish upon it, borne through my body, speech and mind, creating more as I went along, adding from and to that greed, hate, and delusion! The three poisons. Each transgression and poor choice a little pockmark in my beautiful coat of Indra’s net.
So in order to live for all beings(myself included!) I cannot carry that great weight of karma around on my back all the time! What I can do is acknowledge it all, (I now fully avow) recognize that I am human, clean house, BECAUSE I WANT TO! BECAUSE I LOVE!
Repentance In Living By Vow is identified as twofold: formal & formless. Formal, the naming and recognition and taking responsibility. Formless, in zazen. I love the idea that each time I sit down in zazen, I am easing the burden of my ancient, twisted karma.
Okumura says we can choose to live by karma or by vow. I say it’s both. To this moment we arrive with karma. From this moment we step into intention, vow.
Very hard. A continuous process. And, again, we’re human. This is not an invitation to try to be perfect. It’s a statement of your humanity, and the chance to work with what you’ve got, not just perpetuating the cycle of that beginning,es greed, hate, and delusion.
How are you living in repentance, in karma, in vow?
So let us recover our original selves.
Devotion to zazen, kindness, fairness, support of others.
From Rumi:
“Come, come, whoever you are,
wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving,
it doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times.
Come, come again, come
