Attaining the Buddha Way: The Fourth Bodhisattva Vow Redux
Photo by Daria Nepriakhina
The fourth bodhisattva vow—the Buddha Way is unattainable, I vow to attain it—speaks to a basic sense of belonging, as well as the work needed for us to realize that we’ve never been apart.
In this talk, Zuisei speaks of the fourth vow and of the process of “transliteration”—the movement from the language of dharma to the language of everyday life—in order to make this and all teachings easy to remember and make use of in our lives.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
We’ve been looking at the Fourth Bodhisattva vow: The Buddha Way is unattainable, I vow to attain it. And we’ve been engaging with this and the other bodhisattva vows in a process of transliteration, I’m going to call it, where we’re shifting from the dharma as a language to everyday life as language. Same teaching, same meaning, same practice, different words. Because it’s through this process that we bring the dharma to life in our own lives. This is how we not take these teachings for granted, thinking that we know what they are, what they mean, how they work.
The worst disservice we can do to anything, really, is to assume we know it. That’s the surest way to kill a moment, an experience, an encounter. So instead, we don’t assume but investigate. We meet a teaching, and we grapple with it a bit, and we distill it to its essence, and then we try it out, see how it fits in our lives. We adjust it if needed, and keep going in a process that keeps these teachings alive and relevant.
So, tonight I’d like to speak of this fourth vow in terms of belonging. Because, fundamentally, this is what this vow is about. Fundamentally, this is what our search is about—our need to belong, to feel a part of, to feel connected, and right in a very basic sense.
If we consider all the various religious traditions that have appeared in the world since the beginning of humanity, at their core is a common premise: we are connected to something larger, more vast, more universal than what we tend to touch in our day to day lives.
From one day to the next we’re mostly preoccupied. We’re preoccupied with making a living, making a home, making a family. We’re preoccupied with forming and keeping relationships—with partners, friends, parents, children. We’re preoccupied with being safe, and fed, and clothed, and happy, and comfortable, and loved, and recognized, and respected—and maybe admired (at least a little), and popular, and beautiful, and healthy, oh, and maybe powerful.
But maybe at some point we pause, and we look around, and we wonder, is this it? Is this the way to spend a life? Making and maintaining and raising and protecting… little old me? I mean, it can’t be. It can’t be that the entire universe exists for me—no matter how we see some politicians act.
The universe isn’t here for me—and yet it’s also not apart from me. Isn’t that strange? That’s what we’re here to see—that we belong, that we are part of a larger whole. That we’re not outside, we’re not wrong, we’re not broken, we’re not alone. And this is why we have religion; this is why we have spiritual paths. This is why we have questions and the answers to those questions—primarily, what is all this? And what’s my place in it?
All religious traditions are asking in one way or another: how do all the many pieces of the world fit together? How do good and evil fit together? Me and you? Birth and death?
Now, in our case, we have to wonder, if Buddhism is telling me that these pieces fit—and they do so perfectly—why is it that I so often feel like they don’t? Like I don’t? Why is that? Why do we have this insistent feeling that something’s missing, that something’s wrong?
Could it maybe have something to do with attainment? Could it be that this wanting and lacking and winning and losing is what creates a split in something that’s always been whole?
A brahmin once asked the Buddha, “Will all the world reach awakening, or only half the world, or a third of the world?” (Just tell it to me straight—what are my chances here?) But the Buddha doesn’t answer. Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin an attendant, sees this and he gets worried that the brahmin will misunderstand, so he takes the man aside and, to help him, gives him an analogy:
Imagine a fortress with a single gate and a single gatekeeper. The gatekeeper, concerned about the people who might walk in, checks all around the wall to make sure there aren’t any gaps through which someone might get through. There are none. Now, because this gatekeeper is wise, they know that their understanding can’t tell them how many people will enter the fortress, but they can know with certainty that whoever comes in, has to come through the gate.
What is Ananda saying to the brahmin? Why did the Buddha remain silent? How many people will become enlightened? Will I? Do you believe that you can realize yourself? Do you really believe it?
Let me say it another way: Once, a group of students was learning tracking from their elder when one of them asked, “How can we know where to find the buffalo? You know, where do they hide, usually?” And the elder pointed to a gas station and said, “I can’t tell you where to find a buffalo, but I can tell you that you won’t find him over there.”
The Buddha didn’t know, couldn’t know, how many would realize themselves—even though in the sutras the Buddha is said to be omniscient. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he did know, then what? He tells one of them you will absolutely, without a doubt become enlightened? He tells another one, So sorry but no, not this time around? Then what? What will those students do with that information? How does it help them?
The Buddha doesn’t answer the brahmin because that question won’t help him. It won’t relieve his suffering. But if he had answered, he could have said, “I don’t know how many will realize themselves, but I do know they’ll have to follow the path.” Which path? The Noble Eightfold Path, of course, the path of suffering and the end of suffering. The path of practice, realization, and transliteration into our own particular lives.
So, we have this problem. We can’t help but belong because we ourselves are nothing but belonging. We are nothing but relationship, entanglement, interdependence. And yet, we insist on believing that we don’t, that we don’t fit, that we’re different, and alone in our difference. That’s like a wave looking around the ocean and being convinced she alone is not water. In those moments, it’s like we’d rather be special, unique, instead of free. We want to belong, but not if it means being like everyone else. But we are like everyone else! We’re the ocean. And we’re also not—we’re a wave.
No one has ever or will ever move through life quite in the way that you do. But the fact that we share the ocean means that we can use practice to wake up.
The sutras say there are four obstacles to our inherent wisdom:
The first is ignorance, our insistence to see things as we are instead of as they are. Our insistence to be someone, period—to be a self, apart from other selves. This is ignorance
The second is clinging. It’s like the monkey trapped with a gourd. In India, hunters will sometimes hollow out a gourd and place a banana in it. A monkey, smelling the banana, will stick his hand into the gourd, and grabbing the banana, makes a tight fist. But the fist is too big to pull back through the hole, so the only way the monkey can free itself is by letting go. You’d be surprised—and heartbroken—to know how many monkeys choose holding on over letting go. Blinded by their hunger, their craving, they can’t let go—and so they die. And yet, all they have to do, if they want to live, is open their hand.
The third obstacle is emotional distraction.It’s tThe turmoil that sends us spinning this way and that, and robs us of our clarity and calm. It’s amazing how something that has no substance, no solidity whatsoever, can rule over so much of our lives.
Think of a grudge. Someone does something, you get angry, and you hold on. Years later, you’re still holding on—maybe you even pass it on to the next generation. A single emotion, and from it, all that strife.
The fourth obstacle is karma. We accumulate karma from this life and past lives, piling on more and more weight on our backs—the weight of our beliefs, and ideas, and mistakes, and reactions, and habits, and misunderstandings. And we try to move through life, teetering under all that weight, and we wonder why we’re so tired. We wonder why we so often feel like Sisyphus: pushing that huge boulder uphill, gravel sliding under our feet, sweat pouring from our bodies, until we get to the top and poop, the tiniest action and there goes the boulder rolling all the way down again. And we try again, struggling to make our way up, and back down we go.
But there’s a way to work with these obstructions, particularly with our karma. And that’s by working with the three “karma doors” (kammadvara in Pali).
The three doors of karma or action are body, speech, and mind. And they are our gateways to the world. We “enter” the world through our actions, our words, and our thoughts. This is why it’s so important to guard these doors, to move through them carefully. We can swing lightly through the door of speech, for example, offering loving words, or we can barge into another’s space swearing and screaming. We can knock softly on the door of action through a kind gesture, a look, an act of generosity. Or we can kick that door down. We can open the door of thought, inviting in demons and friends. We can send loving-kindness out into the world. Or we can shut ourselves down, keep ourselves apart from what we don’t like—both in others and in ourselves.
As you can see, how we approach each of these doors will determine what we find on the other side. Which means we have to use them well. Think of the door of an airplane. If you’re sitting in an exit row during a flight, you’d never dream of flinging open the door and rushing through it in an emergency. You’d study the operating instructions—ideally before the emergency begins—and follow the right procedure to keep everyone safe.
Studying the instructions to these doors is like developing our ability to see clearly. Moving through them well is following the right procedure, which we can do by taking each door and pairing it with its equivalent in the eightfold path—right speech, right action, and right livelihood.
We’ve talked about right speech quite a bit, so I’ll just sum it up as speech that is true, kind, necessary, beneficial, and timely. We can ask ourselves, Is what I’m about to say factual? (Do I know it to be true?) Will it help? Is this the time to speak up? Does what I want to say need to be said? Do I need to say it?
The second factor, right action, is made up of the first three precepts of not killing, not stealing, and not misusing sexuality. And as we know, when we look closely we see that a look, a put-down, a dismissive gesture can all be forms of killing. We can steal time or space, we can steal ideas, and we can even rob another of their experience when we deny it, or when we tell them what they’re feeling. We can fail to honor the body through our own guilt, or shame, or denial, obsessiveness, repression—all of these cause terrible suffering. Practicing right action means choosing actions that honor instead of harm, affirm instead of deny, lift up instead of put down.
The third factor, right livelihood is the tight balance of energy, resources, profit, and sustainability. I wrote recently of the hidden costs of using artificial intelligence, for example . ChatGPT uses half a million kilowatts of electricity each day. Half a million! By comparison, an entire US household uses only twenty-nine. We should remember this the next time we ask ChatGPT to create an image or answer a question about whatever it is we’re curious about. It’s always been true that every one of our actions affects the whole, but today some of those actions have the power to destroy us.
The good news is that we, too, have more power than we think. It’s the power of seeing—of clear seeing and clear living. That’s what a bodhisattva does. That’s what the unattainable path is all about.
Forget about enlightenment as an abstract term. Just think of living in the light. Oh, that sounds a little woo woo. What I mean is, instead of stumbling around a darkened room, bumping into the furniture and each other, we reach over and turn on the light. This is our vow.
Annie Dillard once said, “I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.” But there is more we can do. We can practice patiently but steadily to see that we never were and we never are apart from that light. We can practice to see that we are the beam.
Explore further
01 : The Bodhisattva Vows by Robert Aitken
02 : Four Vows by Thich Nhat Hanh
03: The Fourth Bodhisattva Vow, Part 1 with Vannesa Zuisei Goddard
04: The Four Bodhisattva Vows: An Impossible Dream by Vannesa Zuisei Goddard