The Four Bodhisattva Vows
Photo by Design Ecologist
No one is free until everyone is free. To take the Bodhisattva Vows is to commit fully to liberating all beings—despite of the insurmountability of the notion of ending all suffering.
In this introductory talk to a series exploring the Four Bodhisattva Vows, Zuisei explains why commitment to the path of a Bodhisattva is essential— why we cannot give up, even in a world with so much suffering and oppression.
“To save the environment and this planet? Impossible. To establish racial, gender, sexual, and age equality? Impossible. To put an end to poverty and hunger? Impossible.” Yet we vow to fulfill these vows, because we understand it is the only way to free ourselves and others from suffering.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is lightly edited for clarity.
Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to put an end to them.
The dharmas are boundless; I vow to master them.
The buddha way is unattainable; I vow to attain it.
These, as you know, are the four bodhisattva vows. They are the vows we chant every day; sometimes twice a day during sesshin. Each of these vows is a fluke, as in the arm of an anchor, and together they are the anchor, the mooring of our practice as Buddhists.
If you ever feel lost, if you’re ever confused, unsure, ambivalent, return to these vows. All of practice is contained within them.
Okumura Roshi says that originally, these vows were directly connected to the Four Noble Truths, and there’s a version that appeared in the Bodhisattva Jewel Necklace Sutra, which originated in China—I couldn’t find when, but it had to be before the sixth century, when Chih-i formulated the version of the vows we know now. In this older version, the vows read:
I vow to enable people to be released from the truth of suffering.
I vow to enable people to understand the truth of the origin of suffering.
I vow to enable people to peacefully settle down in the truth of the path leading to the cessation of suffering.
I vow to enable people to enter the cessation of suffering, that is, nirvana.
And look at how they relate to the way the Buddha spoke about the Four Noble Truths themselves:
The truth of suffering is to be understood.
The root of suffering—thirst or desire—is to be abandoned.
The cessation of suffering is to be realized.
The path of the cessation of suffering is to be practiced.
It’s not enough to know that suffering exists, that its root is desire, that it’s possible to put an end to it, and that there is a path. It’s not enough to understand each of these truths must be actively engaged.
We need to see suffering as what it is, contained in the first of the four vows in the original wording. We need to abandon desire, the second vow. We need to realize freedom and practice the path, third and fourth vows.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s wording of the Four Vows is very interesting:
However innumerable beings are, I vow to meet them with kindness and interest.
However inexhaustible the states of suffering are, I vow to touch them with patience and love.
However immeasurable the dharmas are, I vow to explore them deeply.
However incomparable the mystery of interbeing, I vow to surrender to it freely.
These seem very doable, right? Certainly much more than saving all sentient beings, putting an end to inexhaustible desires, mastering boundless dharmas, and attaining the way, which is, by definition, unattainable. Meeting beings with kindness and interest is something I can practice. It’s something I can do, it’s within my reach. I can at least try to touch my suffering with patience and kindness. It’s hard, but I definitely can explore the dharma. Attain it? Maybe not so much. But I can explore it, I can study it, sure.
And this business about us being all one? Well, I don’t fully understand it. I’m willing to see if it’s true and to live my life from that perspective because if all these teachers say that it’s the path to freedom, there must be something to it.
This wording is less abstract. You can sink your teeth into it, it gives you something to practice, concrete. On the other hand, the wording we use conveys the immensity of these vows. And they are immense and we shouldn’t forget that. They are boundless, inexhaustible themselves.
That was one of my favorite moments in Daido Roshi’s talks, when he’d speak of these vows. He’d be wearing his light blue kimono and robe, his grey kesa. He’d have his glasses perched at the end of his nose, and he would lean toward us on the high seat and say: “Sentient beings are numberless—I can’t possibly save them all. Yet I vow to do it!” “Desires are inexhaustible—put an end to them? Can’t do it. But I vow to do it!”
And he would get louder and louder as he went along, more and more riled up, until, at the end, he would burst into song: “The impossible Dream,” from Man of La Mancha…. and you’d be thinking, “Yeah! Hell, yeah! I can do this!” And just in case we still didn’t get it, he’d then say, “This is impossible. So if you’re hanging on to any sense of hope, forgeddaboutit! There is no hope!”
A bodhisattva doesn’t need hope, he was saying. A bodhisattva has vow. The word vow includes several meanings: solemn and voluntary promise, prayer, sacrifice. I would add: includes wisdom, aspiration, commitment, remembrance. Because when you’ve said you’re going to do something and you hit a spot when you don’t want to, it doesn’t feel good, it’s too much work, it’s boring… Vow helps you to remember what you said you wanted in the first place. A vow is binding, in that it is made by you for you, that aspect of yourself that really wants to wake up, that really wants to be free. And it can’t be a cautious vow, it can’t come from a limited place, a place of ignorance, it has to come from a larger perspective you can’t see, but sense, otherwise you wouldn’t have come here.
So even when you think you’ve lost your way, you haven’t. The same part of you that began questioning, began searching, is the same part of you that knows what to do when you think you don’t know what to do. And what part of you is that? Awakening that part of you that is awake, that is a buddha.
In the last chapter of the Avatamsaka (Flower Garland) Sutra, Samantabhadra makes the Ten Great Vows of a bodhisattva. This chapter is often treated as a separate scripture called “Entry into Reality” and it was first translated in the third century, so you can see how first this concept of the bodhisattva vowing to wake up for the sake of others emerges and is slowly developed over the centuries of Buddhist teaching and thought.
In this chapter, Samantabhadra offers the following invocation:
May I purify an ocean of realms,
May I liberate an ocean of sentient beings,
May I see an ocean of truths,
And may I realize an ocean of wisdom.
Again, the precursors of the Four Bodhisattva Vows that are also later echoed in the Fusatsu, Renewal of Vows ceremony:
Being One with the Buddha
With all sentient beings, raise the bodhi mind (enlightenment)
Let the supreme way be realized
Being One with the Dharma
With all sentient beings, penetrate all sutras
Let wisdom be like the ocean
Being One with the Sangha
With all sentient beings, lead the people
Let harmony pervade everywhere
Being one with these three treasures, with all beings we practice. This is key. Mahayana is saying, “You can’t do this alone,” that’s impossible.
Some people say, “You know, I came here to deal with my own suffering. I don’t really feel that called to save all beings or to become enlightened. I don’t even know what that is.”
And really, this is how we all come into practice. We’re mostly thinking about ourselves, our pain, our confusion, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s because of our dawning awareness of our suffering and ignorance that we can turn to the path, that we can turn to practice, so this step is necessary but we can’t stay there.
If you do enter into practice, at some point your suffering begins to abate. Things aren’t so dire. You might look around and say, “Now what? I feel pretty good, why do I need to practice?” And you can be certain that students were asking the same question two thousand years ago. And picking up on exactly this kind of thought, the Mahayana school evolved, whose teaching, in a nutshell, can be expressed as: You can’t really be free until all beings are free.
Remember what the Buddha said upon his enlightenment: “All sentient beings, this great earth and I, have at once entered the way.”
So in one way, you could say that the Mahayana was born on that very day. It’s seeds had been planted, they just needed time and light and nourishment to germinate. But why would he say that? You can realize emptiness all on your own, can’t you? No, because emptiness is not a void. It’s interdependence, interbeing, as Thich Nhat Hanh calls it. So what you’re realizing, is all beings, all dharmas, all desires. That’s why you can’t do it on your own, you can’t do it in a bubble.
Take this ango, for example. Some of us have been wondering why we’re deliberately turning toward the environmental crisis and making that part of our practice, part of awareness. “I thought I came here to look at myself, isn’t that what Zen is about? Why we do the people of color and lgbtq meetings, beyond fear of differences meetings, sangha treasure meetings, all these meetings?” The answer is in the Buddha’s statement, “We all together, at once, must enter the way.”
As Shugen Roshi was saying in his talk last week, there is so much that we disregard, so many people and things that we throw away, discard as unimportant. So if you came here to look at yourself, know that you can’t separate you and the world or you and the parts of you that you don’t like, unsavory, embarrassing. Know that when we try to separate them, the result is the world we’re living in. A world filled with suffering and conflict and alienation.
So yes, these vows are impossible and that is exactly why we must make them. To save the environment and this planet? Impossible. To establish racial, gender, sexual, age equality? Impossible. Put an end to poverty and hunger? Impossible. Yet I vow to dedicate my life to attaining these, in small or large measure, knowing that they’re unattainable, knowing that I’ll never be done, I can never just… switch off, stop caring, paying attention.
And if this sounds like bad news to you, like so…. much…. work, just look closely at this switching on and off and see if it’s satisfying to begin with. This is how we operate, isn’t it? Work, work, work, collapse and veg out.
When people say, I don’t know how to take practice into my life, that’s exactly why, because we think they’re separate. We think “I can work hard on my cushion and that somehow that will automatically translate into my relationships, my work, my free time” It won’t, it won’t happen automatically.
Your life and your practice are not two different things. They’re not separate compartments in the cupboard that is you. In fact, the stress is all these compartments, an ever-proliferating number of drawers and trays and cubbies where we tuck things away and then riffle through when we need something.
You are not a cupboard, you are not segmented, you are a whole human being that feels and thinks and senses in three dimensions and that is unavoidably connected to every other being and every other thing in this universe.
If we want to know how to bring practice into our lives, there’s one thing we must do: embody it. More and more, we live in our heads, not just intellectual people, the crazy scientists and the gnarly, eremitic writers and the addled mathematicians, all of us. As someone said, we think of our bodies as transportation for our brains. They’re a way to get us to all those meetings.
In our brains, saving all beings and saving myself are different. But in reality, they’re not. It’s our ever increasing disconnect from ourselves and everything else that’s gotten us into the mess we’re in.
Again, we’re not liberated until all beings are liberated. And we can’t liberate ourselves and others by leaving out the paramitas (virtues), by leaving out the precepts, by leaving out kindness and deep interest and care for all beings, in other words, we can’t just stay in our room and hope that things will sort themselves out.
Although, that’s not completely true. I read about a Tibetan teacher who in his thirties vowed to never cross the threshold of his room again so he could devote himself to the dharma. And that’s what he did for the next sixty years, people came to him, to be taught, to practice. So there’s many ways to save all beings, to put an end to desires, to master the dharmas, to reach the world.
Someone gave me a book about consciousness, and towards the end there was a chapter on “uploading,” the idea that we can extend our lives by “uploading” the contents of our mind onto a computer and essentially living on indefinitely without a body. Now, I’m not against progress, but I find the idea of attaining immortality—presumably our view of freedom—by becoming bodyless deeply disturbing and counter-intuitive. Human life is meant to be finite, all life is meant to be finite. That’s what gives it its urgency. It’s not a fault in the system that things end, but that doesn’t mean I then shouldn’t care about how I live. Our vow is to alleviate suffering, to end suffering that’s arisen, to not give rise to more suffering. And we think we’ll be able to do that without bodies?
I get so upset about all these technological acrobatics. I mean, will women and children in Uganda be able to upload? People in the slums of Brazil? Or a coal miner, a teacher, a farmer in South Dakota?
Erasing the body is not what we need. We need to grapple with it, we need to feel its discomfort, it’s fragility, it’s finality—that’s what’s going to get us on our feet and moving, looking for a saner way to live.
I was speaking to someone doing their first retreat at the monastery and after the first morning I asked them how zazen was. She said, “It was hard! My legs hurt so bad I felt as if they were going to fall off.” I nodded knowingly. My first sesshin was in July, in 95-degree weather and I was tight from running and I remember sitting on the dokusan line in a lake of sweat and in agony thinking, “When the hell is this going to be over?” And my next thought was, “When can I do the next one?”
She too, was in agony. She said she began to wonder if the timekeeper had fallen asleep. Ever thought: “What’s wrong with the jikido?” “And where the hell is the monitor? Are they paying attention? Why isn’t anyone doing their job?” Having to stifle the impulse to go, “Monitor? Monitor? Time?”
So, do these vows make you stretch? You bet they do, they have to. It is simply not realistic for us to expect that we can be free by changing absolutely nothing at all about ourselves and our lives. Just as it’s not realistic to expect that the environment will right itself without us giving anything up, without changing our lifestyles, our choices.
But, if at times you feel overwhelmed, know that you’re not alone. Sometimes Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is depicted with eleven heads stacked in three tiers and on top of these is the head of Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light.
The story is that Kuanyin, “The Hearer of the Cries of the World,” vowed to save all beings, but she got so overwhelmed, that her head exploded. Ten times this happened, until Amitabha placed his head on top of hers to ensure that she would never again lack aspiration. Even Kannon got overwhelmed, even the Buddha got tired.
That’s why the bodhisattva has vow. That’s why the bodhisattva must be fearless, meaning, they’re afraid and they step forward anyway.
So, every time you chant these vows, really feel what they’re saying. Really ask yourself, how can I save this being in front of me? How do I look closely at desire, so I’m not led around by it? Am I studying the teachings? Do I understand them? When I don’t, do I ask? Most importantly, what does it mean to attain the unattainable Buddha way? What am I saying when I say this?
I want to look at these in subsequent talks because there is so much to them. So many teachings, so much possibility.
Please know that we are not helpless. We’re not victims of government, corporations, authority figures. Each one of us is the agent of our lives and we must exercise that agency if we’re going to survive as a species.
We’re not playing at being Buddhists. Practice is not a rehearsal for the real thing, for real life, it is life. Your life, and my life. The question is, how will we live it? Here’s another invocation, this time by Shantideva:
May I live endowed with strength in whatever posture I am
May my way of life be like that of Manjushri, the great bodhisattva of wisdom.
(This line is my addition) and that of Kannon, the great bodhisattva of compassion
who live to accomplish the benefit of every sentient being in every direction.
For as long as space endures, and for as long as the world lasts,
may I live dispelling the miseries of the world.
May I live dispelling the miseries of the world. This is our work, this is our imperative. These miseries include me and you, we’re not leaving ourselves out of the picture. But they include so much more than me and you, just as these vows, the medicine, include so much more. Don’t let these vows be small. Let them be as large, as immeasurable, as they really are.
Explore further
02 : Four Noble Truths
03: Avatamsaka (Flower Garland) Sutra (pdf)
04 : The First Bodhisattva Vow with Zuisei Goddard
05 : The Second Bodhisattva Vow with Zuisei Goddard
06: The Third Boddhisattva Vow wiht Zuisei Goddard
07: The Four Bodhisattva Vows: An Impossible Dream by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard