Power of Bow
Photo by Ahmed
Why prostrate yourself, when Buddhism doesn’t include belief in God or a higher power?
With insights from Eihei Dogen, Judy Lief, and Reggie Ray, Zuisei looks at the power of the sacred and of bowing, as well as the importance of prostration in the cultivation of devotion—an attitude of respect and reverence so needed in this world today.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hello, everyone. I had something planned for today, but as some of you know, I’ve been doing a retreat this week, and in the middle of the stillness and the silence something else came up insistently enough that I decided to shift—though I think not too much.
When we look at the world right now, we see a lot of disturbance, to say the least—climate change, COVID, the conflict in Afghanistan, the earthquake that just happened in Haiti. There are so many things that are not in our control—well, essentially everything. At the same time, we have practice. By practice I mean meditation, for sure, but also all the many skillful means that have been handed down during the couple of millennia that Buddhism has existed. Practice gives us access to more options to respond to the many things that happen to us that we didn’t necessarily want or expect. Practice gives us tools with which to meet the world.
We’ve been reading Thich Nhat Hahn, and in the commentary to one of the verses he says: “The inside is made of outside."I was thinking about how we work with the inside in order to work with the outside, and what came up very strongly for me this morning was… bow, the power of bow. That’s bow with a B as in biscuit. Bow as in prostration. Bow as an act of meeting ourselves and the world in a very simple way, in a very undefended way.
We’re not a reverential culture, generally speaking, but bowing has been a part of all sorts of cultures since—always. There are greeting bows in Japan or India—standing with palms together—in what in Japanese we call gassho. And one way to think about gassho is as the bringing together of the dualities that only exist in our minds. The dualities that exist in the world of form, the relative, and that come together in the absolute. Gassho is also a gesture of respect and gratitude.
There’s genuflection in the Christian tradition. There’s the full-body prostrations that are part of Vajrayana practice (the kind of Buddhism that is prevalent in Tibet, in Burma, in Nepal) and are also part of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. There’s bowing in Islam and Judaism. In some Buddhist countries, it’s not unusual for pilgrims to travel to a shrine or stupa to circumambulate it, walking in circles around the monument, and often prostrating all along the way. Keep in mind that the Vajrayana bow is a full-body prostration—full as in your arms are fully extended, feet flat on the floor behind you. You’re literally flat on the floor, forehead on the ground, as horizontal as you can possibly go. As flat as this three-dimensional body will allow. Imagine traveling, sometimes hundreds of miles, doing a bow like that with each step. Why? Why would anyone do such a thing in the 21st century, the age of reason, of science, of fact, of experiment? Why prostrate yourself to something or some being that most likely doesn’t even exist, factually?
Buddhism does not posit the existence of God, of a higher being or higher power, yet in Zen we bow all the time. We do standing bows, we do seated bows, we do kneeling bows, full prostrations. We bow before work, we bow at the end of it, to start the meal, to end the meal. Before we take our seat we bow to the sangha, we bow to the buddha on the altar, we bow to each other… bow, bow, bow, bow.
When I was at the monastery, one of my jobs was to give people instruction in face-to-face teaching, the formal meeting with a teacher. I would go over the sequence of bows: first you bow by yourself doing a full prostration to the Buddha on the altar. You go all the way down and finish with a standing bow. Oh, wait, no—you do that with the person that was in the room before you. Then, you step forward and do a full bow to the teacher, but you don’t finish the bow because halfway through, you’ll go down on your knees and have the interview. At the end of the interview you do the standing bow because the face-to-face teaching is really happening within a bow. Then, when it’s clear that the interview is over, the teacher will ring their bell, you do a seated bow, and another standing bow. You go back to the door, you step aside, and the next person steps next to you. Finally, to end, together you do a full bow to the Buddha.
As I was giving these instructions, invariably I’d see people’s eyes get bigger and bigger. I could see they were just freaking out, thinking, How in the world am I going to remember all of this? And I’d just say to them, “It’s okay. You don’t have to get it perfectly. We know this is your first time doing this. It’s really okay. Really, when in doubt, just bow. It’s always good practice.” Actually, I think that serves in the rest of our lives, as well. When in doubt, bow, even if it’s just in your mind.
And all this bowing—some people really liked it, some not so much. But here’s the thing: whether we like it or not depends entirely on how we understand what we’re doing. It depends on the movement of our minds. The body doesn’t care about the motions themselves one way or another. The body doesn’t judge. We may be able or not to do it, depending on our own particular bodies. So, physically speaking, it may be easy or difficult for to bow. But it’s our feelings about it that determine how we experience this act. This is true of everything.
As we go about our lives, our bodies perceive all sorts of things. They see form, they hear sounds, they smell, they taste, they touch. Then, the mind labels each of these experiences as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. But this happens after the fact, very quickly after, but after nonetheless. So when I’m watching a sunrise by the ocean, it isn’t just my eyes that are seeing the sun coming up over the waves. My feet are feeling the soft sand underneath. My nose is smelling the sea breeze. I’m hearing the surf. My whole body is taking in this input and very quickly forming a picture that the mind calls “sunrise,” so that I can understand it. So I can then talk to myself about it and talk to you about it. But in the moment of directly experiencing this sunrise, I’m just experiencing it as it is, without filters. My body is acting as a conduit that lets that experience flow through, and unless I grab on to it in some way—whoosh, it just flows by, leaving no trace, no weight behind. That’s important to remember. The body has the capacity to let go. The body also has the capacity to remember, especially when we decide to label, categorize, and put things in little drawers. Then the body can’t release it, it can’t move through.
Consider a bow. You are standing with your feet together. Your body is at attention, right? It’s tall and stable like a mountain, like Tadasana or Mountain Pose in yoga. There’s an alertness and engagement to it. Then, you hold your hands in front of your chest. In Zen, technically, they’re really about a fist away from your nose. Your elbows are a little bit out to the sides, which again, you have to do deliberately. There’s an energy to that is different than if you’re just [gestures holding palms together with elbows dropped] doing this. There’s an energy, I feel, of care or respect. Usually when you’re bowing there’s a little bit of an inward gaze. Perhaps you’re looking at the buddha on the altar or at someone else, but otherwise there’s a kind of inward turning. You’re turning toward the body. You’re turning in, in order to take all of it in as well.
Dogen Zenji, the 13th century Zen Master, said: “When you bow to buddha ancestors, you experience miraculous transformation. When you bow to ancient buddhas and present buddhas in countless billions of eons, it is the moment of being wrapped in the Buddha’s robe.” In Buddhism, bowing is an acknowledgment of that part of me that is already awake. I’m not actually bowing to someone else or to a more enlightened being like the Buddha. Yet we do have an image, a statue, a picture. It seems we almost can’t help ourselves because we need something to focus our attention on. The Buddha himself said, “Do not make images of me.” But we did anyway. So when I bow, I am acknowledging my own buddha nature, my own wakefulness. I am, in that moment, enlivening my own awakened nature.
But, tell me, when Dogen says that you bow to buddha ancestors, who are they? Where are they? He says we’re bowing to ancient buddhas and present buddhas in billions of aeons. How is that possible? Where are all these beings?
Ultimately, the reason we bow to an image is because it does focus our attention. It lets us know that there is something happening that is different from what happened before. Right? Why? If every moment is perfect and complete, then why bow? Why show that kind of reverence and devotion? Why have an altar? Why chant? How are any of these a miraculous transformation? Are they? Or are they just things? Is bowing just about a gesture?
Reflect on what happens when you enter a space and you see an altar, any kind of altar. Think of the associations that come up in your mind when you see a buddha statue. (There’s actually a little buddha head next to the little pool downstairs.) What do you think when you see a buddha next to the pool, and what do you think when you see a buddha on the altar? Is it different?
Years ago, I was doing work practice at the monastery, and visitors came in. They had walked right into the zendo with their shoes on, which we normally don’t do, and were taking pictures. One of them was sitting on Shugen Roshi’s seat—the abbot’s seat—at the front of the room, right next to the altar. He was just sitting there, taking pictures. [Chuckles] I felt my stomach kind of go into a knot. And then I thought, Relax. They don’t know. To them it’s just a cushion on the floor. To me, it means something. It’s a seat that I hold in high regard because of the relationship I have with my teacher, because of all the liturgy that I’ve done around it, because of how we speak about it at the monastery. In general, you never drop a cushion on the floor. You don’t straighten it with your feet. Why? Because this is the buddha’s seat and you want to show it some kind of regard, some kind of reverence. But is that reverence in our minds? Is it in our bodies? Is it in the environment? Where is it?
A sacred space, even if it’s a corner of the room in your home where you have your cushion or an altar of some kind, reminds you that something different can happen there. That is not to say that it can’t happen anywhere else, it’s just a little more difficult. Fundamentally, a bathroom, a garbage dump, or a mall is just as deserving of our care as a temple or a church. Yet we create temples or churches, or we designate a corner in our room, a practice space, because they do something in our minds. They remind us that there’s something important happening there.
So, as I said, a bow is a way of remembering I’m perfect and complete just as I am in this moment. It’s remembering that I have the capacity to be present to myself and to my life. I remember that it takes work to do this, yet here I am doing it. So Dogen is exactly right. When you do a bow with every cell in your body, every ounce of your awareness, it is miraculous transformation. It is a moment of bowing to past, present, and future buddhas.
Remember the scene in the Brothers Karamazov where Father Zossima bows to Dimitri? Dimitri, the eldest of the brothers, is having a fight with his father in front of all these people. They are so irate with each other they’re practically hysterical, both of them. At a certain point, Father Zossima, the elder, gets up—he’s very, very old and frail—and without a single word, walks up to Dimitri, stands in front of him, and does a full prostration to him. Dimitri is so broken apart by this he can’t do anything but run away.
I think that in itself would have been powerful enough, if Dostoyevsky had just left it there. But, the next day the younger brother, Alyosha, goes back to Father Zossima and asks why? Why did you bow? What did that mean? Father Zossima says something so interesting. He says, “I saw how much Dimitri was going to suffer and I was bowing to that suffering in him.” I saw how much he was going to suffer and I bowed to that.
A bow is also saying: I bow to all those parts of me that I still have to bring along, that I still struggle and fight with. Parts in me and you that I don’t like and resist. Imagine how powerful that is. We did this at the monastery when we had a conflict with someone. We were asked to face one another and bow. Meet one another in that way. Meet as past and present buddhas. That is a moment of being wrapped in the buddha’s robe.
I really love that image. This [gestures to rakusu] is the miniature buddha’s robe. The traditional robe goes over the shoulder. In the warmer countries, certainly in India where Buddhism started, it was the only thing that was worn. They had another undergarment, and then just the robe over one shoulder. In Japan there was colder weather, so more layers. Also, in Japan and China the monks started working, which they didn’t do in the Southeast Asian countries. Working was impractical in robes, so Japanese monks designed the rakusu which is sewn in the image of a rice field. Every morning we place it over our heads and chant: “Vast is the robe of liberation/a formless field of benefaction….” We’re hold the rakusu on our heads, then we bow with it, and we put it on. We do that, reminding ourselves that it’s a buddha field. [gestures to herself] This is a buddha field too. But, I have to do the work to tend the field. Sitting still is not difficult after a while. It’s tending to our lives, to each other, to the planet, that’s the real challenge. We cannot tend it in a disembodied state.
I was reading a portion of Reggie Ray’s Touching Enlightenment. He says, “We’re in the presence of a being, our own body that is wise, loving, flawlessly reliable, and strange to say, worthy of our deepest devotion.” I don’t think that’s strange. What is strange is that for a culture so obsessed with the body, we’re mostly completely disconnected from it. We love our bodies. We hate our bodies. We primp them. We neglect them. We nip and tuck them. But we very rarely inhabit them. To show devotion means to show respect for the body. We listen to the body.
When we bow, we bow in gratitude, in humility, in appreciation for everything that this physical body and that the body of the universe gives us. We acknowledge that there’s so much that we don’t know, but that we want to know. A teacher said, “The mind is distracted, the body isn’t. The body knows.” We’re acknowledging this wisdom of the body in a bow, letting it come forth. We’re not going to solve the problems we’re facing with mind only, or we would have done it already. We have to bring the whole system in line.
So to close, Judy Lief (both Judy Lief and Reggie Ray were trained in the Shambhala tradition) says:
In prostration practice, we visualize everything as included in one vast world. The lineage is before us, our natural world surrounds us, our friends and family are at our side, and our enemies are behind us. Animals, crowds of people, and supernatural beings all join in. Nothing is excluded.
That’s it—the entire universe is contained in bow. That’s always true. But it only comes alive, it’s only made real, when there’s nothing between us and the world. When everything that we are, and think, and feel and do, when everything inside and outside bows at once, the whole universe is right there.
Explore further
01 : Touching Enlightenment by Reggie Ray
02 : Bowing: Prostrations by Judy Lief
03 : Raihai Tokuzui: Bowing and Acquiring the Essence by Eihei Dogen, translated by Ven. Anzan Hoshin Roshi and Yasuda Joshu Dainen Roshi