Saving All Sentient Beings: The First Bodhisattva Vow Redux
Thousand Hands Bodhisattva performed by the Chinese People’s Art Troupe of People with Disabilities, Paralympics, 2004
The first bodhisattva vow—sentient beings are numberless, I vow save them—speaks to the choice to love, even when it is difficult.
In this talk, Zuisei illustrates how others have taken up the first bodhisattva vow and shares clearly how we might take it up in our daily 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.
Good evening, everyone. I am settling in after returning from New York and our Spring sesshin, a wonderful gathering of bodhisattvas—two-legged, four legged, fully mobile and mobile-learning. It was delightful, during the weekend, to have Helen, Kaito’s two-year-old, come up to someone at random times to ask, “What you doin’?” To have her declare at some point during the retreat—and rightly so—that we were all buddhas. Wonderful to dive right into the silence and stillness of sesshin, all of us in one space, more tangibly one mind.
I don’t know if this happened to you but for me, the transition into sesshin was seamless. There was no warming up period, no settling down period where I just let my mind wander all over the place until it’s quieted down enough to do the work I came to do. There was none of that. I stepped into the zendo, I took my seat, and vuuooom! I was in it. I was inside the silence, inside the gathering of the mind that is sesshin, as if we’d been sitting together for a month and not just a few minutes.
How wonderful to be so comfortable together, so trusting in all that space, all that silence… may it always be so. May we always care for one another and protect one another and love one another in this and every way. May we always recognize how rare and how important—how life giving—this practice is. Not because it’s that way inherently, but because we make it so with our care. It’s a self-nurturing system.
Practice works because we let it work, we cause it to work, we choose to make it work by aligning our thoughts, our words, our actions with its teaching, which is the teaching of the buddhadharma. May we always recognize how incredibly lucky we are to have found one another, and to have found the dharma—an ocean of dharma practiced by an ocean of beings.
Tonight we are looking at the First Bodhisattva Vow: Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them. And I’ve asked, and you’ve answered, what it means “to save” here. You’ve said it means to see you, and love you, and respect you, and help you, and celebrate you. You’ve said it means to see me as you, and to help free you as I want to free myself. This is, indeed, what it means to save all beings: to regard them, to free them, to realize them as no different from me, no more separate than my own hand, or my liver, or my heart. It’s a very beautiful teaching, isn’t it?
But tell me, in the past week, how many times did you secretly want to kill your partner, or your child? How many times did you wish you were single again, or at least childless? How many times did you have to stop yourself from cursing at that driver who cut you off, or the woman who stepped ahead of you in line at the airport? How many times have you caught yourself putting someone down in your mind for the way they talk, the way they act, what they do or don’t do? It’s not so easy to regard all beings with love, is it?
And these are the people who are close, or who haven’t hurt us in any significant way. How do we love, then, in the face of injustice and cruelty? How do we meet another when we find their views, their actions, reprehensible? How do we meet another, how do we get close, when their actions are designed to separate and divide?
I mentioned this the other night—there’s a Chinese sutra called the Bodhisattva Jewel Necklace Sutra that takes the Four Vows and ties them to the Four Noble Truths. And so, in this sutra, this vow is expressed as: I vow to enable beings to be released from the truth of suffering. The Four Noble Truths are also known, in the sutras, as the Four Tasks. The Buddha said that:
The truth of suffering must be understood.
The root of suffering—craving or thirst—must be abandoned.
The cessation of suffering—nirvana—must be realized.
The path of the cessation of suffering must be practiced.
In other words, these aren’t just noble teachings you look at every once in a while and that make you feel good about being a Buddhist. These are tasks that we should undertake. There’s something to do with each of these. We have to understand suffering. We have to let go of craving. We have to realize enlightenment, nirvana. And we have to practice or develop the path.
Contemporary scholars say that it’d be better to translate the Pali for the Four Noble Truths to the Four Truths of Noble People. The truths aren’t noble by themselves—they’re made noble by the nobility of the people who practice them, by the realization of the people who practice them. Do you understand?
Like sesshin, like sacred space, the space is made sacred by our presence, the silence, the stillness, the clarity that come out of them, are made so by our presence and our practice. I don’t mean just human presence, but the presence of all sorts of beings and things. But sacredness is made, it’s co-created, so is silence, and clarity. So are the Four Noble Truths, so is realization, so is the path. That’s why no one can realize themselves or be themselves by themselves—not even the Buddha. This is why we need each other, we rely on each other, we support each other. Because a single wave cannot exist by itself. It needs the ocean, it needs the whole ocean in order to be itself. How wonderful is that?
I vow to enable beings to be released from the truth of suffering. I vow to help all beings understanding suffering and its root. I vow to help point them in the right direction. I vow to encourage them when they’re flagging, celebrate when they take a few steps. We can do that, I think we can all do that.
But tread carefully here. What does this vow look like when we’re talking of the big oil companies drilling away at our last few natural reservoirs or the fraudsters who specialize in stealing from the elderly, the vulnerable?
At the end of sesshin we started talking about scams—phone scams, email scams, that sort of thing. I told the group about one time I was staying at the Temple
I don’t remember who of the monks was in charge that week but they were on vacation and I was filling in. And I picked up the phone one day and the guy said he was from ConEd. And he was talking really fast in a clipped but authoritative voice, and he told me that we hadn’t paid our bill for the last two months and if I didn’t pay today, they’d cut off our electricity. I’d just gotten to the Temple the day before, and I thought, Oh no! I can’t have them cut the lights on my watch! We have a retreat coming up. I got a little flustered, but I’d never dream of giving a credit card number to a stranger over the phone, so I said, Hold on, and went to check our files. Lo and behold, we didn’t even use the same electric company. We used Nyseg, so the guy was after me or whomever he could get. I got on the phone and said, Is this really how you want to be making a living? Then I hung up.
But afterward I reflected that it was such a missed opportunity. Maybe, if I had been more skillful, I could have gotten him to reconsider. Like the cab driver who took me to the bus station on my way to the airport as I was heading up to NY. We started talking, and I said to him at one point, “You know, as a woman I’m always concerned about safety when I use a cab, but you guys are constantly taking strangers into your car. That must get iffy sometimes.” And he told me that yes, once or twice he’d been in some touchy situations. He’d picked up a guy who was acting a bit strange—asked him to drop him off at a different place than he’d said originally, and who, first thing after getting into the cab says, “Aren’t you worried I might rob you?” How’s that for an ice-breaker? But it turned out this cab driver was pretty religious, he was always playing hymns in his car, and has always felt that God has got his back, so he said to the man, “No, I’m not worried. Aren’t you worried I might rob you?” And the guy laughed.
But later his friends told him to be careful of that guy—they saw him in the car with him—they said he was part of a gang. But the driver never had any problems with him, picked him up a number of times and they always got along.
Another time, a man gets in the cab and immediately the driver realizes he’s high
The man says, “I have to rob someone. I have to rob someone today.” And the driver just starts talking to him while the hymns are playing in the background and he convinces him to reconsider. He says, This kind of life won’t help you, you’ll get hurt, others will get hurt, why don’t you come to church with me instead?
And the man does! That weekend he goes to church with the driver. For all we know, he’s still going to church and hasn’t robbed anyone again. All because of that cab driver and his faith, his love.
I vow to enable beings to be released from the truth of suffering, indeed. And how did that release come about? Through understanding. Instead of berating the man, instead of fearing or judging him, the driver understood—consciously or unconsciously—what was driving him. He saw the man’s need, his fear, his desperation, and he met it in the best way that he knew how.
It is of course possible for the story to turn out differently, but the point here is less the outcome than the intent, the way the cab driver chose to respond to the situation in order to help the man who’d come into his car asking for help, in fact.
He didn’t need to announce he had to rob someone that day. He could just have done it and gotten it over with. It was like he was begging to be recognized. Like he was saying, please help me, someone help me, save me from myself. And the driver did. He heard the call and he answered it, like Kuanyin.
Suppose that we take these four tasks and apply them to a single situation—a situation in which we’re meeting someone who’s difficult to meet. Someone we’d rather avoid, or ignore, or tell off, if we can. Instead, we reflect on these four tasks and apply them to our interaction in order to help and not harm.
First make an effort to understand them. Why might this person be acting the way they are? What set of circumstances might have shaped their view of themselves, of the world? What is it that they want, at heart?
Next we let go of our own wish to set them right. It’s not our job to teach them (unless they’ve specifically asked). It’s not our job to convince them of anything or change their mind. Our job is to meet them, as I say in the invocation when someone becomes a formal student in the Ocean Mind Sangha:
May you regard all beings with love;
and if you can’t, with respect;
and if you can’t, with kindness;
and if you can’t, with care—
and if you can, with all of these,
because they deserve it, as do you.
So anything that gets in the way of that—our opinions, our own views, our judgment, criticism—we deliberately let it go so we can meet them not knowing what we’ll find. So we can discover this being, see this being for who they are, not who we want them to be.
Third we work to realize our unity, our identity. We practice to see that they are me, and I’m them—that we are the same inside. But not poetically, truly to see me as you and you as me, because this is the truth of things.
And fourth to practice practicing this every time we meet another, especially when the meeting is difficult. For those of you who have joined more recently,
when I first started teaching again I created what I called the Bodhisattva Academy. And in my mind, all our retreats and classes and sittings would be offerings of the academy, whose purpose was to train bodhisattvas and have them infiltrate the world. Love warriors, kindness warriors, peace warriors who are not afraid to let freedom lead, not pride, not jealousy, not stinginess. We’re not featuring the academy anymore but the training stands. This is what we’re doing: training to love when loving is hard.
That’s a good place to end, actually. This is my version of this First Bodhisattva Vow: I vow to love you—especially when it’s hard.
Explore further
01 : The Bodhisattva Vows by Robert Aitken
02 : Four Vows by Thich Nhat Hanh
03: The First Bodhisattva Vow with Vannesa Zuisei Goddard
04: The Four Bodhisattva Vows: An Impossible Dream by Vannesa Zuisei Goddard