The Third Bodhisattva Vow
Photo by Susan Q. Yin
This talk explores the third Bodhisattva Vow: The dharmas are boundless; I vow to master them.
To vow to master the dharmas is to undertake the commitment to thoroughly study the Way— understanding that despite the fact that we can never learn it all, we work to understand as much as we can.
Seeing dharmas as dharmas we begin to understand that we’re not victims of our thoughts. They have power, they have history, but inherently, they don’t own that power—it’s not intrinsic to these dharmas because they are, in fact, empty.
Recorded at Zen Center of New York City 7/24/2016
Transcript
This talk is lightly edited for clarity.
I’d like to speak about belonging. I’d like to speak about that place, that state, that all of us yearn for, an intrinsic feeling of rightness, of not being apart from, of being utterly, profoundly accepted by what/who? By ourselves certainly, but it’s deeper than that. We want others to accept us and most of our actions we choose and consider in light of this need, we try to secure and maintain it. We want the universe to accept us as well. We want to feel we profoundly belong in this world, this life, that there’s a purpose to our being here, that we fit in the scheme of things.
There have been times in which I’ve felt this profound rightness, this belonging: in zazen, a sense of homecoming, returning to what was most basic in me. I had considered becoming a doctor, psychotherapist, a teacher. Then I went to college and I changed my mind. I’d look around me and think, we need a lot of healing and ask, why is this so? And I sensed that getting to know my body and mind intimately was the way to start: Tai chi, shiatsu, yoga, Freud, Jung, Kant, Herrigel, Hannah Arendt, who said: “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.”
Traveling, I went to a bookstore in Madrid and said to myself, “I need something,” and I picked up the Tao Teh Ching, in Spanish, and fell in love with it. Later I found a book on Zen and I fell in love with it. I began to do zazen and I thought, early on, this is the way to address the human problem. I can help to heal it, or I can try to uproot it at its source. And so, in my zazen, over time, I touched that place of rightness, perfection, belonging. I remember saying to my teacher not so long ago, “If I died right now, it would be okay.” I meant it, I felt it, I still do. There are a few things I’d like to do before that, but it would still be okay.
I have felt this fundamental rightness a few times in my running. It’s the reason I’m so interested in the relationship between movement and stillness. Take that sense of belonging, of not being apart into activity, actually, you’re not taking it into activity, you’re discovering it, since it’s there.
I have felt it and have been feeling it swimming. This last that is so tangible, so visceral, because it’s such a physical, felt sense, undeniable feeling of being held, supported by the water which is me. It’s in my molecules and bones, in my organs and sinews. Nowhere else can I relax so completely, so quickly. My comfort dreams are dreams of swimming, feeling of immersion in being, effortless, cap down over ears, mirrored goggles so I won’t see people in lane near mine, start comparing, losing track of myself.
Swimming is so healing. There’s no other, no time, no past, no future, there’s only the now, there’s nowhere to go, nothing, absolutely nothing to attain. The only blip is my scheming: how can I do this more?
Fourth Bodhisattva vow:
The Buddha Way is unattainable; I vow to attain it.
This fourth vow says that the way, this path we’ve chosen to tread together is unattainable. We cannot complete it. There’s no finish line, no ribbon snapping across your chest as you fly through, arms outstretched, head thrown back, thinking, “I did it!” This isn’t like that, it’s never-ending.
Zeno was a Greek philosopher and founder of Stoicism who said, among other things, that motion is an illusion. In the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, Achilles gives the tortoise 100 meters head start on a foot race. If they each run at a constant speed, very fast and very slow, after some time, Achilles will get to the point where the tortoise started but the tortoise too, will have moved ahead. So every time Achilles reaches a point where the tortoise has been and the distance between these points keeps getting smaller and smaller, the tortoise has already moved ahead. Therefore, because there is an infinite number of points that Achilles must get to where the tortoise has already been, he can never overtake it, he can never finish the race.
This is what the path is like, but that’s not a bad thing, in case you’re thinking, “what a drag,” the fact that it doesn’t end is the best news. It’s exactly this vastness that leads to the sense of belonging, of rightness. It doesn’t lead to it, it is it. Do you see?
As long as there is something to attain, there is something to strive for. There’s something always just out of reach, like the tortoise. In the Buddha Way there is no striving, no reaching, therefore no incomplete, no lack. Please feel for a moment what these words are actually saying. We hear them so often, it’s easy to think, yeah, yeah, that’s nice, place of no lack. But imagine living in that place, from that place. Imagine, feel, actually believing that you don’t have to fix yourself in any way, any way at all. You don’t have to fix others, have them conform to your idea of them.
Imagine Master Dogen’s “No creature ever falls short of its own completeness. Wherever it stands, it never fails to cover the ground—imagine this being your ground, your truth. Imagine it being the way things actually are. Would there be any room left for conflict, resentment, fear? Would there be any room for self-doubt, second-guessing yourself, confusion about who you are or about your place in the world?
There’s a story, an odd story, in a book called Brunelleschi’s Dome about the building of the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, that’s an incredible story. The biggest dome ever built which weighs something like 37,000 tons and is a feat of engineering. It was built, of course, without all the machinery we have at our disposal, and something unheard of at the time, without wooden centering system or wooden frame. Read a book like this and you think, “If we’re able to work such wonders with so little to go on, how come we’re still as confused and conflict-ridden as we are?” We should have figured out by now, with out intelligence and ingenuity, how to get along, how to leave peacefully and in harmony.
Anyway, one day, Brunelleschi decided to play a prank on his friend Manetto. He didn’t go to a party that Brunelleschi has put together, and in retaliation, Brunelleschi devised this elaborate hoax, impersonated Manetto and drove him from his house. Friends on the street addressed him as Matteo, as did the bailiff who arrested him for debt. In prison, all the prisoners addressed him as Matteo also Matteo’s brothers came next morning and identified him as their kin, paid bail, and took him to Matteo’s home. He protested, no one listened, until he began to doubt that he was not, in fact, Matteo. Brunelleschi drugged him, placed him reversed on his bed.
He woke up and found his carpenter shop completely rearranged. Matteo comes and tells Manetto the night before he dreamt he was a carpenter and noticing, in his dream, his tools were out of order, rearranged them. And for the rest of his life, Manetto was convinced that he had, for a day and a night, become someone else.
The other day I woke up with the fully-formed thought: what makes my experience mine? Related: What makes me me? And how come I continue to be me?
We understand so much of the physical universe, but we still don’t understand that. We understand that consciousness is, but we don’t know how or why.
Once a monk said to Master Seijo, “Daitso Chisho Buddha did zazen on a bodhi seat for ten kalpas. Buddhadharma was not manifested, nor did he attain buddhahood. Why was it?”
Seijo said, “Your question is splendid indeed.”
The monk asked again, “He did practice zazen on a bodhi seat. Why did he not attain buddhahood?”
Seijo replied, “Because he did not attain buddhahood.”
Why did Daitso Chisho Buddha not attain buddhahood? And why, if the buddha way is unattainable, do we vow to attain it? Isn’t the whole point of practice to realize enlightenment, to attain buddhahood? Is this some Buddhist thing, you vow to do what is difficult, impossible to do?
With a little study, with a little practice, we can discern, well, he didn’t attain buddhahood because he’s already a buddha, true. Buddhism 101. That’s true for every single one of us too. But if that’s so, then why does life feel so difficult, why do we suffer so? Why can we understand that we can’t turn ourselves into buddhas because we already are that, and still struggle so much to make that reality actually function in our lives?
Then why can’t I just let it go of this sense of self? Isn’t it empty? Why do we have to strive so much in a path of no striving? Why am I, even when I gain some insight, find myself doing the same thing I’ve always done?
I was just reading a neuroscientist who said the lifespan of an emotion is a minute and a half. So it takes 90 seconds for an emotion to move through our body, after that, the only way that it can continue is through being fed by thought, isn’t that interesting? A pure, raw emotion will change, will subside, in 90 seconds, but we can, if we choose to, keep it going for days and weeks.
The sutras say there’s four obscurations that cover up our intrinsic wisdom: 1. primordial ignorance, 2. dualistic clinging, 3. emotional distraction, 4. karmic accumulation. Add a fifth: competitiveness - actually contains all of the above, but given our propensity for it, doesn’t hurt to highlight it.
The Tibetan teacher, Anyen Rinpoche, says, “Focus on others.” We believe every feeling, every emotion is true, and we don’t have to. He’s not saying we shouldn’t feel.
In one New Yorker cartoon, there’s a huge barn covered in chains and padlocks, and a farmer standing outside tells his son: “This is the barn where we keep our feelings. If a feeling comes to you, bring it out here and lock it up.”
On one hand we can belabor our feelings, on the other we can suppress. Is there another way? The image that comes to me is of opening all the doors and all windows and saying to an emotion: “Come on in” (the doors or windows of the senses). The key is to open all those doors and windows, let the emotion pass through and wash us clean. And the only thing it leaves behind is a little bit more understanding: “Oh, this is what an emotion is.” “Oh, this is how to deal with it,” feel it, allow it. You don’t even have to let it go; just don’t hold on. I’m making it sound easy. It’s not.
The only way throughanemotion was to feel it completely, not to feed it with anger and justification, which I can easily do, but just to feel it, let it kill me. That’s one way of saying it, another way would be to let it soften me, let it make me tender, until “I” disappear. Then it’s okay, it’s right, it passes and I’m fine, and I know, no matter what, “I will be fine.”
Katagiri Roshi once said: “In the relative we are completely responsible. In the absolute we are completely forgiven.” Being completely forgiven is “the buddha way is unattainable.” Being completely responsible is “I vow to attain it.”
Thich Nhat Hanh says:
However incomparable the mystery of interbeing, I vow to surrender to it freely.
The word “surrender” is not used much in the classical Buddhist literature. But it appears often in the accounts of the Christian and Sufi mystics. It means to cease resistance, to abandon oneself entirely to. How? By letting it be what it is without judgment, resistance, guilt or shame. And it is this very act of release that gives rise to the possibility of experiencing belonging, seeing that we’ve never been apart from everything else. That this feeling of being alienated, alone, independent, solitary, lonely, is actually contradictory to what it means to be a human being.
It is like an ocean wave looking around and saying, “where is everyone?” “Why am I the only one here?” while this vast body of water is buoying her, it is her. From the perspective of the wave, separation is not only possible, it feels like reality. From the perspective of the ocean, the question would not even arise. There’s no need to strive to become water or to check that you’re still water. We don’t constantly ask, “Am I Zuisei? Am I Zuisei? Am I still Zuisei?”—unless your friend is Brunelleschi.
We wouldn’t do this, but we do it in zazen. “Am I here? Am I still here? Am I still me? How am I doing? Not to good, it seems, it’s hopeless, I’m hopeless.” And we think it’s our fault, or the teacher’s, sangha’s, Buddha’s but is it really so?
Traveling the Buddha way, trying to mark your progress is like putting a notch on the side of your boat to mark a good fishing spot.
There’s no need to ask how much longer until I realize my water nature? “When will I be done? What if I’m never done? What if I, of all waves, am not made of water?”
Can we, as Daido Roshi would say, give ourselves permission to really be ourselves? Can we not be afraid of our belonging? Can we not be afraid of being so close, so close to one another and every blessed thing? Can we not be in such a rush to be done, to be finished, and then what? Where will we go when we are all done?
That foot race between Achilles and the tortoise…? Achilles is not unable to finish the race. He’s perfectly, perfectly capable, perfectly able of body and mind. He’s not able to finish the race because every time he takes a step, that step extends in all directions, fills all of space and time. You can’t see the beginning, and you can’t see the end, that’s exactly right.
Let me end with a poem:
Of Molluscs • May Sarton
As the tide rises, the closed mollusc
Opens a fraction to the ocean's food,
Bathed in its riches. Do not ask
What force would do, or if force could.
A knife is of no use against a fortress.
You might break it to pieces as gulls do.
No, only the rising tide and its slow progress
Opens the shell. Lovers, I tell you true.
You who have held yourselves closed hard
Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears
And hostile to a touch or tender word—
The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.
Now you are floated on this gentle flood
That cannot force or be forced, welcome food
Salt as your tears, the rich ocean's blood,
Eat, rest, be nourished on the tide of love.
Explore further
02 : Thich Nhat Hanh’s Four Bodhisattva Vows
03: The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda