We are finally up to the fourth Bodhisattva vow:


The Buddha’s way is unsurpassable 
 I vow to become it. 

          This seems clear, but  how can we become the Buddha way and not just follow the Buddha way.  The first three Bodhisattva vows are a shortened version of the Buddha way; help other beings, eliminate selfish desires and embrace each moment, but as long as we self-consciously follow this path we are not quite fulfilling the Buddha Way.  This last vow is to push us to the completion of this path we call Buddhism.  But then to believe that we can ever as individuals complete the path is a mistake.  This is a lifetime commitment.  
          I had just formally finished my training and been given the authority to teach Zen at the previous meditation retreat.  And though all these years of practice had changed me and given me a completely different view of the world and my self this did not mean that I was beyond selfishness or being upset at times.  After returning from the retreat, after the samadhi wore off I returned to a more normal state of mind, I found that I was not beyond an occasional fight with my wife and being upset by certain events, and I certainly was thinking a lot again.  I  did not feel that my need to practice had ended so I went to the next sesshin.  At sanzen during the next sesshin Harada maybe a little surprised I was there says to me, "A single lifetime is too short to completely polish the mind."  Even though I have had several dramatic Zen experiences while sitting and not sitting I still feel a need to practice an awful lot.  There is no conclusion to this practice.
          I have changed in some very important ways and this leads me to another interpretation of this vow.  If you read this blog and my essays you will notice some repeated themes.  I write a lot about experience in meditation,  I write a lot about dropping the concept of self.  And I also write a lot about what is sometimes called the True Self or the Large Self.  If in our practice we are successful in dropping our concept of self and our dualistic way of thinking then, a whole new non-dual way of seeing opens up.  We call this way of seeing the world,  the True Dharma Eye, the eye of non-duality.  With this eye we see the whole Universe as a single thing, a single being, a single life.  Zen and Buddhism is not about dropping our thoughts and dropping our concept of self and entering a sort of zombie existence of total absorption in some object of concentration.  Sometime we Buddhist teachers teach our students to do just that, enter total absorption, but that is just a means to an end, the end being the opening of the Eye of Non-Duality.  Once this eye is open,  instead of not thinking about our self at all a new understanding of the self opens.  We identify with the single life of the Non-Dual, the Whole Universe.  This also doesn't mean that we completely forget about ourselves as individuals.  Again, it just opens up a new understanding of ourselves as individuals. 
           Early Buddhist philosophers said there were three ways a Buddha thought of him/herself.  This was expressed in the idea of the Trikaya, the three bodies of the Buddha.  You can look it up but here is its essence.  The first is the Buddha as an individual person. This is the Sambhogakaya, which translates as "bliss body", which refers to the individual's happiness that results from enlightenment  Yes Buddhas are supposed to be happy this is the individual result of their realization.  I think it is important to remember that Buddhas are also people, with personality and individual quirks, and quite capable of making mistakes.   In some sense we are all Buddhas, just some of us are an experience and realization away from understanding this and actualizing as a Buddha. 
          The second way a Buddha thinks of him/herself is to identify him/herself with other beings.  This is the source of a Buddha's compassion, to not only think of himself as an individual being but to understand and experience the deep connection between all beings.  This is a deeply experienced understanding and I am using the word beings in the broadest sense.  In Zen we frequently say, become one with this or that.  Become one with the breath.  Become one with our pain.  Become one with the sound of the river. Become one with other people.  This experience allows us to become one with other beings as well as other things.  This goes back to the third vow of mastering all dharmas.  With this experience and the resulting understanding we now identify ourselves with all other beings whether saint or sinner.  All beings exist within my True Self.  Knowing this I can truthfully say that I manifest as all teachers of Buddhism as well  as all mass murders.  We all share the same body.  This is called the Nirmanakaya translated as the "transformation body". 
          In reading the Paranirvana Sutra, Shakyamuni tells his disciples not to grieve over his imminent death because he will still be with them through his teachings, thus we know he identified with his teachings.  This is also a way we can understand the Nirmanakaya 
          The third body of the Buddha is the Absolute Body the Dharmakaya  This is the Body which contains everything and is the True Self.  From this absolute perspective not an individual thing exists.  There is no division, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no sound, no smell, no body, no mind.  This is the experience and understanding presented in the Heart Sutra.  Yet we humans naturally divide the world into a multiplicity of things.  We may have an experience of the Absolute but this cannot be where we live our lives.  We can understand the Dharmakaya as the deeper truth and thereby it can form the background for our experience and understanding.  Thus we live in duality experienced through the the eye of non-duality. 
          This practice of ours is not just about ending any concept of our individual selves. Yes, we are asked to do this temporarily in meditation. Ultimately we transform our understanding of ourselves as individuals, so that we see ourselves through the eye of non-duality.  We may view this as fulfilling the fourth vow and become the Buddha Way.


Realizing the thought of no thought as thought, 
whether singing or dancing, we are the 
voice of the Dharma.*

* From Hakuin's Song of Zazen

 
 

          Hi out there in blog land.  I am not sure anyone is actually reading this blog but the stats on this site is that 20 or so people come to this site each day.  Maybe most of you are just surfers.  No one has added comments.  If you wish to comment on anything I have written feel free and maybe we can start a conversation.

The Dharmas are boundless 
 I vow to master them.

          This is the third Bodhisattva vow and it is confusing like the other two.  Most people in the West think that the word Dharma's in this vow means  Buddhist teachings and some translations of theses vows directly translate this vow this way.  But if you read up on ancient Buddhist philosophy the word dharma is used very differently. (Conze's Buddhist Thought in India is a good read on this subject)  Dharma can be translated as sense object or sense experience.  It can also be translated as a true constituents of reality.  Buddhism taught from the beginning that the way the world appears to us is a delusion.  It appears to us delusively because of our delusive way of thinking.  It was understood that through meditation we could experience the world without delusion..  Such words as dharma and suchness referred to an experience of the world untainted by delusive thought.  To experience the world without the taint of delusion was to realize the Dharma.  Now we can understand how the word Dharma transformed into meaning the teachings of Buddhism. The Dharma refered not so much to the core teachings of Buddhism but the core experience of Buddhism.  The true Dharma cannot be put into words but must be experienced.  
          There is an other translation of this vow which goes:

The Dharma Gates are boundless
I vow to master them.

 I like this translation because the wording Dharma Gates better conveys what I think is the meaning of this vow.  What is a Dharma Gate?  Well anything can be a Dharma Gate and that is just the point.  If we read many of the stories of enlightenment we realize that just about anything can precipitate an enlightenment experience,   There are stories of people being enlightened by punches, shouts, the sound of a pebble being kicked, the sound of snow falling, the following of the breath, chanting, and on and on the stories go.   Every experience every moment is a  Dharma Gate.  If we can for even a moment experience without delusion then we have mastered the Dharma Gate which is that moment.            There is a Zen story (koan) in which Zen master Zuigon every morning sits upon a rock and says to himself "Master, let me not be fooled today."  Such a strange story, but really it is just about a man who reminds himself not to be caught in delusive thinking.  And is this not the same as the vow to master all Dharmas?
          Again and again I come back to experience in my essays and these blogs, which is because Zen and Buddhism is really about experience, not a bunch of intellectual ideas.  All the verbal teachings are peripheral, just helping point one towards the central experience of Buddhism, enlightenment.  I know I know the first Noble Truth is "right understanding"  but that understanding must start with experience otherwise it is just a bunch of words running through our heads and that can be dangerous.
          I look around at the various schools of Buddhism and see that some of them have built large intellectual edifices,  the "path" is laid out in explicit detail.  Philosophic explanations of suffering, and delusion and the meaning of such words as "emptiness" are laid out in explicit detail.  And there are also explicit behavioral rules. and many articles of faith such as reincarnation.  For many, this is Buddhism and I guess this is what people want, this is how you build a religion.  But this reminds me of a couple of old sayings:
 "Organized religion is designed to prevent people from having a religious experience", and "the map is not the territory."
          The core of Buddhism is that experience that Shakyamuni had 2500 years ago sitting in meditation under the Bodhi Tree.  And he made it eminently clear that this is an experience that all people can have and that he was teaching people how to have this experience.
              And then many people think that all a person needs to do is have an enlightenment experience and they are enlightened but that is also too much of a simplification.  As the Sixth Patriarch of Zen put it,  A person is enlightened when they have an enlightened thought and deluded when they have a deluded thought.  All delusional thinking is not ended with one experience.  The real trick is to learn to come back again and again to this clear un-deluded place of enlightenment.  Remember, Shakyamuni practiced meditation throughout  his whole life, returning again and again to that same clear state of mind of enlightenment.
          Master a dharma, master a moment, how do you do that?  Well, in meditation we sit until we clear our minds of all delusions which means pretty much empty our minds of all thoughts.  But sitting on the meditation cushion is only a small portion of our lives.  How do we master dharmas in our every day lives?  The answer is simple but just as difficult as emptying our minds during meditation.  Embrace each moment  Simply do what you are doing without self consciousness, without extra thoughts.  This is the practice, but sometimes it is a lot more then just the practice.  The other morning I took a walk on a slightly foggy day and I was overcome by beauty and filled with joy.  Is this not mastering a dharma.  This is not practice.  Thinking "practice" is to be self conscious.  The true practice is to drop all thought of practice and to be absorbed in the moment.  But it was also something more then just being absorbed in the moment because in that moment I knew that I was looking at myself, that the trees and plants, flowers, houses, Puget Sound seen through the mist, the mist itself and the people in the houses, the whole shabang was just Me.
          In the second vow to end all desires and the third vow to master all dharmas I see the positive and negative aspects to the same practice and that same state of mind in which the practice is realized.  The practice is simple to express, forget the self, drop all selfish desires, and embrace each moment, everything we do and feel and think.  The realization of the practice is that state of mind in which without effort selfish desires are forgotten and each moment is naturally embraced.

Desires are inexhaustible 
 I vow to put an end to them

          There is a person who comes to sit at the Moonwater Dojo most weeks who has a very difficult time with this vow.  She doesn't buy this vow, why would a person want to desire nothing?  We must desire food and water or we die.  We need to desire sex or the species dies.  And then doesn't passion give life meaning?  Today in our society it is often felt that we need to live our passions to be happy.  This vow seems to go against the most obvious truths recognized by our society.
          In the Theravada tradition the Buddhist path is often called "the path of perfection" and enlightenment is often thought to be the complete elimination of desire.  This vow seems to put Zen in the "path of perfection" camp.  Yes, I think this is correct in a certain way.  Maybe the emphasis is a bit different then in Theravada which in SE Asia is primarily a monastic tradition though in the West Theravada has been transformed into a lay practice.  In a monastic setting one can make a whole sale assault on desire.  The Mahayana tradition has always been more open to lay practice.  In some Mahayana Sutras the Bodhisattvas like Manjusri were lay followers of the Buddha. The monks were called Bhiksu or Bhikkhu.  Some people think that the Bodhisattva path was originally a layman's path.  Today in Japan Zen is mostly a monks path though there is nothing stopping the layman from being a serious practitioner and the Pure Land sects which are Mahayana have mostly lay practitioners.  Thus there is a difference when a follower of the Bodhisattva path tries to end desire and when a Theravada monk tries to end desire.  The Bodhisattva path starts with the desire to help others and lay people need a certain amount of desire to help direct their lives.  Without any desire a person becomes non- functional and might as well be a monk.  And yet in a certain way the Buddhist paths cannot be accomplished without ending desire at least temporarily.
          This reminds me of a story.  Many years ago I was hanging out with my buddy Neils talking about Buddhism and he says to me that it is impossible to be completely with out attachment.  There will always remain the attachment to being unattached.  I tell him that this is not true.  Yes you cannot end attachment with being attached to being non-attached but that there is simply a state of mind that is without attachment.  The same can be said of desire.  There is a state of mind without desire and it is the same state of mind that is without attachment and this state of mind is significantly different from our normal state of mind filled with attachments and desires This state of mind cannot be gotten to by simply practicing non-attachment and eliminating desires and yet the practices of non-attachment and eliminating desires is very helpful in eventually experiencing this state of mind which we all know has many names,  samadhi, kensho, satori, nirvana, enlightenment.
           I have heard that the Tibetan Vajrayana path of Buddhism (Vajrayana Buddhism is within the Mahayana.) is able to embrace desire and attachments and utilize them in the Buddhist path.  One thing is that desire and attachment can have the effect of concentrating the mind.  Certainly the passion, energy and practice a great artist or athlete puts into their craft often propels them into a type of samadhi.  My own experience is that during the period when I first experienced a deep Zen samadhi I was also becoming passionately involved with my future wife. yet when I went to sesshin (zen retreat) I was able to leave everything behind.  
          The conclusion is that I told this person I sit with that it is important to drop all desires in the practice of Zazen.  In the rest of life it is ok to have some desires.  Certainly the desire for enlightenment propels our practice.  But if one is somehow to experience enlightenment he/she must completely drop desire as they must also drop all attachments, and all thoughts for a period of time.  And if one can go as far as to experience this state of mind, when it is over they will find their whole way of thinking and motivations realigned. The Bodhisattva path becomes more then something we intend to practice but rather the natural direction of our thoughts and motivation.
          

The Bodhisattva Vows 

Sentient beings are numberless 
 I vow to liberate them. 
Desires are inexhaustible 
 I vow to put an end to them. 
The Dharmas are boundless 
 I vow to master them. 
The Buddha’s way is unsurpassable 
 I vow to become it. 

           These are the four Bodhisattva vows used in Zen  I don't know where they came from though they are probably of ancient origin.  There are many versiions of these vows. Each of the large sangas seems to put their own twist on these vows.  This is the translation that the One Drop Sanga uses.  There are also other completely different  Bodhisattva vows used in other Buddhist traditions.

          The first vow is to liberate all sentient beings.  The early translations of these vows uses the word "save" instead of liberate.  This give the vows a Christian feeling and is rarely used now to avoid this confusion.  To be "saved"  means something very different for most Christians then "liberate" means for most Buddhists.  We Buddhists have our own vocabulary for the fulfillment of Buddhist Practice; liberation, enlightenment, nirvana, etc..  And then a Buddhist can never be sure of what these terms mean unless he/she has fulfilled the Buddhist path and actually experienced what these terms refer to.  Christians usually have a much clearer idea of what being saved is.
           From the first vow we are thrown into confusion.  The task is impossible.  There are essentially an infinite number of sentient beings to liberate.  And how do we liberate even a single sentient being when we ourselves are not liberated?  And by the way what is a sentient being?  Obviously we humans are sentient beings but do you have to be as intelligent and feeling and capable of liberation as a human to be a sentient being?  Are dogs sentient beings, can  they be liberated or are they already liberated?
          Even without a thorough understanding of this  first vow we can understand that it asks us to do the simple things to save other beings.  To be kind and work towards relieving others suffering even knowing that anything we do as an individual will not be permanent. Yet every action we take has effects that go far beyond the immediate result of the action.  In some sense we are building a kinder happier world one kind act at a time.  We all have a tendency to think "me first, me first" but the Bodhisattva path is to say, "You first."
          Sometimes a Zen student is given the Koan  "How do you save all sentient beings?" Like all koans we initially want to think about the question but no that wont work.  Zen is all about meditation so eventually we forget about trying to come up with some smart intellectual answer and just continue sitting and then if the sitting goes deep enough we have an experience that answers the question.  The answer does not come out of our normal dualistic perspective but only a non-dual perspective in which an independent being does not exist.  This reminds me of the last section of Dogen Zenji's Genjo Koan


          Zen master Baoche of Mount Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached 
and said, "Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not 
reach. Why, then do you fan yourself?" "Although you understand that the nature of 
wind is permanent;" Baoche replied, "you do not understand the meaning of its 
reaching everywhere." "What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?" asked the 
monk again. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply. The 
actualization of the buddha-dharma, the vital path of its correct transmission, is like 
this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is 
permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither 
permanence nor the nature of wind. The nature of wind is permanent; because of that, 
the wind of the Buddha's house brings forth the gold of the earth and makes fragrant 
the cream of the long river. (This translation is from the San Francisco Zen Center web site http://www.sfzc.org/sp_download/liturgy/24_genjo_koan.pdf  )

           Just as the wind is permanent but is not felt without a fan so the great perfection which is the Universe is not experienced without practice.  In this great perfection all beings are enlightened and yet most suffer in the ignorance of their true nature which as Hakuin Zenji said is "no nature."

Bodhisattva 1

          Hi Everyone, onward ho,  I am enjoying writing these blogs.  This next set of Blogs will be on the Bodhisattva ideal and the Bodhisattva vows. Lets begin.
          If you are reading this you probably know Buddhism is divided into two primary schools.  Hinayana and Mahayana.  Hinayana means "small raft"  and Mahayana means "large raft."  Within these primary divisions there are and were many many subdivisions.  Today there is one surviving school of the Hinayana  called Theravada Buddhism, and many surviving schools from, Tibetan Buddhism to Zen, of the Mahayana.  The primary difference between Mahayana and the Hinayana is that the Mahayana schools teach the Bodhisattva ideal and the Hinayana does not.
          The most difficult barrier on the Buddhist path is the conception of a small self the "I". No- self is a fundamental teaching of Buddhism but how do we transcend the self when the self is so deeply ingrained in our thinking and seems to be the motivator even for our practice of Buddhism?  The Buddha said to use fire to put out fire, fire being the the concept of self,  The Buddha gave many a talk in which he equated the concept of self  with a fire which is burning us causing immeasurable suffering.  Usually the concept of self is translated as "ego" and this has lead to a misunderstanding by many Buddhist practitioners in the West because we do not think of ego as so much the concept of self but rather as thoughts of exaggerated self importance and specialness.  These people do not  want to give up a concept of self, just  their egotism.   This is a wrong reading of Buddhism because the non-atman doctrine tells us that the self does not exist.  But it does not exist in the way that all things don't exist.   Things  don't exist because they are impermanent, ever changing.  Even a rock is not the same rock moment to moment.  Forces are changing it and wareing it away.  Wind and rain carry off atoms, The sun and rain transform atoms and there are internal atomic and subatomic processes that are also constantly changing the rock.  Humans are impermanent ever changing, constantly replacing atoms, aging, healing and breaking down .  Our minds and our bodies are in constant motion.  If a rock is ever changing we are certainly ever changing.  In some ways we are more like a river then a rock.  Can we say we are the same person moment to moment?  There is a second way in which all individual things don't exist.  Individual things don't exist as truly separable from the single whole that is the Universe.  We might say that all things are part and product of an almost infinitely complex web of causation which stretches from one end of the Universe to the other.  Which is why all things are impermanent and ever changing.  This is an intellectual and mechanistic reason but our non-separableness can also be experienced and without this experience our understanding of Buddhist Teachings will never be complete. And it is this experience which is so difficult to manifest
          We humans carry around a deep sense of our individuality our separateness, our specialness.  We obsess over it and we intellectually justify it.  Many of us believe we each have something inside us which we call the soul which is permanent and does not die, which confers upon each of us individual specialness.  The Buddha categorically denied this.  He understood our sense of self to be  nothing more then a way of thinking, an internal response to external stimuli. 
          The Twelve Fold Chain of Interdependent Origination, one of the more obscure of the Buddha's teachings was his attempt to show that through our ignorance a whole chain of thought in response to stimuli is constantly reinforcing an ignorant idea of the self.  The Twelve Fold Chain deserves it's own blog but not now.
             Though I have to say that a complete denial of things and ourselves is not quite correct because there is a certain  recognizable continuity in time and space to ourselves and other things.  And it may even be natural for us humans to divide the world up into individual things and individual beings but in Buddhism we believe that this tendency to divide reality up has created a deeply flawed way of thinking and understanding of ourselves in relation to that reality.  And in Buddhism we don't want to destroy any idea of self but rather experience and understand its illusory nature because the individual self is a useful distinction, just not fully accurate
          In the Hinayana schools the emphasis has always been on individual effort in the search for individual liberation.  This was emphasized by the Buddha in several Sutras.  Shortly before his death in the Paranirvana Sutra he says that each individual must be a "light unto your self", individuals attain liberation through their own discipline and effort.  The Buddha believed in the self as a useful fiction in our motivation to practice.  But this is a double edge sword. We come back to the original problem.  If Buddhist liberation is to experience selflessness how can we do that with such a strong emphasis in practice on our own individual selves?  Already in this country we have many people who have been practicing meditation for many many years and many of these people have never had a deep  experience of selflessness, why?  Maybe most of these people practice with a selfish attitude.  They want to attain something.  "I want to be happy." "I want to discipline my mind so I may be better at work."  "I want to attain enlightenment."  How can you let go of the "I" if the I is always in your thoughts.
          The Mahayana was a response to this issue.  In the Mahayana the ideal is the Bodhisattva who selflessly practices so that all beings may attain liberation.  The Bodhisattva path is to practice selflessness.  The Bodhisattva path is to drop thought of self in both meditation and the other activities of life and function for the good of others.  The ideal of the Bodhisattva is one who delays one's own liberation until all other beings are also liberated.  And yet if one completely and truly practices the Bodhisattva path for even a few moments then that person is already liberated because Buddhist liberation or enlightenment is to be liberated from the self.  And if one truly understands this then they will discover that with one person's liberation the whole Universe becomes liberated.  
         Even the Bodhisattva path has problems because though it embraces selflessness it misses the other side of the equation.  True selflessness can only exist in non-duality where neither an individual or a Bodhisattva exists