making a vow

 

Couples make solemn vows during their marriage ceremony, others vow to right a wrong or to avenge a misdeed. Some professions ask new members to vow to uphold professional standards. At monasteries and practice centers, Buddhist practitioners recite the Bodhisattva Vows which, depending on translations, go something like this:

 

Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.
Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
Buddha’s way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.

 

Some people also make life vows, described by Hogen Bays as “an expression of our deepest aspirations.” My own life vow is to be of service. Ever since making it on December 31, 2000 at Zen Mountain Monastery my life has unfolded along a trajectory of clarity and purpose. Chozen Bays relates how her teacher, the late Taizan Maezumi Roshi, founder of the Los Angeles Zen Center, talked often about the importance of making vows–

“It took me many years,” she writes, “to understand that vows are at the core of practice, actually are the ‘nuclear’ core of the energy pile that is our life. An interviewer once asked [him] if Buddhists believed in something like a soul that continued after death. Maezumi Roshi said, ‘No. It is the vow that continues.’  

“A vow is like a seal that imprints itself on the wet clay of another emerging life, but it is more than a passive seal. It has a propelling energy. It propels us into the search for an end to suffering and into finding ways to help each others. Finally, when all the various schemes we have developed to do those things fail, it propels us into practice.”

Roshi is an honorific awarded to senior Zen teachers, meaning “old venerable master;” sensei means “qualified teacher.” Chozen Bays Roshi and Hogen Bays Sensei are my primary teachers at Great Vow Zen Monastery where they are co-abbots and spiritual directors.

source: Bays, J.C. (2002). Jizo Bodhisattva. Boston: Tuttle.