Mastering the Dharmas: The Third Vow Redux
Photo by Amber Maxwell Boydell
The third bodhisattva vow—the dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them—speaks of the importance of letting everything in our lives teach us.
Zuisei gives a short talk on this vow and the process she went through with a couple of students to rewrite it, looking for an expression based on their experience that was simple, relatable and actionable.
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.
Tonight I want to speak about Mastering the Dharmas, the third of the Four Bodhisattva Vows. I’ve shared with you that I’ve worked for many years with a mother-son team, teaching him—and by extension her—about Buddhism. We started working together when he was three years old, in what was the monastery’s kids’ program, Zen Kids. He’s now a teen-ager, old enough to really grapple with the dharma, working to make sense of it so he can use it in his life.
Not long ago I asked both of them to re-write the Four Vows, making them relatable and actionable, simple enough for anyone to understand with or without any knowledge of Buddhism, and they did a beautiful job. Such a good job that I saw the value of really having to immerse yourself in these vows and translate them, as it were, chew them and digest them and then express them in a new way. And I thought we could do the same.
I also thought of moving in order, working our way through the vows properly and systematically. But it’s this third vow that’s been very much on my mind, and that I’ve been turning over and wanting to talk about with you so, here we are.
The dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them. Or, as Thich Nhat Han says: However immeasurable the dharmas are, I vow to explore them deeply. Robert Aitken translated it as: Dharma gates are countless; I vow to wake to them. And Joan Halifax Roshi of Upaya Zen Center: Reality is boundless; I vow to perceive it.
We took all these iterations, this mother and son and I, and we talked about what mastering means, especially since we’re not talking about knowledge or information. We talked about what it means to wake to these dharma gates, passing from ignorance to wisdom. And we struggled a bit to understand what it means for reality to have no edges—kind of like the universe, except bigger.
And finally we—or they, really—came up with their own version of this vow:
I vow to learn from all that can teach me, which I thought was both simple and beautiful. To turn the mastering around so it’s us—each one of us—that’s mastered by the dharmas, taught by the dharmas, woken up by the dharmas.
And what are dharmas? Things. All things.
It’s a little bit like Dogen saying:
To study the Buddha way is to study the self
To study the self is to forget the self
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.
We could also say: the dharmas are boundless, I vow to be taught by them. How? By seeing and letting go of the veil that separates us and them. I’m not going to master them—the mastering is mutual, and it’s not something I can really do. I can only practice and allow.
Our language is completely tied into our perception of the world and our need to control it. We think master and we think power! We think dominion. Worse, we think of a self—right? We think of Me. I will master the dharmas, I will realize myself, I will be victorious!
And very quickly, we see that’s not how it works. Very quickly we think, why can’t I do this? Why am I not understanding? Why am I not getting it? Why am I stuck? Why is this so difficult? Does it have to be so difficult? Can’t we just love one another and not think about it? That would be great, if we could actually do it. It would be even better if we could do it all the time—but that’s hard.
Also hard is for us to understand that part of mastering the dharmas is learning how to love. Studying these texts, doing koans, working on getting closer to our breath and loving aren’t different things. We study, we sit, we do liturgy so that we can love better and more. But when we don’t see this, we read about these difficult concepts: oneness, suchness, the absolute, nonduality, and either our head spins, or we think we get it and move on.
But are we living oneness? Do we trust oneness? Can we see that realizing oneness is easily the most important thing any of us will ever do with this one precious life?
I vow to learn from all that can teach me—which is everything. Everything teaches, all of the time. We see it or we don’t, we get it or we don’t, but everything teaches, always. Which brings me to these talks.
You know how sometimes I’ll say something, and you’ll come to me afterward and ask, were you talking to me? The way I see it, there are four possibilities:
When I’m offering a teaching that seems to land squarely where you sit, if you think I’m talking to you, it’s either true—I am talking to you, or it’s not true, but because you tend to take things personally, or to doubt yourself, you think you’re the one I’m talking about.
If, on the other hand, I say something and you don’t think it applies to you at all, there are again two possibilities: it’s true—I wasn’t thinking of you when I thought of that particular teaching, or it’s not true—I am indeed talking to you but you’ve missed it.
So how do you proceed with each of these possibilities? In exactly the same way: let them teach you. In other words, investigate. Forgetting whether I am or am not talking to you specifically, ask yourself is this true? Is this relevant? Do I see it in my life? If I don’t see, am I missing something? What can I learn?
This is the most important point. What can I learn here?
I vow to learn from everything. Then, no matter what the issue is, we can’t lose. There’s nothing, nothing in the whole wide world that can’t wake us. You see?
So instead of getting frustrated when we don’t see, instead of getting caught in the content of our thoughts about it, we investigate the frustration. We investigate not understanding. We investigate the one who’s getting caught. Then we can’t lose.
We’re talking about anuttara-samyaksambodhi; complete liberation, after all. Barring that, we’re talking about transforming our lives. I don’t know why we’d ever think that we’re going to read one book or two or thirty, and get it. No, I do know—it’s because everything else in our lives works that way. If I study hard, do my homework, take the exam, I’ll eventually graduate from my program. If I read the manual, I’ll be able to put this TV console together—I mean, how hard can it be?
The dharma is not like that. Forgetting the self is not like that—it’s the opposite of that, if it’s anything at all. Liberation isn’t something we graduate into. It’s not something we assemble, taking a teaching from here, pasting a teaching from there. It’s not something that I or anyone else can give you. It’s something you uncover—little by little, mostly. Or in a big chunk every once in a while, something that rips the eyelids from your eyes—like Bodhidharma.
For those who don’t know, Bodhidharma was a semi-legendary figure, who was said to take Zen from India to China; he’s the first Chinese ancestor in our lineage. In paintings, he looks very much like a pirate: bald head, big beard, hoop earrings, and huge, bulging eyes. The story goes that he went off to Shao Lin monastery and sat for nine years facing the wall, and because he was struggling to stay awake, at one point he ripped off his eyelids. On the place they fell, tea plants grew, and that’s why Zen monks drink green tea to stay awake.
Probably apocryphal, this story. But what is true is that we inherited wall gazing from Bodhidharma. There’s only one text that’s been attributed to him. It’s called the Two Entrances and Four Practices, where he describes the term “wall-gazing” as follows:
Those who turn from delusion back to reality, who meditate on walls, the absence of self and other, the oneness of ordinary person and sage, and who remain unmoved even by scriptures are in complete and unspoken agreement with reason.
Essentially, those who don’t get caught in words, who don’t separate themselves, judge themselves, put themselves up or down, they are in complete and unspoken agreement, not just with reason, but with reality. And this wall gazing—in a Zen monastery or temple you normally face the wall when you sit. It’s one way of expressing your aloneness in zazen—your all-oneness. It’s a way of turning your attention inward, instead of outward, where we usually place it.
And even then, think about how much time we spend thinking about others as we’re sitting there quietly and alone. We travel to distant countries. We travel in time. We have whole conversations, we have meals, we watch movies—all on our little 2x3 piece of fabric.
Crazy, no? Someone said we’d never pay to watch a bad movie over and over and over again. Yet we do it willingly every time we sit down to meditate. But of course, it’s not all like that—otherwise no one would stay. We do it trusting that we can face ourselves. Trusting that this is how we learn from all that can teach us—which is everything.
Practice:
Spend some time re-writing this vow. Make the wording simple, relatable, and actionable, without using Buddhist jargon or abstract words. Anyone with our without knowledge of Buddhism should be able to understand what you mean.
Explore further
01 : The Bodhisattva Vows by Robert Aitken
02 : Four Vows by Thich Nhat Hanh
03 : To Study the Self by Sally Jiko Tisdale
04: The Third Bodhisattva Vow with Zuisei Goddard