The Impossible Dream
You are within me. I'm just facing myself.
In other words, you exist within myself,
and it is to that you that I direct myself.
That is what "vow" is.
—Koso Uchiyama
Buddhist vows can feel so daunting. I've told my students the story of a woman who first went to Zen Mountain Monastery for a Sunday program, at the end of which she heard the sangha chanting the Four Bodhisattva Vows:
Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to put an end to them.
The dharmas are boundless; I vow to master them.
The Buddha Way is unattainable; I vow to attain it.
Looking around the room, the woman wondered whether everyone had gone crazy. "Do they know what they're saying?" she asked herself. "How can anyone vow to do this? These vows are impossible!"
Then she walked out and didn't return for twenty years.
My first teacher, Daido Roshi, used to revel in this very impossibility. "It's impossible to save all beings!" he'd bellow. "Impossible to put an end to desires, to master all dharmas, to attain the unattainable. These are impossible vows!" Then he'd launch into his rendition of Man of
La Mancha's "The Impossible Dream." For him, the fact that these vows were impossible was exactly what gave them their power. The measurable, the attainable or containable is not where liberation is to be found, he pointed out.
On the other hand, when we consider Uchiyama's definition of vow, we see that possibility is always present because the place where we stand contains all there is. In other words, to save all beings is to save myself. To put an end to desires is to understand and liberate mine. This is not a microscopic, me-centered view of practice but an expansive perspective in which the "me" enlarges to contain the whole universe.
It is by directing ourselves to the many yous in each of us, Uchiyama says, that we fulfill our vows. How? By meeting a single you, and knowing that in that moment, we're meeting ourselves. The most effective way to do this, I've found, is through the practice of zazen—that ultimate dissolver of boundaries. But mystics of decidedly unreligious stripes have also understood, and viscerally, the unity that underlies all that we see and sense and experience.
Rachel Carlson, for example:
To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water. ("Undersea")
We cannot force this shedding of our usual modes of perception, but we can train ourselves to effect that release. This is exactly what zazen is. To become swell and seaweed, snow-covered cypress or thirsty hummingbird in mid-flight. The point is not to become these
things, since how do you become what you already are? (And it's certainly not to pretend.) The point is to get out of the way so all those many selves can reveal themselves as they really are: a single, vast, and wondrous body breathing itself, each and every moment, into life.
* Don Quijote illustration by Tomasz Hanarz, hummingbird photo by Candi Foltz
Zazen • Zen Meditation
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