On Vow

I've recently been thinking about this topic a lot. It came up in a response to post I made on the Dharmaoverground site about the Bodhisattva Vow. The Bodhisattva Vow normally goes something like this:

As long as samsara exists, may I continue to exist to help sentient beings achieve enlightenment.

We chant a similar wording at every Zen retreat. What the Bodhisattva Vow is saying is that the vow-er gives up the possibility to cut off rebirth through enlightenment, to continue being reborn in a way that helps sentient beings, essentially endlessly, until the end of time.

Now, on the face of it, that's a pretty tall order. First off, it presumes a metaphysical doctrine of rebirth. In fact, my post to the Dharamoverground site was about a quote from Mahasi Saydaw's book Progress of Insight:

Some meditators are unable to go beyond the Knowledge of Equanimity about
Formations due to some powerful aspirations they have made in the past,
such as for Buddhahood, or Paccekabuddhahood, Chief Discipleship, etc.
In fact, it is at this stage that one can ascertain whether one has made
any such aspiration in the past. Sometimes when he has reached this
stage the meditator himself comes to feel that he is cherishing a
powerful aspiration. However, even for an aspirant to Buddhahood or
Paccekabuddahood, the Knowledge of Equanimity about Formations will be
an asset towards his fulfilment of the perfection of wisdom
(panna-parami). This Equanimity of Formations is of no small
significance when one takes into account the high degree of development
in knowledge at this stage

Mahasi Saydaw seems to be saying that a meditator can't go beyond the last stage in the stages of insight, Knowledge of Equanimity, if they've ever taken the Bodhisattva Vow. So the Bodhisattva Vow acts as a kind of block to achieving First Path (or as it is more commonly known, sotapanna or stream entry, more about this in a later post) because if you ever achieve First Path, you only have seven lifetimes before you will achieve full enlightenment which cuts off further rebirth.  Of course, if you don't share the canonical Theravadan metaphysical view of rebirth then the Bodhisattva Vow as a block to First Path is moot.

But this got me to thinking about vows. Vows are an unpopular topic these days, because most people, especially young people, don't like to commit themselves. Now normally, a vow is nothing if not a commitment. You state a clear intention to accomplish something, usually in public, then put the full force of body, speech, and mind behind achieving that. It's different than just wanting to do something, because you've more or less promised yourself and sometimes other people that you'll try to accomplish it. You may or may not achieve your intention. If you don't, you will most likely learn something about yourself and the world that you would not otherwise have learned. Then you can either modify your vow or abandon it or continue to try to achieve it, whatever seems most appropriate at the time.

The Bodhisattva Vow isn't like that. If you generate an intention to achieve it, then put the full force of your body, speech, and mind behind the intention, you either end up becoming very frustrated or go crazy*. So what is it?

A couple weeks ago, I was on a retreat with Zen Heart Sangha, and the theme for the retreat was vow, a surprising coincidence considering it has been a hot topic in my practice lately. The last day of the retreat, I realized what the difference was: the Bodhisattva Vow is like a koan. It isn't logically achievable like a normal vow. You express your realization by the extent you embody it.

For myself, I took vows around the 10 precepts when I was ordained as a Zen monk in 1994 and even though I am not in active training anymore, I still try to keep them. The two most difficult to keep are the vow not to kill and the vows around speech.

That the vows around speech are hard to keep might not seem surprising. Third party speech, complaining about other people's performance at work, praising our own performance, even telling a small lie now and then in order to avoid hurting other people's feelings are things that everybody does. While I try to avoid them as much as possible (especially lying) sometimes I slip up. And, like I said above, this tells me something about myself and the world that lets me recommit to my vows. What it tells me about myself is that I've got a ways to go before the sense of "me" is weak enough that I'm prepared to let some conversation go by where I might end up at a disadvantage. What it tells me about the world is that society is built in a certain way that, sometimes, you end up in a position where you think that speech in conflict with the vow is necessary to keep social harmony.

But the vow around killing: how is that hard to keep that? Well, this vow has to do with killing anything, not just people and large mammals. I don't hunt, but we do get invasions of ants in our house, and I've got no choice but to kill them. Otherwise, they end up crawling on food and on us when we are asleep. So I try to do it in a way that is as ecologically benign as possible to avoid endangering other animals: first find where they are getting into the house and block it up, second use boric acid, which is nontoxic to larger animals, where they have trails outside, and finally, by flooding their nests if I can find them. And while I fortunately haven't really had to do it yet, I'm also prepared to kill rats if they persist in using our garden as a buffet.

Again, what I learn about the world from the ants is that if you introduce an invasive species into an ecosystem, sometimes it will get out of control. The ants we have problems with were introduced from Argentina many decades ago. In their home country, they are much more genetically diverse, so their numbers are kept in check by wars between colonies and their queens. In California, the genetic diversity is so low that some nests have multiple queens. So they reproduce to enormous numbers, especially in late summer. In most urban areas, the Argentine ants have wiped out the native Californian species. They are not enough of an economic problem to have attracted the attention of the agricultural departments at UC, otherwise there might have been an effort to find an ecological control.

Rats are more complicated. Unfortunately, our neighbors house and yard is overrun with them, and since our neighbors are both elderly, they don't seem to notice or care. We had rats under our house for many years and after much difficulty managed to get rid of them. I really don't want them back, because they make noise at night and their urine and feces smell, to say nothing of the occasional dead rat that ends up decaying. As with the ants, I try to encourage them not to come into our yard, with an ultrasonic device that is unpleasant for them to hear, but sometimes the prospect of a freshly fallen peach is worth the unpleasantness.

So what to do? Admit that I need to violate my vow and, sadly, that the world is unfortunately the way it is, but take no delight or exhibit aggressiveness at having to arrange for the demise of a fellow sentient being. Sometimes, say an "om mani padme hum!" to wish them well on their next round of samsara.** Then recommit to not killing. And, if they ever come up with a way to get rid of rats or ants that doesn't involve killing them, deploy it in our yard as soon as possible.



* Actually, this is part of what happened when I was on retreat and went crazy in 2011. I literally generated an intention to save all sentient beings then tried to carry it out in the only way I knew how at the time. See the "Flashback 2011" chapter in the book for more.

** Even though the scientific evidence indicates that rebirth is physically impossible.

Image courtesy of tricycle.com