Living by Vow ~

~ Living by Vow ~

Living by vow, silently sitting Sixtythree years Plum blossoms begin to bloom The jeweled mirror reflects truth as it is.

~ Dainin Katagiri Roshi

(written a few weeks before his death)

Vows are the forces that weave together the fabric of your life and all of life. Without vows, without purposeful action, life would cease to exist. Vows are not a mysterious, rare, or arcane activity. Once you learn about vows, you see and hear them everywhere. Headlines often call our attention to accomplishments impelled by vows: 'Woman with one leg out to conquer Everest." "Six-year-old boy's dream brings water to half a million people." "Muslim man saves Jewish shoppers from Islamic gunman." Look around—vows are everywhere. They manifest as the book in your hands, the food in your refrigerator, the chair you are sitting on, the shelter over your head. Someone made each of these things, and that someone had to have a vow, a goal, a clear intention, in order to make it. Without vows, innovation and progress would not occur. There would have been no spearheads chipped from obsidian, no written languages, no solar panels, and there will be no future treatment for dementia.

When you begin to look at life through the lens of vows, you are touched not only by the dedication of human beings to form an aspiration to grow, change, and overcome obstacles, but also by their unselfish efforts to dedicate themselves to a larger beneficial purpose, even to an end they will not live to see manifest. Is this not the highest

Vajrayana Online | Weekly Readings | Hinayana Conduct (Three Yanas Section 4) 1 form of a unique human ability, the ability to form and carry out a vow? Zen masters often speak of the vows that are the fuel for their lives. Soen Roshi, while standing before the grave of Hakuin Zenji (a brilliant Zen master who had lived two centuries before him), was moved to compose this haiku:

Endless is my vow under the azure sky boundless autumn.

Both Katagiri Roshi and Soen Roshi were writing about a vow without end, a vow that had been transmitted from master to disciple from the time of the Buddha down to the present, for over twenty-five hundred years of autumns. It is a primary and powerful vow, the vow to awaken to our essential nature, which is boundless and timeless, and then to help others also to awaken.

Jan Chozen Bays, MD, is the cofounder and coabbot of Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon. She also teaches at Zen Community of Oregon in Portland.

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