Repentance, Gratitude and the Birth of Vow
Talk from Practice Period Opening Retreat
Susan Jion Postal
Empty Hand Zen Center
Sept 8, 2013
Uchiyama Roshi once stated:
“Vow gives us courage, repentance totally crushes our arrogance – it is precisely this kind of posture that constitutes an alive religious life.
This morning I would like to open up our Practice Period with this question – how is it possible to live an alive religious life? While not disagreeing with Uchiyama, I would like to expand and rephrase a bit. It seems to me that Vow is given life, is born, from both Repentance and Gratitude; there are two “parents” so to speak. For the next five weeks we will make room in our lives for a beautiful and powerful text – Eihei Koso Hotsuganmon, Master Dogen’s Vow. Reciting this during our service, reading it daily at home, and sitting with and breathing with selected phrases each week, we can begin to
experience the quickening of a living vow in our own heart/mind.
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Let’s begin with Repentance. Michael Wenger in his book 49 Fingers, a collection of modern American Koans, sights the following case:
“Katagiri Roshi was once asked, “Why did you add the Verse of Purification to your
morning service? Is it traditional?” (It is not part of the usual Soto Zen service as found
in San Francisco Zen Center, for example) “I decided to do it,” Katagiri answered. “Is
that because we Americans need it more?” Katagiri responded, “no, it is because we
humans need it.”
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Katagiri was not the only one to emphasize the Verse of Purification. I recently discovered that Torei Zenji, Dharma Heir of the great Hakuin Zenji, gave his students a list of three things to do to clean their karma: bow fully, sit zazen and recite the Verse of Purification. Here every weekday and Sunday morning we follow our bows with this verse – All my ancient twisted karma - owning up to our own responsibility, acknowledging how we may have caused harm, and also cleaning it, purifying it, not carrying it farther. We set it all down, fold it up, move on with emptier hands. Since the time of the historical Shakyamuni Buddha, Repentance, or Confession, has been seen as the preparation for taking the Bodhisattva Vows. Shantideva said “one law serves to summarize the whole of the Mahayana. The protection of all beings is accomplished
through examination of one’s own mistakes.”
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Shohaku Okamura in his helpful new book Living by Vow comments that awakening to our own imperfection is repentance. (p.34) He also reminds us that in Buddhism repentance is not just an apology for a mistake we have made. Saying we are sorry may be relevant and helpful, but it is only a partial step. As Buddhist practitioners our full repentance requires clear awareness of our limitations and imperfections. Then the release and purification can actually happen. That release means that we don’t go around for the rest of our life filled with guilt and self-criticism about the endless number of mistakes we make.
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In my experience, bowing and chanting are close and helpful partners in repentance. Both chanting and bowing offer a direct doorway into practice that is physical –once again it is body practice –allowing us to become sound, become
gesture. Dropping to the floor is a whole body expression of letting go of the self, of “me.” Reb Anderson notes that bowing is not to bow down to something. He says “to bow is to crack duality.” (p79) Maybe it is this cracking, this experience of no-separation, which makes room for vow to begin to grow, to be born. In our Service, wholeheartedly
giving voice to a Sutra, a Dharani, a reading, we release the struggle to understand its ‘meaning’ and simply let the sounds we are uttering teach us directly. Again, no room left for “me”, just an outflow of sound from our vocal chords and an inflow through our ears.
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And gratitude – so beautifully expressed in Dogen’s vow – for the endless compassion of the Buddhas and Ancestors. We are invited to honestly see our failure to practice, our lack of faith. We are assured that repenting in this way, we will receive deep and unending help.
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Our own two karma verses - Purification and Gratitude, serve as bookends in our daily service at Empty Hand. In the opening Verse of Purification we acknowledge our ancient twisted karma. And then in Verse of Gratitude that closes our service, we give thanks for all the positive karma, all the blessings of this life. The three infinities embedded in the middle, which are actually vows or maybe prayers. Whenever we find the word “may” in our service what follows is a vow or a prayer. Not directed to any being or diety outside of us, but to Endless Dimension Universal Life, as Soen Roshi
called it. So in our Verse of Gratitude we say:
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“May this gratitude be expressed through infinite kindness to the past,
Infinite service to the present, infinite responsibility to the future.”
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Gratitude seems an essential element for the birth of these vows in us. It is the wellspring which allows the outflowing to begin. This is a huge turning, when we find ourselves not practicing to get something for ‘me’, but rather with a pouring out, a lateral flow out, in all directions. When we are filled to overflowing with gratitude, not only is there some space, some growing room, for vows to be born, but perhaps the embryonic vows are also deeply and directly nourished by our gratitude.
Two Teachers, Eihei Dogen in our Soto line and Torei Zenji, Dharma Heir of the great Hakuin in the Rinzai line, both wrote eloquently about Vow. Torei wrote the following in his treatise The Undying Lamp of Zen, “What is received from the teacher, inspiring gratitude for the teaching, is something you should not turn your back on, even at the expense of your life. When you include gratitude for the achievements of successive generations of Zen masters, each one equal, no amount of effort is adequate to requite it.”
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Dogen, in his wisdom, makes clear that the compassion of the Buddhas and Ancestors is so fully and freely extended to us, we are able not only to have realization of Buddhahood but also let go of the realization. This release of realization – something we seek, we make great effort to ‘get’ – may sound strange, but in this lies the key. Empty hands cannot hold any notion of realization.
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This birth of a life of vow is, in fact, the birth of the Bodhisattva – All of us are ‘baby bodhisattvas.’ A shift happens, we are no longer sitting for ‘me’ but actually for all beings. There is an outward flow in our zazen that just happens. We may be subtly aware of this movement, but we cannot really make it happen. The Bodhisattva –which is Sanskrit for awakened being – is not doing this for others – there are no the others. There is, in fact, no duality, not-two.
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Some of you may remember that during a talk on vow a few years ago I found myself making the rather outrageous statement that Vow isn’t something we do, but rather something that happens to us.
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The aliveness, the actual living of a life of Vow, is not the same as a promise, a commitment, or a New Year’s resolution. In my own limited experience of this, it has been like being turned inside out, like a glove, like a sock. The “me” , the person in charge that ordinarily is on the surface, running the show, with unique habits and conditioning, is still here, but now on is the inside, being useful, serving. What was on the ‘inside’ - a kind of soft open awareness, becomes that which meets the world, which interacts with people and circumstances as is appropriate. This is a quality of warmth, of open acceptance, which serves to relieve suffering even in the middle of great difficulty.
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Many of you are beginning to experience “being practiced” - your zazen is starting to practice you. “You” are not doing it. In the same way, I would suggest that the life of Vow can be born in us, can become alive in us though the ongoing deep
introspective release of true repentance and the profound and joyful outflow of boundless gratitude.
Our Phrase from Dogen’s Vow is as follows: “Meeting and maintaining it [the True Dharma] we renounce worldly affairs and together with all beings and the great earth realize the Buddha Way.”
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I suggest in your sitting today – breathe out “Meeting and Maintaining the true Dharma.”
Meet, don’t turn away from, this teaching of radical release of self.
Meet the fact that we are sitting for all beings, not “me.”
Maintain your own true repentance and gratitude, let them do their work.