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The
Four Great Vows
by
Ven. Shikai Zuiko
osho
A
Series of Four Dharma Talks
Part
1 of 4
Following
three strikes of the gong, the Godo chants The Four Great Vows in Japanese:
Shi Gu Sei Gan
SHU JO MU HEN SEI GAN DO
BON NO MU JIN SEI GAN DAN
HO MON MU RYO SEI GAN GAKU
BUTSUDO MU JO SEI GAN JO
[One gong strike]
All beings without number I vow to liberate.
Endless obsessions I vow to release.
Dharma gates beyond measure I vow to penetrate.
Limitless awakening I vow to unfold.
[Three gong strikes]
The Shi Gu Sei Gan: The Four Great Vows
, is chanted in this monastery and in many if not all other Zen monasteries
to end formal sittings. Here at Dainen-ji, we chant this at the end of
the formal sitting in the morning and we chant it at the end of the formal
sitting in the evening. We chant The Four Great Vows during sesshin,
at the end of oryoki. Some of you have attended the formal sittings and
some of you have heard The Four Great Vows chanted before. And
some of you have chanted The Four Great Vows yourself or with the
Sangha. For example The Four Great Vows are chanted by students
doing retreats.
Chanting, of course, is a form of practice and, as with any of the forms,
chanting is an opportunity to align body, breath, speech and mind with
the Teacher and the Teachings, the Lineage, and with this moment. This
Saturday morning we are in the Hatto at Dainen-ji. The Hatto is completely
full today; every zabuton and zafu is occupied and we are sitting zazen.
Now if zazen were all that there were to practice then that would be convenient.
Zazen is essential to practice but it is not the only form. As associate
students and general students, you are already familiar with other forms
of practice; you are familiar with kinhin, practice whilst walking or
walking practice. You bow in gassho monjin at the entrance to the Hatto,
yet another opportunity to see how you are. Chanting practice is a bit
different in that what were doing is making sounds and although
Anzan Hoshin sensei has said that we could chant the phone book and still
make make very good use of that form of practice, we actually chant, particularly
in the case of The Four Great Vows, words which actually show us
what it is we are doing when we are practicing; actually instruct us in
how to practice.
Our topic is The Four Great Vows . I hope that it will be useful
to start by explaining what The Four Great Vows are not. The
Four Great Vows are not a creed, they are not a dogma, they are not
an article of faith, nor are they prayers or hymns. This is a vow and
a vow is a solemn promise to do something. In the case of this practice,
each time we chant or hear The Four Great Vows we are vowing to
practice and wake up to who and what this is, to who and what this life
that is living us all is. The Four Great Vows provide us with instruction
and a reminder of that instruction, a reminder of what we are doing. Now,
what we understand of the Four Great Vows , of course, will depend
on what we understand of practice. Zen Master Anzan Hoshins understanding
and practice and expression of The Four Great Vows will necessarily
be vaster than yours. Next year or perhaps if you become a a general student
or a probationary formal student or formal student or take lay monks
vows, you will be doing this because your understanding of the vows is
deeper and therefore your understanding of your practice is deeper. And
because your practice is deeper, your understanding of what is being spoken
of each time you hear The Four Great Vows , is
deeper and different and vaster. Something that I believe to be the case
is that each one of us sitting here has come to practice, has sought instruction
because there was a realization of the truth of The Four Great Vows
. We may not have known what the words were but there was something
that we knew, that when we hear The Four Great Vows
makes us perhaps go "Yes! Yes! Thats it!"
It would be useful at this point if we were all to have a look at The
Four Great Vows . So if you direct your eyes down to your right knee,
you will see your chanting text. Please notice how the chanting text is
placed so that you can return it to exactly the same place so that you
do not cause anyone else, the next person to come along, any entanglement
because of how you have had a lapse of attention. Now lift the text up
and turn to page 15. (Students pick up texts) So we will just read
through this. I will read and you can follow along just with your eyes.
Shi Gu Sei Gan: The Four Great Vows
SHU JO MU HEN SEI GAN DO
BON NO MU JIN SEI GAN DAN
HO MON MU RYO SEI GAN GAKU
BUTSUDO MU JO SEI GAN JO
And in English
All beings without number I vow to liberate.
Endless obsessions I vow to release.
Dharma gates beyond measure I vow to penetrate.
Limitless awakening I vow to unfold.
So now you can put your text down and should you attend a formal sitting
you will know how to pick up the text , you will know that the text should
be placed so that the cover without the printing on it is facing out and
you will know that page 15 is the page upon which The Four Great Vows
is printed. As you also know from reading "Before Thinking"
and in particular Anzan senseis teisho The
Five Styles of Zen, the fourth mode of Zen practice is Daijo Zen
which is the practice of the Mahayana or the great and open way. As Anzan
Sensei says: "This way embraces everything that is arising for us
and is not simply concerned with our own liberation but recognizes that
the liberation of all beings is inseparable from our own because we are
inseparable from all beings and work for that liberation" The
whole of the Mahayana is embodied in the Shi Gu Sei Gan, The
Four Great Vows . But you dont just memorize them then spout
them forth. As the Sensei says, we embody them. We are those vows; that
is what we do.
Today were looking at the first line, the first vow: "All
beings without number I vow to liberate." And that raises questions.
It shows that in the Mahayana, the great and open way, practice is not
just for your own benefit but it is for the benefit of all beings. Now
we do understand that how we are, how you are, affects everybody else,
and the way everybody else is affects us, affects you, and there is no
clear line separating us from everything else. There couldnt be.
Someone twitches in the Hatto and we feel it. We might twitch as well.
Someone breathes next to us and we find ourselves affected by it. We notice
a presencing of experiencing, a movement of knowing. Perhaps we notice
ourselves becoming edgy or irritated. Our attention starts to move towards
that and we find ourselves becoming something or something coming into
being; something thats irritated. The first great vow reminds us
that "All beings without number I vow to liberate". At
the moment of noticing that becoming, that coming into being of a separate
self; a self that is separate from everyone and everything else (which
of course is impossible; each thing does make everything else what it
is)...at the moment of noticing that becoming, that coming into being
, we have noticed something about our experiencing and we practice mindfulness
of breath in that moment and as attention ceases to move towards that
being, that becoming, that being is liberated, its released. All
other beings in the Hatto are of course liberated from the possible effects
of that irritated being. Moment after moment we practice The Four Great
Vows for just as all the Mahayana is contained in The Four Great
Vows , all of practice is spoken of in each great vow and each great
vow speaks of the other three. They are all talking about awakening, about
waking up, about recognizing that you are Buddha in this moment and this
moment and the next.
Continuing our investigation of the first of The Four Great Vows :
"all beings! All beings without number? Wow!. Is that even possible?
Now hold on! What exactly is a being? OK, I can understand the movement
of attention into becoming something that is irritated at the person next
to me..." But thats not all it is. It can also mean recognizing
when someone else is stuck and offering our help, knowing that perhaps
they have other things to do which you cant do and doing what you
can do, can help free them, can help them do something else that will
be of benefit to someone else. So it reminds us to pay attention to those
around. But it also means paying attention to anything, any presencing,
any moment of knowing - colours, forms, sounds - they come into being
and then are gone. We cant hang onto them; by noticing we can only
liberate; by noticing and practising we can notice that there is more
and more available to us.
Practice is also about taking responsibility. Taking responsibility means
looking at what we do and how we do it and looking at how we are. There
are many facets to this taking responsibility and to this liberating of
beings; its not as simple as it sounds. In the newspapers recently
there have been a number of articles about laboratory animals. Now, liberating
beings doest mean storming a lab and releasing the lab animals and
indeed, when we think about it, we can recognize very clearly that that
can cause more suffering for the very creatures whose suffering we wish
to ease. By releasing animals into a world of which they have no knowledge
we perhaps are putting them at greater danger. There is a story that I
heard some time ago and it was about a chimpanzee. This is when there
was a lot of money available in the United States in particular for interspecies
study and the study of the communication between species. There were chimps
who had been taught to sign. One particular chimp, Lucy, had been, since
she was very young, in a lab with her person and this person was like
a mother to her, had raised her, cared for her, and taught her language.
Well the money ran out and the experiment came to an end and the people
and the person who had raised and cared for and taught Lucy, decided after
a great deal of thought, because they were certainly not uncaring people,
that the best thing for all concerned was to send Lucy to a retirement
camp, a camp specifically for chimpanzee who had been been retired from
labs and from zoos and other human endeavours really, in her country of
origin which was in Africa. Lucy had a very difficult time and the reports
were that, although the other animals were of her own species, they were
strangers to her; they were savages and, by her standards, illiterate.
So she took to hanging about the periphery, near the fence, spending most
of her time alone. And she was there for about 6 years and the people,
particularly the person who had cared for her, came to that country to
visit and they went to see Lucy. Lucy saw them and recognized the woman
who had cared for her immediately and she went over to the fence and looked
at her with pleading eyes and signed to her - HELP- HOME. We must be very
careful of everything that we do. We need to understand what our practice
is because as Anzan Sensei says "If we do not understand our practice
we will practice our misunderstanding." With the first great vow:
"All beings without number I vow to liberate" you have a template;
you have something that you can use during this coming week to look at
how you are, how beings are, to notice interactions that you may previously
have not noticed.
The Four Great Vows are useful for what they are not because what
they are not, teaches us. The Four Great Vows are not rules, they
are not there to help you generate a feeling tone about being a person
who liberates beings; they are not a strategy of how to be. They are instruction;
each of the Great Vows is talking about the same thing; releasing colours,
forms, sounds, thoughts, feelings, all beings, into liberation. Practice
is growing up, taking responsibility for being a real human being. The
Sensei says in Five Styles of Zen "Being human means dignity,
compassion; realizing that ones life is the life of all beings".
Next week well look at the second of The Four Great Vows:
"Endless obsessions I vow to release." Thank you for listening.
With
three strikes of the gong, the Godo chants:
All beings without number I vow to liberate.
Endless obsessions I vow to release.
Dharma gates beyond measure I vow to penetrate.
Limitless awakening I vow to unfold.
[one bow, two strikes of the gong]
Click
here for the next Dharma Talk in the series
©
2004 White Wind Zen Community. All rights reserved.
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