Finding your voice as a dharma teacher
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Personal vows: What kind of dharma leader do you want to be?
Determining your personal vows is intimately related to your aspirations about dharma leadership. In this time and place, there are myriad ways to be a dharma leader using your life skills and experiences. Broadly consider the following questions and make some notes to yourself. Then look for themes, connections or intersections among your answers. Don’t ignore items that appear to be strange bedfellows. Is there an interesting link between working in sales, directing the school play and reading poems by Ryokan?
Begin drafting one or more personal vows based on your exploration of the questions above. It’s not necessary to have all the expertise you need today to carry them out; this is the purpose of a training plan. These vows should be larger than particular projects (writing a book, offering a class, starting a sitting group); they will last for your lifetime and give direction to your life as a dharma leader. Your projects are the means of carrying out your vow(s). Examples of concrete personal vows (別願 betsugan)
Eihei Dōgen
When Dōgen went to practice in China and saw the monks putting their okesas on their heads in the morning and chanting the robe verse, he felt that he had never seen such a gracious thing. His body was filled with delight, and tears of joy silently fell and moistened the lapel of his robe. Then he took a vow to introduce Japanese practitioners to this practice. He wrote:
ときにひそかに発願す、いかにしてかわれ不肖なりといふとも、仏法の嫡嗣となり、正法を正伝して、郷土の衆生をあはれむに、仏祖正伝の衣法を見聞せしめん。 At the time, I vowed to myself, “Although I am unworthy, by all means I will become a legitimate heir of buddha dharma, correctly transmit the true dharma and, out of compassion for the people in my country, I will enable them to see and hear the robe and Dharma that have been authentically transmitted by buddha-ancestors.” After returning to Japan, he made efforts to encourage his students to wear the authentically transmitted form of the kashaya (okesa) and each morning to venerate it and recite the robe verse. As the result of his vow and efforts, he wrote: かのときの発願いまむなしからず、袈裟を受持せる在家出家の菩薩おほし、歓喜するところなり。 My vow at that time was not in vain. Now there are many bodhisattvas, both home-leavers and householders, who have received and maintain the kashaya. I am so glad about this. This is one of Dōgen Zenji’s concrete personal vows. It has been continuously practiced for about eight hundred years not only in Japanese Sōtō Zen monasteries and temples but also many Zen centers in the West. Kosho Uchiyama
In his final lecture at Antaiji, Uchiyama Roshi said that he had two personal vows. One was to produce committed practitioners of strong zazen practice who could be models of that practice. The other was to write texts about zazen practice as the buddhadharma taught by Dōgen Zenji suitable for modern people. There are many Zen texts written in Chinese or Japanese, but they are all written in classic language using ancient concepts, expressions, and logic. He vowed to write understandable texts about Zen for modern people, both Japanese and Westerners. This is what he could do having studied Western philosophy, Christianity and Buddhism, and thoroughly practiced zazen. Thus the vow he took as a teenager to build a bridge between Eastern spiritual tradition and Western rational civilization was fulfilled.
Shohaku Okumura
I inherit my vows from these two vows of Uchiyama Rōshi. When I finished at Komazawa University and entered Antaiji, Uchiyama Rōshi encouraged me to study English, and when he retired in 1975 he sent three of his disciples, including me, to the United States. Studying English and practicing with Western people became something natural to me. When I went back to Japan from Valley Zendo in 1981, he encouraged me to work on translating Dōgen Zenji’s writings, as well as his own, into English. Practicing zazen with Western people and sharing the meaning of zazen practice and the Dharma teaching of Buddha, Dōgen, and Uchiyama Rōshi became my vow for my entire lifetime.
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Say it your own way
In Roots of Goodness, Uchiyama Roshi emphasizes the need for dharma teachers today to speak and teach in ways that make sense for the audiences they're serving. While we certainly need to be well grounded in the important texts of our tradition, we also need enough personal experience of practice and insight into the dharma to express it in ways that are our own. Otherwise, we're just parroting the words of others and not authentically transmitting truth. In explaining about a dharma in which there is one true reality, it's not helpful to anyone to try and describe it by just repeating the same terms that were used in ancient times. . . . For that reason, in reading Shobogenzo, it's useless to simply redefine or explain the worlds that Dogen used. I want, instead, to read this text considering the life I have been given in this present age. [pp. 38-39] As I have been saying for many years, the reality of the dharma is what Shakyamuni Buddha personally experienced and realized through his practice; there is nothing that has changed. Yet, even as I say that and though the substance is the same, ways of expressing it do change in accordance with the era and become clearer. In going deeper into the expressions, we must physically realize the dharma, changing with the times. If we don['t make every effort to come up with new expressions, even if only slightly different, that are fresh and in accord with the times, then I'm afraid Buddhism will simply wither away. If we just look at the sutras of old and just comment or make footnotes, saying the same old things, Buddhism will just get weaker and weaker. Worse, by only repeating the expressions that have been around for ages, Buddhism will surely just die off. [p. 53] |
