Determining your personal vows as clergy

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?  

  • What elements of the Soto Zen tradition are most meaningful to you?
  • What elements of the Sanshin style of practice are most meaningful to you?
  • What three words best describe your personality?
  • What has been your favorite secular job or career?  Alternately, if you could have any secular job or career, what would it be?  Why?
  • What’s your favorite hobby or pastime?  
  • What skills do you most enjoy using?  What do you do best?
  • What activities do you find most rewarding?
  • How would you describe yourself as a leader?  Toward what leadership role(s) do you naturally gravitate?
  • What is your greatest strength as a leader?
  • What kinds of people do you want to serve as a dharma leader?
  • When people come to you for help, what are they looking for and what do you provide?
  • When you look around at your community and world today, where and how are practice and the dharma most needed?
  • What support, guidance or resources did you most wish you had when you were beginning your practice?
  • What’s your primary motivation for becoming a novice?  What will you be able to do that you cannot do as a layperson?

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
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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
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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
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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.