A Meditation on the Bodhisattva Vows…

I vow to liberate all sentient beings, Uproot all blind passions, penetrate all dharma gates, and attain th great way of Buddha….All impossible vows, impossible quests…so what’s up with this, I ask?

“At the top of a 100-foot pole, an iron cow gives birth to a calf.” There are many impossible irrational zen koans or situations like this that block the rational mind with a contradiction: It means something or it would no be there for a thousand years (Chinese koans are very old), so what could it mean..my logical mind just cannot penetrate this…

And the Bodhisattva vows are as impenetrable as the iron cow koan..What’s I have to liberate fleas..a flea is a sentient being…

And yet the Bodhisattva vows are chanted in Zen centers…I vow to do the impossible…The vows themselves are a Dharma gate…or gateless gate, which is like a revolving door which you go through can come out where you started…

But a vow is an anchor.. A wedding vow anchors a marriage…I vow is something that you don’t break..vengeance is a vow..I vow to make them pay…I vow to become an Olympian…I vow to become rich…I vow to win…So I vow cannot be taken lightly. It’s more than a promise…It is an intention that directs one’s hold life…Everythng is integrated into your vow, becomes food for it, and by overcoming obstacles to your vow, your vow becomes stronger…A vow is greater than life itself…for people die for their vow…

So why would I vow to liberate all sentient beings? Why does the iron cow give birth at the top of a 100-foot pole? How does the cow jump over the moon? Impossible…we just drop it as stupid..but a few stay and work with it….So lets work with it…

All of these vows are absolutely totally impossible…so they are useless. What good is a vow that cannot be accomplished by any means?…It cannot be achieved in time..And yet…one makes the vows…Is it valuable because it is impossible?

But I imagine most just chant the words without really penetrating them…The mind just can’t go there..So the changing is probably for most a mindless ritual..How does one get their heart into it?

This is, I have found out, the enigma of Zen teaching…it’s ironic…It’s getting the ironic joke and falling on the floor laughing…You either get irony or you don’t. No one can tell you the meaning of an ironic joke so you will laugh like those who got it the first time…You may get a smile…but no fall on the floor laughing…

The irony of these vows is that if you realize through and through that it is impossible, yet you still sit before this wall…at some point a shift happens where the totally impossible breaks open and your viewpoint from a fixed sense of self, gives way and you break through the Impossible to a new way of knowing….a new way of being in the world…where nothing is impossible…

So what’s the ironic teaching of the Vows? The image of the guy in the raft paddling across the ocean is from Catch 22…