Dispatch #3: "Cultivating the Clouds"
The Vows of a Mountain Monk
Vow.
It’s a teeny word that hardly takes up any space on the page. A word I barely uttered until 2001 when I began practicing Zen. Twenty-two (gulp!) years later, and I’ve chanted this three-letter word hundreds, maybe even a thousand, times.
As we know, vow means a solemn promise or a set of promises that commits someone to “a prescribed role, calling, or course of action, typically to marriage or a monastic career.” The origin of the word stems from the Latin votum, which in ancient Rome meant a “vow or a promise to a deity.”
Votum, according to the Oxford Languages dictionary, is also the root of the word “vote”—expressing a wish, making a choice, and of course, casting a ballot in an election. When we make a vow, we rule out other courses of actions (and speech) and dedicate ourselves to maintaining our solemn promise(s).
When I ordained as a Zen priest in October 2014, I pledged to uphold the bodhisattva vows. The word bodhisattva means a person who seeks to awaken to and embody their True Nature. Each full moon, at all three temples of San Francisco Zen Center, we participate in Ryaku Fusatsu—a ceremony where we re-dedicate ourselves to these vows or precepts. You can learn more about them in these previous posts: “The Grave Precepts” and “Our Zazen and the Precepts Are One.”
Since we’re human, we won’t always be steadfast in our commitment. For me, it’s about my intention to remember these precepts when I get buffeted by my karmic conditioning and act or speak from a constricted sense of self(ing) rather than from a spacious heart-mind.
Since I’m an avid journaler, I found the intentions I wrote down on May 9, 2009, in a beautiful notebook handmade in India that my mother gave me:
My intentions for summer work practice:
To maintain right speech
To practice functional speech while working
To be mindful of thoughts, word and deed
To be grateful (not complaining)
To be willing to remove the armor covering my heart
To follow the monastic schedule completely
All of the above are still on my list of intentions for this practice period and beyond. However, since 14 years have passed, I thought I’d add a few more that have bubbled to the surface of consciousness since I arrived at Tassajara on Sept. 21st:
Drop fascination with thinking: Notice thoughts arise and let them float away. Remember that whatever arises in the mind is not who/what you are; it’s impermanent; and grasping onto these fabrications causes suffering.
Follow the breath: One way to practice #1 is to follow the breath—to become intimate with the sensations of the inhale, the exhale and the pauses in between. When we put our attention on the cycle of breathing, the mind begins to quiet and settle. The less energy we give to discursive thinking—the less we believe its arising stories—the more attuned we are to the physicality of the present moment.
Be a body: The mind is a sensory organ, the sixth one, that processes the input from the other five physical senses. When the intellect becomes the dominant sense, we become dissociated from the heart-mind-body. Instead of being bodies, we’re talking heads. Zen is a body practice. Transformation happens below the neck.
Flow like a creek: When we concretize our stories about ourselves and others, we’re like sticks in the mud.
Sit like a mountain: Mountains are stable, dynamic, and unflappable. It’s possible, even if just for a minute, to sit (or stand, walk, or lie down) amid the rush of daily life and experience stability by accepting what’s happening and be calm by expanding our perspective as though we were atop a mountain.
Treat everyone with kindness: Enough said.
Practice as if to save my head from fire: Death is certain; the time of death is uncertain. Vowing to practice as if to save all beings from a burning house is the vow of this mountain monk.
Verse of Life in the Mountains
The way of the patriarch’s coming from the West,
I transmit to the East.
Yearning for the ancient ways,
catching the moon,
cultivating the clouds,
untouched by worldly dust
fluttering about
a thatched hut—
snowy evening, deep mountain. — Eihei Dogen Zenji
I’m starting my first practice period at Green Gulch tomorrow, and these are some very helpful reflections- thank you!
Love these dispatches! Please keep sending them.