I recently retook the bodhisattva vow with James Low, many years after taking it with Ken McLeod. The vow expresses an extraordinary aspiration: to live and practise for the awakening of all sentient beings.
James describes the person taking the vow as a placeholder for the one who may eventually be capable of fulfilling it. We are giving expression to an aspiration that reaches far beyond our present capacities. Ken emphasises that the vow establishes a direction in life rather than a standard of perfection. Through practice and repeated commitment, intention may mature into what he calls will, a deep clarity about the direction of our lives.
Both teachers approach the vow as something that reaches into every aspect of our experience. It challenges the habitual ways in which we organise life around ourselves, protecting our preferences, opinions and identities. The vow makes us curious about the places where we are not present, where reactivity takes over and our intention to care for others is forgotten.
I had a poignant and revealing experience of this recently.
I've been making sets of hand beads to offer to people who are struggling with difficulties in their lives, asking friends and acquaintances to donate beads they no longer wear. A woman gave me several beautiful old malas. She seemed a little reluctant to part with them, so I asked whether she was sure.
A few weeks later, she asked what I'd made with her beads and whether I could show her, commenting that craftspeople display their creations to others. I took that to mean that she regarded hand beads as jewellery, as objects to be shown and admired. I immediately felt a tightening and hardening in my body, but rather than pausing, responded rather sharply.
"The hand beads aren't about me," I said rather snippily.
But suddenly it was all about me.
I had become caught in what Buddhist teachings describe as the arrogance of the god realm. I was right. She was attached to those beads. If she had really given them freely, why did she have expectations about what I would do with them?
From my frozen position of superiority and self-righteousness, I could see her attachment clearly, but not my own. I was defending my understanding of generosity, my intention in making the hand beads, and perhaps my sense of myself as someone engaged in a meaningful act of care. I also felt hurt and uncomfortable. Something important to me seemed to have been misunderstood, and the arrogance offered a way of protecting myself from that discomfort.
Yet even as the words came out of my mouth, I recognised that I had acted contrary to the bodhisattva vow. The tightening began to loosen almost immediately. Later, reflecting on what had happened, and then talking it through with a trusted dharma sister, I became increasingly aware of how completely I had been caught. My experience of the woman began to open up. I no longer needed to hold on to my judgement that she was attached or that her request was inappropriate. Perhaps she was simply curious about what had become of her beads. Perhaps she wanted to feel connected to their new purpose. How could I possibly know?
Ken emphasises that the vow gradually becomes part of how we meet experience. Attention helps us recognise our habitual patterns, although sometimes recognition comes too late to prevent a reactive response. James, approaching the vow from the dzogchen view, emphasises the intrinsic openness of awareness and the natural responsiveness of compassion. As our fixation on ourselves relaxes, we become more available to others.
How quickly my intention to care for others became entangled with the need to defend myself. The practice of the vow arose most vividly not in offering the hand beads to someone who was struggling, but in an encounter with someone who had contributed to making them. She is as much within the scope of the vow as anyone who might eventually receive a set of beads.
The vow helps me recognise when I fall into reactivity. Sometimes that recognition comes too late to prevent an unkind response, as it did here. Yet even then, the possibility of opening is present. The aspiration to benefit all beings is limitless, but it becomes real in our everyday encounters, especially those that disturb us.