I vow with all beings:
Serving my parents
In the training temple, there are four-line verses (Skt. gāthās, Jp. ge) to be chanted for a variety of daily activities. Everything from waking up in the morning to brushing the teeth to eating a meal is an opportunity to remember to practice what Buddha taught. These gāthās are based on teachings from Volume 14 (Purifying Practice) of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Hoko takes a look at these sutra verses to investigate what they’re pointing to and how we can include them in our own daily practice.
Serving my parents,
I vow with all beings
to serve the Buddha,
protecting and nourishing everyone.[1]
Whether or not our parents are still here with us in the physical world, this verse gives us something to work with in our practice. Toward the end of the jukai or zaike tokudo ceremony, the preceptor declares, “Surely, you are a child of Buddha!” When we return to the temple each month to renew those vows during the ryaku fusatsu ceremony, we hear Dōgen Zenji’s Kyōjukaimon read aloud. Its explanation of the tenth precept, not ignorantly slandering the Three Treasures, says,
“[The Buddha] manifested his body and expounded the Dharma. [These Three Treasures] are the crossing point of the world. The virtues [of the Three Treasures] return to the ocean of all-knowing wisdom and are immeasurable. We should respectfully accept, attend, and serve the Three Treasures.”
Clearly, the Buddha is considered to be like a parent for us, and as dutiful children, we’re engaged in serving him. But what does that really mean? To understand, we’ll need to consider the nature of parents, Buddha and serving.
Our Sōtō Zen tradition originated in Asian countries with strong Confucian cultures. Parent and child is the first of the Five Constant Relationships,[2] and filial piety is considered the root of virtue and humanity. The reciprocal nature of these relationships is important; the more powerful person is responsible for directing and guiding, but the less powerful person is responsible for providing support and care. When children are little, parents raise and teach them, providing for their material needs as well as their development as healthy and competent individuals. When parents become old, children look after them with respect and kindness, continuing to make offerings to them even after their death. The point of identifying and considering these relationships within Confucian culture is not to point out a difference of status but to explore interconnectedness between the people in the pair. Each is responsible to and for the other.
Lineage is also an important element of our tradition, but that too has a larger cultural context. In Japan, skills in traditional arts are passed down from generation to generation through the iemoto 家元, or family foundation, system that began in feudal times. The iemoto is the head of a school, family or house of a traditional art such as tea ceremony, ikebana, theater or calligraphy. The iemoto is the master at the top of the hierarchy who has inherited the secrets of the tradition from his master before him and is charged with preserving and transmitting those secrets accurately to students. He’s considered the final authority on everything related to the school, including who is qualified to teach and to succeed him as iemoto, and he chooses ceremonial names for the most advanced practitioners.
This may sound familiar if you’ve practiced in a temple, received the precepts, or entered into an ordination and training process. You’ve become part of a dharma family with an identified lineage made up of a chain of teacher-student relationships beginning with Shakyamuni and ending with your teacher and yourself. You’ve joined the other practitioners who have received the precepts from your teacher in being brothers and sisters in the dharma, with your teacher at the head of that family. Your teacher has also given you a robe and a name and, if you train as clergy, will decide when you’ve gained a level of dharma mastery suitable for you to receive dharma transmission. Your job is then to pass along that dharma transmission to at least one person in the next generation before you die. This is how the lineage remains alive, and it was a key point of Dōgen Zenji’s teaching.
Thus we have biological parents as well as parents in the practice, you might say. Our teachers and the buddhas and ancestors make up our dharma genealogy just as our great grandparents and their great grandparents make up our family trees. If any one of them had broken the chain, we wouldn’t be here in this form today. It’s a graphic demonstration of the reality of causes and conditions. We didn’t arise on our own. We inherited everything from our ancestors. On that basis alone, gratitude and the desire to be of service show up naturally.
When we’re children and our brains are developing, we’re naturally self-centered. Between the ages of about six and thirteen, we start realizing that we and our needs and impulses are not the center of the world, and that there are other beings out there who are affected by what we do. We still struggle with selfishness even when we know better, but our parents’ reminders help us build the social skills to get along with others.
Our dharma teachers sometimes serve a similar purpose. Our ego attachments as adults can be more subtle and deeply ingrained than those we had as children, and it takes spending time in a dharma family, with others also determined to follow Buddha’s way and exercise wisdom and compassion, for us to continue to refine our habituated thinking. Mindfulness, or remembering to practice what Buddha taught, can help us loosen our attachment to our five skandhas and become grown-ups.
In the Tenzo Kyōkun, Dōgen Zenji recommended that a person working to benefit all beings should maintain three mental attitudes: magnanimous mind (daishin 大心), nurturing mind (rōshin 老心), and joyful mind (kishin 喜心). Nurturing mind, literally “old mind,” is akin to the attitude of a kindly grandmother or parent who delights in caring for others. It is the spirit of the bodhisattva, the fully mature person. Okumura Rōshi writes,
“It is especially important to have this attitude when we practice in a community. The attitude of parents is to take care of others. When we live [or practice] together, caring and being cared for are the same. The reality of what is happening is the same. The inner attitude of the caregiver, however, is very different from that of the one who expects to be cared for. This difference determines the quality of the community. A place where people want to be taken care of is very different from a place where people care for others. We should understand that this small difference in our inner attitude has very large effects on the world around us.”[3]
But what does it mean to serve Buddha, who doesn’t have any physical needs we can satisfy 2500 years after his death? And how does that turn into protecting and nourishing everyone?
It seems important that this verse isn’t asking us to serve Shakyamuni, the human being. It’s talking about Buddha, specifically the absolute Buddha Treasure.[4] Buddha in this form is reality itself, the complete functioning of the universe, with nothing left out. With this understanding, we can see how serving the Buddha means serving everyone. We can certainly find meaning in making offerings at a Buddha altar, and in taking care of the representations of Buddha that we encounter, like statues and pictures. We can also see that we serve Buddha in living by the precepts, engaging in zazen and studying the dharma, in not creating hindrances and suffering for ourselves or others because we’re fully aware of what’s going on around us and responding appropriately.
Making effort in our practice in this way is necessary, and yet in the largest possible view, we don’t need to do anything at all in the service of Buddha. Dōgen ultimately concluded that buddha-nature isn’t a thing, a state, a potentiality, an essence, a power or a substance. Buddha-nature is being, but not in the sense of existing or not existing. It’s functioning; anything that is, is changing and functioning. This kind of being is not a static condition. Buddha-nature is all beings or all dharmas simply doing what they do as part of universal functioning, so the ultimate truth is not some timeless principle, but what is actually going on around us.
The root of the word “parent” means to bring forth. One of our “parents” in the practice is not a human being at all, but wisdom itself, or prajñā pāramitā. Sometimes we anthropomorphize prajñā and call her the “mother of all Buddhas.” It is because of prajñā that we understand emptiness, experience awakening, and fully manifest buddha-nature. According to the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā,
“She is the Perfect Wisdom that never comes into being, and therefore never goes out of being. She is known as the Great Mother…. She is the Perfect Wisdom who gives birthless birth to all Buddhas. And through these sublimely Awakened Ones, it is Mother Prajñāpāramitā alone who turns the wheel of true teaching.”[5]
Thus, without prajñā, Buddhas would not exist, just as we would not exist without our own parents. Pranja makes possible, or brings forth, awakening.
We can’t know all the streams of causes and conditions that brought us forth in our karmic human form. Often we uncover surprising incidents and circumstances when we start to research our family histories. Some of these are fun and amusing, and some are disturbing. When I began looking into my genealogy, I had no idea that I had roots in the deep South and came from slaveholding families. It took me some time to come to terms with who that made me; I lived in a relatively comfortable way now because two or three hundred years ago, my people owned other human beings. I can’t change that; the only venue we have for action is here and now. However, it’s become part of my own personal vow (hotsugan 発願) to make the best use of the karmic circumstances brought forth for me by the suffering of those people to free all beings.
Ultimately, because of the interconnectedness of causes and conditions, we are supported by all beings and we support all beings simply through our daily functioning. In that way, we are all parents and children for each other. Serving our parents and serving all beings are not separate.
When we’re taking care of our parents, whether or not they’re here with us, let’s vow with all beings to realize that this is not separate from taking care of Buddha. Within the reality of interconnectedness, let’s see all beings as our parents and children. Let’s remember to practice what Buddha taught.
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Next time:
Being with my spouse and children,
I vow with all beings
to be impartial toward everyone
and forever give up attachment.
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[1] Translations are based upon Thomas Cleary’s translation of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, and have been recast by Hoko in the form of standard Sōtōshū gāthās.
[2] Confucianism’s Five Constant Relationships are parent and child, minister and ruler, husband and wife, older and younger brother, and friend and friend.
[3] Okumura, Shohaku. Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. Wisdom Publications, 2012. p. 38–39.
[4] For more on the Absolute version of the Three Treasures, see this commentary by Okumura Rōshi.
[5] Shaw, Miranda (2006). Buddhist Goddesses of India, Princeton University Press. p. 166.
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Commentary by Hoko Karnegis
The Dōgen Institute offers a monthly series of posts by Hoko Karnegis, Senior Dharma Teacher at Sanshinji, in Bloomington, Indiana.
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For further study:
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