There is in Buddhism a vow called the Bodhisattva vow. It goes like this: as long as space endures, and as long as there are any beings to be found, may I continue likewise throughout all my lives to become more and more capable of driving away the sorrows of the world.
To which any sane person would say, holy shit. It seems an overwhelming goal, and it is. But it is such a straightforward, beautiful thing, some find it irresistible…to become more and more capable of driving away the sorrows of the world. Can you think of a better use of energy, were such an astounding and lovely thing possible?
It’s like this: the other day, in one of those bursts of organizational energy that rarely lasts, I made a to-do list. Not a clip-toenails-empty-dead-bugs-out-of-light-fixtures to-do list, but a life-is-short-and-i’m-getting-old kind of to-do list. The top goal? Develop a Vision Statement and Goal Plan for My Life, I wrote. Like that, with caps, in black ink. And then I instantly realized, who am I kidding? A vision statement and goal plan for my LIFE? I can’t even develop a vision statement and goal plan for my DINNER. What I’m saying is, we fall short, a lot. We make lists, we scratch them out and crumple them up. We make new lists of things we’ve already done, just so we can check things off.
We make Big plans sometimes, even while our lives are made up of mostly little things. Little things like dishes, junk mail, ball point pens, apples, dead batteries, nail clippers, bread crumbs, toe-less socks, school calendars, pumpkin carving kits, and empty fast food cups.
The Bodhissatva vow is a Big thing, at first glance. But the beauty of Buddhist teachings and the practice of meditation is that ideas of scale fall away. When you meditate with discipline you get a taste of it. You’re sitting in one spot, trying to be still. It’s torture, your mind is racing. then thoughts stop, and peace happens for a moment. And in that moment, the tiny nothing things that lie around you, they fill you up…a blade of grass, the shadow of a fly, one shaking leaf on a limb, the sensation of sky. These things take on grand proportions, and all we’ve done is remove from them the weights and measures that we normally apply. The grand proportions have been there all along.
Dag Hammarskjold wrote, “In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses.”
So maybe the vow isn’t so big after all. Maybe it’s as simple as removing the weights and measures that we tend to apply. Maybe it’s achieved through very small acts. Small, quiet, unimportant acts like the act of meditation, or the act of listening. acts that are the very opposite of the busy, distracting, fast worlds of money and media which are constantly vying for and buying our attention.
I believe we can cultivate a taste for peace. By looking for that point of rest again and again, and finding the point of rest here and there, we become familiar with it. We get to know it. And it seems possible that we would soon prefer it. As Hammerskjold pointed out, amazing things are happening there. In my life what happens there is the infectious laugh of a six-year-old, the smell of a man’s worn shirt, the sweat on a cold glass of water, the purring breath of a sleeping baby, the traveling whiff of a passing cigar.
In seems possible that peace could fill us up, and in doing so could drive out sorrow and its residual cravings. Then one bread crumb, one baby breath, one dirty shirt at a time, in driving away our own distraction and discontentedness, we might find we are fulfilling the vow. Becoming more and more capable of driving away the sorrows of the world or something small like that.
1 Comment
November 2, 2007 at 6:45 am
A desire clubbed with ability to drive away the sorrows of other people in the world is a big thing.