Why We Take Our Vows

staying big no matter what

Dear dharma friends,

This is a mama post. All the kids turn out okay.

I was at my son’s swim lesson. About 40 children at an indoor pool were put in different learning groups. The instructors are teenagers, and there is a grown-up head coach. There was lot of shouting. The sound echoed in the splashy atrium. The kids in my son’s group put on fins for the first time. They looked excited as they jumped into the water. One teenager got in the water at one end of the pool, and the other stood over the lane on the other side. My son’s group looked down the 25 meters. They were going to move from swimming the widths, to the full length for the first time. They started to paddle.

My son wasn’t moving much. One swift kick of a fin and you usually accelerate. I got down close to the water. He wasn’t really kicking his legs. It was more like a half-hearted doggie paddle, focusing on his hands. I shouted his name and mimed kicking. He kicked, and burst through the water. As he swam each length, his confidence built. He got faster each time and he knew it. By the end of the lesson, he was smiling underwater, crinkling his eyes, and water came into his goggles.

The teenagers in charge of our group seemed distracted. One was looking at the kids and turning to talk to his buddy as the buddy circled the pool deck. The instructor out of the water kept looking up to the ceiling. I moved to the other side of the pool. There was an elevated bleacher I hadn’t known was there. What looked to be the school’s swim team was stretching in their swimsuits.

In the water, one of the kids doing what my son had been doing in the beginning. Not really kicking, just paddling his hands. He was slowing down. He got slower. The head coach was behind a desk, behind a laptop, laughing into his phone.

I had a mental moment.

Kick off your shoes, jump in the water.

Clothes? In clothes.

This could be embarrassing.

Who are his caregivers?

He’s not my problem.

The kid was starting to sink. I jumped off the bench. The kid reached out his hands, gripped the side of the pool, and scooted himself along.

His laps were done that way for the rest of the class.

Interference

About a month ago at my gym, I was in the steam room when the heat got too much for me. I couldn’t see my hand at the end of my arm. I stumbled to the door. I remembered that there was a woman still inside, at the far other end of the steam room.

“Can I turn off the steam?” I shouted.

No reply.

“DO YOU MIND IF I TURN OFF THE STEAM?”

No reply.

The woman had collapsed. I jumped out of the room, hit the OFF button, propped the door open, and shouted for help.

The front desk attendant and another woman ran over. We ran into the steam, still unable to see. The steam cleared. The woman sat at the back of the room, upright on a bench. “Is there a problem?” she said as she took her earbuds out.

I am sure I was bright red when I said, “Wow, I’m sorry.” I got dressed and hurried away.

What Do We Owe Each Other?

The swim lesson has stayed with me. The steam room has stayed with me. The question that comes to mind is: what, if anything, we owe each other?

It was embarrassing for me to make that mistake in the steam room. If I had jumped into the pool to come up to the kid’s parents sitting on the side, glancing up from their twinned phones, saying “Excuse me what are you doing?” maybe my son and I would not have gone back to the lessons. I don’t want to be an over-reactive Good Samaritan. I don’t want to be an annoying, jumpy mom. And yet.

Despite cinematic depictions, I suspect that kids do not drown while shouting and thrashing. My guess is that they get tired and stop moving. They’re going to have a little rest. By the time they have gulped water and started to panic, they’re too far underwater.

If my kid was slowing, sinking, I would want to trust that any of the fully-dressed strangers around the pool would jump in the water, even if it turned out that my son was playing some silly game. Water is scary. My reverence for the ocean is entwined with my respect for her power. I’m sorry to scare everyone reading this here. The question, to me, is how far our care is supposed to reach. Outside our body? Outside our family? Outside our race?

In some part of the world, the dominant culture cherishes the children, who thrive in the love beam of strangers on the bus, a teenager walking by with a soccer ball, the other moms in the café. That is not broadly true of the society we’ve built in the US. In our hyper-individualized culture, I could imagine getting yelled at by a parent for touching their kid, or presuming to interfere with a lesson. What if we look absurd? What if we are accused of interfering? What if we are—gulp—sued?

We may have gotten to this place incrementally, with good intentions or not, but we have ended up in a culture where we override our natural human instinct to feel responsible for one another’s wellbeing. Instead there is a hesitation that has seeped inside us like noxious gas. We default to Not My Business. We would rather hide from the potential of social awkwardness in our phones.

The Buddhist Part

Does this have anything to do with Buddhism? I think so.

There’s a special moment when you can become a Buddhist. It’s when we take our Buddhist vows. To be clear, we don’t covert anyone. At heart, we are a religion without boundaries, a group for all living beings, and the more we think ourselves special, the less we embody the dharma.

Buddhism is an opt-in situation, and even if you are native Buddhist, as I am, I recommend taking your vows again as an adult. This is stepping into the dharma consciously, when you have done the homework of finding a teacher, a sangha, and a lineage that suits you. Then it is a fully adult choice to decide that this is the spiritual path for you, and not default inherit a religious culture from your parents and community. That is beautiful, and, that keeps a person in the position of a child.

There is a ceremony when you can become Buddhist, if you choose to.

In brief, first you meditate on the mind of disenchantment. You are turning away from our samsaric refuges in material culture, in sensory pleasures, in chasing the illusions of career, ambition, success, to become homeless within Samsara. This is an intense sensation to sit with.

Then you take refuge in the Buddha as the potential for awakening within you; the dharma as the instructions—with special gratitude for not having to bumble through and figure this out yourself! and the sangha, the enlightened community. It may be everyone who has walked with you on the path, the people witnessing your vows in that moment, and even your healed ancestors.

My beautiful teacher Anam Thubten says that a person can give themselves the Buddhist vows. That looks like: you ask the mountains to be witness, the trees, the ocean. There is a splendor to that. If you choose to take your vows from a living teacher, especially one holding a living lineage, it has a different kind of majesty. By taking vows from a person, you are joining your life, across time, human to human, back 2,600 years.

Breathe in that perspective! Sit with the awe and humility of that simple fact. Teacher to student, practitioner to sincere practitioner, we have been asking the question of how should a person be for a long time.

This is a path that everyone is welcome to join. Women, when that was controversial. Poor people, when it was radical. Many Dalits, formerly known as Untouchables, are Buddhist. This may have more to do with the fact that Dalits were welcome to join than because Buddhism has anything superior to offer.

Once ordained in the lineage of the Buddha Shakyamuni, there is a symbolic haircut. We give something to get something.

And then we take our bodhisattva’s vows. That is what I want to focus on. We vow not to run away from the sorrows of Samsara. We vow to take our struggles as the path. We vow to serve all sentient beings without bias. The most important promise is ahimsa, non-violence. We try (and fail, and try again) to have non-violent intention and action, as much as possible.

Why We Take Our Vows

The moment we take the Bodhisattva’s vows, we make a promise to our biggest self. We cannot wait for perfect circumstances. We are ready right now to embody our biggest self.

I cry when I give this part of the talk. I find it wildly hopeful, heart-burstingly immense, that people line up burning with impatience to be of service.

As with all vows, they hold us to our commitments even when it’s inconvenient. Even when no one is looking. Even when we may look a fool.

There is no perfect moment to jump in the water. We will never have all the data that we are not going to make a mistake and get laughed at. If we are sincere in our Bodhisattva’s vows, we are okay sacrificing the flimsy edifice of that risk, because we are dialed into our heart.

Most of us have been trained to succeed within Maslow’s hierarchy. We are automatically committed to our own safety and security. Even if we get to ascend, we can become obsessed with our enviability, which is the realm of the Jealous Gods (to mix metaphors). Even if we study Dzogchen, the highest of the nine yanas (vehicles) of the Nyingma school, it can be done for an especially shiny spiritual badge, which means we are still within the narrow self, the ego.

The heart aches in this world of suffering. It longs to be of service. We take our vows because we are committed to letting ourselves fall open into an ocean of love and compassion and equanimity.

It is a nice feeling to go in this direction, can I tell you? It is not hard at all. We let go. It is a transcendent, profound, sacred letting go.

We say, I’m going to promise myself that I will not abide in narrow limits. I will not play the small game. This means that even if you’re in the most competitive meeting room invented, among people who are like: I’m achieving. Are you achieving? You don’t look like you’re achieving. You are going to notice that internally and go: Ah. Unfortunately and fortunately, I’ve taken my Bodhisattva vows, and I am here to express something different than the hyper-capitalist mode that we seem to be living in.

Pillars of Safety

Some of us have had encounters with people who are Bodhisattvas. They are usually inspiring. In my mind James Baldwin was a bodhisattva, Lucille Clifton was a bodhisattva, and Audre Lorde. I have read much of their writing. Their immense, heart-forward racial consciousness has changed me.

The bodhisattvas in your life now and from the past may be why you’re here. They are not only Buddhists. You can usually feel when you’re near a bodhisattva. Particularly if you were a child and they were your teacher, your social worker, your caseworker, your neighbor— there’s a feeling of safety, a melting-with-love around people like this. These people may have been the pillars of safety in your world. Sometimes those people have been a refuge for us in ways that have been startling because we didn’t do anything to earn that loving treatment.

We weren’t a “good child,” or we weren’t their child, or we weren’t smart, beautiful or good at sports. Still we were treated like the most cherished human being. That’s how you know you were in the orbit of a Bodhisattva.

Everyone needs to feel safe. Everyone needs to feel loved. The world is not prioritizing that sort of human development right now. When we are adults, the biggest thing we can do is to commit to being a pillar of safety for others. In fact that is the mature, evolved, sacred thing to do. To be safe for everything alive—human, animal, trees, fish, all of life.

Once we take our vows, we say: I am here to be a conscious member of Samsara.

I am here to be conscious.

I wish you luck on the path. It is a good one! 🙏🏼

Sunisa

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