Honest Affirmations

 

10.22.2021 HONEST AFFIRMATIONS I drink a lot of tea. And over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly aware of the little tags on the teabags — many of them offer short quotes, or more often, some kind of affirmation. Here’s what I got this morning: “There is nothing like you, there was nothing like you, and there shall be nothing like you.” (Recent favorites include “The purpose of life is to enjoy every moment” and “Recognize that you are the truth.”) Most, it seems to me, are variations on You’re special, or, put more plainly, You’re at the center. I matter — or so my teabag tag tells me — more than anyone. My feelings, I’m told, are true. I appreciate encouragement as much as anyone. But, if I’m honest, I don’t think being told I’m special is what I need. Like a hit of sugar, these kinds of affirmations can give me a little lift, but then what? I think I’d be better off with a reminder of the purpose of my life — and it isn’t, I’m afraid, to enjoy every moment. What is the purpose, from a Buddhist perspective? Perhaps there’s more to it than this, but it seems a big part is simply to take responsibility—for my life, for my actions, for the welfare of others, for this moment. In my practice of Zen, I feel the weight of that when I recite the repentance verse: All my past and harmful karma / born from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion / through body, speech, and mind / I now fully avow. And I know the possibility of it when I renew the bodhisattva vows: Beings are countless; I vow to free them all / Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to put an end to them / Dharma gates are infinite; I vow to enter them / The awakened way is unsurpassable; I vow to embody it. If this is the responsibility we take on, how do we encourage ourselves to carry so much, to keep going on a path that, from the outside, looks like it promises failure? I think we need some honesty, not flattery. In “Maezumi’s Three Teachings,” Karen Maezen Miller shares three reminders that we could all benefit from — probably every day. In “Living a Life of Vow,” Zenkei Blanche Hartman outlines not just how vows operate in our lives but how they manifest as a formal practice, something we return to and renew in community. And in “I Kinda Vow,” we hear, in the honest and very funny voice of Genine Lentine, how it feels when we really need that pep talk but show up for the practice anyway. If I knew the magic words of encouragement for someone on this path, I’d write them here. I’d say them to myself. But I’m not sure they’d make a difference. When the dishes are dirty, we clean them; when we drop something, we pick it up. What’s the alternative? That’s not special, but I think it’s enough. —Koun Franz, Editor, Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Guide

Maezumi’s Three Teachings Karen Maezen Miller explores Maezumi’s Three Teachings. Wisdom teachings are fascinating things. They may not appear to be special. They are never complicated. They can sound so ordinary that we don’t even hear them or grant them consideration. But like seeds, they burrow into us and one day surface in full bloom. Only then are we ready to appreciate them. Here are Maezumi’s Three Teachings, which you’re not likely to find elsewhere.

Living a Life of Vow To live the life of a vow, says the late Zen teacher Blanche Hartman, is to be at home right here in this body. In our Soto Zen tradition we have a ceremony called tokudo in Japanese—”entering the Way,” or “attaining the Way.” The opening line of the invocation is, “In faith that we are Buddha, we enter Buddha’s Way.” The main elements of the ceremony are confession and repentance to purify the mind, followed by receiving the precepts and vowing “to follow this compassionate practice even after becoming Buddha.” So here we have both faith and vow, which, together with practice, I have found to be the three main supports of my life.

“I Kinda Vow” author Genine Lentine explains the background to her Half-Moon Ceremony Genine Lentine wrote a piece for the Winter 2011 issue of Buddhadharma about her murky relationship with the Buddhist precepts, creating a humorous ceremony of vows called the Half-Moon Ceremony. Here, she explains where this idea emerged. In my own relationship with the sixteen bodhisattva precepts, I have found this ceremony very helpful and anchoring; voicing something so clearly as “I vow not to harbor ill will” is very useful in routing out where some residue of offense might be lingering, and in that room with others, it becomes possible to experiment with releasing into that vow. My own relationship to the moon has long been one in which I’ve felt very attuned to its cycles, with my own patterns of accumulation and release paralleling lunar cycles. So of the many ceremonies that happen at SFZC where I live, I’ve felt particularly close to the Full Moon Ceremony.

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