Creations are numberless, I vow to free them.

This is the first of the Great Vows for All. We will be chanting the vows in a little while, as we do after most sittings here at Still Mind Zendo.

When I first heard this vow, it sounded fantastical. What exactly are we promising here?

These vows are also known as the bodhisattva vows.

This “bodhisattva” is an interesting concept. In Mahayana Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a celestial being who postpones full awakening, Buddhahood, nirvana, out of compassion to stay in this world to free others from suffering.

The bodhisattva in the heart sutra, Avalokiteshvara, the one who hears the cries of the world, is said to have a body covered with a thousand arms and eyes. What a fantastic description.

Are we meant to take this literally? Is it a metaphor?

Not long after I joined Still Mind Zendo, my first teacher Roshi Gregory Abels asked me, “so, are you a Bodhisattva yet?”

What a question!

I don’t know about you, but I do not feel like a bodhisattva most of the time. All around me, humans and other sentient beings are still suffering, unliberated, unfree, unsaved, un-awakened.

And even after years of practice, all these hours on the meditation mat, I get irritable, angry, impatient.

I must make a great effort to find compassion, not only for others, but for myself.

That’s OK. It is the effort that matters.

In modern Zen, a bodhisattva is anyone on the path of awakening. A sincere practitioner. If you chant the vows, and you mean them, you are a bodhisattva.

That includes all of us in this room.

And it is probably best to treat the concept of the bodhisattva, and the vows, like koans, a tool for breaking through the logjams of the rational mind.

When I chant the bodhisattva vows, I let the syllables and sounds fill my entire body. I try not to dwell on the meaning.

When the chanting clicks, it feels as if the sangha has one voice. This is a full body sensation. I love how it rumbles: I VOWWWW.

It resonates, and the tension leaves my body.

How is it for you?

“Vow” is a deeply serious word. An oath. A promise. Ancient people made vows to their gods, on the graves of their loved ones, at the risk of death and great suffering, damnation.

Modern people make vows to their tribes, their partner, their countries, the constitution.

So, my fellow bodhisattvas, what are we promising in this first vow?

There are differing translations. I found a comparison online at the Village Zendo.

“Numberless beings, I vow to serve them.” That is what our White Plum asanga cousins chant at the Zen Center of Los Angeles.

“Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” That is the chant at Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York.

A few more…

“All beings, One Body, we vow to liberate.”

“However innumerable all beings are, I vow to enlighten them all.”

In Japanese, the chant is “Shujo muhen seigan do.”

That roughly translates as “all the many that have been born, I pledge to take over to the other shore.”

That last phrase corresponds to a Sanskrit word familiar to most of us. It is often translated as “the transcending perfection to reach the other shore.”

The Sanskrit word is paramita.

The paramitas are the six perfections practiced by bodhisattvas. We discussed them during Ango, our annual winter study period. Generosity, morality, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom.

To free all creations, we must embody the paramitas. We need to feel the Bodhisattva vows in our bones.

It is worth pointing out that the three vows are in some sense identical.

Freeing numberless creations.

Entering boundless dharma gates.

Embodying the awakened way.

These are all different ways to say the same thing.

But for this talk, I want to focus on the first vow, word by word.

Creations are numberless, I vow to free them.

I used to get hung up on the word “creation.” That was my Catholic upbringing, I guess. Creator was uncomfortably close to the idea of God in Christianity, something I did not believe in.

In Zen, the creator is Mind. My small-m mind. Your small-m mind. The great web of our minds, the capital M Mind.

“Creations” is a more expansive word than “sentient beings.” It includes all animals, plants, microbes, minerals, atoms, molecules, processes. The insentient as well as the sentient. It can also include products of the mind that we consider intangible: concepts, ideas, notions, labels, thoughts, daydreams, nightmares.

The next word in the vow is “are,” a form of the verb “to Be.”

This word is especially tricky. It gives birth to many delusions. You may have heard the saying, “the map is not the territory.” Words are maps. While they stand for phenomena in the world, they are not the phenomena. Nor are they permanent fixtures. They are smoke.

Our minds forget this.

An aside. The word “mind” itself is a map, a label, a creation. The word mind is not Mind. It is not the territory. That’s why our teachers warn us to be careful when we talk about it.

The next word in the vow is numberless.

The sutras talk about the myriad things, the 10,000 things. Countless. Infinite. The relative world.

The discriminating mind carves everything up and puts it in separate boxes. Here is a table. Some papers. There is the chanter. The timekeeper. There are our teachers. Behind me, an altar and a buddha statue. The floor below, the ceiling above, trees outside the window.

Clouds in the sky. Stars.

This floor is made up of individual planks of wood, the wood is made of molecules and atoms. A floor is not just wood. It is also varnish and piping and support beams, insulation and other building materials.

Floorness is not a simple matter when I examine it closely.

Outside, the streets are full of individual people, and their bodies are full of tissue and bone, and cells and microbes. All around them are invisible waves and satellite beams carrying data and words and our culture. We drift through dazzling smells and colors and textures and sounds.

This mind could spend every remaining minute of my life labeling and sub-labeling all of these things.

But this notion of “numberless creations” is itself an illusion.

This table is not separate from the floor. I am not separate from the table. We are not separate from each other. We are numberless, but we are oneness too, as all the chants say. The relative and the absolute fit together like a box and its lid. Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.

During Ango, I had an insight into the word numberless in one of our discussion circles, when we discussed the paramita of patience.

It came to me that were as many opportunities and causes of impatience as there are events, situations, other beings.

Impatience is numberless.

Getting stuck in traffic. Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. On hold with the insurance company. A stopped train in a subway tunnel. Waiting for election results. Waiting for the bell to end the sitting period.

But shanti, the paramita, the perfection, is not numberless. It is one thing.

One-ness.

Impatience itself is just one of the myriad forms of suffering, unease, dukkah.

In the sutra book we studied during ango, “Teachings of the Buddha,” the translator Glenn Wallis listed many other words for this lack of ease.

Faint unsettledness.

Irritation

Annoyance

Frustration

Disappointment

Dissatisfaction

Aggravation

Tension

Stress

Anxiety

Exasperation

Vexation

Distress

Desperation

Sorrow

Sadness

Misery

Agony

Anguish

I’ve experienced them all. How about you?

Suffering is numberless. Ease is oneness.

The next word in the first vow may be the trickiest.

It is a pronoun. I.

Who makes the vow? Is it Patrick, an aging skin bag on a mat in a room on 15th Street in New York City? Is it all of us, the sangha? Is it all the buddhas and bodhisattvas throughout space and time?

Here is what the sutras and koans say.

When Sakyamuni Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi tree, he said, “I, and the great earth and beings, simultaneously achieve the way.” The Buddha’s enlightenment is our enlightenment.

When he says I, he does not mean his small ego-mind I.

A Chinese master, Seng Chao, put it this way: “Heaven, earth and I are of the same root; the myriad things and I are one body.”

Here’s a simpler version: “Self and other are not two.”

The I in the vow contains all creations.

Usually, my small-m mind does not care for this. I am a self, damn it. An ego. An individual. I am special. Me, me, me. My mind wants to chain this body to this identity, to duality. But there are other times, usually late in the afternoon after hours or days of sitting on retreat, when the mind shuts up, for a moment or two, and I experience ease, relief. Is this the grace of the bodhisattva? I don’t know. It is probably best not to map that territory with words or labels. The mind can’t grasp it.

And now we have reached the last phrase of the first vow, the one where the work is.

I vow to free them.

I used to wonder, what does it mean to free all creations? Do we go up to the Bronx Zoo and unlock all the cages? Do we walk through subway cars telling people to wake up?

Do we sit zazen until our arms and legs fall off?

The Buddha laid it all out in the sutras, and every week our teachers have been talking about it.

The method is simple, but it is not easy. As we know, it starts here, in the body. Present-moment awareness focused on breathing.

The breath is a perfect manifestation of the reality described in the Bodhisattva vows. As Sensei Marisa said in a recent talk, we are already here. We just have to realize it. How?

The breath.

The average person breathes 12 to 20 times per minute. That's 8 to 9 million breaths per year. A breath is the last and first action of our lives. At age 63, I have taken more than half a billion. I will never know the final total, nor when it will come.

Breaths are literally countless. Boundless. Unsurpassable. Beginning meditators are told to count breaths. They rarely get past 2 or 3. There’s a lesson in that.

In the sutras, the Buddha itemized the many types of breath: long ones, short ones, heavy ones, fast ones, slow ones, full ones, ragged ones. Each breath is distinct, unique to its precise time and place, a culmination of everything that came before it.

My mind can’t even separate a breath into its parts. It is not just inhalation and exhalation, or the specific mix of gas molecules and particles. My nose, mouth, throat, lungs, blood vessels all play a role.

It is a process, indivisible, not separate from the world around it. It is the outside joining the inside and back again.

The breath is a perfect tool for freeing numberless creations. When I focus on breathing, my mind has trouble creating. It shuts up.

We have heard the instructions. Focus on your breath. When a creation arises in the mind, notice it. Allow it. Breathe.

Let the creation fall away. It’s free. So are you. For a little while. When a new creation arises, begin again.

I am constantly forgetting this. I need to be reminded.

It is why I come to the zendo, why I study koans, why I do daisan, why I do service, why I practice.

And it is why I am grateful for the Bodhisattva vows. They help me to remember. In a few moments, we will chant and remember together.

But first, let’s settle back into our mats and free some creations.

I gave a version of this talk on April, 22, 2025, at Still Mind Zendo (34 W. 15th St., near Union Square, Manhattan).