I gave this teisho tonight at our Full Moon Zen regular weekly practice session.  You’ll find a recording of this talk after the text.

 

Vast is the robe of liberation,

A formless field of benefaction!

I wear the Tathāgatha’s teaching

Saving all sentient beings.

This chant is called the Verse of the Kesa. Kesa is the Japanese version of the Sanskrit word kāshāya, which means robe. Zen adepts through the centuries have chanted this verse each morning, whether individually or collectively, as they put on their robes before meditation. They balance them on their heads and let them drop into their hands near the end, just as I did now.

I do this every day before I sit. This rakusu I wear, which is ochre to signify that I’m a teacher, is a simplified version of the longer and more formal patched robe worn over the shoulder by a Buddhist monk or nun. I didn’t sew this one, but years ago I sewed the traditional black rakusu worn by a student after their Jukai ceremony, in which one formally receives and takes on the Buddhist precepts as a way of life.

Eihei Dōgen, who carried the Zen tradition from China to Japan early in the 13^th century, was moved to tears the first time he heard this chant and observed this practice while on retreat at a monastery in China.  He made a vow to himself at that moment:

However unsuited I may be, I will become an authentic holder of the buddha dharma . . . and with compassion show the buddha ancestors’ authentically transmitted dharma robes to those in my land.

Dōgen ultimately returned to Japan and fulfilled that vow.  Not only did he carry traditional Zen forms and practices from China to Japan—many of which you and I still uphold today—he also became a great religious innovator.  Whenever Zen migrates from one land to another, form one cultural context to another, new life is breathed into the tradition, just as the tradition breathes new life into that land and context.  This is happening now in the United States, and throughout the Western world, in these still relatively early days of Zen’s migration here.

Like Dōgen, I love this chant and practice. Well, most of it, anyway.

Vast is the robe of liberation,

A formless field of benefaction!

When I chant these words each morning, I remind myself that this is the garment I wear; the robe that envelops me, everywhere and always. This robe is a borderless, seamless field of benefaction—of goodness. At once, vast and mysterious and as concrete and visible as my tee shirt.

You and I also are that vastness and mystery, made concrete and visible. Each morning when I chant these words, I remind myself of this. Each day, if I consent and commit the way Dōgen did, I live more deeply and concretely into the mystery, and the mystery lives more deeply and concretely into me.

My life becomes more and more like that old Zen story about the monk walking through the mist.  When he leaves the meditation hall, his robe is dry.  At some point, it’s soaked through and through.  When is that point exactly?  Who really knows.  Just walk the path, and it’s happening.

I wear the Tathāgatha’s teaching

Tathātaga is a Sanskrit word the Indian sage Siddhartha Gotama, aka The Buddha, used to refer to himself.  It means “one who is thus gone” or “one who has thus come,” suggesting that he had seen into his true nature, beyond all dualities of coming and going, living and dying.  When I chant these words, I remind myself of my own buddha nature.  I also situate myself in the ancient, evolving Zen tradition.

To be honest, I don’t much like the last line in this particular translation of the chant:

Saving all sentient beings.

To my ears, this smacks of a sort of dualistic exclusivism or fundamentalism and of missionary zeal. On one reading of this line, and others like it in other Zen chants and verses, one is either saved or not, and it’s our job to save others once we’ve saved ourselves. Sure, there are more nuanced and contemporary ways this line can be spun; even so, it still grates on me a bit.

Salvation here means awakening; seeing our true nature.  This commitment to save other beings actually is viewed within the Mahayana strain of Buddhism, from which Zen sprouted, as an advance over the goal in the prior, and oldest strain of Buddhism, called Hinayana, where the focus was on personal salvation.  The Boddhisattva ideal arises with this new commitment.  A Boddhisattva vows not to transcend this realm of suffering until all sentient beings do so.

But what is a sentient being exactly?  Only humans, or also animal life?  What about plant life, and even seemingly inanimate things?  What about the biosphere and the universe as a whole?

What would it mean for a plant, or our whole biosphere, to wake up; to be saved?  Perhaps, especially now, waking up, salvation, must be as much a collective endeavor and experience as a personal one.  Perhaps it’s less about striving to escape one’s personal suffering and more about compassionately embracing our own and others’ creatureliness, and making this one life—yours and mine and the goldfish’s—as good and right as it can be.

There’s another traditional translation of the last line of the Verse of the Kesa that I like a bit better.  Rather than “saving all sentient beings,” it’s simply “to awaken countless beings.”

But maybe we need a new last line for this era, in this land and context.  As I was reading the David Loy book, A New Buddhist Path, that I quoted from in my last talk, a phrase that seems like a good candidate last line leapt off a page:

Working for the wellbeing of the whole.

I rather like it:

Vast is the robe of liberation,

A formless field of benefaction!

I wear the Tathāgatha’s teaching

Working for the wellbeing of the whole.

Zen master Keizan urges us not to “just long for the past,” but to “avail oneself of the present day to practice Zen.”  These words are so contemporary, yet Keizan lived over 700 years ago.  He studied and became a teacher at the great monastery Dōgen founded when he returned to Japan from China.  Keizan ultimately left it to make Zen more accessible and relevant to ordinary people like you and me, including women—which, sadly, was a rather radical proposition at that time.

I assembled a very bare bones chant book as we launched this small, informal group a short while ago.  Some people today find the traditional Zen chants and verses, many of which are still recited in the West in Pali, Sanskrit or Japanese, odd and off-putting.  Others, love and are very moved by chanting.  Our chants and verses are a rich part of the tradition.  I’ll progressively be adding more of them to our chant book and liturgy. 

As I do, I plan to revisit the traditional formulations of some them, perhaps taking liberties here and there; updating some of those formulations, mindful of Keizan’s encouragement.  I want to be careful and respectful as I do, however.  We are recipients and stewards of an ancient tradition that has served countless beings very well.  These beings developed these chants for us.  These chants are recognizable to people all over the world, much like a Catholic can attend mass anywhere and feel it’s familiar, even if she doesn’t speak the local language.  There’s something really beautiful and awe inspiring about this.

Our chants take many different forms and seem to have many different functions.  Invocations.  Thanksgiving.  Atonement.  Remembrance.  Dedication.  Honoring our ancestors in The Way.  Marking the opening or the close of a meal or a teacher’s talk.  Expressing our aspirations.  Though Zen is nontheistic, some chants bear a resemblance to petitionary prayer in theistic traditions, as in the version of the dedication chant we used tonight:

Whenever these devoted invocations are sent forth they are perceived and subtly answered.

Some chants, called dharanis, are incantations that are thought to bring good fortune, to help avert calamity, or whatever.  Most have their roots in the Vedic scriptures of Hinduism.  We can think of them as mantras.  Most have not been translated into English, in part because that would be difficult or impossible to do.  The literal meaning of the words is obscure, and their literal meaning is not really the point.  Our intention, in our hearts, and the experience of chanting them is the point.

Here’s one common dharani:

No mo san man da moto nan

oha ra chi koto sha sono nan

to ji to en gya gya gya ki gya ki un nun

shifu ra shifu ra hara shifu ra hara shifu ra

chishu sa chishu sa chishu ri chishu ri

soha ja soha ja sen chi gya

shiri ei somo ko

Whatever your present orientation to our chants, I encourage you to let them chant you. I’ll be chanting them in the traditional way, so just follow along. You’ll get the hang of it. Don’t let fear of making mistakes hinder you. In Zen, there is no such thing as a mistake, and everything is a mistake.

Why do we chant?  Why do we play bells and drums and wooden blocks?  Why do we balance our robes on our heads and let them fall to our hands?

In a famous koan, the great teacher Yunmen said, “The world is vast and wide.  For what reason do you put on your seven-piece robe at the sound of the bell?”

Today Yunmen might ask instead, “For what reason do you pull your jeans on in the morning?”

The answer for each of us is lurking in the question.

Perhaps you will also chant the Verse of the Kesa as you put on your robe—even if that means your sweatpants and hoodie—in the morning. If that seems like too much, perhaps you might at least call to mind and heart the spirit of this verse as you dress for the day. Maybe some of you will decide to sew your own rakusu and take up the Boddhisattva precepts one day. I’d be more than happy to support anyone who wishes to do that; to help you make it happen.