After fifty plus years of walking the Buddhist path of meditation, I can’t claim to have achieved true freedom. Buddhists talk alot about liberation. Are liberation and freedom synonymous terms, I wonder? Can one voluntarily relinquish ones freedom to do whatever one wishes, whenever one wishes? I think it a good thing to accept servanthood. To take vows. To walk a path -never taking vacations from or regressing- that one will never depart from this life, nor the next life nor the one after that, nor a hundred, a thousand, a million- but countless lives so long as one has lives, till the very end of Time itself. This would be the greatest of good fortunes- there can be nothing higher than to be an eternal servitor of the Dharma. Can anyone see this clearly, how great a blessing to be locked into a single path, a single goal for eternity? To choose to be good, to choose to be so bound? It would be wonderful to again encounter someone on this loftiest of paths. It is the special virtue of the Mahayana that it values this, that we take those daily Bodhisattva vows.
I bear on my forearms two white circular scars of the small fire that burnt down as I knelt reciting two sets of vows at the monastery as did the other monks in their times. At the time I took the Bodhisattva vows, there was one other monk present and the Preceptor was my teacher. The small heat hurt but not so much as my knees. I was shaking with pain.
I was always a shaky monk, even when not in pain, and wouldn't gain even a little steadiness until many many years afterward. But those scars are as fresh now as they were back then and my aspirations never wavered. They are there on my arms as I write this.
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I don't see this emphasis in the great Mediterranean monotheisms. Their path seems to end in a terminus in Heaven. There seems to be no vows to benefit others past this life. I do remember that Saint Thérèse of Lisieux reportedly said this:
"I want to spend my Heaven doing good on earth until the end of the world.”
This is as close to the Mahayana ideal that I've heard of outside Buddhism itself. I used to carry a little picture of her with that saying on it. I found it on a sidewalk. Sometime in the ensuing decades I lost it. But though lost it was not a loss if it found a new owner who could understand that great Intent, woven into space itself, that transcends the religions and philosophies.
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Well-said Michael and I like how you mention certain monotheist religions tend toward a path that "seems to end in a terminus in Heaven." I've found that as well having been raised in one the first two decades of my life. It never took though, thankfully.
The one practice I keep returning to day in and day out is a simple Seon/Chan/Zen. It's been the most beneficial and I like that freedom of a simple path. From the outside looking in, it appears restrictive, but from the inside looking out, the freedom is indescribably endless. "From birth to death it's only this!"
As I read up on her on the web, I found a french site that had this quote by Saint Thérèse:
"...I would like to be a missionary, not only for a few years, but I would like to have been so since the creation of the world and be so until the consumption of centuries… "
An astonishing perception.