By: Roshi Joan Halifax
The traditional third vow speaks of dharma gates, hōmon in Japanese, the countless entrances to the teaching: dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. Our rendering compresses and universalizes: reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it. Again an interpretive move, and again deliberate. A “dharma gate” can sound like specialized religious equipment, something found only inside a monastery or a sutra. But the actual teaching of the boundless gates is that everything is an entrance. A mustard seed is a dharma gate. A broom is a dharma gate. The rice field robe, sewn stitch by stitch, is a dharma gate; so is the kitchen at four in the morning, and the mountain trail, and the headline you cannot bear to read. To say “reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it” is only to say what the boundless gates were always saying: the whole of reality is the curriculum, and the practice is to show up for it.
And to perceive reality, to see things as they are, is, in this tradition, not preparation for liberation. It is liberation. Cessation is not a departure to somewhere else; it is the ending of obscuration, the fire of confusion going out because nothing is left to feed it. That is why this vow answers the truth of cessation: the gate, entered all the way, is the arrival. I have seen that arrival at bedsides more than once, the moment a dying person stops refusing what is here, and the whole room softens, as if the walls themselves had been holding their breath.
Notice what this vow asks. Not to believe something. Not to attain something. To perceive, the humblest of verbs, and the hardest. Zhiyi would recognize this vow as his home territory, because the great subject of the Mohe Zhiguan (Larger Treatise on Cessation and Calming) is precisely the training of perception: zhi, the calming of the mind’s turbulence, and guan, the clear seeing that becomes possible on a calmed surface. Stopping and seeing. His insistence, radical in his century and radical in ours, was that reality does not need to be reached. It is not elsewhere, behind the appearances, waiting at the top of a long ascent. His teaching that the entirety of reality is present in a single moment of thought is among the most breathtaking claims in Buddhist philosophy, and it means the third vow is not a travel itinerary. Everything is already here. What is missing is not reality but perception.
And perception is a moral act. Most of the harm in the world is not done by people who perceive clearly and choose evil; it is done by people who have arranged not to perceive.
We look away from the dying, from the imprisoned, from the poisoned river, from the war on our screens that we have learned to scroll past because perceiving would obligate us. Bearing witness, the second of Bernie’s Three Tenets, is nothing other than this third vow in action: the discipline of keeping one’s eyes open in precisely the places where every instinct says to close them. Reality is boundless, which means there is no edge past which I am excused from looking, not Auschwitz, not Los Alamos, not Gaza, not the bed where my father fought his ship’s last battle. That is a terrifying vow, taken seriously. It is also the beginning of every compassionate act I have ever witnessed, because no one has ever responded to suffering they had successfully avoided seeing.
Note: Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD is the founder and Guiding Teacher at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received dharma transmission from Bernie Glassman and among other teachers previously studied with Seung Sahn, who was Just Show Up Zen Center founder Ava Stanton’s root dharma teacher.