I Promise to Fail — For Good.

What's the point of making a promise you're guaranteed to break?

The Four Great Vows of the Bodhisattva are exactly that — impossible by design. In this episode, Justin explores each of the four vows, what they actually mean in a Buddhist context, and why failing to keep them might be the most honest thing you can do. Along the way: compassion as practice rather than feeling, delusion as conditioning rather than character flaw, and why direction matters more than destination.

You will fail these vows. That's kind of the whole point.

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Transcript

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What would motivate you to make a promise that's impossible to keep? The four great vows of the Bodhisattva are exactly that kind of promise. Hello friends, I'm your host and Bodhisattva wannabe, Justin. Welcome back to Be Your Own Zen Master. We make promises all the time. When we're kids, we promise to behave, usually in exchange for a toy or a treat. With our jobs, we promise to do the work in exchange for a paycheck. We don't like something about our lives, we promise to change. We make resolutions. We join gyms. Most of the time, there's a reward at the end. Something that benefits us, or at least some sense of reciprocity. And sometimes we fail. Desire wins. Judgment lapses. Sometimes having ice cream seems like a hell of a lot of a better idea than going to the gym. But here's what I want to sit with today. When a promise is impossible to keep, when you can't complete the obligation, ever, by definition. What reward is there to be had? Why commit? Today I'd like to explore the four vows of the Bodhisattva, what they're about, what they mean to me personally, and how committing to the impossible might be its own reward. So here we go. Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. The Buddha way is unsurpassable. I vow to embody it. These are the four great vows of the Bodhisattva. Translations vary, but the intention is the same. And a quick note for anyone new to the tradition. The Bodhisattva is a central figure in Mahayana Buddhism. The branch most common in East Asia ends in practice. A Bodhisattva is someone who vows to attain enlightenment, not just for themselves, but for the benefit of all beings. These four vows are their defining commitment, their job description, if you will. They're not goals to complete. They are direction, a kind of North Star. The Bodhisattva envisions a world where beings are free from suffering, free from the conditions that create and sustain it. The mission is to live the Buddha way, to practice, to respond as skillfully as possible, and to support others in doing the same. The vows are impossible. That's what makes them useful. They don't shrink to fit our lives, we grow into them. Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them. Sentient beings suffer. Not only, life isn't just suffering, but enough so that it shapes things. Birth, aging, illness, loss, and then all the smaller, quieter dissatisfactions layered in between. The first vow helps us see beyond ourselves. It reminds us, it's not just me. And that can open the door to compassion, not as a feeling you wait for, but as something you actually practice. When someone is angry with us, we usually meet it with more anger, or we get defensive, or we shut down entirely. But if we can recognize, even sometimes, that what's coming at us might be a person suffering, something can shift. We may still feel it, we probably will, but maybe we don't have to add quite so much to it. And quote unquote saving a being doesn't have to mean fixing someone or solving their life. Sometimes it just means not making things worse. Sometimes it means listening, or pausing, or not saying the thing you really want to say. Lately, when I sit down and meditate, I've been silently repeating the vows, not in a formal way, just as a reminder, trying to burn them in. My hope, maybe a naive hope, is that the repetition turns into something like muscle memory, that the next time I'm caught off guard or pulled into an argument, something in me remembers to pause. And always, but sometimes. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. Delusions are the stories and assumptions that shape how we see, act, and react. They're not personal failures or character flaws, they're conditioning. Most of them were handed to us long before we had any say in the matter. We suffer when we can't see beyond them, and we cause suffering when we act from them. Ending delusion doesn't mean eliminating thought or belief, it means seeing more clearly, seeing what's there, where it came from, and having at least a little space between the trigger and the response. This is not easy. It requires a kind of honesty that can be uncomfortable. I used to be, or maybe technically still am, what some might call a rageaholic. For a long time, I had no idea. I thought my reactions were normal, or justified. It was what I grew up with, it felt familiar, safe even. I could get so consumed by anger that when it was over, I didn't really have a clear picture of what had just happened. Just the aftermath, guilt, and shame. I wish I could say there was a single moment where everything clicked and I just stopped, but it didn't happen like that. It's been layers, years of layers. One of the first cracks came when someone close to me told me that the way my father behaved was wrong. I didn't believe it at first, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks, just months before my oldest son was born. It didn't fix anything overnight, but it stuck. From there it's been repetition, seeing patterns, missing them, seeing them again later, realizing again that I'm doing the same thing I said I wouldn't do. My anger is a story tied together by many delusions. Your story might look completely different. Maybe it's the story you tell yourself about why you can't change, or why someone doesn't deserve your patience, or why things have to be a certain way. The content varies, the pattern is what matters. If there's a place to start, it might just be noticing that pattern, breaking down the story formula, and if you can't see it yourself, try listening when someone else points it out, even if that's the last thing you want to hear. Try not to jump straight into defense mode, which is easier said than done. Then sit with it, turn it over, talk it through with someone you trust, and then do it again. And if there's something causing real harm, please get help. There's no reason to try to muscle through that alone. Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. There's no limit to what can teach us, traffic, conversations, mistakes. A moment of beauty that catches you completely off guard. Anything can be a part of the path if we're paying attention. The spirit of this vow is don't close yourself off, stay open to possibilities, but experience actually land. Sit with it long enough to learn something, even if that something is small. And even when you think you've mastered something, the path has a way of showing you there's more, always more. That's not discouraging, that's the whole point. The Buddha way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it. The Buddha way is the path of practice. For bodhisattvas, this is often expressed through the six perfections, generosity, ethics, patience, diligence, concentration, and wisdom. Not steps to climb in sequence, but more like facets of a single stone. You work on all of them, all the time, and they inform each other. I'll come back to the six perfections in depth in a future episode, and the ethical framework alone, the precepts, could easily fill its own conversation. But for now, let me just say this. The perfections are less a checklist and more a way of orienting yourself. They ask, am I giving freely, or am I keeping score? Am I seeing clearly, or am I reacting? Am I showing up consistently, even when it's hard? Those are the kinds of questions the fourth vow lives in. I'll give you one honest example from my own practice. I have a hard time being generous with time, I might even be greedy with it. My wife says I have a bad relationship with time, just probably fair. I get frustrated when it feels like it's being wasted or taken, but maybe the problem is thinking time belongs to me in the first place. That's a generosity problem, it's also a patience problem, and underneath both of those, it's probably a concentration problem, because the steadier mind doesn't grip time quite so tightly. See how they connect? And then, slowly, out of all of it, the giving, the showing up, the sitting still long enough to actually see what's happening. Something like wisdom starts to emerge. For me, it's been slow. More like an insect trying to fly through a window, just hitting the same spot over and over again, until eventually I notice the window is open a few inches over. A vow isn't a performance, it's something you live with. In formal Zen community, reciting the Four Great Bowls is part of something shared. There's an accountability built into that. Other people are saying it alongside you, and that means something. On your own, it's a little quieter than that. You're often the only witness. So the question becomes personal. What would it actually look like to live this way? Not in a monastery. In your actual life, your commute, your family, your work, your bad days, and how do you stay committed, patient with yourself, even knowing you're going to fall short? That tension, I think, is where the practice actually lives. Before I wrap up, I want to come back to the vows one more time. Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. The Buddha way is unsurpassable. I vow to embody it. So what motivates us to commit to something impossible? Maybe it's this. When a vow can't be completed, it can't be abandoned either. There's no finish line, no point where you've done enough and can stop. The practice just continues. And in that continuity, in the returning, the failing, the returning again, something changes, not all at once, in layers. That might be the reward, not the completion, the direction. Oh, one more thing. Sometimes the traditional wording doesn't feel right for me. I feel a little phony. That might point to something I need to let go of, or it might just be a matter of translation. Either way, I'll sometimes adjust the language as long as the meaning is still there. You can do the same. Put the vow in your own words. Say it. Repeat it. Try to live it. There's a long path ahead. You will fail these vows, repeatedly. And somehow, that's still the practice. Well, that wraps up another episode. It's been a long time coming, and I'm glad it's here. If you think someone you know might find this helpful, please consider sharing. If you'd like to leave feedback, you can find me at Justin.tension at byozm.blog, or leave a review wherever you listen. As always, all this podcast costs is your time, and I thank you for spending it here. Until next time, keep practicing and take care. Hey, everybody, how you doing? I don't normally do this kind of thing, but just felt like going off script a little bit. Maybe giving some shout outs to some people, some places, some things, you know, first things first. We're about, oh, what are we, a week after Mother's Day. So shout out to moms everywhere. Wouldn't be here without you. Really appreciate it. Thanks, mom. And then shout out to some downloads, like, honestly, I don't know where they come from. I don't know how people find it, but it's pretty amazing to me that just organically get some downloads, and I wouldn't be able to, I wouldn't keep doing this without them. So big shout out to everybody who's downloaded. And if I, if I skip over your city, I'm sorry. It's probably because I can't pronounce it and I'm, I'm dumb and I don't know where it is located, but here we go with a few of them. Thank you for joining me, wow, you guys, number one city on downloads, whatever you're doing, DACA. Oh, Park Illinois. Shout out to South Lebanon, Ohio, Auckland, New Zealand, Kokomo, Indiana, Ashburn, Virginia, Mason, Ohio, Munich, Bavaria, Naples, Florida, Los Angeles, California, Miami Beach, Florida, St. Louis, Missouri, Apple Valley, Minnesota, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Council Bluffs, Iowa, Las Vegas, Nevada, Melbourne, Australia, Dayton, Ohio, Hayward, California, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Ryan Pennsylvania, New York, New York, Middlesbrough, Middlesbrough, Gresham, Oregon, Newark, New Jersey, Boardman, Oregon, Westchester, Ohio, Seattle, Washington, Matsuyama, Ehime, where is that? Blackwood, New Jersey, Queens, New York, Bengaluru, Karnataka, where is that? I don't know. Federal Way, Washington, where is that? Cincinnati, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, Columbus, Ohio, Middleburg, Pumalanga, where the hell is that? Lovely, Ohio, got a bunch of Ohio's here. Louisville, Kentucky, Sydney, New South Wales, Buffalo, New York, Ottawa, Ontario, Wellington, Wellington region, Baghdad, Henley, what? Really, thanks a lot everybody, very much appreciated.