Practicing Benefical Actions

In the section of Instructions for the Cook that we’re studying now for the online practice period, Dogen says, “Taking the backward step of transforming the self is the way to bring ease to the community” (Leighton and Okumura translation).

This comment has a number of angles. One is foreshadow for several stories that Dogen then tells about his encounters with tenzos who took radical responsibility for their service. That’s coming up next week.

For now, after contemplating those we serve, we’re practicing precise giving – just the right amount, no more, no less, in the spirit of bringing ease to our community by taking the backward step ourselves.

Another dimension of this work, especially in the context of the womb of the sage (see previous post), is practicing the second of the Three Collective Pure Precepts:

With purity of heart, vowing to practice noninjury.
With purity of heart, vowing to practice beneficial actions.
With purity of heart, vowing to free all sentient beings.

In Asanga’s Chapter on Ethics, he explains about this precept,

The bodhisattva, subsequent to undertaking the ethics of vow, for the sake of great awakening accumulates with body and speech anything that is wholesome, all of which is called, briefly, the ethics of collecting wholesome factors (p. 49).

Asanga and the Tsong-kha-pa commentary have a great deal to say about this tender and heartfelt aspect of our practice. The paradoxical but intuitively right-on main idea is that serving, giving and rejoicing in the virtues of others is the way of collecting the factors necessary for our own great awakening with everyone. I’ve excerpted a bit of that here:

The bodhisattva who is based upon
and maintaining ethics applies hearing,
contemplation, cultivation of calm and insight,
and delights in solitude.
The bodhisattva respectfully addresses
teachers from time to time,
prostrating, rising promptly, and joining palms.

The bodhisattva serves the sick and out of compassion nursing their illnesses; giving a “Well done!” to what has been well spoken; assigning genuine praise

to persons endowed with good qualities.

The bodhisattva generates a satisfaction
from the bottom of her/his heart
at all the merit of all living beings in infinity,
appreciating it and describing it in words.

The bodhisattva dedicates everything
wholesome done with body, speech, and mind,
and all that is yet to do,
to supreme, right and full awakening.

The bodhisattva remains vigilant,
guarding the physical and verbal bases of training
with mindfulness and awareness;
guarding the sense gates,
aware of moderation in food.

The bodhisattva applies wakefulness
in the earlier and later parts of the night.

The bodhisattva recognizes her/his own mistakes
and looks at her/his faults; cognized and seen,
they will be relinquished. And any mistake is confessed as a lapse to the buddhas, bodhisattvas, and co-religionists.

Ethics that procures, preserves,
and increases wholesome factors such as these,
are known as the bodhisattva’s ethics
of collecting wholesome factors.