Beings are countless; I vow to liberate us all. Sufferings are inexhaustible; I vow to cut through them all. Enlightened teachings are boundless; I vow to learn them all. The Awakened Way is unsurpassable; I vow to become it fully.
These are the Four Bodhisattva Vows that are at the center of Zen Buddhism and many other Buddhist schools. You might ask, “What is a bodhisattva?” Well, a bodhisattva starts as a person who takes up these vows. If you find them inspiring and want to use them to guide your intentions and actions, then congratulations! You have become a budding bodhisattva!
Club Bodhisattva is a fine company to join, as its countless members range from ordinary beings who take up these vows like you and me to some highly skilled individuals. Have you heard about Guanyin, aka Avalokiteshvara, also known as the goddess of compassion or Manjushree, the lord of wisdom? They are both bodhisattvas. In a nutshell, we are all good ones in the Bodhisattva Club: we take up these ancient vows to face the sufferings of the world head-on and take all living beings to awaken with us.
That’s right: these vows of compassion and awakening are ancient. They are gifted to us when the majority of humanity, let alone other living beings, were slaves eking out a subsistent existence and when humans had no clue how to treat horrid conditions like smallpox or bubonic plague. The world has its problems now, big problems, as it did then. It has never been perfect. Yet that didn’t stop our ancestors from taking up these powerfully inspiring Bodhisattva Vows to imagine a future of universal enlightenment and work towards it with their human strength. If they could do it then, we can do it now.