Commitment to service projects for the marginalized and disadvantaged

The Zen Garland Order has as a Core Practice, Engaged Compassion, expressing our spiritual and organizational commitment to the socially engaged Buddhist movement brought alive in our lineage by Zen Master Bernie Glassman and carried on by Roshi Genki. Engaged Compassion refers to seeking practical ways to apply and implement the insights from various forms of Zen practice, realization and teachings to situations of social, political, environmental and economic suffering and injustice. Engaged Compassion seeks to apply Buddhist teachings in a more activist and social manner than has been traditional. Engaged Compassion aims to reduce social suffering and oppression through political and social reform.

Rev. Joanne Kyouji Cacciatore, one of our Zen Garland Order Priests has created The Selah Carefarm, an Engaged Compassion Program for the traumatically bereaved.
Read more about the Carefarm here…

Engaged Compassion expresses The Zen Garland Order’s ethical framework embodied in The Zen Garland Vows, an impetus of care and love toward all creation. We describe this impetus as “Reclaiming the World.” It requires that we manifest a Presence that actively engages suffering in the grainy particulars of interactive, co-creative existence we call the “Ever-Intimate (Shinzo)”

Zen, as part of Mahayana or Great Vehicle Buddhism, is devoted to the salvation, healing and liberation of all creation, including not only human beings, but animals, insects, valleys, mountains and rivers, Earth, galaxies and everything in the cosmos. Our ideal is the Bodhisattva, a personally enlightened being who commits their life to “hearing the cries of the world,” which means grounding their self in human suffering and working for its healing. The Bodhisattva raises Bodhicitta, the motivation and vow to work for the welfare of all creation. As an enlightened being, the Bodhisattva knows there are no “others.” All creation is our self. In the purity of a Bodhisattva’s spirit of service, there is no one serving, no one served, and no service.

Our beliefs about compassion and how to nurture and live a compassionate life begins by recognizing suffering as the ground of practice: loneliness, loss, sickness, inequity, injustice and misfortune. It’s easy and natural to want to avoid or escape these situations. Spiritual practice requires us to directly address suffering in a commitment to heal ourselves, others and the living ecological interactive, co-creative interconnections Buddhism refers to as Indra’s Net. We embrace our full human nature, our humanity, by embracing holistically our identity with the living cosmos, and by being active, conscious participants in the care for all creation.

Roshi Genki is a Dharma Successor of the late Zen Master Bernie Tetsugen Glassman, one of the most powerful, prolific, and inspirational forces in socially engaged Buddhism. He addressed the issues of suffering with personal intimacy, directness, and creativity. Facing the fact of great indifference to homelessness in America, he invented Street Retreats, taking people for three to five days to live on the street themselves and experience homelessness firsthand.  Facing issues of prejudice toward people with addictions, mental illness, and poverty, he created a business with open hiring, training a staff of the marginalized to run a bakery. When contemplating how difficult it was for people with AIDs to find or maintain housing, he worked with the town of Yonkers, NY to convert a nunnery into residences with an onsite medical clinic specializing in AIDs treatment. Here’s an example of Bernie working on a koan in his own words from his book, Bearing Witness:

“On January 18, 1994, I celebrated my fifty-fifth birthday by throwing myself a party on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. There, wrapped in a coat and blanket, I sat the entire day with one question in mind: What can I do about homelessness, AIDS, and violence in this country. Sometimes there were fifteen people at my party, other times as many as thirty. It lasted for five days….some of the coldest days in Washington, DC’s history. We included lawyers, corporate executives, actors, film producers, war veterans, writers, social activists, architects, street people, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, men, women, Africans, and Americans.”

The Zen Garland Order Vows embody the Great Bodhicitta Vow and delineate its meanings further. These vows are one of our seven Core Practices, ethical living, living from the perspective and reality of Oneness. The Vows are a shared set of commitments taken by all practitioners who become members of the Zen Garland Order.

“As we begin to wake up and realize that we are not separate from each other, nor from this wondrous earth, we realize that the ways we live together and relate to the earth need to be reconstructed too. That means not only social engagement as individuals helping other individuals, but finding ways to address the problematic economic and political structures that are deeply implicated in the eco-crisis and the social justice issues that confront us today. Ultimately, the paths of personal transformation and social transformation are not really separate from each other. Engagement in the world is how our individual awakening blossoms, and how contemplative practices such as meditation ground our activism, transforming it into a spiritual path.”

Zen Master David Loy, Ecodharma, p.5.

I take refuge in the Buddha, Oneness
I Take refuge in the Dharma, Diversity
I take refuge in the Sangha, Harmony

I vow to embrace each moment with Not-Knowing, the Practice of Presence and Service as a way of being.

I vow devotion to Zazen, to awakening and to embodying a field of enlightenment.

I vow to transform suffering and anger into wisdom and compassionate action.

I vow to speak from the heart, to listen wholeheartedly, and to seek the wisdom of council.

I vow to cultivate respect and dignity in all relationships.

I vow to use discernment from a perspective of unity and to nurture a culture of cooperation.

I vow to seek what is needed responsibly, to share generously, to work well with what I have, and to take only what is freely given.

I vow to promote solidarity and a just economic order.

I vow to care for the sacred elements – earth, water, air and fire, to help heal the infinite forms of life and energy that co-create our precious earth and universe.

I make these vows in oneness with the Zen Garland Community and cultivate its practices for the welfare of all creation.