The Zen Garland Vows

Practicing the Zen Garland Order Vows means to embody Zen ethics as a way to salvation, healing, and liberation. The Vows are an essential element in the practice path of all Buddhist traditions: precepts, meditation, and wisdom. Taking the Zen Garland Vows is the commitment to enter the Zen Buddhist path and the initiation into the Zen Garland Order practice community.

This empowerment is open to those with over a year of regular practice under the guidance of a Zen Garland Order Teacher. Prior Buddhist, and specifically Zen, practice experience, can be considered as contributing to this requirement. The practitioner request of their teacher to take and receive the Zen Garland Order Vows.

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.