Making Vows

 Master Sheng Yen has always stressed the importance of making vows, and I haven't really reflected on it for a while...but certainly one of the most impactful expressions he has made is, "it's better to break a vow than to have no vow to break." Although Master Sheng Yen was addressing this expression in a Buddhist context, I tend to believe that it might just as well apply to any moral perspective. Without a kind of promise to fulfill a value or standard, life can easily devolve into a kind of numbing or filling the void.
     Does this mean, however, that one should feel eternally bad when they break a vow? And another related question is, does breaking a vow mean that a person was not sincere enough to keep the vow? In today's very cynical world, there is a tendency to think that because people break their promises or ideals, then therefore ideals in general are either very fake or very unattainable. In fact, however, it's not difficult to understand why people don't keep vows. For one, it's not always easy to discern where to put one's energies, and thus it can be quite easy to make mistakes when trying to actualize one's values or ideal sense of being. The other reason is that we don't always live in social worlds that welcome the personal values we uphold, and there might even be a tendency to downplay those ideals in favor of more expedient or less mindful ways of being. And finally, there may be so many competing aims within us, that it can become very difficult to discern which parts will win out in the 'battle for the mind.'
    Does all this mean, however , that one should throw in the towel and never make moral vows? No, it doesn't mean that: it simply means that one can learn to distinguish very clearly, from one instant to the next, between the ideal and one's present situation, with all its internal and external demands. When a person is able to clearly hold these two things in dynamic tension (ideals and present reality), one is in a better position to choose wholesome actions.
    If a person tries to stifle their experiences in favour of an unrealized, abstract principle, there always ends up this kind of inner resistance. In a sense, it's like two parts of the brain aren't even talking to each other, and they need to start talking for the whole brain to work. Maybe this requires  a literal conversation: checking in with the parts of me that are not 'with' the ideals I uphold, and seeing exactly why there may be a reluctance or a resistance there. This kind of delicate curiosity might also be the key to doing peace work, but the problem is that I am still making assumptions about what is 'good' and 'not so good' about me, and this could also be due to ideals which have nothing to do with my value as a person.