Why I’m taking a new name

This evening I am to be lay-ordained in the Buddhist tradition. The ordination will be performed by Shinzen Young, and it will be held at the home monastery of my teacher, Soryu Forall. I do not yet know what name I will be given.

I am committing to live my life from now on in service of something greater than myself.

I have tried living life many other ways. I have tried living in service of being impressive, in service of not having regrets, in service of being approved of, in service of feeling good, in service of being safe. I’ve tried this for 33 years and it hasn’t worked. Perhaps the 34th year would have been the year where this approach started to work, but I doubt it. And I don’t plan to find out.

Instead I plan to find out what happens when I live in service of something greater than myself. This is a different kind of approach to those that I have tried before, and it will be a different kind of life. It is appropriate, then, that I will take on a new name. Though it is less than two hours until the ceremony, I do not yet know what my new name will be, because it will be chosen by my teacher.

I’m not planning to retreat to some mountain cave and meditate for the rest of my life. I plan to use my new name and new life to help the world out with the most pressing problems facing life on this planet. There are many of them, and I cannot solve any of them on my own. But I sure as heck can throw every damn thing I’ve got at them.

To do this, it’s important to train the mind. The mind sits at an important point of leverage within a life. At its most skillful, it can be a powerful tool for clear analysis and deft decision-making. At its most unskillful it can be a hindrance to all ethical action. Whether trained or untrained, the mind is not to be relied upon as the ultimate authority of anything. Neither is the body. But both the mind and the body must be trained in order to carve one’s life into the shape of a quick spear so that it cuts.

I once thought being happy and living an ethical life were opposed to one another. I said that happiness was overrated, that it was better to choose ethics over happiness. I said that I was afraid to move back to my home country because I might be overly happy and forget about living ethically. But true happiness comes directly from living an ethical life, from giving up on the things we think will bring impressiveness, approval, good feelings, safety, and turning our attention to the larger story of which we are a part. There is only a tradeoff between what is good for me and what is good for the world on a narrow view of goodness. On a broader view, what is truly good for me turns out to be to completely surrender my life in service of what is truly good for the world. And so behaving in a way that is truly good for the world turns out to be exactly the behavior that brings true happiness to me.

But it is not easy to adopt this behavior. I have spent 33 years practicing one approach to life, and that approach is deeply ingrained in my bones. Just as speaking sentences in English comes naturally, involuntarily, due to the many years that I have practiced it, so acting out of my own personal desires comes more easily than the alternative given the amount of time that I’ve spent practicing that approach to life. To overturn such ingrained habits, we simply practice that which we seek to become. If each day I add more hours of practicing living according to my vows than I add of practicing living according to my preferences, then eventually the latter will overwhelm the former, and will become the natural and involuntary truth of my life. It should now be clear why this takes a lot of time (because so much time has already been invested in the old way), and why it cannot be rushed (because no matter how hard we practice, we cannot add more than 24 hours to the tally during each day).

I will publicly commit to five ethical precepts and four Bodhisattva vows. The precepts are: not to kill, not to steal, not to commit sexual misconduct, not to speak falsely, and not to consume intoxicants.

I do not expect to simply succeed at holding to these ethical precepts. I expect to fall down. What I am committing to is that, when I do, I’ll get back up.

Now there is a simple way in which I’m certain to fail to follow these precepts. If I take a hike in the woods for a few hours I’m almost certain to kill some living being beneath my shoes. But what I mean is that I’m certain to actually break integrity with the spirit of the precept. Perhaps I’ll be driving through a wooded area one day, and, distracted by my phone, run my car into an animal crossing the road. Perhaps I’ll adopt a dog companion and forget that he’s in the car and leave him locked in there to suffocate in the sun. This would be terrible. What I’m committing to in this ceremony is to look squarely at my actions; to explain my actions to others; to stand behind my skillful actions; and to change my actions when they are unskillful.

The vows are: to liberate all beings, to end all greed and hate, to know the truth completely, and to fulfil the path of enlightenment. These are breathtaking, aren’t they?

I don’t have to get lay-ordained this afternoon. I could wait and give myself more time to think it over. I could wait until the conditions are better, until I’ve had time to decide exactly which name I should choose, until after this pandemic when perhaps some friends and family could travel to witness the ceremony. But hesitating at a moment like this comes with tremendous risk. I do not know how much longer I have in this life. Perhaps a handful of decades. Perhaps less. I am at a point of some clarity in my life, having had the blessed opportunity to have spent the first quarter of this year immersed in full-time training. I don’t know how long the conditions that permit this clarity will last. If I am to use my life to demonstrate my realization of these vows, it’s not wise to hesitate, especially not when it comes to an important decision like this.

As I look over my life, the best decision I made was to enter a PhD program. This decision opened me to a new and beautiful way of being, and introduced me to all the major positive forces that have shaped my life over the past decade. But although I thought carefully about which university to go to, and how to get in, I never really thought much about whether to enter a PhD program. It was obvious, and I was wise enough not to doubt it. At that time I acted without hesitation, and took a giant leap of faith. Now, 12 years later, I leap once more.