While reciting the Verse of the Robe, I balance my rokusu on my head. This seems profoundly silly. The rokusu is a bib-like garment sewn according to the same pattern as the larger patchwork robe worn by Buddhist monks. It signifies lay ordination, and I worked with my teacher, Dainai Applebaum, over several months, cutting a large piece of fabric into small rectangles and sewing them back together in a pattern representing a rice paddy. This also seems profoundly silly.
The profound silliness of this involved sitting and making thousands of stitches, ensuring the overlaps were in the correct orientation to allow the water to flow through the rice paddy. While doing this, we discussed the vows taken as part of lay ordination.
The silliness of "profoundly silly" seems obvious—or perhaps not; I'll think about that later. The profound part is that the rokusu reminds us that a fellow living two and a half millennia ago had such excellent ideas about how we might live satisfying lives. Miraculously, these ideas were passed on by word of mouth, then later documented, discussed, debated, and elaborated in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, English, and numerous other languages; and somehow, they still seem helpful and true.
After reciting the Verse of the Robe, there is the option to make prostrations in honor of this miraculous process, to show honor to our ancestors who carried forward this wisdom, with its many mistakes, blunders, and the general fact that words fail us, and we fail ourselves. I, however, at my current age and stage of life, find great joy in getting down on the floor and then getting back up again.
That is profoundly silly.