Tricycle | Awake in the World

This excerpt from "The Great Story," or Mahavastu—the Buddhist text that appeared about three hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha is part of a cohesive cosmogony that provides an account of the origins of precepts and their necessity. The story, told by Shakyamuni Buddha to his monks, describes the human compulsions toward greed, anger, and ignorance, the need for precepts to inhibit these tendencies, and the responsibility incumbent on a community—or state or nation—to elect a wise and noble leader. Theft, as described in the story, evolves from the idea of property, which is itself a consequence of a worldview grounded in duality. But this passage also suggests that while precepts can provide valuable and necessary resistance, they cannot in themselves return us to the "self-luminous state of joy," described here as our primordial condition. So while the election of a just ruler ends the chapter, it's not the end of the path of liberation. Reprinted from J. J. Jones' 1949 translation with permission from the Pali Text Society.