Tricycle | Awake in the World

Bodhin Kjolhede leads the January 2012 Tricycle Retreat, "The Precepts as Practice."

If you’re looking to rest your practice on anything (other than Nothing), you can’t do better than Buddhism’s three essentials: meditation (dhyana), wisdom (prajna), and morality (shila)—the three-legged stool of practice. The meditation component has always been well covered in Western Buddhism. Probably for most practitioners in the Americas and Europe it’s become all but synonymous with practice. And the promise of prajna, the transcendental wisdom revealed through awakening, has stirred the minds of practitioners ever since Shakyamuni looked up at the morning star from beneath the Bodhi tree. But upright conduct has never gotten equal attention in Western practice.

Ultimately, morality, wisdom, and meditation are equally vital aspects of the Way that mutually condition one another. Awakening reveals the no-thingness of things—that no thing is apart from all other things. To realize truly that there is only this nature, with no “other” outside us, is to naturally want to refrain from causing harm, just as we refrain from doing harm to one of our own limbs or eyes. The Ten Cardinal Precepts then articulate how to live up to this vision of things as they are—as one. Conversely, by upholding the precepts even before awakening, we are allowing the afflictions that obstruct that experience to loosen and dissolve. And since the precepts collectively may be seen as a description of enlightened conduct, in harmonizing with them we are actualizing our buddhanature.

Upholding the precepts can’t be called the sexiest of practices. Refraining from moral reflections—in beginners, especially—is often symptomatic of an immature practice driven by a grasping mind. But to minimize the importance of the precepts reveals a poor understanding of them.

To disregard the precepts may also suggest a reaction to the moralism at the heart of our American culture, with its deeply-rooted Puritanical strain. We are a people preoccupied with good and evil. Just ask our European friends, or count our TV shows that revolve around it, or notice the showy religiosity in our politics. But the vocabulary of good and evil is a cultural accretion we don’t need. The dharma offers a more basic judgment of conduct—whether it causes harm or not. That’s really the only measure we need. Moralistic concerns are superfluous.

Buddhist shila is not really a matter of being “good.” It’s not about being anything—any thing. That would imply a fixed self that either is something or isn’t something. Rather, sila rests on action. This is how Aristotle saw morality—as praxis, or doing, as distinguished from theory. The praxis of the precepts is the work of refraining from acting, speaking, or thinking in such a way as to cause harm. In Buddhist ethics, the language of good and bad just muddies the water.

Even understanding shila simply in terms of causation, or karma, without the freight of right and wrong, doesn’t make a moral dilemma easier to resolve. Each precept may be interpreted according to various degrees of strictness. For example, we may take the third of the Ten Cardinal Precepts, not to misuse sexuality, as prohibiting merely adultery and sexual intercourse with a mentally disabled or underage person, or, more strictly, as referring to any form of “using or abusing” one’s partner. Applying the strictest interpretation to the second precept, not to take what is not given, would have us breaking it when we make consumer choices that implicate us in the misappropriation of the world’s resources. Even talking around the truth may be seen, from the most stringent view, as a violation of the fourth precept, “I resolve not to lie.”

No realm of life is potentially more complex than that of ethics. It involves a consensus of prohibited conduct that may be universal and timeless (such as stealing), but otherwise is culturally constructed. In fact, the consensus even within one milieu can change over time. We see how ideas about harmful behavior have shifted with respect to marijuana use, same-sex marriage, and abortion. Moreover, the precepts in Mahayana Buddhism may be interpreted from different perspectives. An action that violates the wording of a precept may actually cause less suffering, overall, than it would when considered in a broader context. Thus, with respect to the first of the Ten Cardinal Precepts, “I resolve not to kill,” shooting a rabid dog could well be ethically more responsible than letting it run amok, if the choice was between the life of a child and that of the dog.

From a third perspective, that of essential nature, killing, death, and karma are altogether devoid of meaning. This is the realm of emptiness, which is unscored by any such discriminations even as it gives birth to them—indeed, to all phenomena. It was from this absolute level that Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, declared with respect to the first precept:

Self nature is inconceivably wondrous.
In the everlasting dharma,
Not giving rise to the notion of extinction
Is called the precept of refraining from taking life.

Although this world of emptiness informs everything, it is only one side of the twofold dharma. Coexistent with it is the conventional realm we’re all groping our way through together, every day. At this level, our choices in conduct do indeed matter, literally—they materialize in consequences. The precepts can’t spell out every answer for us, but with them we need not be left floundering with our subjective views; we don’t need to reinvent the dharma wheel. It’s still greed, anger, and delusion, in their myriad variants, that we’re working with, and in the precepts we’ve inherited a map to help us navigate this long and perilous waterway of practice. On this map you can almost see the glyphs of fearsome marine monsters next to the warning signs: “Don’t go here.” Or “Drift into these waters at your own peril.”

The essentially practical nature of shila is revealed in a common English translation of the original Pali wording. Each precept begins, “I undertake the training rule to abstain from….” No talk of principles here, much less of good and evil. In Buddhist texts, shila is often defined as “discipline”—and a discipline it surely is. In dharma practice, we’re swimming upstream against the current of habitual consciousness (to use a metaphor of the Buddha’s), and these forces of mental grasping and dispersion just keep coming. To hold our own against them requires discipline in body, speech, and mind, working—consciously and every day—with our egotistic impulses. This requires noticing those impulses as they arise— something easier said than done. But through daily meditation over long enough time we do manage to catch them sooner and sooner. Only then do we have a choice as to whether to act on the impulse or not.

Ah, but impulses can be so tantalizing! When temptation arises, how do you avoid breaking a precept—which by definition would invite suffering? A traditional Zen method would be to marshal one’s attention and simply cut through the images and thoughts that fuel such an impulse. Another classic approach would be to inquire deeply into the nature of the passion in order to see through it—“What is this, really?” But these and other established methods may not always work, especially in high-stakes situations involving one of the Grave Precepts (the first five of the Ten Cardinal Precepts).

Let’s suppose that a married practitioner was feeling increasingly attracted to another woman, and asked for advice on how to proceed—or not. He could go outside orthodox Zen methods and enlist his imagination, pausing to visualize the pain it would cause if the transgression came to light (as such things usually do). He could start with the hurt and anger in his wife’s face and body, and that of his children, and maybe of his parents and other family members, and the sleepless nights they would go through, and, when the news reached those in his sangha and workplace and neighborhood, the widespread disappointment in him that would unfold, and the pain that would roll back to his paramour, not to mention to the cheater himself.