This episode, “Precepts: Transcending Self-Attachment,” is the third installment of chapter five of my book-in-process, The Ten Fields of Zen: A Primer for Practitioners. In the first episode, I described the central role of Precepts in Zen and covered the Three Refuges, Three Pure Precepts, and two of the Grave Precepts. In the last episode, I talked about the Grave (serious, or weighty) Precepts 3-8. In this episode, I discuss Grave Precepts nine and ten, and talk about how we work with Precepts.
Read/listen to Part 2
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The Ten Grave Precepts, Continued…
Do not indulge anger – cultivate equanimity
Do not defame the Three Treasures – respect the Buddha, unfold the Dharma, nourish the Sangha
Working with the Precepts
The Ten Grave Precepts, Continued…
Continuing, then, with third Grave Precept (see Part 1 for an explanation of the literal, mental, and spiritual levels of each precept):
Do not indulge anger – cultivate equanimity
Literal Level: You break this precept when you express your anger through speech or action, even in small ways, without a very good reason. We use the term “indulge” because anger, in and of itself, is simply the mental, emotional, and physical experience you have when you perceive that someone or something is under threat (including you). The experience of anger is sometimes an entirely appropriate response, and speaking or acting from a place of anger may, on occasion, be what’s called for. However, you indulge anger when you allow it to intoxicate you or when you form a narrative of self-righteousness around it. When you indulge anger, you lose your ability to see a situation clearly. You tend to get fixated on a course of action and neglect to consider what would be the wisest thing to do from a bigger perspective. When you’re caught up in anger, you’re likely to feel entirely justified in your speech and actions and deny you’re “indulging” the feeling, so it’s important to learn to acknowledge when your anger is getting the better of you, especially when you’re feeling it on your own behalf.
Mental Level: It’s easy to break this precept at the mental level by brooding on anger and resentment, even if you refrain from speaking or acting out your feelings. The initial experience of anger is simply information: You perceived, correctly or incorrectly, that someone or something was under threat. If you manage to refrain from indulging your anger, you can take time to reflect on whether your perceptions were correct and think about the most compassionate but effective way to respond.[1] Indulging anger mentally means you skip this attempt to be objective and instead create and reinforce a narrative that makes someone else a villain and you either a victim or defender of righteousness. Such narratives are damaging and self-perpetuating and can consume a lifetime’s worth of energy.
Spiritual Level: It’s natural and healthy to experience the urge to protect ourselves and others from perceived threats. There’s probably something awry in our psyche if we are unable to feel anger. However, resentment nurtured and sustained is one of the primary manifestations of our delusion of a separate, inherent, enduring self-nature. Indulging anger is premised on the existence of such a self, and few things reinforce our belief in such a self as strongly as our experience of anger. The only way out of anger once it has us in its grasp is to let it go. To do so makes no sense to us at first, and actually seems dangerous. But when we manage to let go of anger, we let go of self-attachment at the same time.
Do not defame the Three Treasures – respect the Buddha, unfold the Dharma, nourish the Sangha
Literal Level: To break this precept means to speak ill of Buddha, Dharma, or Sangha. Few would think to disparage or criticize the Buddha – Shakyamuni – but you may be tempted to speak thus about the possibility of someone’s awakening (your own, or someone else’s). You may criticize Dharma teachings or blame them – or those who teach them – for your lack of spiritual progress. Most tempting of all is to speak ill of your fellow practitioners, your Sangha, or other Sanghas. Of course, there are times when compassionate critique is necessary, but saying anything negative about the Three Treasures breaks this precept so you should carefully examine your motivations before speaking.
Mental Level: Other precepts encourage you to refrain from dwelling unnecessarily on people’s mistakes or shortcomings (including your own), from speaking or acting in ways that bolster your sense of self at the expense of others, from expressing your anger through speech or action without a very good reason, and from brooding on anger and resentment. This precept specifically addresses your behavior with respect to the Three Treasures for two reasons.
First, once you have taken refuge in the Three Treasures, you will inevitably experience some level of dissatisfaction in your relationship with them. It can be tempting to conclude the teachings are incorrect and not all beings possess the possibility of awakening, or to blame your lack of satisfaction on teachers, teachings, fellow practitioners, or your Sangha. You should participate compassionately in the care and maintenance of the Three Treasures but blaming them for your dissatisfaction is a dead-end in practice.
Second, although the Three Treasures are inevitably encountered through imperfect human beings, communities, and institutions, you depend on them for your spiritual well-being and development. You can respect the Buddha, unfold the Dharma, and nourish the Sangha by cultivating gratitude for the Three Treasures, humility about your own opinions, patience with deficiencies, and determination to maintain a relationship with the Three Treasures – in one form or another – for the rest of your life.
Spiritual Level: Our Bodhicitta, Way-Seeking Mind, has led us to seek refuge in the Three Treasures. For many of us, embracing practice is our last resort for finding peace of mind and a meaningful way to live. We naturally have hopes about what Zen teachings, practices, and community can do for us, and expectations about the wisdom, compassion, and skillfulness we see manifested in them. Over time, however, we may find ourselves thinking we would be able to awaken and achieve ultimate contentment if only the teachings were presented differently, or the teacher was more skillful or enlightened, or our Sangha members weren’t so petty and fallible, or if we were able to go off and practice in that monastery. When we do this, we have begun to relate to the Three Treasures like every other potential source of happiness we have encountered in the world, all of which fail to provide us with lasting satisfaction. We blame our Dukkha on things outside of ourselves instead of looking within. While it is valuable to look for teachings that you resonate with, and teachers and community you trust, ultimately – if you want to experience the depth of Zen practice – you have to settle down, stop dwelling on deficiencies in the Three Treasures, and resolve the koan within.
Working with the Precepts
Within any social group, from a Zen community to a nation, there have to be rules governing behavior. If you participate in a Sangha, at least for the sake of others you’ll be expected to refrain from violence, stealing, manipulating or abusing people, lying, and harsh speech. Such expectations are about practical considerations for group harmony and preserving the Sangha treasure for all. You might be surprised to hear me say that expectations of respectful behavior within the Sangha are not about precept practice.
The precepts are not a list of rules you keep in order to be considered a Zen Buddhist or use to exclude people from that privileged category. Obviously, behaving respectfully and appropriately in Sangha is one way our precept practice manifests, but ultimately your relationship to the precepts is no one’s business but your own. To engage this practice fully, you cultivate increasing awareness of your behavior and its consequences, both internal and external. You pay close attention to the state of your mind and learn to be brutally honest with yourself about your intentions. You carefully examine your own conscience and ask yourself what it means to keep each precept in your unique body, mind, and life circumstances. Your way of keeping a precept may look different than another person’s, which is why you trust other practitioners to navigate their own precept practice. This is why we don’t demand that people who take the vow to keep the precepts be vegetarian or to abstain entirely from intoxicants.
Once you start earnestly practicing with the precepts, you will quickly learn that they rarely provide you with neat, easy answers when you need to make moral decisions. If you look closely at each situation, you will usually see many possibilities, and none of them are guaranteed to yield only good results. Your motives tend to be complex and multifaceted. Sometimes you need to break one precept in order to keep another. It’s a very rare situation where you can act with complete and utter confidence that you behaved in a way that honored the spirit of a precept perfectly.
Fortunately, you don’t need to keep the precepts perfectly in order to practice with them perfectly. You need to do your best to accord with the precepts, but what’s most important is to keep them present in your heart and mind, allowing them to serve as a karmic mirror. Changing your behavior is not simply an act of will; if it was, people would have very few problems! While will is sometimes involved as you choose to pay attention, or strive to make a different choice, it’s just as important to face up to your mistakes, realize your limitations, practice self-compassion, and continue to cultivate your Bodhicitta. Dismissing the importance of the precepts and making lots of excuses for your behavior misses the mark, but so does beating yourself up because you fall short of your aspirations. After all, the precepts describe the behavior of a perfect Buddha, and which of us is that?
The centrality of the precepts in our Zen practice is reflected in the fact that, if you want to formally make vows as a Zen Buddhist, you do so in a ceremony we call Jukai[i] that involves “receiving” the precepts. You vow to practice with each of the sixteen Bodhisattva precepts (the Three Refuges, the Three Pure Precepts, and the Ten Grave Precepts) to the best of your ability. It’s significant that to be officially recognized as an avowed Zen Buddhist within the Sangha, you don’t have to promise to sit zazen, or study the Dharma, or listen to teachers. All you have to do is express an intention to make the precepts an important part of your life.
It’s understood that the other aspects of Zen practice enhance your ability to live in accord with the precepts. All Fields of Zen Practice work together in synergy; your practice is the result of all of them combined, without you having to worry about exactly how that happens. In the case of the precepts, Zazen and Mindfulness allow you to pay more attention to your actions of body, speech, and mind. Your Bodhicitta is your aspiration to behave in a more Buddha-like way for the sake of self and others. As you closely observe the results of breaking the precepts versus the results of keeping them, your Dharma Study becomes personal as you experience firsthand that actions based on the delusion of a separate, enduring, independent self-nature cause suffering, suggesting your whole self-nature assumption is wrong. On the other hand, you experience peace and joy when acting generously, suggesting you might just have a Buddha-Nature after all!
Presumably, if you want to take the path of Zen you will avail yourself of the benefit of the other aspects of practice, but in the end what’s most important is your behavior. Deep meditative states and profound insights are useless if they don’t translate into wise, compassionate, and selfless action.
Read/listen to Part 2
See all Ten Fields of Zen Practice
[1] Speaking or acting out of anger in a moment of crisis, is, arguably, not “indulging” anger but making a quick judgment call that someone or something (including you) needs to be protected now.
[i] Receiving Jukai is an important step for many people, but it’s entirely optional, as is anything in Zen beyond treating others with basic respect.
