The Nature of the Precepts
An
introduction to Zen ethics
By
Robert Aitken
FEB 19, 2009
The precepts of Zen Buddhism derive from the rules that governed the Sangha, or community of monks and nuns who gathered about
Shakyamuni Buddha. As the religion of Buddhism developed through the Mahayana
schools, the meaning of sangha broadened to include all beings, not just monks
and nuns, and not just human beings. Community continues to be a treasure of
the religion today, and the precepts continue to be a guide. My purpose in this
book is to clarify them for Western students of Buddhism as a way to help make
Buddhism a daily practice.
Without the precepts as guidelines, Zen Buddhism tends to
become a hobby, made to fit the needs of the ego. Selflessness, as taught in
the Zen center, conflicts with the indulgence that is encouraged by society.
The student is drawn back and forth, from outside to within the Zen center,
tending to use the center as a sanctuary from the difficulties experienced in
the world. In my view, the true Zen Buddhist center is not a mere sanctuary,
but a source from which ethically motivated people move outward to engage in
the larger community. There are different sets of precepts, depending on the
teachings of the various schools of Buddhism. In the Harada-Yasutani line of
Zen, which derives from the Soto school, the “Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts” are
studied and followed. These begin with the “Three Vows of Refuge”:
I take refuge
in the Buddha;
I take refuge in the Dharma;
I take refuge in the Sangha.
Buddha, Dharma,
and Sangha can be understood here to mean realization, truth, and harmony.
These Three Vows of Refuge are central to the ceremony of initiation to
Buddhism in all of its schools.
The way of
applying these vows in daily life is presented in “The Three Pure Precepts,”
which derive from a gatha (didactic verse) in
the Dhammapada and
other early Buddhist books:
Renounce
all evil;
practice all good;
keep your mind pure—
thus all the Buddhas taught.1
In Mahayana
Buddhism, these lines underwent a change reflecting a shift from the
ideal of personal perfection to the ideal of oneness with all beings. The last
line was dropped, and the third rewritten:
Renounce all
evil;
practice all good;
save the many beings.
These simple
moral injunctions are then explicated in detail in “The Ten Grave Precepts,”
“Not Killing, Not Stealing, Not Misusing Sex,” and so on, which are discussed
in the next ten chapters.
These sixteen
Bodhisattva precepts are accepted by the Zen student in the ceremony called Jukai (“Receiving
the Precepts”), in which the student acknowledges the guidance of the Buddha.
They are studied privately with the roshi, the teacher, but are not taken up in teisho (Dharma
talks), or discussed at any length in Zen commentaries.
I
think the reason for this esotericism is the fear of misunderstanding. When
Bodhidharma says that in self-nature there is no thought of killing, as he does
in his comment on the First Grave Precept, this was his way of saving all
beings. When Dogen Kigen Zenji says that you should forget yourself, as he does
throughout his writing, this was his way of teaching openness to the mind of
the universe. However, it seems that teachers worry that “no thought of
killing” and “forgetting the self’ could be misunderstood to mean that one has
license to do anything, so long as one does it forgetfully.
I agree that
the pure words of Bodhidharma and Dogen Zenjican be misunderstood, but for this
very reason I think it is the responsibility of Zen teachers to interpret them
correctly. Takuan Soho Zenji fails to live up to this responsibility, it seems
to me, in his instructions to a samurai:
The uplifted
sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. It is like a flash of
lightning. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, as is
the one who wields the sword. . .
Do
not get your mind stopped with the sword you raise; forget about what you are
doing, and strike the enemy. Do not keep your mind on the person before you.
They are all of emptiness, but beware of your mind being caught in emptiness.2
The Devil
quotes scripture, and Mara, the incarnation of
ignorance, can quote the Abhidharma. The fallacy of
the Way of the Samurai is similar to the fallacy of the Code of the Crusader.
Both distort what should be a universal view into an argument for partisan
warfare. The catholic charity of the Holy See did not include people it called
pagans. The vow of Takuan Zenji to save all beings did not encompass the one he
called the enemy.3
This is very
different from the celebrated koan of Nanch’uan killing the cat:
The Priest Nan-ch’uan
found monks of the Eastern and Western halls arguing about a cat. He held up
the cat and said, “Everyone! If you can say something, I will spare this cat.
If you can’t say anything, I will cut off its head.” No one could say anything,
so Nansen cut the cat into two.4
Like all koans,
this is a folk story, expressive of essential nature as it shows up in a
particular setting. The people who object to its violence are those who refuse
to read fairy tales to their children. Fairy tales have an inner teaching which
children grasp intuitively, and koans are windows onto spiritual knowledge.
Fairy tales do not teach people to grind up bones of Englishmen to make bread,
and koans do not instruct us to go around killing pets.
Spiritual
knowledge is a powerful tool. Certain teachings of Zen Buddhism and certain
elements of its practice can be abstracted and used for secular purposes, some
of them benign, such as achievement in sports; some nefarious, such as murder
for hire. The Buddha Dharma with its integration of wisdom and compassion must
be taught in its fullness. Otherwise its parts can be poison when they are
misused.
“Buddha Dharma”
means here “Buddhist doctrine,” but “Dharma” has a broader meaning than
“doctrine,” and indeed it carries with it an entire culture of meaning.
Misunderstanding of the precepts begins with misunderstanding of the Dharma,
and likewise clear insight into the Dharma opens the way to upright practice.
First of all,
the Dharma is the mind, not merely the brain, or the human spirit. “Mind” with
a capital letter, if you like. It is vast and fathomless, pure and clear,
altogether empty, and charged with possibilities. It is the unknown, the
unnameable, from which and as which all beings come forth.
Second, these
beings that come forth also are the Dharma. People are beings, and so are
animals and plants, so are stones and clouds, so are postulations and images
that appear in dreams. The Dharma is phenomena and the world of phenomena.
Third, the
Dharma is the interaction of phenomena and the law of that interaction.
“Dharma” and its translations mean “law” in all languages of Buddhist lineage,
Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese. The Dharma is the law of the universe, a law
that may be expressed simply: “One thing depends upon another.” Cause leads to
effect, which in turn is cause leading to effect, in an infinite, dynamic web
of endless dimensions. The operation of this law is called “karma.”
Many people
feel there is something mechanical in the karmic interpretation of the Dharma.
“Cause and effect,” however dynamic, can imply something blind, so it is
important to understand that “affinity” is another meaning of karma. When a man
and woman in Japan meet and fall in love, commonly they will say to each other,
“We must have known each other in previous lives.” Western couples may not say
such a thing, but they will feel this same sense of affinity. What we in the
West attribute to coincidence, the Asians attribute to affinity. “Mysterious
karma” is an expression you will commonly hear.
Affinity and
coincidence are surface manifestations of the organic nature of the universe,
in which nothing occurs independently or from a specific set of causes, but
rather everything is intimately related to everything else, and things happen
by the tendencies of the whole in the context of particular circumstances. The
Law of Karma expresses the fact that the entire universe is in equilibrium, as
Marco Pallis has said.5
This intimate
interconnection is found in nature by biologists and physicists today as it was
once found by the Buddhist geniuses who composed Mahayana texts, particularly
the Prajnaparamita (Perfection
of Wisdom) and the Huayen (Garland of Flowers) sutras. These are
compendiums of religious literature that offer important tools for
understanding the Dharma, and thus understanding the precepts.
The Heart
Sutra, which condenses the Prajnaparamita into just a
couple of pages, begins with the words:
Avalokitesvara, doing deep prajnaparamita,
clearly saw that all five skandhas are empty,
transforming suffering and distress.6
Avalokiteshvara
is the Bodhisattva of Mercy, who by his or her very name expresses the fact
that the truth not merely sets you free, it also brings you into compassion
with others. In the Far East, the name is translated in two ways, “The One Who
Perceives the [Essential] Self at Rest,” and “The One Who Perceives the Sounds
of the World.” In Japanese these names are Kanjizai and Kanzeon respectively.
Kanjizai, the
one who perceives the self at rest, clearly sees that the skandhas, phenomena
and our perceptions of them, are all without substance. This is the truth that
liberates and transforms. Kanzeon, the one who perceives the sounds of the
world in this setting of empty infinity, is totally free of self-preoccupation,
and so is tuned to the suffering other creatures. Kanjizai and Kanzeon are the
same Bodhisattva of Mercy.
“Bodhisattva”
is a compound Sanskrit word that means “enlightenment-being.” There are three
implications of the term: a being who is enlightened, a being who is on the
path of enlightenment, and one who enlightens beings. The whole of Mahayana
metaphysics is encapsulated in this triple archetype. Avalokiteshvara is the
Buddha from the beginning and also is on the path to realizing that fact.
Moreover, this self-realization is not separate from the Tao (“the Way”) of
saving others. For you and me, this means that saving others is saving
ourselves, and saving ourselves is realizing what has always been true. As
disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha, we exemplify these three meanings. Senzaki
Nyogen
Sensei used to
begin his talks by saying, “Bodhisattvas,” as another speaker in his time would
have said, “Ladies and Gentlemen.”
Learning to
accept the role of the Bodhisattva is the nature of Buddhist practice.
Avalokiteshvara is not just a figure on the altar. He or she is sitting on your
chair as you read this. When you accept your merciful and compassionate tasks
in a modest spirit, you walk the path of the Buddha. When the members of the
Zen Buddhist center act together as Bodhisattvas, they generate great power for
social change—this is the sangha as the Buddha intended it to be.
The Hua-yen Sutra
refines our understanding of the Bodhisattva role in presenting the doctrine of
interpenetration: that I and all beings perfectly reflect and indeed are all
people, animals, plants, and so on. The metaphor is the “Net of Indra,” a model
of the universe in which each point of the net is a jewel that perfectly
reflects all other jewels. This model is made intimate in Zen study, beginning
with our examination of the Buddha’s own experience on seeing the Morning Star,
when he exclaimed, “I and all beings have at this moment attained the way.”7
You are at ease
with yourself when Kanjizai sits on your cushions—at ease with the world when
Kanzeon listens through the hairs of your ears. You are open to the song of the
thrush and to the curse of the harlot—like Blake, who knew intimately the
interpenetration of things:
I wander thro’
each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of
every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
How the
Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appals;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro’
midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.8
We are all of
us interrelated—not just people, but animals too, and stones, clouds, trees.
And, as Blake wrote so passionately, what a mess we have made of the precious
net of relationships. We rationalize ourselves into insensitivity about people,
animals, and plants, forging manacles of the mind, confining ourselves to fixed
concepts of I and you, we and it, birth and death, being and time. This is
suffering and distress. But if you can see that all phenomena are transparent,
ephemeral, and indeed altogether void, then the thrush will sing in your heart,
and you can suffer with the prostitute.
Experiencing
emptiness is also experiencing peace, and the potential of peace is its
unfolding as harmony among all people, animals, plants, and things. The
precepts formulate this harmony, showing how the absence of killing and
stealing is the very condition of mercy and charity.
This
is the Middle Way of Mahayana Buddhism. It is unself-conscious, and so avoids
perfectionism. It is unselfish, and so avoids hedonism. Perfection is the trap
of literal attachment to concepts. A priest from Southeast Asia explained to us
at Koko An, many years ago, that his practice consisted solely of reciting his
precepts, hundreds and hundreds of them. To make his trip to the United States,
he had to receive special dispensation in order to handle money and talk to
women. Surely this was a case of perfectionism.
Hedonism, on
the other hand, is the trap of ego-indulgence that will not permit any kind of
censor, overt or internal, to interfere with self-gratification. The sociopath,
guided only by strategy to get his or her own way, is the extreme model of such
a person. Certain walks of life are full of sociopaths, but all of us can
relate to that condition. Notice how often you manipulate other people. Where
is your compassion?
In the study of
the precepts, compassion is seen to have two aspects, benevolence and
reverence. Benevolence, when stripped of its patronizing connotations, is
simply our love for those who need our love. Reverence, when stripped of its
passive connotations, is simply our love for those who express their love to
us.
The model of
benevolence would be the love of parent toward child, and the model of reverence
would be the love of child toward parent. However, a child may feel benevolence
toward parents, and parents reverence toward children. Between husband and
wife, or friend and friend, these models of compassion are always in flux,
sometimes mixed, sometimes exchanged.
Seeing
compassion in this detail enables us to understand love as it is, the
expression of deepest consciousness directed in an appropriate manner. Wu-men
uses the expression, “The sword that kills; the sword that gives life,”9 in describing the
compassionate action of a great teacher. On the one hand there is love that
says, “Don’t do that!” And on the other hand, there is the love that says, “Do
as you think best.” It is the same love, now “killing” and now “giving life.”
To one friend we may say, “That’s fine.” To another we may say, “That won’t
do.” The two actions involved might be quite similar, but in our wisdom perhaps
we can discern when to wield the negative, and when the positive.
Without this
single, realized mind, corruption can appear. I am thinking of a teacher from
India who is currently very popular. I know nothing about him except his many
books. His writings sparkle with genuine insight. Yet something is awry. There
are sordid patches of anti-Semitism and sexism. Moreover, he does not seem to
caution his students about cause and effect in daily life. What went wrong
here? I think he chose a short cut to teaching. My impression is that he
underwent a genuine religious experience, but missed taking the vital,
step-by-step training which in Zen Buddhist tradition comes after realization.
Chao-chou trained for over sixty years before he began to teach—a sobering
example for us all. The religious path begins again with an experience of
insight, and we must train diligently thereafter to become mature.
One of my
students taught me the Latin maxim, In corruptio optima pessima, “In
corruption, the best becomes the worst.” For the teacher of religious practice,
the opportunity to exploit students increases with his or her charisma and
power of expression. Students become more and more openand trusting. The fall
of such a teacher is thus a catastrophe that can bring social and psychological
breakdown in the sangha.
This is not
only a violation of common decency but also of the world view that emerges from
deepest experience. You and I come forth as possibilities of essential nature,
alone and independent as stars, yet reflecting and being reflected by all
things. My life and yours are the unfolding realization of total aloneness and
total intimacy. The self is completely autonomous, yet exists only in resonance
with all other selves.
Yun-men said,
“Medicine and sickness mutually correspond. The whole universe is medicine.
What is the self?” I know of no koan that points more directly to the Net of
Indra. Yun-men is engaged in the unfolding of universal realization, showing
the interchange of self and other as a process of universal health. To see this
clearly, you must come to answer Yun-men’s question, “What is the self?”10
Do you say
there is no such thing? Who is saying that, after all! How do you account for
the individuality of your manner, the uniqueness of your face? The sixteen
Bodhisattva precepts bring Yun-men’s question into focus and give it context,
the universe and its phenomenon. But while the crackerbarrel philosopher keeps
context outside, Yun-men is not such a fellow.
Still, cultural attitudes must be given their due. As Western Buddhists,
we are also Judeo-Christian in outlook, perhaps without knowing it. Inevitably
we take the precepts differently, just as the Japanese rook them differently
when they received them from China, and the Chinese differently when
Bodhidharma appeared. Where we would say a person is alcoholic, the Japanese
will say, “He likes saké very much.” The addiction is the same, the suffering
is the same, and life is cut short in the same way. But the precept about
substance-abuse will naturally be applied one way by Japanese, and another by
Americans.
It is also important to trace changes in Western society coward
traditional matters over the past twenty years. The Western Zen student is
usually particularly sensitive to these changes. Christian and Judaic teachings
may seem thin, and nineteenth-century ideals that led people so proudly to
celebrate Independence Day and to cheer the Stars and Stripes have all but died
out.
I don’t dream about the President any more, and when I talk to my
friends, I find they don’t either. The Great Leader is a hollow man, the Law of
the Market cannot prove itself, and the Nation State mocks its own values.
This loss of old concepts and images gives us unprecedented freedom to
make use of fundamental virtues, “grandmother wisdom” of conservation,
proportion, and decency, to seek the source of rest and peace that has no East
or West. It is not possible to identify this source specifically in words–the
Zen teacher Seung Sahn calls it the “Don’t-Know Mind.” He and I and all people
who write and speak about Buddhism use Buddhist words and personages to
identify that place, yet such presentations continually fall in upon themselves
and disappear. We take our inspiration from the Diamond Sutra and
other sutras of the Prajnaparamita tradition, which stress the importance of
not clinging to concepts, even of Buddhahood.11
Wu-tsu said, “Shakyamuni and Maitreya are servants of another. I want to
ask you, ‘Who is that other?’”12 After you examine yourself for a response to this question, you
might want the Buddha and his colleagues to stay around and lend a hand.
Perhaps they can inspire your dreams, and their words express your deepest
aspirations; but if they are true servants, they will vanish any time they get
in the way.
We need archetypes, as our dreams tell us, to inspire our lives. As lay
people together, we do not have the model of a priest as a leader, but we
follow in the footsteps of a few great lay personages from Vimalakirti to our
own Yamada Roshi, who manifest and maintain the Dharma while nurturing a
family.
The sixteen Bodhisattva precepts, too, are archetypes, “skillful means”
for us to use in guiding our engagement with the world. They are not
commandments engraved in stone, but expressions of inspiration written in
something more fluid than water. Relative and absolute are altogether blended.
Comments on the precepts by Bodhidharma and Dogen Zenji are studied as koans,
but our everyday life is a great, multifaceted koan that we resolve at every
moment, and yet never completely resolve.
NOTES
1See Irving
Babbitt, trans., The Dhammapada (New York: New Directions,
1965), p. 30.
2D. T.
Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1959),
pp. 114-115.
3Takuan Zenji
echoes Krishna’s advice to Arjuna:
These bodies are perishable, but the dwellers in these
Bodies are eternal, indestructible, and impenetrable.
Therefore fight, O descendant of Bharata!
He who considers this (Self) as a slayer or he who thinks
That this (Self) is slain, neither of these knows the
Truth. For It does not slay, nor is It slain.
“Bhagavad Gita,” II, 17-19
Lin Yutang, ed., The Wisdom of China and India (New York:
Random House, 1942), p. 62.
The separation of the absolute from the relative and the treatment of the
absolute as something impenetrable may be good Hinduism, but it is not the
teaching of the Buddha, for whom absolute and relative were inseparable except
when necessary to highlight them as aspects of a unified reality.
4See Koun
Yamada, Gateless Gate (Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1979), p. 76.
5Marco
Pallis, A Buddhist Spectrum (New York: The Seabury Press,
1981), p. 10.
6Robert
Aitken, Taking the Path of Zen (San Francisco: Nort Point Press, 1982), p. 110.
7Koun Yamada
and Robert Aitken, trans. Denkoroku, mimeo., Diamond Sangha, Honolulu &
Haiku, Hawaii, Case 1.
8William
Blake, “London,” Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed.
Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Library, 1961), p. 75.
9Yamada, Gateless
Gate, p. 64.
10See J. C.
and Thomas Cleary, The Blue Cliff Record, 3 vols. (Boulder and London:
Shambhala, 1977), III p. 559.
11See Edward
Conze, trans., Buddhist Wisdom Books (London: Allen and Unwin,
1975), pp. 17-74; and D. T. Suzuki, trans., Manual of Zen
Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 38-72.
12Comments
attributed to Bodhidharma and comments by Dogen Zenji, which appear in each of
my essays on the Ten Grave Precepts were translated by Yamada Koun Roshi and
myself from Goi, Sanki, Sanju, Jujukinkai Dokugo (Soliloquy on the Five
Degrees, the Three Refuges, the Three Pure Precepts, and the Ten Grave
Precepts) by Yasutani Hakuun Roshi (Tokyo: Sanbokoryukai, 1962), pp.
x–xvi; 71–97. These comments were also translated by Maezumi Taizan Roshi in
the pamphlet Mindless Flower, published many years ago by the
Zen Center of Los Angeles and now out of print. I have used Maezumi Roshi’s
work as a reference in revising the translations that Yamada Roshi and I made
originally. The comments attributed to Bodhidharma are believed by modern
scholars to have been written by Hui-ssu (ancestor of the T’ien T’ai school of
Buddhism) and adopted later by Zen teachers. I have retained the legend that
Bodhidharma wrote them; after all Bodhidharma himself is something of a legend.
Legends fuel our practice. My reference is a personal letter from the Hui-ssu
scholar Dan Stevenson dated August 22, 1983.
From The Mind of Clover, 1984, by Robert Aitken
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