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| Practicing the Precepts... "The Precepts are so fundamentally and eternally pure and spotless that you could not fully transmit their greatness if you painted them across the endless sky. They are so perfect that if the entire universe crumbled into powder, these supreme Precepts would remain indestructible." ~ Venerable Song-Chol As Venerable Master Hsing Yun points out, we might consider three aspects to practicing the precepts: form, practice, and spirit. Form means grasping the idea. This whole chapter has been about the precepts' form. But once you understand the words, you must put them into practice. Then you'll see the inner spirit of the precepts, and can internalize them for yourself. People often take refuge in only those precepts with which they're comfortable, on a one-by-one basis. This is in accord with the Buddhist tenet of weighing everything against your own life experience. Use your intuition. Listen within. And, anyway, to observe just one precept deeply is to ultimately observe all the others, anyway. They're deeply intertwined: lying to one's self (denial) and addiction, addiction and sexual abuse, sexual abuse and violence, violence and greed, and so on. To practice all the precepts might seem to require monasticism. Yet you can follow them and still carry on with regular, rent-paying daily life. That seeming impossibility, however, is important to note. It's an aspect of another Buddhist tenet in which we're constantly asked us to consider the seemingly impossible ... a snowball of purity in a blazing furnace ... or the sound of one hand. A zen approach recognizes three levels to the |
| precepts. The first level is straightforward: Don't do harmful things, such as killing, for example. The second level asks us to recognize that we're killing all the time (crushing microbes, quenching flames, eating vegetables, and so on. Being aware of this keeps us from being too self-righteous.) The third level asks us to recognize the impossibility of killing. Matter is never created nor destroyed. Destroy something here, and it pops up in another form elsewhere. This three-fold approach applies for all the precepts. "To live by the precepts is to travel the Way of unity and harmony in which the road is smooth, the obstructions few, and the scenery strikingly beautiful. To transgress the precepts is to take a side road that appears interesting but which soon turns bumpy, becomes monotonous, and ends in the dead-end of regret and apprehension." ~ Philip Kapleau Roshi The Precepts as a Mindfulness Meditation... In my own experience, the precepts reinforce my mindfulness, and my mindfulness illuminates my understanding of the precepts. They coexist beautifully. Within your ordinary mind is Buddha mind, as you discover when you do one thing at a time, mindfully. This takes discipline. The precepts cultivate conditions to further your goal. It's not an imposition from the outside but rather a means of realizing that no one owns your mind but you, an opportunity of learning how to live that freedom. "Establishing a virtuous and harmonious relationship to the world brings ease and lightness to the heart and steadfast clarity to the mind. A foundation of virtue brings great happiness and liberation in itself and is the precondition for wise meditation. With it we can be conscious and not waste the extraordinary opportunity of a human birth, the opportunity to grow in compassion and true understanding in our life." ~ Jack Kornfield Building upon an insight meditation exercise taught by American vipassana teacher Jack Kornfield, I'd like to invite you to make this Precept Mindfulness Month. (Actually, at least five weeks, one for each precept.) For one week, just notice the influence of the first precept in your life. Vow to bring no harm to any living creature through word, deed, or thought. Yourself included. Notice all the living beings in your world you might normally ignore. Weeds poking up through pavement. Bugs. Birds. Cultivate a sense of care and reverence for them. Houseplants and weeds are buddhas, too. Stones are, too. Next week, observe the material things in your daily life, including money. How do you handle the objects that cross your path ~ yours and others? Do you recycle? Do you waste water in the shower? Are you energy efficient? Are you tempted by what's not yours? And you might make this week one in which to practice random acts of spontaneous kindness. Act on your friendly, benevolent impulses. At the end of the week, measure your wealth in non-material terms. How many sunsets or dawns did you watch? How many times did you play with kids? During Week Three, notice how often sex arises in your consciousness. Each time, ask yourself what's it associated with. Power? Loneliness? Compassion? Stress? Self-esteem? Pressure? Pleasure? You might be surprised. You can extend this into an additional week of observing your sensuality, sensing your senses, and seeing what pulls you in. Yet another week could be devoted to relationships. Do you view others as objects? Where do you withhold, where do you yield? Where do you respond as an equal? Next, devote a week to deep listening and loving speech. Listening, see if you can completely give yourself over to it. Do you listen with an open mind, an open heart? Are you judging? ... rehearsing what you'll say? ... trying to show what a good listener you are? Speaking, listen to yourself. Do you see and mean each word? Try envisioning every noun, verb, and adjective in your mind's eye. Note how often you make frivolous, cynical and negative comments. And how often do you speak of things about which you really don't know first-hand? Last, spend one week observing what you consume. Do you consume only things which promote health? When you have an urge to consume a little dose of poison, see what motivates your impulse. Refrain from smoking, drinking, or using any drugs, including caffeine. Notice your addictions and observe what beliefs they satisfy. Remember: Habits are habit-forming. Personalizing the Precepts... If you're already practicing with a Sangha, then you already have its set of precepts to live by. You can also adapt and personalize the precepts. The extended Sangha of Thich Nhat Hanh, for example, call the precepts "mindfulness trainings," a means of keeping "our appointment with life." Here's a set created by author Celeste West: It is my sincere intention to align and harmonize myself with the Blessing Way via these Five Cardinal Precepts: As a lover of the Way, I do not harm, but cherish all life. As a lover of the Way, I do not take what is not given or waste resources. I create abundance and fearless generosity. As a lover of the Way, touching the world, I do not misuse sensuality. I consecrate my senses in wonder and honesty and joy. As a lover of the Way, I do not use false or harsh language. I choose clear and respectful words ~ or maintain deep-listening silence. As a lover of the Way, I neither cloud this precious consciousness nor poison this precious body. I nurture my body with wholesome food, exercise, and rest. I cultivate my mind/heart/spirit in lucid relaxation time and in wisdom/kindness action. The Least You Need to Know... Along with wisdom and meditation, the precepts are an essential aspect of the Buddha's way. Precepts are ethical guidelines for conscious conduct along the Path. A skillful means of correcting behavior, they aren't constraints but rather a structure for living in harmony. To not harm implies reverence for life, all forms of life. To not steal implies generosity and trustworthiness. Sexual restraint implies respect, intimacy, trust, and responsibility. Abstinence from alcohol implies sobriety and health as well as freedom from addictions of any kind. Practicing the precepts is an essential aspect of Buddha's way, integral to meditation and wisdom. The precepts are purely personal. Listen to how they resonate within you. Practice of just one precept will lead to practice of all of the others. [The five Precepts: no killing, no stealing, no lying, no sexual misconduct, and no intoxicants.] |
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| The Great Liberation... "...The well-informed dreamer may cease taking pleasure in dreaming. He may stop imitating those dreamers who, enjoying the phantasmagoria which they watch and in which they play a part, persist in wishing to remain asleep. In truth, why do the dreamers fear awakening, why do they imagine in advance other dreams of hells and heavens which await them after death? It is because they fear that with the disappearance of the 'images seen in dreams', the illusory 'Ego' which is an integral part of them will disappear. They have not yet perceived that the real face of this chimerical 'Ego' is the face of Death. As long as the idea of this impermanent Ego lasts, this simple mass of elements which various causes have brought together and which other causes will separate, death also subsists. The Dhammapada (an early Buddhist scripture emphasising good moral conduct, meditation and self-discipline) alludes to the disappearance of this phantom from the field of our mental activity when it refers to whom 'death does not see', that is, he for whom death does not exist. "The awakening is liberation, salvation. The Secret Teachings propose no other object than this to their pupils. |
| "To wake up...The Buddhas have done nothing else than this, and it is this awakening which has made them become Buddhas." (The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects) (Why are Tibetan Buddhism and theoretical physics so amazingly similar?) "History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." James Joyce, Ulysses "There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being." Albert Einstein "Subtle, sparkling, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time in one continuous stream of vibrations... That is the radiance of thine own true nature." Bardo Thodol |
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| Throw the Hatred Out: A Question of Heart... We have to be genuine, which means not having aggression and being true to oneself. A lot of us feel attacked by our own aggression and by our own misery and pain. What we need, to begin with, is to develop kindness toward ourselves and then to develop kindness toward others. It sounds very simpleminded, which it is. At the same time, it is very difficult to practice. I would like to keep our discussion very simple and direct. Pain causes a lot of chaos and resentment, and we have to overcome that. It is an extremely simple logic. Once we can overcome pain, we discover intrinsic joy, and we have less resentment towards the world and ourselves. By being here, naturally being here, we have less resentment. Resentment is not being here. We are somewhere else, because we are preoccupied with something else. When we are here, we are simply here- without resentment and without preoccupation. Joining Together Sadness and Joy... We have to know how to act or manifest fully. We are not going to spend unnecessary time philosophizing. Time is short and the situation is urgent. So we don't have time to discuss metaphysics, but we do have time to discuss know-how, how to actualize goodness. I would like to share that particular wisdom with all of you. In fact, I'm delighted to do so. Ordinarily, when you talk about feeling sad, it means that you are so hurt; you feel so bad. When you talk about feeling joyous, it means that you feel excited and uplifted. The real heart of genuineness is to develop sadness and joy at once. You feel tender - extremely tender and sad. When you fall in love for the first time, you have delightful thoughts about your lover, but at the same time you feel somewhat sad. It's not purely that your lover isn't with you, but you feel tender even when you're together. On the spot, in the same room, when you look at your lover, it feels great, but at the same time, it feels very touching and sad. It is wonderful, in fact it is ideal, that human emotions are expressed that way. When you feel sad, therefore you feel great. Hot and cold, sweet and sour, at once, take place. According to the Shambhala principles, you can feel that way with everything you do. Whether you have a good time or a bad time, you can feel sad and full of delight at once. That is how to be a real decent human being. This is also connected with the Buddhist principle of longing, or devotion. Longing is the hunger for sacredness. When you feel you're too much in the secular world, you long for a sacred world. Therefore, you feel sad, and you open yourself up that way. When you feel so sad and tender, that also brings ideas for how to uplift the rest of the world. Joining sadness and joy is the way to help others. Leaving the Cocoon and Taking Responsibility for the World... In the Shambhala tradition, we talk about being a warrior. In this case, a warrior is not someone who wages war. A Shambhala warrior is someone who is brave enough not to give into the aggression and contradictions that exist in society. A warrior, or pawo in Tibetan, is a brave person, a genuine person who is able to step out of the cocoon - which is the shyness and aggression in which we wrap ourselves. Your cocoon is fabricated out of tremendous aggression, which comes from fighting against your environment, your parental upbringing, your educational upbringing, your upbringing of all kinds. You don't really have to fight with your cocoon. You can raise your head and just take a little peek out of the cocoon. Then, having peeked out, you become brave enough to climb out of the cocoon. You sit on your cocoon and look around. You stretch your arms and begin to develop your head and shoulders. The environment is called "Boston," or "New York City." It is your world. Still sitting on the cocoon, you raise yourself up a little further. As you look around, you begin to realize that the insulation of the cocoon is no longer useful. It's just a little cast that's been put on you by your own collective imaginary paranoia and confusion, which didn't want to relate with the world outside. Then, you extend one leg, rather tentatively, to touch the ground around the cocoon. When you first touch the Earth, you find it's very rough. It's made out of earth, dirt. But soon you discover the intelligence that will allow you to walk on the Earth, and you begin to think the process might be workable. You realize that you inherited this family heirloom, called "Planet Earth," a long time ago. From the dictionary's point of view, sadness has negative connotations. If you feel sad, you feel unfortunate or bad. Or you are sad because you don't have enough money or you don't have any security. But from the Shambhala point of view, sadness is also inspiring. You feel sad and empty-hearted, but you also feel something positive, because this sadness involves appreciation for others. That empty-heartedness is the principle of the broken-hearted warrior. Once you develop this quality of sadness, you also develop a quality of dignity or positive arrogance within yourself, which is quite different from the usual negative arrogance. You can manifest yourself with dignity to show the degraded world that trying to avoid death by sleeping in a cocoon is not the way. The Shambhala tradition is based on developing gentleness and genuineness so that we can help ourselves and develop tenderness in our hearts. We no longer wrap ourselves in the sleeping bag of our cocoon. We feel responsible for ourselves, and we feel good taking responsibility. We also feel grateful that, as human beings, we can actually work for others. It is about time that we did something to help the world. It is the right time, the right moment. As decent human beings, we face the facts of reality. Whether we are in the middle of a snowstorm or a rainstorm, whether there is family chaos, whatever problems there may be, we are willing to work them out. Looking into those situations is no longer regarded as a hassle, but it is regarded as our duty. Although helping others has been preached quite a lot, we don't really believe we can do it. The traditional American expression, as I've heard it, is that we don't want to get our hands dirty. That, in a nutshell, is why we want to stay in the cocoon: we don't want to get our hands dirty. But we must do something about this world, so that the world can develop into a nonaggressive society where people can wake themselves up. Helping others is one of the biggest challenges. The basic point is to become very genuine within yourselves. Please don't hurt others. Treat yourself better and don't punish yourself by sleeping in your cocoon. Finally, please try to work with people and be helpful to them. A fantastically large number of people need help. Please try to help them, for goodness sake, for heaven and earth. Don't just collect Oriental wisdoms one after the other. Don't just sit on an empty meditation cushion, but go out and try to help others, if you can. That is the main point. We have to do something. We've got to do something. As we read in the newspapers and see on television, the world is deteriorating, one thing after the other, every hour, every minute. Your help doesn't have to be a big deal. To begin with, work with your friends and work with yourself at the same time. It is time that we became responsible for this world. It will pay for itself. The Discipline of Gentleness... We are worthy to live in this world. The Shambhala journey is a process of learning to appreciate and understand this worthiness. This training is based on the discipline of uplifting and civilizing ourselves, which is partly a reflection of the teachings of the Buddha. Buddhism provides an idea of how to handle ourselves: body, mind, speech, and livelihood all together. The Shambhala training is also a response to suffering and pain, the misery, terror, and horror that have developed throughout what is known as the setting-sun world: a world based on the fear of death, fear of oneself, and fear of others - a world that comes with lots of warnings. We have no idea how to actually live and lead our lives in today's society. How can we be decent human beings, dignified human beings, awake human beings? The Shambhala path involves individual training. It presents the real heart of the matter. By joining the Buddhist-oriented practice of sitting meditation with the appreciation of our lives, there is no discrepancy between dealing with ourselves and dealing with others at all. The Shambhala training is learning how to be gentle to ourselves and others and learning why that works better. It is educating ourselves to become very decent human beings so that we can work with domestic situations and with our emotional life properly. We can synchronize our mind and body together, and without resentment or aggression, with enormous gentleness, we treat ourselves so well. In that way, we celebrate life properly. (by Chgyam Trungpa. The above material is excerpted from Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala. Copyright 2000. Used by permission of the publisher, Shambhala Publications.) |
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| (Beyond Thought)... The void is an absence of anything we can conceive of... "Void is understood as a state in which the elements do not produce any combination, give rise to no phenomenon, a state in which only forces, latent and non-manifest, exist. Being the sphere of complete absence of manifestation, the Void is inconceivable." - The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects "Nothingness' is not the vacuum of physics, loaded with geometry and field fluctuations; it is a nothingness devoid of structure, law or plan..." - John Wheeler, "Frontiers of Time" (We do not exist as a soul or individual self.)... "The answer to those that imagine that Buddhist salvation consists in the annihilation of the 'ego,' at the death of the 'person,' is that, as Buddhism denies the existence of an 'ego' or a soul, whatever be the name given to it, there cannot be any question of the annihilation of that which is held to be non-existent. "In reality there is annihilation but it is that of false views, of ignorance, and more exactly of the belief in the existence of an 'ego' which is independent, homogeneous and permanent, a belief which deforms our understanding of the world in deforming our mental vision." - The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects "Humans come to think of the individual self as a fundamentally separate 'thing' which persists despite an immensity of changes that take place in one's life." - Briggs and Peat, Looking Glass Universe (We are the many fragments of others)... "The Secret Teachings lead the pupil further. They teach him to look, with the same |
| serene indifference at the incessant working of his mind and the physical activity displayed by the body. He ought to succeed in understanding, in noting that nothing of all that is from him, is him. He, physically and mentally, is the multitude of others. "This 'multitude of others' includes the material elements - the ground, one might say - which he owes to his heredity, to his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, and which, assimilated by him, have become with the complex forces inherent in them, constituent parts of his being. "On the mental plane, this 'multitude of others' includes many beings who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, whose actions he watches. Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which he considers his 'I', form there a swarming throng." - The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects "The origin of chaos is in our fragmented, atomistic thought. Only when thought is not there would it be possible to perceive what is beyond thought." - David Bohm, in RE-VISION 1 (Disclaimer: All articles and/or images retain the original copyrights of their original owners.) |
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