Precepts #6 and #7

I resolve not to speak of the faults of others but to be understanding and sympathetic.

I resolve not to praise myself and disparage others, but to overcome my own shortcomings.
by Caroline Devane

These precepts seem self-explanatory and clear, right? For the first few years of my coming to the Zen Center I see now that, in a way, I dismissed the precepts because they seemed so obvious: “Oh yeah, of course you don’t lie, cheat, steal, kill, etc.! No problem!” What I didn’t see or understand was their continual applicability, that they weren’t commandments from above that only applied to rarified situations, but they describe mindful living. Their subtlety is great and unless our awareness is gauged to that level of subtlety, easy to dismiss as obvious. Apparent truths are easy to overlook.

Recently, someone unconnected with the Zen Center asked me a few questions about Buddhist practice. He was amazingly curious about practice, but was avowedly committed to a different tradition. He asked me if the practice of zazen changes your behavior in any way, to which I replied that it can. I tried to explain that, given enough time and effort, our sensitivity to the world deepens and brings with it a deeper morality. If engaged in regular zazen, we start to notice our imperfections. My questioner looked confused, so I tried to elaborate on what it means to develop sensitivity to one’s missteps by saying, “Haven’t you ever said something to someone and then walked away and felt like a jerk?” I was then going to say that for some, practicing zazen helps one to catch oneself sooner – that one’s awareness of one’s unskillful actions, and further, the motivations behind such actions, becomes clearer if one works at it. I remember one of our former members describing a new-found sensitivity to ants after a sesshin. He was walking to the train stop and, looking at the ground as he walked, fumbled so as to not step on an ant that was directly underfoot. In terms of these precepts, though, what a different feeling it is to encounter someone who used to really push your buttons and catch yourself before you retort with something unkind. Or even nominally unkind. It’s the need to defend oneself in the face of oftentimes imagined opposition that has gotten me in trouble. If Zen can teach us to open up and let it go, and that opening this way is morality itself, then in those situations where we walk away feeling like jerks, we can still find the courage to hold ourselves accountable.

But all of the above went unsaid in the dialogue with this fellow. To my question if he’d ever said something he regretted, he replied, “No. I am very careful about what I say, and I never hurt anyone’s feelings.”

Really? Perhaps this person actually is perfect and has never said anything out of place! But for the purpose of this article, let’s assume for a moment that this person is simply unaware of himself. We often are not aware of the impact we have on people, especially when it means we would have to admit to ourselves that we did something wrong. Or maybe the pain of realizing that we screw up is too great, and we get trapped in believing that, most of the time, we don’t screw up. I believe this was the attitude behind my initial understanding of these precepts. Simply because I believed that the precepts described the right way to live somehow made me feel like I was living the right way. What a conclusion! And a convenient way of avoiding pain.

The precepts are obvious, self-explanatory, and clear. Yet it seems there are two ways to see them as obvious, self-explanatory, and clear: with self or without self. One way is the way of my questioner (and a way I am familiar with): “Of course I don’t kill, steal, abuse, lie, act stingy, angry, ignorant, greedy, or mean! I am an upstanding person who does his best to be nice, generous, gentle, open, nurturing, sympathetic, understanding, compassionate, and clean!” Speaking from experience, in this position there is a lot of effort to retrace the lines around “who I am.” The other way (echoing the precept itself) is to approach the precepts with the willingness to overcome our shortcomings. It’s a willingness to let the ego take a blow, and not ignore the truth of the situation at hand, no matter how humbling or painful it may be. This alternate way places the evolving truth of the moment above our self-interest. Even if we’ve come to a place of admitting to ourselves that we have work to do, it’s only half the battle. The need to be brutally honest with ourselves about our unskillful actions and speech will never go away.

And in the end, since these precepts do not come to us from “on high,” but are really descriptions of how a skillful person lives, what do we do when faced with the brand of denial we may be encountering in my questioner? If my questioner can’t be brutally honest with himself about his past transgressions, it likely doesn’t fall to me to tell him. If I said something in response, would it really help? Perhaps it would be better to spend time looking at all the occasions in which I was so unskillful – the times I walked away feeling like a jerk.