This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. My worry is that the people on Zoom will look here and go, oh, look, this is just a tape of what we did last week. And they'll all get up and leave. So please don't do that. I'm going to give exactly the same talk as I gave last week. There's a long history in the literature of people doing that. The most famous one is the whole fire boy comes seeking fire, go on, right? So... And this teacher goes, how come you never see me for Doka-san?

[01:00]

He goes, oh, well, you know, I was in line a long time ago. And it was this whole thing about, you know, fire boy comes seeking fire. And I woke up, right? The teacher said that and I woke up. And the teacher says, clearly you misunderstood. And the student said, okay, well, tell me, what would you say? And the guy, It says, fire boy, come seeking fire. And the student has a new, you know, brand new awakening or something like that. Anyway, so it's going to be exactly the same talk. No, that's not true. I'm going to talk... Okay, so the reason I'm here is that originally we were going to have a jukeye today and then a number of things happened and we unfortunately weren't able to do it. But... I was going to come and talk about the precepts, and originally I was going to come and talk about the precepts with a couple of other teachers.

[02:04]

We were going to do a sort of, you know, like triple tag team dharma talk, which would have been fun. But in any case, I'm here today and I'm going to talk about the precepts. So, like I said last week, it's kind of useful to identify the problem, right? And what I said last week, and the same thing is true this week, is that the problem is that we're constantly messing things up, getting it wrong, were guided by this sort of... Well, there's an interesting bit in Red Pine's Commentary on the Heart Sutra where he retranslates the section of the...

[03:26]

sutra where the zen center translated is the mind is no hindrance right and he says actually where there is more like barrier and it refers to these barriers to essentially you know goodness right and there um as i remember he says there the barrier of karmic consequences, the barrier of incomplete knowledge, and the barrier of grasping in desire, which is essentially an analog of the three poisons, right? Greed, hatred, and delusion. And so we're moved by, we're enclosed by those barriers, moved by those poisons in our body and mind to commit, really kind of a horrible act on all sorts of scales from down from the very tiniest and most intimate up to at this point worldwide.

[04:32]

Right. And I said last week, that's clear now, but honestly, it's been clear to people for as long as we have a record of what's been clear to people. Right. The, all of the not all the vast majority of the ancient literatures of the world and our first examples of written stuff are fundamentally about that that we're constantly even you know even often the the the plot is you have all these exemplary marvelous right and they're still messing things up there's a I think I've mentioned this before it's one of my favorite examples but there's a passage at the beginning of the Odyssey where it's kind of the intro right where Zeus and Athena are sitting around talking about stuff and they're like god these people they're so horrible right

[05:50]

We give them free will, and then they mess everything up, and then they blame it on us, the gods. And Zeus says, I think we should just kill them all and start over. And then Athena says, well, you know, they're not all bad. And she makes a play for being nicer to Odysseus, and that sort of kicks off the Odyssey. But I mean, that's a pretty bald statement, right? you know we're we're essentially taking our gift of you know you can you can have an argument about how big this gift is um the gift of free will either we have a gift of free will that's this big or we have a large one but in any case it's a gift right it's it's it's given to us by some combination of you know um cultural and biological evolution.

[06:52]

And we squander it doing horrible things and then fall on our knees and say, why? It's kind of bad. And for as long as people have been recognizing this fact, and it's useful to speculate, although totally unanswerable, about when it started. Like, you know, were humans in the deep Paleolithic suffering in the same way? Yeah, maybe not, right? But we have no idea. Certainly by the time we know about what they were doing, like, you know, the Bronze Age, things were pretty horrible, right? And people have been writing about it and trying to cook up explanations and solutions ever since.

[07:54]

And there was this explosion of literature, oddly enough, around the time of the Buddha, that traded and... explanations and solutions. And so, for example, the most obvious one, or the one that's most familiar to us, let's put it that way, the Old Testament, their explanation is humans were tempted, they acted badly, they acquired this gift of self-realization or self-recognition and free will and they've and for that they've been cursed to to suffer and um and the solution proposed by in that scheme is a set of rules and there's kind of it's like be good to each other in the following ways and and

[09:07]

And just do it. And then the other aspect of that solution and a lot of solutions like it is that it presupposes an omniscient observer and judge. And so the idea is it's as though, you know, your mom was following you around and going, hey, don't do that. Oh, you said you weren't going to do that, right? There's a bunch of those, and then there's some very sophisticated ones like Confucianism, which has a much more complex and nuanced flavor, but it's targeted at a at a complex and nuanced society and how to get people to behave well towards each other depending on the specific nature of the relationship they're in, right?

[10:18]

Kind of great, right? And so on. You know, Buddhism is an explanation and a solution too, right? It says more or less is, you know, like the other ones. We're all messing up here. And the particular explanation it puts out for it is that we're induced to suffer and be dissatisfied by something about our basic nature. And we'll talk a little bit about what about our basic nature causes that, and that that suffering leads, suffering in the self-reification that comes with it leads to grasping and aversion and bad social behavior and so on and so forth, right?

[11:23]

But the thing about Buddhism is that it, from the very beginning, it emphasizes, emphasizes experience, and it points to both outer conduct and inner conduct, right? So even the, you know, we don't really know what the Buddha said originally, but by the time people were writing it down, the record of what he says, well, I mean, for example, the Satipadana Sutta, right? So it's a series of exercises in inner conduct that are designed to produce a being bring into the world a being who who operates more comfortably and skillfully with the with the human condition and with you know social interactions and so on and and in the end um

[12:29]

manages to rescue her karma from the state that it's that it's in and and allow her to step out of the round of rebirth and suffering right the current karma rebirth and suffering um and the These exercises are things like contemplating death and dissolution in various ways and contemplating the body both as a remarkable instrument and also as a thing that's constantly falling apart and full of, you know, I don't know, like gut bacteria and stuff like that, right? But the other thing that it brings up is it says, and you should contemplate these things in this very specific way. Bring up a mind that is perceptive and aware, acknowledges and affirms the thing that you're perceiving and considering and doesn't condemn it, doesn't elevate it, doesn't struggle with it.

[13:53]

takes it in in a way that's accepting and skillful, right? That's amazing, right? And that implication from the very beginning was that practicing like this was going to save people from suffering, right? Marvelous. You might ask then, why do we have the precepts, right? And it's a great question. And it was clearly considered a great question back in the day as well, because somebody wrote a document about it, talking about how the precepts came into being. I think it's called the Padimoksha.

[14:55]

the story goes that there are all these Buddhists, you know, living together, engaged in, for the most part, exemplary activity, you know, diligently pursuing the practice in the way prescribed, that was prescribed by the Buddha and so on. And then it turned out some of them weren't being so diligent, right? And they, you know, In one example, somebody turned out to be embezzling money from the sangha, right? And the Buddha said, ah, we have to have a meeting. And he called a meeting, and he said, you knew this was a terrible idea, and you did it anyway. Let's make a rule. And so over time, this large body of rules came into being that covered a wide variety of things, right? gender and sexuality, money, both money and things given as donations or held as possessions, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[16:13]

And then down to the greedy details, like how wide should the borders of your robe be if your robe is a particular size, right? And some other stuff like that, right? And so after that, and by the time we started actually having a Buddhist literature, which is arguably around the time of King Ashoka, a few hundred years after the life of the Buddha, there were a whole bunch of Buddhist schools. while they agreed in principle on the fundamentals that we were just talking about, you know, people have this capacity to not mess things up by working with their suffering and working to alleviate it and so on, right?

[17:27]

And to, you know, operate... comfortably and skillfully in the world with the human condition, right? They disagreed. A lot of them disagreed about the actual content and function of divinia, the precepts, right? And they also disagreed on the particulars of how to pursue those fundamentals, right? And so the... The largest school was a school of kind of naive realists who explored more and more deeply and in more and more detail the particulars of experience, right?

[18:33]

And tried to come up with a... exhaustive explanation for human experience. Obviously, as a guide to how to do this activity of canceling, or not canceling, of alleviating suffering. And they cooked up the Abhidharma. They wrote Abhidharma documents, let's put it that way. Which is to say sort of supplemental dharma, right? that talked in detail about the roots of experience in the world of form and then the way that sensation happens by contact between parts of the world of form that are part of this body and parts of the world of form that might not be part of this body, right? And how that turns into perception and how...

[19:35]

how memory gets tangled up with that and how, um, pattern matching and stored, stored, um, habitual responses and all the rest of that sort of thing cook up and how all that stuff happens in the light of a kind of consciousness that, that, um, that enables agency, right? It enables a kind of, uh, an illusion of the personal, um, and, and agency. And they kind of thought that this stuff was real and that it was a kind of science, right? And a few hundred years later, there was a kind of reaction and critique to that and Mahayana Buddhism started to develop. Mahayana Buddhism emphasized a couple of things that were slightly different, right?

[20:40]

It kind of replaced the ideal of the arhat, who is somebody who had totally, you know, like, resolved their issues. And and wasn't going to get reborn, right? With Bodhisattva, who was somebody who was down in the world doing the work and putting off this sort of soteriological goal of being released from the round of birth and death and suffering essentially forever. The... Which is, in some ways, it's a colossal philosophical shift and also kind of experiential shift when you think about it, right?

[21:43]

They also emphasize, they critique the sort of realism, the naive realism and essentialism of some of the most popular Buddhist schools at the time and replace those with this notion of emptiness, right? The idea that all of those ways of talking about how the world is, the dharmas are, are fine in a provisional way, but they don't really have any essential self nature, pointing back at the original Buddhist teachings, right? The teachings of interdependent co-arising and no self, right? So their point was everything, all this stuff has no self. All this stuff arises together, interconnected in a way that's far too complex and shifty to grasp. And in any case, if we thought we grasped it in one moment, it's ungraspable in the next, right?

[22:48]

And in the process of moving into China and the advent of Chinese Buddhism, and in particular, Tendai Buddhism, the Tendai school, the precepts were reconfigured a bit. They developed 10 what are called, in our translation of it, sort of grave precepts. And a lot of the other, what had originally been part of the Vinaya, was moved into this sort of document of guidelines, right? So when I was I'm going to say my priest robe, I was talking with Blanche Hardman, and she brought up all the guidelines that came out of the Vinaya and said, well, you know, they're guidelines, right? But I mean, they're still with us, right? They have this slightly different status, right? So the precepts were simplified, and then the other thing that they did was they...

[23:59]

hooked up a few other ways of talking about this question, and one of them was the paramitas. So there are six paramitas, and you can look at them as kind of you can look at them as simultaneously addressing and encouraging in a positive way the certain kinds of exemplary inner and outer conduct right um so in particular their uh generosity or donna right um uh conduct per se so you know it's living by the precepts basically in sila right um patience uh diligence meditation and wisdom right so there that's the six and Somewhere Red Pine says, and you know, they kind of thought wisdom was the key one.

[25:06]

And so when you read the vast Mahayana literature, including the not-so-vast Heart Sutra, it says the sort of ideal of practice that it holds up is the practice of Prajnaparamita, which is to say... the paramita of wisdom, right? And what para means here, it's kind of, it's kind of interesting, right? Like sometimes it's translated as perfect or perfection, and sometimes it's, it can be translated as transcended, right? And, and both are kind of true of the paramitas, right? They're, they can be seen as a aspirational, um, goal of perfection, or they can be seen as inner and outer conduct that transcends concepts like perfection and that is what it is without reference to that.

[26:15]

And they were an answer in some ways to the precepts, which are largely prescriptive. They're like, don't do this, don't do that, don't do the other thing. It's more like, here's how you can, in a positive way, model your inner and outer conduct in order to practice in this way. And initially, it seems to me, and to some other people, that they were set up as a sequence. was i think conceived as the um the province of the laity so the function of the lady was to support generously the monastic community right and the and the and the spread of practice right and then the the second conduct sila right was

[27:20]

um was the gate was the gateway to the other four which are because that's that's like taking the presets right um yeah and the other four are patience diligence meditation and and wisdom you can see how if you looked at that as a sequence while you patiently and diligently meditate and then wisdom accrues right done um But by the time you get to the Zen school, it's pretty clear they're not thinking about it that way. There's this really kind of great koan due to a, not exactly Zen, sort of like early Zen-ish East Mountain School teacher, I think, part of whose name was Hui Hai, right? And a monk asked him, so how do you enter our school? And... He says, dana paramita, the first paramita, right?

[28:23]

And the monk says, yeah, but there's a bunch of paramitas, six. And he might even be implying that maybe dana paramita isn't really the important one, right? Why do you say that? And the... And Huiha says, well, you know, ignorant people misunderstand that dana paramita is the key, and it's the entry point to all the other ones, right? And the monk says, well, then why is it called dana paramita? And he says, well, because dana means relinquishment. And the monk says, relinquishment of what? And Huiha says, well, you know. dualistic thinking. And then he goes on, there's much more to the comment. He goes on to explain that we're talking about all of the dualisms that drive our tendency to screw things up.

[29:25]

The dualism that gives rise to those barriers and poisons that we were talking about earlier. It seems pretty clear to me that In that formulation, each of the paramitas is the key, right? And you can look at the practice of being awake and living comfortably and skillfully with a human condition as mutually dependent on the practice of the paramitas, right? So, you know... relinquishing dualistic thinking. Yeah, exactly. Executing all our behaviors in accordance with the precepts in a way that's utterly non-transactional. That's just because that's essentially devotional.

[30:27]

And so on. And then leading around to wisdom, this kind of confluence of the inner world and the outer world that happens in a way that's unconditioned, spacious, and unloaded. That's the practice. And that practice then converts the precepts, each of the precepts, from proscriptions to kind of lenses and invitations to a particular domain of self-study. So let's pick one.

[31:30]

The last five precepts are pretty much all about the kinds of social interactions that happen inside and to a certain extent outside uh sanghas right so you know like there's one that says yeah don't don't go around telling stories about people right not particularly negative stories but maybe even not any stories um and If we just pick that one up and hold it in the light of the practice of the paramitas, we can see the way that it works in our own experience, in our own particular version of the human condition. You can see the way in which the conditional and transactional flavor of our everyday

[32:34]

Diligence naturally leads to friction and maybe a little bit of, oh, wow, I'm doing this so much better than, or I'm doing this so much worse than this other person, right? And it can lead to resentment and difficulty, right? To really be with people... in a community in a way that doesn't lead to gossip and tailbearing requires a kind of unconditioned generosity, right? You don't have to do anything when people, you know, in some sense mess up because there are no mistakes and we're and everyone's behavior is connected with everyone else's, et cetera, right?

[33:39]

So, and et cetera, right? How much time do I got? Hmm, lots of time, nice. And so what you can see is that the precepts are held in this way that aligns with, for example, Dogen's most famous summation of how the way of practice works. You study the self, and when you study the self, it's usually translated as forget, but you could also say you transcend the self. And the invitations to different specific domains of self-study are invited by the precepts.

[34:47]

They are made by the precepts. And why are they those... those particular precepts, you know, not killing, not lying, not stealing, not intoxicating the self or other reasons in the right order, but not engaging in sexual misconduct, not gossiping, not, you know, harboring ill will, et cetera, not praising self at the expense of others, pumping yourself up and putting others down, not being stingy, not misusing or defaming the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, which is to say the practice, the teachings, and the community. The reason why those were chosen is simply because they're the most obvious ways into the study of how we mess things up.

[35:59]

And one of the ways you can recognize that is that a lot of them are the same as the other rule sets that people came up with over the course of millennia, trying to figure out how to get people to stop messing up. They're not unlike the Ten Commandments. They're just held in this frame of... emphasizing experience and pointing to both inner and outer conduct. Pointing to, as Richard Baker said when he came here to talk a number of years ago, our inner and outer posture, right? It's like, this is the outer posture. Somewhere lurking in here is an inner posture, and that inner posture is both completely intertwined with the outer posture and also either mutually supporting or your inner posture and your outer posture can struggle, right?

[37:09]

And that leads to suffering, among other things. I guess in the end, I'd just say this, right? The ultimate framing for that goes back really to the earliest Buddhist doctrine, the Dharma, right? That we have installed in our bodies and minds multiple modes of being and engagement that are mostly obscured by because our activity of self-reification, self-narration, future planning, wrangling with the past, social gymnastics, and so on,

[38:34]

is so involving, so attention-grabbing, and such an expenditure of energy that we barely notice a lot of the other ones. And when you look at the Zen literature, you start to see that It's mostly about allowing those other modes of being an engagement, the luminous sense of unconstructed, unloaded, and receptive attention that... takes in everything, including, interestingly, the machinations of our self-construct, and meets it in a way that ranges between unconditioned appreciation, delight, and empathy.

[39:55]

Lovely. tremendous capacity to resonate with other beings and things, right? To care deeply about the perceptions that we bring forward of how people are doing, how they're expressing it, how rocks, trees, and bicycles are doing, cats do, and generating empathic, compassionate concern. We use that all the time, too, because we're constantly using our perceptions of other people. We just don't fully inhabit it. And to fully inhabit it is to kind of fully inhabit the practice of Quan Yin. So when...

[41:00]

when we're practicing in that way, fully bringing along the whole picture of what it is to be human, then it's not like we never screw up. Of course we screw up all the time. The Bodhisattva vow that celebrates the qualities of the Bodhisattva says, you know, delusions are inexhaustible. But we have a much more solid and skillful basis on which to meet all of it, including our diluted misbehavior. So thank you so much for listening. That was a rambling talk, and not at all like the one I gave last week. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[42:10]

Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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