The 9th precept admonishes us to not be angry.
In Buddhism—and in “enlightened” Western culture, in general–we condemn anger, we warn each other and ourselves against anger, we fear anger, we avoid situations in which we think we will feel angry or others will be angry at us, we can even get into the habit of denying that we feel angry. Why is this?
We “shun” anger because of what it can drive us to do—shout, curse, say things we would never otherwise say, even hit and injure the person or object we’re angry at.
So it’s what we DO when anger arises that is the problem, not the emotion of anger in itself. But rather than scolding us to not be angry, in The Mind of Clover Aiken Roshi quite gently advises us: Don’t indulge in anger. Don’t indulge in anger.

What is indulging in anger? It’s yelling and cursing and hitting and harming! Or it’s castigating oneself for feeling angry. Or it’s going so far as to become depressed rather than to feel angry. Not indulging does not mean, Never feel anger, always suppress it, always deny you feel it, choose depression instead. After all, anger is a human emotion equal in status, though not in kind, with the other strong emotions we humans can feel—love, joy, fear, grief. Anger is in the human repertoire. If we were never to feel anger, we’d lose some of our humanness. So not indulging in anger doesn’t mean don’t ever feel or be angry. It simply means don’t act on the feelings of anger when they arise.

So, following Aiken Roshi’s advice not to indulge in our anger, we work on ourselves and eventually we get ourselves under enough control so that we only slam doors or clam up or some other ineffective behavior that telegraphs our anger but at least it doesn’t physically or verbally harm the person we’re angry at.

But we’ve still got this anger inside (and it IS leaking out to those around us whether we realize it or not). The anger may feel boiling hot; it may feel steely cold. Whatever its temperature, we really need to deal with it somehow. To that end, Aiken Roshi quotes Thich Nhat Hahn, who encourages us to become well acquainted with our anger, to respect it, treat it tenderly, as it too is Buddha: (p. 95).

Angry behavior, I think, is an attempt to have or regain control—or agency—over our experience and circumstances. My young son who has been playing outside is very late coming home for supper, and I have begun to be very worried, so when he comes in the door, I yell at him with an angry face, “Where have you been? You’re LATE!” Or my husband has a rough day at work, so when he comes home and hears the neighbor’s big dog barking incessantly, he opens the window and yells an obscenity in the direction of the neighbor.

Angry behavior says, “What about me? am here too! I’m important too!” I And while these examples are not the very worst things people can do to each other, they are harmful—and we Buddhist practitioners want to learn how to avoid expressing anger in harmful ways. We need to learn how to express our “agency” in non-harmful ways. So, in order to convey our concerns without behaving angrily—we need to get to know our anger.

Let’s look at a few of the perhaps many varieties of anger. 1) There is righteous anger, such as what one feels when someone—oneself or someone else is treated unfairly or unjustly; or when the environment is degraded, or some institution causes harm to a whole class of people. There are plenty of things to feel and express righteous anger about these days, and there are many reasonable avenues for expressing it. We can learn and practice the skills for effectively expressing our righteous anger in the world.

2) Then there is ill will, a perhaps habitual reaction to certain events or people, based on our judgment or pre-judgment of others.
Something in our experience has led us to feel resentment or suspicion or skepticism toward another.
Ill Will may be a more cognitively driven mental formation. It’s our “attitude” about certain classes of experience or people; it may be a subtle and pervasive feeling and thereby, in a way, a more difficult feeling for us to detect in ourselves—and thus a more ubiquitous mental state.
E.g, I often turn off the radio news when a politician I know I disagree with starts to speak. I realize I am experiencing and expressing ill will toward the politician.
In connection with ill will, because I am strongly for better gun control in our country, lately I have been trying to understand the point of view of gun advocate. I heard someone comment that gun owners have positive experiences with guns, while people like me have only negative associations with them. So I’m trying to listen to what gun advocates say, hoping to better understand them. I’ve just finished reading a book about why Americans like guns, and it has helped me get beyond my automatic reaction of ill will and begin to think about how to include such people in problem solving.

Well, Ill Will is an unhappy state of mind, a drag on our mental and emotional life, not to speak of how it separates us from others unnecessarily. I can and do study my daily life for instances of Ill Will. It pops up pretty frequently, I must admit. But over time, through mindfulness, I can investigate it and, as in the example I gave about gun control, reduce the unhappy feelings of ill will in myself.

3) Then there is the kind of anger that is deeply or highly emotional, the kind that might erupt suddenly, explosively, as a feeling of rage; or the kind that might build over time to become a cold condemning judgment that resists all reason and argument. This very emotional anger can be more troublesome than the first two I described because it arises perhaps entirely out of the unconscious. It may not occur often, and if we aren’t prone to aggression toward others, this deep anger may not lead to physical violence, but it can scare or dismay people who witness it. So although this kind of anger is the type we’d like to deny we ever feel or express, because it is so unwholesome, it is the type we must get to know. As with all negative emotions, the way to reduce or eliminate deep anger is not by pretending we don’t feel it, not by suppressing or denying it, not by avoiding situations in which it might arise. The way to stop this deep anger is to become intimate with it, to study it thoroughly in all its manifestations.

We must ask, In what circumstances, under what conditions, does this anger arise? As I have pondered instances of this deep type anger in myself, I have discovered that deep anger occurs almost exclusively in my relationships with people or situations that are important to me. Some people get really angry when their stuff breaks—their car or computer or toilet, whatever. That’s not me. I get frustrated, but not really angry, so I can relax on that count. But in important relationships in which I have a strong investment are where the strong emotion of anger can be triggered.

So I study the instances in my close relationships in which anger has arisen in the past–
What am I studying when I study my anger?
What it feels like, where I feel it in my body. You’ve heard the saying, “Seeing Red”? That is the physical sensation of anger for some people. I’m not sure I see red, but what has happened for me when strong anger has come up is that I have whirled into action—not toward another person, but just physically doing something. One time I flung a whole carton of milk on the kitchen floor, knowing all the while that I was the one who would have to clean it up, and knowing from experience how hard it is to thoroughly clean up milk!

But what’s driving my anger? Anger, psychologists have observed, is a cover up for a prior emotion that we feel is even less manageable than the anger itself—
Fear, or hurt, or guilt or any number of other difficult emotions.
Anger has a lot of energy, which gives us the illusion of being in control,
When experiencing a prior, less tolerable emotion, we quickly default to anger and we feel at least a tiny bit better.
I’ve discovered that for me, one catalyzing emotion can be shame. Shame that I feel when I believe I have done something that I think makes me look bad—stupid, inappropriate, imperfect to someone who matters to me.
So now shame becomes my focus of my study.
Whereas anger can manifest as Seeing Red, for me
Shame manifests in my body like a black drapery dropping over my head and covering my entire body. It’s a terrible feeling of worthlessness—the exposed worthlessness of my Self—my ego—that tells me that I am separate from others and unworthy.

An example of a time when I experienced shame and in quick succession this full bodied physical reaction in order to feel more in control again:
35 years ago, when my husband and I were in the process of a painful divorce.
Just prior to the divorce trial, his lawyer called me on the phone (something he shouldn’t have done) probably to see if he could push my buttons and learn something that would help him in court.
During the conversation, in which I was very nervous, realizing that he was manipulating me, he said a word that I didn’t understand, which made my response inappropriate. He chortled and said something dismissive that made me feel incompetent and embarrassed—and the black cloud of shame dropped over me instantly.
As soon as I hung up the phone, I whirled around and kicked the nearby door and I sprained my toe! Why such explosive anger? Because the shame felt so overwhelming.

So in my case (yours will be different) when I felt acutely ashamed, I defaulted immediately to anger in order to dispel the unbearable discomfort of the shame.
So trying to understand my anger, I ask, When /why do I feel shame? And I answer, When I am shown or revealed to be imperfect to people who are, for one reason or another, critical to me or my welfare (my husband’s adversarial lawyer).
Of course, rationally, I know I am not perfect, and I am aware and accepting of the fact that my imperfections are no doubt obvious to everyone. But I’m speaking about emotionally fraught situations here.

So for me, the study of my anger is really about shame, which is really about my illusion that I have a Self, for which I apparently have the requirement that it be Perfect!
Because I have observed that my emotion of shame so quickly defaults to anger and then blame of the other person, my study now takes me to what Buddhism teaches about the Self.
The Lojong saying, “Drive all blames into one” applies here. Who or what is “the One”? It is the mistaken belief that I have a Self. The one to blame, of course, for my unhappiness is my own ego centered self that wants what it wants. This slogan is the perfect antidote for me.

It’s not my husband’s lawyer who has caused my anger. It’s my misunderstanding—or ILLUSION—that I have a Self to protect and perpetuate in its “perfection” that is at fault here. When I get to this insight, all the air hisses out of the balloon of my anger and I am done emoting. I may not have any words for the situation. I am done. Quiet.

So, to follow and practice the precept of not indulging in Anger, we must
Study ourselves, our body and sensations and thoughts when anger or ill will arises.
Look underneath the anger to what drives it.
Once we get a handle on the prior emotion and see that it is connected with our bedrock assumption that we have a Self we must protect and perpetuate, our “case” for being angry begins to dissolve, fall away.

Buddhism teaches that everything is always changing, including ourselves. If this is so, then there is nothing to defend or perpetuate, is there? We can let go of the anger, let go of the shame or fear or whatever drives the anger, and just be aware of what is—a clever lawyer who got a rise out of me. Nothing more. Unpleasant? Yes. Cause for rage? No.

Meanwhile, of course, we are practicing this precept by not attacking anyone verbally or physically, not shouting, hitting, cursing, kicking doors, whatever. And we are not harming ourselves by going off on the tangent of being angry when the real problem is we feel hurt or afraid or embarrassed, or–whatever. We can remember that being human includes feeling anger. And we can begin to follow Thich Nhat Hanh’s advice:

6. Do not maintain anger or hatred. Learn to penetrate and transform them when they are still seeds in your consciousness. As soon as they arise, turn your attention to your breath in order to see and understand the nature of your anger and hatred and the nature of the persons who have caused your anger and hatred (from The Fourteen Precepts of the Order of Interbeing)
and

The seeds of anger are always there. But when you notice, when you keep alive your
understanding, they have no chance to manifest. Understanding is something that stays
with you, and practicing the precepts, practicing meditation, helps you deepen your
understanding all the time. (from Tricycle, May 4, 2013 edition)

Right Speech — Precepts 4, 6, and 7 Red Cedar Dharma Hall April 24, 2013

#4 – A Disciple of Buddha is truthful, does not lie

–reasons we might choose to lie
-avoid responsibility, blame, and punishment
-please others; feel like we belong
-manipulate others to get what we want
-reassurance that we “know”; are in control-self deception
-protect ourselves and others
-avoid giving pain to others
-avoid conflict

*so easy to do-ex. of at a movie when asked by ticket person, “One child, one senior?” TOTALLY, seamlessly I just said “Yes”.

–consequences
-causes confusion in others, fostering insecurity and mistrust
-self-deception; creating a false “reality”, avoiding the present moment
-unresolved conflicts continue to “simmer”, creating/holding grudges
-creates and maintains separation from others
-can protect others from harm, as in war
-can solidify into dogma-story of Mara (Rizzetto, pg.56)

-lies of silence
-complicity in another’s harmful choice
-protecting others from exposure/harm
-initiates a inner defensiveness which then must continue, deepening and
self-deception

#6-A disciple of Buddha sees goodness, does not slander

-reasons we might choose to speak ill of others:
-revenge, having felt hurt by another
-to feel “in the know”—special
-to feel one belongs to a certain group at the exclusion of others
-to create a (false) sense of intimacy-secret-sharers

-consequences
-creates separateness and disharmony between other s
-sows seeds of doubt and suspicion, encouraging mistrust
-intimacy between “secret-sharers” is false, based on rejecting another rather
accepting each other
-implies a constancy of character; unchanging; presents a person as a caricature
rather than a dynamic, multi-faceted human
– nurtures dehumanization, which in the extreme can provide justification of
Genocide

-complicity of silence
-Latin maxim: “Qui tacat consentire videtur” –“silence implies consent” is used
in Robert’s Rules of Order and adopted as policy in organizations such as
NATO and the European Union—demonstrating the power of silence—
-listening to gossip with out speaking up or leaving the scene can be just as
harmful to self and others as being the speaker herself

*great example of my friend gently reminding me of this precept by saying, “Should I really be hearing this?”

#7-A disciple of Buddha is modest, does not praise self at the expense or disparagement of others

-Bodhidharma said, “Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the equitable
Dharma not dwelling upon I against you is called the Precept of Not Praising Yourself
While Abusing Others.

-can be one of the most subtle ways of harming others as comparison, whether good or
bad, separates us—high lights the differences and divides us from one another
-often involves drawing attention to our selves-wanting to be seen as special, sometimes
as “the best”, sometimes as “the worst”.
-self-praise, or any action or speech meant to draw attention to your self, even if not
criticizing others, is certainly immodest
-“energy suckers”-those of us are often playing the clown, teasing the teacher, holding
forth in “high dudgeon” serves only your own ego and, as was pointed out to me, again,
lovingly and gently-leaves no room of others to engage with you-or anyone really,
depending on how many people you are holding captive with your rant, or jokes, or
know-it-all observations.
-subtle criticisms are slippery—how many of us had the experience in which our parents
or teachers took the pencil, or dish you were washing or the broom you sweeping with-
took it right out of your hands and said “O-just let me do it—it will be faster, better-you-
fill-in-the-blank…or were taught how to behave through shame (ex. you spill your milk
and you are called clumsy, stupid—instead of hearing, “it was just a mistake, let’s clean
it up”?)

-praising ourselves and criticizing others is one of the more obvious ways to demonstrate the power of attachment, just as putting ourselves down as less than everyone also shows attachment—to be special
-such a hunger to be seen, no?

-this precept easily intersects with #6—how else best to puff our selves up than by saying
or thinking: Thank God that is not me!
-example from the bible of the publican and the beggar-each giving what they can to the
Temple but the richer man thanking God he has more to give—not out of generosity,
but out of pride.

Summary

The skills to practice again and again are those of mindfulness, of observing our own behavior and how it leads us to feel—being willing to listen to others when they say how your behavior affects them-with out defensiveness or pretending to take it in and then holding a grudge against them for the rest of your life. Some where I read or was told the best thing to do before you speak or pass judgment or jump into the gossip pool is to ask your self:
-Is what I am thinking or about to say true?
-Is it necessary?
-Is it kind and life encouraging?

AND-although we are not in control of what others think of us or how they will take in our words, are we truly using the most nurturing language-and can we sit still for a moment in what Rizzetto refers to as the dead spot-the moment before we speak, to consider the questions above.

Dizang’s Fields

Red Cedar Zen Member Dave Lynch is growing eggs and veggies for all to enjoy in support of Red Cedar Dharma Hall

AVAILABLE NOW DOWNSTAIRS:

Fresh eggs – $5 suggested

(in the small fridge by the back door downstairs)

Book of Serenity case 12:
Dizang asked Xuishan, “Where do you come from?”
Xuishan said, “From the South.”
Dizang said, “How is Buddhism in the South these days?”
Xuishan said, “There is extensive discussion.”
Dizang said, “How can that compare to me here, planting the fields and making rice to eat?”
Xuishan said, “What do you know about the world?”
Dizang said, “What do you call the world?”

All donations support the Hall

I want to speak today about two of the 10 clear-mind precepts. [hand outs]

These two precepts are about generosity and theft. About taking and giving. About opening the hands or grabbing with the hands.

In Buddhist ethics we start with the mind and end with the mind. Our meditation practice encourages us to be more sensitive to the process of how the mind emerges and passes away. How we are a flow and a process, not a fixed being in any way.

So we talk about actions of body, speech, and mind having a karmic effect. That what we think about matters.

Here we need to make a distinction between the emerging of a conditioned thought and the response to that thought.

Nasty thoughts emerge.

In one system of consciousness they suggest that our collective karma as suffering human beings with our endless legacy of war and violence has planted seeds in all of us.

We all have seeds of hatred, seeds of greed, seeds of fear. And when conditions are right these seeds start to sprout.

There evidence from neuroscience that evolution has equipped us with 7 basic emotional systems that happen at a very low level in the mind:

SEEKING: how the brain generates a euphoric and expectant response
- FEAR: how the brain responds to the threat of physical danger and death
- RAGE: sources of irritation and fury in the brain
- LUST: how sexual desire and attachments are elaborated in the brain
- CARE: sources of maternal nurturance
- GRIEF: sources of non-sexual attachments
- PLAY: how the brain generates joyous, rough-and-tumble interactions
- SELF: a hypothesis explaining how affects might be elaborated in the brain

And so it’s not a personal failure or a breech of precepts when an angry thought or a greedy impulse or feeling or thought emerges. It’s natural and built into us.

The work of awareness that is the practice of precepts is to see and understand these thoughts and urges and impulses more clearly. To make a decision which seeds we water.

And we know that seeds sprout if conditions are right. There are levels of choice here. We can feed habits that tend to encourage greedy action, we can support habits that bring us into clarity. We can notice where we’re tight, and where we’re relaxed and open in body speech and mind.

These two precepts are particularly about possessiveness. What do you we think we own, what do we possess.

And the mind is so quick to rationalize. I was working at UW the other night, I’m there when only one or two people are in this fancy academic building and there are multiple piles of lost and found. I found myself so interested in this box of lost and found – was there anything good in there? Anything I want? This stuff is just going to Goodwill probably – might as well give it a good home. Wow, so quick. The security guy was with me, a really nice chatty guy named Norman, and I found myself waiting for him to go off on his rounds.

Luckily for my precepts practice the nice earbuds in the box didn’t fit my ears.

One way the 2nd precept is expressed is not to take what is not freely given. That’s a great metric. Is this really being given to me freely?

The 8th precept has a surprising variety of translations, did you notice that. That’s because literally it’s more specific to the Buddhist clergy, a bit less universal than most of the bodhisattva precepts. Literally the characters mean “not stingy dharma money precept” The literal precept is don’t be stingy with Dharma teachings and money. Money for the temple presumably.

so this has been expanded by most contemporary teachers to be about generosity generally.

The 2nd precept of course implies generosity but I think it’s more about respecting boundaries and limitations. I actually had a reason to be pawing through the lost n found box at UW – I had lost a laptop power supply a few weeks earlier – but I was going beyond the boundaries of the situation the moment I started feeding that thought “hmm, what’s this other stuff in here?” I went beyond wise restraint.

Did you read Aitken roshi’s story of the drunk with the big bankroll. The question of being wise about the situations we put ourselves in and the situations we put others in is important.

The idea is not to be super-humans who are never tempted by anything. Those seeds of greed are there. The idea is to get smart about when we put ourselves in a moist environment where those seeds are going to sprout.

That’s how I’ve come to think about locking doors. Some of my friends at times have idealized places where you never lock the doors (or at least you think it’s okay) and how sad it is to lock doors.

I don’t think that way, I think we lock doors out of kindness. SO that others who have the karmic circumstances to have these seeds of greed really growing and active have a little encouragement not to steal. It’s a kindness to them to prevent them from stealing and reduce the negative consequences of stealing in their lives.

Precepts have many levels – we think about the literal level – do not steal. And in the literal we consider what’s being prohibited – stealing, stinginess – and what’s being encouraged – respect for boundaries. generosity.

The second level is the relative level, here we may need to take action that seems to break the literal level in service of some higher reason. So you might for health reasons need to eat meat for instance. I heard a powerful story on a podcast of a French Jewish woman who was rescued from the Nazi’s by Catholic nuns who had to lie to her and to the authorities to keep her safe.

And the third level is the absolute level, or the ultimate level. Here we recognize the limitations of all of these distinctions and separations. Is there really anything to steal? Do we really own anything anyway? This is the level where the three marks of existence are truly seen as the nature of all that is: impermanence, not-self, and suffering. Everything is impermanent and changing, nothing is separate or really existing in the way we think it is, nothing in the conditioned world will truly satisfy us anyway. There is not point to stealing as the thing we want to steal won’t lead to the happiness we think it will. There is no point to stealing as that thing isn’t even the thing it appears to be, and it will soon break and decay.

holding these three levels with some fluidity and grace is a key part of precepts practice. We can look to balance, kind of in the same way we talked about our work with the 7 factors of awakening. We can see if we’re being lazy about the literal level and what the consequences of that are – ouch. We can see if we’re afraid of the relative level and hiding in some kind of simplistic idea. We can see if we are caught up in the foolish distinctions and limited views of the world and missing the absolute level altogether.

Heigaku Talus Latona discusses the 1st and 2nd of the 10 Grave Precepts together.

Our bodhisattva precepts emerged originally, probably in China, as a compliment to the long and very specific list of monastic precepts generally called the pratimoksha. The Buddha realized how the monks conduct themselves was critical both to the progress of their meditation practice and to the practical survival of the monastic order. Since he wanted the monastics to focus completely on liberation the system was set up so that the monastics were completely dependent on the goodwill of the communities they lived near. Part of their daily routine was walk and alms round. And that alms round wasn’t just to receive food and support so they could practice all day. It in itself is a deep practice of equanimity and humility.

And as they went along living together in small communities and interacting with the lay people like this various problems emerged which the Buddha responded to with a gradually increasing list of rules until there were about 250 pratimoksha rules for monks and about 280 rules for women. And many of these rules were in support of a kind of ecosystem of practice and dependence on these lay communities. There was a major issue at one point for instance around some monks choosing to head for the richer parts of town to do their begging. And other monks feeling that this was both greedy in the obvious way but also greedy in the sense that it was denying the poorer people the opportunity to practice generosity – denying them the spiritual merit received from giving to the order – so the second group of monks started going exclusively to the poor parts of town. The Buddha got wind of that and say “no, both are improper, you should wander through the town without preference for rich or poor.”

And some of the rules were very simple and practical around the extremely simple lifestyle of the monastics. The possessions you can own: just three robes, a sitting cloth, a begging bowl, a little medicine. Not much. Both again a simple lifestyle oriented around practice but also a radical way to work with desire and materialism. The monastics were not allowed to handle money for instance. And there are many monastics, mostly in the southern Buddhist countries of Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka who live like this today. And many who don’t too.

And these early detailed rules weren’t just an efficiency thing to allow the monastic to meditate a lot either. One rule for example was no saving any food for later. You receive what you need for your one large meal a deal, eaten a bit before noon, and you eat it all, no saving for the next day. If it was just about maximizing time on the cushion maybe you would do a big long begging round and try to save some of it for later – no refrigeration of course so this would still be a limited solution – but no it seems like Buddha’s plan was to really include the inter-dependency of the monastics and the lay people as a daily practice. And thus in these early days the communities couldn’t be too large and they had to be somewhat distributed around the different communities of the Ganghetic plain in northeastern India where this all started.
When Buddhism was established in China between the 3rd and 5th centuries in the common era that system changed. Partly due to climate, partly culture and precedent of other Chinese religions. The monastics established more permanent temples and eventually monasteries. The monastics now needed to work, they needed warmer clothes. Rules that allowed monks and nuns to fit in gracefully in Indian society would make them weirdos in Confucian China. So the rules needed to be modified and supplemented.

But also the religious impulse and purpose of practice and the forms of practice also changed. And when the practice of precepts reaches China the religious meaning of precepts practice will change even more.

The Mahayana branch of Buddhism that came to China emphasizes compassion and service a bit more than the earlier Buddhisms, which are now represented by Theravada Buddhism. And most important for precept practice the Mahayana Buddhism, or Buddhisms really, emphasized flexibility – this idea of upaya, or skillful means, is strongly emphasized. If you participated in Edie’s study group around the Lotus Sutra you might remember this. And paired with this emphasis on being flexible in helping others we have the emphasis on understanding the ultimate empty nature of this whole show. If you participated in Talus’s study group on the Diamond Sutra you heard something about emptiness and the spirit by which it’s recommend that Bodhisattvas go around saving beings. More or less it says the way Boddhisatva’s go about saving beings needs to include letting go of any such idea of “saving” or “beings” – that these are very limited markers for an inexplicably rich and mysterious reality.

And so the great Buddhism minds in China realized they needed some guidelines that transcend the nitty gritty details about which kind of bed to sleep on, what the order of seniority in the sangha is, and what kinds of food are allowed. That they needed guidelines that encouraged the monastics to access this larger vision of the bodhisattva – the enlightening worker helping others by every means needed. Even in some cases when the means needed to help might look on the surface like violating the pratimoksha precepts.

And so they did what the great religions usually do – they put words into the founders mouth and wrote a sutra, called the Brahma’s Net Sutra, in which the Buddha explains that these new precepts – 10 major precepts and 48 minor precepts are in fact the ultimate expression of Buddha’s mind. The ten grave precepts in our own list of 16 are a slightly modified version of these 10 major precepts in this Chinese sutra.

What isn’t well known in the Japanese Zen circles is that the monastics in China received, and still receive, both a version of the pratimoksha precepts, and these additional list of 58 bodhisattva precepts. This was later to cause a little trouble for our Japanese founder, Dogen, when he went to China to study.

One of the wonderful and odd aspects of religion is that meaning and spiritual power bubbles up in all kinds of interesting ways. While we can see precepts as supports for practice, what happened in Japan is that precepts become not just a support but the very essence of Buddha’s practice. And even more importantly, precepts become the very essence of the lineage. And the lineage is more deeply important than I think we can ever quite understand from our cultural seat in this somewhat infantile materialistic society. There I mean materialistic not in the sense of acquiring junk, that’s a limited understanding of materialism. The deeper and more important way to understand materialism is that we think that only things we take for real are important. We start with what we can see and feel and we also invest reality in patterns and a simple kind of cause and effect too but our consensus reality world is pretty narrow and seems to have a result of supporting a kind of self-oriented world.

In Japan and China and also in our local Indian communities, there a feeling that this world is a little less substantial and the world of ancestors, the world of spirits, is much more real and important. That our ancestors are with us always. Watching over us, concerned about us, supporting us. And there for the logical way to live is not oriented around self- improvement or self-indulgence but around honoring our ancestors.

And thus in Japan we had a big shift in how precepts are understood. Starting with an 8th century monk named Saicho who is seen as the founder of the Tendai School and flowing into the 11th and 12th century founders of Japanese Zen, all of whom received precepts and initial monastic training in that same Tendai school, we make two big changes. First we drop the pratimoksha precepts altogether, and second we imbue the Bodhisattva precepts with a powerful religious spirit as a great vehicle for understanding the Dharma and honoring and holding our Buddhist ancestors. We say in our ceremonies to this day that the precepts are the blood vein of the ancestral lineage. Not just a support for being a better person and a wiser practitioner. Our Dharma Transmission ceremonies, one of our holiest and most important rituals, are all about two things: precepts and ancestors and they are two sides of the same coin. It’s not “follow the precepts to honor the ancestors”, it’s “following precepts is honoring, or even becoming, the ancestors.”

And so we have this feeling that precepts are very central. The center of our practice. As rules in some ways, sure, but with a much deeper spirit and meaning. When we bring precepts to mind, when we study precepts, when we give and receive precepts in ceremonies, we are deeply honoring and loving and being the ancestors.

And thus in all of the major Japanese Buddhist schools the monastics receive just the Bodhisattva precepts. In Tendai and some other Zen schools they receive the 58 precepts, and somehow in Soto Zen Dogen reformulated precepts to a list of 16. First he included the powerful and very ancient practice of taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha as the first three, then three broad and universal guidelines around beneficial action are given as the next three, and finally the 10 grave precepts are a version of the 10 major precepts in the Brahma’s Net Sutra that the Chinese created taking which become the only precepts formally taken in monastic ordination.

Dogen really went off on his own with this. He claims in his writings that the 16 precepts were exactly what he received from his teacher in China, Rujing, but historians are really doubtful that Rujing would have done anything other than the standard system as his monastery was a public state-supported institution and precepts and ordinations are a big deal. You don’t tinker with them without high level approval.

And it was the same in Japan for the mainline Buddhist schools in Nara and the Tendai school. Saicho had to petition the emperor for permission to start doing ordinations with the 58 bodhisattva precepts and it took many years before it was approved.

The Dogen just created his own system and went off to the mountains to start his own school was actually a pretty radical thing to do and he must have wondered if it would last very long. But he had seven powerful disciples who all started temples and a 2nd generation disciple, Keizan, used precepts in innovative ways to serve ordinary lay people – they would go to villages and do lay ordinations for the whole village, in many cases the documents the villagers received were their own exposure to written language one scholar suggests, so very powerful. And Soto Zen priests even used precept ordinations to pacify troubled kami – spirits of different places who were causing trouble.

So in our lineage the precepts are both a very powerful lineage-ritual-empowerment matrix and a list of guidelines for behavior.

Wednesday evenings and Fridays at 1pm. The first talk is available on the Dharma Talks page.

And registration has begun for our 2013 Samish Island sesshin.

To review briefly, these are qualities of mind that the Buddha recommends that we nurture, support and bring forth in order to align the mind with freedom and awakening. There’s a dynamic tension in that in terms of this question around whether we are making something happen or just attending to the conditions of our life so that qualities of mind which are already there will blossom naturally. One teacher says the idea is to “incline the mind” in the direction of these qualities. The idea being that we have a kind of orientating power with the mind. The etymology of attention or “to attend” is atendere in Latin which means something like “to bend the mind to” so we are back to how we direct our spotlight of attention. It’s easier for us to see what we are listening to or seeing outside but the invitation in encouraging these qualities to flourish is that we attend to our inner experience more carefully. I think about it like each moment is a great meeting of the deep conditioned past and how we are holding ourself in the present. How do we meet this conjunction of condition and response – present, past, and our momentum and direction – how does it all come together.

So we look at overall patterns and moment by moment patterns. What are we doing to practice and continue our mindfulness, our remembering to pay attention in the present moment? Our gentle and persistent effort to bring up what I’ve been calling the 3 A’s in mindfulness class: awareness, acceptance, and accuracy. Interestingly a few students have reacted to accuracy. But I think I’m keeping it. Of course our view is always a little distorted so it’s hard to know what’s accurate, but we bring that up as an aspiration. To have clarity, to have accuracy, what’s happening know. Just as we can’t always be aware or accepting we bring forward the intention, the vow, to be completely aware and deeply accepting of what is. And not a passive kind of acceptance either! Then we respond as skillfully as we can to conditions. Which is another way to look at the 7 Factors – a set of guidelines for how to respond to these arising moments.

So we respond first with mindfulness, inclining the mind towards awareness of the present. Then the second factor discernment or investigation kicks in, we wonder what’s really happening here? And that gets pretty interesting – we notice things about mind, body and world that we never noticed before. And that interest born of investigation helps to motivate us – wow there’s something to this! I don’t have to be stuck in all my old patterns forever – outstanding. And so the 3rd factor of diligence or energy arises. And as we feel energized there’s a kind of warm and goodness to that even if we don’t exactly like all that we are discovering. It’s the joy of feeling that we are walking on the path. Are we at our destination yet? Of course not but that joy in moving, in hiking along our path. I put some of the summer’s hiking retreats on the website calendar today actually – you can practice literally walking the path as Dharma practice then if you like.

Anyway our joy enlivens us and softens us and we feel safe relaxing a little. This is the 4th factor – lightness and ease or calm. And sometimes of course we get hooked in joy and we need these teachings to remind us to deliberately incline the mind towards calm. Or to make choices that support the conditions leading to calm – mindful of the food we eat, the drinks we drink, the media we consume for instance. Wow, I’m really amped up, this feels a little jaggy and unsustainable, a little disconnect maybe so we bring up calm as the grounding and soothing counterpart to joy.

As we calm down we find the mind is supported to be more stable, this is samadhi or concentration that we talked about last week, the sixth factor of awakening. We can take up a single object when there is a practice or a worldly task that calls for that, and what a calming joy it is to actually be able to concentrate – isn’t it? When you are both energized and settled. When we are a student we often stumble into that state sometime, or maybe we stay up all night hoping it will come along. And when it kicks in wow, you are so much smarter than you thought you were. But of course “smart” is just a process not a state or an attribute of a person. I should teach the 7 factors of awakening to the students up at Western – it would help their studies for sure.

And as our mind become stable and concentration is strong when we don’t have a task to do or some reason to concentrate single-pointedly we can just rest the mind in open awareness. Just widen out the focus and enjoy the experience of being. If something comes up noticing it and attending to it but not so grabbed by it, and that is the precursor to our last factor. Which we’ll get to in a moment.

And a post-script to the last talk on samadhi or concentration is I found out the etymology of samadhi. Sam means gathering, and the root dha means placing. So it’s a gathering up our inner resources and choosing where to place them. On a single object, or placing them in some broad way on the whole of experience.

So there’s a balance here maybe with doing and non-doing in working with these factors. Maybe the way to talk about how to actually accomplish the nurturing of these mental factors is something like this:
1) build a good foundation
2) incline the mind
3) accept what is

Build a good foundation is our whole life. And this includes precepts practice. Is our life upright and ethical? Kind to others? Restrained and clear? In the traditional commentaries they include working with the 5 hindrances as part of building a good foundation.

Here’s a nice story from Sheng Yen about the hindrance of desire:

A young professor was attending a retreat for the first time. During the first five days she suffered greatly. She kept saying to herself that the next day would be better, but every day her suffering actually increased. She told herself that if things did not get better by the fifth day, she was going to leave. She blamed herself for not having virtuous roots and not having the capacity to practice Chan. She decided that Chan was not for her and she stood up, getting ready to leave. At that moment she felt she had let me down, and that she had let down the Buddha. She felt embarrassed, so she bowed to the Buddha statue in the Chan Hall. In that moment all the physical discomforts that she had been experiencing vanished. She had been struggling and suffering so greatly for five days, and suddenly all those negative sensations were gone. She so attached to her suffering that she could not let it go. The moment she gave up on that idea, her discomforts dropped away. She returned to her cushion and sat very well for the rest of the retreat. The difference was that she no longer wished her suffering to be gone, and she no longer rejected the discomforts of sitting. She was then able to practice very well, and at the end she did not want to leave. In fact, she plans to become a nun!

So it’s good to train in noticing the hindrances as hindrances, and in the mindfulness of our practicing with them and the importance of it. Not to feed desire or aversion. To respond creatively to restlessness and dullness. To meet doubt with wisdom and kindness.

And with a strong foundation it’s more possible to incline the mind. To pause, breathe, and wonder about our current state. And then to tune into what seems low. If we’re really distracted and sleepy to turn up investigation and diligence. If we bouncing off the walls to incline the mind and the activity towards calm and steadiness. If our mind is bouncing around to focus the mind by sitting down to practice or just holding the mind in a focussed and steady way. Even if it doesn’t seem subjectively like we are instantly successful we bring up our faith and do our best anyway. This is a long term project, the patterns are deep.

So I made a mistake on the little sheets somehow. That 7th factor is not wisdom, it’s equanimity. There are many connections between the two. Equanimity is from the Sanskrit upeksha which means “not taking notice of”. So it has a kind of “never you mind” root meaning. Equanimity has a shared root in English with equality. So it’s a kind of being equal in our response to this world. Something good happens we enjoy it, “ahhhh”, something bad happens, too bad, “ahhhh”. To there’s a measuredness that we cultivate in our responses to the shifting sands of experience.

This one’s really about process too. When we get too hooked into the contents of what’s happening it’s hard to maintain equanimity.

A traditional way to look at what hooks us are the 8 worldly concerns. A list from the Buddha. They are 4 pairs: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and dishonor, gain and loss. That kind of sums up what we worry about doesn’t?

Much as we think the positive one is better and is what want, these teachings of equanimity tell us that reaching too hard for the positive or being fixated on someone else’s fame or success certainly, destabilizes the mind. Buddhism asks us to make a deep choice here, do we want worldly, temporary, conditioned happiness that is sure to fail us in the end, or do we want to throw our lot in with awakening. With a deep appreciation for the unfolding of things as they go. Nothing is wrong with fame or success, and in these teachings there is nothing wrong with blame and failure either. It is just what it is. Really.

So an interesting practice is to release from fame and success. We went to see our sangha friend Ruth Ozeki at the Chuckanut Radio Hour. Before we went Janet listened to a wonderful interview with her on NPR. And there was nice write up in the New York Times about her new book. Oh and she’s now on the independent bookseller’s best sellers list now too. She was fresh back from her second trip to London paid for by her publisher too. So fame and gain for sure. Really exciting. And I’m glad to say she looked pretty balanced. She said to me last night, “I figured out that a book tour like this is just like sesshin!”

I had a little taste of praise and fame the other night myself in my mindfulness mode. I was invited to present at the monthly educational event for the National Association for Mental Illness which is a really neat advocacy and education group around mental illness which even today has such horrible stigma. The turn out was twice what they usually get and the response and feeling in the room were really strong so I was feeling pretty good. Then one woman who’d taken one of our classes spoke up right at the end, actually kind of interrupting me as I was winding things down to say: “Tim I just want to make sure everyone knows what a treasure you are and how lucky Bellingham is to have you. My husband and I took your four week class and it’s totally changed our lives.”

So that was quite the note to end on. Maybe 45 people in the room. Pretty crowded.

What I noticed when I got home was that I had a bit of a praise and fame buzz on. And that I could feel into a desire to rattle on way too long about how great it went with Janet. She’s glad to hear about how things go but at a certain point you aren’t really having a conversation are you? So I made myself a snack and practices moving a little more slowly and just letting that energy go. It was actually a really kind of beautiful feeling to let it go and not be so caught up in it. You know how when you get caught up in that kind of thing how you get kind of edgy. A little fear comes with it too – did they really like me? Will I be able to keep this up? Can I do more of these presentations without them all getting tired of me? A lot of compelling thoughts about the future.

But just letting it go was a kind of dropping into the present. And there weren’t so many thoughts about the future. I still felt good but there was a lightness to it. Maybe it was a kind of shifting from joy into calm as I tried to practice equanimity. And for sure I had some pretty solid concentration inspired by making a presentation.

The eight worldly concerns aren’t that different from the five hindrances really but they are usually taught in connection to equanimity practice. And the first step is always awareness. Am I worried about having more pleasure and avoiding pain? How much energy is going there? Am I really reactive to blame and really caught up when I receive praise? Do I want a little local fame? And is there horror around the possibility that I might have a bad reputation in the community? And what do I want to gain, what am I bothered by losing?

All of this operates in the context of the bodhisattva vow and our wholesome desire to help others of course too. If it’s skillful to be a locally famous and praised mindfulness teacher then that’s what I need to take on and practice with. If it were skillful to be a homeless person and live under the Chestnut Street bridge in a tent scorned by the well meaning middle class people around us can we practice with that? It’s an active and creative kind of engagement with conditions.

So that’s a few words on equanimity. I hope our discussion of the seven factors of awakening has been helpful. It’s actually I think in some ways a pretty simple teaching – bring up these positive qualities, face the hindrances – but in other ways it’s really subtle and easy to misunderstand. We can be too prescriptive and narrow and take these things on as rules.