writers on the bodhisattva path tended to emphasize those things about the bodhisattva path which are unique to it, like compassion and emphasis on emptiness and so forth. However, so in a way, our attitude about precepts is a little on the esoteric side, that is to say, it's not explicitly stated anywhere in some text in what way our understanding of precepts is different than that of early Buddhism. So it has to be, the understanding has to be put together from the general context of the whole bodhisattva tradition. So today I plan to speak to you for the only time in the class really, historically, and to give you a little background about where these precepts come from and their development in Buddhism, because that is actually apropos to what they mean for us.

[01:09]

So, to start, we have to go back to the time of the Buddha and the very beginnings of the community of Buddhism, which is called the Sangha, which, just like Buddhist communities today, practiced communities today, began as an informal group of students around the teacher. The older word in Buddhism for precepts is the Vinaya, which means the body of rules, the regulations, V-I-N-A-Y-A, for those of you behind the board. The Vinaya is the literature about the regulations for the community, the community norms.

[02:18]

And the Vinaya is a rather large, it's about six volumes, six 300-page volumes in English. The actual list of rules is quite short. The schools of Buddhism had somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 for men and somewhat more for women. Part of that is just, there are some things having to do with women that don't apply to men, having to do with age of ordination and whether you've been married before or whether you've had children. So this body of rules is rather short, but the literature which explains their background and how they came about is rather large. And we don't know, of course, whether this literature, to what extent it's historical and to what extent it was put together later, because all of this literature was totally

[03:24]

oral until about 100 B.C., so it's very hard to know. But it seems that there was a clear intention in the literature to convey a sense of the rules, the body of rules, being developed rather situationally rather than being enunciated by the Buddha. And what I mean by that is that the original Sangha was something very simple, and I believe the first ordination ceremony performed by the Buddha, he was asked by a disciple to be ordained. What's historically the case is that there was the society of palm-leavers that collected

[04:37]

around the Buddha was in a long historical tradition of forest aesthetics, which had been a pattern of religious life in India for centuries before the Buddha. And the basic modes of respected behavior were already pretty much established in the culture. And in fact, the major precepts of Buddhism are not at all that different from what you would find in non-Buddhist Hindu texts about the life of a shramana or ascetic wanderer and what was to be expected of them. So it was not as though the basic understanding of how one should behave is something the main rules were already basically a part of the culture, the religious culture of India. And there were other great teachers at the time of the Buddha who also had communities

[05:46]

of celibate monastic practitioners who followed also a very similar mode of life. So the general dimensions of the regulations of the community were rather, I would say, obvious to those who were involved. I don't think it required them to... It was a big surprise to them that the Buddha would say to them that they were doing something unfulfilling. That would just be, I think, assumed. Although, not necessarily by all strata of Indian culture, because the period of time involved the dominant religious force in the society was Vedic Hinduism, which emphasized animal sacrifice. So it may be that Brahmins of a Vedic bent who came into the Buddhist life had to be

[06:49]

up all animal sacrifice and killing and so forth. Anyway, to get back to my main thread, the literature about the precepts in the Pali Canon presents the material as though something fresh each time it came up. So originally there were no rules, and then somebody does something in the community. Somebody kills a frog or whatever. I have to look back to the literature to find out what the example is. They have several examples of various kinds of each sort of thing. And then what characteristically occurs in the formula is that the lay people, the lay supporters of the monastic community complained to the Buddha that they observed a monk who was not doing something. And they didn't like it. It made them feel bad. It didn't feel like supporting such a person.

[07:49]

So interestingly enough, the arbiters or the people who keep the monks in line are those who support them, the lay supporters from whom the monks beg for alms. These were the ones who are the reporters of the misdeed. Then the Buddha calls forth the miscreant to come forward. And you have to remember the Buddha is omniscient, so trying to conceal your misdeed from the Buddha is rather futile. So it's never the case that the person did it. They say they didn't because the Buddha already knows exactly what happened. So they always confess. And then the Buddha asks them, and I will give you a handout of some excerpts like this so you can see the formula in operation. The Buddha always asks them next, and oh brother, was this an intentional deed? And then he says if it was or it wasn't. And there's always examples given in every example of a Naya rule.

[08:53]

An example of it being done intentionally, an example of it being done unintentionally. And in the case of it being done intentionally, the Buddha then announces to the community this is not a good thing to do. This is not what Buddhist monks and nuns should do. We should refrain from this activity in the future. And those who do this thing, it shall be an offense inheriting. And then he gives the consequence. The most serious ones are expulsion from the order. And those are called five grave misdeeds, which correspond roughly to the first five of these. Not exactly the fifth one is different, but the first four anyway are the grave offenses. And then there are five different lesser rank offenses. From being put on probation and having to be temporarily withdrawn from the satsanga,

[09:57]

which is the next most serious. And then one which a person has to confess before the whole assembly. And then the lesser ones still simply involve being reprimanded by an elder. And then there's a whole body. The largest number is kind of miscellaneous ones, which there's not... They're more like details. So, there are two things to be observed from this origin of the Buddhist precepts. One is that, first of all, they're not a kind of commandments from on high, which were enunciated as some kind of strictures. Well, there's several things to point out. That's one. Whether or not the formula is exactly historical, it seems pretty obvious that the compilers of the literature wanted to make it clear

[10:58]

that it was built up out of experience. Out of experience and inquiry to the Buddha. And in fact, the Buddha was recorded to have said, toward the end of his life, that after he died they wanted to change the vinaya they were welcomed to. That would be up to them. So, it was clear that the earliest idea of the vinaya was that it was a body of behavioral guidelines that was considered necessary and helpful for the accomplishment of the task and practice. The next point is that the consequence of perpetrating these misdeeds

[12:09]

was basically some version of being excluded from the community. So, these are not, you might say, universal moral laws that, like a blanket, cover every living being. They're practical indications of how a member of the Buddhist community is expected to behave. And if someone cannot behave in that way, it simply means they can't be part of that community or that family. They can go elsewhere and do those things. So, there was a sense of, this is our rule for our community. These are our household modes of behavior. If you can't behave this way, you can't be part of the Buddhist community. So, the scope of the precepts in the early tradition is somewhat modest,

[13:11]

you might say. It's not some blanket prohibition that people who don't live that way are somehow condemned. There is, of course, in the background of these precepts, an understanding of what is karma, what is the consequence of karmic deeds. But, that background was not so much contained within the rules themselves, but rather in the whole of the Buddhist doctrine. But, related to that is this idea of intentionality, that the ethics of Buddhism is an ethics of intention. And, sometimes they go to rather ridiculous lengths in the literature to ream up some example of unintentionality with regard to some of the rules. Some of the rules, it's very hard to think of an unintentional example of the rule,

[14:21]

but they really work hard because they want to make it very clear that what is the key here, based on the Buddhist idea of karma, or intentional action, is the intentional or conscious, willful perpetration of the deed, not that it happens accidentally or unconsciously. We'll have occasion, I think, to talk a lot more about just what this distinction implies, because it's very important for an understanding of right action in Buddhism. And, I think maybe rather, although, of course, Western legal system does incorporate some aspects of intentionality. You know, we have the idea that when you hit somebody with a car, maybe you were driving too fast, but you didn't see them, there's some sense of, you didn't intend to hit them.

[15:25]

So, there's some word for that. Negligent homicides, negligent manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, which is, I think, in some circumstances, even a misdemeanor, it's not considered a serious crime. As opposed to premeditated murder, which is, in our society, I think, the most serious crime imaginable, as it would be for a Buddhist. So, within that, but Buddhism clearly understands the possibility of doing wrong things, and not intending to do so. So, what that distinction is, we'll have to look at more closely, because it seems to be quite important for an understanding of the precepts. The 250 regulations, the precepts, were for the monks, for the monastic community.

[16:42]

And the non-monastic community of Buddhists, the lay people, were expected to follow five, or perhaps on special occasions, special days, or special times of the year, would follow ten precepts. And again, these five are very similar to the first five on the list. By first five, I mean, I'm sorry, of the ten last ones, the ten prohibitory precepts, I meant the first five of those. The Bodhisattva precepts here is actually a combination of the three refuges, which is the first section. The three, what's called the three pure precepts, which you don't find in exactly that form in the Theravada or early Buddhist tradition. And then the ten prohibitory precepts. So I've been talking now about more the prohibitory precepts side of the teaching. This body of regulations for the monks is called the Pratimoksha.

[17:55]

And a full ordination as a monk meant a vow to keep all of these Pratimoksha precepts. And the earliest ceremony of Buddhism, in fact the only ceremony other than ordination, which was for an individual, the only group ceremony that was ever done for some centuries, was called the Uposatha ceremony, which we still do. There's some form of it anyway. The Uposatha was performed at the new moon and the full moon. And it consisted of a gathering of the four categories of Buddhists. Monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen. All of them got together and the entire body of the 250 Pratimoksha precepts would be decided by the elders in the community one by one.

[19:07]

And after each rule, he would ask three times ritually if anyone in the community had violated this precept. And then anyone who had was supposed to confess publicly that they had. And if no one had violated it, then the elder was supposed to say, the Sangha is pure in this respect and then he would go on to the next one. As far as I know, this ceremony is still performed and is very close to its original form in Sri Lanka and Burma and Thailand. It places what the Theravada tradition is the tradition of the culture. And this body of regulations, the Vinaya, has been the bedrock and common thread of all Buddhist traditions.

[20:14]

The Vinaya was the thing about which all Buddhists had had the most agreement and there's been the smallest degree of change. And Xuanzang, the famous Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who went to India in the 7th century, to the famous centers of Buddhism there, came back and he said, We have this idea from reading books that somehow the Mahayana, or Great Vehicle Teaching, and the Hinayana, have some great schism in Buddhism and they kind of snarl at each other from across the fence or something. It's true, the literature sometimes has a bit of a vituperative quality. But actually, Xuanzang said, Yes, I saw Mahayana monks and Hinayana monks living in the same jihara, in the same monastery, following the same Vinaya, the same rules, and it seems that the difference was that the Mahayana monks studied Mahayana sutras and the Hinayana monks studied Hinayana sutras.

[21:28]

So the brotherhood of monks seems to have been far closer above any particular doctrinal differences, at least in the early stages of Indian Buddhism. So, this Upasana ceremony was, during most of the year in India, the only time that the Sangha came together, because the style of practice at that time was that the monks, for most of the year, except when it was raining, would live out in the open by themselves and practice their meditation. And during the rainy times, and during the new moon and full moon, they would come together and live together and be together.

[22:28]

So, the strictness of the rules for the monastic community, which included such things as never handling any money, never going, for instance, if you were a male monk, you could never go anywhere unattended where there were women. You couldn't go into the village and be where there were women around. You could never be alone with a woman unless another monk was present. So, the rules were very restrictive and also separated the monastic community and the way that they lived very much from the lay community. The movement in Buddhism, which became the Mahayana, the Great Vehicle of Teaching, from the very beginning had a rather different attitude about, first of all, the relationship of monks to lay people,

[23:50]

and also a different attitude about the role of the lay person in practice and the possibilities of practice for the lay person. And this attitude is one of the ways that the Mahayana or the Bodhisattva path developed. It also very deeply influenced, I think, the understanding of how a Bodhisattva is to understand the precepts. Just to jump ahead, I can say that in Chinese Buddhism, which almost entirely was, after the first couple of centuries, Mahayana Buddhism, the schools of Theravada Buddhism that came from India never really took hold in China. Most of the monks, after a certain period of time, did not take the full bhikkhu, the full monk's ordination with the 250 rules,

[24:56]

but only took a novice's ordination, which is basically the precepts that we take now and the precepts that you have before you. A novice monk would vow to follow this list of precepts, and then after five years or ten years would receive the full ordination of a senior monk, a bhikkhu. That was the tradition in India, but more and more the style in China was to, and in Tibet too, was that taking the bhikkhu ordination was something unusual, something special that you would do as some added discipline. Some people like Dogen, for instance, never took the full 250 precepts. He used to sign his name Shramana Dogen, which meant novice monk Dogen. From the precepts point of view, that was his station.

[25:58]

So if you look historically at how we receive this form of the precepts, it grew organically out of the sense that the bodhisattva path is something that is quite situational and flexible, and needs a certain flexibility, and is more involved in the spirit, the underlying spirit of all the precepts, rather than some particular list of things that you're prohibited from doing. And this is very much influenced by the doctrine of upaya, or skillful means, which became a very prominent feature of the great wisdom literature, that the fundamental precept is to act with an enlightened consciousness in all situations,

[27:02]

and to act always for the benefit of beings. And that may mean, in some extreme circumstances, even violating one or more of the traditional rules. So I'm giving you both ends of the development. I'm encompassing about 1,000 to 1,500 years of development, so that we have a sense of where Buddhism began with its sense of precepts, and where it ended up. You have at the furthest extreme the tradition of the left-handed tantra, in which not only are the precepts considered to be somewhat flexible, but they intentionally broke them, as a way of very quickly making contact with the depths of your life that are the source of how you break the precepts, shall we say. It took the attitude that if you want to know, as quickly as possible,

[28:10]

what it is in you that could kill, one possible strategy, although a dangerous one, and one that has to be closely watched, one possible strategy is to send you out to kill something, either really, or at least you visualize that, or you enact it somehow, involuntarily. So, if you look at the entire history of Buddhism, what we find is a very definite continuity of how one should behave, how one should act in the world. And then within that, a wide variety of different strategies of how to do it, how to understand it, how to live it. So, mostly what I would like to talk about, and I think you would like me to talk about in this class, is our own understanding of the precepts in our Zen tradition, and practically speaking, how we might go about trying to apply them in our society, in our life,

[29:19]

in the situation that comprises us, which Akin Roshi takes up a bit in his own book. And I have a couple of other versions of, you might say, modern day precepts, which I would like to, at some point, hand out to you for us to discuss. One of them is fourteen precepts of the new Buddhist order founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam. The first precept, for instance, of his order is, one should not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, any theory, any ideology, including Buddhist ones. Buddhist systems of thought must be guiding meaning, not absolute truth. That's the first precept of his new order. And I have some other things, too, of modern teachers reinterpreting the traditional precepts in the light of the modern age.

[30:31]

I think to get a firm grasp of the background of how we understand the precepts, we need to discuss a little bit the question of karma in more detail. I'd like to start with that in the remaining time today, and continue some next week about it, too. Some of you, I think, have been in other classes in which we have discussed it, so it never hurts to discuss it again. But I think, in this case, I want to discuss it specifically having to do with the precepts. So, maybe I should pause for a moment and see if there are any questions about anything I've said. Well, you know, it's the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

[31:55]

And I think that books by people like Trungpa Rinpoche express the feeling of that. But, you know, Tantra is secret. The actual practices and literature are secret. Nothing's written about it. It's very useful, I should tell you. But if you're interested, there are several introductory books about Tantric Buddhism, like Introduction to Tantric Buddhism by Datputa, Lama Vibhinda's book on Tibetan Buddhism, which I think shed some light on this. And there are sections of other Buddhist books which have chapters about it. If there was anything written about it, why? Oh, well, they're just a categorization of left-handed and right-handed Tantra. Left-handed means the Tantra which emphasizes the worship and invocation of the benevolent beings. And right-handed Tantra is more the masculine side.

[33:03]

It's the kind of Tantra Buddhism that came to China and Japan. It's been incorporated into Shingon Buddhism, right? But these are rather scholar's terms. You might say the left-handed Tantra had incorporated practices of shamanism and witchcraft that were prevalent in India for the 5th, 6th, 7th centuries. Buddhism has been very eclectic. Every generation of Buddhist teachers has looked around at what was going on, what was in the culture, and they've tried to use what people seem to be interested in in the way of teaching. Maybe today, Buddhist teachers are talking about computers, new physics and things that are in the air, nuclear disarmament and so forth. In those days, what seemed to be in the air was other things.

[34:05]

They were brought into Buddhism and made a means for people to understand the teaching in that particular period. So there was a whole wave of Tantric influx into Buddhism in a certain period. And the rest of Buddhism and non-Buddhist Western scholars are only now, I think, really beginning to accept it as not some horrible perversion of the teaching. In the first 50 years or so, Western Buddhist scholars started to find out about these Tantric teachers who were rather disgusting. It was a degenerative phase. But that was before I think anyone had ever met anybody who actually did it. If you meet the Dalai Lama or the Kala Rinpoche or something like that, you can feel the Tantric degeneracy. But if you read the texts, you don't quite know what it's all about.

[35:06]

Is there a difference in value placed on the left hand or the right hand? Well, it's a huge subject. I can't really do justice to it. If you're interested, maybe I can talk to you about some books to read. It's not an area I'm very well-informed, actually. Yes, in the back. When Thich Nhat Hanh chooses that precept as the first precept, is that again a situational thing? Has he felt that his son had needed some kind of redirection, that there was self-righteous quality developing in Vietnam, that he was breaking in some way? And does the first precept take precedence over the second and third? No, it's just the one he chose to mention first. But I think probably that's so. I think he felt in the whole world that that was necessary. That maybe he's not just speaking to Buddhists either, but to all religious people. And his observation, we can observe right today

[36:12]

that some of the most violent and hateful conflicts going on in the world are over religion in some form, or at least religious culture. Protestants and Catholics in Ireland and Muslims and Christians. I'm still trying to get used to this idea of the newspaper nomenclature of the Christian phalangists doing this massacre. They use it as just a kind of political label. The Christian phalangists is one of the political factions in Lebanon. But still, it brings me up short a little bit to have them say, the Christian phalangists massacred 1,200 Palestinians. And Herb kind of mentioned that as a self-censoring phrase. Maybe they call themselves that as a label. So anyway, I think that Thich Nhat Hanh coming out of the experience of the Vietnam War, which maybe was not religious exactly, but maybe if you treat the evangelical Marxism of northern Vietnam

[37:12]

as a sort of semi-religious event, and also the conflicts of Catholicism and Buddhism in Vietnam over the last couple of centuries, because there's a lot of Catholicism in Vietnam, and probably a mutual antagonism between the two. There's some historical reason why he would do that. Anyway, I think the basic point is that it's the first time, I think, that Buddhists have taken into account... As I mentioned, the precepts basically were a self-contained, self-regulating body of law for the Buddhist community. There's not much reference in the traditional precepts to how non-Buddhists ought to behave, or how one ought to behave to non-Buddhists. It was considered to be, if you're in the Buddhist community, you should behave in such and such a way. So I think that the gradual universalization of the precepts, through the understanding of the Bodhisattva vow and so forth,

[38:15]

was just taken to its ultimate point in making explicit the sense that one doesn't treat even the Buddhist teaching as an ultimate thing, and that maybe there isn't even any such thing as Buddhism, which is something that Suzuki Roshi used to say sometimes. He himself found some problem in being considered a Buddhist, because he seemed rather extraneous or extra. Was there something else? I have a question. I know in Chinese Buddhism there are 50 or so Bodhisattvas, so I'm wondering if you know why there is a difference between them and Buddhism? If Buddhism and then Buddhism. Well, there are various lists of precepts. The main text in Chinese Buddhism for the precepts is the Brahmajala Sutra, the Mahayana Brahmajala Sutra, which maybe that's the source of the 58.

[39:16]

There are a larger list, and one of the books that does exist on the precepts, and on that sutra, is by Master Hua, in the Golden Mountain Monastery. I'm going to be using that to some extent. The lower 48, so to speak, are some version of the more minor, detailed precepts, which are kept by monks who take the full ordination, and are not expected for lay people. They would be monks' precepts. This is my understanding, but there are different sects in Chinese Buddhism, too, and they each have their own customs about the precepts. So I don't know if you have anything further to say. I'm just wondering why in Buddhism there are 16, or how does it work? I mean, how is the tradition of the Buddhist precepts

[40:16]

handed down from country to country? Well, actually the history is a little obscure. The best that I can tell you is what I already said, that these are essentially layman's precepts. Oh, the 16? Yeah. And I think the feeling became more and more that these are very broad precepts, as we'll certainly find out when we discuss them, and I think the feeling was they contained all the other precepts. And if you thoroughly understand these, it's enough. But actually these contain the 250 precepts, and that it isn't a matter that this is a less inclusive job than the 250 that's maybe just said. There are two attitudes to take about rules. One is the more rules you have, the better. And the other attitude, which became more characteristic, I think, of the Bodhisattva vow, is the less rules you have, the better. I don't know if you understand what I mean.

[41:17]

If you have a lot of rules, it makes it seem as though those rules cover everything, and then anything that isn't covered is okay. If you have only a few rules, which are very broad, and which don't have much sense of specificity, then in a sense, one way, one side, is they cover much more territory, because there's not a real sense of where the rule ends. So, for instance, there's lots of little rules in the traditional 250 Pratimoksha precepts having to do with the care of your clothing as a monk. Many little rules about that you're not supposed to wear it or wash it a certain way, you're not supposed to do this, you're not supposed to leave it out in the sun, things that don't exactly seem very relevant. But you might say that all of them would be covered under one broad rubric of being mindful of not covering it.

[42:23]

So I think it's not that Buddhism got lazy as time went on and reduced the number of rules, but rather the understanding of how to live with the rules underwent some transformation. You see, our form of the Upasada ceremony that we do once a month is interesting because we don't recite the precepts at all, even though that's the basis of the ceremony. What we do recite is a verse or gatha of repentance or confession, which some of you know, and I'm going to hand out the whole ceremony to you. Which goes, All my ancient twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hate and self-delusion, born of body, speech and mind, I now fully avow. So instead of having the preceptor of the community say,

[43:30]

with regard to precept number 17, has anyone committed some transgression, you're confessing or avowing all of your transgressions for all of your lifetimes up to the present moment, everything you've ever done. So in a way, by not saying anything, you're saying much more. And I think the... And then what we do is we bow a great many times to all the great Bodhisattvas and Buddhas. So the emphasis of the ceremony is infinite confession and infinite gratitude. Now practically speaking, I think you can say that there's a danger in that, is that actually the practical consequence of that is you might be rather, much more casual about the precept. If you had some specific rules, that's the weak point, generality. And in fact,

[44:37]

in the latter days of Buddhism, both in China and in Japan, there tended to be quite a bit of laxness about the precepts, which is not so good. So as I said in the course syllabus, the understanding we have about the precepts is that they're not rules really at all, but rather, a point that I like to make a lot is that they are a description of awakened mind's activity. And from this point of view, the basis of the precepts is enlightenment itself. When you observe the activity of a thoroughly awakened human being, these precepts become a description of what you see.

[45:42]

So that's the reason why in our ceremony of Upasada, it emphasizes the evocation of enlightened mind through the recitation of the names of the Buddhas of the past and the Bodhisattvas. And then we recite the four vows, which also, you might say, include all the precepts too. Just... ... [...] And from this point of view, the basis of the precepts is enlightenment itself.

[46:50]

When you observe the activity of a thoroughly awakened human being, these precepts become a description of what you see. So that's the reason why in our ceremony of Upasada, it emphasizes the evocation of enlightened mind through the recitation of the names of the Buddhas of the past and the Bodhisattvas. And then we recite the four vows, which also, you might say, include all the precepts too. Just the first vow, I vow to liberate all beings, who are numberless. As soon as you ask the question, how does one go about doing this, immediately you're in the realm of the precepts. Because precepts means the activity of awakened vow,

[48:00]

or the vow of awakened mind. So we could do a class, and I think Rev has done classes in the past, in which we research the, exhaustively and in detail, the literature of rules and regulations in Buddhism and in its various traditions. And that is what I'm not going to do, because, first of all, I don't think it's really what you're interested in, primarily. And those of you that are, we could do it at some other time. But I fashioned this course as an introductory course, along the lines of the kinds of classes that we've done on Sunday mornings for years now. And my feeling is, why you've come, and I think why I want to do the class, is because you're interested in some very basic sense of what Buddhism has to say about how to live.

[49:04]

And in particular, how to live in your own situations, in which the practical matters of what to do are very real to you, what to do in your personal relationships, what to do in your work situation with various issues that come up that seem questionable to you, and what to do about them. How to deal with the everyday frustrations in our life, and so forth. Which, to put it that way, means that pretty much everybody, whether they know it or not, is involved in some issue about precepts, either consciously or unconsciously, because people are making decisions all the time that are based on some sense of moral or non-moral sense about their life. So, part of what I hope to do is not so much teach you what the precepts are, but together we can bring out and make conscious

[50:07]

the precepts that we're already living by, and see to what extent they are in accord with or are corroborated by by these 16 precepts that we take. This is my intention. Speaking of intention, but Bill, you had your question. I was just wondering whether having fewer detailed precepts would require us to be more aware of necessity of our life, and that maybe would make us more personally responsible, seeing that in some way, that if we don't have something that's this, that's this, that's this, that we just have to be broader people. Would you have to be more aware of daily activities and more responsible? Well, it cuts both ways.

[51:10]

I think, practically speaking, when you practice, particularly if you're practicing as a monk in, let's say, a Zen center, what you find is that in your own life you end up recreating the 250 Pratyamoksha precepts. You have to start recreating rules about where your toothbrush goes and how to clean a sink out. And in fact, you know, I think anyone who's practiced for a long time could probably write down, if they had to, lots and lots of rules that you come to because out of the practical application of each one of these precepts. And we don't write them down because once you start writing them down it makes you think as though there could be an end to it. And actually, each situation is new. There's no rule for it. And I think you just, you know, there are two basic strategies. Human beings do need specificity and are helped by specificity. And I think that the power

[52:13]

of the detailed regulations of monastic life produce the survival of Buddhism. I mean, the fact that we're here and able to hear the teaching, I think it's due to the power of that very highly regulated, strictly circumscribed sort of life which was strong enough to transcend the vast spans of history and of people and so forth and a hundred generations of human beings followed that way and are still following that way. On the other hand, there is the question of vitality or energy, of how to maintain the vitality and flexibility and energy in a situation where things are too spelled out. So I think that actually we're talking about both. And part of what you might say

[53:17]

that we're going to produce in discussing these precepts is kind of footnotes, practical footnotes or the beginnings of your own list. You know, if somebody brings up they're angry with somebody in the office and what should you do? That's, you know, number 17 or it's the next thing to say what you do in that situation. You know, maybe the list would be thousands of articles long if we kept at it long enough. We'd come up with many different things. And monastic life in Zen is largely, for the first couple of years, learning all these little details that are practical applications of the precepts. For instance, just to give you two brief examples, So, in Japan, where still the washing water for your face is in a bowl or a cistern with a dipper,

[54:21]

you're supposed to fill the dipper three-fourths full and then when you're through using it you pour the extra back. And it's a very practical sense of awareness about not taking what is not given. You don't waste the water. You don't treat the water as though there's water everywhere. There's always going to be water in something. You treat the water, even though it's just a little dipper full, as though it's a precious thing. And you take more than you need and then you pour some extra back. So, every time you do it, you're expressing a sense of gratitude and awareness about the amount of water that you're using. That's one little example. And another example that's something we do is that when we pour the wastewater from having cleaned our bowls in the oryoki, the ceremony of eating,

[55:25]

we pour it out. We pour it out into the bucket. Then we're supposed to touch the edge of the bowl to the inside of the bucket. Now, the bowl is, you might say, pure. It's what you eat off of. And the bucket is something dirty or impure. So you touch the pure to the impure at the end. It's like making an electrical contact or something. There's some sense of connection that you're not separating yourself from this bucket full of waste. Whether the waste and you are somehow connected. That's one of our big tendencies in life, of course, is to, in all situations of waste or outside, we tend to separate ourselves or flush it away or something. So, there's all kinds of little things like that which are hidden or detailed expressions of these basic rules that go on.

[56:26]

So, I think that if general or broad rules are going to be useful in your life, they have to be the seed of some very specific decisions that you make that have to do with your intention. And a part of this dynamic tension between lots of rules and a few rules has to do with this issue of intention or vow and what that really is in one's life. Maybe, since the bell is ringing, although I wanted to get into that topic from today, I can leave that for next time. I would like you to set about memorizing, those of you who have the pages, these precepts over the next couple of weeks so that you know them by heart. And we'll continue next time. So, maybe if there are further questions, ask me after David Smith and those of you who want to get their seat.

[57:26]

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