The True Human Body & the Precepts

by Abbess Taitaku Pat Phelan

I want to talk about turning our body around through practicing with the precepts. The transforming power in practice is our attention, the readiness of mind to meet through our presence what we encounter externally and internally. To meet anything, we have to be awake, paying attention. Zazen is the practice of paying attention to our body and breath, to our presence, instant after instant. Working with the precepts helps us pay attention in our daily life.

Aitken Roshi said that the precepts in Zen are not worded, "Thou shalt not," but, rather, "There is no...." He said, "That is, in the mind there is no killing, no stealing, and so on. This does not mean merely that you should attain to that kind of relative condition where you are pure, but that in the mind, which is the universe, [in] the Buddha-mind, there is no killing, no stealing, and so on, from the very beginning." He said, "Some commentaries by Dogen on the Ten Precepts carry the verb, "must not," but this can be understood to be for the purposes of training. As a device, to reach the realization, that fundamentally there is no killing in the mind, [therefore] you must not kill."

The first precept is "A disciple of the Buddha does not kill." When I hear "Do not kill" as one of the Ten Commandments, I feel fairly clear about its meaning; do not kill other people. But when I hear "Do not kill" in a Buddhist context, the question comes up, do not kill what? People, animals, cockroaches, the enthusiasm or generosity or investigative nature of others? Exactly what are we not to kill? This precept has both the meaning of non-harming as well as cherishing and encouraging life. According to Roshi Philip Kapleau, "To willfully take life means to disrupt and destroy our inherent wholeness and to blunt our feelings of reverence and compassion arising from our Buddha Nature." This means we can’t intentionally harm others or ourselves without harming our own wholeness, which includes our capacity for compassion.

One of my teachers said: "You've seen people with hands or arms or legs missing, whenever you hate anything, you are cutting off a part of yourself." This reminds me of the Buddhist teaching of interconnectedness or interdependence. According to these teachings, nothing comes into existence without a cause and every cause has an effect on everything else.

For example, living beings are the result of many factors and conditions. Some of these are the presence of sperm, an egg, the condition of fertility, and the presence of a being desiring a form. And once living beings are created, there are other conditions necessary for their survival, such as sunshine, warmth, air, or, for anaerobic beings, the absence of these, as well as water and food. Many of the things that make up our world were once alive and depended on these same conditions, like wood and paper, cotton, wool, and oil products. But even stones and diamonds, the planet itself, are the result of many related factors. All causes and conditions are interrelated. Yet, because of our conditioning and our delusions, we are easily confused and distracted from seeing our true relationship to all things. I think the nature of delusion is that it makes us feel separate, giving the illusion of duality.

In Taking the Path of Zen, Aitken Roshi said, "There is fundamentally no birth and no death as we die and are born. When we kill the spirit that may realize this fact, we are violating this precept. We kill that spirit in ourselves and in others when we brutalize human potential, animal potential, earth potential...."

Dogen taught that we have the precept "Do not kill" because we cannot kill. When we look into the nature of birth and death, we see we do not have the power to create life force or to destroy it. By life force, I mean the karmic propensity or drive, the energy that propels us into the next moment, into the next situation, or into the next realm of existence. Some of us are parents, and, of course, we are responsible for creating our children, but from the position of the absolute, we cannot create life. Life force is beginningless. Life force or karmic energy isn't something that is created at birth and destroyed at death. When the necessary causes and conditions come together, a living being is created, and, when they change, the living being dies, but not the karmic energy. Something cannot be made from nothing, nor can something be turned into nothing. So Dogen said that we must not kill because in actuality we cannot kill, and by not giving the appearance of killing, we are honoring this actuality.

Precepts have been developing since Buddha’s time as a way for people practicing together to live in harmony. When Buddhism was established, it didn’t come with a set of precepts. They were created by trial and error over time as people living in Buddhist communities found what actions supported practice and what actions didn’t. There are many versions of precepts. Generally there are five to ten precepts that are considered major and then a number of minor precepts, ranging from forty-eight to about two-hundred-fifty.

Some of the minor precepts are directed to the many details of monastic living. These precepts regulating monastic details are similar to the forms we follow here, such as taking off your shoes when entering the meditation hall and making sure your feet and clothes are clean. At the San Francisco Zen Center, there are small altars in the halls outside the bathrooms, as there are in Japanese monasteries. The practice is to bow before entering the bathroom, and, if you are wearing a rakusu or okesa, to take it off, and then bowing again when leaving. Stopping and bowing helps us acknowledge our present activity. Other teachings for the monastery, such as completing each action, can be applied in our everyday activity. For example, when you take a break at work, after you are through with your coffee or tea, complete the action by washing your cup and putting it away rather than abandoning it with your last swallow wherever you are. It’s traditional, when walking to and from the zendo, to walk with the hands in the shashu position. This position helps us collect and focus our attention so we start collecting our mind before we sit down. These kinds of details can be both practical and foster mindfulness as well. So we make use of them. But in Zen when we refer to the precepts, we usually mean the Ten Major Precepts.

The essence of the precepts, and especially the first precept, is non-harming. One way to practice with the precepts is to look at what you are doing, in this moment, are your actions encouraging life? Or throughout the day ask yourself, right now, what does it mean to not kill? Another way to practice with the precepts is, as you begin each action of body, speech, and mind, look at your motive or intention, is it wholesome or unwholesome? If it is unwholesome, do not continue it into further activity. This doesn't mean to stop and think before each thing you do. It means to be aware of your intention before you act on it.

The more we become aware of our activity and its effects, we begin to realize that we actually can't live without harming. On the gross level, simple things like using coffee and chocolate, teak wood furniture and oil products directly affect the way people in other countries live their lives. The common activities of flushing toilets, cutting trees, paving roads and parking lots, and growing vegetables with pesticides have effects on beings around us, and when we do these things on a collective basis, the effects are profound. The precepts help us acknowledge what we are actually doing, and the more we become aware of what we are doing and of the effects, the better chance we have to minimize the suffering we cause.

The Sanskrit word used for precepts, or right conduct, is sila, which is the second of the Six Paramitas. Sila is derived from the word meaning "to exercise, or to practice." Katagiri Roshi said that sila means to form a habit. "Forming a habit of living in a way that is based on Buddha’s teaching is...called vow....We have to put this vow into practice in our everyday life.... Every day, constantly, we have to form the habit of living in a way that is based on Buddha’s teaching. The deep meaning of precept is that it is Buddha-nature or Truth." He also said, "The main purpose of Buddhism is to form the habit of practice as a vow forever."

In another talk, Katagiri Roshi gave a description of "not killing" from the position of the absolute saying that we shouldn’t see things from the perspective of our conditioning, our projections, or our needs, which he compared to a telescope through which we see the world. He said, in the relative world of comparisons, there are emotions, memories and lots of complications. In this realm we are immediately separated from everything else, and he used a table as an example:

"... if you see the table according to your telescope you kill the life of the table, that is you kill the buddha-life....Not to kill life doesn’t just mean [not] to physically kill people or animals; you have to deeply understand the meaning of ‘not to kill’. Not to kill the life of the table is not to handle the table according to our telescope which separates us from others.... If we handle this table according to our telescope we may end up breaking it and using it as firewood....We have to deal with the table as a manifestation of eternity....This is really the life of the table, the life of toilet paper, the life of your suit, the life of your boots. At that time this is called oneness between subject and object—exactly one, no gap between them....This is to animate the life of the table as buddha."

This doesn’t mean that we give life to the table. Rather, to practice with the table, we need to let go of our conceptualizations that categorize the table according to our needs, and instead be open to the table from the table’s perspective. When we treat people and things as objects out there, as something we can use or manipulate, we have already separated ourselves. We can kill the enemy or cows or termites or trees because we see them as separate from us.

In How To Raise An Ox, Francis Cook discusses another aspect of this precept. He says that, as Zen practitioners, our work is to fully engage in the present, and when we don’t, we are killing the present–the only realm in which we can actually live our lives. The past is only a memory and the future is just an idea, existing only in our imagination.

There are two ways we can kill the present. One is by inattentiveness, by letting our activity become habitual. When we perform activity unconsciously, we let consciousness die. The other way we kill our present life is to want to be somewhere else or doing something else. "To want to be in some other place is to kill this place." To want to be doing something else is to kill our present activity–the only activity we can practice with. The problem is that we kill so much of our lives in the expectation that there is something better someplace else. By neglecting our present body and mind, we are neglecting our true body, the living presence of our original nature.

In Suzuki Roshi's teaching on the precepts, and in his teaching in general, he emphasized nonduality above all else–using the precepts in such a way that they lead to nonduality. Suzuki Roshi said, "If you think ‘I have to observe the ten precepts, one by one,’ that is wrong practice. The foundation...of precepts is based on the various ways of understanding the one reality which is always with you. The reality is not divisible into three (refuges) or sixteen (bodhisattva precepts) or ten (grave precepts). Tentatively, we divide (the precepts into these categories) and we explain them from various angles, but those are just words. Real precepts are beyond words. So, if you think the meaning of precepts is just to observe various rules, your understanding is very far from true understanding of real precepts. The first of the...precepts we observe is 'one reality which cannot be divided into three or sixteen.' The precepts of one reality: you may call it 'emptiness' or you may call it the 'absolute.' This is the first precept we observe....Without understanding this precept, our precepts don't make any sense."

In Zen training, the precepts aren’t taught as a separate practice. Our effort in zazen, our effort to realize unconditioned nature, includes maintaining the precepts. These aren’t two different practices. Suzuki Roshi said: "'Do not kill' means do, do realize your true nature."

© Copyright Taitaku Patricia Phelan, 2004