Internal Affairs part 4

January 30th, 2011

This is the last of four posts on the concept of “internal” and “external.” Read the rest of the posts by going to part one, part two, and part three.

Because I started this discussion with the rules of games, like Scrabble and Chess, we should bring it around to the ethical rules of Buddhism. We call them “the precepts,” and phrase them this way:

Five Traditional Precepts:

1. Do not harm but cherish all life.
2. Do not take what is not given but respect the things of others.
3. Do not engage in sexual promiscuity but practice purity of mind and self-restraint.
4. Do not lie but speak the truth.
5. Do not partake in the production and transactions of firearms and chemical poisons that are injurious to public health and safety nor of drugs and liquors that confuse and weaken the mind.

Three Contemporary Precepts:

6. Do not waste but conserve energy and natural resources.
7. Do not harbor enmity against the wrongs of others but promote peace and justice through non-violent means.
8. Do not cling to things that belong to you but practice generosity and the joy of sharing.

Once we take the precepts, we vow to uphold them. But we must ask, are these precepts like the rules of Chess, or like the rules of Scrabble? Are they the lines we will never cross, or the principles that we will test?

I look at other traditions for signs of this. A friend of mine showed me a set of videos online, the Shaytan videos. These were a set of public service commercials that aired in some Muslim countries. In these videos, a person will, say, be contemplating whether to falsely call in sick from work, and then a man dressed as a red devil appears over his shoulder and says (in Arabic) “Sure! Lie to your boss!” Or a child is reprimanded by his mother for eating with his left hand, then the red devil comes on to say, “It’s totally cool to eat with your left hand!” And the insight I get from these videos is that these are the points of struggle in the Muslim world, the issues that people need some encouragement on. There are no videos where people face the truly unthinkable. The ethical rules in the videos are internal to Muslim life.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition of Vietnamese Zen, the precepts are called “mindfulness trainings.” To benefit from them, you do have to take them seriously, but you’ll never learn if you don’t stumble. In this way, the rules are very much internal. In a Buddhist life, we will have a discussion about what constitutes “truth” or “harm,” and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Bernie Glassman speaks of a distinction between “violating the precepts” and “breaking the precepts.” Violating the precepts is like getting a dish dirty; it’s what we do with the dish, a part of using the dish and a part of its function. We work to keep our dishes clean for our own health. I think breaking the precepts is more like denying their value–instead of trying to become more mindful, deciding that it doesn’t really matter because the trainings are “only suggestions.”

When we reconcile this, the precepts aren’t restrictive or oppressive. They are merely the rules of the game that we are playing. To play the game well, we learn the rules.

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