The Five Precepts and Anapanasati Meditation Reverence for Life I want to spend a couple of Sundays and talk about Buddhist precepts and their relationship to what we're doing in Anapanasati meditation.
The clarity that we can achieve through meditation impacts how deeply things like the five hindrances affect us.
And so do our actions.
And of course,
The two are related.
Through the insight of meditation,
We come to know the workings of our mind as we've been talking about,
As we've been getting into the third set of contemplations.
How greed,
Hatred,
And delusions scatter our attention.
They distract us from our spiritual center with feelings of longing and regret and inadequacy and fear.
In short,
Difficult emotions.
Suffering.
Which hinders our progress and coming to understand ourselves through meditation.
It hinders our work to lessen the impact of what the Buddha called the three poisons of greed,
Hatred,
And delusion.
These are the things that manifest in us as these five hindrances.
Sensory desire,
That clinging that we deal with.
Ill will,
Aversion,
Pushing things away,
Spiritual drowsiness,
A lack of effort in our practice,
Restlessness,
Worry that distract us from our purpose,
And doubt,
Which really can call into question our very commitment to practice.
So it's a power of these hindrances that we as Buddhists work to overcome.
And that really is,
If you think about it,
What our Anapanasati contemplations help us to achieve through centering us in our bodies,
Helping us to calm our feelings,
To understand more clearly the contents of our minds and the suffering that we create for ourselves.
And there can be a lot there to deal with,
Honestly.
And this is where an ethical code,
As embodied by the precepts,
Comes into play.
By living in ways which create less suffering,
Less fear,
Less desire,
Less worry,
Less doubt,
The contents of our mind become more clear in the first place.
Offering us a greater place of calm as a starting point for contemplation than we might otherwise have.
So really engaging in ethical code,
Such as precepts,
Enhances the meditation that we do.
The precepts,
If you're not familiar with them,
They're essentially a code of conduct or rules to help people behave in a more moral and ethical way.
They began in response to ethical situations.
So it came up among members of the Buddha's first Sangha 2,
600 years ago and over time and through development of different schools of Buddhist thought,
Lists of precepts have taken different forms.
For monks and nuns in the Theravada tradition,
The number of precepts they have to observe can run into the hundreds.
As a Zen practitioner myself,
I follow a set of eight precepts.
The most commonly known set of precepts,
And we see them in our Refuge Recovery Book,
The most commonly known set of precepts for lay Buddhist practitioners such as ourselves,
Are simply known as the five precepts,
Sometimes called the five wonderful precepts.
And these five precepts,
I undertake to abstain from taking life,
To abstain from taking what is not freely given,
To abstain from sensuous misconduct,
You hear that sometimes referred to as sexual misconduct,
To abstain from false speech,
And to abstain,
Importantly for us,
To abstain from intoxicants as these tend to cloud the mind.
Now it's said that when we observe precepts,
When we live our lives by commitment rather than simply the storm toss of karma,
It's said that we live the life of the Buddha.
Living by precepts,
We live the life of the Buddha,
We live as the Buddha did,
Practicing the Dharma in such a way where our clinging and aversion are understood and their effect is minimized,
Where right effort leads us to actively explore our practice,
Our potential for awakening,
Where the fruit of our meditation is a calm and open mind.
And where we come to know the benefit of a life lived in the refuges of Buddha,
Dharma,
And Sangha,
Where we come into a lived experience of Buddha,
Dharma.
In the book Interbeing,
Which Joe maybe you're familiar with,
And Sam possibly too,
In the book Interbeing,
The Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh expands the wording of these precepts to apply them into broad areas of our lives,
And he presents them as trainings in mindfulness through which we can bring a meditative presence to the moral and ethical aspects of our lives.
The first of these,
To abstain from killing,
Becomes in Thich Nhat Hanh's words,
Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life.
I am committed to cultivating compassion and to learn ways to protect the lives of people,
Animals,
Plants,
And minerals.
I'm determined not to kill,
Not to let others kill,
And not to support any act of killing in the world,
In my thinking,
Or in my way of life.
And in a different book he added to this,
Seeing that harmful actions arise from anger,
Fear,
Greed,
And intolerance,
I will cultivate openness,
Non-discrimination,
And non-attachment to views in order to transform violence,
Fanaticism,
And dogmatism in myself and in the world.
So Thich Nhat Hanh retitles this precept as reverence for life.
And on its face,
This precept serves to remind us to protect life.
It reminds us of the potential of violence in our lives,
Large and small,
Physical,
Mental,
Emotional.
Its meaning is clear.
But,
You know,
Of course it isn't possible really to avoid all violence and killing just out of hand.
I mean,
In the very acts of walking and driving,
We inadvertently end the lives of many beings,
Almost all of which we can't even see,
And most of which we're not even aware of.
The spirit of the precept though is to work toward less suffering,
To choose to minimize suffering,
To reduce suffering in the ways that we can,
Each time that we act.
And of course we have to consider the primary factors of our actions,
Cravings,
Desire,
Anger,
Ignorance,
And we have to work to change these things.
Now in the context of the Eightfold Path,
Right View is to see things through the lens of the Four Noble Truths to recognize that suffering or disease is a condition of life.
We see the causes of our disease.
We see that it can be relieved.
With Right View really,
Really understanding the Noble Truths,
We can't justify committing violence,
Be it physical,
Emotional,
Or verbal,
Knowing how we suffer and that all beings suffer.
We can't in good conscience contribute to the suffering of ourselves or others.
So we work to practice non-violence,
To protect not just the existence of life,
But the condition of the lives of those around us.
And to do this,
Again,
We have to understand our own suffering.
We have to release the thoughts which result from our suffering and which cause our suffering.
And it's here that our Anapanasati contemplations of the mind really come into play.
Breathing in,
Seeing our suffering arise in the mind.
Breathing out,
Not clinging to these thoughts,
Not pushing them away,
But simply letting them fade in open-handed release.
We have to practice.
We have to train ourselves to lessen our propensity to spiritual or physical violence through self-understanding.
And we do this by practicing mindfulness so that instead of reacting to the stimulus around us,
We go back to our breathing.
We calm our body.
We understand our thinking.
And we bring ourselves to the present moment where our minds can be calm,
And our minds can be glad,
And our minds can become concentrated.
GONG GONG GONG
