Precepts For Beginners: The Ten Great Precepts

When people talk about Buddhism in popular culture these days, the focus is usually meditation, compassion, or mindfulness. What doesn’t get talked about so much are the precepts.

In that spirit, I offer this primer.

The Buddhist precepts are a guide to living a life free from suffering, not just for ourselves, but for those around us. The number of precepts varies from tradition to tradition; Soto Zen has sixteen. There are the Three Treasures, the Three Pure Precepts, and the Ten Great Precepts.

Today we’ll talk about the Ten Great Precepts. We see them worded in a number of different ways. Here is my version.

1. I’m learning not to kill.

2. I’m teaching myself not to steal

3. I’m learning to tell the truth.

4. I’m learning to be sexually responsible.

5. I’m learning not to delude myself.

6. I’m teaching myself not to be proud of myself and devalue others.

7. I’m learning not to gossip.

8. I’m teaching myself to handle my anger.

9. I’m learning generosity.

10. I’m teaching myself to trust my own heart.

Those of us who come to zen believing it is a ‘do your own thing’ religion (or philosophy, if the word ‘religion‘ doesn‘t fit with our perception of ourselves of Buddhism) bristle at the idea of precepts. They sound suspiciously like rules or commandments. We like to think we’re beyond such things. Like ceremonies, they feel uncomfortable, like they are meant to constrain us in some way. My first response upon hearing them was, Oh yeah? You can’t tell me what to do.

Which is entirely the point. We are completely free to make our own choices. The precepts are guidelines towards making decisions that don’t hurt us or others. The precepts are intended to help.

We aren‘t used to looking at lists in this way. Whatever we call them--rules, commandments, recommended directions for use--our tendency is to see them as restrictions on our fun or someone trying to boss us around. We see them as strangling our individuality or freedom of expression.

In other cases, we might swing in the opposite direction. We can enslave ourselves to them, surrendering our own judgement in favor of blind obedience. We might see them as ways of measuring how we’re doing or as a way to judge ourselves or someone else as though the precepts were a moral report card.  Or we experience them as things we must follow or risk getting into trouble from a higher authority whether that authority is God or the court system.

We forget they are there to be helpful. What would happen if we looked at these Precepts and other limitations placed on our behaviour as ways to make our lives safer and easier? How would our perception shift if we looked at them as ways of reducing suffering for ourselves and those around us?

This leads me to a point we find easy to understand intellectually but difficult to put into practice: choices have consequences.

Furthermore, those consequences are often a direct result of that choice.

Imagine, for example, I make the decision to sleep in one morning, which leads me to rush out the door without breakfast. As the day goes on, I get hungry, but my job has taken me to a place where the only food is available is vending machine candy bars. Even worse, instead of dispensing a nutritious snack of Mars Bar, the machine takes my money. Because my blood sugar is low, I lose my temper and punch the side of the machine--a choice the lands me in the emergency room being treated for a broken hand instead of dancing to 80s music with my friends.

There’s a couple things to notice in this story. Firstly, there is no moral component to what happened. I am not a bad person for skipping breakfast. Punching the machine does not make me a monster. It might have been an unwise choice, but it is not a referendum on my worth as a human being.

We extend this non-judgement to the way we relate to the precepts. Lying or stealing or abusing alcohol does not make you irredeemably bad. It is not something you need to feel ashamed about. But it can be helpful to look at what lying and stealing and abusing alcohol is doing to your life.

A second thing in the story worth noting is that each consequence arose from the action that preceded it. I chose to sleep in so I didn’t have time for breakfast. I chose not to eat, so my blood sugar was low. I lost my temper and struck the machine and thus I broke my hand.

We often don’t see consequences in this way. We view them instead as a system of rewards and punishments. I helped the homesless guy, therefore I have earned something great that will happen to me in the future--such as this pint of ice cream that happens to be on sale. My neighbour snapped at his wife and therefore he deserves to fall down an open manhole.

It doesn’t work like that. There is no magic scorekeeper doling out demerits and gold stars. The consequences I’m talking about here are ones that are the natural and direct result of choices we‘ve made.

What it important to make this distinction? Because we need to understand that our external circumstances are not rewards or punishments for who we are or what we‘ve done.  If you were born into privilege and wealth, that does not mean you are somehow better than others. Perhaps more importantly, it means that if you have found yourself the victim of violence or suffering through an illness, you did not necessarily do something to deserve it. If something terrible was done to you by another, it is not your fault.

In other words, it is not my fault if my partner abuses me. It is my choice whether or not I stay in that relationship. Sometimes that choice is not as easy or obvious as it might appear to someone on the outside, but whatever my decision is, I need to make it with full acceptance of the consequences that might occur.

Which brings us to the tricky thing about choices and consequences--WE CAN”T KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. We know there will be consequences. But we don’t know what those consequences will be.

This is where the helpfulness of the precepts becomes something to cling to in the waves when we can’t see through the storm.

Although we can’t see the future, we DO know from experience that choices that turn away from the precepts tend to result in misery more frequently than when we accept them as guides. Following the precepts doesn’t guarantee a pain-free existence, but in general, avoiding malicious gossip, handling anger properly, and keeping a clear head has better results more often than doing the opposite.

Our relationship with the precepts deepens the more we examine them and the role they play in our lives. Sometimes a precept that seems obvious and straightforward at the start can surprise us. I’ll give a couple of examples.

Take the precept ‘I’m learning not to be proud of myself and devalue others.‘ The obvious way to read this precept is as an admonishment not to brag or to put ourselves above other people. It reminds us not to see ourselves as more valuable than others, to expect special treatment for ourselves.

But there is another type of pride. That pride is thinking that we are worse than other people. Our delusional belief is that our badness is such that the paths to success that work for others cannot possibly work for us. We are worthless and un-saveable and there is nothing we or anyone else can do about it. We are destined to be the lowest of the low, looking up on others who have so much more than us.

It might not be the sort of pride as we‘re used to defining it, but it’s still a form of pride. It doesn‘t matter if we see ourselves as better than others or worse. In both cases, we are buying into the illusion of being different or special. We are isolating ourselves by cutting ourselves off from the things we share with others.

A second example is the precept that cautions against anger. We’ve seen the danger people acting out of anger can do with their words, thoughts, and actions. But some people take this precept to mean “don’t get angry.” As a result, we suppress resentment or pretend to ourselves and others that we aren’t angry when we actually are.

Lying to ourselves or others is not handling anger appropriately. That’s trying to pretend anger doesn’t exist. And while the harm it causes might not be as loud or visible as screaming matches and slamming doors, that invisible anger is no less damaging, corroding away our relationships and hearts from the inside.

The precepts are not exhaustive. Depending on our lives, we may find it helpful to add more. In keeping with the spirit of helpfulness, I have added a precept which sounds silly, but has helped me a lot: I am training myself to use text messaging responsibly.

I want to think before I post my hilarious social media update. I want to be careful about making assumptions around ambiguous messages. I want to be careful responding to texts--or lack of texts--when I’m angry or fearful and apt to interpret things in the worst possible light. I want to be careful who I reach out to when I’m lonely.

It’s a small precept for a small thing. But it has been helpful. And small reductions in suffering still count. They add up over time.

With all of this said, there are times when the Great Precepts--or the smaller ones we’ve added don’t seem to apply. There are also times we are faced with the possibility of breaking a precept to avert a greater harm. And there are moments when their seems to be no good choice or worse, that we have no choice.

In such cases, we turn to the three Pure Precepts and/or the Three Treasures.

We’ll tackle them in a future installment.