I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen evening sit on Thursday, June 7th. A recording follows the text.

We’ll begin a study group on the Zen Boddhisattva Precepts later this month, so I thought I’d talk tonight about the precepts and how we think about and practice them. 

The 16 precepts we chanted earlier this evening evolved from the Vinaya, the oldest and smallest of the three sections of the Pali Canon, which are the early Buddhist scriptures.  Dōgen crafted the version we chanted tonight.  Our Zen Boddhisattva Precepts derive, in part, from the Vinaya and the much longer sets of vows based upon the Vinaya that Buddhist monastics in traditions other than Zen are required to make.  Depending upon what part of the Buddhist world you are in; whether you are, say, a Theravadan or Tibetan Buddhist; and whether you are male or female, you will make somewhere between about 225 and nearly 360 vows as a Buddhist monastic in traditions other than Zen.

Each of these long sets of monastic vows used in other Buddhist traditions includes familiar prohibitions of things humans throughout space and time have regarded as serious moral lapses, like murder and stealing.  Each also includes many things that, today, we would consider to be a matter of personal choice, like eating meat, even if most of us would acknowledge there are weighty moral issues attending that choice. 

As you might expect with such long lists of vows, each contains some prohibitions many of us today would see as antiquated, or needlessly formalistic, or perhaps too wrapped up in a rigid purity ethic, maybe even performative virtue signaling.  There’s a prohibition on touching money in the monastic vows of other Buddhist traditions that some of us might see that way.

There’s a whole lot of lore about how the Vinaya developed.  As with many things about early Buddhism, it’s a bit hard to separate myth from history.  According to the lore, the sangha—which meant the community of Shakyamuni Buddha’s followers who “left home” to take up a celibate, monastic life with him—functioned quite well without rules for over a decade.   As the community grew larger, more diverse, and more dispersed, however, challenges and conflicts arose.  The Buddha apparently decided it was necessary to begin formulating norms that would help guide and regulate personal conduct and communal life.

It’s said Jesus didn’t start Christianity, and I suppose something like that can be said about Shakyamuni Buddha and Buddhism.  Shakyamuni didn’t use the term Buddhism for the religion he’s said to have founded.  He called it Dhamma-Vinaya.  That’s Dhamma-hyphen-Vinaya; one word.  Dhamma can be translated as truth, and Vinaya as discipline.  The Buddha seems to have been saying the truth he wanted people to know is realized and manifested through the Vinaya, or moral discipline.

The Buddha did indeed speak of a higher truth, or a deeper reality, and he encouraged a practice, meditation, that could help us know it as more than an idea.  But it seems he also came to regard a set of moral principles and practices, or disciplines, as the truest, embodied expression of this higher truth, this deeper reality.  He seems to have increasingly come to regard the Buddhist path as fundamentally about character development; about development of both the character of the individual practitioner and the character of the community. 

A line in the Vinaya reads, “Though the Buddha’s discourses (sutra) and advanced doctrines (abhidharma) may be forgotten so long as the vinaya still exists the Buddha’s teachings yet endure.”  Sutras, doctrines, and Vinaya are the three categories of teachings in the Pali Canon, so this passage is telling us that the moral virtues and principles attributed to the Buddha are the heart of his teaching.

So why do we only have 16 precepts in Zen when other streams of Buddhism have hundreds?  The first of our Precepts are the Three Treasures, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.  If we don’t count them, we’re left with only 13 precepts.  Three of those 13 are the so-called Pure Precepts, which are very general:  I vow to cease from evil.  I vow to practice good.  I vow to save all beings.  This leaves only 10 very specific precepts, like not lying and not misusing sex.  These 10 are known as the Grave Precepts.

There’s a longer story here, but I think it’s fair to say Zen has only 16 precepts because of changing times and life patterns.  Even in Dōgen’s day, there was an increasing number of people who couldn’t or didn’t want to live as monastics but who did want to live an intentional way of life.  And, even in Dōgen’s day, there were questions about whether certain formalisms really added anything meaningful to monastic life.  There had been a lot of questioning of all this in Japan around the time Dōgen lived, within streams of Buddhism that arrived and developed there before he brought the precursor to Soto Zen from China.  Dōgen himself had a hard time finding monasteries in China that would accept him, because he hadn’t taken the long list of vows most monks there took.

It does seem like there’s a purity ethic and needless formalism in many of the ancient monastic vows.  But I’m conscious of the fact that I’m reading them from a 21st century, Western cultural perspective.  Life was very different for people throughout Asia long ago, and it’s still very different than our lives in many parts of the world for some people who seek refuge in Buddhism.

What’s clear, however, is that the vows Buddhists take, whether many or few, are about cultivating a good life, individually and together.  The Vinaya was developed because early Buddhists were concerned their community was disintegrating.  We could say the precepts developed to resist the force of entropy operating in individual psyches and in the early Buddhist community.  They continue to serve this function today.

The precepts are one of our most cherished forms.  And they’re a form that is very much about personal and collective formation.  When we bake a cake, we don’t pour the batter onto a borderless cookie sheet and let it harden into a random blob.  We pour it into a mold that gives it a satisfying shape.  The Zen Boddhisattva Precepts developed over centuries as our ancestors learned from experience and were able to articulate a spare set of principles that help give our lives a satisfying shape.

But the precepts and our relationship to them are more dynamic than this metaphor suggests.  When we use the word “form” in Zen, it almost immediately evokes the word “emptiness.”  It’s too easy to thingify the words form and emptiness and regard them as binaries, even if we also say that form and emptiness are one. 

But what does it really mean to say form and emptiness are one?  It means they’re not things and they don’t create a binary.  It means yin and yang are always co-creating and interpenetrating each other; always dancing. 

So let’s not think of a precept as a static form and embrace it only in a strict, literal sense.  That is one essential way to relate to the precepts, as we’ll discuss in our study group.  Yet Zen also approaches the precepts from other, more nuanced perspectives, as we’ll see.  The deepest meaning of the precepts is realized as we live with, through, and as them in the ever newly unfolding experiences of our lives.