The First Precept: Meditation In A Precept-Led Life

This short talk is the first in a series discussing the five precepts and their role in Buddhist-oriented recovery. While addressing the first of the five precepts, to preserve life, the primary emphasis of this talk is the importance of meditation in developing an understanding of the hindrances which keep us from embracing the precepts and their active practice in our lives.

Transcript

Good morning.

As we move into our study of the precepts,

I'd like to consider precepts in relation to our Buddhist recovery path,

Of course,

But more specifically,

I want to talk about the role of meditation in deepening our understanding of the precepts themselves,

And of what it is in ourselves which keeps us from engaging precepts in meaningful ways,

In ways which help us to lead our lives according to principles of right action,

Right thought,

Right speech.

These understandings are the fruits of a regular meditation practice,

Where we come to see our emotional and mental qualities and the things which impact them,

How greed,

Hatred,

And confusion scatter our attention,

How they distract us from our spiritual center with feelings of longing,

Regret,

Inadequacy,

Fear.

In short,

Meditation can reveal our difficult emotions,

Our painful thoughts,

Our suffering,

Which hinders our living of a more upright and sober life,

Things which manifest in us as the five hindrances,

Sensory desire or clinging,

Ill will and diversion,

Spiritual drowsiness,

A lack of effort in our practice,

Restlessness and worry,

Distraction from our purpose,

And doubt,

Which can call our very commitment to practice into question.

It's the power of these hindrances that we work to overcome in Buddhist recovery,

And this really is what our practice of meditation can help us achieve through centering us in our bodies,

Helping us to calm our feelings and understand more clearly the contents of our minds and the suffering that we create for ourselves.

Now there's one quality of mind which is a powerful tool for this exploration,

The quality of bare attention,

Being aware of our bodies,

Our feelings,

Our minds,

Without judgment,

Without comment,

Without engaging a choice between right and wrong,

Good and bad,

Without projections about how we would like things to be.

Bare attention is a non-attached awareness that simply sees things as they are,

Free from our past conditioning and biases,

Just open and receptive to what we find in the moment.

Bare attention is not about learning a doctrine or to practice a particular style of meditation,

Such as the loving kindness meditation for example.

Rather to practice bare attention in meditation is to clearly understand our processes of body,

Feelings and mind,

And to experience their nature.

Over time we can cultivate bare attention,

We can learn to engage with the sensations of our experience,

Just the fact that they're happening,

That they are what they are.

I once heard a Dharma talk by Paul Haller from the San Francisco Zen Center who spoke of the difference between directed attention and receptive attention.

Directed attention is what it sounds like when we bring our attention to an input from our senses,

Including our thoughts,

Which the Buddha considered as input from a sixth sensory organ,

The mind itself.

The difficulty with directed attention though is we tend to bring things along with it,

Impressions from past events,

Our preconceived ideas,

Our values,

Our judgments,

All of these accompany our directed attention.

And our awareness of our sensory experiences is changed by them,

Colored by them,

Disrupted by them.

Now with receptive attention we leave all that behind.

When we meet sensory input,

Including thought,

With receptive attention,

Our awareness doesn't extend outward.

Rather we invite sensations to reach inward,

To meet us,

Honest in their nature,

Unadorned,

Unencumbered by us.

Seeing this distinction encourages us to approach moments of difficulty with a receptive attention to the sensations of our experience rather than with directed attention and its attempts to interpret our experience.

With receptive attention we engage our feelings and our qualities of mind in a way that allows them to communicate their nature,

Which we perceive through a sensation of experience rather than thought.

With bare receptive attention the sensations of our experience become more vital than our effort to interpret our experience.

We simply know,

I'm experiencing doubt,

I'm experiencing sense desire,

I'm worried.

When we engage with our thoughts and emotions with receptive attention we find something being expressed.

We experience what arises and engage it with non-judgmental acceptance.

When we cultivate this receptive,

Bare attention we see what's happening within ourselves and this begins to affect changes in the way that we live because bare attention grounds us in the present,

Experiencing fully what's happening now,

In the moment.

And this is how we meet the request of Buddhist practice and Buddhist recovery,

To nurture our awareness,

To look at our lives so that,

Again,

We can see what there is about ourselves which helps or which hinders our living and acting in accordance with the spirit of the precepts.

With bare attention we can see our clinging and aversion clearly and this is important because we're constantly being buffeted back and forth between these two and our lives can become unbalanced in choices which are not in line with the precept-led path that our recovery calls us to follow.

Confident as an act of reception this is at the heart of a contemplative practice of meditation and this is where we begin to see a reciprocal relationship between meditation and the precepts.

When through meditation we become familiar with how our suffering states affect us,

The nature of our fear,

Desire,

Worry,

Doubt,

These things begin to come clear and we can bring compassion to ourselves.

Compassion to our suffering states and in this way begin to loosen their hold.

At the same time when we keep the precepts at the forefront of our lives,

Practicing and recovering in ways that are based in care and honesty,

This offers us a greater place of calm as a starting point for meditation than we might otherwise have.

So let's talk about precepts.

Precepts are essentially a code of conduct which help people to behave in ethical and compassionate ways.

They began in response to ethical situations which came up among members of the Buddha's original Sangha 2,

600 years ago.

Over time and through the development of different schools of Buddhist thought,

Lists of precepts have taken different forms.

For monks and nuns in the Theravadin tradition,

The number of precepts they observe runs into the hundreds.

As a Zen practitioner,

I follow a set of 16 precepts.

The most commonly known set of precepts are known simply as the five precepts,

Sometimes called the five wonderful precepts.

They're the same ones we see in the Recovery Dharma book,

The Refuge Recovery book and others.

The five precepts I undertake to abstain from taking life,

To abstain from taking what is not freely given,

To abstain from sensuous or sexual misconduct,

To abstain from false speech and 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 choice and commitment rather than the storm toss of karma,

We live the life of the Buddha,

We live life 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 and our potential for sobriety and awakening.

Where the fruit of our meditation is a calm and open mind and where we've come to know the benefit of a life lived in the refuges of Buddha,

Dharma and Sangha.

In the book Interbeing,

The Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh expanded 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 ethical aspects of our lives.

The first precept to abstain from taking life becomes this,

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life,

I am committed to cultivating compassion and to learning 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 life.

In a different book he adds,

Seeing that harmful actions arise from anger,

Fear,

Greed and intolerance I will cultivate openness,

Non-discrimination and non-attachment of views in order to transform violence,

Fanaticism and dogmatism in myself and in the world.

Thich Nhat Hanh retitled this first precept,

Reverence for Life.

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 and emotional,

Its meaning is clear.

But of course,

It isn't possible to avoid all violence and killing out of hand,

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.

The spirit of this first precept is to work toward causing less suffering,

To choose through our thoughts,

Words and deeds to minimize suffering,

To reduce suffering in the ways that we can,

Each time that we act.

To do this,

We have to consider the difficult factors of our actions,

Desire,

Aversion,

Anger,

Ignorance.

And we have to work to change these things.

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 dis-ease is a condition of life and that we can see the causes of our dis-ease and that it can be relieved.

With Right View,

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 with the first precept,

We work to practice non-violence.

To protect not just the existence of life,

But the condition of the lives of those around us.

But we have to understand our own suffering first.

We have to release the thoughts which cause our suffering and which result from our suffering.

And it's here that meditation really comes into play.

Breathing in,

Seeing suffering arise in the mind.

Breathing out,

Not clinging to these thoughts,

Not pushing them away,

Just simply letting them fade in open-handed release.

We have to practice.

We have to train ourselves to lessen our propensity to spiritual and physical violence.

We can do this by practicing mindfulness and meditation so that instead of reacting to what's happening around us,

We can go back to our breathing.

We can calm our body and our feelings.

We can understand our thinking.

And then in the peace of the present moment,

With calm mind and glad heart,

We can choose the actions of a compassionate life.

Reviews

A very good discussion of the importance of the first precept. Well presented. 🙏

Clear and organized explanation of first precept. Appreciate the straightforward presentation.

Wonderfully worded and relaxing to follow. Thank you

I love all your work, your voice and message are perfect. 🙏

I’m excited to dive deeper into this. I am aware that I know so little. Thank you! 🙏