I'm A Good Person -- Why Bother With Moral Precepts?

With so much concern about moral decline in the world, why even bother with "outdated" morality like the 16 bodhisattva precepts? These guidelines, which have been pillars of a good life for centuries, are the core of spiritual practice and can help us choose our path every day.
Without them, practice becomes an empty exercise, and it's easy to lose our way.

Please note: This track may include some explicit language.

Transcript

And you probably noticed from what we read that the precepts are these very structured guidelines that you're all familiar with.

The Three Refuges,

Taking refuge in Buddha and Dharma and Sangha.

And then the Pure Precepts,

Vowing to do good,

To cease from evil.

And then ten precepts that sound a lot like the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament,

But they are so different from the Ten Commandments.

Because rather than being thou shalt nots,

They are saying,

I vow to take up the way of trying to do these things and refrain from those things.

To refrain from killing,

From stealing,

From speaking falsely.

And the question always comes up,

Why would we bother to do this?

We're all good people.

Isn't this kind of thing old-fashioned,

Outdated?

We live in a time of moral relativism,

Where this stuff really doesn't matter anymore.

Well,

I puzzle about this every time we have a Jukai ceremony,

And this week I read an article by the journalist and commentator David Brooks,

In which he was addressing this question.

He started by asking the question,

Why have we,

Particularly here in the United States,

Why have we gotten so sad in recent years,

And why have we gotten so mean to each other?

And he thinks that they both go together.

And he says,

Yes,

There are lots of explanations,

Political polarization,

And the technology revolution,

And economic inequality,

Yes.

But he reminds us that there are many parts of the world that have these problems,

But don't have this dramatic rise in both sadness and meanness.

And what he wonders,

And I've come to wonder,

Is whether this has something to do with the fact that we have,

In the last half-century,

Really stopped paying that much attention to emphasizing how we treat each other,

Emphasizing these values like kindness and compassion.

That we no longer prioritize those.

And in essence,

What we don't prioritize is the correctives for all the delusive thinking that we point to in Buddhism every time we chant a sutra service.

So what does emphasizing moral education mean?

Well,

It means restraining that innate selfishness that we all have,

That comes from the delusion of the isolated,

Independent self that needs to win.

That comes from the delusion of the isolated,

Independent self that needs to win.

It comes from that wariness of others that makes us not want to welcome people who've had to leave their homes,

That makes us not know how to disagree without harming each other.

And it's made us stop paying attention to things we now think of as almost cliche,

Like whether my life has meaning,

Whether my life has a purpose that's worth devoting this precious time and energy to.

The bodhisattva precepts are really a set of north stars that are there to tame the natural flaws that are just part of how we're built as human beings.

These natural flaws that get inflamed,

That get exaggerated,

Whenever we're challenged.

Whenever we're challenged by changing our Whenever we're challenged.

Whenever we're challenged by changes that we don't understand,

By suffering,

Which comes to all of us,

By fears of all kinds.

You probably know there's been a lot of debate for centuries about whether we as human beings are inherently good or inherently bad.

Buddhism doesn't worry about that.

It worries about how we are.

And what Buddhism says,

Having honed this wisdom over centuries,

Is that there are certain ways that we typically behave that we can tame,

And that life works so much better when we do that taming.

Now,

This may sound very suspicious to you,

Because many of us come to Zen precisely because we want to get away from any talk of morality,

Of right and wrong.

We're running away from all the thou shalt nots that many of us,

Myself included,

Were raised on,

That include a lot of shaming,

That include racism and sexism.

And Buddhism isn't immune to this either.

The history of Buddhism includes all those things.

And so many of us turned away from any talk of moral principles or moral training for good reason,

Because we've been burned.

And in fact,

I was trained that way.

I,

You know,

I went to,

I got a lot of education,

Including education in mental health.

And in mental health,

We're taught to understand someone's background as a way to understand why we do what we do.

And so we stop thinking about good and evil,

But we really think about the why,

The psychological why of what makes us behave as we do.

The danger here is that when we stop paying attention to moral principles,

We throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I mean,

Certainly the bathwater is all those shaming thou shalt nots,

Those arbitrary standards that have caused so much harm.

But the baby is those aspirations to be good people,

To be better than we are,

To be as good ethically as we can be,

Which is always flawed,

But can always be better.

And I used to have the fantasy that education would take care of all the unreasonable prejudices and biases and things that,

You know,

We think of as evil.

And so they've just published some studies that show that,

In fact,

When they wanted to look at how people felt about Jews,

That anti-Semitism was,

If anything,

Stronger among people with higher levels of education.

And this could be racism of any kind,

It could be sexism,

You name it.

In other words,

My fantasy that all my education would protect me,

Would make me a good person,

That doesn't seem to work.

So I'm going to read again the quote that I began this evening with from Jack Kornfield,

When he said,

It's really clear that no amount of technology,

No amount of computers and biotechnology and nanotechnology and all these things,

Is going to stop continuing warfare and racism and environmental destruction.

What's called for on the earth at this time is really a change of heart.

We are a nation,

As one of the great generals said,

Of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

That when we don't take on some aspirations to be better than we are,

To tame some of our usual impulses,

To be selfish and take what isn't freely given and misuse other people,

That when we don't do that,

It leaves us fragile,

It leaves us more sad and more cynical it also leaves us prone to looking for saviors in the wrong places.

I mean,

Many people are wondering now,

How is it that millions of people admire,

Even worship,

People who do horrible things to others,

People who you wouldn't want your child to be alone in a room with,

Let alone lead a government?

How did we get to the place where people with no moral compass are people that millions of us admire?

Now the danger that many of us feel,

Including in Zen,

Is that putting anyone up on a pedestal,

Looking for anybody to save us,

Gets us into trouble.

And indeed that's true.

That there's that famous saying,

If you meet the Buddha on the road,

Kill him.

If you put Bob Waldinger Roshi on a pedestal,

Get rid of that pedestal.

Because putting any of us up on a pedestal is a dangerous endeavor.

That's the bath water that we want to throw out.

But the baby that we want to hold on to,

What's precious are these guiding principles.

They might be the bodhisattva precepts of not speaking falsely,

Not killing,

Not misusing sex,

Not finding fault with others,

Not elevating myself at the expense of other people.

All of those aspirations,

Those are the aspirations we need to hold on to.

Whether we sell a raksu or find some other compass that we want to keep our eye on.

And of course what's wonderful and vital about the bodhisattva precepts is that we can never keep them fully.

We break them all the time.

Before I took the bodhisattva precepts,

I didn't think about whether I was a good person and I basically assumed,

Yeah,

I'm fine,

No problem,

Nothing to atone for,

Nothing to worry about.

Once I took those precepts and committed myself,

Things were coming up all day long where I would ask myself,

Is that what I committed to?

Is that how I want to behave?

Is that my best effort?

And so suddenly just the act of committing to a set of guiding principles made me change the way I experienced myself in the world.

So let me close with a quote from John Dido Lurie who wrote one of the four texts that we read when we study the precepts.

He wrote about the precepts,

Over time we realize that the precepts are not really rules,

They are a definition of the life of a Buddha,

Of how a Buddha functions in the world.

They are how enlightened beings live their lives,

Relate to other human beings and this planet,

And make moral and ethical decisions while manifesting wisdom and compassion in everyday life.

So if you can,

Come and join us for the Jukai ceremony on Sunday and at that time we ask everyone present to take up these Bodhisattva precepts with the assurance that if you want to,

You can put them down again as soon as the ceremony is over.

But the hope is this might inspire more of us to think about what we're using as our moral compass and how this practice may help us find a steady reliable compass in a world that otherwise can seem like it's spinning out of control.

Thank you.

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