The New York Times
on Wednesday, July 29, 2009 ran four lead articles across its front page, above
the fold. If you scanned them from
left to right you saw that the first one concerned prison abuse in Iran after
the elections; the second one dealt with a lucrative money-management firm and
a federal agency with billions to invest; the third article analyzed the fate
of one of the youngest detainees at Guantánamo Bay prison; and the last
one discussed the precipitous fall in housing prices that has left many
home-owners upside down in their mortgages.
I wouldn’t have noticed this had I not recently returned from India, and as a result of a noxious cocktail of medicines, fallen sick as soon as I landed stateside and stopped taking the medicine. After a brief stay in the hospital, I returned home and began a process of recuperation that involved rest, a change in my daily schedule, and a commitment to take better care of myself—the kinds of things you typically hear from middle-aged people like myself who, for various reasons, still believe that they are a good deal younger than they actually are.
I changed my meditation schedule and decided to undertake a
four-week program that the editors of tricycle had put together in Spring 2007. They
called it the “Commit to Sit” program, and I guess the catchy phrase was
designed to sell copies of their magazine. It must have been a popular program because they later
re-published it as a book, and that was what I’d purchased. I tweaked the program a little, based
on my own strengths and weaknesses, but I was due to finish the four weeks the
day after I saw the front page of the Times.
(In a later posting, I’ll list and offer a few comments on the books that I used during this period of time. I found some very helpful things that I believe many of you who are immersed in the Gelugpa tradition would also find helpful, as a kind of counter-balance, if you will.)
Each day before beginning the meditation session, I took the Five Precepts, promising to make my best effort to keep them until the next session. You are, of course, wondering which five precepts I took because one of the first things Westerners learn about Buddhism is that all phenomena can be numbered and that Buddhists have made an exhaustive effort to number them—from the Four Noble Truths to the 108 delusions that account for the 108 beads on the mala, numbering is a way to get a handle on chaos, which leads to confusion, which leads to ignorance, which leads to suffering. To number something is to know, at least, how many things you’re dealing with, and to know how many things you’re dealing with is to make a small step on the path toward knowledge. So Buddhists number things, and the Precepts are no exception. As I said, I took five of them, twice a day, before each meditation session.
Here are the five that I took (and take):
1. 1. Refrain from killing or physical violence.
2. 2. Refrain from stealing.
3. 3. Refrain from sexual misconduct.
4. 4. Refrain from irresponsible speech.
5. 5. Refrain from intoxicants.
But I don’t like talking about these precepts using the negative form (don’t do this, don’t do that) because they weren’t originally conceived in that manner and because whenever I’m given a list of things I shouldn’t do, I’m reminded of the Ten Commandments, and that’s not a helpful association for me.
To my mind, Buddhists precepts are intended to describe enlightened behavior more than prohibit unenlightened behavior, and so I revise them slightly whenever I commit to them and wind up with something like this:
1. 1. It appears that highly realized spiritual people are naturally non-violent and don’t kill living beings (Precept 1);
2. 2. Also that they are satisfied deeply with whatever they have to hand that is healthy and life-giving, and therefore don’t feel the need to steal or misappropriate or envy (Precept 2);
3. 3. That they use their physical appetites and attractions responsibly and with full consideration of their partners’ well-being (Precept 3);
4. 4. That they speak with reason, gentleness, and a sense of the real power and influence of every word they utter (Precept 4);
5. 5. And that they don’t become fixed on ideas, behaviors, emotions, foods, and drinks that distort their views of themselves or the world around them; in this sense, you can become intoxicated by just about anything (Precept 5).
When viewed in this fashion, I can commit to them wholly and
without reservation.
Besides, I believe that authentic spiritual realization
naturally gives rise to these characteristics anyway, and so I also believe
that if I cultivate these insights within myself, these very same
characteristics will show up in my own life.
In other words, it’s better to be non-violent than to
practice non-violence, although I know that in most cases the practice
precedes the being, if you see what I’m driving at.
So I’ll use these precepts as guidelines, as reminders of what the target looks like, because there are many times when I’m so angry or so thirsty or so fixated on something that I forget the target altogether. Then the precepts are there to remind me.
The two that I want to talk about in reference to the New York Times article are the injunctions against violence and stealing. And to talk about them I’d like to quote from the Buddha himself. The passage comes from the Digha Nikaya or the long discourses of the Buddha:
Thus, Ananda, in dependence upon feeling there is craving; in dependence upon craving there is pursuit; in dependence upon pursuit there is gain; in dependence upon gain there is decision-making; in dependence upon decision-making there is desire and lust; in dependence upon desire and lust there is attachment; in dependence upon attachment there is possessiveness; in dependence upon possessiveness, there is stinginess; in dependence upon stinginess, there is defensiveness; and because of defensiveness, various evil, unwholesome things originate—the taking up of clubs and weapons, conflicts, quarrels, and disputes, insults, slander, and falsehood.
We crave pleasurable feelings and
desirable possessions, and so we pursue them. To get what we want, though, we have to make decisions that
derive from our desire and lust for these things, and when we do that, our
attachment to these things increases because we have now committed ourselves to
a plan of action for acquiring them.
Once we get them, of course, we become attached to them, but even before
they arrive, our anticipation of their arrival is simply another form of
attachment. And once we are in
possession of whatever it is we wanted, we don’t willingly give it up--we
become possessive of it and stingy about keeping it to ourselves; and our
stinginess leads us to become defensive about what we have acquired because we
can’t imagine happiness without this acquisition. It is at this point that we become prone to violence in
order to keep our stuff whenever we feel our stuff is threatened, and we will
resort to all manner of conflicts, quarrels, disputes, insults, slander, and
falsehood to fight for it.
That’s 179 words, but I’m not the Buddha. Here’s the point: you begin, innocently enough, with a craving for pleasurable feelings, and in pursuit of them, you end up with violence or war.
So when I saw the piece in The Times, I saw violence and greed and realized that the one exists in the service of the other. I saw that the violence in Iran and Guantánamo are attempts to maintain an empire of power and possessions that has arisen, in turn, from the greed that fuels the lucrative money-management firms and the incessant quest for larger and larger homes that we can less and less afford.
In other words, once we become attached to something, we’ll
fight to keep it.
And that can be a problem.
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