Writers on the Bodhisattvatakha tended to emphasize those things about the Bodhisattvatakha which are unique to it, like passion and emphasis on emptiness and so forth. So, in a way, our attitude about precepts is a little on the esoteric side. That is to say, it's not explicitly stated anywhere in some text in what way our understanding of precepts is different than that of early Buddhism. So it has to be, the understanding has to be put together from the general context of the whole Bodhisattva tradition. So today I plan to speak to you for the only time in the class, really, historically, to give you a little background about where these precepts come from and their development through Buddhism, because that is actually apropos to what they mean for us.

[01:09]

So, to start, we have to go back to the time of the Buddha. and the very beginnings of the community of Buddhism, which is called the Samhita. Which, just like Buddhist communities today, practicing Buddhism today, began as an informal group of students around the teacher. The word, the word, only word in Buddhism for precepts is the Vinaya, which means the body of rules and regulations, V-I-N-A-Y-A, for those of you behind the board. The Vinaya is the literature about the regulations for the community, the community norms.

[02:18]

And the Vinaya is a rather large book. It's about six volumes, six three-page volumes in English. The actual list of rules is quite short. The early schools of Buddhism had somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 for men and somewhat more for women. Part of that is just There are some things having to do with women that don't apply to men. Having to do with age of ordination and whether you've been married before, whether you've had children. So, this body of rules is rather short, but the literature which explains their background, how they came about, is rather large. And we don't know, of course, whether this literature... to what extent it's historical and to what extent it was put together later, because all of this literature was totally oral until about, I don't remember, D.C.

[03:27]

So it's very hard to know. But it seems that there was a clear intention in literature to convey a sense of the rules, the body of rules, being developed rather situationally, rather than being enunciated by the Buddha. And what I mean by that is that the original Sangha was something very simple. And I believe the first ordination ceremony performed by the Buddha was asked by a disciple to... What's historically the case is that there was the society of palm weavers that collected around the Buddha was in a long historical tradition of forest aesthetics, which had been a pattern of religious life in India for centuries before the Buddha.

[04:54]

And the basic modes of expected behavior were already pretty much established in the culture. And, in fact, the major precepts of Buddhism are not all that different from what you would find in non-Buddhist Hindu texts about the life of a shamatha or ascetic wonder and what was to be expected of them. It was not as though the basic understanding of how one should behave was something the Buddha invented on the spot. The main rules were already basically a part of the culture, the religious culture of India. And there were other great teachers at the time of the Buddha who also had communities of celibate monastic practitioners. who followed also a very similar mode of life.

[05:56]

So the general dimensions of the regulations of the community were rather, I would say, obvious to those who were involved. I don't think it required them to... It was a big surprise to them that the Buddha would say to them that they were doing painful killing. And that would just be, I think, a sin of... Although, not necessarily by all strata of Indian culture, because the period of time involved the dominant religious force in the society was Vedic Hinduism, which emphasized animal sacrifice. So it may be that problems of Vedic bent who came into the Buddhist life had to be reminded they were to give up all animal sacrifice and so forth. Anyway, to get back to my main thread, the literature about the precepts in the Pali Canon presents the material as though something fresh each time it came up.

[07:12]

So originally there were no rules, and then somebody does something in the community. Somebody kills a frog, whatever. I have to look back to the literature to find out what the example is. They have several examples of various kinds of each sort of thing. And then what characteristically occurs in the formula is that the lay people, the lay supporters of the monastic community complain to the Buddha that they observed a monk not doing something and they didn't like it. They feel bad. They didn't feel like supporting such a person. So interestingly enough, the arbiters, or the people who keep the monks in line, are the those who support them, the lay supporters from whom the monks beg for alms. These were the ones who are the reporters of the misdeed. Then the Buddha calls for the miscreant to come forward. And you have to remember the Buddha is omniscient, so trying to conceal your misdeed from the Buddha is rather futile.

[08:19]

So it's never the case that the person did it. They say they did. Buddha already knows exactly what happened. So they always confess. And then the Buddha asks them, and I will give you a handout of some excerpts like this so you can see the formula of the operation. Buddha always asks them next, and, oh brother, was this an intentional being? And then he says, if it was, it was, and there's always examples given in every example of Vinaya rule. An example of this being done intentionally, and an example of it being done unintentionally. And in case of it being done intentionally, the Buddha then announces to the community, this is not a good thing to do, this is not what Buddhist monks should do. We should refrain from this activity in the future, and those who do this thing, it shall be an offense in charity, and it gives the consequence.

[09:23]

The most serious ones are exculsion of the order, and those are called five grave misdeeds, which correspond roughly to the first five of these. Not exactly the fifth one, but the first four, anyway, are the grave misdeeds. And then there are five different lesser ranked events, from being put on probation, having to temporarily withdraw in the satsanga, which is the next little series, and then one which person has to confess before the whole assembly, and the lesser ones still simply involve being reprimanded by an elder. And then there's a whole body. The large assembly is a miscellaneous one, which there's not. They're more like details. So, there are two things to be observed from this origin of the Buddhist precepts.

[10:32]

One is that, first of all, they're not a kind of commandment from on high, which were enunciated as some kind of scriptures. Well, there's several things to point out, that's why. Whether or not the formula is exactly historical, it seems pretty obvious that the compiler of the literature wanted to make it clear that it was built up out of experience, out of experience and inquiry to the Buddha, And in fact, the Buddha was recorded to have said toward the end of his life that after he died they wanted to change the Vinaya they were welcome to. That would be up to them. So it was clear that the earliest idea of the Vinaya was that it was a body of behavioral guidelines that was considered necessary and helpful for the accomplishment of the task of practice.

[11:36]

The next point is that the consequence of perpetrating these misdeeds was basically some version of being excluded from the community. So these are not, you might say, universal moral laws that like a blanket, cover every living being, they're practical indications of how a member of the Buddhist community is expected to behave. And if someone cannot be made in that way, it simply means they can't be part of that community, of that family. They can go elsewhere through this. So there was a sense of this is our rule or our community. These are our household laws that we made.

[12:58]

If you can't behave this way, you can't be part of the Buddhist community. So the scope of the precepts in the early tradition is somewhat modest, you might say. It's a blanket prohibition to it. the extent that people who don't live that way are somehow condemned. There is, of course, in the background of these precepts an understanding of what is a karma, what is the consequence of karmic deeds. But these were not, that background was not so much contained within the rules themselves, but rather in the whole of the Buddhist doctrine. But related to that is this idea of intentionality, that the ethics of Buddhism isn't ethics of intention. And sometimes they go to rather ridiculous lengths in the literature to bring up some example of unintentionality with regard to some of the rules.

[14:07]

Some of the rules, it's very hard to think of an unintentional example of the rule but they really work hard because they want to make it very clear that what is the key here based on the Buddhist idea of karma or intentional action is the intentional or conscious willful perpetration of the not that it happens accidentally or unconsciously And we'll have occasion, I think, to talk a lot more about just what this distinction implies, because it's very important for an understanding of right actions. And I think maybe rather, although, of course, Western legal system does incorporate some aspects of intentionality.

[15:13]

You know, we have the You know, the idea that when you hit somebody with a car and maybe you were driving too fast but you didn't see them, there's some sense of you didn't intend to hit them. So there's some work to that. Negligent homicides. Negligent manslaughter. Involuntary manslaughter. Involuntary manslaughter, which is, I think in some circumstances, even a misdemeanor is not considered a serious crime. As opposed to re-meditated murder, which is in our society a serious crime. Imaginable. as it would be for a Buddhist. So within that, but Buddhism clearly understands the possibility of doing wrong things and not intending to do so. So what that distinction is we'll have to look at more closely because it seems to be quite important for understanding of the precepts. The 250 regulations or precepts were for the monks, for the monastic community.

[16:42]

And the non-monastic community of Buddhists, the lay people, were expected to follow five or less on special occasions, special days or special times of the year, would follow ten precepts. And again, these five are very similar to the first five on your list. By first five, I mean, I'm sorry, of the ten last ones, the ten prohibitory precepts, I meant the first five of those. The bodhisattva precepts here is actually a combination of the three refuges, which is the first section. The three, what's called the three pure precepts, which you don't find in exactly that form in the Theravada or early Buddhist tradition, and then the ten prohibitory precepts. So I've been talking now about the prohibitory precepts. This body of regulations for the monks is called the Pradipoksha.

[17:55]

And a full ordination as a monk meant a vow to keep all his pranamoksha precepts. And the earliest ceremony of Buddhism, in fact the only ceremony, other than ordination, which was for an individual, the only group ceremony that was ever done for some centuries was called Vosatha ceremony. We still do it. There's some form of it, I think. The Uposada was performed at the new moon and the full moon. And it consisted of a gathering of the four categories of Buddhists. Monks, nuns, lay men and lay women. All of them got together and

[18:57]

the entire body of the 250 pradikamoksha precepts would be recited by the elder in the community one by one. And after each rule, he would ask three times, ritually, if anyone in the community had violated this precept. And then anyone who had was supposed to confess publicly that they had. And if no one had violated it, then the elder was supposed to say, the Sangha's cure is respect the one to the rest. As far as I know, this ceremony is still performed and it's very close to its original form in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, places where the Theravada tradition is the tradition of culture. And this body of regulations, the Vinaya, has been the bedrock and common thread of all Buddhist traditions.

[20:14]

The Vinaya was the thing about which all Buddhists had the most agreement and has been the smallest degree of change. So... And Xuanzang, the famous Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who went to India in the 7th century to the famous centers of Buddhism there, came back and he said, we have this idea from reading books that somehow the Mahayana or great vehicle teaching in the Hinayana is some great schism in Buddhism. They kind of snarl at each other from across the fence or something, you know, in the Hinayana. It's true, the literature sometimes has a bit of a vituperative quality. But actually, Xuanzang said, yes, I saw Mahayana monks and Hinayana monks living in the same zihara and the same monastery, following the same vinaya, the same rules, And it seemed that the difference was that the Mahayana monks studied Mahayana sutras and the Yinayana monks studied Vipassutra.

[21:29]

So the brotherhood of monks seems to have been far closer above in particular doctrinal differences, at least in the early stages of Indian Buddhism. So this Upasada ceremony was, during most of the year in India, the only time the Sangha came together. Because the style of practice at that time was that the monks for most of the year, except when it was raining, would live out in the open by themselves, practicing meditation. And during the rainy times, during the new moon and full moon, they would come together. and live together, live together.

[22:38]

So, the strictness of the rules for the monastic community which included such things as never handling any money, never going. For instance, if you were a male monk, you could never go anywhere unattended where there were women. You couldn't go into the village and be where there were women around. You could never be alone, you know, with a woman plus another monk who was present. The rules were very restrictive and also separated the monastic community and the way that they lived very much from the lay. The movement in Buddhism, which became the Mahayana, the great vehicle teaching, from the very beginning had a rather different attitude about, first of all, the relationship of monks to lay people.

[23:51]

and also a different attitude about the role of the layperson in practice, and the possibilities of practice for the layperson. And this attitude is one of the ways that the Mahayana or the Bodhisattva path developed. It also very deeply influenced, I think, the understanding of how a Bodhisattva is to understand the precepts. Just to jump ahead, I can say that in Chinese Buddhism, which almost entirely was after the first couple of centuries, Mahayana Buddhism, the schools of Theravada Buddhism that came from India never really took hold in China. Most of the monks, after a certain period of time, did not take the full bhikkhu, the full monk's ordination with 250 rules, but only took a novice's ordination, which is basically the precepts that we take now and the precepts that you can have before you.

[25:05]

A novice monk would vow to follow this list of precepts and then after five years or ten years would received the full ordination of the senior Mapa Bhikkhu. That was the tradition in India, but more and more the style in China was to, and in Tibet too, was that taking the Bhikkhu ordination was something unusual, something special that she would do. as some added discipline. And some people like Dogen never took the bull to precepts. He used to sign his name, Shramana Dogen, which meant kind of novice monk Dogen. That was his, from the precepts point of view, that was his station. And that, so if you look historically at how we receive this form of the precepts,

[26:07]

it grew organically out of the sense that the bodhisattva path is something that is quite situational and flexible and needs a certain flexibility and is more involved in the spirit, the underlying spirit of all the precepts, rather than some particular list of things that you're prohibited from doing. And this is very much influenced by the doctrine of upaya, or skillful means, which became a very prominent feature of the great wisdom literature. That the fundamental precept is to act within like consciousness in all situations, and to act always for the benefit of beings. And that may mean, in some extreme circumstance, even violating one or more of the traditional rules.

[27:13]

So I'm giving you both ends of the development. I'm encompassing about 1,000 to 1,500 years of development so that we have a sense of where Buddhism began with extensive precepts and where it ended up. You have at the furthest extreme the tradition of the left-handed tantra, in which not only are the precepts considered to be somewhat flexible, but they intentionally broke as a way of very quickly making contact with the depths of your life that are the source of how you break the precepts, shall we say. it took the attitude that if you want to know quickly as possible what it is in you that could kill, one possible strategy, or dangerous one that has to be closely watched, one possible strategy is to send you out to kill something.

[28:22]

Either really, or at least you visualize that, or you enact it somehow. So... If you look at the entire history of Buddhism, what we find is not... We find a very definite continuity of how one should behave, how one should act in the world, and then within that, a wide variety of different strategies of how to do it, how to understand it, how to live it. So, mostly what I would like to talk about and I think you would like me to talk about in this class, is our own understanding of precepts in our tradition, our Zen tradition, and practically speaking, how we might go about trying to apply them in our society, in our life, in a situation that concerns us, which Eiken Roshi takes up a bit in his own book, and I have

[29:28]

A couple of other versions of, you might say, modern-day pretexts, which I would like to, at some point, hand out to you for us to discuss. One of them is 14 Precepts of the New Buddhist Order founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam. which the first precept, for instance, of his order is one should not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, any theory, any ideology, including Buddhist one. Buddhist system, you thought, must be guiding meaning, but not absolute truth. That's the first precept of his order. Thank you. And I have some other things too. Modern teachers reinterpreting the traditional precepts in the light of the modern age.

[30:31]

I think to get a firm graph of the background of how we understand the precepts, we need to discuss a little bit the question of climate in general with more detail. And I'd like to start with that in the remaining time today and continue next week about it too. Some of you, I think it did in other classes in which we have discussed it, So we can discuss it again. But I think in this case, I want to discuss it specifically having to do with the precepts. So maybe I should pause for a moment and see if there are any questions about anything like that. The left-handed puncture. well you know it's the lima the lima tradition and i think that you know looked by people like tripple river chain correct the feeling of that but you know tantra is secret the actual practices and literature nothing's written but it's very youthful and intelligible

[32:12]

But if you're interested, there are several introductory books about tantric Buddhism, like Introduction to Tantric Buddhism by Das Buddha, Lama Govinda's book on Tibetan Buddhism, which I think I've shared somewhat. And there are sections of other Buddhist books, which have chapters that... If there was anything written... Oh, well, they just, the categorization of left-handed and right-handed tantra. Left-handed means the tantra which emphasizes the worship and invocation of the right-handed tantra is more the best. So it's the kind of tantra Judaism that Cambridge Hanukkah has been incorporated into the But these are rather scholars.

[33:17]

You might say the left-handed tantra more incorporates, had incorporated practices of shamanism and witchcraft that were prevalent in India. You know, Buddhism has been very eclectic. they looked, every generation of Buddhist teachers had looked around at what was going on, what was in the culture, and they tried to use what people seemed to be interested in as a way of teaching. So, you know, maybe today Buddhist teachers are talking about computers, you know, things that are, you know, nuclear disarmament and so forth. In those days, brought into Buddhism and made needs for people to understand the teaching in that particular period. So there was a whole wave of contract influx of Buddhists in a certain period. And the rest of Buddhism and non-Buddhist Western scholars are only now, I think, really beginning to accept it as not some horrible perversion

[34:32]

The first 50 years or so when Western Buddhist scholars started to find out about these one-trick, two-trick, they were rather disgusted with them, why it was degenerative faith. But that was before I think anyone had ever met anybody who actually did it. If you read the text, you may feel, you know, you don't quite know what it's all about. Mm-hmm. There's different values that I'm listening to about. And then I'm... Well, it's a huge subject. I can't really do justice to it. If you're interested, maybe I could talk to you about some books to read. It's not an area I'm very well aware of. Yes, ma'am. Can you tell how he chooses that three-step as opposed to two-step?

[35:38]

Is that, again, a situational thing that he felt that he signed immediately? some kind of redirection, that there was a righteous quality developing in Vietnam, that we were breaking in some way? Is that the first precept they corrected, or is that the third? No, it's just the one he chose to mention first. But I think probably that's so. I think he maybe felt in the whole world that that was necessary. Maybe he's not just speaking to Buddhists either, but to all religious people. and his observation that we can observe right today that some of the most violent and hateful conflicts going on in the world are over religion, or at least religious culture. Protestants and Catholics in Ireland and Muslims and Christians. I mean, I'm still trying to get used to this idea of the newspaper nomenclature of the Christian Falangists, you know, doing this massacre. And they use it as just a kind of political label, you know.

[36:39]

Christian Falangists is one of the political factions in Lebanon. But still, it brings me up short a little bit to have them say Christian Falangists massacred 1,200 Palestinians. or maybe they call themselves that you know like a label but so anyway i think that thich nhat hanh coming out of the experience of the vietnam war which maybe was not religious exactly but maybe if you treat you know the evangelical marxism of northern vietnam is sort of semi-religious event, and also the conflicts of Catholicism and Buddhism in Vietnam over the last couple of centuries. I think, because there's a lot of Catholic, there's a lot of Catholicism, you know, probably a visual antagonist. There's some historical reason why he would do that. Anyway, I think the basic point is that it's the first time, I think, that Buddhists have taken into account

[37:44]

You know, as I mentioned, the precepts basically were a self-contained, self-regulating body of law for the Buddhist community. There's not much reference in the traditional precepts to how non-Buddhists ought to behave or how one ought to behave to non-Buddhists. It was considered to be, if you're in the Buddhist community, you should behave in such and such a way. So I think that the gradual universalization of the precepts, through the understanding of the Bodhisattva balance of what we've just taken to his ultimate point, in making explicit the sense that one doesn't treat even the Buddhist teaching as an ultimate thing. And that maybe there isn't even any such thing as Buddhists, which is something that Suzuki Roshi used to say. But he himself found some problem at being considered a Buddhist because he seemed rather extraneous or extraneous. Is there something else?

[38:53]

Well, there are various lists of precepts. The main text in Chinese Buddhism for the precepts is the Brahmajala Sutra, the Mahayana Brahmajala Sutra. which maybe that's the source of the 58. There are a larger list. And one of the books that does exist on the precepts and on that sutra is by Master Hua in Goldmouth Monastery. And I'm going to be using that to some extent. The lower 48, so to speak, are some version of the more minor detailed precepts, which... are kept by monks who take the full ordination, and are not expected for labor. They would be monks themselves. This is my understanding, but there are different sects in Chinese Buddhism, too, and they each have their own custom.

[40:02]

So I don't know if... Well, actually the history is a little obscure. The best that I can tell you is what I already said, that these are essentially layman's precepts. Yeah. And I think the feeling became more and more that But these are very broad precepts, as we'll certainly find out when we discuss them. And I think the feeling was they contain all the other precepts. But if you thoroughly understand these, it's enough. That actually these contain the 250 precepts. And that it isn't a matter that this is a less inclusive job that the 250s maybe just said... So there are two attitudes to take about rules.

[41:06]

One is the more rules you have, the better. And the other attitude, which is more, became characteristic, I think, of the Bodhisattva vow, is the less rules you have, the better. I don't know if you understand what I mean. If you have a lot of rules, it makes it seem as though those rules cover everything, and then anything that isn't covered is okay. You know? If you have only a few rules, which are very broad and which don't have much sense of specificity, they can sense one way, one side, as they cover much more territory, because there's not a real sense of where the rule ends. So, for instance, there's lots of little rules In the traditional 250 Pali Moksha precepts having to do with the care of your clothing as a monk, many little rules about that you're not supposed to wear it or wash it a certain way, you're not supposed to do this, you're not supposed to leave it out in the sun, things that don't exactly seem very relevant.

[42:07]

But you might say that all of them would be covered under one broad rubric of being mindful, not coveting. So I think it's not that Buddhists have got lazy as time went on and reduced the number of rules, but rather the understanding of how to live with the rules underwent some transformation. And you see, our form of the Upasada ceremony that we do once a month It's interesting because we don't recite the precept at all, even though that's the basis of the ceremony. What we do recite is a verse or gatha of repentance or confession, which some of you know, and I'm going to hand out the whole ceremony to you, which goes, all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, self-illusion,

[43:20]

born of body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. So instead of having the preceptor of the community say, with regard to precept number 17, has anyone created some transgression, you're confessing or avowing all of your transgressions for all of your lifetimes up to the present moment, everything that you've ever done. So in a way, by not saying anything, you're saying much more. And then what we do is we bow a great many times to all the great Bodhisattvas and Buddhas. So the emphasis of the ceremony is infinite confession and infinite gratitude. Now practically speaking, I think you can say that the danger in that is that actually the practical The consequence of that is you might be much more casual about the precepts if you had some specific rules.

[44:27]

That's the weak point, generality. And in fact, in the latter days of Buddhism, both in China and in Japan, there tended to be quite a bit of laxness about the precepts, which is not so good. So, as I said in the course syllabus, the understanding we have about the precepts is that they're not rules really at all, but rather, a point that I like to make a lot is that they are a description of of awakened mind's activity. And from this point of view, the basis of the precepts is enlightenment itself.

[45:29]

When you observe the activity of a thoroughly awakened human being, these precepts become a description of what you see. So that's the reason why in our ceremony of Upasada, it emphasizes the evocation of enlightened mind through the recitation of the names of the Buddhas of the past and the Bodhisattvas. And then we recite the four vows, which also you might say include all the precepts too. And from this point of view, the basis of the precepts is enlightenment itself.

[46:50]

When you observe the activity of a thoroughly awake human being, these precepts become a description of what you see. So that's the reason why in our ceremony of Upasada, it emphasizes the evocation of enlightened mind through the reputation of the names of the Buddhists of the past and the Bodhisattvas. And then we recite the four vows, which also, you might say, include all the precepts, too. Just the first vow, I vow to liberate all being, who are numberless, As soon as you ask the question, how does one go about doing this, immediately you're in the realm of the precepts. The precepts means the activity of awakened vow or the vow of awakened mind.

[48:02]

So we could do a class, and I think Rep has done classes in the past, in which we research the, exhaustively and in detail, the literature of rules and regulations in Buddhism and its various traditions. And that is what I'm not going to do, because, first of all, I don't think it's really what you're interested in, primarily. And those of you that are, we could do it at some other time. But I fashioned this course as an introductory course along the lines of the kinds of classes that we've done on Sunday mornings for years now. And my feeling is, why you've come, and I think why I wanted to do the class, because you're interested in some very basic sense of what Buddhism has to say about how to live. and in particular how to live in your own situations, in which the practical matters of what to do are very real to you, what to do in your personal relationships, what to do in your work situation with various issues that come up that seem questionable to you, or what to do about it, how to deal with the everyday frustrations of our life, and so forth.

[49:30]

which, to put it that way, means that pretty much everybody, whether they know it or not, is involved in some issue about precepts, either consciously or unconsciously, because people are making decisions all the time that are based on some sense of moral or non-moral sense about their life. So part of what I hope to do is not too much teach you what the precepts are, but together we can bring out, make conscious the precepts that we're already living by and see to what extent they are in accord with or are corroborated by these 16 precepts that we take. This is my intention. Speaking of intention, but Bill, you had a question.

[50:33]

Well, I was just wondering whether having fewer detailed precepts would require us to be more aware of necessity for our life, and that maybe would make us more personally responsible, seeing that in some way, that if we don't have something to do with this, Do you just have to keep broader people? Do you have to be more aware of your daily activity and more responsible? Well, it cuts both ways. I think, practically speaking, when you practice, particularly if you're practicing as a monk in, let's say, Zen Center, what you find is that in your own life you end up recreating 250 Prati Moksha precepts. You have to start recreating rules about where your toothbrush goes and how to clean the sink out. And in fact, you know, I think anyone who's practiced for a long time could probably write down, if they had to, lots and lots of rules that you come to because out of the practical application of each one of these precepts.

[51:46]

And we don't write them down because once you start writing them down, it makes you think as though there could be an end to it. And actually, each situation is new. There's no rule for it. And I think you just, you know, there are two basic strategies. Human beings do need specificity and are helped by specificity. And I think that the power of the detailed regulations of monastic life produce the survival of Buddhists The fact that we're here, able to hear the teaching, I think is due to the power of that very highly regulated, strictly circumscribed sort of life, which was strong enough to transcend the vast spans of history of people and so forth, a hundred generations of people being followed that way and are still following that way. On the other hand, There's the question of vitality of energy, of how to maintain the vitality and flexibility and energy in a situation where things are too spelled out.

[53:09]

So I think that actually we're talking about both. And part of what... you might say we're going to produce in discussing these precepts is kind of footnotes, practical footnotes, or the beginnings of your own list. You know, if somebody brings up they're angry with somebody in the office and what you can do, that's, you know, number 17, or it's the next thing to say, what you do in that situation. And, you know, maybe the list could be thousands of articles long if we... kept at it long enough, we'd come up with many different things. And monastic life in Zen is largely, for the first couple of years, learning all these little details that are practical applications of precepts. For instance, just to give you two brief examples, In Japan, where still the washing water for your face is in a bowl or a cistern with a dipper, you're supposed to fill the dipper three-fourths full, and then when you're through using it, you pour the extra back.

[54:34]

And it's a very practical sense of awareness about not taking what is not given. You don't waste the water. You don't treat the water as though there's water everywhere. There's always going to be water or something. You treat the water, even though it's just a little dipper full, as though it's a precious thing. And you take more than you need and then you pour some extra back. So every time you do it, you're expressing a sense of gratitude and awareness about the amount of water that you're using. That's one little example. And Another example that's something we do is that when we pour the wastewater from having cleaned our bowls in the oryoki, in the ceremony of eating, when we pour it out, we pour it out into the bucket, and we're supposed to touch the edge of the bowl to the inside of the bucket. The bowl is, you might say, pure, what you eat off of, and the bucket is something dirty or impure.

[55:42]

So you touch the pure to the impure at the end. It's like making an electrical contact or something, there's some sense of connection, that you're not separating yourself from this bucket full of waste. Rather the waste and you are somehow connected. It's a very... That's one of our big tendencies in life, of course, is to... In all situations of waste or outside, we tend to separate ourselves or flush away. So there's all kinds of little things like that which are hidden or detailed expressions of these basic rules that go on. So I think that it... general or broad rules are going to be useful in your life, they have to be the seed of some very specific decisions that you make that have to do with your intention. And a part of this dynamic tension between lots of rules and a few rules has to do with this issue of intention or vow and what that really is in one's life.

[56:56]

Maybe the bell is ringing. although I wanted to get into that topic some today, I can leave that for next time. I would like you to set about memorizing, those of you who have the pages, these precepts over the next couple of weeks, so that you know them by heart. And we'll continue next time. So maybe if there are further questions, ask me after this, especially those of you who want to get a seat. Thank you.

[57:27]

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