Learning from the Precepts

I received a message from a student today who had been caught in a sudden set of circumstances where she ended up telling a lie, and she was wondering if there might be some leniency around the precepts for laypeople who live a more difficult life than those of us who live in the monastery—leniency, I guess, in the sense of not being punished for the breaking of a precept.

Well, the precept is not a question of punishment or of a judge who does or doesn’t grant leniency. Precepts are training rules. You’re supposed to learn from following them. The more strictly you hold to them, the more you learn. This is part of the Buddha’s general teachings on how to get to know your mind at the same time that you’re developing good qualities in the mind. Those two things go together.

After all, if you act on intentions that you know are unskillful, you’re putting up a resistance. You’re putting up a wall, saying at that point: The Buddha doesn’t matter; the teachings of the ajaans and all the effort they went to re-establish the Dhamma, they don’t matter. When you have that kind of wall in your mind, you’re not going to learn anything. It’s when you act on impulses that are skillful that the mind is a lot more open to itself, more open to judging the results of acting on those impulses, to see how harmless they really are. In this way, you’re training both the heart and the mind at the same time. You’re training the heart in the desire to be harmless, and the mind in the desire to know itself.

Remember, of course, that the Pali word citta means both heart and mind. If you’re going to train one side of it, you’ve got to train the other side, too. Otherwise, it’s like exercising your body: Exercising only the right side, but not the left side, you get out of balance. When you exercise both sides, then things are in balance. You become strong, and your strength doesn’t become a burden or an actual hindrance.

So. What do you learn? Well, one thing: You learn about being mindful. You have to keep the precept in mind.

And you have to be alert, because things are going to come up fast, both inside and outside.

I find this particularly in the case that the student was talking about today—by telling a lie, she saved herself a lot of inconvenience. But that means your convenience is more important than the precept. Is that really your sense of values? If it is, you’ve learned about your values, but then you’ve got to say: “This attitude is getting in the way of my training. I’ve got to do something about it.”

Sometimes you lie out of the desire to please, to be friendly, to not make waves. Okay, which is more important: holding to the precept, realizing that in the long run it’s going to be better to tell the truth, or just going for the quick fix of being pleasing?

If you hold by the precept, you’re learning the set of values that underlies the third quality, which is ardency.

Remember that when Ajaan Lee was describing these three qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency, ardency for him was the insight factor of the three. This is different from what you get in the commentary. The commentary defines the word *****sampajañña—*****that we define as “alertness”—as “clear comprehension”: understanding things in terms of the three characteristics. Now, you find this not at all in the Canon. Every time the Canon talks about alertness or sampajañña, it means knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it.

The commentary says, though, “Well, everybody knows what they’re doing while they’re doing it. Even jackals know that they’re howling when they howl. Babies know that they’re sucking on their mother’s breast when they’re sucking on their mother’s breast.” But do they really know? Their minds are off someplace else. When the commentary gets snide like this, you know its interpretation is on shaky ground. To be alert, you have to be really on top of what you’re doing, clear about what you’re doing.

Now, as you’re ardent in trying to do things well, you begin to see more clearly what gets in the way. If you’re not especially ardent, things can get in the way and they seem okay. Ardency contains the value judgment that you really do want to hold by the precepts and to learn the lessons they have to teach.

You begin to understand layers and layers in the mind. After all, how do you break a precept? You do it intentionally. How clear are you about your intentions? Most people are not clear at all. You ask them, “Why did you do that?” and they have to pause and think for a minute. If you really were on top of your intentions, you wouldn’t have to pause.

That’s because you begin to realize that there are many layers in your intentions, some of which are skillful, some of which are not. And you’re not going to see them if you keep breaking the precepts. You will see them, though, if you try not to break them. That’s when you begin to focus on the Buddha’s teaching about where craving is located, which is basically the same as, “Where is the allure of these things that would pull you away?” What do you like about them?

As the texts say, the allure could be anywhere. It could be in a perception, it could be in a thought construct. You read the long list of possibilities and you can get overwhelmed by the fact that the allure could be anywhere, but the Buddha is not describing things to overwhelm you. He’s giving you leads. Follow this lead and see where it takes you. Follow that lead and see where it takes you. The list opens your mind to possibilities.

For instance, look at your perceptions. Look at your perception of a situation. Look at the narratives you tell yourself about a situation, especially the ones that would say, “I don’t have to observe the precept here,” or, “The precepts don’t apply here.” What in that narrative has its pull? Or in the desire to please? Or in the desire for convenience? Exactly where is that craving located? Where is the allure located?

When you try to thwart these things, that’s when you know them. The Buddha gives the analogy of a dam. You put a dam across the river, and it holds the water back. But it doesn’t just hold the water back. In the course of putting the dam across the river, you learn a lot about the currents flowing beneath the surface.

So remember, these precepts are called training rules for a good reason. You train the mind so that you can get to know it. The more you train the mind in the precepts, the more open it is with itself. The fact that you’re able to stick with the precepts makes you more willing to open up, look inside, with the confidence that you can do something about what you find inside if you run into things you don’t like to see about yourself.

This, too, teaches you a lesson: that your sense of self is fluid. It can be tricky because it’s fluid, because you find yourself identifying with things that you wouldn’t expect sometimes. This fluidity seeps into your perceptions, seeps into your thought constructs, seeps into your inner conversations. But you can make it seep in a good way.

That’s a large part of the practice right there: seeing things you don’t like about yourself but not having to identify with them. Identify with the precepts. Create a sense of self around the precepts, for the time being at least, so that you can undo your sense of self that would be willing to break the precepts.

Just because you’ve been a certain kind of person for who knows how long doesn’t mean you have to continue being that kind of person. After all, the Buddha said that if people couldn’t learn how to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones, there’d be no point in his teaching. It’s because we can do this that he taught. So he has confidence in you that you can change your ways. And you find that you’re able to live with yourself more and more, and be open to yourself more and more, the more you hold by the precepts.

There’s a tendency sometimes to divide the practice of Buddhism into two areas: one is the area of making merit, and the other is the practice leading to nibbāna. Making merit is considered to be a lowly practice. Of course, it’s better than not making merit but it’s not divorced from the practice leading to nibbāna. After all, you make merit for a good life in future lifetimes, and part of that is holding to the precepts. When we chant the factors of the noble eightfold path, we run into the precepts again. The difference simply is in how you use them. If you use them for training the mind so that it can get to understand itself, you’re actually doing both practices at once. It’s simply a matter of how refined you are in the lessons you learn, how observant you are.

This is one of the reasons why we practice meditation: mindfulness and concentration. That practice builds on the precepts but also turns around and helps us to be even stricter with ourselves in holding to the precepts.

After all, the Dhamma eye has as one of its rewards the fact that your precepts now become pleasing to the noble ones. In other words, you hold to them continually in a way that’s conducive to concentration.

So there’s a lot to learn by observing the precepts: this quest to always choose the right thing, the most skillful thing to do and say and think. See them as a training, an opportunity to come to know yourself and to be open to yourself, so that the mind is open to the heart, the heart is open to the mind—and both sides grow.