Brad Warner has been a notable figure in Zen in the West since the publication of his first book, Hardcore Zen, in 2003. His blog of the same title was a prominent landmark in online Buddhist discourse as dharma communities ventured into the digital space two decades ago.

Warner is a bass guitarist in a punk band, and his teaching style often has an irreverent exterior. On the cover of his new book, The Other Side of Nothing (New World Library, May 2022) the Buddha sports a spiky blue hairdo. This tongue-in-cheek presentation is matched by Warner’s laidback writing style. But his approach to the dharma, if not exactly orthodox, is deeply rooted in texts and tradition (Warner is a dharma heir of Soto Zen priest Nishijima Roshi.) 

Warner has also been a vocal critic of dharma “innovations” such as the use of psychedelics as an aid to practice, and remains skeptical of online teaching. He was vocal about abuses of power by those in authority in our 2011 interview but still insists that Zen communities cannot function when run by committee. He recently left the center he founded in Los Angeles, Angel City Zen Center. I spoke with Brad in early March 2022 about his new book on Buddhist ethics, the importance of following tradition—even the parts that don’t always make sense to modern practitioners—and his future as a teacher.

—Philip Ryan 

***

Tricycle: In your new book you tie ethics to nonduality and argue that behaving unethically is hurting ourselves. We may think acting unethically is selfish, but you’re saying it’s much more than that: It’s nonsensical. Can you lay out that case?

Brad Warner: It’s funny, I’ve gone so deeply into the book that I’ve gone straight through and come out the other side! I’ve forgotten what I put in and what I left out. There was one thing I kept trying to write for years, I don’t know if I decided to put it in or not. It’s the concept of enlightened selfishness, that the best thing you can do for yourself is to be decent and kind to others. If you want a good life, a truly good life for yourself, then your best bet is to be good to others, because there’s essentially no separation between all of us. Anything you do to somebody else, you’re actually doing to yourself. 

When I first heard the precepts, I heard them as admonishments. Like, there’s a bunch of fun stuff you could do and gain a lot but you better not do that because that wouldn’t be good! And then I came to realize that’s not the case at all. The precepts are actually telling you how to have a better life. Just don’t do these things, and you’ll actually enjoy your life more. Anything you do to somebody else is harming yourself. Another way of saying it is that it’s good to be careful.

Tricycle: Westerners sometimes come to the precepts with ideas about the 10 commandments. They hear the precepts and think, oh, no, that’s not what I want in Buddhism! I’m here for the freedom.

BW: There are parallels with the 10 commandments. Several of the precepts are the same as the 10 commandments, but the attitude is different. The precepts are not presented as coming from God who must be obeyed, and whose opinion is right because He’s God. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, God appears to them and they say, “Good idea, oh, Lord,” and God says, “Of course, it’s a good idea, I thought of it!” 

But when we understand that the process of how the precepts came about we see it’s different. When the Buddha had his original sangha, they basically started out with no rules, and then as things came up, they created rules, and that’s the basis for the precepts. It’s understood that they’re made by people, but even so they’re not arbitrary. They’ve been honed for a long time. 

My teacher used this analogy, and I have mixed feelings about it, but I’ll give it to you anyway. We’re like cows in the pasture, or sheep. And as long as we’re in the fenced-in pasture, everything’s fine, because the predators can’t get to us. But when you go out of the fence, then you’re in danger, then things can happen and things can go wrong. You’re putting yourself at risk. I don’t like to compare people to sheep, or cattle, but maybe the analogy still works. 

Tricycle: How is it helpful to understand “we’re all one,” when you’re in the middle of a disagreement with someone? How do we use that?

BW: Ultimately you can’t use it. By that I mean that you, as an entity apart from whoever you are disagreeing with, can’t use that understanding. You, as an entity who uses your understanding, has to step aside. This is easier said than done for most of us. In a conventional way I guess you could keep in mind that your opponent is really just an aspect of yourself, metaphysically speaking. That might work. I think it can be helpful to do that. It can be useful to conceive of things that way. But what I’m really saying is you have to let go of yourself completely.

In my book Sit Down and Shut Up I told the story of how I was having an argument with my then-wife. I can’t remember what we were arguing about. But there came a point where she said something and I thought of the perfect “winning” response. There’s an episode of Seinfeld in which George comes up with a killer comeback to something one of his co-workers said. But he thinks of it too late. So he keeps trying to get the co-worker to say the same thing again. In this case, I thought of the killer response right then. How often does that happen? But I also saw that, in winning the argument, I’d end up creating a lot of resentment and bad feeling. So I shut up, and said nothing. I dropped my desire to be a winner and accepted that saying nothing was the better way. The argument just kind of fizzled out then and we both felt a lot better. That kind of thing is really difficult, but it’s incredibly worthwhile, I think.

Tricycle: Do you think ethics are fundamental to us? Are they something that we rediscover as we look at the precepts or are they something that comes from the outside that we need to fence in our chaotic natures?

BW: I think it’s a bit of both. I think we have a natural desire to be ethical. We can overcome that if we think there’s something to be gained by overcoming it. But when I examine myself, it seems like every time that I act unethically in order to gain something, I don’t actually gain anything. As far as whether it has to be imposed, I don’t know. I think everything has that aspect to it, external and internal. It’s like the question of why you need a teacher. This comes up in Buddhism a lot. Dogen always emphasizes this need to have a teacher. 

I’ve been studying the Advaita Vedanta tradition lately. I got on a kick a couple of years ago to look into it, and they have the same idea of the guru. They frame it differently, but it’s still an outside thing and they actually have terminology for it. There’s the guru that’s inside and the guru that’s outside, but in their way of framing things they’re one and the same. I don’t see that exact way of explaining it in Zen but I do feel like it’s a similar idea. I needed to have an external teacher to awaken the internal teacher that was already there. 

Buddhist ethics are based on an intuitive sense that is difficult to come by. This is one of the reasons we meditate. Zazen or whatever meditation you choose is usually good for clearing away all the other stuff, all the thoughts and things. Thought comes in and muddles things up, and it’s not that you have to try to stop thinking. What’s more useful is to learn to stop believing your own thoughts, because you don’t really have all that much control over your own thoughts. 

I think Sam Harris said this, that I can no more predict my next thought than I can predict your next thought. We imagine that we have control over what’s going on in our heads, but we don’t. Maybe we have a tiny bit of control, but not very much. The best strategy, I think, is just to learn to let go. It’s just more noise, you know, it’s like there’s people arguing next door and you can listen in on the argument or you can ignore it. If it’s a really loud argument, it’s hard to ignore. A meditation practice will help you get to the point where the thoughts, even though they’re still happening, are less distracting. They’re just background noise.

Tricycle: I was struck by your chapter on confession. How important for maintaining our ethical behavior are other people, or what we think that other people think of us? 

BW: It is important because we’re built that way. It’s probably something to do with being a primate. Your instinct is to live in a social group and look at the other members of the group for clues on how to behave and what’s acceptable and what’s not. We do seem to need that. I didn’t set out to write about confession, but when I decided to write about the precepts, that was a big part of how the precepts in Buddhism developed. There was a system of confessing your wrongdoings to the group which has largely disappeared. But in the early days of Buddhism, that was a big deal. It’s developed into a formula: 

All my ancient twisted karma 
From the beginning, this greed, hatred, and ignorance
born from body, speech, and mind
I now fully avow

It’s a general acknowledgment that you’ve done something, but you don’t have to say specifically what you did. This saves you some embarrassment and I think it’s probably fine if you keep those things private. But it was useful for me, sometimes, to talk to my teachers about specific things I’d done one-on-one and say, here’s what’s going on. And my teachers were always like, “Oh, don’t worry about it.” It’s funny that “Don’t worry about it” can have a whole different meaning when it’s coming in a different context. 

You understand that what you did in the past was not what you should have done. And then you make an effort not to do that again. The sixth precept is usually given as “Don’t criticize the faults of monks and Buddhist laypeople,” but the version I learned was “No speaking of past mistakes,” which means not just the mistakes of others, but your own mistakes. You don’t need to dwell on your mistakes, but you need to see that you did them, and make an effort not to do them any more once you realize they’re wrong. Dwelling on past mistakes is just a way to inflate your ego. You inflate your ego through negative things as much as by positive things. I’ve noticed that I’m much more inclined to inflate my ego with negative stuff. Because I’m so bad. I’m so wrong. I did that terrible thing. It’s me me me, so it reinforces that sense of self. And I find myself doing that much more than the other version of being egotistical, which is, I’m the greatest thing in the world. That one doesn’t work as well for me.

Tricycle: You’ve been a consistent critic of drug use over the years, back when people were talking a lot about psychedelics, which is still going on. But in this book, you talk about how it’s important not to use meditation itself as an intoxicant. Do you mean that you can get addicted to it?

BW: I meditate twice a day every day, rain or shine, so you could think I’m addicted to it. And I feel weird if I don’t do it. But no, I think the problem where meditation becomes like a drug happens more often to people who don’t have a teacher. You can get very indulgent in your own fantasies. If your fantasies happen to match what you might read in certain meditation literature, then you can get really suckered into it. It’s good to have somebody outside to balance that out. And it might be necessary to have this corrective at some point in practice. Anybody is going to  encounter these situations where it’s exactly what you wanted. When you get exactly what you wanted out of meditation, sometimes that’s a good thing, but often, that’s not a good thing.

It can be very seductive. It’s like your own virtual reality that you’ve created, which is better than any virtual reality somebody else could create, because you tailor-made it to yourself. I see a lot of people go wrong that way. You can look at cult leaders, for example, as evil manipulative people, but often, I think they’re just as seduced by it as anybody else. They get so into the thing, that they start to believe their own fantasies, and then start to propagate their own fantasies. And it can get crazy.

Tricycle: You recently left Angel City Zen Center, which you helped found. Can you talk about that, and what’s next for you in terms of being a teacher?

BW: I don’t want to say too much about that. I just felt like it wasn’t working. It still exists, the Angel City Zen Center, and God bless them on what they’re doing. But it wasn’t working. I felt like a mascot instead of a teacher. I felt like Scooby Doo: His name is on the show, but nobody really listens to what Scooby Doo has to say. He’s just there to be funny. And that’s the way I felt. 

In the whole Zen center system there’s a sense in which keeping the community happy is the important thing. But my teacher said something which would probably rankle all Americans who hear it. He said, a Zen Buddhist sangha can never be a democracy. He was really firm about that. I’ve found that if you want to have a Zen center in America, people will insist on it being a democracy. And I’m saying, it can’t be a democracy, because not everybody understands everything equally. And if you let everybody make the decisions, it gets wonky. I don’t want too many people to hate me for saying that, but I read Shoes Outside the Door and I can understand why the San Francisco Zen Center now has three abbots instead of one. But at the same time, you’re diffusing things a lot when you do it that way. 

I’ll continue to do what I do. I have a YouTube channel, and that’s been really interesting, because I think something is coming through there. But I also think there’s an entertainment factor. And I don’t really mind it, because it’s YouTube and it’s all about entertainment. So I’m providing what I hope to be a better sort of entertainment, but it’s still entertainment, it’s still trying to put on a show. 

There is a guy I’ve been talking to locally about starting another sort of sitting group. But I want it to be less of a Zen center and more of a speakeasy where not only is it not advertised, you have to know the secret code word to even get in. Once you establish something where having butts in seats is a necessary part for keeping it going, then you run into a lot of tendency to compromise. And I don’t want to compromise the things that shouldn’t be compromised, but I want to be able to compromise the things that should be. So it’s like that Alcoholics Anonymous prayer: Lord, let me know which things should be compromised and which shouldn’t, and how to tell the difference.

Tricycle: In the book you say that we’re punching ourselves in the face when we act unethically, because we’re all one. But at this cultural moment it feels like other people are punching us in the face, too. Maybe it’s always been this way. How are you seeing things these days?

BW: I don’t know how much of that is new. Is anything new? One of the weird things that’s happening with with social media is we’re being exposed to the inner thoughts of a lot of people and we’re seeing things that would normally go unexpressed, One of the first things I got involved with on the internet came out in the late ‘90s or early 2000s on the Cleveland punk scene. They had a forum called the Bathroom Wall where the idea was that you’re writing graffiti on the bathroom wall. And ever since then, that’s the way I think of all these technologies. Twitter is like this big electronic bathroom wall where people think they’re in their stall and nobody can see them and they write terrible things on the wall.

In the past, 1,000 or 10,000 years ago, you had to actually say the thing right in front of the person and then you might get punched in the mouth. But now everybody’s inner thoughts are all out in the open. I think we’re confused by that. We haven’t figured that out yet.

Tricycle: Someone said, probably on Twitter, that our brains weren’t built to process all the world’s emergencies at one time. So we’re exposed to an unfiltered stream of other people’s anger, greed, and delusion, with horrible news from around the world mixed in with pictures of dogs and cats.

BW: I always go for the dog and cat pictures. I’m old enough that I’ve lived through several crises where the world was about to end, so I’m less inclined to believe the next world-ending thing. Maybe one day I’ll be wrong, but I won’t know it because we’ll all be gone! Maybe this is just a step in our evolution, that opening up of everybody’s inner thoughts? And then we have to figure that out. People ask me all the time, have I seen this or that in the news. And you know, what am I gonna do about it? The bottom line is you can’t do much. Maybe someday we’ll establish contact with other planets. And then we’ll start getting news from Regizvan-11 or something. Oh, my God, there’s a war on Regizvan-11! It’s 25 light years away, but I’m so concerned about it. It’s natural to be concerned and to have empathy with your fellow human beings. But you also have to step back and say, there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t want to be ignorant of it, or be dismissive or flippant about it, but there’s only so much I can do to stop global climate change.

Tricycle: You talk about letting go of your collections, particularly your record collection, in the book. What collections have you held onto?

BW: Not much! I kept all my Buddhist books, because I need them for reference when I’m writing. And I kept some of the really special records that were meaningful to me. And now I’ve bought a bunch more since, so, oh well, but it felt good to unburden myself from some of that. 

I worked for a company that made Japanese monster films for a long time and I had a pretty good collection of memorabilia. I called up a friend of mine who’s even more of a collector than me, and I said, just come down and I’ll leave and you can hang out in my apartment for however long you want, and just take anything you want. And he came down with a pickup truck and he filled it up.

I did ask for a couple of things back, but mostly, it felt great. It was one of the biggest highs I’ve ever had, which made me feel like maybe this isn’t so good. But I was so happy to be able to say, ok, it’s gone. Occasionally I remember something that I used to have and I think, ah, but then that feeling goes away. It’s just like one of the things you learn when you’re meditating. The biggest feeling that you have will eventually just fizzle out after a while and you don’t really have to do anything about it. You just say, Yeah, I remember that I had that. Ok.

Tricycle: The neighbors next door will stop arguing, eventually.

BW: Yeah, eventually, they’ll have to go to bed.

♦

The post Zen Is Not a Democracy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What does it mean to live an ethical life today? What are the principles that can guide us in our daily actions?

In this series, Insight teacher Leslie Booker explores Buddhist teachings on sila, or moral conduct. Rooted in the recognition that we are deeply connected to each other, sila offers guidelines for moving through the world and taking care of ourselves, others, and the Earth. These guidelines include the five precepts, Buddhism’s basic code of ethics. When we follow the precepts, our life becomes our practice. They teach us to show up for one another with a fierce tenderness, remembering how deeply our lives are intertwined. Booker leads an investigation of the precepts as the foundation for all of our actions through the lens of dharma, embodied wisdom, and social justice.

Watch a recording of Leslie Booker’s live meditation, dharma talk, and Q&A session from December 10, 2020 here.

Leslie Booker brings her heart and wisdom to the intersection of dharma, embodied wisdom, and social justice. She shares her expertise nationally as a guest lecturer at conferences, universities, and dharma centers, on expanding our vision around culturally responsive teaching, and changing the paradigm of self and community care. She is a co-author of Best Practices for Yoga in a Criminal Justice Setting and a graduate of Spirit Rock’s Mindful Yoga and Meditation Training (2012), Community Dharma Leaders’ Training (2017), and four-year Retreat Teacher Training (2020).

The post Guidelines for an Ethical Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In a dialogue where the Buddha listed the duties of teachers to their students (DN 31), the final and most prominent item on the list was this: that the teacher provide the student with protection in all directions. Of course, this didn’t mean that teachers were duty-bound to follow their students around with shields to ward off potential dangers. Instead, it meant that teachers should provide their students with knowledge that the students could use to protect themselves in every situation. And in a dialogue where the Buddha criticized some teachers of other sects for leaving their students unprotected (AN 3:62), he made clear that protective knowledge was expressed in terms of a duality: clearly seeing the difference between what should and shouldn’t be done.

That’s right: a duality. For all the dualities the Buddha avoided, this was one he adhered to consistently in his role as a responsible teacher.

The need for this kind of protective knowledge is based on the Buddha’s analysis of how we shape our experience. Instead of being a passive recipient of the results of past kamma (karma), we’re proactive: Through our desires—expressed in acts of attention, perception, and intention—we take the input of the senses, which comes from past kamma, and shape it into a present-moment experience. For example, we don’t just passively register the sight of an apple as it occurs. If we’re already looking for food, then by the time we’re aware of the apple, we’ve already decided whether we want to eat it or not. If we’re not looking for food, the apple hardly registers at all because we have our eye out for something else.

The problem is that we’re often ignorant of what we’re doing, so we shape things unskillfully and suffer as a result. And when we suffer, we react in two ways. The first reaction is bewilderment: “Where does this suffering come from?” The second is a search: “Is there anyone who knows a way out of this suffering?” The search explains why people go looking for teachers in the first place. The bewilderment explains why we can easily look to the wrong people for help.

So we need two sorts of protection: protection against ourselves, to overcome our ignorance of what we’re doing; and protection against teachers—and this can include anyone who offers advice, even well-meaning friends and acquaintances—who might wittingly or unwittingly do us harm.

The knowledge that the Buddha offered as protection attacked these problems on many levels—and the word attack is appropriate here. In the Tittha Sutta (“Sectarians,” AN 3:62), he did something that he rarely ever did, which was to seek out other teachers and denounce them sharply for their doctrines. The harm they were causing was that serious. He criticized, in particular, three teachings: that whatever pleasure or pain you experience is (1) determined by past actions, (2) determined by a creator god, or (3) occurs randomly, without cause of condition.

In each case, his criticism was the same: If you adopted any of these teachings, you’d believe yourself powerless in the present moment to change things here and now. You’d have no motivation to think in terms of what should and shouldn’t be done, because the choice would be meaningless. Since all your actions in the present moment, in your eyes, would either be predetermined or ineffectual, the duality between good and evil would be an empty convention.

The Buddha’s argument was the same in each of the three cases, so here are his words on just the first:

In that case, a person is a killer of living beings because of what was done in the past. A person is a thief… uncelibate… a liar… a divisive speaker… a harsh speaker… an idle chatterer… greedy… malicious… a holder of wrong views because of what was done in the past.’ When one falls back on what was done in the past as being essential, there is no desire, no effort (at the thought), ‘This should be done. This shouldn’t be done.’ When one can’t pin down as a truth or reality what should & shouldn’t be done, one dwells bewildered & unprotected.

The implication here is that if a teaching is going to protect you, the first level of protection has to be on the theoretical level. You have to understand that your present actions are free, to at least some extent, to shape the present moment—for good or bad—and to have an impact on the future. This understanding of kamma would then provide you with motivation for looking carefully at what should and shouldn’t be done right now to avoid causing suffering.

And this is precisely the understanding of kamma that the Buddha taught. As he pointed out in the Loṇaphala Sutta (“The Salt Crystal,” AN 3:101), past actions do have an impact on the present moment, but how that impact is experienced is filtered through your present-moment mind-state. This is one of the reasons that Buddhist meditation focuses on being alert to what the mind is doing right now. If you’re sensitive to your present actions, you can shape them well enough to mitigate the influences from any past bad kamma and, through your present skillful kamma, to provide conditions for pleasure and happiness now and into the future.

So the first level of protection lies in the realm of general theory. However, the dualistic knowledge offered by the Buddha doesn’t stop there. It also goes into specific examples of what should and shouldn’t be done, and from there into general principles to be used in judging for yourself what should and shouldn’t be done in instances not covered by the examples.

The examples are offered as rules and precepts, such as the precepts against killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, and taking intoxicants. Many people don’t like rules, seeing them as small-minded and confining, but it’s hard to argue with some of the rules the Buddha offers for your protection. They give you clear warning signs for when your ignorance is blinding you to behavior that will, in the long term, cause harm. The rules give you objective standards for judging not only your own behavior but also the behavior of people who offer themselves as teachers.

The monks, for example, have a rule that if a monk even suggests to a student—or anyone at all, for that matter—that she would benefit from having sex with him, he has to undergo a penance for six days. During the penance, he is stripped of his seniority and has to confess his offense to all his fellow monks daily. If he hides the offense, then when he’s found out he has to undergo an added probation for as many days as he hid the offense. If he actually has sex with anyone, he’s out—automatically stripped of his status as a monk and prohibited from re-ordaining for the rest of this lifetime.

The existence of these rules doesn’t guarantee that people won’t break them, but they do serve as red flags and to indicate that the Buddha had no tolerance for this sort of behavior. Students aware of these rules would then know for sure when a monk—or any teacher—had stepped out of bounds. If knowledge of these rules were available in all Buddhist communities, it would prevent a lot of confusion and grief.

You sometimes hear the argument that awakened people are beyond observing the precepts because they have abandoned the fetter of “grasping at precepts and practices” (silabbata-paramasa), but this argument is based on a misunderstanding of what “grasping” means here. Actually, as the Vera Sutta (“Animosity,” AN 10:92) shows, people who have abandoned this fetter never intentionally break the precepts. Their precepts are “untorn, unbroken, unspotted, unsplattered, liberating, praised by the observant, ungrasped at, leading to concentration.” The fact that they’re untorn means that they’re observed consistently. “Ungrasped at” means that even though such people are virtuous, they don’t fashion any sense of self around their virtues (MN 78).

This means that awakened people are consistently virtuous, but—unlike ordinary people still grappling with the precepts—they have freed themselves from having to construct an identity around virtue in order to maintain it. In other words, they don’t have to keep reminding themselves of the precepts, but their behavior still falls perfectly in line with what the precepts teach.

As for the general principles the Buddha taught for deciding what should and shouldn’t be done, they start on a very basic level with the instructions he gave to his son, Rahula, on how to purify his actions (MN 61). These boil down to the principle that you judge your actions both by the intentions motivating them and by the results they yield. If you can foresee that an action you want to do will cause harm, either to yourself or to others, you shouldn’t do it. If you don’t foresee harm, you can go ahead and do it but—in line with the power of actions to shape both the present and the future—you have to check for the results of the action both while you’re doing it and after it’s done. If, in the course of doing the action, you find that you’re causing unexpected harm, you stop. If you find out only after the fact that it caused harm, you talk it over with someone more advanced on the path and resolve not to repeat the mistake. This way you gain practical experience, based on your own powers of observation, in mastering the dualistic principle of what should and shouldn’t be done.

The duality of this principle extends to more advanced teachings as well. The four noble truths, for example, are basically dualistic, and not just because four is a double duality. Suffering (the first noble truth) and the end of suffering (the third) are two very different things. You may have heard the Buddha quoted as saying, “I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering,” which sounds like he’s offering a non-dualistic perspective on suffering and its end. But that wasn’t what he actually said. His actual words were much more straightforward and dualistic: “Both formerly and now, it’s only suffering that I describe, and the cessation of suffering.” (SN 22:86)

And the duties appropriate to the four noble truths show that this is a genuine duality: The origination of suffering (the second noble truth) should be abandoned. The path to the cessation of suffering (the fourth truth) should be developed. Abandoning and developing are two opposite things. And the path is composed of eight right factors clearly differentiated from eight corresponding wrong factors. All of this continues the dualistic pattern of the Buddha’s protective teaching: having a solid grounding for deciding what should and shouldn’t be done.

This pattern extends even to the Buddha’s subtlest teaching, dependent co-arising, his detailed explanation of all the many factors that go into causing suffering. This teaching is sometimes hailed as non-dualistic, and it is true that the Buddha’s explanation of these factors avoids the duality of saying that everything is either a Oneness or a plurality. So to that extent, they are non-dual.

But when the Buddha explained dependent co-arising in detail, he repeatedly presented it in terms of a different duality: how it should and shouldn’t be approached (see, for starters, the many discourses in SN 12). If, when dealing with the factors as they actually present themselves, you approach them in ignorance, you cause suffering. If you approach them in terms of knowledge of the four noble truths and their duties, you bring suffering to an end.

So here, again, even on the most refined levels of the dharma, there’s a clear distinction between what should and shouldn’t be done.

Which means that even though the Buddha taught metaphysical non-duality with regard to some issues, he didn’t take a blanket non-dual approach to all issues, and especially not to moral ones. The distinction between actions that should and shouldn’t be done is a duality that offers protection, inside and out, on every level of the practice, from the most basic to the most advanced.

If we look at the Buddha’s teachings on this duality in terms of Western psychoanalysis, we can see that what he’s teaching is a healthy super-ego, the functions of the mind that provide you with a strong sense of what should and shouldn’t be done. However, unlike the Western super-ego that Sigmund Freud studied, the Buddhist super-ego is not heedless of your happiness, and it’s not forced on you against your will. Instead, its primary concern is focused directly on your true happiness, and the Buddha offers his shoulds as conditional. He’s not demanding that you take on his shoulds, but from his vast experience he’s advising you that if you want true happiness, if you want to protect yourself, and if you want to end your bewilderment, this is how it has to be done. The choice to take on these shoulds—or not—is yours.

The sad irony is that the basic duality of the Buddha’s protective teachings has become so deeply obscured over the centuries. A teaching that the Buddha denounced—that the present moment is determined by your past kamma—has become widely accepted as the standard Buddhist explanation of kamma. Non-duality has been proclaimed as superior and more advanced than duality in all areas, including the distinction between right and wrong, what should and shouldn’t be done. The ego has been so demonized that many students are led to believe that all ego and super-ego functions have to be obliterated if they want to gain awakening.

The result is that many people who encounter these unsafe teachings when coming to Buddhism actually find themselves stripped of whatever protective sense of “should and shouldn’t be done” they might already have. This has led, as we’ve all too often seen, to their exploitation by unscrupulous teachers.

It would clearly be for the good of the world if the Buddha’s protective teachings were dusted off and returned to their rightful, central place in every school of practice that claims to take inspiration from him. This might not prevent the exploitation of students in all cases. After all, there will always be people, both students and teachers, who see rules as an incitement to rebel. But—unlike the blanket teachings of ego-destruction and the non-duality of right and wrong—the clear distinction between what should and shouldn’t be done would provide no room at all for justifying such bewildered and unsafe behavior as “compassionate” or “advanced.”

♦

Further reading: Here’s another take on the duality of good and evil by eco-dharma pioneer David Loy, a look at the sexual abuse scandals in Buddhist communities, and an article by Thanissaro Bhikkhu on everything you wanted to know about karma but were afraid to ask.

The post Safety in Duality appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

How can we be more ethical at work if we’re not in a position to change our company’s practices (and can’t afford to quit)?

The most direct answer is that you can bring more attention to your body, speech, and mind and notice the times when you are doing good and avoiding harm by being clear, honest, and transparent. You can listen more deeply, give others your attention and time, and look for ways to help those around you. You can also bring more attention to how you may be creating harm—times when you are closed or judgmental, or when your thoughts, words, and actions don’t align with your aspirations for relating to others. Just notice, and cultivate understanding, without judging or blaming yourself.

Questions of ethics at work and the ethics of the companies we work for can raise challenging issues. As a CEO, I’ve been approached by defense contractors and have wrestled with the question whether it is ethical to teach mindfulness to their employees. Although I won’t invest in the defense industry, I have come to feel that raising consciousness and supporting leaders and staff in virtually any industry can help people to be more aware and flexible, and hopefully this training will bring more clarity concerning ethics into their decision making.

I appreciate that the focus of this question relates to ourselves and what we can do. In the realm of ethics, it’s easy to judge, cast blame, and see ourselves as not connected to others. Pressure to perform and meet revenue goals can lead organizations to emphasize the bottom line of profits rather than the other important bottom lines: people and the planet. The introduction of new structures—such as B Corp certification, which measures a company’s social and environmental performance—gives me some hope that ethics will play a greater role in for-profit organizations in the future.

In the situation described by the question, it sounds like the unethical practices of the company are blatant, so you’ve decided it’s time for a change. In the meantime, you can continue to look for opportunities to learn, grow, and become more aligned with your own ethical values and actions.

The post Ask a Teacher appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I look upon the judgment
of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons.

–Buddha’s Zen, story #101 in Zen Flesh Zen Bones

In Virginia a while back I met with a young college student who was interested in Buddhism. Recently arrived from China, Han Longwei was beautiful, articulate, and deeply curious. We had spent a good deal of time discussing Buddhist ethics and philosophy when he looked at me, head tilted, and said,

“May I ask you an unrelated question?”

“Sure,” I answered.

“Why doesn’t one ever see dragons?” Han Longwei inquired.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been to many zoos in Asia and the United States, but I’ve never seen a dragon. I’ve seen paintings and sculptures of them, but no photographs. Why is that?”

Unprepared for this, I replied without thinking, “Well, because they’re not real.”

This troubled him. “What do you mean, not real?” he asked.

What did I mean, not real? If you believe that dragons exist, if they’re real for you, does your perception of them differ from my perception of, say, pterodactyls?

The question of belief is central to my work as a chaplain, in an obvious way, and also to my life as a Buddhist student, teacher, and practitioner. But it goes further than that. Belief is about how I interact with my physical world, how my emotions manifest, my social life, and the sense I make of spiritual insights. In fact, the more I ponder belief, the more it seems to permeate every aspect of my life save, perhaps, that very first instant of experience that precedes interpretation.

Thoughts are fleeting; faith belongs to intangibles and is not necessarily determined by critical thinking; but belief is the framework that embraces our thoughts, opinions, convictions, perceptions, and views. Belief, simply put, is what we hold to be true or real. It can be explicit (“I believe in elves”) or implicit (“I believe I exist”). Assumptions are implicit beliefs. There are beliefs we debate about, endlessly, and beliefs shared by mentally sound people the world over. Belief is a distinctly human noun; I don’t imagine that other animals are defined by their beliefs in quite the same way. And although beliefs and assumptions are, arguably, the substratum of existence, if you prompt a dinner table conversation about belief, you might be surprised by the effort required to contextualize it.

In its least subtle manifestation, belief is political and societal worldview. I’ve known Bhutanese lamas living in the West who were certain that males of any species were superior to females in every way; that the Buddha didn’t walk, he glided on those wheels beneath his feet; and that the cosmos physically resembled the scriptural description: flat, four continents, eight subcontinents of specific geometric shapes, all laid out around Mount Meru, the axial point. They’d become very agitated if anyone tried to tell them otherwise.

And in my work with patients and families in central Virginia, I meet people who take the Bible very literally, who delight in rebutting evolution, and who earnestly tell me that their family misfortunes are the work of Satan. Signs on their lawns exhort me to “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” According to them, most of humanity is on a fast track to damnation.

As a species, we use our beliefs—in a view, in a rigidly defined higher power and in how the faithful must serve that power, in the superiority of one tribe or culture over others, in forms of government, in our entitlement as humans, in our having been wronged, and on and on—to justify every imaginable abomination. On the basis of our beliefs we create stained-glass windows and space stations and hospitals, march peacefully for a just cause, help others, overthrow despots, chant, and plant trees. On the basis of our beliefs, we study, contemplate, and practice the dharma.

My root teacher and retreat master, Gendun Rinpoche, reminded us often that what we believe determines how we experience our world. Without question, most of us assume that our perceptions present us with a reasonably accurate portrait of reality. We function on the basis of our senses and the processing of those senses: the thoughts and emotions, habits and reactions that arise. Of course, we need to filter, process, and categorize to make sense of our world and thrive in it. But without a deep appreciation for the subjective nature of our experience and the fragility of our constructs, we naturally interpret and judge the beliefs and actions of others according to our own worldview.

Our perceptions and knowledge are exceedingly partial; we tend to notice and retain that which validates our preconceptions. In other words, we see and believe what we already think. Nowadays we call this “confirmation bias,” and it operates in tandem with a whole range of psychological habits—cognitive biases—that hamper the freedom with which we might tune into and work with the bigger picture. Four hundred years ago, the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon described confirmation bias to a tee:

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

I can easily find such biases in my own habits. And I know that nearly everyone I meet in my role as a chaplain, or while I’m walking the dog, or when I lead meditation practice, harbors assumptions—those tacit beliefs—about me.

Acknowledging these shared cognitive biases can help us accept others’ views and actions. Our current embattled political landscape is so riddled by partisan opinions that it can be difficult to believe in the goodness of the people behind them. But in my work I am constantly called to step over surface inclinations in order to relate to a person on a deeper level. A few months ago one of my favorite patients, a kindly and lovable old Tinkerbell who always wore purple, looked at me wide-eyed from her bed in an upscale assisted-living facility and lamented, “Isn’t it just awful what the press is doing to the president? He says that all they do is lie about him.” A habitually argumentative part of me wanted to protest, but a more useful part could just focus on soothing her through this new distress.

I used to defend my views and beliefs with a good deal of passion. Years ago, at the beginning of my chaplaincy training, it rankled when colleagues would validate me as being an “instrument of God” regardless of my beliefs, my professed godlessness. I felt the need to assert myself. With time, I began to take clearer stock of my own conditioning and assumptions. I wondered what would happen if I set them aside. And I found that when I accompanied people in physical, emotional, or spiritual pain, the need to be present and caring naturally eclipsed dogma. I began to taste the freedom of empathic presence unsullied by belief in a way that reminded me of the freedom of being fully present on the cushion.

After certain patient and family encounters, though, I would lose my footing. An early incident with a dying woman whose daughter had begged me to help her mother reconcile herself with Christ unsettled me for months. With my encouragement, the mother began praying for the first time in decades, and there was such sudden peace in her that it was palpable. During our time together, I acted without thinking about what was going on. But after I’d left the room and the situation behind, it really shook me—the Buddhist—up. I tried to define it, I meditated on it, I wrestled with it, I wrote a poem. It needed time to incubate.

In fact, meditation experiences would often lead to a similar process: I would arise from what I might now call a “state of grace” to instinctively begin defining, comparing, adhering, clinging, and sometimes wrestling. I think that we can learn to expect and live with that. Once we come back to conventional reality, raw experience is always interpreted according to what we think we know. Other practitioners may have a similar experience of clarity, bliss, or emptiness . . . and call it God, or grace, or communion.

When I was in retreat in the ’90s, we recited texts in which mu stegs—heretics—were to be overcome, albeit compassionately. Heretics had wrong views; we had right views. Our beliefs were aligned with the Buddha’s teachings and led to enlightenment; theirs were not and led to suffering. Other texts warned us against falling into “old school” motivations of individual liberation instead of being concerned first and foremost with liberating all sentient beings from the ocean of existence and its turbulent waves of birth, aging, sickness, and death.

It was a given that Madhyamika, the “Middle Way” philosophical school that we followed, was the best, because it was best able to guide us to enlightenment. Such partisanship is quite present within Buddhism in general. In Tibet, for example, monasteries were appropriated, block prints burned, and lineages forcibly assimilated in the service of how certain Madhyamika tenets were interpreted. How ironic when proponents of the Middle Way go at it—ostensibly because of doctrinal disagreements about what, exactly, is meant by emptiness. Imagine the monks glowering at each other and quarreling about emptiness like we argue politics.

In mapping out the path to liberation, the Buddha was famously more concerned with the mechanics of experience than with defining “reality.” Reality is invariably subjective. An expression of this is found in the Buddhist Yogacara—mind-only or consciousness only—school of philosophy. In Living Yogacara, Tagawa Shun’ei writes:

Our so-called cognition, or the action of discerning the meaning of things as they are perceived by us, is never in any case a perception of the external world exactly as it is, but rather a world that can only be apprehended via its interface with our present mental state. In other words, it is nothing other than our own mind that constructs things and determines their content. This is the meaning of “consciousness-only,” or “nothing but the transformations of consciousness.” And, if we turn this around, we ourselves are nothing  other than things that dwell in a world defined by the limits of that which is knowable by the functions of our own mind.

–trans. Charles Muller

It can be liberating to recognize the ubiquity of subjectivity and belief and accept the limitations of knowledge. Only when I perceive myself as being a “thing that dwells in a world defined by the limits of that which is knowable by the functions of my own mind” can I truly delight in the beliefs and faiths of others, especially when their faith sustains them and brings them peace. Instead of having to define others’ paths, I can walk alongside them on the paths they have adopted, pray with them that their wishes come true, and mean it.

We all believe in something: self, nonself, an omnipotent creator, karma, science, reality, emptiness, dragons, elves. . . When we see that belief gives color to every stratum of our experience of reality, we can embrace others as kindred believers, regardless of the shades we tend to favor.

The post Real Belief appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It seems to be commonly assumed among Buddhist social activists that there is something fundamentally and ethically suspicious about business and economics. Corporations, in particular, are seen as a destructive force. Are they?

We’re asked the same two questions often: how existing businesses can be incorporated as “benefit corporations,”or “B-corps”—a business that explicitly lays out goals related to serving the world and the greater good—and advice on how our greed-driven, corporate-dominated economic system can be dismantled and replaced with a “new economy” of Buddhist-centered values. We each find ourselves explaining over and over that the starting point of such requests is itself misguided.

These requests arise from the belief that leaders of a traditional corporation are legally obligated to prioritize short-term profits over all else, so long as they run the business within the bounds of other regulations. Some Buddhist commentators even say that because the essence of a traditional corporation is profit maximization, it is the institutionalization of the poison of greed. So we don’t have to go on repeating ourselves, we’d like to first explain a few little-understood facts about law and economics, and then explore how releasing such beliefs about the “essence” of the corporation is actually very much in line with core Buddhist teachings.

Let’s start by examining the facts: traditional corporations are not required to maximize profits. The corporate charter is the state-granted document that brings a corporation into legal existence. No matter what you’ve read elsewhere, these charters do not require traditional corporations to maximize profits. Many U.S. corporations are chartered in Delaware, for example, because that state has the most developed set of laws governing corporations that say, in short, that corporations are formed “to conduct or promote any lawful business or purpose.” Profits do not receive special mention. And in legal interpretations of corporate charters, the notion of corporate “purpose” is usually interpreted broadly. Consideration of ethics and of the interests of other stakeholders in the firm—such as employees, communities, suppliers, creditors, and customers—are not excluded.

If profit maximization is neither written into the law regarding charters nor in the charters themselves, is it enforced by lawsuits brought by shareholders against corporate executives? In actuality, the courts regularly apply something called the business judgment rule when shareholders try to claim that managers have breached their fiduciary duty to serve the interests of the corporation. The laws about fiduciary duty were created with the intent of promoting loyalty to the company and reasonable care in decision-making. Managers are entitled to reasonable compensation, but aren’t supposed to divert company resources and opportunities to uses that otherwise benefit themselves. And they’re required to analyze options carefully as they make decisions, not just wing it. In practice, a court usually will accept any reasonable business purpose expressed by managers, trusting that the managers know the ins and outs of the particular business much better than they do.

Executives, then, have considerable freedom from court intervention when they make their decisions. If the executives argue that, for example, an environmental initiative is in the long-term interest of the business, the courts generally will not second-guess their arguments. Neither, by the way, do the courts generally support shareholders when they question the idea that the “market for executive talent” justifies granting outrageous compensation packages to the executive team. It is not just people on the left who are angry about ridiculously high executive pay—even right-leaning shareholders are, too. The idea that shareholders of large, publicly traded corporations can easily sue, fire, or cut the pay of executives if they take some displeasing action—whether that action be in the service of the social good, or in the service of feathering the executives’ own nests—is a myth.

The one case in which the law directs managers to maximize the financial return to shareholders is at the moment when a publicly listed company is being taken over. This is because the shareholders’ stock will be converted to cash (or to stock of the acquirer) at that instant. But until the moment when the sale becomes inevitable, managers and directors still have considerable latitude. They are allowed to consider the effects of a sale on other stakeholders as well as take any actions that plausibly could preserve or increase the financial value of the business over the long-term, should it not be sold. Because a number of studies suggest that running a business with sensitivity to the concerns of employees, customers, communities, and the environment increases long-term share value, it’s not all that difficult for managers to make the case that continuing to operate the business in ways that serve these concerns is a reasonable exercise of business judgment.

If there is no general legal obligation to maximize profit, then perhaps the principle is enforced by market competition. According to mainstream economic theory, in a perfectly competitive market a firm that does not maximize profits will be driven out of business. If the wages it pays, for example, are higher than those paid by its competitors, it will have to raise the prices it charges, and this will drive away its customers. If it shows lower profits than its competitors, it will be unable to get financing. Yet, to the extent this picture has any truth to it, it holds just as much for the “benefit corporations” that some activists are now championing as it does for traditional corporations. Neither is organized as a not-for-profit corporation—and even a nonprofit organization must find a way to bring in at least as much cash as it spends. And, of course, reality often very little resembles the economists’ model of perfect competition. Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, Microsoft and the like are hardly the anonymous, powerless firms envisioned in the theory. Most firms have a good deal of room to make choices—for good or ill.

If you observe the actual behavior of traditional corporations, you will rarely observe a single-minded focus on making money for the shareholders, even though its leaders might sometimes spout that rhetoric. Some corporations are more oriented toward innovation, or expansion, or maximizing CEO compensation, than toward shareholder value. Others focus on preserving a tradition, serving a community, being a great place to work, or providing a beneficial, quality product. The vast majority balance a number of different goals. Still others are rather a mess and do not seem to effectively pursue any goals at all.

This is not a Pollyannaish defense of traditional corporations, but simply a clarification of the facts. Of course corporations can, and all too frequently do, act in ways that cause harm to workers, communities, and the environment. There are all too many examples of this, and they may easily be called on as evidence that traditional corporations are fundamentally a negative influence in the world. But imagine yourself in a similar conversation with a hard-line secularist friend who wants to prove to you that religion is fundamentally a negative influence in the world. Your friend can draw on an endless parade of evidence, including the medieval Christian crusades, the Inquisition, divisions in Ireland, and ISIS. And they won’t forget to include the Zen justifications of samurai codes and imperialist ambitions in Japan, as well recent anti-Muslim acts of violence by Buddhists in Myanmar. What can you reply in defense of Buddhism, except that such anecdotes are only parts of a much bigger picture?

The idea that business firms exist to maximize profit originated with economists. While one might suppose that economists “discovered” this by studying actual businesses, the reality is that economists invented the notion of profit maximization. They did so because it makes the study of business extremely simple—something one can do with math on a blackboard, and which resembles the high-status discipline of physics. This invention means that economists have largely been able to avoid having to talk about those messy, social, soft, complicated topics such as how money alone isn’t enough to get people to cooperate toward a common purpose, or how in the real world many different priorities all demand a leader’s attention.

The notion then gained popularity among many in the business community, academia, and the media. In her book The Shareholder Value Myth, corporate and business law expert Lynn Stout suggests that part of its popularity with scholars is due to the fact that it lends “an attractive patina of scientific rigor” to the study of corporations. Meanwhile, for the media it provides a “sound-bite description of what corporations are and what they are supposed to do.”

This simplicity is a big reason for the myth’s wide reach. Our minds like to think of things as having simple “essences.” This makes them easier to categorize and allows us to make quick and straightforward judgments. If we firmly believe that the essence of a traditional corporation is to make a profit, then we can easily define our ethical orientation toward it. Further investigation and questioning seems unnecessary.

That sort of certainty should make Buddhists nervous. We think it’s useful to approach corporations as we might approach a Zen koan. Zen practice teaches us the importance of doubt and of investigation. We are taught to doubt the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our possession of an unchanging kernel of “me,” and to observe carefully how our own minds function. In particular, we look at how we tend to unreflectively embrace “received wisdom” and how we often layer stories about what’s happening on top of what’s actually happening. Similarly, we can dig deeply into what is in fact in front of us in the realm of commerce.

While Economics 101 teaches that the essence of a firm is to maximize profit, Buddhism 101 tells us that one of the three marks of existence is that all phenomena lack any essential nature. This includes corporations. Real, complicated, contingent, historically arising corporations exist, but they exist as emergent, interdependent, social creations, reflecting a broad range of human interests, emotions, and actions. The notion that that the “essence” of businesses is profit maximization is a socially created belief that we have added on top—and one that is not supported by any fundamental principle of law or economics.

Do we quickly assume that when a traditional corporation adopts a positive environmental change, this must only be crass “greenwashing” and a public relations ploy? And, by the way, do we equally quickly assume that a similar initiative undertaken by a benefit corporation or a nonprofit is clear evidence of a total commitment to protecting the environment? Belief in essences erases doubt and suggests easy answers. Actually investigating the facts of each case might yield answers that surprise us.

Another of the three marks of existence, impermanence and change, also applies to corporations. The behavior of corporations is shaped by cultural norms as well as what the public believes they do and should be doing. It wasn’t that long ago that the vast majority of businesses took pride in how long their products lasted rather than in planned obsolescence. The causes of the recent drastic deterioration of the well-being of many U.S. workers (or former workers) are much more recent and specific than some vague, unchanging “drive for profit.” It’s true that legal rulings sometimes change the environment in which businesses function. The 2010 Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court ruling, for instance, reinforced the idea of a corporation as an independent actor. This decision not only allows corporations free reign to make political donations, but throws further disguise over their actual interdependence and contingency. We can work to change norms, expectations, and laws in a more positive direction.

Let’s also consider the eighth of the 10 grave precepts [a set of Buddhist moral codes], “Not Sparing the Dharma Assets”—being generous, not withholding, and more broadly, not squandering opportunities or potential. If, due to misinformation, we suppose that a large and very powerful sector of contemporary society is by its nature unable to serve the dharma, we engage in an unfortunate squandering of what could be valuable assets. Both Shakyamuni Buddha and the Dalai Lama have offered good, practical guidance to businesspeople about how to make and use wealth in wise and compassionate ways. Bringing that advice into practice more widely, rather than focusing only on building a small set of alternative institutions we might think reflect Buddhist values, would be a noble goal.

If, on the other hand, we help spread the myth that traditional corporations are fundamentally driven—and must be driven—by bottom-line financial interests alone, we actually may make irresponsible behavior more socially acceptable. Business leaders increasingly have been coming to feel that profit maximization is simply expected, despite the fact that it isn’t mandated. Faced with a choice between action that will maximize short-term profits and action that would integrate other values, some may opt for the former, feeling that they have little choice. They are also allowed to excuse themselves by claiming that they are held captive to the system. We can and should demand better, not only of the enterprises we may be directly involved in, but of all enterprises.

We applaud the intentions and support many of the goals of those advocating for benefit corporation legislation and driving the “B corp” movement. We don’t deny that these initiatives are helping some businesspeople form or transform their enterprises around values other than profit maximization. Yet we fear that they are unwittingly reinforcing a false belief that profit maximization is and must be the essence of businesses incorporated in the traditional way.

It may seem surprising, but we see economics and law as potentially healing, pastoral professions, and the world of business and commerce as a place where one can live the enlightened life. Understanding the origins of our mistaken beliefs about corporations can help us expand our understanding of the connection between Buddhist values and the world in which we live. And perhaps it can help us act in business, and in this world more generally, in increasingly wise and compassionate ways.

The post Opinion: Are Corporations Anti-Dharma? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Buddhism generously provides us with an embarrassment of ethical riches—the precepts, the paramitas and brahmaviharas, the Vinaya and Jatakas, the Abhidharma, and the path elements of right speech, action, and livelihood. These diverse resources offer various forms of ethical guidance, including rules for ethical behavior along with accompanying commentary, a catalog of wholesome and unwholesome states of mind, lists of virtues along with methods for their cultivation, and narrative illustrations of moral conduct. The underlying conceptual scheme tying these resources together is simple and clear: our thoughts and actions can be deemed either “skillful” or “unskillful” depending on whether they assist or hinder better conditions for the future, especially for future rebirth or, ideally, an awakening that brings release from the wheel of rebirth entirely. This conceptual scheme—whether expressed in terms of the arhat ideal of attaining nirvana or the bodhisattva ideal of achieving buddhahood for the benefit of all—functions as an effective motivation for ethical behavior when rebirth is of genuine existential concern. For many contemporary Buddhists, however, rebirth is not a compelling basis for their spiritual and moral lives. In the West, even those who accept the possibility of rebirth rarely feel that the idea of ending future lives holds deep personal meaning for them in the conduct of their daily living.

It’s not so much that the idea of rebirth has been disproved; no strong empirical evidence can be mustered either for or against it. It’s that the idea of rebirth is swimming against the tide of contemporary materialism and naturalism—metaphysical propositions that play an important role as core assumptions in science and thus significantly shape our modern cultural worldview. These propositions assert that our best knowledge of the world is achieved by analyzing phenomena as the outcome of processes of physical causation and posit that there’s no world behind or beyond the material world of physics, chemistry, and biology. It follows from this that because consciousness can be fully accounted for by reducing it to material processes, it ceases to exist at death. It’s hard to reconcile rebirth with this outlook, which—regardless of whether one consciously accepts or rejects it—is absorbed by cultural osmosis into one’s modern sense of the world.

Many spiritual seekers—especially in the West, where rebirth has never been widely believed—don’t become Buddhists because they want to end the cycle of rebirth; they’re motivated by some other inner disquiet. As an experiment, take a moment now to check out your own motivation. When was the last time you caught yourself thinking, “I’d really like to end rebirth?” More likely what you’ve been thinking is “I wish I were happier” or “I wish I were a better person” or “What’s the best and most meaningful use I can make of my life?” In other words, you’ve been motivated by concerns about this life here and now. While “rebirth” can still play a useful role as a metaphor for how one moment conditions the next, for many contemporary Buddhists it has lost whatever motivational potency it might once have possessed.

As a consequence, many modern Buddhists—especially those shaped by the assumptions of Western culture—find traditional Buddhist ethics in need of some kind of glue to hold it together. Most recent reinterpreters of Buddhism find that glue in some version of the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia, or human flourishing—an idea so pervasive in Western culture that Westerners are often unaware of its source. Aristotle thought that the telos, or ultimate purpose of human life, was to live well and flourish, and his conception of human flourishing emphasized developing one’s virtues, behaving ethically toward others, and contemplating truth. When transplanted into Buddhism, this Aristotelian ideal shifts the end point of Buddhist practice from ending rebirth to living the best kind of life one possibly can—a best kind of life that combines wisdom, ethics, and contemplation to engender a profound sense of well-being. This is a reinterpretation of the Buddhist enlightenment ideal stripped of any connection to the framework of rebirth. We might label it eudaimonic enlightenment to distinguish it from its more traditional cousins.

To be clear, it isn’t the whole of Aristotelian eudaimonia that gets imported into Buddhism but just its general outlines. The fit between eudaimonia in all its specificity and Buddhist philosophy isn’t sufficiently harmonious to allow wholesale importation of the former. There are notable differences between Aristotle’s list of virtues (for example, wittiness and magnanimity) and the Buddhist list (compassion and lovingkindness). Aristotle’s wisdom (sophia) is a combination of scientific knowledge and critical reason, while Buddhist wisdom (prajna) is insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and the absence of self-nature. Aristotelian happiness is partly contingent on good fortune, whereas Buddhist well-being is largely construed as nonattachment to life’s vicissitudes.

Furthermore, Aristotle saw civic engagement as essential to flourishing, while the Buddha, having left his father’s palace never to return, encouraged withdrawal from the agora (the marketplace) and the polis (the “city,” the hub of political life). As a consequence, Buddhism has remarkably little to say about fairness and justice. The Buddha preached a gospel of personal virtue rather than one of collective political participation and social action, and although he treated persons from all castes equably and abjured violence, he never advocated the abolition of the caste system or the disbanding of armies. Early Buddhism took a dim view of quotidian existence, urging us to find surcease in a transcendent nirvana. The world was inevitably a realm of suffering, and our contemporary notion of civic progress, which takes as given that the world is something to be improved upon, is one the Buddha never would have recognized.

The modern project of constructing a more socially oriented Buddhism requires our importing Western ideas of fairness, liberty, and justice—ideas forged in the American and French revolutions, the Paris Commune, and the abolitionist and suffragette movements—into a religious tradition that, more often than not, historically supported and was supported by the ruling elites of the countries in which it flourished. Our modern idea of justice is part of a lengthy conversation rooted in Greek philosophy and Hebraic law. This conversation is one aspect of the thoroughgoing transformation wrought by modernity, which was initiated in the West but which has profoundly impacted Asia over the past two centuries. It is a conversation that has inspired Gandhi and Nehru, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, Cory Aquino and Aung San Suu Kyi, Sulak Sivaraksa, and Thich Nhat Hanh. The idea of justice is now so deeply a part of our consciousnesses, East and West, that we’re hardly aware we’re importing something new into Buddhism and in the process subtly changing what it means to be a bodhisattva—to work toward the liberation of all beings—in the process.

Despite the specific differences between Aristotelian and Buddhist conceptions of virtue, wisdom, and well-being, the more general Aristotelian notion that a life dedicated to the cultivation of virtue and the contemplation of wisdom is the best and happiest kind of human life is one that has been readily transplanted into Buddhism in a way that resonates deeply with modernity. When I attended a public college in the 1960s, its motto was “Let each become all he is capable of being,” an Aristotelian sentiment if ever there was one. Modified versions of Aristotelian eudaimonia are so deeply embedded in modern humanistic and positive psychology that they’ve become part of what passes broadly for common sense.

As different as they are, Aristotelian and traditional Buddhist ethics are in agreement on one thing: the unity of the virtues. Both view each virtue as compatible with all the others. For Buddhists, there is no conflict between wisdom and compassion. All the paramitas reinforce one another, and each virtue requires its companions for complete practice. Similarly, each step of the noble eightfold path reinforces every other step, with ethics, wisdom, and meditation integrating seamlessly together. That’s why the Buddhist approach is sometimes described as holographic, with each practice contained in every other. The dharmachakra iconography symbolizes this unity—the eight spokes each representing the eight steps of the path, but joined in the middle and radiating outward to form a wheel, or circle of wholeness.

The ancient Greek tragedians, however, did not hold to this unitary vision. In Sophocles’s Antigone, the eponymous heroine is torn between conflicting moral obligations to her brother and her king. The king orders her brother’s body to remain unburied, but Antigone defies him, placing duty to family above duty to king. The tragedians understood that moral dilemmas seldom if ever have perfect solutions. Whichever choice Antigone makes is right in one respect and wrong in another. As polytheists, the Greek tragedians knew that pleasing Zeus risked offending Hera; tragedy was intrinsic to human existence. Zeus implies just that in the Iliad when he says, “there is nothing alive more agonized than man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.” Human nobility lay in choosing between conflicting ethical imperatives and facing one’s fate with courage and equanimity. While sharing a superficial similarity with the Buddha’s first noble truth of suffering, this tragic view differs from it in one fundamental way: Buddhism is, at its core, an optimistic philosophy that posits the fourth noble truth, a path out of suffering. Buddhism claims that it’s possible to achieve a state of ultimate well-being and peace. The Greek tragedians envisioned no such off-ramp; life could be noble, but it was never unreservedly happy.

There are ways in which our modern outlook is closer to that of the Greek tragedians than to that of either Aristotle or the Buddha. For one thing, we live in an age when the unity of the good and the virtues seems irretrievably shattered. The long-term Western philosophical project of seeking a logical basis for ethics—the one best exemplified by the philosophies of Spinoza, Kant, and Mill—came to an unsuccessful conclusion, unable to withstand the scrutiny and objections of Hume, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. At the same time, modernity has put us cheek by jowl with the wisdom traditions of countless cultures past and present, so that we’re acutely aware of the historically conditioned nature of our own conception of the good as just one of many possible competing visions. Lastly, since the publication of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, we’ve become increasingly familiar with the conflicts and disjunctions inherent in our triune nature as mammalian predators, social animals, and rational beings.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the signature ethical dilemmas of our time reflect a conflict and disjunction between differing moral intuitions, often a conflict between opposing “rights” or “goods”: a woman’s right to control her body versus an embryo’s right to life; a gay person’s right to marry versus a fundamentalist’s right to withhold recognition; a rich person’s right to property versus a poor person’s right to escape the ills of poverty; a pacifist’s conviction that war is never justified versus an interventionist’s fear that pacifism abets the triumph of evil.

Each party in these intractable disputes believes that his or her own view trumps the other’s; no logical arguments can convince the other that any errors exist. Each party operates from a separate set of fundamental premises and assumptions about the nature of the good and of human flourishing, premises that are nonrational at their core and grounded in some mix of sentiment, preference, tribal belongings, ideology, and religious revelation. We don’t choose our side on strictly logical grounds, just as we don’t fall in love by making lists of pros and cons about potential suitors. We owe our allegiances to one camp or another based on a set of historical contingencies: what part of the country we were born in, what religion we were raised in, which social class we belong to, and our unique personal journeys and encounters. When people “convert” from one side to another, the conversion, gradual or sudden, is never solely logical in nature. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, we have a revelation. Or, often enough, it’s not so much that our former beliefs are proved erroneous as that we simply move on, jettisoning older beliefs for newer, more useful ones. The key point is that ethical disputes—the ones that really trouble us—aren’t usually disputes between good and evil; more commonly they are disjunctions between rival “goods,” and ultimately there’s no logical basis for their resolution. Often enough they reflect cultural dialogues that need to run their historical course.

How do these two themes just outlined—the modernist substitution of eudaimonia for rebirth, and the acknowledgment of the tension between incompatible and often incommensurable goods—affect Buddhist ethics?

Let’s consider the first Buddhist precept—the precept against taking life—as a paradigmatic case. You and I, no doubt, agree that we’re against killing, at least for the most part and as a general principle. We may disagree, however, over particulars and specifics. Are we categorically opposed to all killing, or do we admit to certain exceptions? Can we use antibiotics to kill disease-causing bacteria? Can we use pesticides to kill malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes? Can we use lethal force, if necessary, to protect family members from rape or murder? Can we defend our country from invaders? Can we forcefully intervene to prevent genocide in a foreign land? All of these questions pit one good—not acting cruelly—against another—preserving the well-being of ourselves and others.

But let’s set these potential exceptions aside and focus on why we’re against killing, at least in general and for the most part. Are we genuinely fearful of rebirth in an animal, hungry ghost, or hell realm? For most modern Westerners, the answer is “Probably not,” despite the fact that this has been the traditional Buddhist rationale. Are we afraid of the wrath of a monotheistic God? For those raised in the Abrahamic faiths, perhaps. Is it because we believe in some version of the Golden Rule—Don’t do unto others what you would not have them do unto you? Maybe. It’s one of our culture’s more enduring ideas.

I suspect, however, that our moral and ethical judgments are actually based on a multiplicity of contingencies. We’re members of the animal kingdom, and as such we have biologically rooted capacities for attachment, befriending, caring, shame, social group formation, protectiveness, revulsion, and disgust that are the raw materials out of which our moral judgments are formed. Our cultures and traditions then mold these proclivities into more or less widely shared notions of compassion, fairness, loyalty, purity, respect, and autonomy. Our final moral judgments reflect the complex interplay of these biological and social factors with our personal faculties of judgment and reason.

Returning to the first precept, our moral opposition to killing probably reflects a multiplicity of factors: a natural revulsion against the spilling of blood, an empathy for others’ pain, rational calculations about fairness and advantage, hopes that others will not kill us or our loved ones, fears of shame, retribution, and punishment, and decades of familiarity with the teachings of our culture and its ethical traditions. If we also happen to be given to moral reflection, we’ve cobbled these together as best we can into our own personal system, all the while realizing that the result is, at best, a curious mixture of reason, practical judgment, intuition, feeling, and instinct. That’s why we’re against killing, in general and for the most part, and why we give this moral opposition serious weight when considering the circumstances under which we might resort to it.

Does the Buddhist ethical tradition have something important and unique to add to this mélange? This is an especially meaningful question for convert Buddhists who, having been raised in another tradition, come to Buddhism with their moral intuitions already fully formed. Critics like the writer and blogger David Chapman suggest that most convert Buddhists simply bypass traditional Buddhist ethics altogether, pouring their preexisting liberal secular humanist ethics into newer bottles bearing, somewhat disingenuously, a “Buddhist” label. The question one might ask is, why bother with Buddhist ethics at all?

The answer to “why bother?” is that Buddhism contains a number of significant ethical ideas that still retain their usefulness even after severance from the framework of rebirth. The first is the idea of karma, or moral cause and effect. According to the rule of karma, we are the authors of our future selves, including our future selves in this lifetime: Our thoughts and actions mold the person we’re about to become. Our repeated actions and thoughts become our habits, and our habits become our character. They shape our perceptions, dispositions, and future possibilities. The effects of our actions extend through space and time like ripples on a pond, influencing not only our future selves but also the others we interact with and our surroundings. If we wish to be a certain kind of person and live in a certain kind of world, we need to be heedful about the seeds we cultivate.

Karma and dependent origination constitute Buddhism’s earliest formulations of causality. Later Buddhist thinkers elaborated on these concepts to develop the Mahayana idea of the mutual interdependence of all dharmas, or phenomena, and the Huayan idea of their interpenetration. These elaborations enabled East Asian Buddhists to place a more positive spin on interconnectivity. Initially, the idea that dharmas lacked self-nature was offered as one more reason not to cling to them. Later, the idea that things were mutually interdependent gave phenomena a positive value as indispensable jewels in Indra’s web. This positive version of interconnectivity resonates with both 19th-century Western Romanticism and 20th century ecological science, and as a consequence is widely endorsed by Buddhist modernists of all stripes. Its view that “we’re all in the stew together,” partners in the seamless fabric of existence, has profound ethical implications. Many of our most intractable ethical dilemmas are the result of our cultural denial of or obliviousness to the reality of interconnectivity, including the terrible damage we’re inflicting on our biosphere and the schisms that tragically divide ethnicities, social classes, religions, and regions. The Buddhist view of interdependence affects ethical considerations, as we replace considerations of how our actions affect “the other” with a more radical awareness that there is no other. While some moralities distinguish between in-groups to whom we owe duties and out-groups to whom we do not, Buddhist interconnectivity denies the existence of out-groups.

If the law of karma tells us that we must act a certain way if we wish to become a certain kind of person, the Buddhist enlightenment ideal defines that kind of person we wish to become. As Buddhists, we intend to “develop” or “uncover” a more enlightened way of being. Even though differing strands of traditionalist and modernist Buddhism disagree on enlightenment’s precise characterization, there is an unforced consensus concerning some of its key elements: non-clinging, non-harming, non-hatred, non-greed, compassion, lovingkindness, equanimity, sympathetic joy, insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, the absence of self-nature, and a less self-preoccupied, more fluid and interconnected sense of ourselves.

If we combine moral cause and effect with the end goal of eudaimonic enlightened being, we have a motivation for ethical behavior that both is compatible with modernity and adds something to ethics above and beyond the Golden Rule. Returning to our discussion of the first precept, killing moves us away from the kind of person we wish to be. Killing reinforces our greed and hatred and diminishes our compassion. Killing feeds the delusion that we are separate from others. It hardens and coarsens us. Killing triggers recursive spirals of retribution and unintended consequences that diminish the odds of experiencing well-being for ourselves and others. The basic Buddhist injunctions against killing, stealing, lying, sexual misbehavior, and heedless intoxication are all aids to move us further along the path toward enlightenment. They’re vehicles for developing character and planting the seeds of future wellbeing. The flip side to this understanding is that breaking the precepts is not so much a matter of breaking deontological “rules” as it is a matter of breaking our deepest commitments to being the kind of person we intend to be.

As Buddhists, we also bring to the table a traditional distrust of fixed views, along with an attitude of open inquiry that aims at preventing our thoughts from becoming stuck in stale and rigid categories. We’re always attempting to listen freshly to our own experience and to other voices as well, always willing to learn and change, always interested in discovering what being moral means in this particular moment and situation. While we affirm the values of enlightenment, we’ve learned to distrust the conceptions we construct surrounding it. We understand that every specific ethical dilemma, if properly attended to, reveals a greater degree of intricate complexity than any rule can possibly allow for.

We also realize that in setting up any ideal, we introduce certain dangers: the danger that we’ll delude ourselves, pretending that we’re further along the path than we are; the danger that we’ll deny, repress, minimize, project, or otherwise underestimate our persistent natures as predatory, competitive, territorial, dominance-seeking, and sexual animals; the danger that we’ll develop an aversion to those parts of ourselves that fall short of the ideal or disparage or punish others who seem to us to fall short. Every ideal also creates tensions between being and becoming, between moving toward the ideal and realizing that the ideal has been, in some way, manifest all along. It also creates tensions between aspirations to a kind of purity and aspirations toward wholeness and integration. The dangers are real, but ethics always involves establishing some ideal, whether it’s one of enlightenment, holiness, or simply civility.

To what degree does this modernist Buddhist ethics with its moral cause and effect, interconnectivity, eudaimonic enlightenment, acknowledgment of rival incommensurate goods, and suspicion of rigid, inflexible rules help us—especially convert Buddhists—in resolving our everyday ethical dilemmas? The answer is that it only helps a little. We still have all the biological, cultural, and rational considerations that shaped our everyday moral intuitions before we became Buddhists. Added to those considerations, however, we now also have an ideal we’ve established with the ultimate goal of helping ourselves and others achieve a Buddhist kind of well-being—a virtuous life consistent with Buddhist principles that speak to our modern lived experience—along with the knowledge that if we are ever to approach that goal, our actions need to be concordant with it. It’s one more consideration, a thumb on the scale that informs our decisions.

Let’s return once more to our paradigmatic first precept against killing. Despite our moral objection to killing, it’s still an issue that arises for us again and again, requiring us to make real choices. Should we be vegetarians? Should abortion or assisted suicide be legalized? Should we pay taxes that support the military? Should we put ailing, suffering pets to sleep? Should we slap at the fly that’s annoying us as we sit trying to meditate?

A fixed rule-based approach to the first precept would tell us that killing is categorically wrong in each and every circumstance. On the other hand, a morality based on our desire to move toward a more enlightened way of being would, it seems to me, be more nuanced. An enlightened being’s prime concern would be the reduction of another’s suffering as best as one could determine how to accomplish it, using all of one’s experience, empathy, respect, reason, and judgment, along with an awareness of possible shadow motivations and unintended consequences—in other words, a melding of Aristotelian practical judgment with Buddhist mindfulness and discernment. It requires that when we decide to cause a certain degree of harm in the pursuit of what we discern to be the wisest good, that we do so with full awareness—without minimization or disengagement—of the extent of the suffering we’re about to become the cause of. It requires that we listen fully and openly to each moment as it speaks to us in all of its intricate complexity. Like the famed Zen monk who carries the young woman across the stream in violation of the Vinaya rules, it sometimes involves breaking one precept to honor another. It recognizes precepts as koans rather than inviolate rules, and that we must struggle with them as Jacob wrestled with his angel, discerning what each moment calls for as we continue our endless journey toward an enlightenment we only dimly understand.

Some traditionalists might contend that this modernist ethics fails the test of being authentically Buddhist. That is an argument that closes the door on those unable to believe in rebirth, leaving them out of the fold. I would argue, instead, that the coexistence of a plurality of Buddhisms—both traditionalist and modern—is evidence of Buddhism’s vibrant health, offering different dharma doors for people with diverse needs. Just as genetic diversity is healthy for breeding populations, ideological diversity helps Buddhism thrive through the cross-fertilization of ideas.

Let’s not forget that many of today’s traditional Buddhisms are themselves the product of ongoing dialogues with neighboring traditions: East Asian Buddhism with Confucianism and Daoism; Tibetan Buddhism with Bon; Japanese Buddhism with kami worship; and Indian Mahayana with emerging forms of Hindu and Tantric practice. History teaches us that religions are ever-developing traditions rather than the final, complete, unalterable word of their originators—traditions that endure or wither according to their ability to address the vital concerns of particular times and places. As religions adapt to conditions, some practitioners argue for the continued relevance of venerable ideas, while others reformulate them to meet the exigencies of the moment. Religions that endure successfully manage the tension between these extremes. The foremost principle of Buddhism is that everything changes. It is a law that governs Buddhism, too.

♦

The sculptures shown here all originate from the ancient region of Gandhara (now parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan), a cultural center and major trade route hub. Under the influence of Indo-Greek rule in the first several centuries both before and during the Common Era, it produced a wealth of distinctive Greco-Buddhist sculptural works.

The post A More Enlightened Way of Being appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As mindfulness has made greater inroads into public life—from hospitals, to schools, to the workplace—its growing distance from Buddhist thought and practice has become a hotly contested issue. Is mindfulness somehow deficient because it lacks Buddhist ethics, and should Buddhist ethics be replicated in mindfulness programs and workshops?

Psychologist Lynette Monteiro, founder of the Ottawa Mindfulness Clinic, points out that the “seeming absence of the explicit teaching of ethics in the MBI [Mindfulness-based Intervention] curriculum” is the “thorniest” basis for criticism. Underlying the discussion of ethics in mindfulness, however, is the presumption that there exists an inherent relation between religion and morality. Yet this focus on morality—thought to define the practice as religious rather than secular, Buddhist rather than non-Buddhist—is based on Western presumptions about religion inherited from Christianity, not Buddhism.

Views on morality and mindfulness tend to fall into three categories: inherent, integral, and modular.

The argument for an inherent relation claims that mindfulness training by itself, without any instruction in morality, leads people to higher moral standing. This is the claim made, for example, by David DeSteno, who says that an eight-week instructional program in meditation—without any accompanying instruction in morality—increased compassionate responses to the suffering of others threefold.

An integral relation, on the other hand, is one in which mindfulness and morality are understood to be inseparable, and the specific morality of the Buddhist tradition is thought to already form a part of mindfulness training. In this view, the success of mindfulness tradition requires practitioners to change their moral orientation to the world in specific—that is, Buddhist—ways.

Finally, a modular relation views mindfulness training and morality as distinct and separate, existing independently of one another. Separate modules like mindfulness training and training in morality can be linked together like Legos to create different structures. Under this conception, the kind of morality attached could just as well be Christian or humanist as Buddhist.

Mindfulness researchers and proponents alike have become entrenched in well-defined and increasingly institutionalized positions regarding ethics. But the fundamental ground of each of these positions—the way in which Western culture conceives of religion—has been ignored. That conception is built on a basic narrative trajectory that leads from primal, blissful harmony in Paradise, through sinful disobedience and ejection from Paradise, to a final atonement and reconciliation. This biblical narrative is fundamentally ethical in nature, hinging as it does on sinful action as the cause for the fall from grace. Many in the Western Buddhist communities have absorbed this cultural identification of religion with morality uncritically and perhaps unconsciously. It is, after all, an assumption so well established as to be invisible to us.

Yet if we look at the Buddhist narrative structure, we find it follows quite a different trajectory. Humanity’s original condition is not one of blissful harmony but rather of ignorance repeatedly leading to suffering. Recognizing this sets one on the path to awakening.

This fundamental difference between the two traditions suggests that the emphasis on morality in present discussions of mindfulness is rooted not in the Buddhist tradition itself but in the cultural preconceptions of Euro-American society.

This is not, of course, to say that the Buddhist tradition does not value morality, only that morality does not play the salvifically central role that it does in Christianity. Rather than being the key to attaining redemption for one’s original sinful failing, morality constitutes a condition for effective practice in Buddhism. After all, in the Buddhist tradition, while morality is conducive to awakening, it is not considered sufficient. Instead, it is a necessary preliminary.

One traditional characterization divides Buddhist practice into trainings in morality, meditation, and wisdom (sila, samadhi, prajna). The order is not incidental, as the practitioner moves from morality, through meditation, to wisdom—each supporting the next to constitute an integrated whole.

The cultural presumption that religion is primarily a matter of morality and that instilling moral behavior is its purpose has the effect of promoting a negative conception of human behavior. Consider, for example, the widespread assumption in the United States that moral behavior follows from being religious, and that anyone who is not religious—having not learned the importance of controlling his or her base and animal desires and motivations—is likely to be immoral.

These values and presumptions also inform the self-improvement culture of our society within which mindfulness training—in both secular and Buddhist forms—exists. The strong moral imperative to improve oneself has its origins in Protestant religious culture, which promoted the exercise of self-control to overcome one’s inherently sinful nature.

The moral imperative toward self-improvement is evident in the negative views held toward people who are not running, dieting, learning a foreign language, meditating, doing yoga, or any of the several dozen other ways society offers for you to improve yourself. Certainly, anyone not involved in such activities is thought to be lazy, stupid, indolent, and—studies surely suggest—will die younger and suffer more than all of those pursuing self-improvement.

One of the strongest motivators for individuals to pursue mindfulness is this imperative toward self-betterment. But such a moral imperative is not wholly consistent with Buddhist thought. Unlike Protestantism, the Buddhist path does not involve a moral control being exerted over the self and its natural animalistic tendencies, but rather the development of greater insight into the conditioned nature of existence. Indeed, the dualism of a self controlling the self feeds the illusion of a separate, independently existing self.

It is this modern moral imperative toward self-improvement that has transformed Buddhist practices from the activities of a relatively small number of monastic specialists into mass-marketed lay workshops, trainings, books, online courses, and so on. Just as the monastic values of late medieval Christian Europe became generalized as appropriate for everyone, so now the monastic values of Buddhism are being propagated and marketed as part of how one can improve oneself.

Arguing over whether introducing clients to the four noble truths is necessary for mindfulness training, and whether it then makes that training Buddhist rather than secular, neglects the roots of mindfulness in the particulars of Buddhist thought, especially those concerning ethics.

This does not resolve any questions about whether mindfulness training programs should teach morality or what kind of morality they should teach, or even the relation of morality to mindfulness training. Instead, highlighting the contradictions between the cultural presumptions that regard morality as the key to salvation and morality’s role within the Buddhist framework might challenge participants in the debate to question why it has become such a hot-button issue. After all, unless the debate changes the ground of shared presumptions, the existing impasse will only become more deeply entrenched.

The post What’s Ethics Got to Do with It? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A Sri Lankan monk once told me, “There is no doubt: if you follow the five precepts, you will be happy. You will live a good life.” We were standing outside the Mahabodhi Temple, in Bodh Gaya, India, discussing the Buddhist path for lay followers. At that point in my life, the monk’s words struck me as uncomplicatedly true. I was living in a Buddhist monastery as part of the Antioch Buddhist Studies program and observing the five precepts with such fervency that I wouldn’t borrow my roommate’s flashlight for even a minute without asking first. “What if she comes back to her room and needs her flashlight while you have it?” my teacher asked sensibly. “It’s a way of avoiding unnecessary complications.” The four months I spent in India were undoubtedly the happiest, simplest days of my life.

So I have complete faith that Shakyamuni Buddha knew what he was talking about when he offered a group of five hundred lay followers a prescription for leading a virtuous life, as told in the Dhammika Sutta: do not injure others, lie, steal, consume intoxicants, or “go with another man’s wife” (nowadays understood to mean “engage in sexual misconduct”). But these guidelines are much stickier to apply in the “real world” than in an Indian monastery filled with devout meditators and robed men and women. Back in the States and back into the swing of college life, I once again began to lie for the sake of convenience, get drunk a couple of nights a week, sleep with people I didn’t love, and subject the ants in my kitchen to death by tile cleaner.

Apparently I am not the only American who considers myself a Buddhist even as I routinely break the precepts. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of the Shambhala lineage, famously showed up drunk to dharma talks and was known to have had sexual relationships with students. And Richard Baker Roshi, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s successor as abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, was pushed out of the organization following an affair with a married student, which catalyzed long-simmering resentments about his leadership style. In a 1985 Yoga Journal article, Jack Kornfield wrote that of 54 teachers and gurus he interviewed, 34 said they had been sexually involved with their students.

It’s no coincidence that the most controversial transgressions against the precepts in fledgling American dharma centers have been related to the open-ended admonition against sexual misconduct. The difference between a white lie and a manipulative untruth is relatively clear; sorting out the wholesome signals one’s body gives from the unwholesome ones presents a much more complicated challenge. It actually took me several years to realize that simply feeling attracted to someone is not a good enough reason to sleep with him.

I’m not sure where I got the idea, which I carried with me throughout college, that pleasurable sex was a virtuous, guilt-free activity. This outlook was at least partly societal: the general consensus among my peers was that orgasms made you happy, pure and simple. And they did make me happy, but they also irrevocably tied my life, however trivially, to the person who gave them to me. Sexual contact is always a commitment, if not to a relationship, then to future dealings—a talk, awkwardness, avoidance, an unrequited crush—stuff my Bodh Gaya teacher would call “unnecessary complications.” As an undergrad, I failed to accept this. I noticed the anxiety caused by sexual encounters, but I never considered changing my behavior. I suppose I had an idea that being open with my sexuality indicated that I was liberated, a freethinker who acted as she chose—and the baggage that came with that freedom? It was just something I had to learn to deal with.

Perhaps this is not so different from the thinking that gave rise to infidelity and teacher-student romances in emergent American sanghas of decades past. Just how hard and fast does the precept against sexual indiscretion need to be? Turning to the Dhammapada for guidance, we are presented with a seemingly unequivocal view: “Whoever [breaks the five precepts],” the Buddha is quoted as saying, “digs up the roots of himself even here in this very world.” But Shakyamuni’s overarching message throughout his life was that one must be one’s own wisdom. In the Kalama Sutta, he states, “Do not go upon…what is in a scripture. Kalamas, when you yourselves know: ‘These things are bad’…abandon them.” I read this as: always follow the five precepts. And figure out what that means on your own.

Indeed, since the publication of Kornfield’s article 20 years ago, dharma centers throughout the US have struggled to settle on appropriate interpretations of the precepts. Some centers have adopted a strict policy of disallowing sexual relationships between students and teachers. The San Francisco Zen Center leaves the option on the table, but only after a period of long and careful consideration. And Shambhala firmly discourages sexual relationships between teachers and students, but stops short of instituting strict rules.

Just as Buddhism in America underwent, and continues to undergo, a process of evolution, Buddhists are challenged to take a similar journey on a personal level. In a culture where one-night stands and “friends with benefits” are accepted as integral to the young adult experience, it took me years to develop a healthy relationship to sex that was wholly my own. Throughout college—notwithstanding my semester in Bodh Gaya—I created undue strain for myself and others by entering sexual relationships casually, often when my thinking was clouded by drinking. If I was having so much fun, I couldn’t be doing anything wrong, right? Twice, I woke up next to someone I couldn’t even bring myself to kiss in the sober light of morning. And these were guys I really liked—as friends. I had to endure weeks of awkwardness before our friendship returned to normal.

For a while, I experienced the closest thing to religious guilt that I’d ever known. Why couldn’t I have simply followed the precepts in the first place? I had always had faith in them; I just hadn’t translated that faith into action. Once I started paying attention to the sense of regret I felt after these experiences, though, I began to develop a “real-world” commitment to the commonsense wisdom of the precepts. Thanks in part to the Buddhist conception of regret as an opportunity not for self-flagellation but for change, I soon saw that I simply needed stricter standards for my conduct in order to make sure I handled my romantic life responsibly and with respect.

In At Home in Muddy Water: The Zen of Living with Everyday Chaos, the Zen teacher Ezra Bayda writes, “The difference between experiencing our sexuality as heaven or hell is rooted in one thing only, and this is the clarity of our awareness.” For me, living up to self-made standards requires not harsh policing, but clarity. (Never drinking hard liquor or removing any of my body hair before I go out helps, too.) If I’m considering getting intimately involved with someone, remembering the regret that I’ve felt in the past is usually enough of a motivation to act mindfully. I ask myself questions like “Would I want to kiss this person if we weren’t drinking Coronas and dancing to the Pet Shop Boys?” or “Do I really think I can look past this guy’s homophobia just because he has his hand on my leg in a parked car?” In the aftermath of my most recent heartbreak, which put an end to a two-year emotional roller coaster, I realized that all of my (extremely flawed) relationships so far had been driven by sex. With this revelation came a sudden sense of calm, the ticker tape of my self-censuring thoughts snipped mid-spin. “Oh, that’s what’s causing this pain,” I thought. “This is behavior I can change.”

I might have spared myself some heartache if I had taken at face value the Buddha’s warning in the Vipaka Sutta that breaking the precepts “leads to hell.” But I needed to have an experiential understanding of what sexual misconduct—and hell—meant for me. Without this, the precept would be a meaningless command that I would have little incentive to obey.

This doesn’t mean that my struggles with the precepts are over. Just the other day, I made out with someone I don’t much care for, caught up in the moment. Even though I had no interest in dating this guy, I found myself hoping he’d call me later. Fortunately, he didn’t—so I got to simply notice the unnecessary emotional energy the encounter had used up, and remind myself to continue trying to be more careful.

At a 1993 symposium with twenty-two Western Buddhist teachers, the Dalai Lama remarked that in a few rare cases it is acceptable for gurus to use sex to help their disciples achieve awakening—but the example he cited was of an ancient lama who was so highly realized he could also fly. Moreover, many people report that Trungpa Rinpoche often delivered crystal-clear dharma talks while intoxicated. Which is not to say that his drinking was unproblematic—just that all of us have different limits, and that we must each grapple with our own. The wonderful challenge of Buddhism is that it does not offer any absolute formulas for virtuousness. In the Silabatta Sutta, the Buddha asks Ananda if every precept and practice taught by the dharma is holy. Ananda replies, “Lord, that is not to be answered with a categorical answer.”

This article was originally published as a Tricycle Web Exclusive in 2008.

The post Personal Heaven, Personal Hell appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The following guest blogpost comes our way from Lama Jampa Thaye, a scholar, author, and meditation master from the UK, trained in both the Karma Kagyu and Sakya traditions of Tibetan Buddhim. A few months ago, Lama Jampa wrote a blogpost titled Buddhism and the Age of Compassion, in which he cautioned against confusing compassion with sentimentality and spoke of the importance of having an ethical foundation at the core of our spiritual endeavors. From the post:

It is vital that our understanding of compassion should be consistent with Buddha’s tough and clear-minded teachings on moral discipline, since, as he insisted, unless people live an ethical life, the genuine happiness that we wish for them in this and future lives will be unobtainable.

We can find these teachings in the vows of the Pratimoksha (‘Individual liberation’), which is regarded in Tibetan Buddhism as the ethical code of the so called Hinayana, just as the Bodhisattva and Vidyadhara vows are the codes for the Mahayana and Vajrayana respectively. In the Pratimoksha vows Buddha set out four fundamental ethical trainings for both householders and monastics:

To avoid taking life
To avoid taking that which has not been given
To avoid sexual misconduct
To avoid false speech

Thus, when we wish that others be endowed with the causes of happiness, we must understand that it is only the practice of these moral precepts that constitutes such causes. In other words, the proper fulfillment of the Bodhisattva vow, the supreme expression of compassionate engagement with the needs of others, depends upon our reliance on the essence of the preceding vow, the Pratimoksha.

In today’s post, he takes this teaching further:

TAKING VOWS ( AND BUDDHISM ) SERIOUSLY by Lama Jampa Thaye

Last time I talked a little about the need for compassion to be founded on the solid rock of moral behavior and pointed to the role played by the Pratimoksha vow, whether for renunciates or householders, in providing that ethical foundation. Now we can discuss the Bodhisattva vow, the second in the sequence of vows taken by Tibetan Buddhist practitioners and the most powerful expression of compassion, while, at the same time, exploring its relationship to the Pratimoksha.

To characterize the significance of the Bodhisattva vow one might say that, just as taking refuge in the Three Jewels defines one as a Buddhist, so taking the Bodhisattva vow defines one as a Mahayanist. Specifically the Bodhisattva vow itself is the acceptance of the commitment to achieve Buddhahood for the benefit of all beings. The ceremony of the vow is thus the manifestation of  bodhichitta, the altruistic thought of enlightenment in a ritual setting. As such it comprises both the aspiration to become a Buddha and the application to undertake the path that leads to that very goal.

In Tibetan Buddhism the Bodhisattva vow has been transmitted in two Mahayana lineages—that of the eminent Indian master Atisha and the Kadam tradition and that of the philosopher Nagarjuna and the Sakya school. In addition, two tantric lineages of the Bodhisattva vow also exist, a general one transmitted in tantric initiations and a special one given during the exposition of the ‘Path and its Fruit’ teaching in the Sakya school.

Three important questions arise, when one examines the relationship between the Pratimoksha and Bodhisattva vows.

1. Is it necessary to have received the Pratimoksha before one can take the Bodhisattva vow?

The followers of Atisha’s lineage argue that it is necessary, citing his statement:

Those who maintain any of the seven kinds of Pratimoksha vow have the good fortune for the Bodhisattva vow but others do not.

On the other hand, Sakya masters claim that it is not necessary, adducing two principal reasons. The first is that, contrary to the Pratimoksha vow, the Bodhisattva vow may be taken by beings in any of the six realms.

The second reason is somewhat more complex. It revolves around the fact that the Pratimoksha vow, being concerned with restraint from physical and verbal misconduct, is tied to the body and thus inevitably ceases at death. As opposed to this,  the Bodhisattva vow, being generated exclusively as a mental resolve, can continue in to future lives. As that is so, it can be present from the beginning of the next life, whereas a person who dies while holding the Pratimoksha vow of a monk cannot then be conceived in the womb at the beginning of his next life automatically possessing the Pratimoksha vow. Yet the absurdity of a monastically ordained unborn child would inevitably follow, if, like the Bodhisattva vow, the Pratimoksha vow did not cease at death. Therefore one can only conclude the Bodhisattva vow can exist in the absence of the Pratimoksha.

2. What happens to someone’s  Pratimoksha vow if he or she subsequently takes the Bodhisattva vow?

In this case the Pratimoksha vow, though it is transmitted exclusively through the ritual found in the Vinaya scriptures of so called Hinayana schools such as the Sarvastivada or Theravada, becomes, in effect, a Mahayana Pratimoksha vow, because it is henceforth  maintained with a Mahayana attitude.

As the erudite Sakya master Drakpa Gyaltsen states:

If one has previously obtained the Pratimoksha, then when one generates the Bodhisattva vow, one obtains the Pratimoksha of the Bodhisattva.

One may conclude from this that any practitioner, who holds a Pratimoksha vow from Theravada, becomes a Mahayanist simply by taking the Bodhisattva vow. In other words, he or she would maintain their identity as a Theravadin, at the very least by virtue of their Pratimoksha vow, but be a Mahayanist in their orientation to the final goal of their practice. Actually, there is nothing surprising about this, when one realizes that Tibetan Buddhists themselves are simultaneously followers of the Sarvastivada, a ‘Hinayana’ school, through their Pratimoksha vow and are ‘Mahayanists’ through their Bodhisattva vow.

3. Can the Pratimoksha and Bodhisattva vows ever be taken in the same ceremony or must they always be given separately?

In the preliminary part of tantric initiations, which, as we have already mentioned,  preserve a form of the Bodhisattva vow, they are given together.

To explain this in a little more detail:

In ‘permission’ initiations, the most commonly bestowed form of initiations, the candidate for initiation is required to take the Pratimoksha and Bodhisattva vows during the preliminary procedures of the initiation. Usually this is accomplished  through recitation of the ‘seven branch declaration’ drawn from the Vajra Panjara tantra. The two vows are taken, or retaken if one has taken them previously, at this point because one cannot receive the permission to practice Vajrayana unless one already has become a Buddhist by taking refuge and maintains the vows of the preceding two vehicles. Naturally in the case of a householder the Pratimoksha vow taken in this fashion is that germane for householders. 

Furthermore, in the case of a major initiation from one of the two higher sets of tantras, the initiate also receives the specifically tantric vow of the Vidyadhara alongside the Pratimoksha and Bodhisattva vows in the preliminary part of the initiation.

All this may well lead us to reflect on the seriousness with which we should view initiations, since they carry such commitments. Yet if one looks around one can easily see that people often receive them without this requisite knowledge. Such an ill-considered approach is one of the main causes of disillusionment experienced by many dharma followers in these modern times.

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