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So, What are Buddhist Moral Codes for, Anyway? A Monkey Mind Ramble…

So, What are Buddhist Moral Codes for, Anyway? A Monkey Mind Ramble…

Last updated on: November 1, 2011 at 3:05 pm by James Ford

So, What are Buddhist Moral Codes for, Anyway? A Monkey Mind Ramble… 2011-11-01T15:05:13-07:00 James Ford

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It has been recently announced that the Blogisattva awards, Buddhist blogging awards established by blogger Tom Armstrong. Tom has moved on to other things, but a new crew has taken on the job. Now, they’ve generated some controversy around the web for various reasons. Personally I like such things. So long as one doesn’t make too much of them, they can acknowledge good work, and as long as they throw the net wide, can point out new or more obscure bloggers who should be better known.

I have to admit a category such as “favorite” blogger is for me a moving target. Depends on lots of things including humidity and air temperature. Still, as far as I’m concerned one of the consistently interesting and sometimes challenging (in the best senses of that word) Buddhist blogger, and one who should be considered for any category of “best all around” would have to be Marnie Louise Froberg who blogs as Smiling Buddha Cabaret.

So, for instance, she has expressed ambivalence about the awards, taking the reader in interesting directions as she does so…

Her most recent post The (Approximately) 32 Marks of a “Good” Buddhist is no exception. And it reveals one of those marks of a good post, so far as I’m concerned. In addition to the new information it may contain (I really liked this, for instance.), it sparks one’s own thinking…

As someone who has been told I’m not a real Buddhist on occasion, I found her essay sparking a variety of thoughts. One or two I share here…

Marnie quotes Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse who wrote a book called What Makes You Not a Buddhist.

The bottom line of it for the good lama are four affirmations.

One is a Buddhist if he or she accepts the following four truths: All compounded things are impermanence. All emotions are pain. All things have no inherent existence. Nirvana is beyond concepts.

While I think the second “truth” or proof of being a Buddhist frames the matter in a way that calls for further unpacking, I “believe” all four of these statements. The scare quotes are there because I have arrived at a place in my life where the belief is informed by direct investigation and are informed by what I’ve found for myself.

Now, beliefs are tricky things. Even informed by investigation and “experienced,” even to one’s bones and marrow, the assertions follow the experience and are informed by lots of things, including the tradition within which I was practicing as I came to have these experiences and from which I acquired the words to express them…

And so even Buddhism is compounded, and there should be no doubt there will be a day when Buddhism vanishes.

To be replaced, I’m confident, by similar assertions, perhaps weighed slightly differently, and with different words – so long as there are creatures with self-reflective minds.

Now what sparked Marnie’s reflection was the question of who is a “good” Buddhist? For her mostly that had to do with categories of niceness, and she provided a list showing how silly that can be. But, she was also concerned with deeper moralities, and how they fit into the scheme of a living Buddhism.

This sparked me. And as I was looking for a sermon I delivered on just that subject I stumbled upon an earlier posting I wrote that addressed a rather larger version of those four statements. It required further unpacking, and I notice I also wanted to qualify even a few words that today I don’t feel such a need to do. Such are the consequences of temperature and humidity…

Now Marnie has a bit of a monkey mind herself, and I hesitate to assert a larger point to many of her blogs, but I would say here she’s largely concerned with morality and its relative place within Buddhism.

And for me the question is what do these deeper insights have to do with us as we try to creatively engage them from the stance of a nonBuddhist culture. (One of my attempts at investigating the precepts from this perspective led to this.)

But, what I think is most interesting about precepts and Buddhism is, if they’re not part of the original insights, the wisdom that informs the great way, what is the purpose of their observation, whether they be five or ten or sixteen of fifty-eight or two hundred ten or two hundred, twenty-seven or three hundred, eleven, all numbers given for various Buddhists of various sorts?

Well, I think there are various reasons for holding the precepts.

When I look at the five so-called “lay precepts,” not killing, not lying, not stealing, not becoming intoxicated, not abusing sexuality, and not becoming intoxicated I think I can discern some things.

One is that I believe, see, have noticed, when one is on their game, when one is acting from that place of seeing truly into those four marks, one tends to act from the place described in the precepts. The person who sees into these things tends to try to avoid killing unnecessarily, tries to be truthful, tries to honor and respect the thingness of things and not take what hasn’t been given or earned, respects ones own and other’s bodies, and tries to remain clear.

And it is pure situational ethics. To keep one precept may require one to break another. Examples abound…

But there’s another point.

One Zen master once said, “I don’t ask about before the fifteenth of the month, I ask about after the fifteenth of the month.” That is a reference to the full moon, and the metaphor is about awakening, and challenging a student to show her awakening, to show his awakening.

To show your awakening.

However, we also need to attend to that before. And the precepts bare and literal are not a bad container for someone who is lost in the dark and trying to find a way. Here the precepts can be a flashlight. You don’t need to know how to make a battery or a light bulb to use it. And sometimes just following the rules is a wise thing to do…

And even then, everything is relative, all compounded things will come apart, and one must muddle through doing one’s best with inadequate information.

But, I suspect, in general, if one takes the precepts to heart, whatever that number is for you, if you try to keep them, holding them with open hands, you’ll do better and be better.

And along the way you might see into why…

Two cents on a Sunday morning in Washington D.C…

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