Can you hear me? If this lamp bursts out, bursts into flames, I think it's okay. I don't know. It's just, maybe it's not been used, so. Well, this is the first class of Aspect of Practice. And tonight, I have a fair amount of material to cover by way of giving you background on the various precept systems and where they come from and how they've, to some degree, how they've changed over the years according to the cultures and practices that they evolved in from covering this enormous amount of time from the Buddha's lifetime until today, going through India, China, Japan, and then America.

[01:09]

So I'm hoping, this is a whole course, really, and we're going to just sort of sketchily move through it tonight. If you have questions, just please raise your hand or jump in and ask them. I have some questions that come up as we go along, but please ask yours so we can be pretty fully participatory. We'll take a break at about a quarter after for five minutes and we will end at nine o'clock and we'll end with the refuges. I thought I'd like to start, do people have the reader? Most people have the reader? If you don't, if you could look on. I think what I'd like to do is start by reading some of the Kyoju Kaimon, Dogen's version of the precepts, which is essentially what we've been given.

[02:23]

And I'd like to start sort of two-thirds of the way down through the first page. So to read actually what we have as the 16 Bodhisattva precepts, which would be the Begin with the paragraph that says, next one should take refuge. You see that? And this is familiar to you from our lay ordination and ordination ceremonies and from the Bodhisattva ceremony. These are Dogen's 16 Bodhisattva precepts Slightly different version, I think this is the city center version or some recension of that. But let's read through these together. Next, one should take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. There are three kinds of virtue to the triple treasure.

[03:27]

They are called the single-body triple treasure, the manifested triple treasure, and the maintained triple treasure. Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi is called the Buddha treasure. Its purity and freedom from dust is the Dharma treasure. The virtue of peace and harmony is a Sangha treasure. These are called the single-bodied triple treasure. The realization of Bodhi is called the Buddha treasure. That which is realized by Buddha is the Dharma treasure. Learning the Buddha and Dharma is the Sangha treasure. These are called the manifested triple treasure. Edifying heavenly beings, edifying humans, appearing in the vast openness of being or appearing within the dust is the Buddha treasure. being changed into the ocean storehouse or sutras written on shells and leaves, edifying animate and inanimate beings.

[04:33]

This is called the Dharma treasure. Relieving all suffering and being free from the house of the three worlds is the Sangha treasure. These are called the maintained triple treasures. In taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, one obtains the great precepts of all Buddha. Buddha is your teacher and not of one of another way. The three collective pure precepts. Precept of fulfilling rules and laws. It is the abode of the laws of all Buddhas. It is the source of the law of all Buddhas. Precept of fulfilling wholesome dharmas. It is the teaching of Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi and is the path of the practicer and what is practiced. precept of fulfilling all beings. It is transcending profane and holy and taking self and others across.

[05:34]

These are called the three collective pure precepts. The ten grave prohibitory precepts. One, not killing. Life is not to kill. Let the Buddha seed grow and succeed to the life and the wisdom of the Buddha, taking no life. Life is not killed. Not stealing. In the suchness of mind and objects, the door gate of liberation is open. not indulging in sexual greed. Because the three wheels are pure, nothing is wished for. All Buddhas are on the same path, not speaking falsehoods. The Dharma wheel incessantly turns, and there is neither excess nor lack. The sweet dew permeates, gain the essence and gain the truth. Not selling fermented liquor, Where nothing can be brought in, that is where everything is inviolable.

[06:36]

This is exactly the great brightness. Not discussing the faults of others. Within Buddha Dharma, all are on the same path, the same Dharma, the same realization, and the same practice. So the faults of others will not be discussed, and confusing speech will not occur. praising self nor slandering others. Buddhas and ancestors realize entire sky and the great earth. Manifesting the great body in the sky, there is no inside or outside. Manifesting the Dharma body on earth, there is not an inch of ground. Not begrudging the bestowal of Dharma, One verse are the myriad forms, the 100 grasses. One dharma and one realization are all the Buddhas and ancestors. From the beginning, there has never been stinginess, not being angry, whether withdrawn or set forth, neither real nor unreal.

[07:46]

Here are oceans of illuminated clouds and oceans of ornamented cloud ocean. not disparaging the triple treasure. The body is manifested, the dharma is unfolded, and there is a bridge in the world for crossing over. Virtue returns to the ocean of all wisdom. They are unfathomable and should be received with devotion and respect. These are the 16 precepts of Buddha in general. We are now instructed to receive respect and reverence when they are taught or conferred. Well, we could spend a long time talking about just that. uh-huh, any one piece of it, any one precept, I'm going to resist for tonight.

[08:49]

But I think that when some of the other classes take place, they'll go into this in some depth. I know there are questions about it. I have questions about it. In the, I really like this lecture, and as Ron pointed out, the lectures in this booklet are in somewhat raw form. They have a lot of Suzuki Roshi's voice. And I like this, the beginning of this lecture, the real precepts are beyond words. In this third paragraph he says, well, in the second paragraph, the purpose of receiving precepts, observing precepts, is not just to remember what we should do or what we shouldn't do.

[09:50]

And how we observe precepts is to practice Zen or to extend our practice to our everyday life. So the idea of precepts is completely different from the usual understanding of precepts. The precepts you know, which is, or the foundation of precepts, true meaning of precepts. Precepts is various way you understand of one reality. One reality which is always with you. Reality which cannot, which is not indivisible in three or in 16 or in 10. Tentatively, we divide. We explain it from various angles, but that is just words. Real, you know, precept is beyond word. We cannot, if we talk about it, it is not real precepts already. So if you think precepts is just to observe some various rules as precepts, it is very different or very far away from the true understanding of the true practice of precepts.

[10:58]

And then in the lecture before that, right at the beginning, how to observe precepts. This morning I want to talk about Zen, Zen precepts. As you know, the real meaning of precepts is not just rules, but rather our way of life. When we organize our life, you see something like rules. Even though you are not intending to observe some particular rule, the rules are always there. As soon as you get up, in order to wake up completely, you wash your face. That is a precept, one of the precepts. And at a certain time, you eat breakfast when you become hungry. That is, you're observing some rules when you eat breakfast at some certain time. It is actually the way of life you follow naturally. I remember talking with Some of you know our friend Santicarl, who studied with the Theravada teacher, Achan Buddhadasa, who translated the word sila, which is normally translated as precepts, and he translated it as natural normalness, which is very much in accord with what Suzuki Roshi was putting forth there,

[12:27]

functioning naturally than you are functioning in a preceptual way. And I think that's very close to our understanding of precepts, but that's one side of our understanding of the precepts. These precepts, you know, it's very deep water. I've been studying about them for a long time and I've been really digging around a lot this week in order to prepare for this class. The more I went into it, the more overwhelmingly complex and multifaceted it was, but quite inspiring. So we can test these waters together tonight a bit and feel around with our toes to see if we can touch the bottom from time to time.

[13:37]

So what we practice, what we receive here are the Bodhisattva precepts, precepts that simultaneously are expressing form and emptiness as the manifestation of our everyday life. And this is, it reminds me of what Suzuki Roshi said. He said we have we have hindayana practice with mahayana mind. And I think what he meant was that our practice is very simple, but it's not easy. And the purpose of our practice is to wake up together with all beings. That's also the purpose of the precepts. It's the method of the precepts. So really the awareness of our posture and our breath

[14:44]

that we would learn here is not so different from what we might learn in the Theravada tradition. And nothing else is really necessary. But within that, at the heart of all Buddhist practice, is just the intention to wake up. the territory of benefiting all beings tends to be staked out by the Mahayana schools, but really I think that's a false distinction. The Buddha offered his teaching for everybody. His intention was to benefit everybody, everybody who was willing to follow the way that he was offering. was seen as having a very good chance of waking up. But yet the practice that evolved in India, which was a practice of a very clear renunciation, did evolve as rules.

[16:03]

And you had something like, there are a number of different patimokas from the different schools of Buddhism. The one that has survived in the Theravada school has something like 227 rules for men and 311 for women. And patimoka means something like, bond or rule in a kind of contractual sense. This is the agreement that you make when you become a monk or a nun and these rules are actually the latticework of your practice. They are the practice themselves living according to this rule. But when we, in our practice, we're trying to practice in a way that's rooted in emptiness, which is, to my mind, simply a word for complete interdependence.

[17:18]

when we have a glimpse of our involvement with all of life, what becomes foremost in our actions is the compassionate intention to live for the benefit of all beings. And so, In the practical trainings that we receive in sila, precepts, samadhi, which is concentration or meditation, prajna, which is wisdom, sila is often seen as the basis. That's a dualistic way of seeing these as separate aspects of practice. They do inform each other, but if you take any of them away, you don't have Buddhism, you don't have Zen practice.

[18:22]

And I keep thinking, I think I've told this, I have told this story here. I remember a couple of years ago, I watched a few episodes of The Sopranos. I don't know if anybody watches that. But there was a guy who got out of jail. He's the guy who also, this is really bad, I'm really, this is, I'm making confession, is the guy who also plays the pizza parlor owner in Everybody Loves Raymond. A very dour, tough-looking Italian guy. And he'd been in prison for a long time. And he was a yogi. He was extremely adept at yoga, and he had a very disciplined practice. But he was a killer. And ultimately, he got his comeuppance. So he had a kind of samadhi practice without sila.

[19:31]

So one can separate these things. But that's really not our practice. To us, they're all flowing together. They should be informing each other. And we need them. We need these precepts. However, whether we see them as rules or we see them as naturally arising, like natural law, However it is, and it's constantly shifting, we need them because we have this room full of people and we have to figure out how to get along. One of my teachers, Shota Harada, said in an interview, if there were no people, there would be no need for precepts. They wouldn't arise. It's kind of like this, it's sort of like the tree falling in the forest question.

[20:35]

Precepts exist because we exist, and we have to interact. In a recent interview that Ed Herzog did with Akin Roshi in Hawaii for BPF, Akin Roshi, he kind of leaned into the camera in his, he's pretty old now, but he said with great passion and intensity, maturity means seeing that there are other people out there. And it was one of those things that just like, wham, just really, you know, it's not like we don't know this, we know this, right? But it was a very powerful statement, a reminder, you know, and I felt when he was saying this, he was saying this as something that in his maturity, he's had to learn.

[21:39]

So that's why we have precepts. For me, the essence of these precepts is about relationality. Yeah, well let's, we can leave that there.

[22:57]

But we owe, I want to say we owe Akinroshi an incredible debt. Because, you know, he has this mixed Soto Rinzai lineage. And in the Rinzai tradition, You don't study, the precepts are at the very end of a particular Koan curriculum. You wouldn't study them. You wouldn't talk about them for fear that your understanding was necessarily going to be dualistic. And I feel like Eken Roshi was somebody who just, he turned that over. And, you know, he, from what whatever inner drive he had to, he felt like we need to be talking about this. We can't wait. And even if we make mistakes, which I think is kind of the The Soto Method is one mistake after another. We need to be talking about it.

[23:58]

But I don't think there was no real public discourse in American Zen about precepts. The other day I was looking for precepts in going through a bunch of D.T. Suzuki's work. It's not there. It just didn't find it. And so much of the dharma and the discourse on all of this important and somewhat obscure stuff is there, but there is no discussion of the precepts. So this is something that we owe Akinboshi. I think many of us have taken the Bodhisattva vows and we get the Kechamiyaku. Did you ever read that Kechamiyaku? Oh, good. It's really powerful. This line of ancestors leads from Shakyamuni Buddha through the Indian ancestors and the Soto and Rinzai lineages to Dogen.

[25:03]

And then from Dogen, it leads all the way down to Suzuki Roshi and to Horitsu Suzuki Roshi and to Sojin Roshi. and then to each of us, and then the line goes back up to the top of Shakyamuni's head. And then the text reminds of us how it was revealed to Dogen's teacher, Myozen, one of Dogen's two teachers, that the preceptual vein of the Bodhisattvas is the single great causal condition of the Zen gate. It's a wonderful line, the perceptual vein of the of the Bodhisattvas is the single great causal condition of the Zen gate. In other words, that's the way you walk in. So, well I'm going to about to launch into some of this history.

[26:08]

Are there any questions or Well, going back to these hundreds of precepts that you might contrast for, what about in the Hindu tradition? How many do Hindu priests have? Well, that's an interesting thing. The five precepts. not killing, not stealing, no sexual misconduct, no lying, no use of intoxicants, is you find that in the Hindu tradition, you find that in the Vedic tradition, you find that in other Middle Eastern traditions, so it's common there. But one of the distinctions between the Hindu religion and the Hindu religion has all of these prohibitions that are somewhat like what you find in Judaism or in Islam.

[27:11]

They're very ritualized prohibitions, things you can do, things you can't do that are not strictly explained. They may have some deep anthropological reason, but those weren't precepts. They were religious law, and they were law that was administered, you know, that was only available, really primarily available to a sort of Brahmanic caste. And then kind of each group under, you know, each successive cast had kind of more leeway and then you had casts who were allowed to do the things so that the higher casts could function. But it's not the same kind of system. But I think they're parallels. That didn't seem to be the case.

[29:05]

Yeah. Well, yeah, I understand that. That's there and hopefully we'll get to that, how that evolved and also how it evolved within the Japanese tradition. Anything else before we move on? Yeah. I don't think he did. I think he was, I don't think he did at all. I think he was just, this was a talk that was given on a particular day. Oh, Diki Suzuki. I don't particularly want to get into it that much, but I think it has to do with, to me, an aberration in the development of Japanese Buddhism, which is not so different from how Buddhist sects could full out back the Japanese war in Asia.

[30:59]

and participate in it. So this is a long discussion and I don't know if we'll get to it, but it's problematic to me. lack of imprisonment to do a lot of repressive rule. Yeah, I think that's right. That's right. So from the beginning, the Buddha was, was talking about morality. In the Dhammapada, what we have as the pure precepts, which we usually translate as, to avoid all evil, do all good.

[32:01]

and save all beings in the Dhammapada is to avoid all evil, cultivate good, and purify your mind. And that's there in Dhammapada 183. And in the very laying out of the Eightfold Path, you have sila, ethics, samadhi, which you could call, you could call psychology, Prajna, which you could call, which is wisdom. So Sila was there right from the beginning as one of the three elements of the training. But in the time, in the early days of the Sangha, the order of monks for quite a while, they were all arhats. Some of them, an arhat means, you know, they were completely liberated from all defilements and were not And that was kind of the model, the goal.

[33:05]

And for the first X number of years, they were either people who were awakened upon hearing the Buddha's words, or upon the act of ordination. And so, there wasn't really, I think, oh yeah, of the first 500 monks, even the least accomplished was a stream winner, which means stream winner is another enlightened state. It means you're only gonna come back once, I think. Or you're guaranteed to become an arhat in how many lives? Seven lives, okay. So stream winner, then there's once returner, is that right? Yeah, non-returner. So among these first 500, even the least of them was a stream winner. So they were really on the path to complete enlightenment. Yeah. Are you actually saying stream winner? Yeah, they won the stream. They were in the stream.

[34:06]

They were swimming to enlightenment. or surfing, I don't know. So there was very little need for rules and regulation and you didn't have the development of what became the Vinaya Patimokkha. But as the years went on, the Sangha grew. One of the things that happened after a time was that the Buddha allowed other people to ordain monks. And as the Sangha grew, various people joined the Sangha who didn't always have, they were not stream winners. And they didn't necessarily have the purest of motivations. They might have been attracted by the prospect of free lunch, which is not a small thing.

[35:09]

or just the stature and respect of becoming a bhikkhu. And these people began to work their way into the Buddha's order. But the story is they had 20 years after the founding of the order before they began to outline the first grave offenses. That's a really long time. And it was the first offense, which called for the first Parajika precept, the precept of defeat, which means you're out of here, can't come back, was Bhikkhu Sudina, who committed the offense of having sexual intercourse with his ex-wife. And that evolved into the first Parajika rule. And so when each time, when a cause arose for laying down a predatory rule, the Buddha would convene an assembly of monks and they would question the monk involved and determine the nature, whether there was an offense, the nature of the offense, and make up a certain rule.

[36:38]

The Buddha also evidently followed the precedent set by earlier Buddhas and using his supernormal powers he reflected on what rules the earlier Buddhas had laid down under similar conditions and he would make up his rules. So you had the evolution of these rules what I'm saying is highly provisional. The history is provisional and somewhat murky because we don't have records. We know that these first five precepts were the precepts for lay people and for everybody, you know, predated the Buddha. But these preceptual systems evolved. when you became a novice, which is as the Sangha developed and became more structurally, and structural and developmental, novices took 10 precepts.

[37:52]

So on top of the first five, they also refrained from taking untimely meals, refrained from dancing, singing music, or watching grotesque mime, I don't know who that would. Yeah, okay. You'll refrain from the use of garlands, perfumes, and personal adornment. That would work very well here. Refrain from using high seats and refrain from accepting silver and gold. So those were the ten sort of novitiate precepts. What? No, you didn't outgrow them. You got more. You got more and they were more particular. You start with those. Yeah. Yes. And that's still true.

[39:06]

I mean, it's still true. I mean, I've had discussions with Santicaro about coming to see me perform. It's like, well, is this education or is this entertainment? And different nowadays, different monastic traditions hold that differently. The funniest thing I ever saw in my life, I just about wet my pants, was seeing an Indian monk at a meeting that I went to in Thailand do stand up. I mean, it was just, it was really bizarre. Yeah, time. Okay, let's take five minutes and please come back to me. So Tamar brought up an interesting point. Wait, is this on? No.

[40:13]

Tamar brought up an interesting point as we were leaning across the tans here. that the ten precepts that I mentioned were familiar to her from the Korean tradition. And versions of these ten, all of these different systems are still alive in various ways. But what was it that you said about keeping them or not keeping them? Could you say it again? Speak up. You know, when I was taking them in the Korean tradition, you were supposed to know when they were open and know when they were closed. What does that mean? Well, you know, if you have a Zen mind, you know, with a mind that is always saving all beings, then, you know, maybe going to entertainment is fine.

[41:14]

It's identity action. Sorry, you didn't want me to expound, did you? But some son going to Las Vegas because they were starting a zen center there. And so there was a ceremony at night, and he was in Las Vegas for the whole day. So he wanted to understand the mind of someone who goes to casinos. So he went to the casino for the whole day and, you know, played the slot machine. Not because he wanted to win or lose anything, but because he wanted to have the same mind as sentient beings that he was encountering. Right. Closed means, you know, follow it exactly. Open means, that's what it means. Sometimes they're open and sometimes they're closed. Judy? I practiced for a long time in the same tradition that she did, and I was thinking Somebody brought up the inevitable thing about, you know, well, if you're enlightened, you can just do anything you want, and the precepts don't count.

[42:28]

And he said, something he said, yes, that's true, but until you're enlightened, you better follow the precepts. And another thing about the open and close, one time he said, you know, if you see the rabbit going this way, and the hunter comes and says, Which way did the rabbit go? It's perfectly okay to say rabbit went that way. In other words, you know, that's the time when it's open and it's okay to lie. Right. So, what I wanted to, the distinction I wanted to make, which is important, particularly relating to these, uh, these Theravada precepts. Uh, the Theravada precepts are about maintaining a harmonious sense of, uh, a harmonious community. where the monks and nuns are in a proper harmonious relationship to each other and the fully ordained community is in the proper relationship to the lay community upon which it depends for support.

[43:34]

These precepts, if you read these 227 precepts, they are all actions. their physical actions or verbal actions. They do not really, even though their meaning is about controlling your mind and controlling your senses, the way they do that is by actually controlling your words and actions. give you something to do or something not to do, but they're about actions, which is actually, and we'll get to that, which is quite distinct from the one-mind precepts, which are really about mind. So, in the context of these Theravada precepts, actions are prescribed. These rules are, in a sense, you could call them, I guess in a sociological sense, normative. They are setting the rules by which you live your life.

[44:37]

And so, this is actually your practice. Meditation is a part of your practice, but really, if you meet, even today, say the Abhayagiri monks, if you've met them, they don't carry money. They only eat what's given to them. They follow all of these 227 rules. They recite them twice a month. And if you have broken any of these rules, you can't sit in the sima, in the circle, of ordained people until you have performed the proper repentance for it, which is sometimes confession to a single monk, it's sometimes confession to the group, it's sometimes forfeiting something that you've gained. Until you have done that action, you actually are not allowed to be in the circle. You're not out of the community, but you can't be in the circle of people who are holding these precepts.

[45:39]

Not one of his students, but another monk. He probably was tried for murder. I bet he was tried for murder. I don't know. He was also crazy, right? He had been in the war or something? I can't remember. I would love to share with you more detail about the Patimokkha, but I think there's really not time. Patimokkha is these 227 rules for monks.

[46:51]

I do want to say, and I'm going to let it go by because I want to get through some stuff. But I do want to say something about the ordination of women. So it's interesting, four years after his enlightenment, the Buddha came to Kapilavastu, which was his native city, and he came to visit his father, King Suddhodana, who was dying. And at that point, his foster mother, Mahapajapati, asked to join the order. And she was not alone. There were 500 other Shakyan women who wanted to join, all of whose husbands had already joined the order.

[47:56]

They had left the household life. So Suddhodana died, and Buddha went back to Vasali. And he refused the repeated requests of Mahapajapati for admission. And at that point, she was very determined. She cut off her hair and put on dyed robes. And with these other 500 women, walked from Kapilavastu to Visali, where the Buddha was staying. And Ananda, who was the Buddha's attendant, who was, He was the soft-hearted one, I think. Compassionate one. He met them at the gate. Oh, maybe so. Anyway, he saw these women with their swollen feet and they were dirty and weeping, standing about and he went to the Buddha and interceded on their behalf and finally he tried to convince the Buddha.

[49:12]

continued to say no. But when Ananda asked the Buddha whether women were capable of attaining the path and of attaining insight, the Buddha replied that they were indeed capable of doing so, provided they had left the household life like their menfolk had. And then Ananda asked him again and pointed out that Mahabhajapati had been of great service to the Buddha as his guardian and nurse, suckling him when his mother died. That's kind of major service. And as women were capable of attaining the path and insight, should be permitted to become bhikkhunis. And the Buddha finally agreed. and set out these eight special rules, which you may have heard about. And this was before, if we think back what I'd said, this is before there were precepts.

[50:14]

So these were the special rules that were applicable to women in order to join the order. And I'll just read a couple of them. A bikuni should not revile a biku in any way, not even obliquely. a bhikkhuni must abide by instructions given her by the bhikkhus, but must not give instructions or advice to bhikkhus. And I think that essentially that a bhikkhuni of a hundred years seniority was not senior to a monk of one day. Mahapajapati accepted these eight conditions and was admitted into the order. So there's a lot of discourse about what this means.

[51:19]

To an extent, there's a kind of one case that's made defending these rules as a way of protecting the women within society and within the order. I believe there's some truth in that. They also reflect the mores and the power arrangements of the time. We have to consider that, but they're not incumbent upon us. If we read the history, we read the history, and that history, of course, flows through all of Buddhism. But again, our job is, how do we manifest what we understand to be the truth today in our circumstances? Laurie?

[52:22]

Yeah. Yeah and mostly the ones who left lay life at that point were older women who had lived their lives and raised their children. Right. Yeah. I think this is very difficult.

[53:23]

I mean, I think that actually we really need to study this and we need to study how it's manifested in the various Buddhist cultures. That's a whole other investigation that would be important for us to do because it still affects us today in ways that we may not be fully aware of and we want to deconstruct so in the course of our liberation we're not caught by, we always want to go back and do, we want to do what the Buddha did, we want to do what we think the Buddha did, we want to do what we think Dogen did, we want to do what we think Suzuki Roshi did, and this is just all our made-up story. What's really important is to figure out what are we doing? What do we want to do? What do we feel people's capability of waking up is? And this is what the Buddha said in the Kalama Sutta.

[54:26]

He said don't depend on what some teacher said or what some other sect said or what some wise person said. Here you actually really have to stand on the ground of your own understanding. So I think that understanding is not necessarily an individual understanding. but a shared one sometimes, but we have to figure out what makes sense within our own lives. So, in 543, the Buddha took ill and took to his deathbed, and he was just on the point of dying. And he left, you know, Ananda went to talk to him as he was dying. He left Ananda with an instruction. He said, Ananda, after my nirvana, if the Sangha asks for the nullification of some orders of the Petivanaya, I give you permission to nullify them.

[55:29]

So three months after the Buddha's death, they had the first council of 500 arhats at Rajagraha. And this is interesting in light of what we were saying. Somehow, you know, there are 500 Arhats. Somehow, like, the women didn't, the invitation got lost in the mail. There were none. There were no women there, although there were many women Arhats. And anyway, Ananda submitted to the, Ananda had to be invited in because he actually wasn't an Arahant yet. He was kind of a slow horse. But they invited him in because he was a slow horse who happened to have photographic memory. So he remembered everything that the Buddha ever said. And so they said, well, what did he say about those precepts when he was dying? And he said, Ananda said, the Tathagata gave permission to nullify the petty Vinaya rules. And so they asked, of course, well, which ones were they?

[56:35]

And unfortunately, Ananda hadn't asked that question. So they decided they were going to keep them all. And so there are various recensions of the Vinaya according to different sects, which go from anywhere from 227 to 300 something. But they kept all the rules. So now we skip ahead and travel north and east to China. Although actually, in India, what evolved in right around the beginning of the Common Era, the Mahayana began to develop and you began to have Mahayana texts and one of the early texts was the Brahmajala Sutra, the Mahayana Brahmajala Sutra, Mahayana Brahmanet Sutra, which was their exposition of the

[57:47]

Vinaya, the Mahayana precepts, which had 10 major and 48 minor precepts. became another track that existed in these monasteries. So all monks and nuns initially in India, if you were a monk or nun you had taken the full Vinaya, but if you lived at a temple where and you had monasteries where you had Arhat vehicle monks and Bodhisattva vehicle monks living together quite harmoniously, doing much the same practice, some different practices. The Mahayana monks and nuns would take these precepts as well. These were not Vinaya precepts. These were Bodhisattva precepts. Yeah. Yeah.

[58:50]

I can. I can. I could, if you wanted, read you all 48, but I won't. So the first one in the Brahman Etcetera is to avoid showing disrespect to teachers and good spiritual acquaintances. To avoid eating meat. These are in the minor. The ten are no killing, stealing, committing sexual misconduct, then no broadcasting the faults of the sanghas, no praising oneself or denigrating others, no being stingy, not harboring or spreading anger, not slandering the three treasures. This is pretty familiar, right? These are basically the 10 grave precepts as we have them. And then there were these minors, so-called, you know, not eating meat, not eating pungent herbs and spices, not keeping deadly weapons, not undertaking business transactions, not accepting personal offerings,

[60:01]

avoiding dangerous places. Some of them are, it's interesting, not harboring thoughts of violating the precepts. I'd be happy to share these with you. Failing to be properly seated while teaching the Dharma. I think I'm okay. Once they got to China, you had these two ordination tracts, and this is still the way it is. If you talk to, if you go to City of 10,000 Buddhas, say, or the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, if you talk to Venerable Hung Hsu, they receive a full, I think they receive a full Sarvastivadin Vinaya. which they keep pretty much, but not with the kind of total strictness, say, that a Theravada monk would, but pretty well.

[61:06]

I mean, they're adjusted, like Hung Hsueh drives, and he also plays the guitar. But his playing guitar is not for entertainment. His playing guitar is teaching. but it's a radical kind of thing, but they also receive these Brahmajala, these Brahman Brahmanet Sutra precepts, these Mahayana precepts as well, and so that's very common in China, and so you had these different levels of precepts in the Chinese tradition. you had the Mahayana precepts, and then you had the monastic rules for each particular monastery, the Shingi, which would be in Japan. And the first of these is reputedly Bajong.

[62:14]

or Yakujo, the person who said a day with no work is a day with no food, and he systematized the Zen monastic system. Now, one of the things that changed in India what you began with a very loose kind of community that was out in the wider community. It was very diffuse and monks would come together for three months a year in certain places and they were very dependent upon the lay community around them to support them. What happened over the years, over the centuries, was they developed monasteries but they had the same rules. And in many ways, the monasteries became somewhat parasitic on the wider community. And so there was resentment and tension. What happened in China, particularly in the Tang Dynasty, late Tang Dynasty,

[63:17]

there were periodic repressions of Buddhism and some of the schools of Buddhism, the Zen school leading, realized that they had to create some base for them to be able to support themselves. So for the first time you had monks and nuns who worked the fields. who did various kinds of jobs, and the monasteries were somewhat self-sustaining. The ones that could sustain themselves were the ones that tended to survive Buddhist repressions. And so they had to be, again, like the Theravada tradition, very respectful to the lay community, but they were very careful not to be these are very poor communities, they couldn't suck the wealth and the food out of them, so they farmed, they produced their own food, and they kept their own kind of, their own order within their monasteries.

[64:23]

In those monasteries, Not everyone had the full Vinaya ordination. Some had just Mahayana ordination and it evolved in some places that the Vinaya ordination was for a kind of higher, more official level monk or nun. But still it wasn't so unusual. And they lived, even when they didn't have Vinaya, they had very strong monastic rules that really functioned in many ways like Vinaya. And then they had the Bodhisattva precepts, which were precepts of mind, not strictly precepts of action. Or if you read this list, you see some of them were actions and some of them were intentions. Does that make sense? Questions? Yeah. Yeah, they were able to survive the Buddhist repressions by whom?

[65:27]

Government. Government kept shifting between Confucianism and Taoism and Buddhism. So they were trying to suppress whatever wasn't human? Right, and some of these places were big and somewhat powerful. And this plays out even more in the 19th century Japan, or it plays out through Japanese history as well, also Japanese history. So, I think I want to move ahead. This is hard because I just feel like there's so much here. Buddhism came to, made its way across the waters to Japan with some figures going back and forth in the, I think the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 5th, 6th, 7th century.

[66:36]

And by the Heian period, mid to late 7th century, you had a tremendous Buddhist base in Japan in the city which is now Nara. there was ordained monks, they had a lot of power, they had a lot of money, and basically there was one ordination platform in the country, in Nara. So if you wanted to be a monk, no matter what school you were, you went to, I think it was Todai-ji, and that's where the platform was set up. You had the Tientai school and the Shingon school, trying to think what other, Khagan school was also very active, and all of these were quite affiliated with the aristocracy in one way or another, and they had wars.

[67:43]

They would go and burn down each other's temples. It was a very dangerous, contentious, cultural landscape to live in, and despite the fact that all of them were fully ordained with the Vinaya, with the Vinaya Padimokkha and with the Bodhisattva precepts, you had this figure, Saicho, who went to China studied Pure Land School there, came back and basically wanted to set up his own, he felt that the monks were corrupt. There's a lot of, again, this is a very complicated and political kind of saga. He came back wanting to create an ordination platform on Mount Hiei and start the Tendai school, which was kind of his own version of the Tientai school.

[68:48]

And he petitioned the emperor for years. He was tremendously resisted both by the other schools and by forces within the Emperor's offices because they perceived him as trying to set up another kind of power base, which is perhaps true. he died but posthumously they agreed to allow this platform to be set up and that platform that the ordination that he offered was a purely bodhisattva ordination based on the Brahma Jala Sutra. So for the first time you had monks and nuns who were not taking the full school that Dogen began to practice in four centuries later.

[69:55]

His first ordination was in the Tendai school. He went to China. It's not clear whether when he entered the monastery in China he received a full and set up, by the point which he came back, ordination was not just confined to these few places, people were ordained at the various temples, and he set up what we see as the Kyoju Kaiman, which we chanted at the beginning, recited at the beginning of this class, just the 16 Bodhisattva precepts. And that's what's been handed to us. This is not a Vinaya ordination and many of the monastic orders around the world look askance at it. But it is what we call one mind precepts.

[70:59]

They're precepts of where action and mind come together in this complicated way. I think Sojin, what did he say the other morning in his last word there? He was talking about the two, the tension between the, can you say it, can you say what it was? But what were they? Oh, the relative and the absolute, that. So in the relative sense, and this is what we have to live with and, um, you know, to cut to the chase, we have these precepts, uh, We've seen them be translated through Robert Aitken's writings in Mind of Clover, Thich Nhat Hanh's which are in here, his five mindfulness trainings, through to some degree our ethics guidelines.

[72:04]

So on the one hand, you have this tension as I laid out before between the normative, in other words rules, which is the relative side, and the Buddha-nature, Buddha-mind aspect of these precepts. So in the Kyochu Kaiman, essentially it says, well, nothing can be killed, nothing can be stolen, nothing can be polluted, nothing can be held, this tremendously expansive open side, which is the side of this natural law in its highest state, that when we strip away our defilements, we act in accord with the precepts. So we live exactly in the middle of this tension between what is a rule,

[73:09]

And what is the truth? And this is a very interesting and difficult high wire line to walk. But that's the nature of the precepts that Dogen created and brought to us. And I think this is what was set in motion from the beginning of Mahayana, emphasized by Saicho in the Japanese, in the Japanese context and then developed further by Dogen. And I think as we touched on earlier when you were asking about DT to Suzuki, if you really look at Japanese history you see there's tremendous aberrations of just a lot of wrongdoing. There's this wonderful quote that I found. Gil Fronsdale was writing about the evolution of precepts.

[74:13]

Let's see if I can find this quote. I don't think any of us would ever dare to say anything, but it sounds an awful lot like George Bush to me. I don't know if I can find it. Anyway, what I can remember, what he said was, when he was in Japan in the 80s, several Japanese priests said essentially, we don't need precepts because the Japanese mind is such that transgressions are not possible. All right.

[75:20]

Well, uh, yeah. So, I mean, this sort of, uh, denial of reality is universal. Yes. And, uh, notice that we have it ourselves. Uh. Absolutely. You know, um, so how do we live within these precepts? All of the theme of this, of this practice period is living the Bodhisattva precepts. Uh, and, uh, know, I apologize for my sketchiness. It's just so much history and detail that we could go into, but each one of these pieces, historical pieces, is a very deep and sincere wish to live with the precepts, to live a moral life, to live a life that's in not just a life of rule, that even the rules of the Theravada monks were not given as just rules, they were given as a way to live in a whole and awake way.

[76:33]

And I think this is what we're trying to do, and we have to keep improvising. So it's interesting that these are, you know, you see them on the one hand as being given by our ancestors and those who come before us, but they're not given as a static law. They were not fixed in time 2,000 or 2,500 years ago. They actually have to be worked with in real time, in our time. Not really. I'm saying we don't always really know. We can't say so easily what the difference is. Theravada monks live by vow, but their vow is to live by rule in many ways.

[77:39]

I don't think the vow is so different from our vows. what we're given is to live, but we try to live by vow. Except that I understand that we try to live by reasonably unattainable vows and rules are things that I presume could be attained if you follow them strenuously. You can follow them. You can live this way and be an inspiration to other people I just, I'm very reluctant to make the distinction because I've just seen such, I've seen, in both schools, I've seen people who were tremendously inspiring and see people who you think, really? Or looks like they're phoning it in, you know, but,

[78:44]

I just don't make a distinction myself between those schools. The distinction that I make is just, what was I given by my teachers? What is it that we're doing here together? So that's the only distinction I make.

[79:06]

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