Focus on the Precepts

Training in virtue is an important part of the path. It teaches you to be honest, to be very clear about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it: to look directly at your intentions. When you take a precept, you can break it only intentionally, so that’s where your attention has to be focused. What is your intention in acting?

At the same time, you have to keep the precept in mind. You have to be alert to what you’re doing and fight off any desires that would break the precepts. That’s developing three important qualities in the mind right there: mindfulness, keeping things in mind; alertness, watching your actions while you’re doing them; and ardency, fighting off unskillful qualities. These are the qualities you need to develop mindfulness and concentration.

Of course, when you get the mind into concentration—the Thai translation of samadhi is “firm intent”—you’re firmly focusing your intention on one object, and you’ve been getting to know your intentions through following the precepts.

One aspect of the precepts that’s not widely appreciated is that they are precepts and not general moral principles. They focus on specific actions that you just don’t do. You also don’t get other people to do them or, if someone does do them, you don’t condone the action.

As they get you to focus specifically on your actions, that’s training in discernment. After all, discernment is focused on: What exactly are you doing? You’re doing the causes of suffering someplace in your mind, and you want to see those actions along with why you do them. You want to develop the actions that lead to the end of suffering. So you want to get very, very sensitive to your actions and the intentions that motivate them. The precepts get you started.

As for larger principles, the Buddha uses them for issues like contentment, non-entanglement, persistence, conviction, but he doesn’t translate the precepts into larger principles, because you can get into trouble that way.

For example, some people say the first precept teaches the sanctity of life. Well, if life is sacred, then you can use that principle to justify lying to protect some people’s lives by lying.

Or you could say that the second precept teaches the sanctity of property: that people should have total rights over their property, and nobody should be able to take it away from them. In other words, there should be no taxation. Someone actually proposed that to me one time: If I could give a Buddhist case for no taxation, I would win a lot of people over to Buddhism.

But you’re getting into dangerous waters that way, because that brings the different principles behind the precepts into conflict with one another, and it’s up to you to decide how to resolve that conflict, because there’s no guidance from the Buddha or from the Dhamma on which principle overrides which other principles. You lose your focus, and you end up breaking the precepts. You’ve aborted your training.

So keep things focused and simple: We’re dealing with precepts, rules about what you shouldn’t do. That way, there’s no conflict among them.

A lot of people rebel against the idea of rules. They would prefer to have the larger principles. But that’s getting morality into vague waters. If all life is sacred, for example, if all property is sacred, how can we live with one another?

But if you focus specifically on certain actions—you will not kill; you will not steal; you will not get other people to kill or to steal; you won’t condone killing; you won’t condone stealing—then things are very focused, very consistent, very clear.

The clarity of the precepts is important. That makes them easy to remember, easy to hold in mind, especially when emotions are running high and you need them most. That’s when you need something very clear and definite to make sure that the emotions don’t spill over and grab at whatever principles they find are in line with what they want.

This is part of a training, and the training right here is very specific. It gets you prepared for concentration practice, gets you prepared for discernment, by focusing on specific actions that you don’t do. It keeps things very clear.

Precepts are what can be pleasing to the noble ones, not larger principles, because they’re precise and clear-cut. As the Buddha said, you want your precepts to be untorn, unbroken, unsplattered. You want them to be pleasing to the noble ones and conducive to concentration. Pleasing to the noble ones means that you hold to the precepts even when it’s difficult.

Remember, as the Buddha said, when you hold to the precepts in all situations, you’re giving universal safety. You may not be able to protect other people from having things stolen from them or having their lives taken from them, but they have nothing to fear from you under any circumstances. He adds that when you give universal safety like that, you have a share in that universal safety. You don’t have anything harmful in your karmic record.

Think of the image of holding poison in your hand. As the Buddha said, if the hand has a wound in it and you try to hold poison, the poison can seep into the wound and kill you. But if there’s no wound in the hand, you can hold the poison and it won’t kill you. There’s no way for it to seep in. If you’ve done something that breaks the precepts, that’s a wound. If you haven’t broken the precepts, your hand is free from wounds. What this means is that you can be in dangerous situations, and you’ll be less likely to be harmed by them. You give yourself protection as you give protection to others.

So you’re not the only one who benefits from this part of the training. This thought can be conducive to concentration.

And as I said, this training fosters mindfulness, alertness, ardency, qualities you need for mindfulness practice. It focuses your mind on your intentions, which is where concentration practice comes in. And it keeps you focused on your actions, so it helps you understand right view. After all, right view focuses on suffering and its causes. And what’s causing suffering? What you’re doing. Right view deals in actions, and right view itself is a type of action.

It starts with that question: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering?” The question that frames discernment or frames wisdom is a question about karma, motivated by the desire to find true happiness through your actions.

So the question itself is a type of karma. And right view is part of the noble eightfold path, which the Buddha says is the karma for the ending of karma—something you do. You do right view. You look at things in terms of the four noble truths. You follow the duties appropriate to those four noble truths, one of which is to comprehend suffering.

Suffering itself is an action. It’s the act of clinging to the aggregates. The aggregates are actions, too. The Buddha defines them as verbs. Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, and so on. Then you apply the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and non-self to those actions and their results, because the duty with regard to those five clinging-aggregates is to comprehend them. To comprehend them means to understand them to the point where you have no passion, aversion, or delusion around them, and you comprehend them through applying these perceptions. The perceptions are actions—they’re a type of karma—applied to the aggregates with a specific purpose.

As the Buddha said, the aggregates do have their pleasant side. But if you focus on their pleasant side, that just induces more passion. Here you’re trying to develop dispassion for them, so you look at them from this side, perceive them from this side: their drawbacks. The purpose of this, of course, is to gain escape from any actions that you’ve been doing through passion. You develop dispassion for them and you’re done with them—if that dispassion is thoroughgoing enough.

So the precepts get you focused on the right context right from the beginning, focusing on actions with a purpose—aimed at true happiness—and then that purpose and that principle carry all the way through.

Even with right view, we’re not here to arrive at right view. We use right view to arrive at freedom, total release.

Even the statements, “All phenomena are non-self,” “All phenomena are unworthy of adherence”: Those, too, are a type of action. Once you’ve applied the three perceptions to the aggregates, then you’ve got to apply the same principle to those perceptions themselves. You’ve got to let go of them. They, too, are unworthy of adherence. They, too, are not-self. And even those statements about all phenomena turn on themselves, because they, too, are phenomena. They’re actions that you have to stop at some point. You accomplish what you need to accomplish, and then you drop the whole thing.

So it’s important, when you think about the precepts, that you’re thinking about specific actions and not general principles. That keeps the issue of what you should and shouldn’t do very clear, and focuses your attention where it should be focused: on what you’re doing and why, trying to bring what you’re doing in line with the path, and the why in line with the desire for happiness that harms no one, a happiness that’s totally reliable.

So do your best to keep the focus clear all the way through, from the beginning to the very end.