do no harm – cultivate goodness – purify the mind
For in the fullness of Heaven and Earth there is nothing that is not the wonder of T’ai Chi (The Source) and Yin/Yang (The Opposites). It was to this that the Sage looked up in contemplation and looked down in examination, seeking from afar and taking from the near at hand. (The Introduction to the Study of Change, by Chu Hsi. Adler, Joseph Alan, trans.of the above book)
For those who read the essay, Two Leashes: Narcissism or Humility, consider this essay as a follow-up. Humility, as I suggest is a virtue that overtakes us. I continue to support that understanding. I will use The Three Pure Precepts of Zen Buddhism – do no harm, cultivate goodness, purify the mind and the four Immeasurables, kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity as the focus of this essay. It is a preliminary practice which as you read along is reflective of the teaching of thusness. It is preliminary but it has a way of unsettling our fixed notions of ourselves hopefully in a manner that pushes to look upward to the Source.
The reason we do not get anywhere is that we do not know our limits and we are not patient in carrying on the work we have done. But without any labour at all we want to gain possession of virtue. (Esther de Waal, Seeking God)
I refer you specifically to her mention of three points, first, we must know our limits, second we must continue to work our spiritual practice and third, without any labour we lose spiritual ground (which she sees as the loss of virtue). I suggest quite strongly that we are limited in a way that might be both weighty and disturbing but is a necessity to see in order to leap clear of our ignorance. If we can yet gain a glimpse of this ignorance we may be able to continue the spiritual work upward in thusness. And finally, without some labour we remain spinning in the cycles of ignorance. I begin with what is most easily known and understood to be the mundane world and explain what we need to do to leap to the transcendent.
THE MUNDANE
This mundane, ordinary world is the world of right and wrong. It is the world of habits which we label as me or the functional self. The ME that likes and dislikes, complains and praises, accepts and rejects and on and on. It is the world of achievement and failure, of winning and losing and every other kind of dualism, i.e., males and females, plants and animals, up and down. It is a story we create which includes the body and mind and we call it, ME.
In this mundane, ordinariness of daily life we meet moment after moment chances to do harm, to do good and to follow the rules. It is in this world that we tend to label ourselves and others as good or bad according to the norms of the day.
Look into your own mind and see if you’ve divided up those you know into “good people” and those others as “not so good people.” This tendency to divide things up this way is the conventional life according to the cultural norms of our time and place.
The world of right and wrong is where we begin the practice of The Three Pure Precepts. We practice restraint and refrain from using our power to harm others and ourselves. We pay attention to what we do and what we say. And we are encouraged to follow the precepts to the best of our ability. We make an effort to act in such a way as to cultivate goodness and clean-up our act.
But…. we need to ask to what aim?
What is the aim of the mundane world in the practice of The Three Pure Precepts? For many, maybe most, the aim is to get along with others and look ‘good’ (whatever the cultural norm defines as ‘good’) so that you can fit in and not be exiled from the group. It is, in many ways, a civilizing survival aim.
Keep out of trouble, don’t hurt others, keep your hands to yourself, don’t talk dirty, stop talking gossip, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t lie, and on and on it goes. This practice aims to help you conform and stay out of trouble. You know, have friends, get a job, marry, kids, buy stuff, become a success, and become a trustworthy, respected person in society. The main aim in simple words is to ‘fulfill your duty.’
This aim is a mundane aim and is no small accomplishment. Many are unable to follow these precepts. I call this work the initial stage of working with The Three Pure Precepts. It is preliminary. What makes it preliminary when it requires large sums of effort? It is preliminary because it is the playground of the functional self (ego, me-mind) and the aim is in the functional realm. Let me explain.
If we look at the pure precepts we see that each precept manifests in some measure of one or more of the four Immeasurables. The Immeasurables are: kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. This practice is usually followed by some self assessment of how we fair in terms of kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. The self-assessment of how well we are doing is expected because it is a tip-off of where one’s practice is.
Most, if not many, can learn to be kind, can learn to be empathic (compassion) and with some stronger training learn to be joyful for another who has received accolades that we may or may not have wanted for our self. In each instance of these three immeasurables, the functional self is getting the training. We teach people to wait and let the other go first, we teach people to be quiet, we teach people to keep their opinions to themselves, we teach people to listen, to put yourself in the other’s shoes, and with more effort we teach others to be glad for someone who got what we wanted. Offices are full of atta’ boy pats on the back.
Beginning with kindness and moving upward to equanimity the work and training is more difficult. The functional self requires more effort and attention, making sympathetic joy more arduous than kindness and compassion.
The Three Pure Precepts, do no harm, cultivate goodness, purify the mind and the first three of the four immeasurables, kindness, compassion and sympathetic joy are for the most part practiced in the mundane world of ordinary life. And they tend to require more effort on the part of the practitioner as the practice moves from do no harm to purify the mind and from kindness to sympathetic joy. Self-assessment is part of this realm and the practitioner often finds yardsticks being dusted off time and again. But it is to be expected since this practice begins in the mundane world and with the functional story of the self. It is preliminary but it must be studied. The functional self must be studied and forgotten or emptied in order to make the leap to the transcendent. Here is where resistance in practice occurs. But that is a huge story in itself to be taken up at another time.
The fourth immeasurable, equanimity, is a bridge between the mundane and the transcendent and is another type of tip-off on where one’s practice is. It’s a bridge because it is difficult to train to be calm-abiding in the face of all the vagaries of life.
Time and again we meditate, study, practice only to find ourselves still irritable, complaining, angry, hurt, cheap, outraged and such worldly annoyances. We find ourselves still measuring our progress with our handy yardstick of good and bad. We carry on with all the same old habits, albeit less, they continue to overtake us. The world’s glitter still draws us away from the Beloved and we find ourselves needing to run back for a tune-up. All mundane. All of the world. All functional.
What is it that might help us cross that bridge to leaping clear to the transcendent.
It requires the dissolution of the first aim, getting along with others and being a good person. It requires letting go of the story of the functional self. And we must have a commitment to the aim of the transcendent world to discover the True Self.
The initial first work is to fulfill one’s duty using the precepts. This work is set down and forgotten. We disentangle from it. Often a natural progression in the material mundane world helps us. When our duties are fulfilled we commit to seeking a spiritual life. The difficulty here is to know when the duty is fulfilled. Parents often struggle with clinging to this duty. Those comfortably set in a particular lifestyle may tend to cling to it long after it is no longer necessary. Our earlier patterns and habits of the functional self are still important and not forgotten.
To summarize. We need to let go of the ‘cleaned up good self we put together’ or ‘the wretched self we patched up and reformed.’ And we must forget the functional story of the mundane world, since it is not necessary in the transcendent.
The focus in the transcendent is the precept, purify the mind and the immeasurable, calm-abiding in all circumstances. The functional self will succumb to worldly distractions and ignorance and circumstances will challenge the calm abiding. Thee ol’ yardstick continues to come out to measure how poorly or how well we are doing.
Please keep in mind that there are not actually two worlds, but for the sake of teaching and because we tend to divide the world according to our ignorance, the division is a teaching tool only. A key point here is that in order to leap, we drop (kill, forget) the functional aim and the self that clings to it.
THE TRANSCENDENT
In the transcendent way, we practice the Three Pure Precepts to discover what exists. And what I mean is we discover our True Self, that which never ends, and never begins. This work is not the work of the functional me. I hope you have a sense that this work cannot be claimed by the functional me-self. And that calm-abiding (equanimity) is needed to enter this work. Without it, the functional ego-me will swamp us and all sorts of complaints and self-worries will win out. We need the calm-abiding mind to support faith in the work and to help us keep our eye on the aim. And what is that aim, it is to discover our True Nature. Not create, clean-up, or polish our functional-me-self, but to forget that and know it to be false (impermanent).
In this realm we begin to see the precepts in service of this aim at this level. A PURE mind is a prerequisite for knowledge, the knowledge of a sort that will be bright enough to extinguish ignorance.
Each third of the three precepts, do no harm, cultivate goodness, purify the mind, is a step on the path upwards (if you will) towards the Light of the ‘clear circle of brightness.’ (Hongzhi) Each third supports the other two making a garland of three and are our instructions to find our True Nature. They show us our True Nature without the functional ego-me-self companion in the mundane realm.
Our True nature is harmless, goodness, purity, immeasurably so. But it is not of the functional ego-me-self. If the ego-me-self practices to polish itself up to look and act like the three precepts and it is still in the mundane realm. The aim of the practice is a realization which is not a function of the ego-self.
The practice is to the quick….where all tendencies, those apparent habits we put together in the mundane world, those ideas of who you think you are (whether good or bad) those false identities you are convinced you are — the false you —-must be dealt with until you know they are not what you are. It is the ‘killing off’ of that false you.
Strong language is often used because our tendency to grip and cling is tenacious. We did all this work in the mundane world to look pretty, be good, love others, be cool and now the practice is to let all of THAT go? YES! It is to let it go. Kill it. Forget it. Do what you need to do to brush it off, burn it, sweep it away….to purify the mind.
Use knowledge to out power ignorance. The knowledge is the power of discrimination between what is real (unborn, undying) and the unreal (born, subject to death) and a simple, but difficult practice is to negate the constructed, put-together false you with a mantra.
To begin this preliminary practice, try one or all three of the following:
- Can you discriminate between the real (unborn, undying) and the unreal (born, dying)?
- Can you see the old story of the mundane world as just a story?
- Every time you hear the old story, can you use the power of chant and face off the story with the chant….Not That! Not That! Not That!
This essay covers just the preliminaries, but we need to start somewhere. And this is a good place to start. After reading and studying this teaching I refer you back to the beginning quote from the work by Chu Hsi,
May the merit of this practice benefit all beings.
Author: FaShi Lao Yue
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