I’m planning to write about each of the Ten Grave Precepts of Zen Buddhism. Not sure if I’ll do one after the other or take breaks in between, but now that I write as a job, it’s more vital than ever that I write about what is important to me to me and not just what I’m told to write about. Stay tuned.
The First Grave Precept: I Take Up the Way of Not Killing.
Bodhidharma: Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the everlasting Dharma, not giving rise to the ideal of killing is called the Precept of Not Killing.
Dogen Zenji: The Buddha seed grows in accordance with not taking life. Transmit the life of Buddha’s wisdom and do not kill.
Robert Chotan Gyoun Aitken Roshi: This First Precept echoes the first of our Great Vows for All, “Though the many beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” The Precept is specific and negative in wording; the Vow is universal and positive. The emphasis in the Precept is upon protection and nurturing: the emphasis in the Vow is upon spiritual encouragement. Both are expressions of perfections: both enhance the process of perfection.
Usually, nurturing a specific being is clearly also a matter of saving the universe, but sometimes options of abortion, spraying bugs, and trapping rats seem to offer ways to keep the world organism thinned and healthy. Such issues can become agonizingly difficult, and it is tempting to make decisions on the basis of persuasive arguments that are over-simple and reductive. They are koans and must be faced with a clear sense of proportion.
Decisions about the quantitatively larger issue of war and peace have been clarified by the unprecedented technological capacity for killing which science has achieved. There is no longer an argument for a “just war”, or for “mutually assured deterence”. Incredibly murderous weapons are prepared to destroy all human life and almost all animal and plant life. The koan here is how to speak out appropriately and take action that is instructive in opposition to such weapons and their so-called rationale.
Less obvious, but no less dangerous, is the probability of biological disaster through the destruction of forests, meadows, wetlands, lakes, rivers, seas, and the air. I vow to moderate my lifestyle and reduce its demands, and to encourage you to do the same, for the protection of all beings in their infinite variety.
The way of non-violence is a challenging one. It’s pretty damn near impossible to live in this world without doing harm to other beings. This isn’t to say that the effort of becoming aware of that harm, and doing what you can to limit and reverse it, isn’t a worthwhile or in fact a necessary effort. But you gotta have perspective. There’s a tendency to see the Vows and Precepts as absolutes. All concepts are relative, so the idea of a rule that covers all circumstances kind of falls apart when you look at it, like pulling on the loose end of a granny knot.
I’m not a vegetarian. I feel great when I eat meat. But I struggle with it. I do avoid factory-raised flesh food, for reasons of compassion and also health. However, I try to maintain awareness that this tasty, tasty strip of bacon was once an intelligent, sensitive being (I’ve met pigs, yo: they’re cool). Is it inherently more compassionate, though, to let animals live and instead slaughter vegetables? And if so, why? Are we so sure that, because we can’t perceive the suffering of plants, that they don’t in fact suffer?
Aitken Roshi’s call to moderate our lifestyles is, without question of doubt, the correct one. An America that ate only organic produce from Whole Foods would still be an America that burned massive amounts of fossil fuels, not to mention piling mountains of solid waste on our earth and dumping rivers of polluted effluents in our water.
Taking up the way of not killing cannot begin and end with avoiding war and the murder of animals. And the fact that it calls for a radical, radical change in the way our entire society lives is not a reason to do nothing. We take up this way with everything we do. There is a reason why it is the First.
