On Precepts and Emotions

 We had a discussion about precepts in our Buddhist academy class today. I have been thinking since then about the notion of using the precepts to "reflect on myself" as opposed to using them to "judge others" and their practice (or karma). It seems that in most religious traditions, people have had a problem when they turn otherwise discretionary precepts into hard commandments, and then use these commandments to persecute or judge those around them. From a Chan perspective, I would say that whenever we judge others, we are really judging ourselves, since everything is of the mind. When we create an attitude of negative energy about a person, we are really attacking ourselves, because that person we see is a manifestation our own mental energy.

   To reverse this tendency, I propose two options. One is that, when we feel disappointed in a person or an outcome, we can change the energy of anger into a cooler and calmer energy, by using the method of turning toward cause and conditions and then feeling the sadness of disappointed outcomes.  I consider sadness and regret to be the flipside of anger, in the sense that the former often come before the energy of anger rears its head. The student whom I was tutoring tonight shared with me how disappointed she felt when she got an A in a sewing assignment, only to find that her second professor docking her grade down due to bell curving. It would be easy to go from feeling hurt and disappointed to feeling the "injustice" and "unfairness" of getting a lowered grade due to some administrative gaffe. However, my student later concluded that life isn't always fair, and this seemed to have given her greater room to grieve and at least accept the possibility that she would be ok no matter what. 

In contrast to sadness, I find that anger polarizes things and people. It divides the world into "good people" and "bad people" and then tries to find a way to control what it deems as bad. Anger justifies itself using words like justice and fairness, but how exactly do we define what is fair? There are many things in life, as my student discovered recently, that just aren't fair at all. So there needs to be a way of handling the disappointment and accepting it even when we do have reasons to feel sad or disappointed.

 It may seem hard to believe, but our thoughts aren't really "our" thoughts. I say this for two reasons. Firstly, most of our thinking is a combination of previous experiences, memories, culture and language. Our personalities are shaped in such indelible ways from the day we are born that it's sometimes no surprise that we find ourselves sounding more and more like our parents as we age. This is because the family is such an intimate bond that has a huge impact on how we frame the worlds that we inhabit. Secondly, thoughts aren't identified with a fixed person or "I". Have you ever had a thought that was so negative that you later judged yourself for having it? That's like giving two hammer strikes instead of one! The first thought hurts you by having a negative energy, but then the second thought judges "you" for having that thought. In fact, so long as we don't water the seeds of negative thinking, those seeds will dissipate. And we can do this by recognizing that the thoughts have no thinker behind them. There is no cohesive or coherent I that is beneath those thoughts.

Some people still try very hard to perfect their selves, but the meaning of repentance is simply to reflect on habitual tendencies. It's not the "self" that we need to make better, but rather, our habitual tendencies and energies that can be improved. No action, no matter how good or bad, can define me, because actions are, at heart, impermanent. If we can move beyond the stifling notion that there is a fixed self, then our attitudes toward ourselves and other beings can become much more fluid and flexible.

Another option for coping with this judging tendency is to simply let go of thinking there is anything outside the mind that we can pass judgment on. After all, if all the things we judge were simply dreams of our own reckoning, is there anybody in that dream who can be judged? Not really! Anything of the mind is only phenomena, and there is not even an "I" in there that we can establish as an object to be punished. In this way we can be freed of judgments altogether as well as the accompanying restrictions that result from them.