Taking Refuge in the Dharma

One, such as myself, who is from time to time con­fused about right and wrong, should turn to the teach­ings of oth­ers. This seems self-evi­dent. How strange then it is that I tend to go about it indi­rect­ly, read­ing of the lives of oth­ers hop­ing to be inspired, or read­ing self-help kinds of books that gain my trust by pathol­o­giz­ing and explain­ing behav­ior while falling short of clear direction.

Being Upright has nei­ther of these short­com­ings. Reb Ander­son starts from a clear plat­form with­out hav­ing to invent it him­self. He gets one of the great­est of start­ing points any­one ever could: the Bod­hisatt­va Pre­cepts. While the Pre­cepts bear some resem­blance to the Ten Com­mand­ments, the focus is dif­fer­ent. These are guides to liv­ing a life of lov­ingkind­ness toward all beings. The Ten Com­mand­ments are orders with­out a promise of the char­ac­ter of the life they will bring. Dis­re­gard the Ten Com­mand­ments and you will go to Hell. Dis­re­gard the six­teen Bod­hisatt­va Pre­cepts and you’ll already be there.

This book was rec­om­mend­ed to me by one of my teach­ers and I took quite a while to get around to read­ing it. How inter­est­ing again that one who is con­fused would avoid a clear set of sug­ges­tions! It makes me won­der if I have the causal rela­tion­ship wrong in that description.

Reb devotes a chap­ter to each of the Pre­cepts, explain­ing their ori­gins and illu­mi­nat­ing them with sto­ries from Bud­dhist tra­di­tion as well as from his own expe­ri­ence. The result is lucid with­out being aca­d­e­m­ic, per­son­al with­out being sen­ti­men­tal. He is a quite capa­ble writer, although appro­pri­ate­ly his tone is slow, mea­sured, calm, and tends to the declar­a­tive. His style is sparse and clean with­out much sub­tle­ty. How­ev­er, while the aim of some lit­er­a­ture is to hide lay­ers of mean­ing for the read­er to uncov­er, a book like this plumbs those lay­ers and puts as many of them on dis­play as pos­si­ble. What in anoth­er book I might cite as a short­com­ing, here is appro­pri­ate and skill­ful use of language.

My own intel­lec­tu­al pride tells me that I should fig­ure out right from wrong for myself so that I can go out and do the right things in the world. There’s some­thing in me that bris­tles at the idea of going to a source out­side myself. But here’s the trou­ble with that: intel­lect was not designed to help us dis­cern right from wrong. That is the purview of the con­science. Per­haps then a bet­ter method than «fig­ur­ing it out myself» is to expose myself to the sug­ges­tions that have been made before me, pay­ing care­ful atten­tion to that con­science. I don’t have to invent some­thing in order to rec­og­nize it.

The Pre­cepts are chal­lenges that are impos­si­ble to fol­low per­fect­ly and yet impos­si­ble to fol­low imper­fect­ly. Many of Reb’s illus­tra­tions point to instances where lit­er­al adher­ence to the pre­cept actu­al­ly con­tro­verts the ulti­mate pur­pose, which is to ben­e­fit all beings.

I have found much more suc­cess in seek­ing right think­ing through right action than in seek­ing right action as the result of right think­ing. This book has remind­ed me of some excel­lent ways to right action with­out hav­ing to think first.