1. What are some advantages of taking precepts?
2. Under any circumstance, should any of the ten precepts be taken lightly?
3. "(The homeless brother) must preach to everyone, he must wake up sleeping people." What do you think this means?
Answers:
1. Precepts provide us with guidelines within which we should live. Sometimes we need these clearly defined markers to keep us moving in the right direction. But, rather than being restrictive they can be a source of great strength. This is especially the case perhaps when we are facing difficulties along our journey, the power and strength of the precepts gives us a base to always fall back on. If other aspects of our practice are not going well, at least we still have the precepts we have taken to keep us from drifting off completely. For example, if we are facing situations in our lives where our normal meditation or scripture study is suffering, and perhaps we have emotional events happening in our lives, the knowledge that we still have our precepts, that we can still keep those pure, can be a considerable help and strength.
2. The simple answer to this is "no" - precepts should never be taken lightly. The karmic consequences are so much greater for one who has taken vows and then broken them, than for someone who has never taken the vows at all, because in taking the vows we are showing that we are fully conscious of how we should behave, and in breaking a vow we are therefore not acting in ignorance. This is why many people who are sincere and devout Mahayana Buddhists may hesitate for years before taking bodhisattva vows because they want to make sure that they are capable of never breaking them before making that commitment.
Controversially however, one may argue that after one has reached a very high level, the precepts become less important, but never will they be taken lightly. This however is a dangerous statement as it would be too easy to use this an excuse to break the precepts one has taken, and very, very few of us will reach such an exalted level in this lifetime.
An equally dangerous statement is that one might argue that someone who has taken bodhisattva vows (which over triple the ten) may find themselves in a situation where, with a completely pure heart and complete consciousness, they choose to break a vow in order to help someone in some way. In doing this he/she is aware that there will be karmic consequences, but they are prepared to accept that through their bodhisattva heart and desire to rescue all sentient beings. This however should be a real exception to the rule of not breaking precepts and certainly not ever taking them lightly.
The bottom line is that precepts should never be taken lightly, no matter what the situation.
3. This means that monks should preach to all, and that we all have Buddha nature (or other traditions may call it God-nature or something different) within us, but it is lying dormant and needs awakening by someone with the skill and ability to do so. Many of us drift along in our lives without any attempt to connect with any deeper understanding. We simply continue to live in our little bubbles, oblivious to the karma we are accumulating along the way, ignorant as to why we feel suffering and dissatisfaction with our lives, perhaps selfishly ignoring the suffering of others, our lives being ruled by sex, drugs and rock and roll! And then we wonder why we feel dissatisfied. To use a more extreme example, perhaps we have all seen people we know on a self-destructive path, drinking too much, with one addiction or another, and yet appearing to be totally oblivious to the self-destructive nature of their lifestyle, whilst others can see it so clearly Often it takes someone with great skill to wake them up and bring them back to a more healthy way of living. The same is true from a spiritual sense, although this is often a much more subtle situation which needs even greater skill to handle.
M D VICKERS
Taiwan