Religious traditions and practices usually include some moral code or set of ethical precepts. These can take the form of explicit rules or implicit expectations of acceptable behaviour within the practicing community. Frequently these precepts are complemented by rituals. While clearly important – or even foundational – for spiritual practice, I have often felt such precepts and rituals to be somehow secondary to the primacy of our relationship with the Eternal or the Divine, however we might conceive this.
As a Quaker and as a Buddhist, I have thought that the key point of deepening a spiritual practice was less about following a set of rules and more about being able to discern what I was called to do in the world through an inner experience of a direct leading, either individual or collective.
Yet somehow, the disunity, animosity, and confusion in our discerned responses to the crises facing the Earth don’t appear to be matching what is clearly asked of us. Maybe a commitment to an appropriate set of precepts and grounding rituals could be more important than I was previously able to acknowledge.
At heart, my concern is that there is increasing anger, fear, and division at precisely the time when the Earth is calling on us to be more responsive. I see people who seem quite clear on how others should change their behaviour, yet I have increasing doubts about the reliability of my own and others’ thoughts and opinions when they are clearly permeated with multiple generations of distorting principles. Those distortions can be through pervasive scientific materialism, colonialism, utilitarian values, or misconceived conceptions of power, control, and agency – to say nothing of the wealth of emotions that continue to swirl through us. Given that our thoughts, opinions, and feelings are always present when discerning what we are called to do, how can we trust what we interpret as a leading from the Eternal?
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Andrew is a Lay Minister in the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives (OBC), Sōtō Zen tradition. This list of the Buddhist Precepts is from an OBC leaflet:
The Three Refuges
The Three Pure Precepts
The Ten Precepts
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For me, the answer has been to return to the practice and tradition that I have come to trust, and reconsider – even rediscover – the value of the precepts and rituals embodied in this tradition. It is an expression of trusting the Ancestors of my practice.
At times of stress, precepts and rituals can hold us together and stop us doing harm to ourselves and others, while the turmoil of emotional responses work their way through us. While moral codes are frequently used unhelpfully for judging ourselves and others, they can also remind us of the qualities of behaviour to which we aspire. Used wisely, they can then help us to accept and nurture ourselves and each other without judgement. Precepts and ritual can ground us in our bodies and in our relationship with all beings, rather than in abstract thoughts. There is something about the act of bowing and accepting that is deeply powerful and transforming. Giving careful, calm, sustained attention to our relationships with all beings somehow seems to lead to an arising of deep joy.
Andrew Taylor-Browne