Since I first joined the Blooming Heart Sangha, I have struggled with what we call the Five Mindfulness Trainings. I have resisted what seemed to me to be echoes of my early exposure to the Ten Commandments. No matter how the descriptions have been updated, they seem to have kept their ancient flavor of “Thou shalt not.” I have tried to value them as an ethical foundation for mindfulness. It is hard to be mindful if one is not ethical.
The flavor of the more contemporary language still has retained the sting of prohibition. I don’t like someone else to tell me what not to do.
It was a “beginning anew” ceremony at the beginning of January that opened my eyes a little more to the underlying problem I have had with our form of Buddhist practice. The ceremony began with a recitation of all the ways in which we had failed to live up to the ideals of the practice. We recited our wrongdoings in the form of a confession. It had all the negative feelings of the “mea culpa” I recited many times as an altar boy at the beginning of the Catholic celebration of Mass. This exercise took me deeper into an understanding of the negativity I have instinctively felt in the recitation of the Five Mindfulness Trainings.
The Five Mindfulness Trainings have their root in the Five Precepts that have come to us from the time of the Buddha. These are vows for lay persons. They are five vows taken to promote good conduct and support spiritual practice. They are all negative: no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no lying and no intoxicants. Traditionally, they are prohibitions of wrong behavior, they are vows of avoidance.
I don’t find this helpful. They are white lines of prohibition along the side of the middle path, warning us not to cross. I would prefer that they be arrows of encouragement, showing actions that promote mindfulness. I would prefer that they not tell me what to avoid.
I think that the Five Mindful Trainings as rewritten by Thay and the monastics of Plum Village are a helpful revision of the traditional Precepts. But they still sound to me like vows of avoidance. They are still burdened by the precepts of avoidance.
My own approach is expressed in the intention that I make every morning to be a guardian of nature, a healer of misery, a messenger of wonder, an architect of peace, a release from all suffering and a font of loving kindness. That kind of guidance for ethical behavior affirms the direction I want to go. It does not define what I want to avoid. It is a guidance based on insight into the object of desire, not on pitfalls to be avoided.
I simply want to acknowledge the Five Mindfulness Trainings as precepts. But I want them to be precepts of nourishing behavior, not warnings of behavior to avoid. If I am going to make it a commitment, I want it to be that I will: cultivate and support all forms of life, be generous and respectful of the needs of others, engage in powerful and loving erotic behavior with all beings, listen and speak with attention and transparency, and attentively nourish my mind and body.
These are precepts that I find helpful and nourishing. These are precepts that have positive meaning. These are precepts that train me in mindfulness.