At SBN’s monthly discussion group meeting last week, several members of the Secular Buddhism Meets Western Psychology subgroup offered their perspectives on Buddhism’s five precepts, including their relevance to our daily practice.

The precepts and questions from daily life - Kate Curtis-McLane

Westerners often have trouble with the five precepts, the underlying system of ethics in basic Buddhist thought.  We don’t like them.  They feel limiting in our very physical, individualistic, and self-centered society.  Surely, we can give ourselves some leeway in interpreting these precepts, since we aren’t in a monastery in 11th century Tibet, right?

And yet…… the precepts have survived for 2500 years as a part of basic Buddhist thought, and as the foundation on which we ‘take refuge’.  A lot of very intelligent people and deep thinkers have failed to dispose of them.  Why? Many secular Buddhists want to honor the heart of basic Buddhist dharma but dispense with the trappings of ‘religion’ and the cultural appropriation cosplay of foreign ceremonies and liturgies. So, where in this do the precepts fit?

Here they are, with some questions to ask:

1. Don’t kill: (non-harming; ahimsa)

Of course we should try never to kill, and we can be reminded of the Hippocratic Oath, which starts with ‘First, do no harm.’

There are often questions about rodents and insects. When it is winter in a snowy place, and taking a spider outside will mean that it dies a certain death from cold, do we take it outside, or do we kill it quickly indoors?

What about when your house is infested with carpenter ants or termites?.  When one of these is a threat to the health or life of humans, when your prevention tactics aren’t working, is it OK to kill them?

What about a bird that flies into your window?  Or an animal that runs out in front of the car?

What kinds of ‘harms’ are included here?  When might it be alright to hurt someone’s feelings? Is being unkind to ourselves included? 

What if you can only manage to be a vegetarian, and not a vegan? What about the little bits of leather that sometimes hold shoes together? What about eating honey, or eggs from chickens who are treated well? 

What about ‘killing time’?

2. Avoid intoxicants:

What about pretending that ‘a drink or two’ doesn’t actually change your mental functioning?

What is the difference between intoxicants and medicines.  Are some psychedelics (ayahuasca, ketamine, psilocybin, LSD??) medicine when used as such, with a guide and a spiritual goal?  What about without a guide, on your own?

What about being intoxicated with anger or rage?  What about sleepiness?

When is bingeing on Netflix or going down a rabbit hole on You Tube an intoxicant? Or obsessing over a new hobby?

3. Don’t lie:

Here, lamas say, intention is all important.  For example, if you are harboring someone on the underground railroad and the KKK comes, and asks if you have any runaway slaves at your house, saying ‘no’ is not the kind of lying that is bad.  The intention to prevent harm is preeminent. 

What about lying to children to ‘protect’ them from unpleasantness in the world?

Or ‘white lies’ that we think won’t really do any harm? Can an environment full of little untruths inhibit full awareness? What about ‘idle chatter’ and gossip?

What about lying to ourselves?  What about the ‘ignorance’ that stems from our own denials and laziness with regard to self-knowledge?

4. Don’t steal: (sometimes written as ‘Don’t take things that are not freely offered’)

This obviously refers to taking physical objects, for starters, but what kind of permission do you need to be sure something is freely offered?

And…What if you will never get caught claiming extra deductions on your tax forms? 

What about ‘stealing someone’s thunder’, or ‘stealing the show’, or ‘stealing the limelight’?  Or taking credit for something that someone else did?

What about taking someone’s self-confidence? Or wasting their time?

5. Be celibate: (usually interpreted for lay people as avoiding sexual impropriety)

In most western cultures, the focus here is on limiting relations to your long-term partner when you are in a committed relationship; sex is also not OK if/when the other person is in a relationship, is too young, or for any reason can’t give valid consent. 

Are we just talking about sexual intercourse here, or are we talking about how we view the world and other people?  What about harboring a crush on your office mate or your friend’s spouse, even if you don’t act on it? What about your demeanor - the way in which you interact with others?

What about dressing in a way that is designed to elicit physical attraction? Low-cut blouses or tight skirts or trousers?  Short shorts out in public? Tight shirts that emphasize breasts or musculature?

Nine points on the precepts - Bero Nizic

1. The five precepts are just one part of the broader picture of ethical living.
2. The intention behind the five precepts is to avoid unnecessary harm.
3. I view the five precepts as guidelines rather than strict rules. Blindly following them isn't the wisest approach. Yes, adhering to them in most cases is beneficial, but it's also important to apply wisdom.
4. It isn't binary: whether you follow the five precepts or you don't. It's more of a range - where we might be at a level 4 of10 in some precepts and 9 of 10 in others. The goal isn't to be perfect, as that's not always possible, but to be honest with ourselves about where we stand and to consider if there's anything we can do to improve even slightly. If we're at a level 4 of10, what's needed to reach 4.5 of 10?
5. For me, ethical living, in simple terms, is: Be a good citizen of the world. This includes not being harmful (‘don't be a jerk’) and being kind to other beings and the environment in a way that is sustainable for you. There's a strong emphasis on ‘sustainable’. You're not helping if you've burned out.
6. Our capacity for ethical living also varies, and the level we're at any given moment depends on many factors, such as context and available resources.
7. One of the criteria for evaluating the usefulness of my (Buddhist) practice is ‘Does it improve my capacity for ethical living?’ If the answer is yes, then it's worth continuing. So far, the answer has been yes.
8. Ethical uncertainty is definitely a thing, no matter how much we might sometimes wish for clear directions on the right thing to do.
9. We can work on our inner world (our inner parts, mind, etc.) and on external conditions (like activism, being socially engaged...). What would be a wise ratio to focus on one over the other? I don't know the correct answers for others, but for me, in this period, it's perhaps 90-10 in favor of working on my inner world. Sometime in the future, when my inner world is in better order, that might become more balanced.

The five precepts and me – Ira Rifkin

Let me explain my situation and, hence, my biases. My work as a religion journalist for more than 40 years exposed me to a cornucopia of religious scriptures and groups, from Anglicans to Zoroastrians. I think of scripture as self-help books for attaining a sense of emotional equilibrium and societal cohesion. 

The five precepts, to my mind, are the Buddhist equivalent of the Abrahamic tradition’s Ten Commandments and Confucianism’s Five Classics. In short, the five precepts are a guidebook code for creating the perfect society. But as you may have noticed, the Abrahamic faiths have yet to create what I’d call a perfect society. Though every other society, including Buddhist cultures, has also fallen short, in my opinion.

I think that’s because as a species, homo sapiens are perfectly imperfect. Very few of us always get it right. We can aspire to the heights. We may even act at times in accordance with our vision of how one behaves when fully self-aware and motivated by compassion. But I know I slip and slide regularly. At times, I’m in accordance with the precepts’ literalism. But that’s less frequently than the times I’m wildly out of sync. 

You should also know that I am now 81. I came of age in the 1960s, absorbing many of the influences one associates with that era. I lived in the East Village and the Haight-Ashbury. I imbibed all I could and tested the limits in so many ways. I’m happy I did. I learned a lot about the human experience and the elasticity of humanity’s varied collections of rules.

For example, the precept against using intoxicants. I still like to drink wine, though I’m careful as to how much. I drink perhaps one or two glasses of wine, preferably a dry red, one or two nights a week. 

More important to this conversation, I think, is that I started using LSD and other psychedelics when I was about 17. I just happened to know someone who knew someone. It was still legal in 1960 when I started. While I overdid it in the way that thrill-seeking teens test themselves, my use of psychedelics is what first opened me to the world of deep psychology, philosophy, and the transpersonal worldview.

Was I wrong to do so, or was I merely engaged in the process of growing my ethical maturation?

And what about killing living beings? I take spiders outside, and haven’t eaten mammals in years. My heart softens watching baby animal videos; I particularly like the ones that show interspecies connections and affection. However, I am by no means a vegan.

I eat fish and on occasion fowl. And because I live in the woods my house is continually being overwhelmed by ants and mice — both of which I eradicate.  For what it’s worth, I feed the mice to my resident red fox. I view that as upholding the natural world’s predator and prey balance.

I also know that Tibetan, Bhutanese and Southeast Asians manage to remain Buddhists while eating animals and their products. I once had the privilege of attending a Passover Seder in Washington with the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan exile leaders. I watched him eat eggs but not the gefilte fish, which for those who don’t know is a cooked fish and egg croquette-like dish that many non-Jews and Jews alike find less than tasty. Sort of how I feel about the Himalayan specialty yak butter tea, which triggers my gag reflex.

My point is that someone as revered in the Buddhist world as Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, commonly referred to as His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, is clearly not a precepts literalist. 

I try to live as ethical a life as I can in regard to my treatment of others, humans and non-humans. I believe that ethical living as expressed in the five precepts is critical to preventing environmental change from ending life as we know it on planet Earth, endless war, and vast discrimination and social upheaval. 

Frankly, I have little hope these days that humanity will pull it together. But I also think that clinging rigidly to the five precepts, or any belief system’s guiding moral principles, risks turning the five precepts into the Five Dogmas. As self-professed secular Buddhists, we can’t have that, can we? 

I think of the precepts as a practical path for ‘living Buddhism’ in a non-Buddhist, Western, contemporary, householder context. That’s 'living' with a lowercase 'l'. It’s my attempt to translate the abstract into a concrete lifestyle.  

Or maybe I’m just too undisciplined and hedonistic and all I’ve said here is what some others might label mere spiritual bypassing — an attempt to avoid facing my deepest pain. If so, think of me as the ‘before’ stage in our ongoing process.