The Ten Zen Precepts

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to all my Zen teachers, Nanrei Kobori Rōshi, Robert Aitken Rōshi and Charlotte Joko Beck, with particular thanks to Joko for helping me find my own dharma voice. I would also like to thank all members of the Ordinary Mind Zen School Sydney, for sharing their dharma friendship, and for patiently listening and giving feedback as I honed these ideas through regular weekly dharma talks.

I would also like to thank Kerry Davies AE for her professional expertise in editing my manuscript, and my Buddhism and psychotherapy colleagues who read the initial draft and gave valuable feedback – Dr John Mercer, Francine Bartlett, Dr Eng-Kong Tan and Dr Julie Green. Also, to the broader faculty and members of the Australian Association of Buddhist Counsellors and Psychotherapists, who have travelled down the same road with me over many years, learning how to integrate Buddhism with psychotherapy. And a thankyou to Dr Belinda Khong for her peer supervision and encouragement in writing and publishing on Buddhism and psychology. I would also like to thank my fellow Zen teachers, Ezra Bayda, Elizabeth Hamilton, Diane Rizzetto and Gregg Howard, for their kindness and collegial support. Last, a big thankyou to my partner in marriage Diana Devitt-Dawson for her ongoing love and generosity.

How to make the most

of this book

While it may be tempting to dip into the book for particular areas of interest (or to skip fundamentals you might already be familiar with), I recommend reading the book from beginning to end.

The introduction and early chapters present concepts in Buddhism and psychology in a new and refreshing approach. Chapters 6 to 16 present a commentary on each of the ten Zen precepts, including reflections to build into your own Buddhist practice. The final chapter and two appendixes discuss integrating the precepts into contemporary life: respectively, everyday life, counselling and psychotherapy, and politics and moral issues.

This natural progression will help you gain a deeper understanding of these guidelines for cultivating moral intelligence.

A glossary of Zen Buddhist and other terms is included at the back of the book.

Introduction

Hurt people hurt people

—attributed initially to Rabbi Yehuda Berg

This simple aphorism summarises the content of this book. In my life’s work as a psychologist I have primarily focused on healing emotionally hurt people. However, most counselling and psychotherapy does not directly address the moral issues of how we may harm others. It is not generally part of the paradigm. Only a few people have the motivation to take the next step of examining not only the harm that has been done to them, but the harm they may also have caused others.

Many people also come to Zen Buddhism to find spiritual healing for their emotional wounds, primarily through the work of sitting meditation and mindfulness. However, Zen also addresses the second part of this aphorism, the harm we may cause others. This is through taking up the practice of the ten Zen precepts, the ethical guidelines of Buddhism that point out the many ways we may cause harm. This book aspires to integrate both sides of this aphorism. It is the view of the author that we cannot fully heal unless we embrace both.

I have been a psychologist for about forty years. I have also been a practitioner of Zen Buddhism for about forty years and a lay Zen teacher for about twenty of those years. I have always been interested in how my training and experience as a psychologist could inform my Zen practice and teaching. Conversely, I have also been interested in how my Zen training could inform my practice of psychology. Both experiences have shaped this book, but it is primarily a book about Zen ethics.

To date, there are only a handful of books written on the Zen precepts. The subject matter of most Zen books is spiritual insight, meditation and the arts, and it appears to me that an important aspect of Zen training is being overlooked and undervalued.

Further, the books written so far on Zen ethics have not been integrated with the insights gained from developmental psychology and neuroscience that help us understand how our early formative years impact on cognitive, emotional and moral intelligence. We do not come to Zen as a psychological blank slate, and it is important to understand more clearly the developed and underdeveloped aspects of who we are individually that we bring to our practice.

Over the last fifty years, Buddhism has influenced counselling and psychotherapy extensively through the popularisation of mindfulness. A second wave of teachings then emphasised the importance of compassion in complementing mindfulness practice. My hope is that this book may be the beginning of a third wave of Buddhist teachings, emphasising the importance of ethics in the cultivation of wellbeing. It is consistent with the philosophy of Aristotle, who emphasised that a happy life is a moral life.

Moral intelligence was first introduced as a concept in 2005 by two business and leadership coaches, Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel, in their book Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance and Leadership Success. Much of the research around moral intelligence agrees that it is a skill that can be further developed with practice. It is also claimed that moral intelligence is the central intelligence for all human beings, and it is considered a distinct form of intelligence independent of both emotional and cognitive intelligence.

The literature that followed from Lennick and Kiel’s book focused mainly on how moral intelligence can be developed in children. Zen Buddhist precepts are primarily for adult dharma practitioners and guide us on how to build on and refine what we have already learned or not learned in our formative years. By integrating developmental psychology and Zen we get a broader, longitudinal understanding of where we have come from and how we can continue to cultivate this important yet underrated aspect of human intelligence.

The three essential aspects to Zen training are the cultivation of spiritual insight; the practice of sitting meditation; and the embodiment of the precepts. They have been likened to a three-legged stool. A stool will be unbalanced if one of the legs is missing or is shorter than the others. A Zen practice that lacks any of these core teachings is not true Zen.

The origin of these three teachings is the Eightfold Noble Path of Buddhism: insight (right view, right intention); meditation (right mindfulness, right concentration, right effort); precepts (right speech, right action, right livelihood) (University of Hawaii, 2020).

Spiritual insight is the intuitive understanding of no-self, the realisation that the self is as transient as a mountain stream and as organic as a rainforest, rather than holding to the conventional view that it is a fixed and separate identity. From a Zen perspective this is not just a philosophical understanding, but a heartfelt experience that wakes us up from a self-centred way of being in the world, to a sense of intimacy with all things and all living creatures.

Meditation is the practice of cultivating serenity in the flow of present-moment experience, by focusing on what is really happening right now, rather than being distracted by the monkey mind – mindless thinking, fantasy and emotional reactivity.

The precepts guide our direction through the hustle and bustle of everyday life, based on these foundations of insight and serenity. Together, they are a moral compass that directs us towards the cultivation of love, compassion, joy and equanimity, and steers us away from causing harm and suffering. They are called the Ten Grave Precepts as they need to be taken seriously. But, paradoxically, when we put them into practice, we experience a joyful lightness of being.

There is a synergy between these three core teachings that together create a dynamic whole. I often say in my dharma talks that if you practice meditation just to calm your mind, you have a third of a practice. If you practice meditation to cultivate insight, you have two-thirds of a practice. If you practice the precepts as well, you have a complete well-rounded practice.

All three are processes through which we see more deeply into the transitory and interconnected nature of the self and then begin to act more from a non-egocentric perspective. How we apply this in our own daily lives depends on each person according to their own context and their own judgement.

This is different from the teachings of world religions that provide moral instruction by way of commandments. In many religions, moral behaviours are mandated by an outside authority in the form of a God, or by the clergy, God’s representatives on Earth. Traditionally, they were written in earlier times when most of the population did not have access to education and an intellectual elite instructed the masses on what was right and wrong. This is no longer appropriate in modern democratic societies that have universal education. The ten Zen precepts are guidelines, not commandments, and we are encouraged to use our own intelligence in applying them wisely and compassionately.

So, if you opened this book thinking it would espouse authoritative Buddhist positions on contemporary moral issues, such as animal rights, abortion or euthanasia, you will be disappointed. Equally, if you opened this book with a post-modern view that morality is just a social construction, and therefore anything goes, I also hope you will be disappointed.

The views expressed in this book are not tied to a political agenda of the progressive left; neither are they aligned with the conservative right. In Japan, Zen tends to be associated with the right of politics. It has its roots in the military code of the Samurai class and espouses traditional values.

By contrast, as it has taken root in Western democracies like the USA and Australia, it is more closely associated with progressive left-wing politics. Some Western Zen Buddhists seem to think it has found its true home on the left in the politics of compassion. However, Zen is Zen and is not the captive of the left or the right. Wisdom is often the conservative position of saying no to something. Compassion is often the position of saying yes. We need both.

While reflecting on how I could write a book on the precepts, I realised that working as a psychologist with people from all walks of life, and specialising in couples and family therapy, has given me an intimate understanding of how deeply human beings can love each other, as well as how carelessly and callously they can harm each other. It occurred to me, based on this clinical experience, there was a treasure trove of material I could draw on to illustrate the moral issues we all face in life.

There is a remarkable similarity between Zen training and developmental psychology. Just as the three pillars of Zen are spiritual insight, meditation and the moral precepts, the three areas of developmental psychology are cognitive development, emotional development and moral development. Cognitive development and cognitive intelligence go hand in hand with spiritual insight as ways of understanding the world. Emotional development and emotional intelligence go hand in hand with meditation as ways of cultivating equilibrium, and moral development and moral intelligence go hand in hand with the precepts in cultivating ethical human beings.

The similarity goes even further. While spiritual insight and meditation have been written about extensively in Zen, cognitive and emotional development have also been studied extensively in developmental psychology, but few psychologists would be as familiar with the study of moral development compared with the other two. It indicates a blind spot – a broad cultural misunderstanding and undervaluing of the role morality plays in how we define human intelligence.

Traditionally the precepts are written only as restraints: no killing, no stealing, no misusing sex and so on. I have borrowed American Zen teacher Norman Fischer’s modern version (Fischer, 2009), which articulates each precept as both a restraint and an aspiration. By expressing the precepts both ways, they instruct us to inhibit harmful impulses, as well as to trust openheartedness. They are as follows.

Not to kill but to nurture life.

Not to steal but to receive what is offered as a gift.

Not to misuse sexuality but to be caring and faithful in intimate relationships.

Not to lie but to be truthful.

Not to intoxicate with substances or doctrines but to promote clarity and awareness.

Not to speak of others’ faults but to speak out of loving kindness.

Not to praise self at the expense of others but to be modest.

Not to be possessive of anything but to be generous.

Not to harbour anger but to forgive.

Not to do anything to diminish the Triple Treasure (Buddha, Dharma and Sangha) but to support and nurture it.

These age-old precepts have been honed and tested through the crucible of time. They have been handed down as precious gifts from generation to generation and have thrived across diverse cultures. There is something archetypal and perennial in their nature. It is the aspiration of this book to keep them alive and fresh in a contemporary world, where the three poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance are spread insidiously by social media, and where outmoded traditional structures are breaking down but being replaced by their very opposite – the self-centred demands of an increasingly narcissistic culture. There is another way.

As my late teacher Charlotte Joko Beck wrote:

[Zen] practice can be stated very simply. It is moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others … If we practice with patience and persistence … we slowly begin to be conscious of the ego barriers of our life: the thoughts, the emotions, the evasions, the manipulation, can now be observed and objectified more easily. This objectification is painful and revealing; but if we continue, the clouds obscuring the scenery become thinner. (Beck, 1989, pp. 131, 132)

My aspiration in writing this book is that the ten Zen precepts, illustrated by these clinical stories and my own personal experience, and informed by the study of developmental psychology and moral intelligence, may awaken all of us to live more noble lives and to see the scenery more clearly.

Note: The way I have applied the ten precepts as a moral code in my own personal life may not necessarily suit others. My contribution is offered as just one example of its application.

CHAPTER 1

Spiritual Insight,

Cognitive Intelligence

and Cognitive Development

Wonderful, Wonderful! Now I realise that all beings are

the tathagatha.

It is only their delusions and attachments that stop them

from realising this very fact.

—Shakyamuni Buddha

E = mc²

—Albert Einstein

The nature of spiritual insight is clarity and simplicity, a direct experience of the wondrous existence of everyday life where everything is interconnected. The nature of philosophical or scientific insight is often abstracted from everyday life and