Vows and Precepts
Part of following the Buddhist path is turning your mind toward the Dharma and contemplating the basic teachings as part of your daily life. With this comes insight and a movement toward wanting to change those aspects of your life that don’t conform to the new point of view. Initially, this is expressed by taking refuge vows in the Buddha (Teacher), Dharma (Teachings), and Sangha (Community of Practitioners.) As a Buddhist, one then accepts five precepts for daily living that help one live a mindful and less harmful life.
Refraining from taking life
Refraining from taking what is not freely given
Refraining from sexual misconduct
Refraining from false or harmful speech
Refraining from intoxicants that cloud the mind
In some cases, this “turning of the mind” inspires a person to want to go deeper into the process of conforming one’s life to a deeper commitment. This refers to the decision to renounce the “householder life” and accept monastic vows laid out in the Vinaya. The Vinaya is the section of Buddhist teachings concerned with ethical discipline and monastic conduct. It contains the rules, guidelines, and practices intended to support harmony, mindfulness, simplicity, and spiritual development within the monastic community.
In 1998, this is the path that I decided to take. It has been a challenging path with its ups and downs. The monastic life is difficult to pursue for many people because there are few monasteries to live in for support. Although I was a resident of Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton under the guidance of Ani Pema Chodron on and off for two years, my life as a nun has been lived “in the world” with few opportunities to live with other monastics. Eventually, the challenges were too difficult to manage, and I stopped wearing my robes. However, I followed the precepts to the best of my abilities. I spent a lot of time on my own on retreat on some family property in Muskoka where I studied Dharma books and did meditation and sadhana practice. I walked through the woods doing mindfulness practice and lived a very simple life. By this time, I was not attending the temple where I had first started practicing Vajrayana and Dzogchen. In many ways I had broken the connection with that sangha as well as the monastic community. This is considered a very serious downfall in Buddhist communities. With help from a therapist and psychiatrist I could see that my difficulty staying in that situation was because I was struggling with undiagnosed major depression disorder and PTSD from physical and sexual trauma. After a crisis moment and a hospital admission for psychiatric assessment and care it was clear to me that many of my decisions up until that point were made without the clearest of motivations. It was determined that the time that I was spending alone was a way to deal with stress and yet was also a way to avoid dealing with the issues which were identified while in hospital. It was a time for re-evaluating everything that I had been doing up until that point, including the Dharma study and practice that I was doing.
During this time, it was clear that I was not “taking refuge” in the support that is offered by the Buddhist teachers, sangha, path. I had isolated myself from the sangha and even though I felt intense grief because I felt that I had turned away from the monastic ideal, I was not wearing my robes. I was disappointed in myself. I was very unhealthy and deep in the grip of compulsive eating. I had reached the highest weight in my life; 336 pounds, had thyroid issues and was diagnosed as being pre-diabetic. Medication seemed to be helping with the depression but anxiety around questions of identity and my overall purpose in life plagued me. Both of my parents were going through major health problems and caring for my mother at home added to the stress I was feeling while I was dealing with my own. I was a mess.
No one ever said that being Buddhist was an easy path. In fact, right from the beginning, you receive the teachings referred to as The Four Noble Truths. The first one, not surprisingly, being “Life is suffering” comes as a bit of a shock but on further consideration it is easy to accept that it is undeniably true. Other translations read “dissatisfactory,” and “stressful,” which are not so blunt but convey the subtleties of the problems that we face in life.
The other Four Noble Truths include:
Suffering is caused by grasping and clinging
There is a way to overcome this suffering
The way is The Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
This brings us right back to the point where we are faced with the choices and decisions that come with receiving and accepting the vows of refuge and daily discipline. They are framed in the early Theravada schools as a path of renunciation, especially for monastics. However, this view never embraced extremism as a means to enlightenment. Buddhism was referred to as the Middle Way, or the path of moderation. Teachings on the concepts of emptiness, karma, impermanence, and no-self are necessarily studied with a teacher’s guidance. They are crucial to liberation. This dependence on and faith in the tradition add insight and surety to the understanding that what the Buddha taught was true.
When viewed from this point of view my own struggles with living a life with mindfulness and non-harm makes perfect sense. The practice is embraced again and again everyday until insight is gained and a sense of release from suffering and peace is eventually found. The fact that there is a strong faith in the teaching that all sentient beings possess inherent buddha nature encourages me to continue on my way, The Way, as I reduce and remove all obscuration and blind spots that have kept me in the dark.
The precepts and the vows to keep them are guides to help us navigate a world of challenges and disappointments. If we accept that grasping at things that are impermanent will inevitably cause pain and suffering, then it makes sense that we learn which situations lead to this condition. If we understand that all sentient beings suffer in the same way that we do, then empathy grows naturally and we are inspired to live a life of non-harm. These decisions and choices are the essence of the Buddha’s Way. To encourage each other to make them is a form of compassion that we all can share. Wearing the robes again is one way for me to add to this compassionate endeavour.