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3 Ways to practice our values with Buddhist Precept - Rev. Liên Shutt

The following talk was given by Rev. Liên Shutt at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on August 26, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Good morning. Thank you, Christina and Jill and Beni and Nancy, and of course to Gil and Andrea for the invitation to be here today. And thank you to you all for being here. Let's start out by what I like to call "Fellowship." If you could turn to your neighbors and say hi, and then also tell them, what is your value today? What is your guiding value today? Go for it. Don't forget your names, though, unless your name is a value.

All right, I could just leave and you guys could finish that. That's probably more important.

So, my name is Reverend Liên Shutt. My pronouns are she/her. Today, gosh, school has started for many people, be it themselves or their family, and also there are just some shifts in life and things. So I thought I'd talk about what's important.

3 Ways to practice our values with Buddhist Precept

I want to talk about the precepts. I will say that being an Asian and monastic person, though I have practiced meditation mostly in the convert Buddhist scene where we think meditation is first, really in most of the Buddhist world, precepts are first. Before you do a retreat, you take the precepts. In terms of studying and learning, I am fully ordained in the Soto Zen¹ tradition. And of course, when we get Dharma transmission, it means we can give the precepts. Before that, you can be a teacher, but you can't give the precepts. So it's really important in the Buddhist world.

However, I'm not going to really talk about them specifically, though of course, the five are: not killing, not stealing, not misusing sexuality, not lying, and not intoxicating the mind and body. Or, I like to say: no killing, no stealing, no peeling (like taking off your clothes), no spieling (talking excessively), and no dealing. This is how I try to remember things. So those are the basic five in all Buddhist traditions.

And, as Gil and I are from the Suzuki Roshi lineage, this is what Suzuki Roshi had to say about the precepts. It's called "Real Precepts Are Beyond Words":

When I say precepts, the first thing you think of is something like the Ten Commandments or ten grave prohibitory precepts. Of course, in the Zen tradition, we have 16, and there are 10 main ones. But Zen precepts are not like that. To study Zen precepts means to understand zazen.² So it is another interpretation of zazen. Precept is, technically, Zen. It isn't meditation; it's just being with things as they are, which sounds easy but is hard to do, as we all know. Using words, word-precepts, we explain what Zen is. Actually, the purpose of receiving precepts, observing precepts, is not just to remember what we should do or what we shouldn't do. How we observe precepts is to practice Zen or to extend our practice to our everyday life. So the idea of precepts is completely different from the usual understanding of precepts.

When I reflected about how precepts and meditation are different, I actually thought, well, I'm going to make the case that they're not so different in this way. So I'm going to talk about three ways of practicing with the precepts: one is called stopping, one is called examining, and one is Enlightenment or actualization.

In terms of meditation, of course, there are two main meditation groupings, and that would be Shamata³ and Vipassanā.⁴ One way to describe Shamata is stopping. You stop to pay attention. In the precepts, as you could see, they start out with the "not"—not killing, not, not, not. The reason for that, and a way that you can call them ethical principles or ethical precepts, which is usually what they call them, or Sīla,⁵ is that it helps you to stop and pay attention.

I also wanted to talk about it as how I learned this, because I think it's really important for us to remember the sources of our learning and our practice. I want to share some stories from my practices overseas of how these ways of working with the precepts were exemplified for me.

One is when I was practicing at the Trúc Lâm, or Bamboo Forest, lineage in Vietnam in 2006 and 2007. My Vietnamese is very bad, so here it goes. Thích Thanh Từ was a contemporary of Thích Nhất Hạnh; when they were young, they practiced together in the Pure Land tradition, and then obviously they went their different ways. Thích Thanh Từ stayed in Vietnam and became kind of the Zen master in Vietnam. I went there for five days and stayed for six months. I worked mainly with this one teacher who had the best English in the nunnery. The monks and nuns were separate, as in a lot of Asia. The master lived in the middle, but it was a big piece of land. In the nunnery, there were between 85 to 100 nuns, and I worked with this one teacher to translate the master's book into English.

When I was there, I had some work. They also did what's called service. If you've been on an IMC retreat, you know you clean the temple a little bit right after the first meditation of the day. So I was doing some gardening work, and there was a big pink rose. I leaned in and I smelled the rose, and a different teacher went by. My Vietnamese, again, is bad, but when you're surrounded by it, I did pick it up a lot better. She was like, "Don't smell the roses." And I was like, okay. I was told what to do all the time, which I'll say more about in the second one.

My Vietnamese was not good, and her English was nonexistent. So the next time I was working with the teacher that spoke English, I said, "What's up with that?" Because in English, we actually have an expression, "stop to smell the roses," which sounds very much like being in life, mindful of your surroundings, enjoying life. So what's wrong with that? She said, "Well, it's like this: the precepts are like fences at the edge of cliffs. Because we tend to go around and pay attention, and then we just fall off a cliff if we're overly passionate, right? If we're just too excited." So they're like fences to help you from falling off the cliff into passion. It's true. When you're very riled up—that's passion—you might say or do things in ways that you will regret later. And so these precepts as "not" really help you to give a clear boundary. They're like a protection fence to go, "Oops, not killing. What does that mean? Not stealing. What does that mean?" So they really stop you. That's stopping.

The second is examining, or you could say Vipassanā, which is to investigate. Now, Vipassanā as a meditation practice is much more about investigating. It's not just like, "Hmm..." you know? That's not really what you're going for in meditation. Yes, you want the investigation to be full of the "how," of curiosity, of non-judgmentalness, the quality of mindfulness. But as a practice, it's actually a very directed investigation or examination of things.

The second way to practice with the precepts is what I would term as compassionate connection. How is it that we interact? How is it that I take my sense of what my values are—as another way to understand the precepts—and then what is the way that I enact it in life? What is my awareness of how I do it, not just my idea of it, whether it's my idea or that I've taken it in as teachings?

Ajahn Chah,⁶ who of course was a Thai Forest teacher of many people we know, says:

In short, keeping Sīla (ethical conduct) means watching over yourself, watching over your actions and speech. The practice involves establishing Sati⁷ (mindfulness) within this one who knows. The one who knows is that intention of mind which previously motivated us to kill living beings, steal other people's property, indulge in illicit sex, lie, slander, say foolish and frivolous things, and engage in all kinds of unrestrained behavior. The one who knows leads us to speak it. It exists within the mind. Focus your mindfulness, or Sati, that constant recollecting, on this one who knows. Let the knowing look after your practice. Use Sati, or awareness, to keep the mind recollecting in the present moment and maintain mental composure. In this way, make the mind look after itself. Do it well. If the mind is really able to look after itself, it is not so difficult to guard speech and actions, since they are all supervised by the mind. Keeping Sīla, in other words, taking care of your actions and speech, is not such a difficult thing. You sustain awareness at every moment and in every posture, whether standing, walking, sitting, or lying down. Before you perform any action, speak, or engage in conversation, establish awareness first. You must have Sati, be recollecting, before you do anything. It doesn't matter what you are going to say; you must first be recollecting in the mind.

So, mindfulness helps us to examine how we're going to interact with each other. Is it from decency or a sense of connectedness? Maybe when I asked you all to say what your value is today, how are you going to actually do that? If "connectedness" was your word for your value, are you speaking in a way that's connecting? Are you interacting in a way that's not killing someone's interaction with you? So it really is the "how," I would say.

My practice in Japan—I did go for an Ango,⁸ or a rains retreat. As many of you know, in Zen our forms are very... lots of forms. One may think that it's just too much, just a lot of difficultness. And I will say, in Japan, if anyone here has been in a Zen Center in the United States that's a convert Zen center, if you think it's hard, try it in Japan. Everything is... you're watched all the time. And everything is, actually, not just in Japan but in all monasteries in Asia, because you're being trained. So much of the directedness is actually on what's called comportment. How do you carry yourself? How do you really take that mindfulness, the development of the zazen mind, the mind that's clearly aware of what is, into what you do?

Because, as you all well know, if I say, "Okay, time now for cookies or potluck," most of you just get up, maybe not even having any mindfulness about how you do it. A lot of us in these transitions, when things are busy, we forget to pay attention and make sure that we're enacting our values in everything we do. And so that's really important. Comportment and how you carry yourself is really important.

I will say, from my experience in Japan, mostly you're instructed on how to do things, and you don't get a lot of praise for it. It's just, "Do it, do it, do it." And there's a lot of practice. And yet, you know, part of that culture is not so much about words. It's really about this sense of relating in a way that we realize that how we hold ourselves and how we interact with each other affect each other and that system. In most monastic systems... I will say, in my experience, I did start out in the Spirit Rock tradition first before I got into Zen. The sense that there's no form in insight practice is actually not so true in my experience when you go to practice in Thailand, say. Because if you're in any monastery or any practice places where there are monks and nuns, there are forms, and there is hierarchy. On one level, in the US we like to think we're all equal, which of course is not true; that's just an ideal we have. And yet, when we are clear about our location, when everyone is aware that location matters, social location matters, then it comes with responsibility, doesn't it? It comes with knowing that if you're in the up-power position, if you're the abbot, if you're the leader, then your task is to take care of the Sangha.

And so how everyone behaves, we learn to move together, and then we like to say, "as one body." This is why when we all turn right, it's so that it looks good, doesn't it? Everyone turning right. But also, it's so that you don't bump into each other and say, "Oh, excuse me," because when you're doing that and someone's meditating, you want to hold the container of quiet for everyone. So a lot of it is, how do we interact in a way that may just seem very un-prescribed, but it's really about having a sense of location between each other and how we negotiate space, how we negotiate holding things. You always hold everything two-handed in Zen. And you may think it's just Zen, but it's actually, again, in all monastic settings.

In fact, I can't remember if it was my one-month or two-month retreat at Spirit Rock, but Guy Armstrong, I believe, said that when he went back—not the first time he went to Burma, I think it was, where he practiced—he said, "Oh, yeah, so many of the monastic precepts are actually how to tie your robes and how to hold it in a certain way." So a lot of it's just comportment, and that's really important because, again, it helps you to have a clear awareness of your body, heart, and mind as it negotiates itself in the world.

Now, I love to look up words. Comportment, the noun, describes both the way a person behaves and also the way they carry themselves, their general manner. The comportment of a bunch of little kids at an amusement park is very different than, say, in the monastery. This is from vocabulary.com. The Middle French root is comportement (bearing or behavior), and from the Latin, comportare (to bring together or collect). Now, doesn't that sound a lot like mindfulness? To bring together and collect, the recollection of what's important in what you're doing. What is your value? How are you enacting it?

So again, I echo Ajahn Chah: "You sustain awareness at every moment and in every posture, whether standing, walking, sitting, or lying down. Before you perform any action, speak or engage in conversation, establishing awareness first. You must have Sati, be recollecting before you do anything." That's examining.

The third way is what I would say as Awakening or as Enlightenment. So now you're like, "Okay, with the two methodologies of meditation, what's the third one?" Being with things as they are, which is Awakening. Which sounds easy, but is hard to do, isn't it? Who here would say that they're awakened? And yet, at least from the Mahayana⁹ view, you are already awakened. But what is it that keeps you from knowing that?

In some ways, the other two steps help us to really realize that we are awakened, that in fact, Awakening is life. We wake up to life as it is, not as our ideas about it that's in the mind, be it the past or the future, but really what is right here. That's what Awakening is. We could say we awaken to wholeness or interconnectedness, to harmony, to how things work as they are. So we actualize or realize this.

Now I want to talk about it in two ways in terms of practice. Again, I'll just say in meditation we say Shamata and Vipassanā, but there are many other kinds of practices, are there not? For instance, chanting. Chanting is a very useful and very much a part of practice. I belong to a Gen X teacher group of different traditions, and recently someone said, "I want to know from your other traditions, what is a way of talking about love or about the quality of goodness in life?" And another teacher in a different Zen tradition, Soto Zen but a different lineage, said, "Oh, well, for us, it's about chanting." And I was like, "Oh, I hadn't heard it said exactly that way." However, in our tradition, Suzuki Roshi used to say, "You chant with your ears, not with your mouth." You're like, "Zen paradox, what does that mean?" It means we chant not to stand out. We're trying to harmonize with everyone else. We're chanting so that we chant together. We're not chanting to say, "Hey, I know this." That stuff happens, mind you, but you practice to let that go, let that be, and then you keep on harmonizing. So it's a way in which we can understand Awakening as knowing that we are not alone, that we are interconnected, that what each of us does impacts each other. We harmonize together. So that's one way I think that you can think about Awakening and Enlightenment. It doesn't have to be just some great thought somewhere.

The other one that I really learned overseas, that I will admit took a little bit of work for me, is devotion. Probably most of you did not wake up today thinking, "Oh, devotion is Enlightenment." I actually poo-pooed it quite a bit and thought, "you know, that's a little bit excessive."

When I practiced in Thailand, I accidentally... I really did. The short version is I was doing my two-month retreat at Spirit Rock, and though I had just ordained in the Zen tradition, I was like, "I need some silence and I need some recovery." So I was blessed that my teacher let me do the two-month at Spirit Rock. And then another monk asked me to go practice with [Sakar?] in Japan, but at the time you couldn't get a visa without going through the diplomatic office. So I thought I'd go to Thailand. I wanted to go back to Vietnam because the first time I went, I moved back and it didn't work out. So I thought this time I'd just go, since I'm from Vietnam, but I wasn't sure I could get a visa. So I thought, "Oh, I better stop in Thailand to make sure I could get a visa." And also, I thought, "Hey, that's where the insight stuff is."

So I heard about this one monk who spoke English, and it turned out he was an arhat¹⁰—Luang Por Boo-da¹¹ is his name. He was 92 at the time, and I met him at a monastery and practiced with him. Then, on the ride back, I also met some German nuns and laypeople, and we were in a van on the way back to Bangkok. They stopped to drop him off because it was the rains retreat, so he had a benefactor that had a place for him. All the nuns were like, "Ooh, we want to see your place, can we come in and see your place?" So we all got out of the van and went in to see his place. And then he had a sala, which is a place where visiting monastics hang out. He had one that was screened in, that was like a living area. The two German laypeople were like, "Hey, can we stay here and practice with him?" You know, travelers are like that in Thailand, too. And so I was like, "Oh, I'd like to do that." So we stayed there, and then they went off. So I was with him for like five weeks and went to different places with him.

He turned out to be an arhat, which I didn't really know. He was so famous that when I was there, Thai Airlines sent him two Gold Card things so that he could just decide whenever he needed to fly somewhere, they would—because he always had an attendant—he and his attendant could just go first class. He was like the American Idol, but as a monastic. No, I'm being really serious, because on the weekend, just mobs of people would come and give him a lot of money and food, because he can't cook or even cut an apple. That's part of his whole practice. And that's why he always has an attendant. He also can't handle money, among other things.

Now, why am I bringing this up, except to just say, "Hey, I got lucky"? No, that's not the real reason. The thing is, at first I was like, "Oh..." and when people would come, they would hand out pictures of him and also little necklaces and stuff. And I thought, "Wow, this is just..." There were some people, especially on the weekend, really rich people who would come and give a lot of money, and then they would come maybe occasionally. But the thing that really made me understand devotion, because I was there with him every day, was that there were some Thai people... so we meditated from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. every day, three hours straight, and then from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. every day. So twice a day for three hours. The reason we started so late is because he watched cable tennis—he was obsessed by tennis—and also Chinese kung fu movies. He was 92, so they were like, "You could do this." And then we would just get up later.

But he still ate two meals, and in the morning, some Thai people would travel for an hour or two by bus to bring him his breakfast that they had made at home, because he can't make anything himself. And then they would go off, maybe for another hour or two on a bus, to work. And then they would return to meditate with him every day of the week. Now, this is the kind of devotion, you know, not the American Idol kind of devotion, but really the devotion of valuing someone who is completely dedicated and who the majority of the people in Thailand really understood to be awakened. Someone whose whole life has been spent in making sure people's suffering is alleviated or can end.

Imagine if your life was that, if that was the most important thing, and that you're devoted to that continuity and that possibility. That's a very different sense of commitment to me. Not just showing up to practice, but really to make sure that this has happened, and to validate and to honor beings whose life is devoted to the end of your suffering. That's huge. Imagine if the United States was devoted to the end of suffering. Imagine if most of the world was devoted to the end of suffering. Not just the values of it, as in "I won't lie," like a self-practice, but also an interactional practice, and then to uphold it in a way that's much more than just about the self or the interpersonal, but as a cultural system. That's devotion. What if that's your devotion?

So, for those who know me a little bit, I really like acronyms or ways of remembering things easily. I've presented for you: Stopping, Examining, and Enlightenment. Stopping, like Shamata, where the precepts are a way to just go, "Whoa, let me just stop a minute" in my habitual, karmic, reactive tendency. I'm just going to stop. Then, I'm going to Examine. What is happening here? Am I acting according to my values? Am I interacting with you, with myself, in a way that is about compassionate connection? And then the last is Enlightenment, which is "See" (S-E-E). The precepts have to be seen. To me, it's not enough to just say, "Oh, I am a moral person."

One of my Dharma sisters who became head monk—when you become a teacher in the Soto Zen tradition—her first talk, she said, "I ordained to live a transparent life." And I was like, "Oops," as I had asked to be ordained. And I was like, "Oh, wow, that's a big commitment." To live a transparent life, to say, "These are my values." And by the way, you take the precepts publicly because you're saying, "Hey, these are my values, and I am making the commitment, I'm vowing to live in this way, publicly." In the Soto Zen tradition, and I think in all the ordination experiences I know of in Vietnam, the public is invited. So anybody can come. Usually, it's just family members and friends, but anyone can come because you're also asking the community to support you to live a life of not killing, not stealing, not misusing sexuality, not lying, and not intoxicating the mind or body. So it's something that needs to be seen.

I will say, I struggle because I also like the acronym "Sea" (S-E-A). The "sea." And the reason for that, and that's why I put Enlightenment and Awakening or Awareness, is because I think that last aspect of practice is to realize that we're actually held in a vastness. The sea or the ocean gives us a sense of vastness, that there's something here that's holding us, that connects us all, that really supports us to live a life that's awakened. And in fact, it's always present. How is it that we practice to know that? To know that we're doing it and to know that this is a value that's important.

So in some ways, you could say we awaken to something bigger than our individual efforts. And yet it does take our individual and collective actions. That's beyond ideals. For me, devotion seems idealistic, but in terms of a practice, it's an everyday kind of practice. For my students, you know, devotion sometimes can sound like faith. And for my students, I like to say faith is strengthened confidence. So how do we practice so that we strengthen our confidence that the end of suffering is possible? That, in fact, we're already awakened.

Katagiri Roshi¹² says, from a chapter entitled "Buddha Mind":

The Buddhist precepts are not commandments. They are not moralistic rules that deluded people are expected to obey. Actually, the Buddhist precepts are not rules at all. They should not be seen from a deluded point of view. Rather than see them as moral dictates to be followed, we should regard them as indicators of the practice of Enlightenment. They should be taken as the Buddha's mind. If you do this, you can behave as a Buddha. At the beginning of practice, you might believe the precepts are moral rules, but you must learn to take them as expressions of the Buddha's activity. Doing so, you will study your everyday life, and before you are conscious of it, these teachings will penetrate your life. In this way, you can live naturally the life of a Buddha.

Thank you for your attention.

Q&A

All right, we have a minute or so if anybody has any questions. I do see a hand, but if you generally move back, I would invite you to move forward.

Phil: Thank you. I want to ask about your Arhat teacher. What was it like being with him? Could you tell he was different from the rest of us?

Rev. Liên Shutt: Um, well, yes, in the sense of all the people around him acted differently towards him. I will say, and also the guy was 92, so he already has a certain bearing, you know? And he's been a monastic since he was 12 or something like that. So a long, long time at that point. We acted in very different ways. Whenever we'd leave, we all would gather and bow. Whenever you arrive, you would... you know, a lot of comportment kind of stuff to honor him. He did speak mostly in Thai, so most of the time I didn't really understand what he was saying, but the feeling is different.

And then one time, as he was getting ready to leave to go do a blessing somewhere, and we were all gathered to send him off, he made eye contact. Not that he didn't make eye contact with me before, mind you, but he did make eye contact with me, and I will tell you, I felt completely seen, but there was no "me." I don't know how to say it any other way. I can't tell you anything else except for we connected and there was no "me" and there was no "him." And that's all I can say. I don't know, maybe I make things up. I have no idea. But yes, I would say that. He and Sakyong [M?] Roshi and the nun I practiced with in Vietnam, I find them all to be enlightened people, and different in different ways of expression. Yeah.

Rob: Yes, my name is Rob. Can you hear me? I have a question. You mentioned a word; I don't believe I understood the pronunciation correctly. Is it Sati?

Rev. Liên Shutt: Sati. S-A-T-I. It's the Pāli word for mindfulness. Literally, it means to recollect or to remember, which is more the practice of mindfulness.

Rob: Thank you.

Rev. Liên Shutt: All right, anyone else? Okay, time for food. Thank you very much. Have a beautiful day.