Saving All Beings (part I)

Melissa and I participated in a Precepts Ceremony yesterday at the Greater Boston Zen Center with our dear friend and colleague, Josh Bartok, Roshi. The ceremony marks the formal entry into the Zen Buddhist path. I’m always moved as the initiates receives the sixteen Buddhist precepts and each speaks of the personal meaning these ancient teachings hold for them.

Three of the initial precepts are called the ‘three pure precepts’. They are quite simple: Avoid evil, Practice good, Save all beings. I could go on at length about the first two, but it’s the third, Save all beings, I’m interested in this morning. But first some theological background.

The essential Zen teaching parallels one of the core teachings in Christianity. In Zen we say everyone is already awake – already enlightened. Christians might say we are already saved. Both ways point me to a life where the most important work has already been done. I cannot be good enough to earn my salvation and I cannot work hard enough to achieve enlightenment. It’s already happened.

I find these teachings to be a deep mystery. My ordinary experience is that I am a quite imperfect human being who is clearly not good enough deserve salvation. And I am certainly not in any kind of state that I would think I should be if I was enlightened. But when I let these teachings sink in, and consider the possibility that I am acceptable, loved and awake as I am, it brings tears to my eyes. Could it be so? Is it possible that I don’t have to earn my life?

In this larger context, what could the precept to ‘Save all beings’ mean? All beings are already saved, already awake. And beside that, in Zen we say that ‘all beings’ are ‘one body’. The separation between me and you, between us and them is simply a perceptual stance that fails to acknowledge the true interdependence and interpenetration of all things.

In my experience, the ‘many beings’ appear both within me and outside of me. Some of the beings that appear come in the guise of people I like and admire, people I think are ‘like me’, people I want to spend time with. Other beings appear as difficult, untrustworthy, different from me, people I judge and don’t want to be around. In ordinary life, we simply try to spend more time with those we like and less time with those we don’t like. (And we try to elect the former and defeat the later.)

There are several problems with this approach. First is that each of us actually contains many different aspects of our self—many different ‘beings’ within us. Sometimes we are patient, sometimes we are in a hurry. Sometimes we are kind, sometimes we are callous. Sometimes we are brave, sometimes cowardly. And though we might prefer some parts of ourselves over other parts, the truth is that we are many things. We might even say we are many beings – one coming after the other. So how do we meet the parts of ourselves we don’t like? How do we save the many beings within us?

Similarly, even the people we most love (especially the people we most love?) appear in many different guises. Sometimes as kind partner, sometimes as disturber of my peace. Sometimes generous, sometimes selfish. And then there are all the people who we judge to be ‘different.’ We may look out at Chris Christie and say ‘What a conniving politician he is. I would never do something like that.’ Or look at the Dalai Lama and think ‘What an amazing human being, I could never be like that.’

So what could this vow to ‘save all beings’ mean?   (….to be continued)