The very first level of practice is to abide by the laws of karma. Buddha’s suggestions: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, and don’t do other negative actions.
The heaviest negative actions are those that harm others, but the reason for refraining from them is because they will harm you by causing you terrible suffering in the future. And, honey, you don’t want that, so back off, mind your own business, and leave sentient beings alone. At least don’t harm, at least don’t harm. This is already tremendous practice – for your sake!
We totally miss this point in the West: we think it sounds selfish. But it’s the first level of practice: renouncing one’s own suffering and its causes.
So there are very skillful ways of doing that. One is – the key one here – is to live in vows. No, two: the key ones are to live in vows and to purify: these are two main practices that are really emphasized by Lama Zopa Rinpoche.
So here let’s look at the logic of vows.
Vows are something we don’t understand – we don’t like vows. We have this punitive view that someone’s sitting on top of us, and saying you must not do that, and if you do it you’re naughty – we have this dumb view.
But actually a vow is something we really do understand. A vow is simply a decision to refrain from something. If we look at it in a simple way, we can see it’s true.
When you learn to drive a car, there’d be hundreds of things that you have vowed you will never do: I will never put my foot on the accelerator at the same time as the brake, I will never turn the wheel left if I want to go right.
I mean, that sounds so dumb, but we know it’s true: you learn these very quickly, and they completely become internal, and you practice them to perfection. That’s a vow!
And why do you vow to refrain from these things? Because you want to become a good driver.
There is, of course, also a list of things that you commit to do. In the teachings they refer to commitments to do something and vows to refrain from something. That’s just how we learn to do everything, except we don’t hear it like that: we just hear it as punitive and punishment, squashing me – it’s so silly.
The Buddha loves his vows. I think Alex Berzin says in the teachings somewhere they talk about a vow being like a subtle physical energy visible to clairvoyants – so potent!
Let’s say we want to store up in our bank vault bucketloads of delicious, rich, strong non-killing karmic seeds, non-harming seeds, non-lying seeds, non-stealing seeds. Why? Because in the future we definitely want the four results of these: 1. a human body, 2. no tendency to kill or steal or lie, 3. no one will kill or steal or lie from you, and 4. you’ll have a good environment. That’s what we want – forget nirvana, bodhichitta! – at the very least we want that.
Good, we’ll say: I’m already not stealing, not killing, not lying, so why do I need a vow? Sure: we’re sitting in this room right now, and we can see we’re not lying, you know – you people aren’t, I’m trying not to – we’re not stealing, we’re not jumping on the wrong partner, and we’re not killing. “I’m being a really nice person now.”
Yes, you are being a really nice person. But the crucial thing to understand is that you’re not creating any karma of those things because the mind is not involved.
We are not killing right now, but there’s zero karma of non-killing leaving seeds, tendencies, in our mind because our mind isn’t having the thought, “I will not kill.”
In order for it to be a complete karma of non-killing, which will be the cause of a human body and those other three results above, there have to be four things in place: 1. a sentient being, a mouse, for example; 2. your mind involved in it, two things mainly, although there’s more to it: 2a. the intention, “I will not kill, I mustn’t harm that mouse,” and 2b. the reason why, the motivation: compassion – those two have got to be there, that’s the mind involved, and that’s the key one; 3. you do the action; 4. result, a happy mouse.
That’s a complete action of non-killing, and that puts a strong seed in your mind. Of the two, intention to not kill and the motivation, the motivation is the most powerful, therefore in this case compassion is the real key to the strength of the karma you create: the stronger the compassion, the stronger the karmic seed of non-killing, and that’ll grow and grow and grow and in the future bring the four results.
Now, we’re not doing that right now, we’re not creating a complete action of not-killing. We’re just being nice people, resting on our laurels from past non-killing – no one’s killing us, no one’s harming us right now because of our past virtue, but we’re not creating any new virtue, just using up our virtuous karma.
How do we create new karmic seeds of not-killing and not-harming in our mind? Living in vows, the Buddha says.
And I think it makes sense. When you decide you’re a Buddhist, when you commit to being a Buddhist, you take refuge first and then you take these five layperson vows: no killing, no stealing, no lying, no jumping on the wrong partner, and, if you want, no intoxicants.
When you do the ceremony you repeat after the teacher you’ve chosen to take refuge and the vows from, “From now until the time of my death, I will never kill, I will never steal” – you say all those five. And then, when you do your purification practice every day, you reiterate that, so you’re strengthening these habits hugely.
Basically, once you’ve got that vow in your mind, because it’s an intentional decision, you’re defining yourself as a non-harming person: it programs you.
It’s like you’ve signed yourself up as a carpenter. You think carpentry thoughts every day, you do your carpentry every day, and you define yourself as a carpenter. You reiterate vows to do non-harming every day – it’s a proactive intentional decision – and you define yourself as a non-harming person, and then you become a non-harming person.
As Rinpoche points out, without a vow, the only time we have the thought not to kill, and therefore create the virtuous karma of non-killing, is when there’s a sentient being in front of us we are trying to avoid killing – and how often in a day does that happen?
But if you have a vow not to kill, it pervades your mind: twenty-four hours a day that you have that vow in your mind, you are ticking over virtuous karmic seeds of non-killing; twenty-four hours a day you are dropping delicious, rich non-killing seeds into your bank vault.
Without living in vows, we won’t get another human life and all the other good results.
In fact, without the power of vows programming our mind and our behavior, we are wasting our human life. As Rinpoche says, “Just being a good person is not enough.”