Part One · Pāli Roots · What the Precept First Looked Like

This book is going to walk a long road—from the plainest of questions asked at the Buddha's feet, "What is the meaning of keeping the precepts?", all the way to the sign-less precept of the Chan school, the precept that sets up no mark. Along the way we will pass through the Vinaya's rules, laid down one by one as cases arose; through the bodhisattva's three clusters of pure precepts; through the precept-substance the patriarchs of China spoke of. But the starting point is in none of those places. The starting point lies somewhere earlier, and plainer.

When most people today hear "the precepts," what comes to mind is a list of don'ts: do not kill, do not steal, do not speak falsely. The list is not wrong; but it is only the corner of the precept that shows above the surface. Beneath that list, the precept the Buddha taught in His day was something far wider, and far more alive.

What Part One does is return to this root.

Four chapters, laid out in order. Chapter one: spread the one word "precept" open and see the three things it carries beneath it—an ability grown into the body, a pair of hands keeping watch at the six sense-doors, a living casebook. Chapter two: see where the precept stands in a person who has entered the stream—the fourth factor, ruled on by the Buddha's own lips. Chapter three: see how the practitioner takes the precepts he has himself kept into being and invites them back into the mind, to recollect them. Chapter four: see where this road leads—when the precept is pure, concentration comes of itself.

Read these four chapters through, and beneath the ever-deepening precept of the twenty-odd chapters that follow—the Vinaya's, the bodhisattva's, the mind-ground's—the grain of one same root will show.

The foundation must be driven firm first. We begin with chapter one.