Three Stretches of the Great Road Are the Precept

2.1 Three Stretches of the Great Road Are the Precept

Sāvatthī, Jeta's Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika's Park. On this day, before the assembled bhikkhus, the Buddha spoke of one disciple in words of a weight He seldom used—weighty in praise.

He said: the bhikkhu Sāriputta is wise—swift in wisdom, keen in wisdom, deep in wisdom; I teach the four noble truths in brief, and he can open them out at length for others, analyze them, display them. Then came two similes of great beauty:

The bhikkhu Sāriputta gives birth to those of the holy life, like a birth mother; the bhikkhu Moggallāna raises those of the holy life, like a nursing mother.

Sāriputta is like the mother who bears: he delivers practitioners into the noble way. Moggallāna is like the mother who nurses: he raises them up and brings them to their full growth. Having said this, the Buddha did one thing: He rose from His seat and went into His chamber to sit in quiet—leaving the whole hall, and with it the topic of the four noble truths, to Sāriputta.

So everything that follows in this Discourse Analyzing the Noble Truths (in fascicle seven of the Madhyama Āgama) is Sāriputta teaching. He spreads the four noble truths open one truth at a time, and when he reaches the truth of the path—the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering—he counts out, limb by limb, the eight limbs of that great road out of suffering: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

And this book of ours, being a book about the precept, will stop at three of the eight: right speech, right action, right livelihood. Because these three limbs are the precept.

The Precept Is Not a Guardrail by the Road

First, a common picture must be turned over.

The image in many minds is this: the noble eightfold path is a road, and the precept is the guardrail along its two edges—there to stop you falling off; auxiliary; negative. But watch how Sāriputta speaks of right speech:

Noble disciples! What is right speech? When a noble disciple contemplates that suffering is suffering, that accumulation is accumulation, that cessation is cessation, and contemplates that the path is the path… therein, apart from the four wholesome verbal actions, all other verbal misconduct he keeps far away from and cuts off—not practicing, not performing, not joining, not meeting. This is called right speech.

The structure of this passage deserves more than one reading. It does not first set up a rule for the mouth and then send a person onto the road holding the rule. It says: while the noble disciple is contemplating the four truths—suffering as suffering, accumulation as accumulation, cessation as cessation, the path as the path—right within that contemplation, the four wholesome actions of speech stand up, and every other misconduct of speech is kept far off, cut away, not practiced, not performed. Right action and right livelihood run on the identical pattern: both open from "when he contemplates that suffering is suffering."

In other words: the precept on this road is not a pass to be secured before setting out; it is part of the walking itself. In a person truly contemplating the four truths, the deeds of his mouth, the deeds of his body, his way of making a living, are of themselves being gathered in—the precept is three stretches of this road's paving, not a guardrail at its edge. Walking the great road, a person does not take one step that does not land on the precept.

The masters who came after saw this layer clearly. The bodhisattva Nāgārjuna, in the Dazhidu lun (Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra), settled it in one sentence:

The eightfold path has three portions: three for sīla, three for samādhi, two for paññā.

Right speech, right action, right livelihood—three limbs for the sīla portion; right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration—three for the samādhi portion; right view, right intention—two for the paññā portion. One great road, divided in three—and the precept holds one of the three. In China, the Great Master Zhiyi put it still more tersely: right speech, right action, right livelihood "belong to sīla and are subsumed under śamatha." Part One said the precept is the foundation—here you see what the foundation looks like laid into a road: three limbs of the eight, one portion of the three.

Keeping Away from Killing Is an Act of Giving

What the precept on the road looks like, the Buddha had one more way of saying—from an entirely different angle: He called the keeping of precepts an act of giving.

In the Aṅguttara Nikāya, the Buddha speaks of "five great gifts." There are five gifts, He says, that are ancient, long-standing, traditional, unadulterated, never once forsaken. What five? The first —

A noble disciple gives up killing, keeps away from killing. By this he gives to countless sentient beings freedom from fear, gives freedom from enmity, gives freedom from ill will.

To keep away from killing is an act of giving. The receivers are countless sentient beings; what is given out is fearlessness—from the day you keep the killing-precept, no being that stands before you need ever fear you again. Keeping away from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, from drink—line by line, every one is a great gift of the same kind.

This way of putting it turns the precept around to face the other way. When we ordinarily think of keeping precepts, we think "what I will not do"—held in, turned inward. The Buddha says: every line you do not do is a giving outward—handing the beings of the whole world a share of safety. Under the precept's negative-looking surface lies an enormous act of giving. The previous volume of this book spoke of giving; this volume speaks of the precept—and in the Buddha's hands, the two were always one thing with two faces.

The Trainee's Carry-Along Equipment

One more passage shows the position of the precept on the road. In the Discourse on the Noble Path of the Madhyama Āgama, the Buddha says:

The trainee accomplishes the eight limbs; the arhat whose taints are exhausted accomplishes the ten limbs.

One still on the trainee's ground accomplishes the eight limbs of the noble path; the arhat whose taints are exhausted adds, beyond the eight, right knowledge and right liberation, accomplishing ten. What the sentence means is this: the noble eightfold path—its three precept limbs included—is the trainee's carry-along equipment, strapped on from the first day of entering the way and worn all the way to the exhaustion of the taints. The precept is not gear for one stage of the road; it is gear on the body for the whole journey.

Part One told how the one who enters the stream is accomplished in the noble ethical conduct; here you see what that accomplishment looks like out on the road: it has dissolved into the three limbs—right speech, right action, right livelihood—and walks the whole way with you.

Down to the Finer Grain

The three precept limbs on the road are the master outline: how the mouth speaks, how the body acts, how a living is made. But an outline must come down into the days, and for that there must be finer items—fine enough for a householder to take up and hold.

Those are the five lines everyone knows: no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no false speech, no drink.

These five, at the rite of reception, are recited side by side as five "abstainings" in a row, and they look like five things of one kind. But look closely at what the discourses say, and the ground each "abstaining" governs is a different stretch of territory. The next chapter draws the boundaries of these five plots of field, line by line.