Precepts Study

THE PATH OF PRECEPTS STUDY AND PRACTICE

The entirety of the Zen path, of our lives, and of all life, is wholly relational through and through. The awakening way recognizes this and accords with it. Study and practice of the Precepts is training in this deep relationality. This relational training in the Precepts welcomes and opens us to a life of Vow, vitalizing our wakeful way with compassion and wisdom, responsiveness and responsibility.

A classic of Zen Buddhist teaching: Ordinary people live being pulled by their conditioning, Bodhisattvas live led by Vow. Precepts study deepens our understanding of the Bodhisattva vows and our relationship with them. We invite these wholesome ways of relating into our lives as an opportunity for self-study. Engagement with the precepts provides an opportunity to see our conditioning more clearly and examine ourselves and situations closely. We can also then meet ourselves, meet our true nature, meet others, meet situations, meet all things in ways which support our continued commitment to waking up and growing up (and down and around, boundlessly). This continually unfolds through our study that we might be further enfolded by it.

Precepts Study will be infused with a strong heart-centered practice orientation for everyday life. In this spirit, you will engage in a full range of feeling, sensing, relating, connecting, reading, discussing, thinking, critical reflection, and action in order to:

• Participate in movement toward individual and collective wholeness. 

• Deepen inquiry into life.

• Explore how the Precepts as Bodhisattva vows can lead us toward more wholesome, wise, compassionate, and connective conduct.

• Examine patterns in our life, the habits and conditioning that push and pull us and can keep us caught in a dream of self. The Precepts serve as mirrors.

• Become familiar with a variety of classical and contemporary expressions of the precepts.

• Attain perspective on the Zen tradition and how we might express it.

• Experiment with voluntarily taking up the Precepts as “training rules” during the course.

• Formulate your own personalized expression of each precept in a way that is most alive to you and supportive of your practice. (This can naturally take different shapes through continued practice).

• Discover a regular daily practice rhythm that supports you, your relationships, your life, and your offering to the world. (This includes our foundational practice of zazen.) Engage in deepening regular practice and study. We can be practitioners and students every day.

• Enrich our experience of one another as Sangha.

• Investigate, engage, study, reflect, and practice meeting each precept with these questions:

• What is being expressed?

• What is being embraced?

• What is being embodied?

• What is being renounced/relinquished/released?

We are choosing to take up a period of practice, study, and training in which we’ll bring some extra intensity and intention. Just this form alone can already help us to see ourselves more clearly.

On giving it all during this course of study and practice: The greatest resources required will be your invaluable effort, energy, and time. Though the cost of the course is “as close to free as possible”, give your all freely, as much as you possibly can. Offer your whole life to the study and practice. In this sense, perhaps study of the Precepts costs everything. And it’s still a great deal! 

Awakening Together Zen Community completed a study of the Precepts in 2022.  

Please let us know if you are interested in a future study of the Precepts.