69 Precept

In 1975 I had surrendered—

To—

I did not know.

"It requires great trust," Billy added. "Trungpa said it has to be like falling in love."

Hmm.

"So it is dangerous."

Hmm.

"You are my main living authority on the subject of devotion to the guru," I replied.

I thought.

"I defer to you on it."

Would a guru ask for unquestioning obedience?

I wondered.

"That I would not give," I told Billy.

Not even if my teacher performed miracles for me. That's what I liked about Socrates and Krishnamurti. As a teacher myself—teacher with a lower case "t"—there were times when I could see clearly that a student would learn faster if he would shut up, stop asking questions, and just do what I said.

But I did not really want my student to do that. My teacher if I had one, I added, would invite and welcome my questions. If he did not, I explained, I would look for a guru who did.

"I agree that we should never violate the truth that we see in our heart of hearts," Billy replied, "and I think a real teacher would not require that."

Our talk of teachers evoked again in me questions of ethical conduct. It was the precepts that had been of most help to me in my practice. I had begun with nonviolence, dedicated myself to telling the truth, then given up or tried to give up the desire for wealth, and so on. It had been the precepts also that seemed of most assistance to me in evaluating teachers.

Jesus—

Why had Jesus condemned deluded sinners to eternal torment in hell?

Trungpa—

Why had Trungpa been addicted to tobacco and alcohol? Even Billy thought it was that combination that killed him just as it had killed our dear friend and mentor O'Malley.

Gaskin—

Why had Stephen Gaskin smoked pot and arranged two-marriages and four-marriages and more? Gaskin had suggested that so long as we were totally honest about it we could enjoy free love and marijuana and still be enlightened. Though in part it had been this suggestion that first attracted me to his teaching I had come through painful personal experience to understand this permissive creed to be a mistake. I had fallen in love and I had remained in love. In our marriage Ruth had at least twice considered leaving me, but I had never once seriously considered leaving her. Still in love with her, I was a monogamist—and although I smoked marijuana for years and loved it my interest in it dwindled, I finally quit and, though I was not judgmental and supported its decriminalization, in retrospect I did believe that it, too, and Gaskin's encouragement of it to have been a mistake. My days of getting drunk and stoned and chasing women were over. I was certain. In a book I had read—I forget which—a Buddhist had listed the five precepts he said were most important.

No killing................... reverence for all life.

No lying..................... honest and open.

No stealing................. respect for property.

No adultery................ ethical sexual conduct.

No intoxication.......... lucidity.

I understood that they were not absolute.

Except for two or three minor instances even as a child I had not been a thief and as an adult I had been too much a Marxist to steal or even to consider cheating on my taxes.

On the other four precepts I scored less well.

Killing—

Though I could not imagine myself bombing a city I had failed as a vegetarian and now did again eat meat. More than once I had required the service of an armed policeman.

Lying—

For years now I had tried every day to speak the truth but I knew that honesty and sincerity were not necessarily truth. I could only try my best to be honest and—when I and others failed—to be quick to apologize and quick to forgive.

Intoxication and sex I had indulged for years—alcohol and marijuana even after my awakening—but that all looked different to me now. In short these precepts now seemed right to me after all, but my saying so in my typically curt and arrogant manner could not help but put my friend Billy on the defensive. His root guru had been a notorious smoker and drinker, a user and an abuser of illicit drugs, and also according to some a sexual libertine.

Billy and I had ourselves once been little different.

Dumb fuckers.

"The precepts have never been of crucial importance to me," Billy said.

Hmm.

"But for periods of time I have taken the vows as a way of watching my mind."

I understood.

Billy did acknowledge the truth of the precepts if taken properly to heart, but growing up in the Church of Christ, he explained, had made the precepts look too much like fundamentalism to him.

"My precept if I have one," he said, "is to choose to wake up."

The very next day Billy wrote to apologize for his possible insensitivity in dismissing the precepts.

I was glad he did.

His note put a stop to some endless circular cogitation in me that his remarks had inspired.

I had to admit to a sentimental attachment to the precepts. It had taken my friend John, in his version of Gaskin's version of Suzuki's version of Buddhism, four years of arguing with me just to persuade me that telling the truth—in the sense he meant it—was even possible. Then—once I committed to it—that scrupulous attention to listening, to meaning, and to honesty educated me in the power of silence; and, when the marvels of consciousness made me fear for my sanity and wonder if I might get so lost that I could hurt somebody, it was the principle of nonviolence that unlocked and opened the door to heaven.

Now in my email to Billy just the recollection and recording of these past events ignited in me a kind of hysteria in which I felt like crying and laughing at one and the same time.

Buddhist practice—my own amateurish version of it—had consisted of twenty years of my trying to regain and to maintain my ordinary beginner's mind and to let go of the wonder and the awe and the private personal subjective experience to which I had remained attached. In the years after I left Reunion I told almost no one—I learned the hard way that trying to communicate it was counterproductive because the "I" kept getting in the way—yet still on the inside I sometimes felt like the pitiful woman I had seen on television who could convince no one that she really had been abducted by aliens from another planet, transported to another realm, and then released and returned to her normal life here on earth.

"You have to let it go," Billy told me.

Yes.

That I knew.

Yes.

I had tried and tried.