The Five Precepts—and so much else of Buddhism—struck me as very real, like a quiet voice that grows louder with every echo in world of constant, strident babbling.
By Tim Cooper
I started meditating because:
a) it’s good for your heart
b) it helps to reduce stress
c) it’s supposed to make you really happy, and…
d) it’s a good way to chat up spiritual babes (“hey, I meditate too! Wanna see my thangkas?”)
Then came a time when my innate distrust of all religions was replaced by a kind of anxious curiosity. When this happened, I suddenly broke out in a rash of spiritual shopping sprees. The “mall” had all kinds of brightly coloured products on display, but in the dusty corners of some stores, behind the Lululemon yoga wear, embroidered meditation cushions and elephant headed figurines, I came across a weird product called ethics.
At that time, I was very much in the grip of a kind of spiritual credit card madness, so the ethical part of the all the products on display looked like a nasty computer cable or a cheap peripheral: it didn’t seem to be that important, I could just do without it. What’s much more fun is the spiritual RAM speed, the microprocessor, the video card, all the stuff that supposedly does stuff.
Then one fine day you discover that the cable or peripheral is vitally important, nothing else really works if the cable isn’t plugged in or the peripheral isn’t running. If you don’t latch onto this seemingly minor detail, then you’re damned to living a long life of trying to get spiritual babes to see your spiritual etchings.
Eastern religions are full of numbered lists.
My first encounter with a list of ethics in the spiritual Walmart was the Yamas and Niyamas. Then came Buddhism and the Five Precepts, which coincided with the uncomfortable realisation that being “spiritual” has a lot more to do with what you do to others (and to yourself) than it does with wearing Om Nama Shivaya tee-shirts.
Such lists stop being something to recite to others or print on yet another tee-shirt; they become something that you do.
Resistance may be fierce to begin with. In Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson lashes out with a crushing putdown of an arrogant intellectual spouting off about ethics and human aggression, and calls her a “pompous celibate.” That phrase always stuck in my mind as an example of what I would not like to be or do.
I’m an English, petit-bourgeois hooligan, with an innate mistrust of people sitting in circles with their shoes off and sharing their feelings. I like rugby, chicken tikka masala and the battle scenes in Lord of the Rings. Concepts like renunciation, non-violence, vegetarianism and brightly coloured woollen socks set my teeth on edge, or at least they used to (the socks still do).
I have an inbuilt radar for pompous celibates, and I always scrutinise the smiling, caring mask to find the rabid beast within.
I just can’t help it. This so-called ‘gift’ hasn’t always helped; it’s often led me to me sneer at people whose intentions were anything but bad, and it can easily spill over into cheap cynicism. But it has given me a deep appreciation of authenticity.
The Five Precepts—and so much else of Buddhism—struck me as very real, like a quiet voice that grows louder with every echo in world of constant, strident babbling. I was also getting very tired of scrolling through websites with photos of scantily glad blondes doing poses that would give me a hernia—sites with names like Yoga Junkie, Asana Gipsy, or Mystical Bikini.
Spirituality meets the free market and becomes commodity. There’s no juice there.
The Five Precepts may take a hold of you. You may realise that ethical conduct is not optional. After all, a lying, thieving junk-bond dealer needs to be mindful, but you, you, really do need to get your shit together and change, and five or 10 or 30 minutes of deep breathing, awareness of your cervical arthritis or buying a mystical bikini won’t even begin to do what really needs to be done.
But everything has its price, and a while ago I paid; I got a pistol-whipping from the fourth precept.
“Refraining from false speech,” is a quaint way of saying don’t be a fucking liar. I used to be very good at lying. My response to George Washington after he hacked down the cherry tree and fessed up would have been, ‘well, you cannot tell a lie but I can, you periwigged buffoon, and I will.”
But then, one day I bought a notebook; a nice little black Moleskine© notebook to jot down my deepest thoughts and reminders to not forget to buy the damn milk. It was a beautiful little notebook, but being the brand it was, it was expensive.
What’s more, I got the price wrong and when I went to pay for that little black rectangle of joy, it was twice the price I thought it was, but a bizarre mixture of embarrassment over my mistake and a sudden, deep and instantaneous attachment to what was now my notebook meant that I would mortgage anything just to have it.
So far, so bad.
But then came a phone call from my partner, and that’s when everything got really interesting. She sounded (I thought) judgmental when I said I’d bought a notebook, she sounded (I thought) unhappy about the decision, and when she asked me about the price, I lied. I said it was half the price it really was. She swore in Galician, and said “I wouldn’t spend that much money on a notebook.” I felt bad.
There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Bart destroys Lisa’s pride and joy—her new hat.
Being Bart, he denies all knowledge of where the hat might be. From then on, he’s pursued by a large, snot green version of himself who’s his guilt complex. The brute just gets bigger every time he lies about that hat. I almost hallucinated a snot green version of myself sitting next to me on the park bench where I’d stopped to talk to my partner. It followed me all the way home. It sat next to me in my office, it even followed me to the bathroom and watched me, tutting and shaking its head.
To cut a long story short, I just knew this was not the way. I just knew it.
Those damn precepts had wheedled their way in. So, I told her the truth, like a kid, head down, mumbling “you know about that notebook…”. After hearing my confession, she burst out laughing, and we had a long conversation that went something like, “I thought that you thought…” My, how we laughed. I felt like a complete dick.
She didn’t care about the damn notebook. She likes me to buy nice things that make me happy, she knows I work hard for not much money. She just prefers to spend her money on other stuff.
The madness that the mind creates. A ceaseless, turbid whirlpool. No wonder the Buddha proposed the Eightfold Path and the Five Precepts. It’s hard enough as it is without making it any harder by behaving like a blockhead.
The snot green giant looming in a corner of the living room finally disappeared in a puff of sulphurous smoke. One of the first things I wrote in my new notebook was “write a piece about the five precepts and the notebook for TTB.” But before that I wrote, “You cost me a fucking fortune. You’d better earn your keep.”
Beware of the five precepts…
To be continued…
Tim Cooper is a more or less practicing Buddhist and recovering alcoholic who’s lived in Spain for over half his life. After many years of stumbling about in the lush gardens of Buddhism, picking one flower here and another flower there, he finally settled down and is trying to make sense of it all in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and generally trying to be a bit nicer. He works as a translator, teacher and facilitator with fellow ex-drunks. He likes flowers, rugby, bad science fiction films and cooking. He also likes to think he writes like Hemingway, but the rejection slips tell another story.
Photo: Pixabay
Editor: Dana Gornall
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