Precept # 1: I Vow Not to kill, but to cherish all life.

So this will be a series of posts that I will do each week as I take each precept into body and mind. I hope to share my experience of working on the precepts towards the process of taking Jukai as a way to strengthen their meaning and to encourage others to look at the precepts as well.

Precept # 1: I Vow Not to kill, but to cherish all life.

Part A: Our Non-feathered Non Vertebrate Friends
So I started working on this last week during the Rohatsu sesshin at Great Vow Zen Monastery. The first way that this precept impacts me is the most obvious. I try whenever possible to directly respect all life which most often comes in the form of respecting insect life. Unless you work on a farm in some other type of business that deals largely with animals insect life is the most commonly encountered of non human life. Though there are birds at the monastery and I have owned pets my relation to insect life seems the most potent. For starters I can easily and with little thought kill most insects I encounter. They are fragile, small in size, and in most cases people think little of someone who kills insects with the exception of perhaps socially favored invertebrates like butterflies or lady bugs. For socially oppressed bugs like roaches and mosquitoes there are various reasons why people encourage their killing on an individual or mass basis. Because of this insects make a good testing ground for seeing if I truly cherish all life.

So this week I took into account how my relationship to my less back boned friends have changed since starting to internalize the precept of non-killing and cherishing all life. The first thing I noticed is that I will now go to fairly great lengths to save a bug. Including using a paper towel to fish one out of the urinals at the monastery. (The urinals here often turn into deadly bug traps.) I also am very careful when walking outside to try and avoid stepping on bugs that cross my path.

The main downside or other side I see to this is that often in my effort to 'save' a bug I accidentally cause it more harm than I might had I just left it alone. The best example of this is I once tried to save a spider (Spider A) by putting it outside, but I accidentally put it into another spiders (Spider B) web. Spider B then went over to attack Spider A. In an effort to break up the fight I instinctively knocked both spiders out of the web. I couldn't find either after that so I'm not sure about whether I helped or hurt them, but it interesting to see that even well meaning acts can go awry.

It's also easy for me to use this as the token example of cherishing life. I can sometimes find myself saying oh well I cherish all life after all I fish bugs out of the urinal. This is the equivalent to saying I'm not a racist because I have friends of color! When I was working with this precept this was at first focus that came into my head, but I knew I had to look at the question more deeply.

Part B: The life of inanimate objects.

Though this perspective of looking at precept had occurred to me before it impacted me in an interesting way this past week. Though some people might argue that inanimate objects don't have life or sentience I still feel that this precept applies to them. Sometimes the first precept is worded by saying all sentient life, but no matter the wording I think that inanimate objects still hold weight with this precept. For man made objects, to respect them is the respect the effort and work that went into creating and maintaining that object. To treat someones craft poorly is to treat them poorly. As for naturally occurring objects whether or not you believe that have a form of sentience that are a resource and part of the network of all life. Lichen need rocks to grow on, dead wood is often home for many animals, and even things like sand or sludge provide the basis for many forms of life. There really isn't anything that exists that I can see doesn't effect life. To cherish these objects or materials is to cherish the ground from which all life springs.

The way this was brought home to me this week had to do with my sandals. We recently got a new shelf to put all our shoes on at the monastery and my shelf is 3 or 4 from the bottom somewhere between stomach or chest height for me. I noticed that early on in the week as I would head to the Zendo for practice or after changing out my work shoes I was dropping my sandals on the ground to put them on. Normally this is something that I would consider quite natural, but I noticed a certain discomfort in my body about this action. As I investigated what it was I noticed that it had something to do with the first precept. My action was not cherishing the life of my sandals. I was literally feeling the disrespect in my body each time I did this. So I began to gently set down my sandals whenever possible, if I forgot my body got that same feeling again. To me this demonstrated that animate inanimate or indeterminate to cherish life is to cherish all aspects of it and a respect for objects as well as individuals grows freely from the ground of this precept.

Part C Everything Is The Life I Cherish
This leads me nicely into the last discovery I made about the first precept. This is that the life I need to respect and cherish the most is my own. All things that I encounter are a reflection of my own life. If I am critical of myself I will be critical of others. If I wish to harm myself I will wish to harm others. To cherish all life is centered in the concept of cherishing my own life. I can't after all cherish anyone's or anything's life for them, but by appreciating that all things flow into and out of my life I can learn to treat all things with the respect my life deserves. Everything I see, hear, taste, touch, smell, or think is part of my life. To cherish every part of it is to be truly present within this blessed gift of a life. By not being present or seeking for things to be other than they are means to kill or devalue this life.

This first precept contains so much within it. It holds both the gross cherishing of life like protecting bugs and animals, but also the subtle cherishing in which all things are a part of my life. I will continue to investigating this precept further and I vow to try to learn to cherish life in a more wholehearted and subtle ways. I vow not to kill, but the cherish all the life that I am blessed with.

Thank you For Reading
Next Week:
I Vow Not Steal, But To Respect The Things Of Others.