Dear Still Water Friends,

After our meditation period this Thursday evening we will recite the Five Mindfulness Trainings. Our program will focus on the First Training, on cultivating compassion:

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life.

What is the connection between ‘protecting the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals’ and our own happiness, our own spiritual development? In short, Why not kill?

In a 1997 Dharma talk on "The Energy of the Bodhisattavas," Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that our liberation from suffering is why we practice:

The business of the sangha is to practice liberation. It’s not to build temples or to do social work, but to practice toward liberation, and to train in liberation. That training, that practice has only one aim, that is to undo the knots in the ropes which tie our body and our mind: our anger, craving, ignorance are ropes, jealousy is a rope, etc. and they bind us. We have to be liberated from these things. The aim of our practice is liberation, and this training is to bring us freedom. Who are you practicing liberation for? For yourself. And to help others to liberate themselves. And that will bring you peace and joy, and bring peace and joy into life.

When does cultivating compassion, protecting life, and not killing contribute to our liberation, our ability to untie the knots in the ropes binding us? And how? And when not?

(The Vietnamese Zen Master Nhat Dinh, after serving as the abbot of a national temple, retired in 1843 and built a very simple temple, not much more than a hut, where he lived with his mother. When told by a doctor that his mother needed fish for her health, he went to the market place, begged for a fish, and carried it back to their quarters. People gossiped about him: Why was a Buddhist monk carrying a fish from the market? But as Thich Nhat Hanh notes in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings, "Someone of Master Nhat Dinh’s realization could do as he pleased without going against the precepts." The simple temple became Tu Hieu Pagoda, Thich Nhat Hanh's root temple.)

Warm wishes,

Mitchell Ratner
Senior Teacher