Having recently signed a 1 year-long contract to consult with my old company, I got to thinking how strange it is to have a deadline to my commitment. For 9 years, I had worked at the same company as a regular employee, but somehow, now, having a time-specified contract, felt different. It got me to start considering how fixed my view of commitment is in general.  I mean sure, I had left jobs, ended assignments and called off relationships in the past. And yet, right up till the last, I had always had a sense of permanence around those things in my heart. Like if you do, you do for life, unless there is a damn good reason otherwise.

It was then that my mind turned to the 8 precepts. Or, more specifically the issue that gnawed at me every year at retreat…everyone else seemed to be taking the precepts, all my friends, all the people I look up to and think ‘good Buddhist’, but I didn’t want to. In fact, even considering taking the precepts made me feel like a fraud. I take commitments seriously, I wont make one till I  believe I can do it totally. Till I feel it is honest. For me it seemed honest, in part at least, equaled forever.

I felt like I wasn’t ready to ordain. I like my lay life, I don’t want to commit myself wholly and completely to my practice to the exclusion of that life. If I commit to the whole precept thing, it should be something I am ready to make permeant, or at least something my heart can accept at any time.

But, to be a bit elementary here — is a permanent view a right view? Really, life is filled with short term commitments. Contracts. Things we agree to, for a time, and then move past. If I am really being honest, isn’t everything in life that way? The idea that I can’t carve out a few days for precepts just because I am not willing to do it for life seems a bit specious.

Of course, there is that second, deeper, issue beneath the nagging feeling, something I wasn’t actually able to overcome, and take the precepts, until quite a few years after this original contemplation (2020 actually): The symbol of wearing white scared me, I didn’t want to need to be so careful with my actions, I feared I couldn’t avoid stains or sins, and I feared everyone could see both in/0n me. I didn’t want to dress the part when I am not the part.

I felt a fraud not just because I couldn’t commit my life to ordination, but because I did not feel like a ‘good Buddhist’, like the kind of person who deserved to be allowed to take the precepts.  I am vain, I am stubborn, I speak harshly, fight with folks I care about, create discord at work, I drink, I swear, I am selfish, wasteful and greedy. I assure anyone reading this post that I am not a perfect person. I am not what I imagine (for what my imagination is worth) a perfect Buddhist to be. But sometime after my contemplations in the 2019 retreat , I began to have confidence in my practice, to clearly see the path and to know that I am on it– if that is not the definition of a Buddhist, I am not sure what is.  I also started training my mind to consider cause and effect more carefully. It was only then that I fully understood the deep flaw in my reasoning: I had cause and effect completely reversed.  My logic was that if I don’t have the effect (ie being a perfectly refined in body speech and mind) I am unworthy of the cause of such an effect (walking the path to becoming enlightened, including taking precepts as I see fit). Putting the cart before the horse isn’t likely to get anyone where they  want to go quickly…