Bodhisattva ethical restraints: Vows 4-5

• Vows 4-5 are to avoid:

  • 4. (a) Abandoning the Mahayana by saying that Mahayana texts are not the words of Buddha or (b) teaching what appears to be the Dharma but is not

  • 5. Taking things belonging to (a) Buddha, (b) Dharma or (c) Sangha

Bodhisattva ethical restraints: Vows 4-5 (download)

Note: The first 11:30 of audio and video are silent.

Many years ago, we were translating the prayers in the red book with Geshe Jampa Gyatso in Italy.  It’s very clear in them that some have two parts or sometimes three parts, and to transgress it, you only need to do one part. You don’t need to do both parts. And so, on the third of the root ones, “Not listening although another declares his or her offense,” or part B, “With anger blaming him or her and retaliating,” it sounds like it’s the same situation of somebody apologizing, and then either you blame them and retaliate, or you don’t listen.  But, upon further reading in this book, it seems that part B of the third one is basically striking anybody; it doesn’t have to be in the context of somebody apologizing to us.  It’s blaming and verbally or physically going after somebody. The way it appeared before was like it was part of this thing of somebody apologizing, but as you read on in what Dugpa Rinpoche says, and I checked some other things, it seems like they’re two different things. One is striking sentient beings, and the other is not forgiving them when they apologize.  

By the way, the group in the six-session, I gave you some homework and said to take the short sadhana and write out where the different samaya were. Did you do that?  

Audience: Yes. 

Venerable Thubten Chodron (VTC): Yes?  Was it helpful?  

Audience: Yes. 

(VTC): Yes.  Who didn’t do it?  

Audience: [Inaudible]. 

(VTC): It’s helpful to write it, because then you can go back and make sure that you covered all of them, and you can compare it with the long one and all the different points in the long one.  

I was also thinking in terms of your meditation, thinking about these different precepts. Of course, there’s one way to think about them in a very legal way: what actually constitutes a full offense and what doesn’t. You can think about it that way so it’s very clear in your mind what is a full transgression and what isn’t.  But beyond that, go and look at them in terms of what kind of mental states they are talking about. Look at them in terms of what kind of behavior they are talking about, regardless of whether you’ve done the full one or not.  Like the one about being miserly—it has to be somebody who has asked you in a proper way, and you’re the only person that they can turn to, there’s nobody else. To be a full transgression, those things need to be intact. 

But then, we can look beyond that to: “What areas in my life am I miserly in? How does my miserliness come up in terms of Dharma, in terms of material goods?” And we can use it as a more expansive thing to check into different behaviors. In the one about forgiving, maybe we haven’t completely blamed somebody and dumped on them and said, “What you did was outrageous and doesn’t deserve to be forgiven” or something like that, but maybe inside we really haven’t forgiven somebody.  And maybe, we’re always talking about people who do phony-bologna apologies, so they don’t really believe it. Well, maybe we do phony-bologna forgiving and we say, “Oh yes, it’s okay,” but inside we really want to get even with that person. We really haven’t let go of our anger toward them. 

So, we can use these things to look at various aspects of our mind and how things come up. Especially if you’re doing Vajrasattva, then it gives you more to purify, in case you’re getting bored in your meditations because you’ve gone through the ten non virtues so many times. Then there are all these other kinds of things that actually fit into the ten non virtues. But it’s easy to overlook. It’s very helpful to look at these kinds of details because it makes us more aware.  

Audience: I was thinking about one situation in particular where I think I’ve forgiven him, but it still causes me pain. 

(VTC): Um hum.  

Audience: So, has the forgiveness been complete? Because I do think I have. 

(VTC): So, it’s a situation where you still feel pain, but in your mind you’ve forgiven them.  

Audience: Yes, I can see why it happens. 

(VTC): Yes, you can see why and understand it. I think forgiveness is very much about letting go of the anger toward the person. Now, underneath the anger there could be the hurt. So, to prevent anger from ever coming up again, you also must release the hurt. But whether you’ve really forgiven them or not, that’s only something you can tell. I can’t determine that for you. 

Audience: No, but I’m just wondering if still, for some reason, I haven’t figured out how to let go of the pain there. 

(VTC): Yes.  

Audience: Then is that still harboring something? 

(VTC): Well, what do you think? Is it still harboring something if you haven’t let go of the pain? 

Audience: I guess so. The story is still there, and it’s a bit solid still. 

(VTC): Yes.  So, the story is there, and it’s a bit solid, and we haven’t really let go of the story completely.  

This is where I think the thought training practices are so incredibly valuable. Thought training gives us a way of looking at the situation with a completely different story. It’s like my story—the usual story that my afflictions believe in—is based on all sorts of exaggerations: thinking the impermanent is permanent, what’s suffering in nature is blissful, what’s impure is pure, and what doesn’t have a self has a self. My story is completely based on all those kinds of distorted conceptions and interpretations and things like that. But the thought-training isn’t based on those same distorted conceptions, those same kinds of inappropriate attention.  And so, it’s giving a different story to the same situation.  

You might also try NVC (Non Violent Communication). A way that they have for making your story less solid is to just describe the bare facts without the words that we so often use in literature that evoke emotion and interpretation and so on. I was realizing that the NVC way of describing something is totally opposite to the way you do something when you’re doing it with creative writing or when you’re trying to tell a story that’s interesting to people. There you use a lot of emotion-evoking words.  NVC is more like “I walked in the room, and she was talking to somebody else.”

Audience: That made me so mad! 

(VTC): When you can see it like that, then you can see how angry and how hurt you were. It’s so silly.  Wasn’t it? But see, you describe the situation with all sorts of things: “She knew I was coming in the room. She deliberately wanted to ignore me because she doesn’t like me. She wants to come between me and my son, and this and that, and that.” A whole elaborate thing that was built up there.  Sometimes just describing the situation by using non-evocative words is very helpful.  

And then, we can really use the thought training to look at it from a different viewpoint. The bottom line is, this came about because of my previous actions. If I’m still hurt by something someone did, why was I in that situation? It was because of my own previous actions. That’s the bottom line. So, why should I complain about being hurt if it’s my own self-centered actions that created the cause for that to happen to me? Rather than sitting there moaning and groaning, let’s just learn from the situation and do things differently in the future. But the thing is, we don’t really believe it came about because of our own previous actions. We think, “That’s like a clever little Dharma trick that you do, but really, it’s their fault.”  We just say that so that we feel better, and we look like good Buddhists. “But it’s really their fault, right?”

It takes a lot of work. This is why we do the retreat—to really familiarize ourselves with the different ways of looking at things and to really believe that different way of looking at it.

4.  Repudiating the Mahayana and expounding fallacious doctrines.

Okay, so we’re on number four.  Chandragomin says:

Repudiating the Mahayana and expounding fallacious doctrines. The fourth transgression of the bodhisattva vows is abandoning the Mahayana and propagating false teachings. This misdeed therefore also presents two aspects.

So, you can break it in either way.

For the first, rejecting the Mahayana, the basis or object of our repudiation, is the teaching of the great vehicle. The teaching denied, however, must represent the entire collection of Mahayana scriptures by including both aspects of its doctrine, the vast path and the profound path.

This one isn’t just saying, “Oh, this Mahayana sutra isn’t the word of the Buddha,” or something like that.  This is saying the whole Mahayana path is not the word of the Buddha, or it’s phony-bologna, or it’s just out on a limb; it doesn’t make any sense. So, this is taking the whole Mahayana path, both the profound teachings on emptiness and the vast teachings on developing bodhicitta, and repudiating the whole kit and caboodle. It’s not just regarding one teaching or one sutra.  

What I find interesting is that this whole thing of validating the Mahayana scriptures as valid has been an ongoing historical thing. It hasn’t been going on since time without beginning but getting close to it. It’s been an issue since the early centuries of A. D., when Mahayana first started to become prominent. First, it was more just an option of a spiritual path. Then there began to be more scriptures talking about it. It was only later that it became an actual tradition. At the beginning, it wasn’t. There were different ways that people practiced, and this was one way.  

But as the scriptures started to appear, and it started to become a different tradition, then there were people who said these scriptures aren’t authentic; they’re apocryphal. It means that they’re made up.  There are still many people today who believe that. You go to any Buddhist conference, or you read things in different articles in magazines from different Buddhist traditions—the non-Mahayana traditions—and they’ll say Mahayana was just something that people made up later. They’ll say it’s not actually the teachings of the Buddha. Instead, the Pali canon in the Theravada tradition are the only true teachings. They’ll say that everything else was made up, because it appeared later historically.  There’s been this kind of controversy for centuries.  

But if you’ve taken the bodhisattva vow, you obviously have some faith in the Mahayana. You think that aspiring to become a Buddha is something really wonderful. The bodhisattva path is something fantastic.  The scriptures teaching you how to do that are just so amazing. After you’ve done that, if you then develop this idea that they aren’t really the teachings of the Buddha, then you see how you’re completely undermining your whole bodhisattva practice. That’s why this one is a transgression here.  

His Holiness talks a lot about why he believes that the Mahayana are the teachings of the Buddha and so on and so forth. For some people, this becomes quite a big issue. You find this in some of the scriptures.  They really go into it quite a lot—proving the Mahayana is the words of the Buddha. For some of us, it’s like, who cares? You read the teachings and they’re completely fantastic. I’m not concerned. This isn’t a big issue to me. This is: “Wow! I can’t find anything better than this!” So, the thought of doubting it because historically they appeared later doesn’t even come into the mind.  

The action of abandoning the Mahayana teaching is verbal. It’s accomplished by asserting that the teaching is not Lord Buddha’s, for example.

So, you see how you’re completely giving up the whole basis for your bodhisattva practice if you say that; you’re digging yourself one of those luxury ditches that you’re going to decorate with your rebellious attitude.  

For the second aspect of the transgression—expounding fallacious doctrines—we must examine the object: what is falsely presented as a reliable teaching. And we have to look at the way that doctrine is propagated. A fallacious doctrine is a teaching or philosophy that misleads people. The Great Way, refers to them as “black teachings.” In other words, they’re ones that spark deeds that are harmful to ourselves and to others. They are false in that they appear to represent a spiritual path, but, in fact, they do the opposite.  They reinforce afflictions, such as attachment and anger and invite negative conduct, such as drinking alcohol and making bloody sacrifices. The action involves personally taking pleasure in such a teaching, expounding it and prompting others to follow it.

The Great Way was Lama Tsongkhapa’s text talking about the bodhisattva restraints.

So, it’s teaching something that you’re presenting as the real Dharma, as the real path to enlightenment, but that doesn’t lead to enlightenment at all. Instead, it makes people have wrong views and encourages their attachment, encourages their anger—things like that.  

You can look at any “new age” newspaper and see lots of these kinds of teachings. But something also to look out for is ways that some therapists encourage people to deal with emotions. I remember being at one conference, and they were having people from the audience speak. There was one man who got up and he was saying, “Such-and-such happened when I was a kid. My therapist is telling me that I must be angry. There’s something really wrong with me if I’m not angry. I’m really trying hard to be angry.” It’s that kind of thing. I think most therapists would say somebody who counseled somebody in that way wasn’t really helping the person. But still, I bet there is more than one person whose therapist is telling them how they should feel and discrediting them if they aren’t angry. In that way, they’re encouraging somebody’s anger to come out when maybe the person genuinely doesn’t feel angry.  

False teachings could also be all sorts of misunderstandings about tantra, like “Sex is going to lead you onto the utmost blissful path to nirvana as quickly as possible.” And you can see even in our monastic precepts, it’s very severe if a monastic starts talking like that and says, “Oh, the Buddha didn’t say desire was a hindrance on the path. In fact, it’s good for the path.” If you say that, it’s a very serious offense. If a novice says it then they’re expelled. It’s quite a serious thing. So, this is talking about some kind of doctrine that just encourages people’s wrong views. 

It might be teachings about animal sacrifice and so on. We may think that’s strange, but a few years ago in Nepal there was a huge animal sacrifice. It was horrible, like tens of thousands of animals were killed.  Even sometimes when I’m in southeast Asia, peoples’ families—not really Buddhists, just kind of following some folk tradition—will sacrifice animals.  There are lots of teachings that still exist like that. It’s important to be quite careful of that kind of thing.  

Audience: [Inaudible]

(VTC): You’re talking about a situation where there’s a teacher who is teaching something that’s a bit controversial or acting in a way that’s controversial, and people come to you and say, “What do you think about them?” The best thing to do is to say, “You should know before you go there that what this person is teaching, or their behavior or whatever it is, is very controversial. So, you need to check up very clearly yourself and see if they’re teaching according to the general Buddhist way and if they’re behaving according to general Buddhist ethics. Don’t just believe that everybody who has followers or who calls themselves a teacher has actually understood things properly.” 

It’s better to do that than to criticize the person directly by saying, “You know, they’re really full of phony-bologna.” I usually say, “You should know that there is controversy about this. It would be very good if you don’t go in blindly. But if you really want to go then you should check-up about what the teaching is and what their behavior is. See if it corresponds to general Buddhist teachings.” And then they’re going to go, “How do I know that?” Well, go and listen to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Listen to some other teachers. Read some books by teachers of the lineage. See if what this person is doing or how they’re behaving corresponds with what you learn. 

Because it happens, especially in the West. There are so many teachers and so many different things going on. You could learn this and that and the other thing. And then it’s only after a while that you figure out: “Oh, gee, hmm, I started out with this group or this teacher, and it really helped me at the beginning, but now I’m seeing that how the teacher is behaving, or what’s going on, or that this is not really in accord with the general Buddhist thing. So, I feel like I need to really make that transition and find another teacher and find something where I really feel that this is the authentic stuff.” 

It happens. Because here in the West it’s a spiritual supermarket, isn’t it? There’s everybody around, and you don’t need any certification to teach. Buddhism isn’t really like that. People don’t know Dharma really well. His Holiness says that this kind of thing happens because Buddhism is very new in the West. People don’t know, for example, what is proper behavior on the part of a monastic or on the part of a teacher.  And then you have teachers here, who are out on their own, and don’t have the support of other Tibetans who know how to behave and things like that, so they go off in the field some way or another.  

Audience: [Inaudible]

(VTC): You’re saying that in Germany there’s a union of Buddhist organizations that screen the different groups. No, we don’t have anything like that. And I think it would be very difficult in the U. S. to set up some standard that everybody would agree upon. 

You see, we have so many different splinter groups from every religion that don’t exist in Europe. People would come here because they didn’t like what was going on in Europe or somewhere else. Then they would have their group, and then inside that group they start having different ideas. So, if you have different ideas, what do you do? You just break-off and start another branch. For example, how many kinds of Baptists are there—besides the recovering ones? [laughter] There are Southern Baptists, American—so many different kinds of Baptists. Any religion you look at in the U. S., there are so many different branches that don’t exist in Europe. This is part of our “freedom.” You can break away and start your own thing.  

Audience: Don’t you think it’s also because we’re so diverse? I mean, we have people from Europe and Asia and South America and Mexico and Canada. There’s such a diversity, so it happens.

(VTC): Yes, we’re a very diverse population ethnically and racially and so on. Who moved to America? It was the people who didn’t fit in in Europe, the people who didn’t like the way things were done there. This is the whole energy, yes?  

Audience: The land of misfit toys. 

(VTC): Yes, it started out from Europe. Then people came from other countries—people who didn’t fit in, people who were refugees, people who were persecuted, people who didn’t toe the party line. That’s who came into this country.  

According to one tradition, the first four major transgressions of the bodhisattva vows found in Arya Asanga’s Ethics Chapter, and in Chandragomin’s Twenty Verses, are each further divided into two, making eight in all. However, they are counted in such a way that they constitute the first four of the eighteen major downfalls.

So, even though the first four have two parts, we don’t count them as eight; we count them as four.  

After explaining the four, Arya Asanga then advises his readers to refer directly to the sutras for the other transgressions. Acharya Shantideva took this suggestion to heart and explored the Mahayana sutras for the remaining major misdeeds contrary to the bodhisattva vows. In his Compendium of Trainings.

That’s referring to the Shikshasamucchaya.

He then compiled the transgressions that he discovered, fourteen from the Ākāśhagarbha Sūtra, and one more from the Sutra for Skillful Methods. If we tally Shantideva’s fourteen, Asanga’s four, and add one more, we have nineteen instead of the usual eighteen. In fact, this is not a problem, as one found in the Ākāśhagarbha Sūtra coincides with one listed by Asanga. Having covered the first four, we will now continue with the remaining fourteen given in Acharya Shantideva’s Compendium of Trainings.

5.  Taking what belongs to the Three Jewels.

Number five is from Shantideva, and it says:

Taking what belongs to the Three Jewels. 

This is one of the elements of it,

The owner of the possessions stolen is one of the Three Jewels—the Buddha, Dharma, or Sangha. To commit this transgression, therefore, one possibility is to steal something that belongs to a living Buddha (statues, paintings, or stupas that represent Buddhas), or to symbols of Buddhas, such as the clothes, scarves, ornaments and so on that have been offered to them. Money or anything else that is offered to a Buddha statue, or a stupa is also considered the property of the Buddha in question.

The statues aren’t saying, “This is mine,” and the buddhas in the pure land aren’t coming and saying,” This is mine.” The buddhas aren’t claiming ownership. Still, there are things that have been offered to the Buddha by devotees with pure intention.  Those things belong to the Buddha, and we shouldn’t just appropriate them for ourselves. Temples have to be very careful because often, if you put the donation box right by the altar, it looks like your donation is for the Buddha when actually, maybe it’s for the people living in that temple. I think many Buddhists know that, and they give with that in mind. But still, it’s a little iffy.  

Actually, Venerable Wu Yin goes into quite a bit of discussion about this in Choosing Simplicity. She discusses what a monastic community should do when they have things that people have offered to the Buddha and they’re accumulating.  What do you do? Somebody offers a diamond necklace to the Buddha. Do you keep that diamond necklace on the altar where the Buddha is? Do you just take it and sell it? What do you do with this? Because people do offer things to the Buddha in that way. Or when we’re rolling mantras for statues, people will bring cloth and say this is for rolling the mantras. Or they’ll bring paper, or they’ll bring jewelry—all sorts of things. They are offering those directly to the Buddha.  So, we shouldn’t say, “Well, you know, Buddha can’t use that, and I can.” 

As a monastery, you have to really sit and deliberate about this. For example, imagine if somebody offers a diamond necklace to the Buddha, but you would like to build a new temple. Venerable Wu Yin is very clear that if you take the diamond necklace and sell it, the money used from selling it should be used for something to do with the Buddha. It shouldn’t be something to do with us but rather something to do with the Buddha. Now, sometimes offerings are damaged, and we have to take them down. They were offered to the Buddha, and we have to take them down because they’re damaged. It doesn’t mean that you just let everything collect dust on your altar because it was offered to the Buddha. What about fruit that is offered to the Buddha? We should see ourselves as the caretaker of the altar. We are taking care of the Buddha’s possessions. So, we take it down. The Buddha gives his permission for things to be distributed afterwards, and for people to eat them.  

What I notice sometimes in some places in southeast Asia, people will bring an offering and put it on the altar. Then after the teachings, when it’s time for refreshments or potluck lunch, they just take it down and give it to everybody. I used to say to them, “Well, you’ve got to look: are you actually offering that to the Buddha? Or are you just putting it on the altar until you feel like eating it?” So, we can eat the things that were offered to the Buddha, but when we offer them, we should really offer them. When we take them down, let’s have some awareness that it’s something that belonged to the Buddha, and that the Buddha is sharing the offering with us to eat. It’s not just “I’m taking it down because I’m hungry now.”

The second possible owner is the Dharma Jewel—the Dharma either as scriptural transmission or as spiritual realizations.

Remember I was talking the other day about the Dharma—the transmitted Dharma and the realized Dharma.

An example of something owned by the Dharma as scriptural transmission would be the Dharma books themselves, the cloth covers in which they are sometimes wrapped, the materials used to produce such books, or the money offered to print them, as well as any offerings placed before them.

The transmitted Dharma is the meaning of the scriptures. So, the things that could be offered to that transmitted Dharma could be the books, the book covers, the bookshelves, or any of quite a number of different things. And again, we shouldn’t just take these things and use them for other purposes. Now it might happen that you build bookshelves for the Dharma and then later you renovate your temple and there’s new bookshelves. Does that mean you can’t use the old bookshelves for anything else? This is the kind of situation where I would think that you would ask the permission of the Dharma and say, “We got something new that is better, and this is old, so may we take it and use it for some other purpose?” Try to have some purpose, as much as possible, that has to do with the Dharma, and not just making it where we put our sci-fi novels or something.  

It’s similar with money that people offer to print books for free distribution. That money should be used to print the books. If you don’t use it for that purpose, then you contact the donor and you say, “We already printed the books. This and that was left over. Can we use it for x, y, and z?” The same thing could go for something that was offered to the Buddha. You can always contact the donor afterward and say, “You offered this diamond necklace, but we don’t really feel comfortable leaving it on the altar because we don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Would it be okay with you if we used it to fill a statue, or sell it, and make something nicer for the altar?” You can check with the donors and ask.

As for the property of the third jewel, the Sangha, this refers to anything belonging to a single member of the Sangha who is an arya.

Here, for the Sangha, we’re talking about either an individual who is an arya—who’s realized emptiness directly—or to a group of a minimum of four fully ordained non-arya members of the Sangha, so four non-arya bhikshus or bhikshunis, which we now have at the abbey.

Is it necessary to steal from all Three Jewels to commit this transgression? No. Taking something that belongs to any one of them without permission is sufficient.

This is one that can be very easy to do when you’re staying at a monastery. There are things that belong to the monastic community, but you think, “Well, nobody’s going to miss this. I can take it.” Or you just take something without asking. They always say it’s much better to ask somebody in the community if it’s not your community. If you’re a monastic and you’re in that community then if you take something, it’s not a full transgression because you already have partial ownership of it, but it’s still a partial transgression. If you’re not a member of that community—you’re a guest—then it’s easy to do this. I talked to one woman, for example, who used to be the person who managed the money for one temple because the monastics themselves didn’t do it. She said that she always put in a little bit extra in case she had accidentally miscounted or misused something. So, this is talking about that kind of thing.  

Otherwise, it’s just always good to ask. Of course, if you go in the bathroom please use the toilet paper.  You don’t have to ask every time. But we shouldn’t just go and take supplies for our own personal use. If we take supplies because we’re using them for the community then that’s fine. But if we’re taking something for our own personal use, then that’s not so good, like going in and taking stamps that belong to the community—stuff like that. It could be a lot of different things. It is always good to ask. Then, if you receive permission, it’s very clean and clear. 

Next, we shall consider the substance stolen. The property may consist of real estate, food, drink, clothing, and means of transportation—in fact, anything that has been dedicated to one of the Three Jewels. The Great Way says that no minimal amount of stolen property is specified in the commentaries; however, if we use our reasoning power, it would be logical to apply the same amount indicated for the vows of individual liberation, which is at least one unit of the local currency. Therefore, taking anything more than at least one unit of local currency is considered theft.  

Now, perhaps that’s the standard in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya: one unit of the local currency.  As Venerable Wu Yin taught it, and practices in the Dharmaguptaka, it’s something of value such that if it was taken, the law would be involved. It wouldn’t just be one dollar or something worth one dollar. It would be something that was more valuable, like taking the computer or something like that. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to take other things that are small. But at least don’t take the big things.

Regarding the matter of possession, a Buddha statue will not assert its ownership like a living person would do. Therefore, awareness of ownership on the part of the owner is not a criteria. The rule is that the object in question has been offered by someone to one of the Three Jewels.  

Another way in the Sangha that they really emphasize is don’t take something that belongs to the Sangha and give it to your friend so that your friend will like you. We have a little gift closet. We may put our own things in it. But we have a community policy that if you’re the one who put something in and later you decide to give it to your friend, it’s okay to do that. Otherwise, it’s okay for somebody else to give it to, like one of the abbey supporters. Or those of you who came here and are leaving, we gave you little gifts—things like that. We have a common community policy for how to use those things, and in that way, nobody has to worry about stealing things.  

But I know very often when I’m traveling somewhere, the possibility of making a donation will come up, and I won’t have time to ask the whole community. But I feel like every time before, when I asked the community if it’s okay to make a donation to a certain this, that, and the other thing, people have said yes. So, I will go ahead and do it. If it’s something from the Dharma account, that one in particular I have the say over. But if it’s something that hasn’t been offered specifically to the Dharma account, sometimes I’ll write you or inform you about it after I come back, so that people know. It’s not exorbitant sums where people would say, “Ah, you gave away all the money for building Chenrezig Hall. What in the world are you doing?”  [Laughter]  But usually, like when I was in Mexico, I gave something for the people who are supporting the Central American immigrants. Remember I told you about that? Different things like that come up and people are always very happy that we gave something. That, too, is kind of a community policy, so that we can rest assured.  

I remember when you were in Singapore, somebody had given some cookies and said, “Here, this is for everybody at the abbey.” You had so many boxes of cookies. How are you going to fit them all in your suitcase? So, you gave them to different people who came and visited you. With that kind of thing also, I would assume that the community would be very happy that you gave those things away. We certainly wouldn’t expect you to pay seventy dollars in overweight luggage fees to bring home boxes of cookies. I think most people would agree that that was a very nice thing to do. Anybody want those cookies back?  [Laughter]  

As for the subject, if the thieves are monks or nuns or other members of the Sangha, the transgression occurs only when they take something that does not belong to their own community but to another community or to one of the other two Jewels.  

Next, we shall consider the thinking behind the action within which we distinguish the thieves’ identification of the object, and their motivation. Concerning identification, the transgression occurs only if the precise object that they intend to steal is taken. For example, if people wish to steal a butter lamp from a shrine and instead mistakenly take a vase, since they have not stolen the object that they originally intended to steal and their identification of the object is incorrect, the transgression is not complete.  

This applies also to our regular precept of stealing: if you steal something that you didn’t intend to steal, it’s not a complete action. It’s the same with the action of killing: if you wanted to kill this one but you killed that one by accident, it’s not a complete break of the precept or a complete negativity.  

Audience: I don’t understand. It is still stealing.

(VTC): If your intention was “I just want to steal anything” in general then whatever you take, you’ve transgressed it. But if your idea was “I want to steal this object,” but it was really dark and instead you stole something else, then actually, what you did didn’t fulfill your actual motivation and purpose. It doesn’t mean that it was karma-free; there’s still negative karma. But because it didn’t correspond to the actual thing, that’s why it’s incomplete.  

On the other hand, if they intend to steal anything that belongs to the Three Jewels, regardless of what it is, then provided they correctly identify the item as belonging to one of them and succeed in taking it, the transgression is effectively accomplished. The motivation is the wish to acquire, by theft, for personal use, an object that we know perfectly well does not belong to us and is in fact the property of one of the Three Jewels. Note that we must be moved to act by one of the kleshas—

We must be motivated by one of the afflictions.

—and intend to use the stolen article for ourselves. In other terms, if it is compassion that inspires us to take something that belongs to one of the Three Jewels and we intend to use it to help someone in need, although it is a serious offense, it is not a major transgression.  

When it’s talking about motivation here, I’m thinking of the cultural revolution during the communist takeover. Also in Tibet, many things were destroyed and many things were taken from the monasteries.  Some of the things that were stolen then later appeared on the free market in Hong Kong for people to buy. So, people who stole things from the monasteries with the intention to sell them and make a lot of money—that’s definitely stealing from the Three Jewels. Someone else, on the other hand, may have taken a statue or a text or something from the temple because they didn’t want it to be destroyed. I’ve heard of people burying things or hiding them in some way. That clearly is not an act of stealing from the Sangha because their whole motivation was to protect the holy objects. And it was done out of respect for the Three Jewels, not out of personal concern. 

Audience: There is a market in China where Tibetan people sell things, but I don’t know where they come from. I bought a little buddha they were selling.  I think inside were some papers. 

(VTC): Yes, it was like a prayer wheel that’s going around, with papers inside?  Uh-huh.  

Audience: They were selling that. I bought some, thinking I can conserve it, but what do you think is better? Is it appropriate to give it as an offering to the Sangha? Because I don’t know where they come from. 

(VTC): Yes, so you bought something. 

Audience: They were selling a lot of things, like buddhas and many things, but I don’t know where they came from. 

(VTC): I encountered this, too, up in the mountains in Nepal. People will have their cloths on the ground with many holy objects, and they’ll just sell them and barter them and things like that. And your question is, do you buy those? Or if you buy them, should you give them to a temple, because we’re not really sure where they came from? That one’s really difficult, because there might be some people who actually want to sell those things because they need the money, but according to many of the lamas, to take a holy object and sell it with the intention to earn money is extremely negative karma. And, with Zopa Rinpoche, if he knew that somebody earned their livelihood through selling holy objects with the intention just to make money, he wouldn’t even accept food from them because there would be such pollution involved. 

But it’s hard because we don’t know what the motivation is of the people selling the things. We don’t know the origin of the things. So, I don’t know. The best thing I can come up with is, if it’s a holy object, and we think we can, “give it a good home,” in the sense of really restoring it to its position as a holy object and not just an object of commercial business, then we’re doing something good.  

Audience: Yes, because the thing I got, I don’t think it was something from a temple, but really, I don’t know. 

(VTC): Yes, right. But it could be. There are many people who make statues of the Buddha; they make these things and then sell them. 

Audience: But the best action is to maybe go with someone that really knows and find out if it is an original, and then maybe give it. 

(VTC): If you can research and find out where the object came from, if it was something stolen or not, that’s the best thing to do. I doubt that many people who are selling religious objects will tell you that it was stolen. [Laughter] I doubt they’d tell you that they got it from somebody else who stole it. So, we really don’t know. But I think what is most important is our own motivation that we see it as a holy object and want to treat it as such. And if we ever find out, for example, that it was stolen and what temple it was stolen from, then we would be very happy to return it and give it back. 

Audience: I think at that moment it is difficult to know. 

(VTC): Yes, you don’t know.  

Audience: But then, where did you get the buddha that time we went to Washington D.C. and people were selling them?

(VTC): That’s what I said: many people make buddha statues, and then they sell them. 

Audience: They’re good? 

(VTC):  We always said this to our teacher, too: “But if they didn’t make them, how would we have them?”  I guess what happened in old Tibet was they commissioned a statue, a person made it, and you gave them an offering. So, by giving them an offering, they’re not charging you a price and treating the statue as a commercial article. That’s very often what we do with our Dharma books out there. We say, “They’re freely offered. You’re welcome to make a donation to the Abbey.” We don’t say, “To the Abbey for the book.”  We just say, “To the abbey.”  If somebody writes a check for a book, then we put it in a special Dharma account, because they gave it for a book. But if they don’t do that, then we treat it as a regular donation. In our hearts, we feel like we’re giving the books away. So, the people, like in D.C., who are selling it for a price, they’re clearly doing it with the intention to make money. And according to many of the lamas, that’s to treat a buddha statue in the same way you would a used car; something in your mind isn’t functioning correctly.  

Audience: So, what should I do with my statues? 

(VTC): You can keep them, yes. It’s fine from your side as the person who purchases—you’re not creating any negativity. I remember we used to say to our teacher, “But we’re helping somebody else to create negativity,” and they said, “No, you have to differentiate between your motivation, which is to have a holy object to create merit, and their motivation, which is to earn money for their own personal use.” At least that’s what the teacher said when I asked him. 

Audience: Maybe they’re really generous with what they do, and they help. 

(VTC): Yes, we have no idea. We have no idea what’s going on in peoples’ minds. People purchase things, and most of these things were given to somebody who gave them to us or were purchased by somebody who donated them to us. Because we live in a totally different economy now than we did in old Tibet. It’s so different, because in old Tibet you would have a wealthy person who would commission these things, and then they would belong to that wealthy person. You didn’t have a middle class of people who would go out and buy things for themselves. It was a totally different economic system. And you would know the person who painted, and they would come and paint there, maybe where you live, and you gave them room and board and then some kind of offering at the end.  

Audience: I also shared on the BBC last week something that came up from me thinking about refuge—on the reliance part of the four opponent powers. In the West, we have quite strong minds of acquisition, the consumer mind. We have all of these magazines and the internet. We have thousands of holy objects at our beck and call to possess. How do we actually make that transaction? Is it to inspire our minds? Or is it to go with growing the paraphernalia of Dharma material that we have now—the whole interior design that our apartment is made of? 

Not so much now, but when I was in Seattle, I had a little bit of my mind on how people would think of me. Would they be curious about what I had on my wall? It’s the whole thing about attachment to reputation because of your prayer flags out in your garden. People would think you’re cool because you’re Buddhist. It’s the mind that we sometimes have being consumers in the world. It’s so easy to acquire without thinking. 

(VTC): It’s always best to really check our motivation: “This isn’t just another possession that I’m getting so that I have a bunch of nice things.” 

Audience: I have a buddha that I bought in the mall, in a market, or something like that. Those things are massively made. Is it fine? 

(VTC): That’s fine, yes. You’re getting something with a pure mind that wants to have an object to put on your altar to inspire your mind. What I’m talking about is people who make objects for the purpose of earning their living with the intention of “I want to make as much money as possible off of this object by charging as much as I can to somebody.” That’s talking about the seller’s motivation. 

Audience: Somebody I know was telling me about a Dharma sculptor.  So, could it also be a sculptor who makes a sculpture for the purpose of sharing the Dharma with people? 

(VTC):  If you’re an ordinary artist, and you make some kind of sculpture, that’s your own personal business, and you can sell that to earn a living. But it’s different if you’re making buddha statues with the thought that there’s no difference between a buddha statue, a used car, and a computer: “I just happen to have these to sell because I want to make a buck.” That’s what we’re talking about—that attitude. 

There’s one more paragraph in this little thing, let me just read that.  We didn’t get so far today.

The act of stealing can be accomplished in various ways. We can do the stealing ourselves or have somebody else do it for us. We can take the object stealthily or use force. We can also obtain the desired object by deceit; for example, by first borrowing a book and then hoping that the person we have borrowed it from forgets that we have it. The karmic path is complete the moment we think ‘now it is mine. ’ Up to that point, the theft is not fully accomplished.  

If you’re wondering why we ask people to just read in the room where the guest library is, it’s because we’ve had a lot of our Dharma books disappear because people just take it with them to their room.  When they pack, they put it in their suitcase, even though there’s a sticker saying Sravasti Abbey, and they take it home with them. Once it’s home, they say, “They have enough books, and it’s going to cost too much to send it back to them,” or “They won’t even notice.” And they start thinking, “It’s mine.” So, we’re trying not only to clutch onto our books but also to prevent people from creating some kind of negative karma by just taking something and then considering it theirs afterward. [laughter]  

Audience: I’ve been carting around a book for ten years that I borrowed from somebody. I don’t consider it mine. It’s The Dhammapada. But I don’t know who I borrowed it from and can’t give it back. 

(VTC): Oh, so you don’t know who you borrowed it from?  

Audience: And every time I see it, I think, “That’s not my book, but…”

(VTC): Oh, but you can’t remember. I don’t know what to tell you then. Just keep in mind: “Well, I can’t remember, and if somebody comes and says, ‘Do you have my Dhammapada?’ then I’m going to give it to them.