Completion

The Buddha said that all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness in the same way that all the footprints of the animals that walk on Earth can be fit into the footprint of an elephant. Heedfulness covers everything. His last instructions were on heedfulness. But not just on heedfulness. He said bring about completion through heedfulness, but because the rules of Pali syntax are different from those in English, his actual last word was the verb: “bring about completion.”

What did he mean? You can become complete in your virtue, complete in your views. Those are the things you really need to depend on.

Being complete in your virtue means that you hold to the precepts. You make your precepts pleasing to the noble ones, conducive to concentration. They’re pleasing to the noble ones because you hold to them all the time, without exception. They’re conducive to concentration because you don’t let them become a source of dis-ease.

Some people, when they take the precepts, get really worked up about them, about minor infractions. You have to remember, they’re training rules. And, yes, you do want to become comfortable holding to the precepts all the time, but you don’t want them to be a source of worry. So remember you’re here to train to get better and better and better at the precepts.

I was reading recently a statement by some monks from a famous monastery in Bangkok that part of being wise means knowing when to follow what the Buddha taught and when to follow your own discernment. What he was basically doing was giving excuses for breaking the rules. That’s not discernment. It may be clever, but it’s not discerning. When you’re really discerning, you know how to hold to the precepts, even when it’s difficult—in situations, say, when you have some information that someone else would like to have, and you’re pretty sure that they would misuse it: How do you keep from telling them without telling a lie? *That *exercises your discernment. So try to be complete in your precepts.

To be complete in your views means that you hold to the basic principles that the Buddha said are true across the board, everywhere and always: to develop skillful qualities and to abandon unskillful ones; to focus on the question of why you’re suffering, how you’re causing the suffering, and what you can do to put an end to that suffering. The more you develop your right views in this area, the more your views become complete.

You can read about right views and memorize them, but a large part of developing right view means putting those views into practice—practicing virtue, practicing concentration, and then developing the discernment that comes out of virtue and concentration. It’s in this way that you become complete in these areas.

So the Buddha’s last message was not just about being heedful. It’s about not resting until you’ve reached the end. Sometimes we do have to rest to gather our strength, but we’re not resting to leave the path. That’s not what we want. We rest so that we can stay on the path. Then we pick ourselves up and keep on going. That was the example the Buddha set for us, and it’s the example we should hold in our minds. He did what he could to help us to show the way. Now it’s up to us to follow the way and to use our discernment in following it, so that we can become complete in things that really matter.