18. Virtue in Rules

The rules and qualities of character that constitute the Buddha’s training in virtue are best seen in his instructions for his monk disciples. This is a point often overlooked in modern Buddhist writings. Given that some exceptional lay people can attain the various levels of awakening, it’s sometimes assumed that the training offered to lay people is the standard, whereas the training offered specifically to monks is superfluous. The decision to become a monk is often portrayed as an aesthetic one: The monk’s life is a “lovely container” for the practice, an option available for those whose tastes run to incense, chanting, and robes.

The Canon, however, makes clear that the life of the monk is designed for those who want to commit themselves fully to the practice unencumbered by the responsibilities and moral ambiguities of lay life. It’s like being trained to run a marathon: It is possible to complete the race if you handicap yourself with extra weights, but it’s much easier to do so if you don’t unnecessarily weigh yourself down. The monk’s life allows you to run the race as lightly as possible.

The image of running a race doesn’t come from the Canon, but the Canon does use other images to make the same point. In an image the Buddha often repeated, household life is confining, a dusty path. The life gone forth into the monkhood is the open air (MN 36). In another image, the Buddha compares the householder to a peacock that can fly only slowly, while a monk is a wild goose that can fly fast and far (Sn 1:12).

The training in virtue offered to the monks is the Buddha’s ideal. Even if you can’t follow it, it’s good to know the ideal so that you can understand where you’re placing restrictions on yourself when you don’t or can’t follow the ideal.

One of the least understood aspects of the monk’s training in virtue is the body of training rules (sikkhāpada) contained in the part of the Canon called the Vinaya, the discipline. Yet the Buddha gave so much importance to this part of his training that he actually called his teaching, not “Buddhism” or even just “Dhamma,” but “this Dhamma-Vinaya.”

The word vinaya is related to the verb vineti, to subdue. The rules of the Vinaya provide training in subduing the desires and passions expressed in the effluents. Central to these rules is a basic code called the Pāṭimokkha, which the monks listen to every fortnight. The rules contained in the Pāṭimokkha cover a wide range of prohibitions, ranging from rules against murder, theft, and sexual intercourse, to rules governing the proper etiquette in eating your meals and wearing your robes. In addition to the Pāṭimokkha, there are 22 chapters containing hundreds of extra rules governing every aspect of communal life, ranging from, on one extreme, how to use the bathroom and clean your hut, to how to conduct communal business on the other.

The severity of the penalty for breaking a rule varies with how serious it is. The strongest penalty is permanent expulsion from the monkhood. More intermediate is a period of penance. The lightest—and this applies to the vast majority of the rules—is having to confess the offense to another monk.

The rules perform an important function in that they remind you that the battle you take on in your determination to reach awakening isn’t engaged with desire in the abstract. It’s continually engaged with specific unskillful desires, large and small, on a day-to-day basis. Some of the rules are focused on minutia because desires focused on minutia can grow larger if they’re undetected and left unchecked. The rules help to make sure that your general aspiration for skillful behavior is an honest, truthful aspiration, and not just a vague, empty wish.

The practice of holding to the rules also provides a good opportunity for developing qualities of mind that will be useful in the practice of meditation. You need to develop:

These three qualities then help in the practice of right mindfulness, which is the basis for the training of right concentration in heightening the mind.

Holding to rules that you know are in your long-term interest also develops pragmatic discernment. As the Buddha notes, your ability to talk yourself into abstaining from a course of action that you like doing but will yield long-term harm is a measure of your discernment. The same holds true with your ability to talk yourself into adopting a course of action that you don’t like doing but will yield long-term benefit (AN 4:115). Taking on the training rules gives you practical experience in the discernment that focuses, not on immediate gratification of your wants, but on the quest for happiness in the long term.

However, the act of following rules can develop your discernment in this way only if the rules are clearly designed to promote your long-term benefit. It’s for this reason that the Vinaya introduces the rules in a way that shows how and why the rules serve a good purpose.

Each rule in the Pāṭimokkha is introduced with an origin story. The first part of the story tells of the incident in which a monk behaved in a way that motivated the Buddha to formulate the rule. Some of the stories, as might be expected, are fairly serious, such as the story of a monk killing animals. Others, though, are more humorous—and intentionally so, showing how foolish in an all-too-human way the monk’s misbehavior was. This element of humor in the discipline helps the reader to side, not with the misbehaving monk, but with the Buddha for calling out such foolishness.

When the Buddha learns of the monk’s misbehavior, he calls the monk into his presence and asks him if he really did misbehave in that way. When the monk confesses that, yes, he did, the Buddha admonishes him. This admonishment is the second part of the origin story, and it’s the part that shows the Buddha’s reasons for formulating the rule.

Below is an example of one of his stronger rebukes, which he gave to a monk who had had sex with his former wife. What’s striking—given our discussion of passion and dispassion so far—is the prominent role that passion and dispassion play from the very beginning of the admonition. The Buddha wanted his followers to examine their behavior in terms of the overarching goals of the practice: the subduing of passion, and the attainment of the freedom that comes with dispassion.

The second part of the rebuke deals in terms of personal qualities: those that a monk practicing discipline is to abandon, and those he is to develop.

This was when the Buddha formulated the training rule, after first stating his reasons for doing so.

These reasons fall into three main types. The first two are external: (1) to ensure peace and well-being within the Community itself, and (2) to foster and protect faith among the laity, on whom the monks depend for their support. (The origin stories depict the laity as being very quick to generalize. One monk misbehaves, and they complain, “How can these monks do that?”) The third type of reason, though, is internal: (3) The rule is to help restrain and prevent mental effluents within the individual monks. In this way, the rules aim not only at the external well-being of the Community but also at the internal well-being of the individual.

Knowing the reasons for the rule, a monk can use them to convince himself that it is in his best interest to abide by the rule. In this way, he’s borrowing the Buddha’s discernment to develop his own. At the same time, he’s showing compassion for himself, for his fellow monks, and for the Community as a whole, now and into the future.