This talk was given the day before a Bodhisattva Precepts Ceremony (Jukai) for five members of the Boulder Zen Center sangha. After describing the ceremony's lineage papers and the intentional family one joins by receiving the precepts, the talk turns to a difficulty. The grave precepts tend to land as a should, like a parental commandment, in what the talk calls the "structure of should," a morally superior part instructing a guilty one. This structure divides us within ourselves and, in the same movement, from other people, and it offers no freedom. The only door is to discover that—underneath our delusions and superficial desires—we already want what the precepts ask. In Zen the precepts are expressions of the awakening mind. It’s the soft, resonant, kind mind that arises through zazen, where interdependence is felt rather than thought. Because we inevitably lose this mind, the talk takes up trust and repentance, the latter understood as melting rather than self-punishment. It closes by observing that enacting this mind also asks for learned adult skills, not spontaneity alone, and encourages receiving the ceremony as a door into trusting one's own awakening mind.

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Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.