The Cocktail of Karma
Unhooking from the Urge to Distract Ourselves
As a child I was raised as a Roman Catholic where the Ten Commandments were inculcated in us as the rules we needed to live by so God would look favorably upon us on judgment day. Abiding by these commandments made us that much more obedient and fearful of the priests, nuns, our parents, and other authority figures. Whenever I broke one of these commandments, which was often since I was a rebellious kid, I’d express contrition for my sins to the parish priests in a confession booth.
Although there are no commandments, per se, in Buddhism, we do our best to abide by the Ten Grave Precepts. Instead of a confessional box, in Soto Zen, we confess and repent each morning during service by chanting this verse:
All my ancient twisted karma,
from beginningless greed, hatred and delusion,
Born through body, speech, and mind,
I now fully avow.
One of the Ten Grave Precepts that’s included in all Buddhist traditions that I am aware of is the fifth precept of not indulging in intoxicants. When we are ensnared by them, suffering ensues. Even though Buddha nature can never be polluted, this precept reminds me that to be liberated from suffering, maintaining a clear mind is of paramount importance.
I've heard the fifth precept phrased in various ways. Here are a few:
A disciple of the Buddha does not intoxicate mind or body of self or others.
Not giving or taking drugs.
Vow to abstain from intoxicants which cause a careless frame of mind.
Taking up the way of cultivating a clear mind.
Originally pure, don’t defile. This is the Great Awareness.
The word "intoxicate" comes from Medieval Latin root for "toxic" or "to poison." As some of you may know, one of the Buddha's primary teachings is the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and ignorance (delusion). These poisons or unwholesome roots are the cause of human suffering; they generate our harmful or unskillful thoughts, speech, and actions; in short, our karmic conditioning.
It is "ignorance" that is the primary poison that fuels human greed and hatred. What is it that we are ignorant of? Our ignorance is the false view that we are independent and abiding beings that are in control of and separate from the world that we perceive through the six sense gates. In other words, we buy into the belief that there is a solid and continuous me that exists outside of what's arising in life—personally and globally.
Fundamentally our main disconnection is with ourselves: we fail to notice what emotions, sensations and thoughts are arising in our bodies and minds in each moment. For some of us, this disconnection is the result of experiencing some form of physical and/or psycho-emotional trauma in our childhood: verbal, physical or sexual abuse; an illness; an accident; or any event that persistently causes us to turn away from or ignore what's happening.
This sense of separation is both the cause and the manifestation of the poison of ignorance. Like other animals, humans' first impulse is to avoid pain and suffering and move toward pleasure. This moving away can be either harmful or beneficial. If we spontaneously jump out of the way from an oncoming vehicle or push someone else out of the way, this is a beneficial form of avoiding.
However, most of the ways we avoid suffering are harmful: we numb our pain by using illegal drugs and the legal drugs of alcohol, marijuana, painkillers, etc. These are the traditional "intoxicants" that this precept is speaking of. These poisons cloud and dull our sensory organs, most especially the mind. When we're drunk or high our mental faculties are impaired and distorted and we often speak and act in heedless ways, causing harm to ourselves and others.
In our endless quest for sensual pleasures as a way to numb ourselves, modern society has concocted countless ways to intoxicate ourselves: working, eating, and exercising; over consumption of material goods; pursuing wealth and fame and sex; and surfing the net, playing video games, binging on TV shows and films, social media, news, etc.
One question to ask ourselves is when does distraction snowball into addiction? What are we not able to walk away from?
A number of years ago, I was sick on Christmas Eve and was staying at my brother's apartment in New York City. I was on vacation from Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and heading back after the New Year. To pass the time while my brother was at work, I watched the pilot of The Walking Dead. Well, 11 hours later, I had finished the entire first season and part of the second!
Whether the intoxicant is a traditional drug or a technological one, the source of intoxication is, quite simply, the cocktail of karma. We are addicted to this sense of a separate, solid, and continuous me, and its endless, self-centered stories. It's easier to see the consequences—the cause and effect—of what we say and do; it's not always as easy to discern the effect our thinking minds have on our actions and words.
Our “small-me” minds run amok all the time. Unlike the body, the mind is a time traveler: fantasizing about the future and regurgitating the past. It's difficult enough to cultivate continuity of mindfulness as we go about our day without adding additional layers of delusion by indulging in intoxicants.
As Zen practitioners, our goal-less goal is purifying mind consciousness—transforming our unskillful karma so we no longer cause harm and can be of a force of wholesome words and deeds that help unite us in a world that is increasingly divided. Right now, there’s so many reasons to distract ourselves from conventional reality. However, instead of continuing to reinforce these patterns and programs (sankhara in Buddhist lingo) we can deepen our practice by paying careful attention to what's arising for us and meet it with compassion and wisdom. Perhaps we can find refuge in the present moment, in the shelter of our clear minds and awake bodies.
When our “personal” cocktail of karma gets too strong, instead of distracting ourselves by reaching for the TV remote or for a bag of popcorn (my favorite “cocktail”), we could open a window and look at the trees, buildings, and birds. Better yet, we could go outside for a long walk or bicycle ride.
Feeling the breeze on our skin, we know it's the pure breath that sustains us all. Staring at the sky, we know its boundlessness permeates us all. The traps and snares of karma can never defile Buddha Nature—our original face—that is, as Dogen says, “the wisdom that runs through all things.”
Thanks for this post. I live in Paris, where the daily rituals and libations that come with the French way of life are constant. It's interesting to read about the Buddhist interpretation of intoxication coming from a culture that believes so strongly in intoxication, in some form or another, as integral to life. I believe in the power of psychedelics, for example, and have had some profoundly spiritual and positive experiences from them. How might Buddhism account for the ritualization of intoxication, say in ancient tribal cultures that ingest ayahuasca or peyote, or in more contemporary cultures like France, which believes that far from being anathema to the spirit, an occasional libation is in fact at the root of a life well lived?