There is so much to how practice unfolds, and so it’s useful to reflect on what is offered by each of the three arms of Buddhadharma practice — meditation, study, and ethics. We practice meditation to unfold and explore natural awareness, usually filled with some sort of content, whether it’s a thought, a physical sensation, an emotional reaction, or looking, listening, dreaming, fantasizing, remembering. These are all mental formations, filling awareness. Sometimes we happen upon open awareness, during zazen or any ordinary moment, which is a sense of timeless intimacy, or uncontained spaciousness . . . where nothing is featured as separate. There is only this.
Study — reading or chanting texts, listening to dharma talks, attending sanzen can clarify and point out confusion and assumptions that get in the way of complete involvement with experience and awareness. Study helps us become more inclusive, so that we don’t invalidate any portion of what we experience, thinking that it’s not part of practice. (life!) Sometimes in studying we realize something that leaves us more completely present and aware. But study can also compound our confusion when we get hung up on particular vocabulary and forget that words simply point to intimate experience that we have access to. We don’t aim to remove ourselves from direct experience or disappear into a conceptual realm separate from it. Which is why it’s so valuable to have a teacher and a sangha to support your practice. We help each other notice habitual misinterpretations and mistaken assumptions.
Buddhist ethics, precepts, describe how to approach our own choices, speech, actions in a way that leads to living with care and wisdom. They help us discern actual, everyday conditions in a way that is measured, grounded in interdependence, and cause and effect, and doesn’t sow seeds for unnecessary future suffering.
