Revd Chris McDermott, Lead Chaplain for the University of Sussex
A horse walks into a pub and orders a pint. When the bar steward asks, ‘would you like a second one?’ the horse replies: ‘I think not’ – and then, poof! The horse suddenly disappears.
You might recognise a bit of Cartesian humour there: Rene Descartes’ famous dictum ‘I think, therefore I am!’ in reverse. I did not want to explain the Cartesian allusion beforehand as that would be putting Descartes before the horse! (Go ahead and groan. Happy to say it is not my joke but one told me by a Physics researcher.)
We are now at number seven in our series on the ten precepts – those pithy descriptions of what we are at our best in the form of ethical guidelines from the Buddhist tradition. The precepts have a universal quality about them that enables them to be read and appreciated across a broad spectrum of traditions. The seventh precept reads:
“Realize self and other as one; Do not elevate the self and blame others”
This precept points us toward the essential sociality of our human nature. It is missed by Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ that is forgetful of language skills enabling thought that is acquired socially within a family, community and wider culture. There is already a ‘we’ embedded in his experience of being a thinking subject. Otherwise, he might have been compelled to modify his insight after the African philosophy of Ubuntu: ‘I am because we are.’
Ubuntu invites to reflect on the degree to which we our individual selves are always shaped in relationship to others and serves, as Kenyan scholar James Ogude asserts, to offer a counterweight against the pervasive and rampant individualism in our wider world. There is also something of this in the views of the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who speaks in terms of us not so much existing as inter-existing. You and I ‘inter-are’. We shape each other out of this interrelationship by way of our direct and indirect interactions. In a sense, if I am what I am it is because you are what you are.
The seventh precept is an advance on the one on which we reflected last month, that invited us to see the positive aspects of the other person and not dwell on the flaws. Here we are asked to acknowledge an even more intimate connection with the other. The connection invites compassion as we recognise ourselves in both the poverty and potential of the other person. In fact, our capacity to be compassionate and kind toward ourselves is foundational to our ability to be compassionate toward the other. It counter-balances our tendency to blame the other as a foil to promoting our own virtues both in our own minds and before the public eye.
Perhaps this orientation will also shape the way those of us who value sacred texts read them: in the story of the Exodus, I will see myself in both the people of Israel escaping slavery and in their oppressors; I am the good Samaritan and the priest and Levite crossing the road to avoid another person’s pain and misfortune; and I will resonate with both Peter and the disciples and Judas. ‘Blaming’ will perhaps fall away as a default strategy when something goes wrong and a larger more nuanced perspective will take its place.
Of course the insight of the seventh precept is not something we can merely take on board as a proposition for agreement but is a consequence of our practice – be that the efforts we take to integrate such insight into our habits of how we see, think and behave towards other or via some explicit spiritual practices, the emerging awareness will be - however imperfect - of an organic interconnectedness shared with the people we meet and with whom we engage. And the whole human family to which we belong.
I am because we are! Had the horse in the opening joke shared such an insight, he might have responded to the bartender ‘yes, and get one for yourself!’ – but, of course, at the expense of any worthwhile punchline.