Buddhist Romanticism

Romantic assertion that feelings of love and compassion on the one hand,
and Oneness on the other, can give a person adequate guidance to skillful
behavior doesn’t hold up to experience.
An attitude of love and compassion—on its own, and uninformed about
how actions work out over time—is not enough to prevent actions with
harmful consequences. Good intentions are not always skillful intentions.
So the precepts act as reminders of what skillful kamma actually is, and
they express their message in a concise form, easy to remember when most
needed, i.e., when events are urgent and confusing, and give rise to
conflicting emotions or conflicting ideas about what a skillful action might
be.
Similarly, an attitude of Oneness—that other people are One with you—
is hard to maintain when those other people are trying to kill you and your
loved ones, or steal what you need to survive. And yet it’s precisely in
situations like those that you need something clear to hold onto so that you
know what, in the long run, is skillful to do, and you have the strength of
character to do it.
But the precepts do more than simply counsel against unskillful
behavior. They are also aids in developing concentration and discernment.
If you follow them carefully, you avoid actions that will lead to regret—or,
from regret, to denial. A mind wounded by regret will have a hard time
settling into concentration. If it has covered that regret with the scar tissue
of denial, it will have a hard time looking carefully at its inner actions.
Discernment won’t have a chance to arise.
Moreover, if you hold carefully to the precepts, you will find that they
conflict with many of your cherished habits and notions. This gives you the
opportunity to come face to face with attachments lying behind those habits
and notions, which you might otherwise hide from yourself. If you tend to
dismiss the precepts as simply the feelings of one person at one particular
point in time—the Buddha in ancient India—which need to be modified for
today, you will easily make exceptions for your notions and habits. That
will deprive you of the “mirror of Dhamma” that the precepts can ideally
provide.
* * *
• This principle holds true, not only for your personal notions and
habits, but also for those you have picked up from your culture. If you can’t
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