What is not to kill? When you meet a sentient being, to give complete attention to that sentient being, to be totally devoted to your friends, to your family, to your dog—that’s not to kill, and that’s what life is. If you practice like this, you will instantly be promoted from an ordinary human being into a Buddha. Devotion is instant promotion. But it must be total. You can’t be holding back even a little bit. Put your entire life into this being or this activity, without expecting anything. Stay close and do nothing, and you will instantly become a Buddha, because that’s what a Buddha would do. That’s what not to kill means.
    Dogen says, “Life is not killed.”1 Not killing is not something you do, exactly, it’s just the way things are, and your practice, then, is just the way things are. If you examine life thoroughly, you’ll see that it’s entirely interconnected. You cannot cut off an interconnected thing.
    Life is not killed. This is a transcendent statement, not just a prohibitory one. Another translation of Dogen’s commentary is, “One must not cut off life,” and this matches our usual understanding of the precept. “Life is not killed” is very different from “One must not cut off life.”
    In the latter translation, Dogen Zenji is like a kindly grandmother, showing us a step-by-step practice by which we will become Buddha. But the way I’m reading the precept, it’s not a step-by-step practice. It’s a practice that’s already over; Buddha has already happened.
    Bodhidharma said, “Self nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of everlasting Dharma, not giving rise to the concept of killing is called the precept of not killing.”
    I think this means when the mind does not believe in the concept of killing, life is not killed. And because life is not killed, the mind can rest completely in its nature, which is not to have a view of killing.
    If life were killed, how could the mind rest? The mind is life. And in the mind at rest, life is not killed. Buddha’s mind is so stupid it can’t think of such a clever thing as to cut off life. If Buddha could figure out how to do it, then Buddha could be a murderer. This is Bodhidharma’s instruction. This is Dogen’s instruction.
    Kyogo, one of Dogen Zenji’s direct disciples, wrote a commentary on what Dogen Zenji said about the precepts. “Living and dying are not before and after,”2 he says. And the Buddhist precepts and Buddhist teaching, too, have nothing to do with before and after. We don’t reject the world and say there is no before and after; human consciousness is involved in before and after. But there’s another way, called Buddha’s way, which is not about before and after.
    Kyogo says, “Just not taking life is the manifestation of the whole works.” This means that the whole, everything, is working. And “the whole works” also means the whole universe. Another translation of “the whole works” would be “total dynamic working.” It’s everything working with everything towards everything, all together. So life is the manifestation of the whole works. Death is the manifestation of the whole works. And just not taking life is the manifestation of the whole works.
    When we understand that life is the manifestation of the whole works, the words “to kill” and “not to kill” are beyond their literal meaning. I think of the little wind bell hanging like a mouth in emptiness, not being concerned with north, south, east, west, good, bad; just being a wind bell. Just hanging there as a manifestation of the whole works.
    Life is just like this. Life is just life-ing. Death is just dying. That’s all. Wind bell is just hanging. The wind is just blowing. It moves the wind bell. The wind bell is just moving. It doesn’t wish it was moving some other direction. It is manifesting its gravity and the movement of wind, and this is all it does. It is the whole works, and that’s enough. And that’s so simple that the human mind can’t stand it. That’s why we receive this precept over and over again, so that we can stand being so simple.
    Someone told me a story about this. This person was a monk at Tassajara, and a message was delivered to her that there was illness in the family. She has a good imagination, and she made up a world, a horrible world full of life that’s not life-ing and death that’s not dying. She imagined a world of life that can be cut off, and dying happening to things. And she became very upset, right in the peaceful little valley of Tassajara. She tried to find out what was wrong, calling all over the world, eliminating some possibilities as she contacted certain relatives, but coming down to a more specific set of possibilities: something must have happened to one of her children.
    Then she went to work in the kitchen, totally distraught. Even though she was in a Zen monastery, she was drowning in a poisonous sea. She was given a bunch of turnips to cut. She asked the turnips to save her—she appealed to each turnip as she took it in her hand—and the turnips saved her. She got to cut the turnips.
    The world of before and after was always a hairsbreadth’s deviation away, but by continuously going back to the turnip and cutting it—thump! thump! thump!—she was saved.
    Of course later she found out that there had been a miscommunication, and everything she had imagined was a dream. She was released from the bad dream, and now she imagined that all the people she loved were happy.
    Then she realized that this was just a dream too, and that the people she cared about might be utterly miserable. She couldn’t know. But the point is that as she switched from dream to dream, where did her turnip go? She had lost her turnip again.
    To go for refuge and to receive these precepts is like receiving a turnip. In fact, every moment we are given a turnip. And we just need to find out what is the turnip of this moment. What is the manifestation of the whole works right now? What frees us from this constant flow of dreams? What protects us from all the endless vanities?
    Do you feel ready to be this sentient being? Do you feel ready to receive the precept of completely being yourself? The Buddha rejoices to see someone who receives this precept. Does anybody lack anything they need to receive this precept?
    Suppose your back hurts. Suppose it feels as though a piece of heavy equipment is rolling over it. That’s your turnip. A back with a steamroller going over it is a huge turnip. Be run over by it. That’s what you have to work with. The way you get into the world beyond birth-and-death is through this body. This steamrollered body is your entrance point to that other world.
    Or maybe you have a lot of doubt. You don’t believe you can ever get to a world beyond birth-and-death. The not believing is another turnip that’s given to you to save you. You have to have something to be saved by. Red, yellow, blue, green, white, form, not form, existing, not existing, cause and effect—we have to have something. You use the stuff of these dreams to save you from the dreams. In the midst of the dreams you have to find something that you pick up and say, “This is my thing to work on.”
    But sometimes the pain is too much. Like the woman I just told you about, you go crazy. If the pain destroys your ability to practice patience, then you’re cooked. You’re temporarily disqualified from the game. But when you see the consequences of that, you come back. Maybe somebody walks up to you and says, “Sister, regain your presence of mind.” Maybe the pain’s not so bad anymore. Maybe it’s the same. Maybe it’s worse. But anyway, you come back into it, and you say, “I’m going to work with this turnip.” Thump! “I’m going to receive the precept of life-is-not-killed. I may have to cry my way into it. I may have to slide my way, but somehow I’m going to get into this body that I’ve got. I’m going to get into this mind that I’ve got. And I’m going to use this to save myself.”
    When human beings accept a precept, and they hear it in terms of past and future, they say, “Oh, I know what that means. I’ll accept that precept.” They are working on their ethics, which is fine. But when human beings accept a precept after hearing that this precept is not about past and future, then they have willingly accepted something which they do not understand. Usually people say, “I don’t want anything that I don’t understand. Get that away from me.” They want to be able to say to themselves: “I don’t have any foreign bodies in here. Everything I’ve got here is part of my system.” But when you know that these precepts are not in the realm of human comprehension, and you still receive them, you are like a Buddha.
    This receiving is free of marks. If someone gives you something that you don’t understand, you just take it. You can just receive a turnip. Or in the morning you can say to yourself, “I receive this precept.” It’s a kind of ceremony. Life is not killed. You’ve not only received something you don’t understand, you’ve received something which is potent and vital.
    This precept is about you being you completely. This, too, we do not understand. It is inexhaustibly vast to be us; we are the manifestation of the whole works.
    After you receive the precept you aren’t different than you were before. But if you don’t receive it, you don’t know that. That’s the advantage of receiving it. It’s like wearing Buddha's robe. The point of putting on Buddha's robe is to understand that it doesn’t make any difference. There’s no difference between receiving the precept and not receiving it.
    There are three levels on which to understand the precept not-to-kill. One level is the literal level, which is the same idea we grow up with in this culture: It’s not right to kill. It’s something you can do which you must not do. It’s a given. In my childhood, and yours, too, probably, killing was just something we didn’t do around the house.
    The next level is the compassionate level. Sometimes you may need to kill in order to be helpful. Sometimes it’s more compassionate to violate the precept in the literal sense, just as you need to lie sometimes in order to benefit beings.
    At the third level, this precept is not talking about killing and not killing. This precept is pointing out that either of those ways of looking at things is violating Buddha’s mind. To think that you can kill is violating this precept. And thinking that you could successfully keep this precept in a conventional sense is also violating this precept. If you are afraid of being killed, it’s because you think you can kill someone. People who believe they can kill need some way to stop themselves from acting on their belief.
    But to think of killing and to realize it’s not possible—that’s not to think of killing. That’s just seeing killing as a unicorn or a chocolate moon, a thought without substance. This precept points to the practice of living in this world without giving substance to the thought that you can kill.
    Thinking you can kill, and thinking you cannot kill both violate the precept, not to mention killing and not killing.
    Anybody who is afraid of being killed is somebody who thinks they can kill somebody else. People go to war because they’re afraid they’re going to be killed. But somebody who knows for sure that they can’t kill anybody, somebody who knows for sure they won’t kill anybody, will not be afraid of being killed, and therefore, won’t go to war. Not only that, but they won’t be killed. And they won’t die. Life doesn’t die. Life is infinite and unbounded. Life is just life-ing, and then it’s gone. It changes. And if death happens, that’s it. There’s just death. Don’t expect any other result.
    If you let death be death, you go to heaven. But if you want death to give you some other result than death, that’s misery, and you’re not dying, or going to heaven, either. The other day I heard someone say, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” In order to go to heaven you have to die. On time. Death’s time, not yours. Also, you get to go to heaven if you just live, and for us human beings to be alive when we’re alive, we have to die to before and after. And that’s heaven—the same heaven as the heaven you go to when death is death.
    You might ask: Why would it matter if I stabbed a bunch of people, since life can’t be killed anyway? But why would you do that? Why would you stab people? Just to see the blood come out? A person who understands that life cannot be killed is a Buddha. Why would a Buddha want to stab somebody? A Buddha looks at a person and sees a Buddha. Why would a Buddha stab a Buddha? Such a being would absolutely not be able to kill anything.
    According to worldly law, and the law of karma, people do kill people. In the realm of ultimate truth that doesn’t happen, but Buddha can see that even the people who think that way are Buddhas, too, and she sees that no matter what they think, their life is not killed. The Buddha can see that people act out a dream of killing each other. The Buddha sees perfect beings causing themselves and each other misery, and Buddha does not see any life killed.
    Buddhism doesn’t contradict the conventional view of what happened; for example during the Holocaust. Buddhism doesn’t say, “That wasn’t a problem.” It was a problem. It is a problem. That’s not what this precept is talking about.
    Most of us have never seen anybody murdered. We’ve heard about it, but we haven’t seen it. In our own life, perhaps the most horrific thing we’ve ever experienced is sesshin. But in one way or another, we’ve experienced before-and-after mind. This precept is asking you to give up before-and-after mind and enter a different reality. It’s saying that if you would die to before-and-after and enter the actual present moment, you could bring a light back to the world and teach people what it means not to kill.
    Buddha understands the mind that thinks we can be killed. Buddha doesn’t say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Buddha comes into the world where people think that there’s killing and not killing, and teaches. As a matter of fact, Buddha exists because of beings like that. Those beings evoke Buddha. If you have thoughts of before and after, and you believe in them, you’re miserable, but if you have such thoughts and see that they’re delusions, you’re happy. In either case, Buddha sees Buddha in you. Both views are perfect manifestations of the way things work.
    Someone asked me if a Buddha could go to San Quentin Prison and teach that life is not killed, and at the same time try to work against the death penalty. Buddha would go into the prison to teach people when the people in the prison were ready to have Buddha come in. If they were in the middle of a fight, Buddha wouldn’t walk in there. And Buddha would go talk to the prison officials and the state government when they were ready to hear Buddha talk.
    They’re probably not going to say, “We’re ready for Buddha to come talk to us.” But when they’re ready, they will express it in some way. If they’re not ready, the Buddha won’t go and talk to them because it’s a waste of time to talk to them before they’re ready.
    Everybody wants to know how to take care of things now before they die, or they want to know how they should take care of things after they die. “Before I go, what can I do?” Or, “After I’ve died and given up my attachment to birth and death, and I’ve gone to Buddha’s land, then what should I do?” But this precept is not talking about how to apply the precept. This precept is pointing to how to become Buddha. Once you’re Buddha, you can talk to people about the details of how to apply it.
    In order to practice this precept, you’ve got to expect no other result than just not to kill. “Not to kill is just not to kill. Not to kill is one precept, not to kill is ten precepts.” Not to kill is the entire world. There’s nothing else. There’s no application. That’s the precept.
    Now of course, if you accept the precept, you have just converted yourself into a beneficent being, and whatever you do will be beneficial in the world. And you can decide whether or not to stand outside of San Quentin, holding up a sign to abolish the death penalty. But we want everything we do to have some result right now. We don’t want to be just who we are, just as we don’t want to be totally devoted to another person, regardless of whether they improve their health, get educated, get better-looking, like us better, give us money—we don’t want to do that. But that’s what this precept is about. It’s about total attention to this moment, to just sitting here, with no idea of any other result but: Just don’t kill.
    As Buddha said, you’re like a person with an arrow in him who goes to the doctor and says, “What extraction procedure are you going to use? Is there going to be an infection following this? Am I going to be as good as I was before? Am I going to be as good-looking, or better-looking?”
    After you believe that not to kill is just not to kill, do you think you could go stab people? And their blood wouldn’t matter? Of course not. But when you receive the precept, you’re giving up control, and you don’t know what you’re going to do after that. You can’t go into Buddha’s realm saying, “Well, I’ll go in there, but you’ve got to guarantee that I won’t do anything wrong after this, that I’ll be politically correct afterwards, that people will still like me.” In fact, you will be more compassionate than you are now, more effective than you are now, but maybe not in the same way.
    We have to give up everything to enter Buddha’s realm, but we don’t have to kill ourselves. We just have to stay in the present, which is exactly the same as dying to each moment so we can be alive in each moment. It’s not a violent thing. You’ve got to do it kindly. You have to be patient with yourself, and notice how difficult it is to let go of this conceptual mind, and to enter a realm where you can just suffer.
    I don’t mean to say it’s easy to give up everything. I know it’s hard. In the meantime, please try to acknowledge your suffering, and to sit patiently in the middle of it, with all sentient beings. When we sit patiently in the presence of our pain, we can see the outlines of birth and death, and we can see our attachments to it. And then we can see where to let go.