The Precepts and the Three Poisons

How can we use the 16 Bodhisattva Precepts to study our own experience and transform it? Buddhism tells us that the root of unwholesomeness (harm, evil) in our own experience is the Three Poisons: greed, hate, and delusion—or more subtly, the moment-to-moment mind-gestures of grasping, resisting, and the delusive replacing of direct experience with conceptual knowledge. Practicing the precepts means to refrain from re-enacting these gestures. Instead, it's committing to the cultivation of a non-reactive mind that allows the flux of pleasant and unpleasant sensations to be the truth of our human experience.