Jukai 2024-2025

Here is the link to the course plan for 2024

Exercise one

Part One

Chapter one, part one- What Are The Precepts’ pages 13-24

What do you think is meant by Zaikke Tokudo ‘taking the precepts while staying at home?’ How would you define home? A house, car, family, a state of mind or all or none of the foregoing?

Does your ‘home’ help or hinder your practice as a lay person? Can you think of other meanings for ‘home’?Priest Dogen said, ‘to keep the precepts, you might have to break the precepts’. How do you understand his intent in speaking this way?

Do you see the precepts as prohibitions or encouragements? 

Are you avoiding suffering and cultivating happiness, or perhaps better said, well being? Does happiness give way to desire? Are all desires bad? What about the desire to take the precepts? To be a Buddhist?

Write your answers. Two pages is enough, more if you would like. Always feel free to add a question that was not asked by me, but that you care about.