Desert Island Precepts
Occasionally, I have taken experiences onto a deserted island thought experiment. There isn’t a problem that cannot be resolved on that island.
I find myself on a deserted island without knowing how I got there. The island is large and fertile. The initial shock to my nervous system and psyche is deeply challenging, the adjustment period promises to be long and intensely painful, should I survive. I might not last very long at all, survival is hardly the point. Escape isn’t the point. For now, the island is my environment. Each day that I do survive, I explore the island a little more and gradually discover that it has everything needed to sustain living. With continuous work, much of it hard, I begin to support myself. This is no impediment, it is just what is needed to be done. To avoid attempting to do this work would be negligent. To ignore the precepts of zazen and not make effort, would be disrespectful to life.
I know nothing beyond the island, so I have no cause to blame the wider world and the people I still share it with, for my problems. I frequently think of family, friends, the world, what good would it do to worry though? When the weather turns destructive, why would I make something that I have no control over, into an enemy? When I get ill, options to aid my healing are limited, why would I worry about what I can’t do to help myself? If I become physically unable to forage, then I die, there is nothing wrong with that. The restrictions of island living make starkly clear the difference between what can be done and what is avoidance and imaginative escapism. Even as reality is laid bare, island living is not devoid of ambiguities, decisions need to be made where the outcomes are not entirely clear. Even so, success and failure have nowhere to take root on the island.
Once, in a group setting, I said that the bodhisattva precepts have to be understood as if we would follow them living alone on a desert island. Someone interjected, “Well of course!”. Is it so obvious though? Does reactivity get to our depths? What about when the aloneness bites, what would I do? Fall into self pity and justify it by saying to myself, “Well, I am a social animal like all humans. Therefore I should despair over my situation, my story is tragic”? Would this be to follow the precepts? I don’t think so. Knowledge becomes poison when used like this, it would turn the island into a prison. There is sympathetic understanding that is not reached by knowledge, one that respects the self, even as it is letting go of the self. The liberating kindness of the precepts is found in the heart of internal conditions and external circumstances, nowhere else. There is no need to construct either a positive, or a negative understanding, in order to put a spin on my situation. The island is ceaselessly reminding me of this.
My little thought game can be expanded to include another person, or a group of us, on the island. This introduces levels of complexity. The possibility of multiples of dynamic interactions that I do influence and, like everything on the island, are also largely beyond my control. Companions would, at times, inevitably test my resolve to follow the precepts in ways that I am not tested when I am a population of one. It’s also vice versa. Alone or with others, the bodhisattva precepts, the precepts of zazen, never exist in isolation. Thousands of miles without another human being, or in the heart of a bustling city, each situation is not the same as the other and essentially there is no difference too. To be stranded alone, without knowledge of its ever coming to an end and to thoroughly realise that there is no isolation, would be a rare occurrence I think. It’s probably equally rare while in company.
A thought experiment is not experience. Reality cuts deeper than hypothetical thought. I cannot know how I would respond if I found myself in such an unlikely situation. Thinking can be shaped by experience. Essentially, life on the island wouldn’t be different to my experience today. I trust what I have come to trust, the life beyond thinking about appearances, outside of the traps of conceptual escapism and the feelings that accrue around it.
The imaginary island thought experiment is also a real sitting place, the true sitting place of today. A lotus throne, a diamond seat, my seat. A seat to break into pieces, not a place to hide away on.
Willard Lee 24/06/2025