Vows

Root downfall 1: Praising yourself or criticizing others. This one in particular is motivated by pride that makes us want to have some self gain, for greater respect or admiration for oneself. The breaking of this vow actually contributes to schism. It's creating divisiveness, motivated by wrong pride, which plants the seeds for pulling people apart. 

Root downfall 2: Avoiding giving Dharma or material assistance. For us to break a vow by refusing them, they must be in serious need, you are their last resource, and you have what they need but you fail to help them. You could help them get resources from somewhere else, you don't have to personally use your resources. To not give the dharma means withholding some aspect of your dharma wisdom because you think that somehow by sharing it you'll lose something - you will be seen as not higher than them anymore, or that somehow giving your wisdom to someone else makes you have less of it. The mental affliction is stinginess, attachment to our materials, resources, importance, or our position related to the student. It's related to pride.

Root downfall 3: Failing to accept an apology, or striking another person. Someone has done something you don't like, and they've apologized for it, but you stay angry towards them. That anger builds up over time and eventually because of it, you want to hit them or throw something at them or have someone else do the same. The mental affliction is anger. We justify our anger and continue to blame that other for the distress that we feel. Do you see how un-Bodhisattva-ish that is?

Root downfall 4: Giving up the Greater Way or teaching false dharma. The first part is we disrespect the Greater Way by saying, those teachings really can't help us in any way, the Buddha never taught them, somebody else made it up. Who could be well trained and then say something like that? Seeds shift. We might find ourselves in a group that studies the sutra and might come to see their logic, and start to doubt. The second part is we are in a position of sharing the dharma and we come up with our own interpretation of the teachings and teach it to others as if it was what was originally taught by Buddha. When you have personal experience, share that according to how you might help others with it, but clearly identify that these are my experiences.

Root downfall 5: Stealing what belongs to the Three Jewels.  It means stealing from Buddha, Dharma, Sangha - the resources or material things of the Dharma Center, or from a group of people you are studying with, stealing from any one of them. By extension, not for breaking the vow, but for careful behavior, even breaking something that belongs to your Dharma Center and not replacing it would be perceived by our own mind as a kind of stealing from the Dharma Center. Either I take something or I get somebody to get it for me. You don't see it as wrong, you're happy you did it, you would do it again, and there's no shame. "The Dharma center's got six of them, it'd be great for me to have one.' The mental affliction is ignorant liking. 

Root downfall 6: Giving Up the Highest Dharma.  This refers to any of the three levels of Buddha's teaching (Listeners who clasically study the four arya truths, Self-made Buddhas who classically study the 12 links of dependent origination, and the Mahayanists). To give it up means to say this teaching was not spoken by Lord Buddha. The mental affliction is ignorance in the sense of not really knowing historically what Buddha taught and what Buddha didn't teach, but also ignorance of not understanding the seriousness of the seeds you're planting by hearing yourself say to somebody, 'Buddha didn't teach that'.

Root downfall 7: Taking Away the golden robes and the rest and removing someone from the status of an ordained person.  An ordained person only has robes so if you take their robes away, you leave them naked in the street and they don't have a home to run to with a closet full of clothes. So you leave them completely vulnerable. It would take this ugly state of mind that sees them as some kind of threat or some kind of evil. The mental affliction is out of anger from ignorant disliking, we would want to hurt them, and probably the strongest way to hurt an ordained person would be to do something that would make their vow be damaged. 

Root downfall 8: Committing any one of the five immediate misdeeds.  In the order of increasing in harmfulness, they are 1- killing your father, 2- kiling your mother, 3- killing an arhat (someone who has overcome their mental afflictions and seeds for more due to seeing emptiness directly and learning to live according to them), 4- drawing the blood of a Buddha with evil intent or trying to harm a Buddha, 5- creating a schism among the Buddha's followers. Do your best to avoid killing or contributing to killing to any life, and we reduce our seeds to even be in a position where we might kill mother, father, arhat. Avoid creating a schism in any group of people.

Root downfall 9: Holding wrong views.  This refers to the two classical wrong views of 1- denying karma, and 2- denying past and future lifetimes. If someone is nasty to us when we are nice to them, we could come to a conclusion that it cannot be true that a kind deed must bring about a pleasant result. When we don't understand that the consquences of our behavior match the circumstances of it, we will justify doing anything to get what we want. Denying past and future lives leads us to the same conclusion since if I have just this one lifetime, I should do everything I can to get the happiness I want in this lifetime.

Root downfall 10: Destroying towns and such. The 'and such' means countries, counties, cities, whole areas. Technically in modern days, unless we are a ruler of a place, we are probably not in a position to destroy that place. So we can add it to our rejoicables list that we've kept this one. But using the idea of concentric circles, how do we treat pests who see our home as their home? We destroy towns just by living, right? Even just driving adds to air pollution and uses up the road.

Root downfall 11: Teaching emptiness to a person not yet mentally ready. As a result of what we say, the other turns away from the Mahayana and takes up the Hinayana teachings and practices. Underlying all of it is our intention -are we wanting to show them that I know the highest? How do we know when we are teaching emptiness properly, or when we're hearing somebody else teach emptiness properly? Geshehla says, a good clue is that someone who understands emptiness well will always be speaking about ethics or morality within the same conversation as emptiness. Emptiness in its own context is actually not helpful. 

Root downfall 12: Causing someone to turn back from total enlightenment. If you say to someone that the Mahayana path (the path of the six perfections) is too hard for them and then because of your words they turn away and take up a lower path. The motivation was not mentioned by Geshehla, but it seems to involve arrogance and misunderstanding.

Root downfall 13: Causing someone to give up their freedom (Pratimoksha) vows. You break this vow when someone is keeping their Pratimoksha vows properly and they turn away from them by you telling them to come over to Mahayana, and that they don't need freedom vows because Mahayana is all one needs. Lord Je Tsongkapa has said the idea that we do not need to keep our Pratimoksha vows once we have higher vows is as dangerous as a great rain of hail that destroys the tender crops of the happiness of all living kind.

Pratimoksha vows are those of a: fully ordained monk, fully ordained nun, intermediate nun, novice monk, novice nun, lifetime layman, lifetime laywoman, or one-day vows.

Root downfall 14: Disparaging the Hinayana. When a Listener (whose main focus is the four arya truths) or a self-made Buddhas (whose main focus is the 12 links of dependent origination) hears you say that one cannot eliminate their mental afflictions in their entirety at their level, and understands your words whether they believe you or not, this vow is broken. At the Hinayana level, students are focused on reaching the end of their own suffering, and these levels do work to take us to the end of our mental afflictions. Mahayana shares steps with the Hinayana and it breaks our growing wisdom to disrespect the Hinayana.

Root downfall 15: Professing the opposite. This is to give someone else a false impression about your own spiritual attainments.

Root downfall 16: Accepting what belongs to the Jewels when someone presents it to you. This is not about us stealing it or arranging for it to be stolen - that was root downfall 5. This is about accepting what was taken when someone presents it to you, which means you should be sure before accepting something.

Root downfall 17: To institute a bad rule. To what extent are our prejudices influencing our support of others? The underlying mental affliction is judgement; we misunderstand the powers of what others are doing, and in a way, create a schism. Remember the story of Master Shantideva where they thought he wasn't doing anything but eat, poop, and sleep. He was doing more in his meditation than outside, but nobody could see it and so there was this disrespect for him.

Root downfall 18: Giving up the Wish for enlightenment. It only takes an instant for this vow to be broken because in the next instant you are no longer a bodhisattva. If you help someone and they turn around and are ungrateful and your heart goes, 'if they are going to be like that, I quit', you break the vow. It is not the same as thinking, 'I can't do it, it's too hard'. Don't ever think "I quit". You don't need the four chains to break this vow or vow 9 (wrong view). This vow and 9 are the two worst vows to break.

Secondary vow 1 - Failing to make offerings to the Jewels through the three doors of expression. The three doors of expression are body, speech, and mind. The Buddha Jewel refers to the emptiness of Shakyamuni Buddha's mind and the emptiness of our own mind. The Dharma Jewel refers to the cessation in the mind of a being who has experienced emptiness directly, and the subsequent realizations that they gain by applying that wisdom to their behavior to weed out their mental afflictions. The Sangha Jewel is any being who has had the direct experience of emptiness. The common denominator is the understanding of emptiness and dependent origination, so we want to have some understanging of the marriage of karma and emptiness as we, at least once per day, do something physical, say something, and think something that demonstrates that you are choosing your behavior according to your growing wisdom.

Secondary vow 2 - Allowing improper thoughts of desire to go on. The desire can be to avoid something, or desire to get something. The something can be sensual, food, not being satisfied with what we have, desire for others to praise and honor us, etc. To allow the thoughts of desire to go on means we let the state of mind arise and influence our decision making. Struggling against this protects our vow. There is non-mentally afflicted desire - to just want a piece of cake is not breaking the vow, it's willing to give into wanting the pieve of cake to the extent that you take it when it's meant for somebody else. It is okay to desire things - our wisdom desire is the pleasure I want from the thing that is not really in it.

Secondary vow 3 - Not respecting elders. Elders are those who have taken their bodhisattva vows before you, no matter their age. We don't walk around with signs saying when we took our vows so it might be wise to assume everybody has vows senior to you and treat everybody this way. 

Secondary vow 4 - Not answering a question. Do you think of answering questions as being part of your perfection of giving? It is. If the question (dharma or otherwise) was a sincere one, then don't give an irrelevant, flippant, or inadequate answer. 

Exceptions: you are sick, asleep, groggy, teaching and it interrupts the flow, or at a high level of perception of another's karma and know they would benefit if you break this vow (be very careful with this)