excerpt "The first thing we need to remember is that the five precepts are fields of practice and not a checklist of our failures- that sometimes the commandments were for me. Our relationship with them can be contemplative in nature and whose manifestation comes from within in a natural outflowing instead of from guilt or shame of some external ideal. The ethical ideal is not something outside of ourselves but something that comes from with us and flows outward. They are the practice that brings us into harmony with all things.  As John Daido Loori, the abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery writes, To practice the precepts is to be in harmony with your life and the universe."