2 Kings 17:15 · World English Bible
They rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified to them; and they followed vanity, and became vain, and followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom Yahweh had commanded them that they should not do like them.
Sīla: Undertaken training in conduct Statutes are taken up by hand, so letting them go is a hand opening rather than a wall breaking. Kept rules give a life its daily shape, the eating and resting and giving, and when they go the shape goes with them.
From the Buddhism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
BUDDHISM
Sīla: Undertaken training in conduct Statutes are taken up by hand, so letting them go is a hand opening rather than a wall breaking. Kept rules give a life its daily shape, the eating and resting and giving, and when they go the shape goes with them. A fence with the gate left open still stands, and the herd still wanders out.
Muṭṭhassati: Lapsed recollection Testimonies were testified so they would be carried in mind, the way a family keeps retelling where it came from. Once the telling stops nothing dramatic happens, the memory only thins, until no one can say what was witnessed or why it mattered. Forgetting is quiet work, and it does most of the damage before anyone notices something has been refused.
Asāra: Without heartwood Vanity is emptiness here, a breath, a thing with no core, like a log that looks sound until the axe goes in and finds it hollow. Chasing it looks like devotion from the outside, with images and festivals and the same seriousness the covenant once had. Hollowness gets discovered by leaning on it.
Kamma: Action ripening into character Following vanity and becoming vain is one motion, not two: what a person does repeatedly is what that person turns into. Water cuts its channel by running the same way each day, and after enough days it has nowhere else to go. The emptiness walked toward is the emptiness they ended up made of.
Pāpamittatā: Keeping harmful company Nations pressed in on every side, and their ways soaked in the way smoke gets into clothing, with no decision made about it. Company sets the standard for what counts as normal, so the neighbors' altars stop looking foreign and start looking obvious. The command against doing as they did was a command about closeness, given long before there was anything to punish.
Buddhism lens
What have you started copying without ever deciding to?
When the way is lost there is still virtue, when virtue is lost there is still ritual, and ritual is the thin shell left at the end. The forms stay in place long after the thing they held has gone out of them.
Epictetus told his students to write down their rules and live by them without debate, because a principle argued with every morning is already gone. Practice makes the person, and whatever you practice is what you become.
Make a fence around the teaching, the sages said, and keep company with the wise rather than those who will teach you their habits. Who you sit with sets what you come to think is normal.
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Buddhism