Two nagging thoughts I‘ve had for months:
- Is the 7th precept really meant to forbid any kind of storytelling and „listening to“ stories, as one would writing or reading a novel? Monastics seem to differ on this point, and I haven‘t yet seen any explanation of the different Vinaya interpretations.
- Would it really be wise to have a rule that makes it an offense to read Dostoyevsky, but not „Live, Laugh, Love“, going by an arbitrary convention of categorization? Dostoyevsky‘s stories (and many other insightful novelists‘ stories) may be fictional in the most basic sense, but they are in an important sense more truthful than a library‘s worth of vacuous self-help books or self-aggrandizing screeds by ideologizing political hacks. I‘ll even go further and say that many non-fiction books are indeed delusional fictions, and all the more harmful for claiming to be otherwise.