Foreshadowing

I'm not sure when it became a common practice to announce spoilers to those who have not read a book, but this comment will contain spoilers to a Hemingway novel. I would assume that with the concept of foreshadowing a spoiler was lurking, but it never hurts to be explicit. Spoilers ahead.

I'm reading The Sun Also Rises for the 6th time. I love Hemingway in college, and I've reread TSAR because it's my favorite. I loved the partying, the respite in nature, and then the terrible tragedy, the horribleness of it all. 

Montoya the hotel owner loves the bull fighting like Jake does. They point out that there are women who sleep with the young bullfighters because they want to. Lady Brett Ashley enjoys life and sleeps around, though she's married, and about to remarry perhaps, engaged to marry. They call her Circe because she makes men into swine. Poor Robert Cohen is bewitched by her because she slept with him. He hangs around her like a puppy dog. 

Montoya asked Jake if he should pass on a message to the young promising bullfighter. Don't do it, don't let those American women who sleep with the bullfighters get into these guys are ruin them. 

That's foreshadowing. Of course Lady Ashley is going to sleep with him and ruin him. I know because I've read the book. Is it cherry picking to say that that scene with Montoya asking Jake advice is foreshadowing? I don't think so. Foreshadowing is when someone can grok the consequences of personality momentum and you can predict how things will turn out in a way. A Buddhist who meditates and reveres the dharma and sangha will see the future, not exactly, but enough in a way to see disasters coming. I would argue that the ten precepts are about avoiding those disasters. 

The ten precepts are very rough guides. You can find more explicit ones, more elaborate applications of them, but they're not from the Buddha and the Buddha said to get rid of the lessor rules. What that means is the difference between the Theravada tradition and Mahayana tradition in a way. 

And the very rough ethical guidelines are just a skeleton of the ethical considerations. The goal of the Buddhist is to move towards enlightenment, and there are very real and achievable markers along the way so that it's not quite the abstract negation of a concept it seems to be. When you don't follow the ten precepts, it hinders your path toward. Anticipating and foreshadowing helps us along the way, by following the really rough guidance by the elders in the ten precepts.