posted 21 May 2014, 23:17 by Akasharaja Bruton [ updated 12 hours ago ]
Why bother with ethics? Haven’t many of us as post-Christians spent years extricating ourselves from a moral system under which, as Sangharakshita has memorably said, we are told what to do and what not to do, for reasons we’re not clear about, by a being in whose existence we no longer believe? Doesn’t Buddhism point the way to freedom from the straitjacket of externally applied obligations, which are, according to the Old Testament at least, literally set in stone? Isn’t the whole idea rather dull? Isn’t the Dharma supposed to have the taste of freedom?
This is of course all exaggerated, but I suspect there’s something in it. As far as the taste of freedom is concerned, I clearly remember years ago being on retreat with a man who cited the “taste of freedom” as justification for doing what he wanted, which in this case involved behaving badly, certainly inappropriately for a retreat! Perhaps there is an underlying tendency to regard ethical systems as inhibitors to freedom. I know, in my own case, that what very often goes on is a sort of barely conscious quid pro quo arrangement: if I do something ethical, I can let myself off the hook by doing something unethical as a kind of reward for being “good”. In other words, what I really want to do is the unethical thing – that’s where I see the freedom.
As I was musing on this talk at about 2 o’clock this morning, it came to me with astonishing clarity for the wee small hours that ethics is in fact nothing other than a means to liberation. The implications of this rather excited me, and I’d like to share them with you. Happily they also tie in rather neatly with the overall theme of this series of evenings, which is ethics as the path of the spiritual warrior.
Let’s start by looking at the place of ethics in Buddhism. But before we even do that, let’s look at what Buddhism actually is. Some people say it’s a religion; others maintain that it’s a philosophy. But I feel you can sidestep this thorny issue rather neatly by calling it a path. A path leads from one place to another. In our case, it leads from a state of unenlightenment to a state of enlightenment, to Buddhahood. And what characterises that state of unenlightenment? Let’s turn to the Pali canon for guidance. These verses are taken from the Dhammapada:
342. Beset by craving, people run about like an entrapped hare. Held fast by mental fetters, they come to suffering again and again for a long time.
343. Beset by craving, people run about like an entrapped hare. Therefore, one who yearns to be passion-free should destroy his own craving.
And these come from the Anguttara nikaya AN 3.71, the Channa Sutta:
"An aversive person, his mind bound up, overcome with aversion, engages in bodily misconduct, in verbal misconduct, in mental misconduct. But having abandoned aversion, he doesn't engage in bodily misconduct, in verbal misconduct, or in mental misconduct.
"An aversive person, his mind bound up, overcome with aversion, doesn't discern, as it actually is, what is of profit to himself, what is of profit to others, what is of profit to both. But having abandoned aversion, he discerns, as it actually is, what is of profit to himself, what is of profit to others, what is of profit to both.
"Aversion, my friend, makes you blind, makes you sightless, makes you ignorant. It brings about the cessation of discernment, is conducive to trouble, and does not lead to Unbinding.
And, last but not least, we have the story of Prince Jayasena from the Dantabhumi sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya. It’s quite long, so I won’t quote the whole thing, but the gist is that a certain prince, who clearly spends life in the pursuit of pleasure, comes for instruction to one of the Buddha’s disciples, only to promptly dismiss as impossible what he is actually told. Whereupon the Buddha, having heard the story, says this:
Prince Jayasena [is] hemmed in, blocked, obstructed, enveloped by this mass of ignorance. Indeed, that Prince Jayasena, living as he does in the midst of sense-pleasures, enjoying sense-pleasures, being consumed by thoughts of sense-pleasures, eager in the search for sense-pleasures, should know or see or attain or realize that which can be known... seen... attained... realized by renunciation — such a situation does not exist.
In other words, Jayasena is so bound by ignorance that he is simply incapable of recognising the truth of what the Buddha’s disciple has taught him: that abandoning the quest for sense pleasures leads to
So what’s the common theme? It’s bondage. Craving binds us, aversion binds us, ignorance binds us. In other words, the state of unenlightenment, characterised as it is by craving, aversion and ignorance of the true nature of things, is a state of bondage. And the state of enlightenment, as we have all heard many times, is characterised by the opposite: freedom from craving and aversion and direct knowledge that true happiness is only to be attained by the cultivation of that freedom.
So, if Buddhism is a path from one to the other, what does that path consist of? Well, there are various ways of describing it, but one of the best known is the threefold path of ethics, meditation and wisdom – sila, samadhi, panna - emphasised by the Buddha especially toward the end of his life. The order here is not arbitrary: the path to freedom begins with ethics. So ethics is an essential means of liberation. Without it, liberation is impossible.
How does this work? And where does the spiritual warrior fit in?
It’s well known that Buddhist ethics is an ethics of intention. In other words, if you act from particular states of mind, particular consequences follow. As indicated above, acting out of craving, aversion or ignorance leads to bondage, to suffering, for oneself and others. Whereas acting out, for instance, of kindness, awareness, generosity and compassion leads to states of freedom from remorse, fear, craving and anger, and results in happiness, for oneself and others. This is crucial, because it shows that ethics in Buddhism is a question of mental states: it comes from within, from our own motivations, our own intentions. It isn’t imposed on us on stone tablets like the Ten Commandments.
This means that we are responsible for our ethical life. But what is the nature of that ethical life?
Most of you will be familiar with the five precepts. Here they are:
1.
I undertake the training rule to abstain from killing.
Pāṇātipātā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.
2.
I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking what is not given.
Adinnādānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.
3.
I undertake the training rule to avoid sexual misconduct.
Kāmesumicchācāra veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.
4.
I undertake the training rule to abstain from false speech.
Musāvādā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.
5.
I undertake the training rule to abstain from fermented drink that causes heedlessness.
Surāmerayamajjapamādaṭṭhānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.[6]
The Sanskrit term for “precept” is shikshapada. We come across the Pali version of this when we recite the five precepts during a puja. It literally means something like object or item of training: a training principle. So when we recite the precepts we are actually saying that we are undergoing training in sila, in ethics. When you train, you learn to do something. My son Sam frequently gets upset when he can’t do something first time, and we always tell him that he has to practise. So it is with sila, or ethics. We aren’t going to get it right first time. Ethics is a form of training, a discipline. The words we use to define ethically positive or ethically negative actions are telling: we talk about skilful and unskilful actions, rather than good or bad, or good or evil. Ethics is a skill, something you can become skilled in. But what are we in training for? The answer is simple. We’re in training to become Buddhas, to attain enlightenment. If you like, we’re all trainee Buddhas. We’re training in liberation, freedom from bondage. But how do you do that?
The Buddha was born a khattiya or a member of the warrior caste, and he uses martial image to describe the onslaught of his own unreconstructed, unenlightened, reactive tendencies in the form of Mara’s armies during his enlightenment experience. And, in a way, what we have to do is take on our own unskilful, negative reactive tendencies and develop skilful and creative tendencies to counteract them. It’s a bit like being in battle. This of course needs to be heavily qualified so as to prevent us from beating ourselves up and treating ourselves harshly. If we were guided purely by the “negative” precepts, those which instruct us to refrain from particular behaviours, we might end up at a rather joyless halfway house. So I don’t take life, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, tell lies or take intoxicants, but I might end up a rather self-righteous and joyless person. What makes the difference here is the addition, as far as I know unique to Triratna, of the five positive precepts:
With deeds of loving kindness, I purify my body.
With open-handed generosity, I purify my body.
With stillness, simplicity, and contentment, I purify my body.
With truthful communication, I purify my speech.
With mindfulness, clear and radiant, I purify my mind.
The weapons we need are expressed in the positive precepts, and they are all based on metta, or loving kindness. I won’t go into detail here because that is what the rest of the course is about. But you can see that the precepts fall into three categories of action: those of body, speech and mind. In other words, they cover all of our behaviour: physical, verbal and mental. So the Buddhist ethical life involves bringing the weapon of loving kindness to bear on our tendencies toward craving, aversion and ignorance. If we are not trying to do this, then meditation will be virtually impossible, just an endless struggle against streams of distraction based on various forms of craving, aversion and ignorance. And it goes pretty much without saying that any form of wisdom, which, if you have been following the spiral path series, relies on the attainment of joy, rapture, peace, bliss and concentration, can be ruled out.
So I hope I’ve been able to show that ethics is an essential part of the path to liberation, that it involves training and practice and that, frankly, it’s something of a battle, albeit one which we can join with the weapon of loving kindness, toward ourselves and other beings.
Why bother with ethics? Haven’t many of us as post-Christians spent years extricating ourselves from a moral system under which, as Sangharakshita has memorably said, we are told what to do and what not to do, for reasons we’re not clear about, by a being in whose existence we no longer believe? Doesn’t Buddhism point the way to freedom from the straitjacket of externally applied obligations, which are, according to the Old Testament at least, literally set in stone? Isn’t the whole idea rather dull? Isn’t the Dharma supposed to have the taste of freedom?
This is of course all exaggerated, but I suspect there’s something in it. As far as the taste of freedom is concerned, I clearly remember years ago being on retreat with a man who cited the “taste of freedom” as justification for doing what he wanted, which in this case involved behaving badly, certainly inappropriately for a retreat! Perhaps there is an underlying tendency to regard ethical systems as inhibitors to freedom. I know, in my own case, that what very often goes on is a sort of barely conscious quid pro quo arrangement: if I do something ethical, I can let myself off the hook by doing something unethical as a kind of reward for being “good”. In other words, what I really want to do is the unethical thing – that’s where I see the freedom.
As I was musing on this talk at about 2 o’clock this morning, it came to me with astonishing clarity for the wee small hours that ethics is in fact nothing other than a means to liberation. The implications of this rather excited me, and I’d like to share them with you. Happily they also tie in rather neatly with the overall theme of this series of evenings, which is ethics as the path of the spiritual warrior.
Let’s start by looking at the place of ethics in Buddhism. But before we even do that, let’s look at what Buddhism actually is. Some people say it’s a religion; others maintain that it’s a philosophy. But I feel you can sidestep this thorny issue rather neatly by calling it a path. A path leads from one place to another. In our case, it leads from a state of unenlightenment to a state of enlightenment, to Buddhahood. And what characterises that state of unenlightenment? Let’s turn to the Pali canon for guidance. These verses are taken from the Dhammapada:
342. Beset by craving, people run about like an entrapped hare. Held fast by mental fetters, they come to suffering again and again for a long time.
343. Beset by craving, people run about like an entrapped hare. Therefore, one who yearns to be passion-free should destroy his own craving.
And these come from the Anguttara nikaya AN 3.71, the Channa Sutta:
"An aversive person, his mind bound up, overcome with aversion, engages in bodily misconduct, in verbal misconduct, in mental misconduct. But having abandoned aversion, he doesn't engage in bodily misconduct, in verbal misconduct, or in mental misconduct.
"An aversive person, his mind bound up, overcome with aversion, doesn't discern, as it actually is, what is of profit to himself, what is of profit to others, what is of profit to both. But having abandoned aversion, he discerns, as it actually is, what is of profit to himself, what is of profit to others, what is of profit to both.
"Aversion, my friend, makes you blind, makes you sightless, makes you ignorant. It brings about the cessation of discernment, is conducive to trouble, and does not lead to Unbinding.
And, last but not least, we have the story of Prince Jayasena from the Dantabhumi sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya. It’s quite long, so I won’t quote the whole thing, but the gist is that a certain prince, who clearly spends life in the pursuit of pleasure, comes for instruction to one of the Buddha’s disciples, only to promptly dismiss as impossible what he is actually told. Whereupon the Buddha, having heard the story, says this:
Prince Jayasena [is] hemmed in, blocked, obstructed, enveloped by this mass of ignorance. Indeed, that Prince Jayasena, living as he does in the midst of sense-pleasures, enjoying sense-pleasures, being consumed by thoughts of sense-pleasures, eager in the search for sense-pleasures, should know or see or attain or realize that which can be known... seen... attained... realized by renunciation — such a situation does not exist.
In other words, Jayasena is so bound by ignorance that he is simply incapable of recognising the truth of what the Buddha’s disciple has taught him: that abandoning the quest for sense pleasures leads to
So what’s the common theme? It’s bondage. Craving binds us, aversion binds us, ignorance binds us. In other words, the state of unenlightenment, characterised as it is by craving, aversion and ignorance of the true nature of things, is a state of bondage. And the state of enlightenment, as we have all heard many times, is characterised by the opposite: freedom from craving and aversion and direct knowledge that true happiness is only to be attained by the cultivation of that freedom.
So, if Buddhism is a path from one to the other, what does that path consist of? Well, there are various ways of describing it, but one of the best known is the threefold path of ethics, meditation and wisdom – sila, samadhi, panna - emphasised by the Buddha especially toward the end of his life. The order here is not arbitrary: the path to freedom begins with ethics. So ethics is an essential means of liberation. Without it, liberation is impossible.
How does this work? And where does the spiritual warrior fit in?
It’s well known that Buddhist ethics is an ethics of intention. In other words, if you act from particular states of mind, particular consequences follow. As indicated above, acting out of craving, aversion or ignorance leads to bondage, to suffering, for oneself and others. Whereas acting out, for instance, of kindness, awareness, generosity and compassion leads to states of freedom from remorse, fear, craving and anger, and results in happiness, for oneself and others. This is crucial, because it shows that ethics in Buddhism is a question of mental states: it comes from within, from our own motivations, our own intentions. It isn’t imposed on us on stone tablets like the Ten Commandments.
This means that we are responsible for our ethical life. But what is the nature of that ethical life?
Most of you will be familiar with the five precepts. Here they are:
1.
I undertake the training rule to abstain from killing.
Pāṇātipātā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.
2.
I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking what is not given.
Adinnādānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.
3.
I undertake the training rule to avoid sexual misconduct.
Kāmesumicchācāra veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.
4.
I undertake the training rule to abstain from false speech.
Musāvādā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.
5.
I undertake the training rule to abstain from fermented drink that causes heedlessness.
Surāmerayamajjapamādaṭṭhānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.[6]
The Sanskrit term for “precept” is shikshapada. We come across the Pali version of this when we recite the five precepts during a puja. It literally means something like object or item of training: a training principle. So when we recite the precepts we are actually saying that we are undergoing training in sila, in ethics. When you train, you learn to do something. My son Sam frequently gets upset when he can’t do something first time, and we always tell him that he has to practise. So it is with sila, or ethics. We aren’t going to get it right first time. Ethics is a form of training, a discipline. The words we use to define ethically positive or ethically negative actions are telling: we talk about skilful and unskilful actions, rather than good or bad, or good or evil. Ethics is a skill, something you can become skilled in. But what are we in training for? The answer is simple. We’re in training to become Buddhas, to attain enlightenment. If you like, we’re all trainee Buddhas. We’re training in liberation, freedom from bondage. But how do you do that?
The Buddha was born a khattiya or a member of the warrior caste, and he uses martial image to describe the onslaught of his own unreconstructed, unenlightened, reactive tendencies in the form of Mara’s armies during his enlightenment experience. And, in a way, what we have to do is take on our own unskilful, negative reactive tendencies and develop skilful and creative tendencies to counteract them. It’s a bit like being in battle. This of course needs to be heavily qualified so as to prevent us from beating ourselves up and treating ourselves harshly. If we were guided purely by the “negative” precepts, those which instruct us to refrain from particular behaviours, we might end up at a rather joyless halfway house. So I don’t take life, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, tell lies or take intoxicants, but I might end up a rather self-righteous and joyless person. What makes the difference here is the addition, as far as I know unique to Triratna, of the five positive precepts:
With deeds of loving kindness, I purify my body.
With open-handed generosity, I purify my body.
With stillness, simplicity, and contentment, I purify my body.
With truthful communication, I purify my speech.
With mindfulness, clear and radiant, I purify my mind.
The weapons we need are expressed in the positive precepts, and they are all based on metta, or loving kindness. I won’t go into detail here because that is what the rest of the course is about. But you can see that the precepts fall into three categories of action: those of body, speech and mind. In other words, they cover all of our behaviour: physical, verbal and mental. So the Buddhist ethical life involves bringing the weapon of loving kindness to bear on our tendencies toward craving, aversion and ignorance. If we are not trying to do this, then meditation will be virtually impossible, just an endless struggle against streams of distraction based on various forms of craving, aversion and ignorance. And it goes pretty much without saying that any form of wisdom, which, if you have been following the spiral path series, relies on the attainment of joy, rapture, peace, bliss and concentration, can be ruled out.
So I hope I’ve been able to show that ethics is an essential part of the path to liberation, that it involves training and practice and that, frankly, it’s something of a battle, albeit one which we can join with the weapon of loving kindness, toward ourselves and other beings.