Category: Uncategorized

The Path leads to nirvana, to awakening, to the end of all suffering, to escape from the round of rebirth. Before that, the path leads to many intermediary attainments on the way, not only stages of awakening but also progressively to greater virtue, to the purification of mind from defilements with the development of kindness and compassion, to renunciation and to harmlessness, manifesting actions that benefit the world, to an increasing sense of serenity and well-being, to the easing of personal suffering, to impartiality and clear seeing, to the cutting away of delusions, views and conceptualizations that give rise to mis-perceptions, particularly the mis-perception of a separate self.

We are not yet in a position in this book to speculate what nirvana, awakening or escape from the round of rebirth means. However, this overall trajectory of Buddhist practice, carried to completion must lead to what we can provisionally view as the perfection of character in all of its significant aspects. The Noble Eightfold Path is the Buddha’s instructions or how to improve and ultimately perfect human character. It is, in short, the Path to the mastery of the skill of life.

The Buddha taught the Eightfold Noble Path (ariya aṭṭhangika magga) in his very first discourse, often called the Turning of the Wheel (Dhamma-cakkap-pavattana):

And what is that middle way? It is simply the noble eightfold path , that is to say,
(1) right view,
(2) right intention;
(3) right speech,
(4) right action,
(5) right livelihood;
(6) right effort,
(7) right mindfulness,
(8) right concentration.
That is the middle way discovered by a Perfect One, which gives vision, which gives knowledge, and which leads to peace, to direct acquaintance, to discovery, to nibbāna. (SN 56.11, numbers mine)

The word right here is normative, much as skillful and meritorious were normative when we discussed ethics. In fact, the development of a skill is an apt way to describe the development of character: we are developing the behavior, mental qualities and knowledge in order to produce certain results, and in general there is a right way and a wrong way of doing certain things in order to realize these results (or maybe a couple of right ways and an array of wrong ways). Without proper training in the right and wrong ways of doing things we might still be able to cook a meal, but not an appetizing one, we might be able to produce a teapot out of clay, but neither a beautiful nor a functional one, we might be able to accomplish life’s tasks and experience what life offers, but not with fulfillment and joy, nor without causing great harm to others. What we do in Buddhism is the same as what the potter does, except it is our characters, our lives, that we are shaping rather than clay.

The eightfold Path was divided in one of the discourses into three groups, a discourse delivered not by the Buddha but by a disciple, the awakened nun Dhammadinnā (MN44). The first two factors (view and intention) constitute the wisdom group, the next three (speech, action and livelihood) the ethics group, and the last three (effort, mindfulness and concentration) the concentration or mental cultivation group. In the second chapter of this book we discussed Buddhist ethics fairly comprehensively as the foundation of practice. Let me segue into the path proper by demonstrating how it naturally grows out of the practice of ethics. To begin with, three of the eight folds of the path form the ethics (sīla) group.

(3) right speech,
(4) right action,
(5) right livelihood,

These cover refraining from all evil and accomplishing good, which apply to verbal and bodily actions. Right Livelihood avoids employment that compromises the other two practices. The ethics group is bookended by factors of the wisdom and concentration groups that also relate directly to ethics:

(2) right intention,
…
(6) right effort,

Both of these have to do with upholding skillful or wholesome thoughts, right at the heart of purification of mind. Right intention is to understand and set the mind firmly in the direction of renunciation, kindness and harmlessness, the three classes of skillful thoughts we encountered in chapter two.  Right effort is the continual process of  cultivating skillful or wholesome intentions and discouraging the unskillful or unwholesome. Right intention belongs to the wisdom group of the path, along with right view, and right effort to the concentration or mental cultivation group, along with right mindfulness and right concentration. Together, in upholding purity of mind, right intention and right effort also underly accomplishing good and refraining from all evil.

This leaves three folds, in the wisdom and concentration groups:

(1) right view,
…
(7) right mindfulness,
(8) right concentration.

These function in support of the other five (ethical) factors in the Noble Eightfold Path. Right view lays out the fruits of karma, the relationship of suffering to craving, and the matrix of interrelated mental factors that produce karmic actions. Right mindfulness keeps us on task in all the factors of ethics, and right mindfulness and right concentration together extend the power of introspective examination, necessary for deep purification of the mind.

In summary, the Noble Eightfold Path, completing the gradual training, continues to be organized around ethics. Nonetheless, there is a limit to the ethical perspective: it is not a complete resolution of the woes of the world. Even if pure of intention, we nonetheless suffer: we suffer from sickness, old age and death, we still have lingering conceit and cling to results of our noble intentions, and so we suffer again. Ethics is directed toward easing the pain of samsāra for self and other, an existence that with growing wisdom reveals itself increasingly as a sham, and it does not represent release from the drama of life altogether … and yet, such release is possible, as illustrated in the Buddha’s awakening. What is striking is that the deepening of ethical foundations, particularly in working deeply with purifying the mind, seems to take us almost all the way to final liberation. The rest is an excursion made possible by the further development of wisdom. Let’s take up the factors of the Path in turn.

Right View (sammā diṭṭhi)

In order to make a ceramic object a potter needs to understand his materials and tools: the varieties of clay, how much water to add to the clay, how the clay behaves under pressure, what conditions will cause a pot to crack or explode in the kiln, what happens to clay at different baking temperatures, various types and properties of glaze, etc. Likewise, in order to fashion a life in the Dharma, we also must understand the body, the mind, the nature of the world we are embedded in, how thoughts are triggered, how actions are triggered, how our habit patterns evolve. For both, there is an appropriate understanding of the subject matter that will produce worthy results, alongside many unfortunate understandings that produce poor results. Both need right view. a very practical nuts-and-bolts right view about things we can put to use in our own direct experience. Some degree of right view is needed before we undertake any other aspect of practice.

The teachings that are given as right view at the beginning of the Path are enumerated in different ways. One discourse focuses on karmic actions, responsibilities to parents, rebirth and trust in the realizations of sages, and is reminiscent of the first two knowledges on the night of the Buddha’s awakening:

There is what is given, what is offered, what is sacrificed. There are fruits and results of good and bad actions. There is this world and the next world. There is mother and father. There are spontaneously reborn beings; there are brahmans and contemplatives who, faring rightly and practicing rightly, proclaim this world and the next after having directly known and realized it for themselves. (MN 117)

This particular account is often called mundane right view, or right view of the ownership of action (kammassakatā sammādiṭṭhi), with reference to the fruits of kamma, and much of it was discussed with regard to Buddhist ethics in chapter two. It is mundane, and limited, in that it seeks well-being within samsāra, that is, without the goal of liberation or full awakening.

In many places right view is described simply as the Four Noble Truths (cattāri ariyasaccāni); this is most standard.

• Suffering (dukkha), which is to be understood,
• The origin (samudaya) of suffering, which is craving and which is to be abandoned,
• The cessation (nirodha) of suffering, which is the cessation of craving and which is to be realized,
• The path (magga) to the cessation of suffering: Right view, right intention, right action, right speech, right livelihood, right effort, right, mindfulness and right concentration, which is to be developed.

The fourth truth, the path to the cessation of suffering, is the Path we are discussing in the present chapter. We have seen in chapter 2 that suffering is associated incidentally with unwholesome mental factors and that it has a role in the fruits of karma. Right view gives it a particularly prominent role in the Buddhist path as a factor that should be intimately understood in all of its manifestations. It is an indicator of much of what is going on in the mind.

The second truth attributes suffering to craving. Notice that both greed and hatred, which underly many unwholesome mental states, are forms of craving, a craving to obtain or to keep something desirable and a craving to rid oneself of, or to avoid, something undesirable.

The third truth can be personally verified, particularly with a very still mind: there is a point at which interest in something, however small, turns to craving and right at that instant stress and anxiety flood the mind: suddenly the world is a problem. The first three truths are really nuts-and-bolts descriptions of immediate experience.

The fourth truth is not so obviously related to the first three, since the recommended path mentions neither suffering nor craving, though from our study of ethics we can begin to appreciate how craving and suffering are implicated in unwholesome thoughts and actions. We find that the full understanding of all of these truths brings in the whole of the Dharma, and in this sense the Four Noble Truths by itself exhausts right view.

The formulation of the Four Noble Truths has been compared to a doctor’s evaluation. Suffering is the symptom, the origin is the diagnosis, the cessation is the prognosis and the path is the treatment. The Buddha uses this same basic formula with respect to other mental factors besides suffering and craving, as we will soon see, with the treatment in each case consisting of this same Noble Eightfold Path. For convenience, I will call this general formula in the discussion of these cases the four truths formula.

In other suttas, in particular in the Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta (MN 9), right view is described more exhaustively as involving knowledge of the following topics:

• Wholesome/skillful (kusala) and unwholesome/unskillful (akusala) volitional actions (kamma).
• Suffering, whose origin is craving,
• Aging and death, whose origin is birth,
• Birth, whose origin is becoming,
• Becoming, whose origin is attachment,
• Attachment, whose origin is craving,
• Craving, whose origin is feeling,
• Feeling, whose origin is sense contact,
• Sense contact, whose origin is the six-fold sense-base,
• The six-fold sense-base, whose origin is name-and-form,
• Name-and-form, whose origin is consciousness,
• Consciousness, whose origin is volitional formations,
• Volitional formations, whose origin is ignorance,
• Ignorance, whose origin is the taints,
• The taints, whose origin is (reciprocally) ignorance.
• The nutriments that sustain beings and support beings seeking birth, namely, physical food, sense contact, volition and consciousness, whose origin is craving.

The first topic also belongs to mundane right view. The remaining to transcendent right view, which puts the noble in noble eightfold path. The Buddha describes all of the remaining topics except the last in in terms of the four truths formula, providing the Noble Eightfold Path in each case as the appropriate treatment. The Path is a kind of universal elixir for all that ails us. Applying the four truths formula to the second factor on this list, suffering, gives us the four noble truths. For instance, applying it to the seventh, craving, gives us:

• Craving, …,
• The origin of craving, which is feeling …,
• The cessation of suffering, which is the cessation of feeling …,
• The path (magga) to the cessation of craving: Right view, right intention, right action, … .

It should be noted most of these factors, starting with aging and death and ending with ignorance, form a long series, in which one factor is the origin of the previously listed factor. This series is often grouped together entirely or in part as the chain of dependent co-arising (paṭicca-samuppāda). Overall, we have, under right view, the descriptions of a whole lot of factors, most of which are clearly mental, many of which will seem very obscure if the reader is encountering them here for the first time, but each of which is elaborated and related in the ways described here and in often in other different ways in many discourses of the Buddha. Together all of these descriptions constitute a highly sophisticated conditionally connected model of the workings of the human mind, on the basis of which the general human predicament that we call samsāra can be elucidated. The next chapter will attempt to gain some deeper understanding of dependent co-arising.

Each of these descriptions of right view seems to take a different swath across the Dharma. However, because the many teachings of the Dharma are conditionally interrelated, elaborating one generally implicates many others. In fact the Buddha stated that if we understand dependent co-arising, in particular, we understand the entirety of the Dharma.

Elucidation of right view. Buddhist development is a product of two intertwined components: understanding (pariyatti) and practice (paṭipatti). Practice is what brings understanding to life and understanding is useful only as a support for practice. We might think of understanding as the skeleton and practice as the flesh supported and given shape by that skeleton.

Right view is that skeleton. Right View, for Buddhist practitioner or would-be potter, begins with “book learning,” conceptually expressible knowledge conveyed from master to student or apprentice. It provides the orientation, the road map, the instructions, on the basis of which practice can proceed. It is relevant and needed only insofar as it sustains practice and the development of purity of mind and awakening. Right view is like a map of the terrain that we explore in our practice; it is not the terrain itself. It is important that right view ripens into a deeper understanding through tramping through that terrain. At that point our understanding is as much in our feet as in our heads.

This deeper knowledge or wisdom we develop is beyond the limits of conceptual understanding and will unfold with the experience of practice. Consider that most of the knowledge a master potter possesses has come from actually working with the clay, and is found in his fingers not in his head. Or consider the knowledge we put to use in riding a bicycle. Initially, in acquiring this knowledge, we were told, “To go forward, turn the the pedals in that direction, to turn right, move the handlebars in this direction,” but we learn not to lose our balance by “feel,” through experience. Buddhist practice is also like this: the role of right view may fade as intimacy grows with the domain it covers, to be replaced or supplemented by a “feel” for the workings of the mind.

With regard to view, I should mention that the Buddha is somewhat reluctant about having any views at all: they tend to be intellectually faulty and we tend to cling to views. For this reason the Buddha has chosen his views pragmatically and sparingly, as pointers and guides and as ways of undermining pernicious views we might otherwise hold. Dharma consists of views that can actually make a beneficial difference in support of practice. Speculative philosophy and views irrelevant to spiritual development are not Dharma. But even Dharma should not be clung to once it has outlived its usefulness, that is beyond awakening. The Buddha compares this mistake to building a raft in order to cross a body of water, then once on the other shore to be so pleased with the raft as to carry it hither and thither on ones back (MN 22).

The practice of right view. The initial practice of right view is its acquisition through listening to the wise expound the Dharma, reading books on the Dharma, considering what is conveyed, asking questions about what is uncertain, and so on.

“Endowed with these six qualities, a person is capable of alighting on the lawfulness, the rightness of skillful mental qualities even while listening to the true Dhamma. Which six?

“When the Doctrine & Discipline declared by the Tathāgata is being taught, he listens well, gives ear, applies his mind to gnosis, rejects what is worthless, grabs hold of what is worthwhile, and is endowed with the patience to conform with the teaching.” – AN 6.88

There is a wealth of Dharmic textual material available. But be aware that the Dharma comes alive with practice; the Dharma is inert if it remains in the head. A would-be potter does not read Pottery for Dummies then claim to be a potter. A would-be chef does not read The Joy of Cooking then claim to be a cook. A would-be explorer does not sit around reading National Geographic then claim great adventures. A would-be follower of the Buddhist path does not read this book then claim to be a stream enterer. Rather she needs to feel the clay between her fingers, to whip the eggs, to become intimate with suffering and craving and the rest in her own experience. Practice is very much an introspective project developed from its own perspective in each of the steps of the Noble Eightfold Path. But beginning with Right View we can begin to identify the various factors and their conditions or origins in our own experience.

Reviewing the range of topics listed above, many will seem more obscure than others at this early point, but one in particular might appear unverifiable and is therefore bound to raise some modern eyebrows. That is birth, whose origin is becoming. Becoming is, briefly, the (delusive) development of the individual, with is own characteristic attachments, personal footprint, identity and aspirations. We can all see becoming directly (except for awakened people, for whom becoming has ceased), but at death it has a way of propelling itself – pop – into a new life. This is, therefore, re-birth. Unless we happen to have past memories of this process (and some few people do indeed report such memoriesi), we all have to wait for experiential verification of this phenomenon, hopefully for many years.

A note with regard to refuge in the Triple Gem: In the beginning many other Buddhist views will be obscure and complex, and therefore not immediately verified in our own experience. Although verification in our own experience is always encouraged, i.e., blind faith is discouraged, and verification leads to greater confidence in right view, it is important from the beginning that we be ready to accept Buddhist views with an open mind and heart, at least as working assumptions. Too much initial skepticism will inhibit coming to terms with the parts of things as they are that Buddhist doctrine points to. A degree of trust is necessary in this (and in all aspects of life), because of the incessant gap between the little we know and the great deal that we need to know just to function in the world. Even in the training of a scientist one taught particular viewpoints, but then invited to challenge these viewpoints if they seem untenable. So it is in Buddhism.

Right intention (sammā saṅkappa)

Right intention  is also sometimes translated as right resolve or right thought. Right View and right intention together form the wisdom group  within the Eightfold Path. If right view is the map, right intention is the compass that keeps us headed in the right direction. A potter, in crafting a bowl, not only needs to know about clay and glaze and potter’s wheel, he also needs to have an idea of what he hopes to produce. This is his right intention. For the potter right intention might be to make a bowls of exquisite elegance and beauty and at the same time of practical functionality. For the Buddhist Right intention is to fashion a character of highest virtue, one that embodies:

• Renunciation
• Harmlessness
• Good Will

And what is right intention? Being intent on renunciation, on freedom from ill-will, on harmlessness: This is called right intention. (SN 45.8)

Elucidation of right intention. By golly, we’ve seen these three factors before, in fact in chapter 2. Renunciation is the principle factor of purifying the mind. Good-will is the principle factor of accomplishing good. Harmlessness is the principle factor of refraining from all evil. These factors also represent the three classes of wholesome or skillful thoughts recognized by the buddha-to-be in an earlier citation. These are all ethical values that will have been internalized through diligent practice of the gradual instruction. Right intention is a commitment to the wholesome intention, and thereby to meritorious deeds.

The practice of right intention. Renunciation, goodwill and harmlessness are not, for most people, an obvious set of qualities around which to orient their lives. For instance, one might think that the perfected character is wealthy, attractive, popular, fun-loving, sporty, and ever young, .. and, oh, enlightened. Or one might have come to Buddhist practice because of inner pain or one’s intention is to fix yourself and suffer less. Buddhism might not make us sporty, but it will ease our suffering, but only as a side effect of pursuing the right intention.

To develop right intention we continue to reflect on wholesome and unwholesome mental factors, the skillful and the skillful, as we began doing in chapter 2. In particular, we recall and observe the fruits of karma in our own lives and recall the following handy checklist as unskillful qualities arise in our minds:

1. They are grounded either in greed, in hatred or in delusion.
2. When they give rise to actions, those actions usually cause some degree of harm.
3. They give rise to mis-perception.
4. They cause personal suffering.
5. They subvert development along the Path.

In this way we come to realize that wrong intention is more trouble than it is worth. Renunciation in particular often comes slowly, such that the whole Path is sometimes called a path of renunciation, with progress at each stage associated with what has been let go of. Renunciation should not be forced, but comes naturally – much like children outgrowing toys – as we realize increasingly the costs of clinging to things and the poverty of the happiness they bring.

Here is a practical practice that is difficult to implement, but gives a feel for what it is like to take right intention as our guiding principle: Make everything you do a gift! This raises the question, moment by moment, what am I renouncing when I do what I am doing? Is there a sense of good-will behind what I am doing? Am I giving other beings freedom from fear of me?

Right Speech (sammā vācā)

The ethics group (sīla-kkhandha) consists of right speech, right action and right livelihood, representing exemplary conduct in the world. Each of these considers actions from the perspective of all three systems of Buddhist ethics: precepts, generosity and virtue.

It is important to appreciate how much emphasis he Buddha places on right speech. This is true in many of the Suttas and in the Vinaya, and this is probably why it comes as the very first in the ethics group. In is easy to think that speech is relatively harmless when compared to actions. We all know sayings like, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” and “Actions speak louder than words,” But consider that racism, sexism, nationalism and eventually war and ethnic cleansing all start with and are driven by many acts of wrong speech. We use speech as vengeance, to turn one person or group against another, to deceive and manipulate, and get people to buy things. Lying in particular undermines our trust in each other, which a society requires to function. In this modern age of mass communication right speech has become even more critical as it finds expression through so many media and the speech of each of us can easily reach mass audiences. Given a few advances in technology since the Buddha’s day, “Speech” now includes the written word, blogs, videos, radio broadcasts and maybe even pantomime. Speech can now also be passive; watching talk shows generally constitutes being a party to idle chatter.

Elucidation of right speech. The conventional five Buddhist precepts include an abstention from lying. The following are common in enhancements of the basic five:

• not to lie – “I have here in my hand the names of eighty communist sympathizers who have penetrated the State Department!”
• not to slander – “He’s got two wives and a bartender to support.”
• not to speak harshly – “You %&$(*@ jerk! Why don’t you learn how to drive?”
• not to chatter idly – “Well, we were already running late, and I was still trying get the top off the toothpaste, …”

The first three precepts here clearly bring harm, but the last, like the earlier precept concerning intoxication, most directly supports purification of mind, in this case controlling our tendency to restless and conceptual proliferation.

As most of us are aware, there is an art to speech. We can use it skillfully to involve others in desired results, to avoid offense and maintain interpersonal harmony, to inspire and instruct. The Buddha, the master communicator, has a lot to say about the art of speech. He gives particular attention to interpersonal harmony. A thorny situation in this regard that we all experience is, how to admonish someone, to correct what we perceive to be faults or errors on the part of another, without causing offense and in such away that the proffered advice is actually usefully accepted.

“O bhikkhus, a bhikkhu who desires to admonish another should do so after investigating five conditions in himself and after establishing five other conditions in himself. What are the five conditions which he should investigate in himself?
“Am I one who practices purity in bodily action, flawless and untainted…?
“Am I one who practices purity in speech, flawless and untainted…?
“Is the heart of goodwill, free from malice, established in me towards fellow-farers in the holy life…?
“Am I or am I not one who has heard much, who bears in mind what he has heard, who stores up what he has heard? Those teachings which are good alike in their beginning, middle, and ending, proclaiming perfectly the spirit and the letter of the utterly purified holy life — have such teachings been much heard by me, borne in mind, practiced in speech, pondered in the heart and rightly penetrated by insight…?
“Are the Patimokkhas [rules of conduct for monks and for nuns] in full thoroughly learned by heart, well-analyzed with thorough knowledge of their meanings, clearly divided sutta by sutta and known in minute detail by me…?
“These five conditions must be investigated in himself. And what other five conditions must be established in himself?
“Do I speak at the right time, or not?
“Do I speak of facts, or not?
“Do I speak gently or harshly?
“Do I speak profitable words or not?
“Do I speak with a kindly heart, or inwardly malicious?
“O bhikkhus, these five conditions are to be investigated in himself and the latter five established in himself by a bhikkhu who desires to admonish another.”
— AN V (From The Patimokkha, Ñanamoli Thera, trans.)

The first set of conditions, to be investigated in oneself, are useful for dispelling any hubris that often accompanies admonition, and possibly to see matters from the admonishee’s perspective. The second set partly relates to the precepts discussed previously, but also serve to check one’s own intentions. Considering whether the present is the right time takes note of the circumstances in which the admonition is about to happen, for instance, whether the admonishee is a good or receptive mood. Reversing roles, the monastic code includes a rather important precept (Saṅghadisesa 12) that prohibits monks or nuns from being difficult to admonish, for instance, from being argumentative or conjuring up counter-admonitions, as many of us tend to do.

The following admonishes us to consider both consequences and intentions in assessing our verbal actions.

“Monks, a statement endowed with five factors is well-spoken, not ill-spoken. It is blameless & unfaulted by knowledgeable people. Which five?
“It is spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken affectionately. It is spoken beneficially. It is spoken with a mind of good-will.” (AN 5.198)

With regard to idle chatter, the Buddha provides us with examples of topics of conversation to avoid, at least for monastics to avoid.

“Whereas some brahmans and contemplatives, living off food given in faith, are addicted to talking about lowly topics such as these — talking about kings, robbers, ministers of state; armies, alarms, and battles; food and drink; clothing, furniture, garlands, and scents; relatives; vehicles; villages, towns, cities, the countryside; women and heroes; the gossip of the street and the well; tales of the dead; tales of diversity [philosophical discussions of the past and future], the creation of the world and of the sea, and talk of whether things exist or not — he abstains from talking about lowly topics such as these. This, too, is part of his virtue.” – DN 2

He also warned of our relentless tendency to cling to views, turn these to debate and to take pride in being right.

“Whereas some brahmans and contemplatives, living off food given in faith, are addicted to debates such as these — ‘You understand this doctrine and discipline? I’m the one who understands this doctrine and discipline. How could you understand this doctrine and discipline? You’re practicing wrongly. I’m practicing rightly. I’m being consistent. You’re not. What should be said first you said last. What should be said last you said first. What you took so long to think out has been refuted. Your doctrine has been overthrown. You’re defeated. Go and try to salvage your doctrine; extricate yourself if you can!’ — he abstains from debates such as these. This, too, is part of his virtue.” (DN 2)

Practicing right Speech.  The ethics of speech is intimately connected with the practice of purification of mind, for the simple reason that thought is very close to speech; or as the Buddha phrased it, “thought is that which is about to break into speech” (MN 44). We can fairly accurately read off someone else’s intentions simply from which precept concerning speech is being violated. Lying involves gaining some kind of personal advantage in competition with others’ interests through deception, slander is a attempt to destroy someone’s reputation out of personal or general ill-will, idle chatter from restlessness in a fog of delusion. To encourage these forms of speech would be to encourage defiled thoughts. To restrain these tendencies provides a very good opportunity for insight into the mind and support from practicing purity of mind.

Modern times have produced new channels for speech or speech-like activities, such as situation comedies, talk shows, hate radio, crime dramas, war movies, soap operas, pundits propounding, cell phones aringing, ads enticing, thumbs agaming, Webs asurfing, email, texting, social media and crossword puzzles. The volume and vacuity of much of this content have put idle chatter off the charts. The degree of misrepresentation, stereotyping, deceit and swindle represents an unprecedented height of exposure to untruth. Examples of slander, harsh speech and more than occasional depictions of physical violence abound, which our children learn to emulate. It is imperative that we, as Buddhist practitioners, serious about the path, substantially limit our media exposure to specific elucidating kinds of content. Some modern Buddhist writers provide similar advice concerning modern media, but instead as a generalization of the precept concerning intoxication. This emphasizes the stupefying effect of much media, which also cannot be overemphasized.

With mindfulness, it should be possible to practice restraint, to stop at the point where thought turns to speech, whenever the thought is unwholesome. Particularly challenging are angry thoughts, which can overwhelm our discernment very quickly. Controlling such thoughts is generally difficult until we reach advanced stages of practice, but we can begin to control our speech through whatever strategy works best. For instance, never ever write an email in an angry frame of mind; if some issue needs to be addressed wait until the mind is calm, then address it with gentle words, at the right time. Face-to-face encounters that turn to anger might require that we quietly and abruptly leave the room to go simmer down, lest we utter something demeritorious.

The outer form of right speech can, on the other hand, become a mask for unwholesome intentions. The slick or suave among us can become very adept at speaking gently, without slander, in ways that seem to encourage harmony, but that can hide a nest of unwholesome intentions. Our persona can, in other words, create a disconnect between thought and speech that we should become aware of. The unskillfulness of our thoughts must be observed for themselves or revealed by our wrong actions. I suppose the opposite can also happen, in which under certain circumstances it is advantageous to create a harsh and slanderous persona, that might, however, hide a bouquet of wholesome intentions.

Right Action (sammā kammanta)

Bodily action is generally the most dynamic and visible form and therefore is of particularly prominent concern at the beginning of Buddhist practice. Our practice is all intentional action, either of body, speech or mind. The inverse is also true, that all intentional action is practice, since intentions produce karmic effects to which we are heir. Practice is therefore something we do all the time; there is no natural division between  practice time and, say, fun time or work time. For this reason we should “see danger in the slightest fault” (MN 6). This requires the help of precepts, of understanding the consequences of our actions in the world and, particularly on the higher Path, close monitoring of the purity of our intentions and views in all circumstances. We have already learned a lot about right action in our discussion of ethics in chapter 2 as something that begins well before embarking on the Path. As we follow the Path we should give increasing concern to the karmic effects of our actions on the development of the mind.

Elucidation of right action. We might think of our karmic lives as a long series of densely packed choice points, at each of which we try freely to pick the most skillful alternative. Most of the time, however, we don’t feel like we are making choices, because we are simply following accustomed patterns as if on automatic pilot. This is the difference between intention and deliberation. To dedicate oneself to the Path is to live deliberately and to defy accustomed habit patterns when these are unskillful.

We wander, effectively, in what I will call a karmic landscape, heavily rutted where we have traveled over and over. Most worldlings tend simply to fall into the ruts without thinking. At any point they could veer to the right or to the left (this makes their choice intentional), but they generally simply follow the course of least resistance, and thereby make the operative habit patterns even deeper. The rutted landscape, representing our habit patterns, is the stuff of our individuated character. It is a metaphor for old karma, the cumulative conditioning of our past karmic decisions.ii Ethical Conduct, on the other hand, is deliberative: it tends to change our habit patterns with respect to actions of body, speech and mind, to veer out of the accustomed ruts, to the extent that these are unskillful, and through repetition to weaken and eventually obliterate the old unskillful ruts. Precepts, such as, “Do not take that which is not offered,” define clear points at which we make deliberate choices that will reshape the karmic landscape in this way. We can also say the same about conventional generosity, and also about ritual behavior; they are also deliberative in nature.

As we perform right actions, we shape our mental habit patterns along with our bodily habit patterns. As we repeatedly avoid harming others, the mind develops greater kindness. As we repeatedly offer material goods or work in behalf of others, the mind develops its capacity for renunciation. We experience the joy of these right actions themselves and we will experience the well-being of a properly intentioned mind in the future. If we make a practice of non harming of what are generally considered expendable pests (cockroaches, wasps, mice, and so on), we develop kindness towards even them.

A significant aspect of this tendency of the mind to follow the body is that certain bodily practices that produce no direct harm or benefit in the world can nonetheless develop the mind in wholesome or unwholesome directions. An example is bodily expressions of veneration for the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, which develop a receptiveness to the sources of Buddhist wisdom and also humility. An example from right speech is the avoidance of idle chatter, which works against the tendency of the mind to conceptually proliferate. Another example is a precept commonly observed by laypeople every quarter moon, and by monastics effectively always:

I undertake the rule of training to refrain from dancing, singing, music, going to see entertainments, wearing garlands, smartening with perfumes and beautifying with cosmetics.

This works against tendencies of self-gratification. Training the mind, and body, in a less dharmic context, through bodily actions but without worldly consequences seems to be also a primary functions of play, in kids, pups, calves, lambs, cubs and kittens.

The practice of right action. When we first begin to follow precepts, conventional generosity or even ritual, the regulation of our behavior in this way may feel restrictive, like we’ve fit ourselves uncomfortably into a box that affords little ability to move. Certainly our non-Buddhist friends will think that is what we’ve gotten our selves into. Remarkably, within a short while, if we have been practicing diligently, these practices will feel just the opposite: liberating. Certainly, most monastics seem to discover this sense of liberation in following hundreds of precepts. How can this be?

I think that the reason is that we had felt restricted to begin with, oppressed by the ever deepening ruts of our karmic landscape that kept us locked mindlessly in certain patterns of behavior, much of which was unskillfully dedicated to the fruitless search for personal advantage, and thereby painful. The practice of virtue gave us our first taste of liberation by lifting us out of our karmic ruts, by showing that there was no inevitability in our conditioning, that there is a different way of being in the world.

Moreover, as we practice that different way of being in the world, we get a clear picture of the intentions that had been driving out actions in the world. We hadn’t noticed those intentions while we are on autopilot, passively following the ruts wherever they lead, but as we regulate our behaviors we leave many of those intentions frustrated, we frequently leave  some unconsummated impulse or agenda dangling. This is an opportunity for investigation. At one point we will see a bit of ill-will hanging unexpressed, and, peeling off of this, unmistakable stress, and maybe a potential victim that has just benefited as a consequence of our choice not to give expression to our ill-will. We thereby begin to see in what sense many of our thoughts and impulses are indeed unskillful, in fact dangerous, and how restraining them is quite appropriate. We become uncomfortable as we discover who we really are.

Our primary guides for right action, as well as for right speech, are those very intentions, and we become very mindful of them throughout the day. Those intentions have a kind of wisdom behind them, even the unskillful ones, insofar as they know who they are.  The unwholesome ones are those wearing some degree of suffering – stress, anxiety, dis-ease, dis-satisfaction – like a shadow. They are not so wise to recognize that they also give rise to mis-perception and take us away from the path, and that when acted out will almost certainly cause someone harm, but we know this, that is, if we have read this book carefully up to this point. We also know that these are the intentions that are rooted in greed, hatred or delusion.

Once we become mindful of, and learn to recognize, our intentions faithfully, we can treat them with appropriate attention. First, we learn to abort an unskillful intention by not acting on it. For instance, when anger arises we do not yell, we do not throw things, we don’t do anything, until the anger subsides, which it will, at which point we can assess the situation more clearly and seek guidance from skillful intentions. Second, we learn to improve the quality of the intentions that do arise by controlling their conditions. For instance, if I avoid stressful activities, anger is less likely to arise. If I avoid the company of people who are drinking alcohol, I am less likely to have the impulse to do so. In this way we fully engage with the practice of purification of mind, our capacity for which will become quite refined indeed by the end of the Noble Eightfold Path.

Likewise, we learn to protect the purity of the mind even if there is no immediate danger that our unwholesome intentions would cause imminent harm in the world. For instance, we avoid playing violent video games or watching violent television programs, or listening to hateful speech, because we know that these activities will condition the mind in favor of intentions of anger and fear, scoring deep ruts in our karmic landscape. Likewise, channel- or Web-surfing may train the mind toward restlessness and discontent. Entertainments that excite lust will tend similarly to depurify the mind, even while not doing outward harm.

Right Livelihood (sammā ājīva)

Right livelihood  is the third and final factor of the ethics group of the path. Including it as a whole factor of the path addresses a critical issue in pursuing the higher path of practice. This is that, once we choose a career, we might not have much choice left about what karmic actions we preform during our workday. Not only will we have substantially given up control of our practice, but, whether or not the boss is telling us to do them, our actions will still have harm or benefit and will shape or misshape our character and well-being. Therefore, it is important that we choose our livelihood with great care.

Elucidation of right livelihood. So, when is a particular livelihood right? We might begin by looking at the job description. Is each task mentioned consistent with right speech and right action and, while we are at it, conducive to wholesome thoughts? Does a task involve deceit? Does it involve killing or otherwise harming living beings? Does it entail taking what is not given freely? Does it involve or encourage misuse of sexuality?

The Buddha specifically points out the following as characteristic of wrong livelihood,

“scheming, persuading, hinting, belittling, usury,” (MN 117)

which sound embarrassingly like conventional modern corporate business culture. It suggests that it would be a challenge to find right livelihood in sales or marketing, or in investment.

The Buddha also listed the following as livelihoods to be avoided (AN 5.177):

• Business in human beings. In the Buddha’s day this had to do with dealing in slaves and prostitutes.
• Business in weapons. This precludes hunting, fishing, soldiering (see SN 42.3 for more on this) or weapons manufacture.
• Business in meat. This precludes raising animals for slaughter, slaughter itself or selling meat.
• Business in intoxicants. This precludes tending bar, selling or producing alcohol, pushing drugs, growing opium, and so on. Modern allowances should be made for compassionate medicinal uses of intoxicants and poisons. On the other hand, Benedictine monks would not be able to brew beer if the Buddha had a say in the matter.
• Business in poison. This would include manufacturing pesticides and herbicides but also applying them to crops. This would include pest extermination.

Notice that these are broader than precepts in that they proscribe aiding others to violate precepts. To manufacture a weapon is not to kill directly, but certainly provides conditions for that. To sell someone a drink is to be implicated in intoxication even if one remains completely sober oneself. In this way, right livelihood reaches beyond the letter of the precepts, but then in the wrong livelihood one is repeatedly implicated over the course of one’s career.

Many of us are forced into wrong livelihoods because our options are limited and we need the income whatever work we can get provides. If we have debt or a family to feed, or own property or possessions that must be maintained and insured, we are forced into earning a certain level of income. Now,  monastics have the great benefit of what might be called the ideal livelihood. First, in order to be ordained into the Saṅgha one must be quite free of conventional societal obligations: no wealth, no debt, no family to speak of. Second, one is entirely outside of the exchange economy. Third, one has relative autonomy in day-to-day affairs; rarely is there anyone else telling one what to do. The factor of right livelihood is clearly described with laity in mind who often must find a balance between obligations and livelihood options. Reducing obligations as much as possible, for instance, avoiding debt, is one way to realize a more favorable livelihood.

If a livelihood forces one to act habitually with greedy or cruel intentions, the character will develop to become more greedy or cruel. Consider that when you take on employment, your boss generally predetermines many of your choices from that point on. This means that your character will come more and more to resemble that of your boss.

Practicing right livelihood. The practice of right livelihood focuses primarily on understanding the consequences of our major life choices, the benefits and harm thereof. This assessment might occur at a young age, before choosing on a college major or embarking on a career plan. It might involve a reassessment of decisions already made. I used to write software, in what now seems like a previous life, sometimes under Defense Department contracts. One project involved an automated intelligent route planning some kind of small autonomous aircraft, whose description was highly redacted, but which everyone in our team agreed was some kind of weapon system. This ended up being a major factor for me in ending my high-paid high-tech corporate career to do what I do now. However, the radical redirecting of my career path would have been extremely difficult if I were not at a point in life in which my children were reaching adulthood and my family obligations were loosening up.

In these modern times it is probably particularly difficult to find a right livelihood. If one does not design weapons systems, one might work in marketing, trying to convince the public that ingesting some horrid concoction of petrochemicals, high fructose corn syrup and saturated fats will add zest to their lives. We often have little choice of livelihood simply because the economy offers few choices.  Moreover, what is considered a respectable livelihood in our society may be quite a bit different from what is right livelihood in the Buddhist sense. Being a soldier, or a banker, investing in real estate, exterminating insects and pests or stretching the truth a little to make a sale might all be completely acceptable a particular culture or subculture. Furthermore, large modern enterprises typically distribute decisions in such a way that obscure ethical responsibility, and workers compensated through wages have little control over the product of their labor. We might be lucky to find a job at a retail store, in which we will be required to sell pesticides, booze, meat, and (especially in the USA) guns, with whatever scheming, persuading and hinting will close the sale. No religious exemptions are generally offered.

This raises an important question: If we are compelled by our boss to sell pesticides to a customer (and to convince him he needs two cans, where one would do), is it our bad karma? If our act of killing an enemy combatant is under orders of our commanding officer, are we breaking a precept? After all, if we don’t do it, someone else will, so aren’t we off the hook? The Buddhist answer is much like the decision of the Nuremberg Trial: we are not off the hook, orders are not just orders, we are still the heir of our own deeds. This accurately reflects how such actions effect the mind; for instance, combat veterans are known to commit acts of domestic violence at rates much higher than the general population. Issues in right livelihood in our modern times may create dilemmas and and lead to compromises; a right livelihood may be elusive for the practitioner who us unwilling to let his family starve.

Right Effort (sammā vāyāma)

Right effort is the workhorse of virtue or purity of mind. It continually encourages wholesome or skillful thoughts and discourages unwholesome or unskillful. It is like the work of a gardener.

We practice right effort when we bring “desire, work, persistence and intent to bear … (SN45.8):

“… for the sake of the non-arising of unskillful qualities that have not yet arisen…,
“… for the sake of the abandoning of unskillful qualities that have arisen…,
“… for the sake of the arising of skillful qualities that have not yet arisen…, (and)
“… for the maintenance, non-confusion, increase, plenitude, development, and culmination of skillful qualities that have arisen.”

The first is like the gardener keeping weeds from growing, the second like pulling weeds that have grown, the third like planting desirable seeds and watering them so they sprout, and the last like protecting and cultivating the existing desirable plants so that they thrive. Right effort works directly for purification of mind.

Elucidation of right effort. Right effort is ubiquitous in our practice since our practice should constantly in all our waking moments be concerned with ensuring that our karmic intentions are admirable and not ignoble. Right effort carries the practices of abandoning wrong view and entering into right view, of  abandoning wrong intention and entering into right intention, of abandoning wrong speech and entering into right speech, of abandoning wrong action and entering into right action, of abandoning wrong livelihood and entering into right livelihood. (MN 117) The normative duality unskillful/skillful (akusala/kusala) is equivalent to that of wrong/right (sammā/micchā).

A variety of techniques are provided in the discourses for performing right effort. For instance, when an unskillful thought arises we can (MN 20):

• replace it with a different, skillful thought, like getting rid of a coarse peg with a fine one, or
• consider the downside of unskillful thoughts, which we will perceive like someone disgusted by the carcass hung round his or her neck, or
  empty the mind, like a shutting the eyes, or
• step backward to the origins the unskillful thought, like instead of walking fast, walking slowly, or instead of walking slowly, standing, or
• subdue and beat it down with clenched teeth, like a strong man restraining, subduing and beating a weaker man down.

As a result of removing such unskillful thoughts, we are assured, “the mind will stand firm, settle down, become unified and concentrated.” This result points to the causal role of right effort in bringing the mind to concentration, that is, in supporting the last factor of the path. The final three factors of the path – right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration – constitute the concentration group (samādhik-khandha) of the path, often called the training in cultivation of mind.

A short list of five categories of mental factors are distinguished as particularly vexing when we desire to bring the mind to mindfulness and concentration, to experience it standing firm, settled down and unified. These are known as the hindrances (nīvaraṇa). Holding these at least temporarily at bey is necessary for a strong meditation practice.

• Lust. “Hubba-hubba.”
• Ill-will. “That darn %&$*@!”
• Sloth and torpor. “Zzzzzz.”
• Restlessness and remorse. “If only I had …, I know, I’ll …”
• Doubt. “What do I think I’m doing here anyway?”

These factors correspond roughly to greed (1), hate (2) and delusion (3-5). Subduing all of them for a period of time we produce a degree of seclusion from worldly concerns which is very conducive indeed to completive practice, particularly seated meditation. Notice that it is the unskillful factors that trouble us, that prevent the mind from settling. The mind overwhelmed with renunciation or overflowing with kindness is not the one hindered from moving on to the higher practices of mindfulness and concentration.

The practice of right effort. Right Effort provides the energy of practice. Every time there is resistance to right anything, then right effort is called for. If it is time to meditate and you are just to lazy, laziness is to be weeded out and ardency needs to be watered. If you really want to flirt with your neighbor’s wife, sensual passion is to be weeded, contentment with your own wife watered. Often the effort required is enormous; you may be dealing with ingrained habits or natural instinctive behaviors. In addition to the list of mental techniques involved in right effort provided above, you will probably discover some of your own, from changing your perspective or conceptualization of the situation to bringing the thought into the focus of attention until it dissipates of itself. There are a couple of useful modern books that bring together Buddhist teachings specifically on anger, which many of us identify as an area of personal weakness.iii

Right effort is a practice that we should engage in throughout your day. It should be there with every opportunity to avoid evil or accomplish good, but we should especially make a habit initially of monitoring our intentions; with every action we undertake we should be aware, quite frankly, of our motivations behind it, because that gives it its karmic quality. As we begin this practice, we might be embarrassed at how much unwholesomeness we discover, as a constant stream of factors such as anger, lust, deluded views, fear, stress, envy, jealousy, spite, restlessness, anxiety, arrogance and pride persists. It is important to accept this stream as a natural part of the untrained human condition, lest we feel guilty (guilt is just piling another unskillful thought – one rooted in aversion – on top of others). However, just this mindfulness has a way of wearing down our unskillful habit patterns over time. In addition to this, we discover targeted ways to remove the unskillful and cultivate the skillful. With persistence and time, the mind shifts remarkably. This is purity of mind.

Almost the entire thrust of the noble eightfold path up until this point is toward purity of mind through the ethical fine-tuning afforded by right effort. Our views, our intentions, our speech, actions and livelihood come into perfect alignment with our effort. However, right effort is not enough to clean the mind entirely of defilements, to end suffering or to reach final liberation, awakening. The reason is that there are even deeper defilements living at the darker level of latent tendencies, engulfed and held in place by ignorance. Until we can venture into these recesses and shine the light of wisdom, we can never awaken completely. In order to do this, the final practices of mindfulness and concentration are required.

Right Mindfulness (sammā sati)

Mindfulness is simply to remember what it is we are doing, fully cognizant of the present circumstances, it is to be on task, undistracted by what is not relevant to the task. It reminds us to apply precepts, to recognize our skillful and unskillful thoughts, to guard the senses at the right time. It is the nose in the little slot on the door of a speakeasy that demands a password. It is also the engine of insight.

Mindfulness is the conventional translation of Pali sati, and generally a pretty satisfactory translation. It conveys the qualities of being present and giving attention to detail. The word sati is a derivation of the root meaning memory, which is also an aspect of the English word mindfulness, as when we are mindful to rotate our tires at regular intervals.  Many people think of mindfulness as awareness, but actually it is more a matter of filtering the awareness that is already there according to relevance. It is this aspect of mindfulness that connects it particularly intimately with wisdom group of right view and right intention.

And what is the faculty of mindfulness? There is the case where a monk, a disciple of the noble ones, is mindful, highly meticulous, remembering and able to call to mind even things that were done and said long ago. (SN 48.10)

This last passage then continues with a description of this monk’s practice of the foundations of mindfulness (sati-paṭṭhāna). In teaching the four foundations of mindfulness, the Buddha recommends the cultivation of mindfulness in attending to four specific topic areas of meditation that foster insight into the nature of experience, thereby turning right view into seeing things as they are. This is the standard passage that introduces the four foundations of mindfulness.

And what, monks, is right mindfulness? Herein, a monk dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief concerning the world. He dwells contemplating feelings in feelings… states of mind in states of mind… phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief concerning the world. (DN 22, MN 10)

Contemplating the body in the body, etc. is to see directly without conceptual proliferation. Ardent is the energy we commonly associate with mindfulness. Clearly comprehending suggests a degree of investigation or evaluation, is where memory comes into play and is where insight and the development of wisdom occur. Western scholars are not inclined include cognates of a term to be defined (mindful) in the definition itself, but that is common in the early texts, and found here. Finally, putting away covetousness and grief concerning the world is suggestive of holding the hindrances at bey, thereby attaining a degree of mental seclusion conducive to contemplative practice, as described under right effort. Although mindfulness is something we can carry around all day, it is also something we can sit with under a tree in lotus posture as well.

Elucidation of right mindfulness. It is important to understand that what we practice and cultivate here is not any old mindfulness, but right mindfulness, just as we practice and cultivate not any old view, but right view, and just as we practice and cultivate not any old action but right action. Mindfulness is something we all have to an extent, usually to a widely varying extent, and it is generally there when we most need it and can even be further trained. It is there when a sniper is pulling the trigger that will neutralize what has some indications of being a possible enemy combatant. It is there when a cat burglar removes the famous gem with an adeptness that avoids setting off the alarm system. But this is not right mindfulness. Right mindfulness is the mindfulness that is implicated in every other path factor. Right mindfulness does not exist independently of the path.

First establish yourself in the starting point of wholesome states, that is, in purified moral discipline and right view. Then, when your moral discipline is purified and your right view straight, you should practice the four foundations of mindfulness. (SN 47.3)

Right mindfulness is a critical component of right effort, and both work in collaboration with right view.

Right view is the forerunner. And how is right view the forerunner? One discerns wrong action as wrong action, and right action as right action. … One tries to abandon wrong action and to enter into right action: This is one’s right effort. One is mindful to abandon wrong action and to enter and remain in right action: This is one’s right mindfulness. Thus these three qualities — right view, right effort, and right mindfulness — run and circle around right action. – MN 117

This passage circles around right action but it is stated verbatim with each of intention, speech, view and livelihood replacing action in turn. Right view is the forerunner and with right effort and right mindfulness applied critically to the practice of each of the first five path factors. Right view is what we know, right effort is its present observance and right mindfulness is the present recollection of what is to be observed. Mindfulness is like a thermostat that keeps the temperature right.

There is a kind of art to clear comprehension. It is a kind of conceptual investigation, serves to develop wisdom or insight, but stays clear of intellectual reasoning. It is a matter of noting or verifying, sometimes as far as noting a conditioning relation between two factors. For instance, in contemplating feeling in feeling, one might note an instance of suffering, perhaps a twinge of anxiety, and note right before that a covetous thought, then recall the second noble truth. Feeling in feeling places a constraint on how far a thought might wander.

To see how mindfulness with investigation leads to wisdom and ultimately to awakening, and to see how concentration, our final factor on the path, plays a role in this, we turn to the seven factors of awakening (bojjhaṅga), which ties these together into a causal chain:

1. Mindfulness (sati),
2. investigation of experience (dhamma-vicaya),
3. energy (viriya),
4. delight (sometimes called rapture, pīti),
5. calm (passaddhi),
6. concentration (samādhi),
7. equanimity (upekkhā).

Mindfulness underlies the proper investigation of experience, which is according to appropriate attention (yoniso manasikāra), which we already encountered  chapter 2, and in chapter 3 as a faculty of the stream enterer. Investigation, when ardently undertaken, requires energy, which is generally assumed to be a matter of right effort. Investigation in seclusion with energy tends to generate a feeling of delight. Delight (pīti) is a feeling of well-being and includes pleasure, but it is more energetic than simple pleasure, because it has a bit of excitement in it.

Nonetheless, the feeling of well-being lead to calm. This step is a kind of tipping point, since up to now the three previous factors of awakening have been energizing. Calm sets the conditions for concentration, the path factor we have yet to discuss. Higher states of concentration are accompanied by equanimity, or impartiality, which is very conducive to wisdom, and ultimately awakening.

One of the designated subjects of investigation in the foundations of mindfulness is the set of enlightenment factors itself. As our practice in mindfulness improves, we should be able, self-referentially, to investigate each of the enlightenment factors in turn and discover that they are indeed related conditionally. This is how right view, including trust in the Buddha’s views, turns to wisdom as we witness phenomena in our own experience.

The practice of right mindfulness. Right mindfulness is practiced in conjunction with any other path practice. For instance, right action requires mindfulness to note where we might break a precept or to note the arising of unwholesome motivations, before we respond appropriately. Right effort requires constant evaluation of wholesomeness and unwholesomeness. Ethical practices engage us constantly in mindfulness because they challenge us continually to recall what we are supposed to be doing. Ritual or routine tasks are opportunities for mindfulness: if you are cutting potatoes, see if you can put anything else out of mind that is not potato-cutting for the few minutes you are engaged in this task. In fact, make the task a little more challenging: try to cut the potatoes into pieces of equal size; if you drop your mindfulness the sizes will drop their uniformity.

Mindfulness becomes difficult when there is too much going on at once: when the kids are barking at you, the dog needs a ride to his piano lesson, the TV is trying to sell you something that is whiter than white, your cell phone is ringing and you don’t know how you are going to pay the mortgage. We live in a culture that actually discourages mindfulness: We love to multi-task and think that life is boring if a lot of things are not going on at once. We get addicted to the dispersed mind. This is not a Buddhist way of being, which is to relish simplicity. We love to drink alcohol, which disperses the mind so much we forget our cares, often while fostering new ones. Most of what we call modern conveniences are actually just ways to avoid being mindful. For instance, we have different buzzers that go off to remind us of something we would otherwise have had to be mindful about, such as fastening a seat belt. We think ritual or routine is boring in our culture. When we walk through a door our minds are already on the other side of the door in the car and down the street before we even touch the door.

We should try to neutralize these tendencies. Cultivating simplicity tends to reduce potential distractions, so we should not make too many commitments, not live beyond our means (have no debt), don’t own a lot of things. Generally low-tech demands more mindfulness then high-tech. We should give up our addiction to multitasking. If we are cutting potatoes in the kitchen, we should not listen to the radio. We should not leave the TV on all the time, nor talk on the phone while driving. Attending to the task at hand is being mindful.

The better part of right mindfulness is that associated with investigation and with the Dharma, the last specific topic of the foundations of mindfulness teachings. The Dharma invites investigation. Hearing the four noble truths we are compelled to investigate suffering in detail in our own experience, and craving, and how they occur together. We attend to rising and passing away of phenomena, and investigate the possible locus of a self. There is a proper way to investigate, which is through appropriate attention and not through philosophical speculation, which would invariably introduce factors not present in direct experience. Leave investigation at simple perception. This should be a major preoccupation on the path. This is particularly facilitated by practicing mindfulness under circumstances conducive to stillness of mind, which increases the power of mindfulness and the clarity of investigation. This takes us into the final practice of the path, right concentration.

Right Concentration (sammā samādhi)

The concentrated mind has a special stillness and clarity that is conducive, in fact necessary, for the final leg of the path to awakening.

Just as if there were a pool of water in a mountain glen — clear, limpid, and unsullied — where a man with good eyesight standing on the bank could see shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also shoals of fish swimming about and resting, … In the same way — with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability — the monk directs and inclines it to the knowledge of the ending of the mental fermentations. (MN 39)

Non-Buddhist meditation methods typically develop concentration, optimally bringing the mind to a single point so that perception effectively stops, which is often experienced as profound and blissful. Right concentration is different: it is the natural extension of the path, and most immediately the natural extension of mindfulness with investigation into the calm abiding of a highly but not maximally concentrated mind. It is only through right concentration that the higher realizations and awakening are possible.

Elucidation of right concentration. Meditation comes in different forms, but it is not right concentration unless it derives from straightening views and intentions, from purifying virtue and from building on right effort and right mindfulness.

There are right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort and right mindfulness. The unification of mind equipped with these seven factors is called noble right concentration with its supports and accessories. (SN 45.28)

Right concentration is consistently defined in terms of four stages of concentration called jhāna (almost nobody translates the Pali word, so it should be remembered).

And what is right concentration?
There is the case where a monk — quite withdrawn from sensuality, withdrawn from unskillful qualities — enters and remains in the first jhāna: delight and pleasure born from withdrawal, accompanied by thought and evaluation.
With the stilling of thoughts and evaluations, he enters and remains in the second jhāna: delight and pleasure born of composure, unification of mind, free from thought and evaluation — internal assurance.
With the fading of delight, he remains equanimous, mindful and alert, and senses pleasure with the body. He enters and remains in the third jhāna, of which the Noble Ones declare, “Equanimous and mindful, he has a pleasant abiding.”
With the abandoning of pleasure and pain — as with the earlier disappearance of elation and distress — he enters and remains in the fourth jhāna: purity of equanimity and mindfulness, neither pleasure nor pain. This is called right concentration. (SN 45.8)

A table will clarify the logic behind the otherwise puzzling configurations of factors for the jhānas.

                            1st   jhāna    2nd  jhāna    3rd   jhāna    4th  jhāna
thought-evaluation    x
delight                           x               x
pleasure                         x               x                    x
unification                                      x                    x
equanimity                                                            x                     xx
mindfulness                  .                 .                    x                     xx
Figure 2. Stages of concentration

The progression from jhāna  to jhāna  is consistent with the trend already evident in the seven factors of awakening: a trajectory from more energetic to less energetic. Recall that the  jhānas take the place of concentration in this series.

For one of right mindfulness, right concentration springs up. (SN 5.25-6)

Each successive jhāna is produced from the preceding by the loss of the most energetic of four jhāna factors. The factors of thought and evaluation (vitakka-vicāra) are particularly energetic, having a discursive quality:

Thought and evaluation are the verbal formation, one breaks into speech. (MN 44)

The second jhāna and beyond, in which the discursive element is absent, is accordingly referred to as noble silence.  The loss of these two factors together by the second jhāna necessarily shuts any tendency toward intellectual proliferation out of investigation. The factor of delight, also fourth of the seven factors of awakening, has too much energy for the very serene third and fourth jhānas. Even the quiet pleasure that initially accompanies delight is too energetic for the fourth jhāna.

Meanwhile, more serene factors accumulate to offset the loss of the the more energetic factors. Notice that mindfulness must in fact be present as a causal factor in the first jhāna, as a condition of concentration in the first place, though it is not explicitly reported in the early jhānas. Its mention in the higher jhānas suggests that it becomes stronger and very acute there. In this way, mindfulness and concentration are mutually supportive. It is important to bear in mind that evaluation, as a factor of mindfulness, continues unabated, even in the fourth jhāna.

A monk in each jhāna regards whatever phenomena connected with form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications and consciousness as inconstant, stressful, a disease, a cancer, an arrow, painful, an affliction, alien, a disintegration, a void, non-self … (AN 9.36)

Jhāna is therefore not the state of extreme absorption common non-Buddhist traditions, which would cut off all conceptualization altogether. For instance, the Buddha praises Sāriputta for his talents in investigation in all jhānas,

Whatever qualities there are in the first jhāna … he ferrets them out one by one. Known to him they remain, known to him they subside…  (MN 111)

He then makes exactly the same statement but with regard to second jhāna. third jhāna and fourth jhāna.

In summary, right concentration is the continuation of the practices of right effort and right mindfulness in a refined state of serenity and unification of mind. This telescoping of the three explains why the three together are called the concentration group. As our awakened nun Dhammadinnā put it:

Unification of mind is concentration, the four foundations of mindfulness are its themes, the four right efforts are its requisites, and any cultivation, development and pursuit of these qualities are its development. (MN 44)

Since right concentration depends on all the previous steps of the path, the mind as it enters concentration already inclines toward wisdom and virtue, toward viewing reality in terms of impermanence, suffering and non-self,  toward renunciation, kindness and harmlessness, toward purification of the mind of unwholesome factors and toward wise consideration and mindfulness. Right concentration consolidates all of the path practices, and it is in that crystal clear state that practice really starts cooking, and to produce the delectable odors of wisdom.

There is no jhāna for one with no wisdom, no wisdom for one without jhāna. But one with both jhāna and discernment, he’s on the verge of nibbāna. (Dhp 372)

The practice of right concentration. In the mind’s typical worldly state thoughts come at us like a rushing river, like a fire hose or like a sand storm. Alternatively we can say that the mind jumps around from place to place like a monkey, like a basket ball or buzzes around like a swarm of gnats. Under such conditions we have little opportunity to observe our thoughts to get to know them, nor to observe and get to know what is happening in the world around us, for that gets lost in the deluge of thought. Likewise under such conditions we have little opportunity to respond appropriately to thoughts as required by many of the steps in the Path. Even when we seek out the forest pool, our thoughts for a time are like choppy water, stirred up by paddlers and power boats, that is, too agitated to permit us a view of stones, shells and shoals of fish in the murky depths.

Concentration requires right effort to the degree of holding hindrances at bey, and focused engagement in mindfulness as necessary conditions. A degree of seclusion and quiet are contributing factors as well as bringing the body into a state of calm, generally by assuming meditation posture. Right concentration requires the development of the whole Path, but I recommend early forays, before the Path is well developed, into simple concentration as a way to still our busy modern minds and to get a feel for the power of the concentrated mind.

A very simple mindfulness task is best suited for this: pick a meditation object and keep it your awareness centered there. The most common choice of meditation object is the breath or some aspect of the breath, as in the beginning stages of the Ānāpānasati Sutta (MN 118). The awareness will inevitably wander in the early stages of your meditation career; you must be mindful to recenter it over and over. Because it aims at keeping the mind absolutely fixed, this exercise is rarely conducive to penetrating insights, but it does produce calm abiding, is typically quite pleasant, and has a therapeutic quality that is more effective than an evening cocktail for unwinding.

With adeptness in this simple meditation, you can progress to more subtle and complex topics of mindfulness, generally under the guidance of a meditation teacher. You will find that it is more difficult to reach concentration with some topics of mindfulness that require more investigation, but that this becomes easier with time. There is a kind of art in balancing the energy of investigation with the calm of concentration. Be aware that favoring deep levels of concentration over investigation carries a couple of dangers. First, one can become attached to the pleasure of concentration, which then becomes a self-serving impediment to progress on the path. Second, the intense serenity of concentration can mislead one into thinking one has reached some great attainment on the path, possibly even awakening, when it is nothing of the sort.

The Development of Wisdom

The Path begins with right view and right intention, which constitute the wisdom group. Yet wisdom is largely a product of right concentration, keeping in mind that right concentration has already folded in right mindfulness and right effort, along with the rest of the Path.

That one could fulfill the wisdom group without having fulfilled the concentration group that is not possible. (DN 18)

“Bhikkhus, develop concentration. A monk with concentration understands in accordance with reality.” (SN 22.5)

When right concentration does not exist, for one failing right concentration, the proximate cause is destroyed for knowledge and vision of things as they really are. (A.V.4.9-11)

The knowledges are for one with concentration, not for one without concentration. (AN 6.64)

Right view gives us a lot of material for investigation. Right concentration, in effect, transforms right views into wisdom.

When his mind is thus concentrated in concentration, is purified, bright, rid of blemishes, free of taints, soft, workable, steady and attained to imperturbability, he bends and inclines his mind toward knowledge and vision. He understands “this my body is material, made of four elements. … Just as if a man with good sight were to examine a beryl gem in his hand, saying ‘this beryl gem is beautiful, well made, clear and transparent, and through it is strung a blue, yellow, red, white or brown string.” In just the same way he inclines his mind to knowledge and vision … to psychic powers … understands the Four Noble Truths. (DN 2)

Why do we want to develop wisdom? A primary reason is that it is necessary to perfect the purity of mind, to perfect virtue. With limited wisdom we can still correct our conduct and habit patterns, but we cannot correct the most recalcitrant ways we have of mis-perceiving the world.

For instance – and this is the most important instance – most of us have this very pronounced view that we are a separate self, which is always an impediment to perfecting virtue. Most fundamentally, we misperceive the world because of a constant bias in favor of this needy self. Nonetheless, through the practice of ethical conduct we learn to behave toward others as if that self were barely there, by not stealing, by not harming, and so on. Through the practice of purification of mind we can mitigate the affective mental factors that manifest that self, the various forms of greed and hatred that arise in the self’s quest for personal advantage, and try to take control of our actions. Now, all of this will tend to loosen the iron grip of the self, but not eliminate it. Through the development of wisdom we get at the most recalcitrant views. Ultimately, the development of wisdom also underlies the goal of awakening, the final ending of all suffering, the deathless, nirvana, that transcend virtue and ethics.

In the next chapter we will deepen our understanding of right view to comprehend the conditional factors implicated in the arising of the deluded human condition and how these are broken up with the light of wisdom. In the final chapter we endeavor to explain the nature of the higher attainments, particularly complete awakening.

___________________________________

i.See many meticulously documented cases of children’s past-life memories by Ian Stevenson and his colleagues.

ii.Remarkably, we are each born with a thoroughly rutted karmic landscape, or equivalently a well-formed individual character, but typically with no memory of whose steps produced these ruts before we arrived.

iii.Chodrin (), Nhat Hahn ().

This, last week’s post and some yet to come are chapters of a text I am preparing in conjunction with a class I teach periodically here in Austin. I encourage any feedback about mistakes or omissions, and about typos. The text will be called something like Foundations of Early Buddhism: practice and understanding.

In the last chapter we introduced the Buddha’s gradual instruction (Figure 1). The gradual instruction falls into the following three parts, which I give names to here;

1. Common practice and understanding. Generosity – ethics – heaven – drawbacks, degradation and impurity of sensual passions – rewards of renunciation.

2. Transitional qualifications. “The mind is ready, softened, unbiased, elated and trusting.” These are a description of faith or trust, which we discuss in this chapter.

3. Higher instruction. Four Noble Truths – the Path.

The present chapter is concerned with transitional qualifications and, to a degree, with the first three of the four Noble Truths (truth of suffering, the truth of the origin of suffering, the truth of the cessation of suffering). The Path upon which we are embarking is actually the fourth Noble Truth (the way to the cessation of suffering).

It should be noted that no two Buddhist adherents develop in the same way. Buddhism does not expect uniformity of practice among its members, as most religions do. In fact, Buddhism cannot expect such uniformity because its standards are extraordinarily high: its benchmark is the rare attainment of complete awakening, which entails eventual perfect purity in action and thought, penetrating insight and imperturbable serenity. Individually we do what we can to reach that goal, or what we have the opportunity and inclination for, or what we are inspired to accomplish. Some of us jump off the diving board into the deep end and some of us are dog-paddlers. Many remain unclear about the Four Noble Truths and never embark on the Path, but lead, nonetheless, virtuous lives within the common understandings and practice. Many enter the Path rather tentatively, for instance, taking up meditation long before virtue is strong, while the mind is neither ready nor trusting, and with no understanding the importance of the Four Noble Truths. Still others have nearly perfect virtue, absolute trust in the sources of Buddhist wisdom, and an immediate grasp of the Four Noble Truths, then become firmly established on the Path.

We will see in this chapter how the transitional qualities are developed through refuge in the Triple Gem: the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, for these are the three sources of Buddhist wisdom, in all its profundity, to which we must open our hearts and minds until we have seen it for ourselves. Almost as essential are admirable friends, living people of wisdom who can inspire and instruct us on the Path. Finally, the early attainment of a certain kind of insight, called the Dharma eye and developed through appropriate attention, will fully establish one irrevocably and with absolute conviction on the Path. We will review all of these assets in this chapter. Furthermore, we will discuss the ways in which the monastic order provides a valuable resource for anyone dedicated to pursuing the Path, for ordination into its ranks provides the optimal context for development toward awakening.

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce a good friend, the stream enterer, the person fully possessed of all of the assets necessary not only for entering but for establishing oneself firmly on the Path, and an admirable friend who can guide us through the transition to embark on the Path. The stream enterer has made great progress in mastering the common practices and understanding, has an absolute conviction in the efficacy of the Path and, through the Dharma eye, has already reached the first level awakening. She is someone who has not only embarked on the Path, but knows where it leads, as if, upon reaching the trail head, thirty feet from which the Path makes a turn and disappears, hidden by trees and underbrush, she had been able to levitate to see the entire path from the air, to observe for herself whither it wends, and she had found its terminus to be even more beautiful than she had anticipated.

The Stream Enterer

Becoming fully established on the Path is stream entry (sotapatti), and the person who is fully established in the path is called a stream enterer (sotapanna). The stream (sota) is a synonym for the noble eightfold path itself.

[Buddha:] “Sāriputta, ‘The stream, the stream’: thus it is said. And what, Sāriputta, is the stream?”

“This noble eightfold path, lord, is the stream: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.”

“Very good, Sāriputta! Very good! This noble eightfold path — right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration — is the stream.” (SN 55.5)

To get technical, stream entry is often described in two stages: path and fruit. The path of stream entry is the training that results in stream entry. It is generally described as guaranteeing the fruit of stream entry in this very life. The fruit of stream entry is stream entry per se, and that is what is described here unless stated otherwise.

The qualities developed in the stream enterer are described in various ways.

“And which are the four factors of stream-entry with which he is endowed?
“There is the case where the disciple of the noble ones is endowed with unwavering trust in the Awakened One… unwavering trust in the Dhamma… unwavering trust in the Saṅgha… He/she is endowed with virtues that are appealing to the noble ones: untorn, unbroken, unspotted, unsplattered, liberating, praised by the wise, untarnished, leading to concentration.” (AN 10.92)

Here we learn that a stream enterer is one possessed of virtue and trust: virtue may be developed through common practice and understanding, and faith is described in the basic transitional qualification for entering the Path, equivalent to refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma and the Saṅgha. Refuge is might well be listed as a common practice alongside generosity and ethics. But the stream enterer’s level of trust is exceptional, a result of the stream enterer’s aerial glimpse of the Path and where it leads.
With regard to common practice of generosity, or rather its opposite, stinginess, we find a rather definitive claim:

“Monks, there are these five forms of stinginess. Which five? Stinginess as to one’s monastery [lodgings], stinginess as to one’s family [of supporters], stinginess as to one’s gains, stinginess as to one’s status, and stinginess as to the Dhamma. These are the five forms of stinginess. And the meanest of these five is this: stinginess as to the Dhamma… [This occurs, for instance, when a Buddhist teacher will withhold teachings from another teacher, lest the latter attracts more students.]

“Without abandoning these five things, one is incapable of realizing the fruit of stream entry.” (AN 5.254, 5.257)

Elsewhere, additional attainments are attributed to the stream enterer. She is said to have eliminated three of ten fetters (samyojana). As a set the fetters are used to distinguish four levels of awakening as practice attainments, from the lowest to highest: stream enterer, once-returner, non-returner, arahant.

And which are the five lower fetters? Self-identity view, doubt, grasping at habits and practices, sensual desire and ill will. These are the five lower fetters. And which are the five higher fetters? Passion for form, passion for what is formless, conceit, restlessness, and ignorance. These are the five higher fetters. (AN 10.13)

“In this community of monks there are monks who, with the total ending of [the first] three fetters, are stream enterers, steadfast, never again destined for states of woe, headed for self-awakening.” (MN 118)

Of the three fetters that are ended for the stream enterer, the first, identity view (sakkāyadiṭṭhi), is the most subtle: it is the view that we are a fixed self: the one who experiences, the one who has attributes and possessions, the one who craves. This tells us that the stream enterer possesses a significant degree of wisdom, in fact a significant insight. The second, doubt (vicikicchā) is the opposite of trust in the the Buddha, Dharma and Saṅgha, and so reinforces what was said in an earlier passage. The third fetter is attachment to rites and rituals (sīlab-bata-parāmāso), in which the regressive view is implicated that they are effective in producing karmic fruits; Buddhist karma does not work this way. Ending the first and third are therefore matters of wisdom, so we can consider them together. We learn also from this passage that the one firmly established on the path will not take a wrong turn or regress.

Practice on the path to stream Entry

How do we become a stream enterer? By one account,

Association with people of integrity is a factor for stream-entry. Listening to the true Dhamma is a factor for stream-entry. Appropriate attention is a factor for stream-entry. Practice in accordance with the Dhamma is a factor for stream-entry. (SN 55.5)

Association with people of integrity is critical to establishing oneself on the Path. Early Buddhism did not articulate the role of teachers, rather the nearest key concept was that of the admirable friend (kalyāṇa-mitta), one who can provide teaching, but also from whom one can learn by emulating their conduct and one who provides inspiration in the Dhamma overall. In general, those of higher attainment or spiritual progress are those from which we are likely to learn the most. The importance of the admiral friend is expressed in this curious but well-known passage:

As he was seated to one side, Ven. Ananda said to the Blessed One, “This is half of the holy life, lord: having admirable people as friends, companions, and colleagues.”

“Don’t say that, Ananda. Don’t say that. Having admirable people as friends, companions, and colleagues is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, and colleagues, he can be expected to develop and pursue the noble eightfold path.” (SN 45.2)

Listening to the true Dharma is also critical because both the gradual training and the Path involves interplay between understanding and practice. It is through the Dharma that we acquire common understandings to support common practice and it is through the Dharma, particularly through what we will describe in the next chapter as Right View, that we engage the practice of the Path. Of course in modern times we also read the Dharma, a privilege unavailable in the early days of Buddhism, and listening to the Dharma is often just a mouse click away.

Another account of the path to stream entry specifies some degree of insight into the Four Noble Truths:

“He attends appropriately, This is suffering… This is the origination of suffering… This is the cessation of suffering… This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering. As he attends appropriately in this way, three fetters are abandoned in him: self-identity view, doubt, and grasping at rites and rituals.” – MN 2

This describes engagement with the Four Noble Truths as a way to insight, supplementing preparations for the abandoning of each of these fetters through common practices and understandings. The practice of ethics and the development of selfless virtue and renunciation have prepared for the abandoning of identity-view. The practice of refuge has prepared for the abandoning of doubt. The understanding of karma and its fruits as part of ethics has prepared for the abandoning the grasping of rights and rituals. Appropriate attention concerning the Four Noble Truths pushes us over the edge.

We encountered appropriate attention briefly in the last chapter. Appropriate attention (yoniso manasikāra), is a hugely important factor in Buddhist practice, about which the Buddha stated,

Appropriate attention as a quality of a monk in training: nothing else does so much for attaining the superlative goal. A monk, striving appropriately, attains the ending of suffering. (Iti 1.16)

The Pali for appropriate attention is more literally translated as attending to the origin or foundation, refers to a skill for avoiding distraction through speculation or conceptual abstractions, and is in accord with the Buddha’s metaphysics of conditionality. Our example from a previous chapter recognizes poverty is a direct conditioning factor for crime, rather than criminals. It also recognizes birth as a direct conditioning factor for death, rather than ill health. It also recognizes craving as a direct conditioning factor for suffering, rather than irksome circumstances. Phenomena arise from conditions and appropriate attention traces those conditions in the most direct way. Generally the insight reported for the stream enterer is not so much about craving and suffering as it is about conditionality, which relates craving and suffering, but many other factors as well.

Insight prepared by appropriate attention penetrates to a level of understanding that supplants these three fetters once and for all. This insight is called the Dharma eye (dhamma-cakkhu).

There are a number of instances in which disciples discover the Dharma eye. Recall from chapter one the story of Sāriputta’s encounter with one of the Buddha’s first five disciples, in which, Assaji evoked the same realization in Sāriputta in reference to conditionality, and then Sāriputta in Mogallāna. Sāriputta claims to have seen the deathless (Nirvana), yet he was not yet an arahant. Here is another account:

To Upāli the householder, as he was sitting right there, there arose the dustless, stainless Dhamma eye: Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation. Then — having seen the Dhamma, having reached the Dhamma, known the Dhamma, gained a footing in the Dhamma, having crossed over and beyond doubt, having had no more questioning — Upāli the householder gained fearlessness and was independent of others with regard to the Teacher’s message. (MN 56)

The Dharma eye seems to provide this glimpse of Nirvana; after all seeing the conditioned nature of reality gets close to the idea of an unconditioned reality. As the monk Nārada describes it:

“My friend, although I have seen properly with right discernment, as it actually is present, that ‘The cessation of becoming is Nirvana,’ still I am not an arahant whose effluents are ended. It’s as if there were a well along a road in a desert, with neither rope nor water bucket. A man would come along overcome by heat, oppressed by the heat, exhausted, dehydrated, and thirsty. He would look into the well and would have knowledge of ‘water,’ but he would not dwell touching it with his body. In the same way, although I have seen properly with right discernment, as it actually is present, that ‘The cessation of becoming is Nirvana,’ still I am not an arahant whose effluents are ended.” (SN 12.68)

Elsewhere the related insight into impermanence is attributed to the stream enterer. This passage also gives us an idea of two tracks of development on the path to stream entry.

One who has trust and belief that these phenomena are this way [impermanent] is called a faith-follower: One who has entered the orderliness of rightness, entered the plane of people of integrity, transcended the plane of the run-of-the-mill. He is incapable of doing any deed by which he might be reborn in hell, in the animal womb, or in the realm of hungry ghosts. He is incapable of passing away until he has realized the fruit of stream entry.

One who, after pondering with a modicum of discernment, has accepted that these phenomena are this way is called a Dhamma-follower: one who has entered the orderliness of rightness, entered the plane of people of integrity, transcended the plane of the run-of-the-mill. He is incapable of doing any deed by which he might be reborn in hell, in the animal womb, or in the realm of hungry ghosts. He is incapable of passing away until he has realized the fruit of stream entry.

One who knows and sees that these phenomena are this way is called a stream-enterer, steadfast, never again destined for states of woe, headed for self-awakening. (SN 25.1-10, italics mine)

The faith-follower and the Dharma follower are both on the path to stream entry, but ultimately the fruit of stream entry ripens in discernment for both faith- and Dharma-follower. Faith is refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Saṅgha. Dharma here is what one verifies oneself.

Saṅgha

Before discussing the Refuges, we should pin down who the Saṅgha is, and note the special relationship that stream enterers have to the Saṅgha. Actually the word refers to either of two overlapping groups of people, known as the noble saṅgha the the monastic saṅgha.

Stream enterers themselves, or even those on the path of stream entry, qualify – along with once-returners, non-returners and arahants – as officially members of the noble saṅgha (ariya-saṅgha), and are thereby graduates from the ranks of mere worldlings (puthujjana) to noble ones.

This Doctrine and Discipline is the abode of such mighty beings as stream-winners and those practicing to realize the fruit of stream-entry; once-returners and those practicing to realize the fruit of once-returning; non-returners and those practicing to realize the fruit of non-returning; arahants and those practicing for arahantship… (Ud 5.5)

The Saṅgha of the Blessed One’s disciples who have practiced well… who have practiced straight-forwardly… who have practiced methodically… who have practiced masterfully — in other words, the four types when taken as pairs, the eight when taken as individual types — they are the Saṅgha of the Blessed One’s disciples: worthy of gifts, worthy of hospitality, worthy of offerings, worthy of respect, the incomparable field of merit for the world.” (AN 11.2)

Each of these passages refers to those on the path to stream entry as well as those enjoying the fruits. In the second, an oft repeated formula, the four types of noble disciples are just these stream enterers, once-returners, non-returners and arahants, those at any of the four stages of awakening. These four are then as pairs on the basis of path or fruit.

Ordained monks (bhikkhu) and nuns (bhikkhunī) belong to the monastic saṅgha (bhikkhu-saṅgha). A monastic may or may not be a noble one, and a noble one may or may not be a monastic, but both kinds of saṅgha are intimately intertwined. The monastic saṅgha is the natural home of the noble ones and the noble saṅgha is largely a product of the monastic saṅgha. A monastic of no attainment, if he is nonetheless sincere, would generally be expected at least be at least on the path to stream entry. Therefore, if monastics were all sincere, then monastics would all be noble ones. In fact the last passage above actually begins with a description of noble ones, then concludes with treating them like monastics, since offerings are conventionally made to monastics, not to laity. However, some lay people are noble ones but are not monastics; in fact this was very common indeed at the time of the Buddha.

The monastic saṅgha as a resource for the noble saṅgha. The monastic sangha is a multi-functional institution, defined in the Vinaya with a mission statement, a code of conduct, rules of governance, guidelines for handling grievances and many other features.i We noted one of its minor functions in the last chapter, as providing recipients for lay generosity, a kind of priming of the pump of the lifeblood of the Buddhist community.

The monastic saṅgha additionally provides a natural home for those of high spiritual aspirations, for those who wish to dedicate themselves fully to development along the Path to awakening. In fact, this can be regarded as a kind of right for members of the Buddhist community, much like primary education or even college education is a right in many modern counties for qualifying individuals. The monastic saṅgha provides an ideal context for Buddhist practice by defining the life most conducive to upholding Buddhist principles, a life so barren of any opportunity for personal advantage that a self can scarcely find root, except to the extent it continues uselessly to haunt the mind. Into life flow instead the wisdom and compassion that, liberated from the tyranny of personal neediness, burst here and there into various stages of awakening. As an ascetic renunciate community, monks and nuns depend completely on material support from the lay community. Not only does this afford the monastic the leisure of practice, study and accomplishing good, it insulates the monastic from the ups and downs of the contingencies and from the competitiveness of the common world. In this way the monastic saṅgha, as long as it follows the discipline scrupulously, produces relatively effectively noble ones of progressively higher attainment from among its ranks. The flourishing of the monastic saṅgha in this way ensures the flourishing of the noble saṅgha as well. The Buddha stated that,

“… if … the monks should live the life to perfection, the world would not lack for Arahants.” (DN 16)

The world will be even less lack for noble ones, many of whom are not yet arahants but nonetheless attained of lower levels of awakening. The monastic saṅgha is both training ground and dwelling place for the noble saṅgha, much like a university is both a training ground and a dwelling place for scholars.

It is not often enough stated that the founding of the monastic saṅgha was a truly monumental achievement. Although there were ascetics in India before the Buddha, “… among all of the bodies of renouncers it was only the Buddhists who invented monastic life,”ii that is, who provided an organized institution capable of sustaining its teachings. It has also been pointed out that the Buddhist monastic saṅgha is likely the world’s oldest human organization in continual existence and not significantly altered. The Buddha took its development very seriously and most consistently called the body of his teachings not Dharma, not Sāsana, and certainly not Buddhism, but rather Dharma-Vinaya, the doctrine and discipline.

Moreover, the monastic saṅgha appears to have been planned as the ideal society writ small. Internally the Sangha as envisioned by the Buddha observes no class distinctions, provides an exemplary level of gender equality, is regulated in a way to avoid conflicts and maintain harmony, observes procedures to negotiate disagreements should these arise, is democratic and only minimally hierarchical. The nuns and monks are designated in the Vinaya as the full-time caretakers of the Dharma. The Buddha never attempted to organize the lay community except indirectly by putting the monastic community in their midst and letting them sort out what to do about it. The monastics have no coercive power whatever over the laity; there is, for instance, nothing like excommunication. Their authority derives entirely from the respect they receive as teachers and role models, that is, from the degree to which the monastic saṅgha represents the ideal of the noble saṅgha.

The benefits of the noble saṅgha for the Buddhist community. Noble ones ennoble the general Buddhist community. Just as it benefits us to have artists and good plumbers among us, or those educated in the Humanities, it ennobles us to have saints and sages, adepts and arahants in our midst, the more the better. These noble ones, disciples of the Buddha who root their lives entirely in the Dharma and are an inspiration and a resource for us all, constitute an effective civilizing force. Where there are noble ones, trust will be inspired, for they display first-hand the peace and happiness, wisdom and compassion that result from complete immersion in the Buddhist life. The noble ones are close at hand, they teach, they inspire with their deportment, their good works and their knowledge. They inspire self-reflection concerning one’s own life, and tend to melt samsaric tendencies. They keep the flame of the Buddha’s teaching alive.

It is through these admirable friends that the meaning of the Buddha’s life and awakening is revealed and through these admirable friends that the highly sophisticated teachings of the Dharma are clarified step by step to lead the instructling toward and along the path. Keeping the flame of the Dharma burning bright is critical for the perpetuation of the teachings: because those teachings are so subtle and sophisticated they are easily misinterpreted if they are not put into practice and experienced by the noble ones among us.

Refuge

Refuge is represented in the transitional qualifications as “the mind is ready, softened, unbiased, elated and trusting.” It is the kind of faith, trust or acceptance required to embark on the Path.

We live in a relentlessly uncertain world yet need to make decisions in that world. It is the rare decision indeed that comes with absolute certitude. Trust or faith (saddhā) is that which bridges the gap between the little we actually know and the plenty we would need to know in order to make a decision of guaranteed outcome. Trust belongs to the nuts and bolts of human cognition. We may try to bring as much discernment as possible into our trust but in the end we necessarily make a jump, big or little, into the unknown,

“[Gulp] Well, here goes!”

In this way we have entrusted ourselves, for better or worse, to our baby sitters, to our teachers, to our accountant, to TV pundits, to our dentist, to the authority of science, and for fewer and fewer of us to our national leaders. Or we put our trust in alternatives to all of these. We have no choice whether to trust (we don’t know enough individually), only who or what to trust. Some of us fancy ourselves rationalists, but we are all most fundamentally creatures of faith in every aspect of life.

In fact, we grow up, before we know it, trusting a mass of tacit and unexamined assumptions instilled at such a young age that we later forget that they are tacit and unexamined, that they are products of trust. We trust whatever faith we are raised in, or we trust science. We trust free markets, or we trust the communist party. The Westerns and war movies we’ve watched may have taught us to trust the un-Buddhist proposition that “good” must often be expressed through the barrel of a gun because that is all that “bad” people understand. In this modern age we are mired in trust, but this trust is almost entirely implicit, unexamined and undiscerning; the marketing industry even manufactures trust in the craziest things.

For better or worse, there is no getting around trust in an uncertain world. Life-altering decisions generally arise from a sense of urgency that demand big acts of trust and therefore enormous courage; they are way beyond the reach of the timid or of the deniers who cling fearfully to their certitude. This is the courage of the great explorers, of the hippies of yore on quest in India with nothing but a backpack, and more commonly of the betrothed or of the career bound, stirred by deep longing or by desperation. Establishing ourselves on the Path toward awakening will shake our life to the core and this will demand particularly courageous trust. Therefore, we should ensure that it is a discerning trust.

The Triple Gem. In Buddhism we place our trust in three sources of wisdom, which we trust to guide us in our spiritual development and how we conduct our lives. These three sources of wisdom are the Buddha and what he realized, the Dharma, what the Buddha taught, and the Saṅgha, the living noble Buddhist adepts who carry the Buddha’s realization and understanding forward in our own time. These three together are known as the Triple Gem (tiratana) and the trust we accord them is called refuge (saraṇa).

Trust in the Triple Gem is essential for bending our minds around Buddhism, because Buddhism includes understandings and practices difficult to internalize. Until we understand what it is the Buddha realized, what it is the Buddha taught and what it is the Saṅgha has upheld for one hundred generations, we cannot be certain where this way of life and the Path of practice will lead us. Until we have experienced deeply this way of life and traveled far on this Path of practice we will not understand what the Buddha understood, taught and entrusted to the Saṅgha. Therefore, until we have experienced this way of life and traveled far on this Path we require trust, ardent trust in the Triple Gem, to nourish our Buddhist aspirations. Trust in the Triple Gem is what first turns our heads toward virtue, wisdom and peace. However, when we see and fully experience these things for ourselves, trust will no longer be necessary.

Moreover, there is some urgency in taking refuge. Keep in mind that we already trust in our lives many people and understandings, already placing undiscerning trust in a mass of tacit unexamined, and for the most part faulty, assumptions. Our trust in the Triple Gem must be great enough to override these, not to be hindered by them, if we are to bring ourselves in line with the Path. This is why, according to the transitional requirements, the mind must be ready (kalla-cittaṃ), softened (mudu-cittaṃ) and unbiased (vinīvaraṇa-cittaṃ). We do best to embark on the path from the perspective of the Buddha, not from that of Madison Avenue or Rupert Murdock. It is the alliance of trust and discernment that reaches furthest.
Those born into Buddhist cultures and families are commonly taught trust in the Triple Gem from infancy, before they possess the gift of discernment. Many of us in the West who are not born Buddhists gain the initial trust through encounters with Buddhists, who often exhibit profound peace and kindness, or through the profundity that shines through the Buddha’s teachings, even before we grasp more than a hint of their import. Bold at first, that trust will grow progressively more discerning and acquire more depth with experience.

There is great drama in the great decisions that will shape our lives. Initial urgency and fear turns to reflection, then then to commitment, then outcome. Where trust is ongoing, devotion or veneration might follow. The resort to trust in the midst of uncertainty is experienced as a sudden relief, carrying the taste of safety. The uncertainty that had given rise to fear and urgency may not yet be eliminated, but once urgency has turned to commitment, worry tends to disappear. The sense of ease is a refuge, a sense of entrusting oneself to something, much as we as children entrust our well-being to our parents. This is why we describe the mind in the transitional qualifications as elated (udagga-cittaṃ). The trusting mind (pasanna-cittaṃ) is that possessed of the same trust (saddhā) we’ve been talking about: pasanna and saddhā are near synonyms, pasanna also conveying a sense of calm.

The trust we place in the Triple Gem often arises from a sense of urgency which is called in Pali saṃvega, a kind of horror at the realization of the full nature and depth of the human condition (AN 5.77-80). It is said that the Buddha-to-be experienced saṃvega when he learned, to his dismay, of sickness, of old age and of death, and in response began his quest. Saṃvega arises when we lose our capacity for denial, which is a likely outcome when frivolity ceases. The Buddha-to-be then recognized, at the sight of a wandering ascetic, an option that gave rise to the bold resolution to address his despair. It is said that he then experienced a sense of calm relief that in Pali is called pasāda, the antidote to the distress of samvega.

Underlying the metaphors of both refuge and Gem is, in fact, protection or safety. A refuge at the Buddha’s time was understood as the protection provided by a mentor, patron or benefactor in return for a vow of allegiance.iii Gems, similarly, were generally believed to have special protective properties. Refuge in the Triple Gem represents, particularly for those not born Buddhist, a bold decision to entrust oneself to a way of life, understanding and practice that will at first have all the uncertainty and mystery that virgin territory has to the explorer or that a deep and dark cave has to the spelunker. Just as a plan of action is a refuge to relieve the panic of the castaway or of those buried in rubble, entrusting oneself to a Path of practice toward Awakening provides a refuge from saṃvega.

But is this a trust that arises out of wise reflection and discernment?

Refuge in the Buddha. Most religions worship some personality. Buddhism is striking in that the role of veneration is occupied primarily by a now deceased human being rather than a deity or supernatural being, albeit a person who attained some remarkable qualities in his lifetime. We already tend to venerate people with remarkable qualities, for instance, our favorite geniuses like Einstein or Mozart.

When we take Refuge in the Buddha we see in this towering personality the highest qualities we might choose to emulate. Refuge in the Buddha is nonetheless an act of trust, beginning with the trust that such an awakened personality is even possible. With deep practice and study, with our own progress on the Path, we begin to see how his qualities of mind are gradually starting to emerge in us and our trust begins to be confirmed. As we have seen, the stream enterer has experienced at least a brief verifying insight. Still, trust is necessary in the beginning, until we see for ourselves.

Refuge in the Dharma. Most religions have some form of doctrine or belief system, generally providing a metaphysics, an account of the origin of the world, of mankind or of a particular tribe, and so on. The Dharma stands out in its enormous sophistication and its emphasis on the mind rather than on external forces (although in chapter 6 we will learn that this is not entirely true). It deals with the human dilemma, existential crisis, anguish, suffering and dissatisfaction, delusion, harmfulness, meaninglessness and the rest, as human problems with human causes that arise in human minds, and as problems that require human solutions. The Dharma provides a program whereby the mind is tuned, honed, sharpened, tempered, straightened, turned and distilled into an instrument of virtue, serenity and wisdom. The Dharma itself is among the greatest products of the human mind, as skillfully articulated by the Buddha. It is on the basis of trust in the Triple Gem that we begin to study, practice, develop and gain insight through the teachings of the Buddha. As the Buddha states,

“… when someone going for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Saṅgha sees, with right insight, the four Noble Truths: suffering, the arising of suffering, the overcoming of suffering and the Eightfold Path leading to the ending of suffering, then this is the secure refuge; this is the supreme refuge. By going to such a refuge one is released from all suffering. – (Dpd 190-192, Fronsdal, 2005)

The Dharma also stands out in its empirical quality, “come and see” (ehipassiko). The Dharma points almost entirely to what can be verified in our direct experience, or instructs us in ways to move the mind into certain experiences. Many cautious people in the West are inspired to trust in the Dharma in the first place upon learning of this refreshing see-for-yourself quality of the Dharma.

Some caution is, however, in order, lest one think this entails that we should trust our own experience above all. In fact, for the Buddha the typical “uninstructed worldling” is actually astonishingly deluded and the Dharma quite “against the stream” from his perspective. We get hopelessly confused in trying to see, much less interpret, our own experience. For this reason the Buddha, in the famous Kālāma Sutta, warns us not to base one’s understanding on one’s own thinking:

“Come Kālāmas, do not go by … logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, …”iv

In fact, when the Buddha says “Come,” he is shouting down to us flatlanders from the mountaintop. To arrive at his vantage point we need to scramble up hills, struggle through brambles and ford creeks. When the Buddha says “See,” we need to focus our eyes intently in the right direction to barely make out what the Buddha sees with great clarity of vision. In order to be willing to do all of this we have to establish from the beginning great trust that the Buddha knew what he was talking about. This is refuge. What else would induce us to make the difficult climb up the mountain? Investigation and personal verification are necessary parts of following the Dharmic Path but they take time and effort before we can say, “I have come and now I see.” Until then trust is essential. “Come” is trust, and “see” is verification in our own experience.

For instance, the Buddha taught that craving is the origin of suffering (the Second Noble Truth). At first this may seem, at least to some, an abstract proposition which we must ponder and try our darnedest to match up with observation. The most likely early outcome is to dismiss this proposition as simply mistaken. It seems pretty clear to us, for instance, that buying that snazzy shirt we so want, would make us exceedingly dashing and that that would lead to improved prospects for romance and other forms of social and perhaps even business success. Therefore, we conclude, craving clearly leads not to suffering but to happiness!

However, Refuge entails instead that we decide to trust the Buddha before our own premature cogitation about our own experiences. Eventually through years of examination, on and off the cushion, we might discover that the Second Noble Truth is not an abstraction at all; it is something that bites us on the nose over and over all day every day. We begin to notice that as soon as craving comes up the suffering is right behind it. As soon as we have to have that shirt there is stress and anxiety, unmistakably. We might discover we had been living in a world of incessant suffering, a world aflame, all along but not noticing it.

In brief, without Refuge in the Dharma we would never have scrambled to the mountaintop. We’ve already taken refuge implicitly in many faulty, non-Buddhist ideas and habits taught to us from a young age, or absorbed through too much TV, and we are bound to cling to those until we take Refuge in the Dharma, naively misperceiving them for products of our own “free” thinking.

Refuge in the Saṅgha. As we have seen, the Saṅgha includes those of significant attainment on the Buddhist path, from stream enterers to fully awakened arahants on down, even those firmly on the path to stream entry. Alternatively, it includes all monastics, the more visible of the two saṅghas, and the one specifically charged by the Buddha with preserving the Dharma and in any case largely overlapping the first saṅgha. The Saṅgha serves as admirable friends for worldlings, for these are likely people advanced or even perfected in virtue and in understanding, potentially serene and wise. These tend to be the contemporary teachers and protectors of the Dharma. Members of the Saṅgha themselves are expected to seek out admiral friends ideally of even higher attainment.

The Practice of Refuge. To practice trust in the triple gem is to open our hearts and minds to the influence of the Buddha, the Dharma and the Saṅgha. The point is not to put discernment aside; in fact we want with time to verify point by point for ourselves what these sources of wisdom have to teach us to the point that trust is no longer necessary. The point is to listen attentively to what these sources have to teach us, to consider them seriously and to integrate them into our own investigation. The main hindrance to this is our own hubris built on trust in tacit, unexamined assumptions, whose origins may be obscure to us.

One of the issues we encounter in western cultures is the sparseness of the monastic saṅgha. Nonetheless there are many highly qualified lay teachers. Although it is difficult to tell how qualified your teacher is, she could well be a noble one and count as Saṅgha on that account. After due discernment, it is appropriate to consider taking her as a refuge. Whether or not to offer alms or other support depends on whether she charges for her teachings.

The opening of heart and mind has an affective component – this is simply part of human psychology – that shows up as respect, veneration or worship. I will use the middle term, veneration, to encompass all three variants). The practice of veneration works closely with Refuge to open the heart to the influence of worthy teachers and teachings. One cannot learn from someone one does not first treat with regard. When we show proper forms of respect to the elderly, school teachers, professors, piano teachers and master cooks, we take seriously what they have to impart and so open our minds to learn more quickly from them. In a real sense, we become subject to their authority. Notice that, although veneration is prominent in religion, it is common in secular contexts as well, for instance, in saluting higher ranking officers in the military or addressing a judge as “Your Honor.” These practices serve to convey influence or authority – and this works psychologically – whether or not applied to benevolent causes.

We find veneration of the Buddha clearly expressed in the early sources through full prostrations sometimes touching the Buddha’s feet, by circumambulation while keeping the Buddha on one’s right, by covering one’s otherwise bare shoulder with one’s robe, by sitting on a lower seat than the Buddha, by standing when the Buddha would enter the room, by walking behind the Buddha or not turning one’s back to the Buddha and by proper forms of address. In the early scriptures the Buddha occasionally chastised a visitor for not showing proper respect. And this, in fact, began immediately after his awakening, with the Buddha’s re-encounter with the five ascetics to whom he delivered his first Dharma talk.v He understood that without that respect he was wasting his tie talking to an unreceptive audience. Likewise, veneration of the Dhamma for many years after the Buddha was naturally enacted in the effort to recite, remember and preserve his words.vi

Veneration of the Saṅgha is in a sense easier, because it applies to the only living Gem and therefore assumes a particularly personal quality. The veneration of the monastic component of the Saṅgha dovetails with the project of satisfying their material needs, the root lay practice of generosity, discussed in the previous chapter. Monastics were also recipients of many the same kinds of physical expressions of respect accorded to the Buddha during his life.

Veneration is a direct causal factor in attaining certain wholesome qualities of mind that we try to develop in Buddhism, including peace and humility. The deference to another that veneration generally entails, serves immediately to deflate the ego, to knock it out of its accustomed privileged position in the universe. (In fact this seems to me to be a basic function of the worship of God in most religions.) With the development of humility, the craving to be somebody and to distinguish oneself as that somebody, relaxes into a greater sense of ease. As the Buddha states with respect to a particular practice of veneration,

“When a noble disciple recollects the Tathāgata, on that occasion his mind is not obsessed by lust, hatred, or delusion; on that occasion his mind is simply straight. He has departed from greed, freed himself from it, emerged from it. … some beings here are purified in such a way.” (AN 6.25)

This passage is repeated in this sutta with each of Dhamma, Saṅgha, his [own] virtuous behavior, and his [own] generosity replacing Tathāgata.

To bow to the Buddha is to enact veneration for the Buddha, to enact veneration of the Buddha is to feel veneration for the Buddha, to feel veneration for the Buddha is to put aside one’s preconceptions and open one’s heart to the teachings of the Buddha. To do this is to align with the Buddha’s Path. We tend to be dismissive of veneration in modern, and certainly American, cultures, and yet veneration is recommended by the Buddha.vii The advice for moderns: Get over it.viii

Further Reading

Bhikkhu Ariyesako, 1999, The Bhikkhus’ Rules: a Guide for Laypeople, available AccesstoInsight.org, and occasional hardcopy distributions. This is an readable overview of the monastic rules laid out in the Vinaya.

Bhikkhu Cintita,, 2014, A Culture of Awakening: the life and times of the Buddha-Sasana, Lulu.com, down-loadable from bhikkhucintita.wordpress.com. This discusses Buddhist community, refuge and the relationship between laity and Sangha, largely from a historical perspective.

Ajahns Pasanno and Amaro, 2009, The Island: an Anthology of the Buddha’s Teaching on Nibbana, Abhayagiri Monastic Foundation. This has substantial discussion of stream entry.

===========

i. These are surprisingly familiar in modern organizations, given that the monastic saṅgha has following all these years essentially the same regulations codified in the Vinaya (discipline) in the early Buddhist era.

ii. Gombrich (2006), p. 19.

iii. Thanissaro (1996), p. 1.

iv. AN 3.65. Note, I’ve omitted the external sources of evidence in this oft-quoted list.

v. Veneration of the Buddha was enhanced in virtually all of the later traditions, by treating symbols of the Buddha, for instance, pagodas and later statues, in the way we would have treated the Buddha. Some traditions accorded the Buddha a supernatural status unknown in early Buddhis, perhaps out of the same to veneration, mixed with a lot of imagination.

vi. Also respect for these texts is expressed in many later traditions through the care given to their physical manifestations, such as books, and though recitation.

vii. In fact, traditional Indian cultural expressions of veneration, such as anjali, have been carried with Buddhism to every land in which it has alighted.

viii. Zen master Suzuki Roshi, the Japanese founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, discovered that many of his American students had a resistance to the traditional three full prostrations traditionally performed during morning service. Accordingly, he decided to modify the tradition for his American students: Instead they were required to perform nine full prostrations during morning service. They got over it, and maintain this practice over forty years after Suzuki’s death.

Refraining from every evil,
Accomplishing good,
Purifying the mind,
This is Teaching of Buddhas.
(Dhammapāda 183)

Seeing the complete awakening while seated in meditation as the Buddha’s greatest accomplishment, we often fail to recognize how thoroughly Buddhism is about ethics or virtue or morality. The Buddhist path creates saints before it creates awakened ones. Buddhism begins with ethics. Its preliminary teachings are ethical. Buddhist children learn generosity and harmlessness from toddlerhood. Ethics provides the foundation without which higher development of the mind is unattainable. Without the perfection of virtue awakening is impossible. Starting with ethics, we most easily understand the logic of the entire Buddhist path and of meditation and awakening.

The opening verse above, one of the most quoted from the Dhammapāda, itself the most read presectarian Buddhist text, gets to the heart of the matter. It enumerates the three distinct but interrelated systems of Buddhist ethics, and these, in fact, correspond closely to the three major forms of modern normative ethics in the West: deontology or duty ethics, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. Refraining from every evil involves behaving harmlessly according to Buddhist ethical codes. Accomplishing good is acting for the benefit of others. Purifying the mind, the most characteristically Buddhist of the three, makes of virtue not only something we do in the world, but integral to who we are and the way we think. The three, in the Buddha’s teachings, are mutually constraining and mutually supporting, like the legs of a tripod. In this chapter, we will discuss each of the three ethical practices in turn.

Refraining from every evil

Avoiding evil, which is to say, avoiding harmful actions, is generally formulated in Buddhism in terms of precepts  (sikkhā-pada), which are prohibitive rules of thumb. Precepts are similar to the Ten Commandments of the Bible, or to traffic laws, or to the bothersome things your parents told you to do when you were a kid, like not to watch more than seven hours of TV or not to eat the dog’s food.  They also might be compared to professional rules of ethics, such of those observed by psychotherapists (not sleeping with clients) or members of the scientific community (not falsifying data), or automobile drivers (not driving over the speed limit). Traditionally lay people throughout the Buddhist world have observed at least the following five precepts since the time of the Buddha:

I undertake the precept to refrain from killing living things,
I undertake the precept to refrain from take what is not given,
I undertake the precept to refrain from commit sensual misconduct,
I undertake the precept to refrain from falsehood, and
I undertake the precept to refrain from the headlessness of spirits, liquor and intoxicants.

Some people undertake an extended set of precepts, for instance, the very apt:

I undertake the precept to abstain from malicious speech,

… or, on special occasions, …

I undertake the precept to abstain from dancing, singing, music or any kind of entertainment.

I am a Theravada monk, and Theravada monks follow a master list of 227 precepts, all the time, forever. Precepts are almost invariably stated as abstentions, things not to do, for instance, “do not kill,” rather than “protect life,” which is why they may be described with the phrase to refrain from every evil.

Elucidation of refraining from evil. Philosophers would classify a system of precepts a deontological or duty ethics. The motivating principle of refraining from evil is harmlessness (ahiṃsā). It constrains those actions that almost inevitably cause harm, particularly to others. A number of  precepts actually serve functions other than harmlessness, most particularly of purification of mind. We will discuss this latter function later, but an example of a precept justified in terms of purification is that just cited about dancing, singing, etc., for restraint of the senses is a key factor in purification. The precept about alcohol is justified both in terms of purification – inebriation suppresses mindfulness – and at the same time in terms of harmlessness – inebriation commonly results in abusive relations and violence.

Since most readers are at least familiar with Christian commandments, let me make a few contrasts to draw out some peculiar qualities of Buddhist precepts.

Precepts pertain, at least in early Buddhism, to actions of body and speech, but not of thought. Commandments, on the other hand, seem sometimes to apply to thoughts such as coveting our neighbor’s house, cow or wife. Thoughts as a matter of ethics are covered in Buddhism in much more sophisticated detail in purifying mind.

Precepts are taken on in Buddhism entirely as trainings; the Pali word for precept, sikkhā-pada, means literally training step. That is, they are undertaken voluntarily as an individual practice commitment, rather than as imposed by a God, a Pope, government or other authority. As a consequence, there is no sin in Buddhism, whereas violating a commandment in Christianity or in other Abrahamic faiths insults the will of God. Rather, precepts reflect a duty to oneself or to the world, not to God or any higher authority.

Finally, the violation of a precept, although involving a physical act of speech or body, also requires a mental intention; accidentally running over the neighbor’s cat cannot violate the precept against killing living beings. Violating a precept is, in other words, karmic, with karmic fruits.

We cannot talk about ethics – or any element of practice – in Buddhism without reference to karma, an oft poorly understood concept. The term karma in Sanskrit, or kamma in Pali, meant originally simply action. However, the Brahmanic or Vedic religious tradition had long used this word in a specialized sense to capture the key concept of ritual action, where rituals were supposed to determine the future well-being of the person on whose behalf the ritual was conducted. A properly performed ritual, often an animal sacrifice and some incantations of memorized texts, was good karma, an improperly performed ritual was bad karma. For the Buddha every action that each of us performs has this sacred role as a determinant of the actor’s future well-being, for no one can intercede on our behalf. Moreover, the benefit is found not in the ritual quality, but in the ethical quality of our actions. That ethical quality is determined our intentions, roughly, whether we intend harm or benefit to others, or are instead motivated by personal advantage. Karma, in Buddhism, is exactly intentional action. Our future well-being is a matter karmic results or fruits that intentions have in shaping our own future lives. Briefly, as we make the world with our actions, so do we make ourselves. We will come back to karmic fruits or results momentarily.

Precepts provide the most primitive and concise of the three kinds of ethics. Their primary advantage is that they provide reasonably clear guides to conduct, even when we are drawing a blank and cannot work out all the consequences of a proposed action. This reduces much of our conduct to rules of thumb that are easy to learn and remember, even for the young or young at heart, or for the beginning Buddhist or the one with beginner’s mind. A precept tends to highlight a basic problem area in human conduct that the sages of past ages must have experienced and recognized.

The weaknesses of precepts as guides to ethical conduct are that they generally allow loopholes and they don’t permit appropriate exceptions, that is, precepts are porous and rigid.  There is the case in which the Gestapo shows up at our front door and asks us, gleefully aware that a Buddhist will not lie, if we are hiding Jews in the attic, or that in which one of us just happens to be returning from a softball game with a  bat in his hand and walk in right behind a man who has just “gone postal” and is about to embark on taking out fellow employees. There are, moreover, many harmful, generally mildly harmful, behaviors that simply are not covered in precepts, like taking up two parking spaces.

Nonetheless, it is significant that the Buddha rarely sanctioned exceptions to precepts to correct their rigidity. I suspect this is because he wanted us to be fully aware of, and live with, the contradictory nature of the human condition rather than regulating it away. The one example I am aware of in which the Buddha discusses the kinds of contradictions that may arise in following precepts is in MN 38 where the Buddha was challenged for his own use of harsh speech against Devadatta, his cousin, who had (1) created a schism in the Sangha, (2) had injured the Buddha in an assassination attempt, (3) had induced a prince to murder his father in order to become king, and (4) had committed various other odious misdeeds. The Buddha’s response was that sometimes it is necessary to dig a pebble out of a child’s mouth even though it causes great discomfort. Providing a metaphor for choices we must sometimes make, rather than admitting loopholes, was wise: given the smallest loophole, many people will become quite creative in their exceptions to precepts, for instance, soon disregarding non-harming in the case of people one does not like, or for whomever is otherwise imagined to be undeserving.

Although precepts and commandments widely overlap in content, the difference noted entails that one can logically break a commandment without doing or intending harm, or observe a commandment while doing and intending harm, for God’s will can work in mysterious ways that we know not of. Murder, theft, bearing false witness and adultery are actions both harmful to others and displeasing to God. Homosexual acts, on the other hand, making for ourselves an idol or handling leather made from pig skin would seem rather harmless (“victimless crimes”), but nonetheless, we are told in the Old Testament, are displeasing to God. Stoning someone to death is clearly harmful to others and clearly violates the first Buddhist precept, yet might be sanctioned by God in response to others’ deeds. As a practical consequence of the absence of sin, we rarely find “victimless crimes” in early Buddhist ethics. Sexual misconduct in the third precept above, for instance, refers to things like acts of adultery or sex with a child, in which the harmony of standing human relations is violated, tending toward verifiable harm, and is never a matter of the perceived “kinkiness” that might adhere to sexual acts according to societal standards. In fact, the Buddha’s precepts are to a surprising degree free of cultural norms and quite relevant to this day.

The practice of refraining from evil. Taking on the precepts is one of life’s landmark decisions, like choosing a spouse, career path or dog.  We honor this decision with a sense of vow or commitment, dedication and devotion, with full awareness that, “This will be the shape of my life.”

However, in vowing to live according to precepts our intentions are most often mixed (remember, intention is a key word). A very pure motivation indeed for the practice of refraining from evil is one rooted in the virtue of harmlessness, and related virtues such as generosity and kindness play key roles. Humans seem to be born with a certain degree of innate goodness: people want to do good, to benefit and live in harmony with others. One sees this often even in small children and to a surprising degree in the most ignoble ruffians. Such intentions count for a lot in Buddhism. A second, less pure, reason for becoming a precept practitioner is being carried along force of habit or societal norms. For the Buddhist born, precept practice generally already has the great momentum of cultural and family tradition behind it, sustained already without question for many generations, or under the influence of peer pressure

A third reason for commitment to refraining from evil is the fruits  or results of karma mentioned above.  Karma, we have seen, is intentional action and therefore the stuff of ethical conduct – and, in fact, the stuff of our entire Buddhist practice. Volitional acts generally have external consequences for the world, for good or bad (or neutral). It is in this sense that violations of precepts tend to cause harm. In addition, each karmic act has internal consequences, for good or bad, for ourselves. It is roughly described as follows.

Whatever I do, for good or evil, to that I will fall heir. (AN 5.57)

Our karmic acts not only help make the world what it will be, but make us what we will be. Good deeds work to our own benefit as well as to the benefit of others. Bad deeds work against our own benefit as well as against the benefit of others. Pure intentions, as determinant of ethical quality, produce the most personal benefit. These effects on oneself are referred to as karmic results (vipāka) or alternatively a karmic fruits (phala). Exactly how and why karmic acts produce their results according to ethical quality in this way is a natural question for curious moderns and not explicitly clarified by the Buddha. However, I will point out before the end of this chapter that what the Buddha’s psychology does teach, substantially accounts for karmic results.

Karmic results are described allegorically, when not literally, in various ways in early Buddhism. Most often fruits are described in terms of conditions of rebirth. We will consider the role of rebirth in Buddhism in a later chapter, but the idea is that karmic fruits can be realized in this life or in subsequent lives. A habitual doer of good deeds might expect a rebirth in a heavenly realm or as a human under favorable circumstances. A relentless doer of bad deeds might expect a rebirth in a hellish realm or as a human living under unfavorable circumstances, for instance, in poverty. Allegorically, the Buddha on many occasions attributes a particular rebirth to a single karmic act, sometimes a fairly ordinary one, which if we think about it doesn’t make much literal sense given the thousands of karmic acts we perform each day. Nonetheless, we can test for ourselves the general idea that our living circumstances result from our past karmic acts at least with regard to the present life. Consider that the person who acts habitually out of anger or ill-will to the harm of others typically creates his own hell right here on earth, unhappy, alone, unloved, perpetually dissatisfied, guilty, ugly and in poor health. The person who acts habitually out of kindness experiences the world in the opposite way. Ebeneezer Scrooge comes to mind, before and after, but the reader will almost certainly know real-life examples.

The point is that recognizing the nature of karmic fruits provides added incentive for refraining from evil, and also for accomplishing good: As we look out for others, we look out for ourselves and as we look out for ourselves we look out for others (see SN 47.19). It begins to dispel the the notion that self-interest stands in perpetual opposition to other-interest, and encourages us to experience more fully the personal joy and satisfaction that comes from living harmlessly and with kindness.

Without the practice of refraining from evil, we, more often than not, take more from the world than give, harm others, often unspeakably, as we accrue personal material advantages, and we become ever more entrenched in reprobate behaviors as we act out our greed, hatred and delusion.  Even as we practice with precepts, we are likely to struggle with needy and aversive impulses rooted in the central importance of a misperceived self that must navigate a harsh, competitive and often abusive world, at least until we are able to dispel the opposition of self and other that the recognition of karmic results undermines.

Bad deeds, and deeds hurtful to ourselves, are easy to do; what is beneficial and good, that is very difficult to do. (Dhammapāda, 163)

In following precepts, we cannot help but confront the mind; we find ourselves repeatedly sitting on the fence between what our minds demand and what the precepts ask of us. Many of us have little awareness of our own minds, so we do well to take this opportunity to investigate our minds, as preparation for the practice of purifying the mind. We find that sometimes the confrontation involves immediate impulses following familiar habit patterns, such as the impulse to flirt with someone other than our own spouse or to overcharge customers. We may find that more often than not the confrontation between intention and precept involves a pre-planned personal agenda, as when, in order to secure a promotion, we attempt to control who in authority knows what and end up telling a lie as a result. Precept practice has a way of breaking up personal agendas.

Accomplishing good

Go your way, monks, for the benefit of the many: for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, the benefit, the happiness of gods and men. (Vinaya, Mahāvagga).

To accomplish good is to perform actions that have beneficial consequences. It is to make a gift to the world. One might see a turtle in the road, stop the car and carry it to one side lest it be run over by a less mindful driver. One might cook a meal to the delight and nourishment of one’s family. One might rescue a flood victim from perilous waters. One might teach Buddhism or offer a match, to those in need of a light. One might help overturn an unjust economic order for those in need of a bite.

The practice of accomplishing good is generally framed in terms of generosity (dāna). Note, however, that “generosity” is the translation of either of two words in Pali. Dāna is the physical act of giving something material or immaterial, including service, and therefore directly accomplishes good.  Cāga is the internal mental disposition that most typically underlies dāna, though kindness (mettā) and compassion (karuṇā) are also implicated and is thereby more relevant to purifying the mind. I will resort to giving as a translation of dāna when it is important to distinguish physical act from disposition.

A little reflection reveals that how much and what kinds of good can be accomplish is far more open-ended than how much and what kinds of evil we might refrain from. This is probably why the Buddha hoped that we might refrain from all evil, but only accomplish some good. Some people use all of their available energy to feed the homeless, to adopt rescue dogs, to campaign for universal health care, while others, for no apparent lack of good-will, sit at home, read the news and fret, … but don’t steal or lie. Sometimes people are lazy or just lack the imagination or self-confidence for intensive good accomplishment. Others are clever in finding an excuse that it is not their problem, while others readily take responsibility in true dharmic fashion. While refraining from evil can be formalized reasonably effectively in a fixed set of rules, accomplishing good is practiced in an astounding number of different ways. It is not feasible to itemize all of ways to accomplish good in the way we can with refraining from evil.

For the most part the Buddha focused on generosity as it is practiced in the narrow context of the Buddhist community and of the household, on what I will call conventional generosity. The remainder of accomplishing good we I will call unrestricted generosity. Conventional generosity lends itself much more readily to description and formalization and thereby to specific practice commitment than does the hugely open-ended unrestricted generosity.

Elucidation of accomplishing good. Accomplishing good belongs to the class of ethical systems that philosophers call consequentialism. Its motivating principle is kindness (mettā). Whereas refraining from all evil is guided by a good or bad quality attributed to the proposed action itself independently of context, achieving good is guided by the future good or bad consequences of the proposed action. The Buddha introduced this practice to his newly ordained son as follows:

What do you think, Rahula: What is a mirror for?”
“For reflection, sir.”
“In the same way, Rahula, bodily actions, verbal actions, & mental actions are to be done with repeated reflection.
“… if on reflection you know that it would not cause affliction… it would be a skillful bodily action with pleasant consequences, pleasant results, then any bodily action of that sort is fit for you to do. (MN 61)

This last paragraph is repeated verbatim several times, but where skillful verbal  then mental actions are substituted for bodily, and unskillful actions with unpleasant consequences are substituted for skillful and pleasant, then declared not fit for Rahula.

Our practice is in its broadest sense to aim for good consequences, and thereby to give to the world. The world carries a burden of great suffering; it needs people to accomplish good, now more than ever. The great challenge of accomplishing good is to trace as best as possible, with discerning wisdom, just what the heck all the consequences of our actions might be. We live in a very complex and highly interdependent world in which the consequences of the simplest action run very deep, playing themselves out almost forever. We are like the famed butterfly (of the butterfly effect) who, by choosing to fly from one flower to the next, will, meteorologists tell us, trigger storms and hurricanes on the other side of the world in the decades and centuries to come that otherwise would not have occurred, or prevent those that would have. Similarly our actions may (or, more likely, will) enable wars to happen or not to happen, and we may never know. We, like chess players, can only see a few moves ahead. We are at the same time nearly omnipotent yet almost totally blind. This is why the Buddha recommended that Rahula consider his karmic actions with great care.

Merit (puñña) is a kind of composite measure of the ethical value of a karmic action, a tool that incorporates both external consequences and intentions. Karma that is of benefit to others and at the same time is well-intentioned is meritorious, and will accordingly produce good fruits.  Generosity is the practice of gaining merit, or of merit-making. Karma that brings harm to others and is also ill-intentioned is demeritorious. Breaking and thereby causing harm is demerit (pāpa). The Pali word for evil in refraining from all evil is this same pāpa. The merit or demerit of an action represents its expected karmic fruit, and the terms are generally used in the context of quantifying this.

… conventional generosity. Conventional generosity is sometimes described in relation to relative amounts of merit gained. For instance, a high amount of merit is attributed to certain categories of recipients, certain categories of gifts, certain manners of giving and certain intentions behind giving.

• Worthy recipients of generosity are ascetics and priests (who live on alms), destitutes, wayfarers, wanderers, the sick and beggars, as well as family members and guests. The purity of the recipient correlates with the amount of merit made. For instance, offerings to those of great spiritual attainment gain oodles of merit. (DN 5, DN 23, DN 26)
• The gift of Dhamma (dhammadāna) exceeds all other gifts, which tends to give monastics an edge in merit-making.i It is important to note that the merit earned correlates inversely with one’s resources, for instance, a meager offering from a pauper might easily earn more merit than a sumptuous gift from a tycoon. This is because it is the intentions that count. Although most gifts are material, the gift of service (veyyāvacca) is also very meritorious. (SN 1.32, Dhp 224)
• One might give with different intentions: out of annoyance, fear, in exchange, thinking generosity is considered good, to gain a good reputation, out of kindness, aware of the karmic consequences, or to “beautify and adorn the mind .” The first are fairly neutral with regard to merit, since in each case one is generally taking as much as giving. The last gains a truckload of merit. (AN 8.31) Again, we find intention to be critical, for merit ultimately is about purity of mind. In general it is best to give with no expectation of personal benefit. (AN 7.52)

Also, if we feel happy before, during and after gift we are in the swing of this practice (AN 6.37). Then,

When this gift of mine is given, it makes the mind serene. Gratification & joy arise. (AN 7.49)

Accordingly, we should take care that there is later no resentment for having given (SN 3.20). The purest form of giving is with the attitude:

This is an ornament for the mind, a support for the mind. (AN 7.49)

Notice how the Buddha’s emphasis in discussing generosity moves freely from benefit for others to pleasant personal experience and back again. Pure acts of giving are expected to gladden the heart and contribute to the development of personal character. This creates some confusion concerning motives: are we practicing generosity for them or for us, out of benevolence or out of selfishness? The paradox about generosity is that it gains most merit for us when it is most selfless and least merit when it is most selfish. It feels great when our intention is to benefit others. This is a direct experience of the fruits of karma.

For a  lot of our actions we cannot actually trace the consequences, for good or bad, and in fact our judgments about the consequences may be biased by our own personal interests (“It will do the long line of drivers stuck behind me good to slow down, as I drive way under the speed limit in the fast lane; their lives are probably too fast-paced anyway”). In such cases, the merit of our actions depends only on our intentions (Is there benevolence or ill-will? Do I delight in this action?). If the intentions are impure, most likely the consequences of our actions will be harmful, since we are very likely to have introduced a personal bias into our actions. This is why the ultimate determinant of merit is its effect on us, that is, its intentional purity, which corresponds to its karmic fruit. Our actions should be an ornament for the mind.

Continuing, the Buddha recommends that offerings never be given in a callous manner, but rather respectfully, not in a way that humiliates the recipient and ideally with one’s own hands rather than through an intermediary. It is also best to give at a proper time and to give what is not harmful (AN 5.148). Notice that these recommendations encourage direct engagement in, and full experience of, the act of giving. In this way, these measures encourage feelings of friendship, appreciation and interpersonal harmony in association with the act of generosity. They also enhance the benefit consequential on giving, to such a degree that one begins to lose track of who is the giver and who is the receiver in a particular transaction. For unrestricted generosity this manner of giving would suggest that it is better to be actively present at the orphanage one is donating too rather than simply writing out a periodic check, or arranging an automatic fund transfer. Notice that that would also allow us more closely to track the consequences, for harm or benefit, of one’s generosity.

It should be appreciated how the practice of conventional generosity is adapted to the structure of the traditional Buddhist community, in which the relationship of laity to monastic has played a central role since the time of the Buddha and still does in Buddhist lands to this day. The Buddha gave great attention, in the Vinaya, the monastic code, to organizing and regulating the monastic community to a level that seems to have been unknown in other ascetic communities of the time, with full understanding that the lay behavior would shape itself to the behavior of the monastics. Alms-giving, the support of ascetics in various traditions, was already prevalent in India at the time of the Buddha, and is naturally a part of conventional generosity and merit-making for Buddhists.

Moreover, the Buddha did something interesting: He imposed on the monastic community through the monastic precepts an enhanced level of dependence on the laity, removing them entirely from the exchange economy and making their dependence a matter of daily contact with the laity. He made the monks and nuns as helpless as house pets or as young children with regard to their own needs, but did not substantially restrict what monastics can do for others. The result is that monastics live entirely in what has been called by Thanissaro Bhikkhu an economy of gifts in which goods and services flow entirely through acts of generosity. Laity participate in this economy in their interactions with monastics, but the economy also naturally generalizes to the larger community. In Burma, for instance, I observed how readily this classical practice of generosity carries beyond the monastery walls, how people naturally take care of each other with a sense of obligation that requires no compensation. The Buddha fashioned an economy particularly conducive to the practice of conventional generosity. Although the same material benefits might be realized in an exchange economy, the economy of gifts affords more opportunity for merit-making, which is to say, for karmic results such as the improvement of personal development of purity of mind.

… unrestricted generosity. We have been discussing the practice of conventional generosity, which, we see, is handled in Buddhism somewhat formulaically. However, this is only a part of our hugely open-ended capacity for accomplishing good. We can call the remaining range of generosity unrestricted generosity, to distinguish it from conventional generosity. This would include addressing a range of local social needs such as giving alms to the poor, providing care for orphans, organizing education and charitable projects, or addressing more global issues like ending wars, oppression, crime or ecological degradation, sometimes through advocacy for changing social, economic, political or cultural structures and institutions. Presumably because of its diverse range, the Buddha had few specifics to offer about unrestrictive generosity and no structured practice.

Nonetheless, the Buddha did leave us with many examples of unrestricted generosity. In an incident described in the Vinaya (Mv 8.26.1-8) the Buddha and Ānanda come upon a monk sick with dysentery, uncared for, lying in his own urine and feces. After he and Ānanda had personally cleaned the monk up, the Buddha admonished the other monks living nearby for not caring for the sick monk, famously proclaiming:

“Whoever would tend to me, should tend to the sick.”

The Buddha’s design of the monastic order as a kind of microcosm of society gives a clear idea of many of the social values the Buddha felt should be upheld. The traditional Indian caste system completely disappears and almost complete gender equality is implemented within the early monastic Sangha. Moreover, governance is decentralized such that major decisions are made by consensus only among monastics who are physically present in a local community. Detailed instructions sustain harmony within the Sangha.

The Buddha did not actively champion the similar reformation of civil society, but did have a bit to say about responsibilities of kings toward their subjects, sometimes describing the righteous or wheel-turning king as a kind of ideal. In DN 26 he even recommended that such a king seek ethical guidance from wise monastics:

“Whatever ascetics and brahmins in your kingdom have renounced the life of sensual infatuation and are devoted to forbearance and gentleness, each one taming himself, each one calming himself and each one striving for the end of craving, from time to time you should go to them and consult them as to what is wholesome and what is unwholesome, what is blameworthy and what is blameless, what is to be followed and what is not to followed and what action will in the long run lead to harm and sorrow, and what to welfare and happiness. Having listened to them, you should avoid evil and do what is good.”

This passage is significant in view of the common understanding that monastics should not get involved in political or social matters, and are perhaps ill-equipped to do so. It clearly opens a nonpartisan role for them as moral advisors. In DN 5 the Buddha describes a chaplain offering wise advice to a king concerning the relationship of crime, poverty and general prosperity:

“Your Majesty’s country is beset by thieves, it is ravaged, villages and towns are being destroyed, the countryside is infested with brigands. … Suppose Your Majesty were to think: ‘I will get rid of this plague of robbers by executions and imprisonment, or by confiscation, threats and banishment’, the plague would not be properly ended. Those who survived would later harm Your Majesty’s realm. However, with this plan you can completely eliminate the plague: To those in the kingdom who are engaged in cultivating crops and raising cattle, let Your Majesty distribute grain and fodder; to those in trade, give capital; to those in government service assign proper living wages. Then those people, being intent on their own occupations, will not harm the kingdom. Your Majesty’s revenues will be great, the land will be tranquil and not beset by thieves, and the people, with joy in their hearts, will play with their children, and will dwell in unlocked houses.”

We do well to note here and elsewhere a characteristic feature of the Buddha’s method of ethical scrutiny: its uncommon tolerance and forgiveness. He thereby maintains unwavering kindness for all common participants in human society, even thieves and brigands, whose worldly actions he sees as almost unavoidably conditioned by circumstances and as controllable to the extent that conditions can be adjusted, at least by kings. The advice to the king here is also an instance of the practice of appropriate attention (yoniso manasikāra, literally thinking from the origin), which also plays a fundamental role in the seminal teaching of dependent co-arising, which the Buddha applies particularly effectively to the understanding of human psychology. The plague addressed in this passage arises from social conditions, not from some supposed unconditioned evil of thieves and brigands, which would be a commonplace assumption, but one that would lead to a counterproductive and hateful response. The Dhammapāda reaffirms this attitude:

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world.
By kindness alone is hatred appeased.
This is a law eternal. (Dhammapāda 5)

The practice of generosity is further restricted by the practices of refraining from evil and of purifying the mind. We have seen that Buddhist ethics is a hybrid of three ethical systems, each related to what is generally found in isolation in other ethical traditions. Although accomplishing good is in itself consequentialist, it is tempered by its concomitant duty and virtue ethics.  Therefore, whereas a purely consequentialist ethics is generally subject to the  sometimes objectionally radical principle, “the end justifies the means,” in the Buddha’s ethics the means cannot be violent, cannot be exploitive and cannot be deceitful, lest precepts be violated. Nor can they be motivated by greed, hatred or delusion, lest, as we will see, impurity of mind be fostered.

This restraint on ethical reasoning is wise given the practical difficulty, noted at the beginning of this section, in tracing the consequences of our actions, the butterfly effect. Whereas we can fairly clearly understand the means, the ends are rarely reliably predicted in any complex domain, such as in human social systems. Consider that probably most of the great man-made evils of history have applied the principle “the end justifies the means” in the context of an ideologically founded certainty about what the ends will be. These include many Communist programs, such as the Cultural Revolution in China and the attempt of the Khmer Rouge to impose a rural peasant society on Cambodia; the remaking of European society through ethnic cleansing by the National Socialists in Germany and like-minded Fascists elsewhere, the removal of democratic controls and adjustments over markets in neoliberal economic theory, and the practice of the British colonialists in playing one ethnic or religious group against another, with unanticipated but devastating consequences that the worlds’ states-people are trying to sort out to this day.

The practice of accomplishing good. Generosity is the first step in the gradual instruction, which the Buddha presents in various discourses (Udana 5.3, for instance) to newbies who lack the prerequisites to entering the Noble Eightfold Path. See Figure 1 below. It is helpful to review at this juncture the steps of the gradual path to get an idea of how the practice of generosity is foundational to the entire Buddhist path.

• Generosity, the practice of accomplishing good.
• Ethics, the practice of refraining from all evil.
• The heavens, which refers to the fruits of karma, most commonly conceived as rebirth in a heavenly realm.
• The drawbacks, degradation and corruption of sensual passions.
• The rewards of renunciation.

When, from the understanding and pursuit of the foregoing, the mind is ready, malleable, free from hindrances, elated and bright, the Buddha recommends that following should be taken up:

• The Four Noble Truths, including the Noble Eightfold Path.

Figure 1. The gradual instruction.

The reasons for beginning with generosity in the gradual instruction must certainly include the ease with which the practice is understood and taken up, even by children; the traditional community support around conventional generosity that the Buddha had fashioned; and the immediate gratification that arises in conjunction with the practice of generosity, both on the giving and on the receiving end. Generosity can actually engender unworldly mental states of joy and happiness that are, like meditative states, quite independent of sense pleasures.

The next factor in the gradual instruction, ethics (sīla), is generally equated with precepts, but generalizes to all the forms of ethics.

Heavens, or the fruits of karma, follows closely the practices of generosity and precepts. Initially it provides a primary incentive for undertaking these practices, the accrual of merit. Generosity, probably in particular, then provides direct experience of at least some of the paradoxical workings of the fruits of karma, since it feels so good, but less good to the extent that selfish motives intrude.

The next two factors (drawbacks, degradation and corruption of sensual passions; and the rewards of renunciation) are subtle realizations that arise with appropriate attention from the practices of generosity and precepts. Together they provide the entry way into the entire Buddhist path, and at the same time, into our third ethical practice of purification of mind, for which the entire Buddhist path serves. Precepts and generosity force us to struggle and compromise with those mental aspects that attempt to divert us from those practices. Sensual passions are the primary human motivations when no ethical considerations are present. These are presumably what motivate animals almost entirely, but ethical practices repeatedly force restraint. Generosity, in particular, gives frequent rise to supermundane feelings of delight and joy, which are not rooted in sensuality. This puts a new light on the efficacy of the pursuit of sensual pleasures as a path to personal well-being. In fact, at some point these considerations will throw us for a loop and make us wonder why we have been living the self-centered way we have. The more we investigate this, the more we discover the shallowness of  pursuing satisfaction in selfish pursuits. This begins the process of renunciation, the gateway to the remainder of Buddhist practice.

Conventional generosity, because it is practiced primarily in the context of Buddhist community in Asia, is also encouraged and reinforced in that community. Young children who grow up in Buddhist families traditionally learn communal generosity, including support of the monks and maintenance of communal facilities as an integral part of being Buddhist, along with refuge and following precepts. For many Buddhists conventional generosity will remain the primary practice for one’s entire life. In practice, a family or an individual will commonly pick a particular practice of conventional generosity according to a daily or weekly schedule. This might be to prepare and offer rice or other foods for monks on alms round every morning, or to bring a meal offering to the monastery once a week, or to provide work for the community one day a week. In addition an individual might be routinely on the lookout for any Sangha or community need in order to play Johnny-on-the-spot when one  arises. Financial contributions to conventional projects also constitute conventional giving. Generally these practices are accompanied by a sense of merit-making, much as we might keep track of our hours of meditation per week as a kind of practice metric.

All of this works pretty smoothly in Asia at the village level, but is more difficult in cities where there is less sense of community, or in the West where there may not be a local monastery and one might not even know one’s neighbors. In these circumstances, efforts might well be made to create local communities of like-minded people, often centered around temples to which dispersed community members must travel on special days, such as quarter moon days (uposatha days). It is important that a temple or monastery operate without fee or dues, if this is at all possible, because any financial exchange is an opportunity lost for the practice of generosity. In the West, where the Buddhist ethic of generosity is seldom understood, implementing the economy of gifts may require educational effort.

Unrestricted generosity moves beyond the immediate religious community, but might also take the form of  developing projects in a persistent way. One might volunteer as a candy-striper at a local hospital, engage in hospice work, rescue abandoned puppies, pick up trash along the highway, mentor troubled youth, teach meditation in prison, offer sandwiches to the homeless. Regular volunteering is highly recommended as a means of fulfilling the practice of accomplishing good. Such volunteer efforts can scale up to enterprise-level efforts, like founding and funding hospitals, or advocacy for peace, social justice or environmental preservation.ii

Purifying the mind

Well-makers direct the water;
Fletchers bend the arrow;
carpenters bend a log of wood;
Good people fashion themselves.
(Dhammapāda 145)

Our actions, for harm or benefit, arise first in the mind, as thoughts with certain intentionality behind them. For most of us, as we attempt to refrain from evil and accomplish good, the mind is often contrary and unsupportive, agitated and rebellious; it has another, generally selfish, agenda. Following the precepts and practicing generosity is something we need to struggle with. Occasionally, however, we may experience the enormous joy of mind and body coming into full alignment as our most virtuous intentions flow effortlessly into actions harmless and of great benefit. This is a moment purity of mind. There are those noble ones among us whose experience of life is like this all of the time. The mind for them has become an instrument of virtue, of kindness and compassion, wisdom and strength. They have become adepts in virtue through the practice of purifying the mind, and so walk the earth with unbounded good-will, equanimity and wisdom, selfless, beyond delusional views, with an unobscured vision of what is of harm and what is of benefit. They are, by the way, also among the happiest of us.

Purifying the mind begins with the practices of refraining from evil and practicing good, but also to a significant degree takes on a life of its own and in the end floods the practices of refraining from evil and practicing good with pure intentions.

Elucidation of purifying the mind. The basic principle of purifying the mind is expressed in the first two verses of the Dhammapāda  as follows:

All that we are is the result of thought,
Thought is its master,
It is produced by thought.
If one speaks or acts,
With pure thought,
Then happiness follows,
Like a shadow that never leaves.
(Dhammapāda 1-2)

The practice of purifying the mind belongs to virtue ethics. Its motivating principle is renunciation. It sees ethics as a quality of mind, not specifically of physical action and its consequences for benefit or harm. We have seen that refraining from all evil and accomplishing good focus on the latter. Purifying the mind places the emphasis of ethics on the development of the kind of mind that naturally seeks benefit action and eschews harm.

Training the mind toward virtue might, at first, seem like a hopeless task. Most of us have a lot of endless activity rattling and buzzing around between our ears, and it is not clear how it might be brought into any reasonable order much less under control:

“Hubba hubba.” “That jerk!” “Out of my way!” “It’s his own fault.” “Oh boy! Beer!!” “Aha!” “There, there now; let me get you a paper towel.” “If I slide my sunglasses up my forehead I’ll look really cool!” “Good Morning, God!” “Arrrrgh.” “Yaaawn.” “What th…, huh?” “I’m gonna get even!” “Good God: Morning!” “Yikes!” “Yakity yakity yak.” “Relaaaaaax.” “Tomorrow … is another day!” “Let’s be logical about this.” “Mine, all mine! Haha.” “No more … Mr. Nice Guy!”

How do we sort through this, much less point it in the general direction of virtue? Exactly what is a pure thought as opposed to a corrupted thought anyway? Can we actually get rid of one and keep the other so that happiness will follow like a shadow instead of pain like a wheel? The Buddha reports that he had began with such questions early on:

“Bhikkhus, before my enlightenment, while I was still only an unenlightened bodhisatta, it occurred to me, ‘Suppose that I divide my thoughts into two classes’. Then I set on one side thoughts of sensual desire, thoughts of ill will, and thoughts of cruelty, and I set on the other side thoughts of renunciation, thoughts of non-ill will (kindness) and thoughts of non-harming.” (MN 19)

Notice that the thoughts on the second side include renunciation, kindness and non-harming, the motivating principles for purifying the mind, accomplishing good and refraining from all evil, respectively.

The Buddha called the first class of thoughts unwholesome or unskillful (akusala) and the second class wholesome or skillful (kusala). Wholesome thoughts have the intentional quality of meritorious deeds. Unwholesome thoughts have the intentional quality of demeritorious deeds. Wholesome and meritorious (or unwholesome and demeritorious) are interchangeable in most contexts, except that wholesome is generally used for an intention and meritorious for the whole action that intention gives rise to. It is significant that the Buddha chose terminology for the mind suggestive of skill, which – like tennis or crossword puzzles – is something we get better at over time, rather than of moral judgment.

For instance, among the thoughts identified as unskillful are restlessness, agitation, conceit, jealousy, guilt, pride, cynicism, greed, miserliness, thoughts of revenge, spite, envy, grumpiness, ill-will, anger, hatred, rage, sorrow, fear, bias, delusion, stubbornness, narrow-mindedness, torpor, complacency, affection, and lust. Among those identified as skillful are generosity, renunciation, loving-kindness, compassion, patience, intelligence, discernment, shame, rectitude, mindfulness, concentration, equanimity, pliancy, buoyancy, conviction, open-mindedness, composure, proficiency and gladness for the good fortune of others.

What criteria did the Buddha employ to create this dichotomy? Unless we understand this, we will never thoroughly understand the role of skill and non-skill in our own mind, we will continue to be driven by forces we do not understand, we will cause great harm, and we will never find satisfaction in our life. The Buddha discovered that several criteria coincide remarkably in these designations.

There are these three roots of what is unskillful. Which three? Greed as a root of what is unskillful, hatred as a root of what is unskillful, delusion as a root of what is unskillful. These are the three roots of what is unskillful. (Itivuttaka 3.1)
The roots of the skillful are the opposites of the unskillful: non-greed, non-hatred and non-delusion, also known as renunciation, kindness and wisdom.

Greed (lobha) is the desire, longing, attachment or lust for sensual pleasures, for reputation or fame, for wealth, for power, for comfort, for security and so on.  I would prefer to translate this as the more general “neediness,” but “greed” has become standard in English. Greed causes anxiety and restlessness, initially from not having what we desire, then later, if we have acquired what we desire, from knowing we will lose it, or from simply wanting more.

Hatred (dosa) is the aversion, dislike, dread or fear of pain, of discomfort, of enemies and so on. It includes thoughts of anger, revenge, envy or jealousy (these two also involve greed), resentment, guilt and self-hatred, disdain, judgmental attitudes. Aversion is probably better for dosa, though hatred has become standard. Hatred immediately manifests as anxiety and restlessness, in short, suffering, because it entails dissatisfaction with the world as it is. Often it arises when our desires are thwarted or threatened.

Delusion (moha) is found in erroneous views or justifications, mis-perceptions, ignorance and denial. Many of our delusions may be widely held beliefs in a given society, or even across cultures, for instance, that material abundance produces happiness, that unconditionally evil people walk among us, or that one race or class is superior to others. These lead to endemically misguided decisions and actions. Others are often pervasive across cultures, manifesting particularly in the sense that certain things are unchanging, fixed or reliable, and that there is fun, happiness and beauty where in fact there is decay and suffering. The greatest delusion for the Buddhist is that there is an abiding self, a “me,” that in some way remains fixed in spite of all the changes that happen all around it, that is also the owner and controller of this body and mind. For the Buddha, delusion is the most dangerous of the three unwholesome roots.

But there is a taint worse than all taints: delusion is the greatest taint. O mendicants! throw off that taint, and become taintless!    (Dhammapāda 243)

The root of delusion is also the basis of the other two roots, in fact the delusional sense of self is the source of it all and the basis of our resistance to ethical conduct. In the absence of the capacity to take them personally, greed and hatred do not arise.

This relation of delusion to greed and hatred is also reciprocal. The Buddha observed:

Greed, hatred and delusion, friend, make one blind, unseeing and ignorant; they destroy wisdom, are bound up with distress, and do not lead to Nibbāna. (AN 3.71)

Here we see that the arising of any of these is tied up with mis-perception, that is, they distort reality for those under their influence. They also cause personal suffering and are a diversion from the Buddhist path to awakening. The second of the Four Noble Truths (e.g., SN 56.11), that craving is the origin of suffering, should also be mentioned here, since greed is a kind of craving for the presence of something, and hatred for its absence. We will look at the Four Noble Truths in later chapters.

Let’s consider anger, as an example, one of the great fountainheads of karmic intentions. Perceived through angry eyes the object of our anger, even a close friend or family member, easily appears as a  jerk or a schmuck if not a demon, that, when the anger subsides, will remorph back into its normal more amiable form. The level of dukkha associated with the arising of even slight anger is astonishing when seen with a clear mind, and great anger plunges us into a hell-like state. We are all aware that habitual or sustained anger can even affect our physical health (high blood pressure, heart disease) in a profound way. As anger becomes more ingrained through habit, it will become increasingly difficult to bring the mind into states of calm and insight.

The Buddha also discovered that an unwholesome/unskillful thought …

… leads to my own affliction, to others’ affliction and to the affliction of both; it obstructs wisdom, causes difficulties, and leads away from Nibbāna. (MN 19)

This reiterates the suffering, mis-perception of reality and lack of progress on the Buddhist path associated with the unwholesome, and adds to it the inflicting of harm on others. Harm naturally results when greed, hatred or delusion forms the volitional basis of our karmic acts. Consider how often violence or dangerous behaviors, such as road rage, arises from anger, or how our anger leads to fear in others. On the other hand, skillful thoughts bring proportionate success to the practices of refraining from all evil and accomplishing good. It is easy to see why this might be so: We misperceive reality under the influence of greed or hatred, our actions are like driving with a frosty windshield. We may spot our ignoble goals but don’t know who we might be running over as we head toward them. As we have seen, it is difficult enough to track consequences of actions into the future even when we see the present reasonably clearly.

To summarize the Buddha’s observations just discussed, unwholesome/ unskillful thoughts are recognizable in terms of the following handy checklist:

1. They are grounded either in greed, in hatred or in delusion.
2. When they give rise to actions, those actions generally cause some degree of harm.
3. They give rise to mis-perception.
4. They cause personal suffering.
5. They subvert development along the Path.

Let me take lust as another example of an unwholesome mental factor. Alongside anger, lust is another major fountainhead of human intentionality. Although we tend to think of lust in western culture as a positive factor in our lives (unlike anger), in terms of the five factors listed above, we discover otherwise.

1. Lust is grounded in greed, that is, in neediness.

2. Lust also tends toward harm. For instance, stealing is often a result of lust, including stealing someone’s man or someone’s woman. Often it is even consciously self-destructive: people sacrifice physical health out of lust for food, drink, cigarettes and so on, and sacrifice mental health out of lust for electronic entertainment, drugs and so on. People are often propelled by lust from one unhealthy and unhappy sexual relationship to another.

3. We lose wisdom under the spell of lust, sometimes sacrificing careers and marriages as well as health in the hopes that “love will find a way.”  When the object of lust is not attained or is lost, depression, and even suicide or murder can result.

4. Lust is always at least a bit painful, sometimes so painful we can hardly stand it. It often flares up into a fever of longing. Relief is possible if the object of lust is realized, but otherwise lust may lead to bitter disappointment, itself a kind of aversion or hatred.

5. Finally, lust diverts from the path to awakening: It agitates the mind, obstructing stillness and other skillful factors. It easily spins out other unskillful thoughts such as anger, jealousy, and greed for various instruments needed for satisfying lust such as those sporty clothes or that sexy sports car. It easily becomes ingrained as unskillful habit patterns, that is, addictions.

This is quite an indictment against lust, one that the Buddha makes repeatedly. Why, then, do we tend to think of lust as something positive? I think it is because we confuse lust with pleasure. Lust seeks pleasure, and pleasure often evokes lust for more of the same, or for an escalation of pleasure. Together they are typically bound in an intimate cycle of mutual conditionality, and are thereby identified with one another. However, the two are quite distinct: lust is painful, pleasure is, uh, pleasurable. Addiction is when this cycle spins out of control. The failure to properly understand the cycle of lust and pleasure, and to recognize which is which, has miswritten many lives, and even the histories of nations. The Buddha warns us,

There is no satisfying lusts, even by a shower of gold pieces; he who knows that lusts have a short taste and cause pain, he is wise; Even in heavenly pleasures he finds no satisfaction, the disciple who is fully awakened delights only in the destruction of all desires.  (  186-7)

Notice that the last two characteristics of the unwholesome, that is, 4. suffering and 5. retarded development, together tell us that virtue is its own reward. As long as we act with unskillful intentions we suffer. Moreover, since we also fail to make progress, in fact, regress, on the path we sacrifice the future happiness enjoyed by those of advanced spiritual attainment, for when we repeatedly weaken the habit patterns that trigger skillful thoughts and strengthen the habit patterns that trigger unskillful thoughts, we ensure greater suffering in the future as well. The Buddha describes this process of strengthening habit patterns:

Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness. If a monk keeps pursuing thinking imbued with sensuality, abandoning thinking imbued with renunciation, his mind is bent by that thinking imbued with sensuality. If a monk keeps pursuing thinking imbued with ill will, abandoning thinking imbued with non-ill will, his mind is bent by that thinking imbued with ill will. If a monk keeps pursuing thinking imbued with harmfulness, abandoning thinking imbued with harmlessness, his mind is bent by that thinking imbued with harmfulness. (MN 190)

In short, when we act with unskillful intentions, we suffer twice, first, immediately and, secondly, through the replaying of the habit patters that we are reinforcing. This is reminiscent of the fruits of karma:

Whatever I do, for good or evil, to that I will fall heir. (AN 5.57)

Recall that while we make the world through our actions, we also make ourselves. While we perform virtuous actions, we become virtuous people. While we perform beastly actions we become cads. We therefore expect merit-making/good karma to adhere to the intentions, wholesome or unwholesome, behind our actions rather than to the form of the physical actions themselves.

In short, the Buddha’s psychological observations anticipate many of the kinds of fruits of different karmic intentions will bring (though the Buddha did not himself make explicit why karmic actions should have fruits) and should convince the most skeptical reader that there is at least some validity to the notions of karmic fruits and merits.

A number of additional examples of karmic fruits from the early texts also have simple explanations: Our harmful actions tend to incite retribution to our detriment from those affected, because people tend by nature to be vengeful. Our angry or greedy disposition gives rise to loneliness, because people tend also not to like those of angry or greedy disposition and therefore eschew them. Furthermore, habitual anger and other unwholesome mental factors are demonstrably associated with physical health problems. Even physical beauty adheres to ethical character: kind people often exhibit a kind of angelic glow where hateful people often seem perpetually under a cloud.

Remaining, mysterious examples from the discourses, such as offering a monk alms in one life and then receiving great riches for oneself in the next, are actually fairly rare in the earliest texts and could well be entirely allegorical. In brief, practical psychological, physiological and sociological processes in themselves adequately motivate almost all of the claims about karmic fruits.

What about unfortunate things that happen to us without a karmic explanation, like being uplifted by a tornado or falling through a manhole? It should be understood that it is very common misconception among Buddhists that everything that happens to us for good or evil, like winning the lottery or being run over by a truck, must have a karmic basis as a fruit of our own past actions. This is, in fact, explicitly denied by the Buddha in the Sīvaka Sutta (SN 36.21).

We might suspect that if we continue practicing generosity and precepts for many many years, the mind will eventually become perfectly pure when habit patterns of greed, hatred and delusion have completely disappeared as motivational factors in our actions. It is not quite so simple: There are points at which we will get stuck, largely related to recalcitrant delusional conceptualizations that need to be broken down. This is why the Buddha also gave us a Noble Eightfold Path and a very sophisticated understanding of human psychology, with which much of this book will deal.

The practice of purifying the mind. I hope none of this discussion evokes images of goose-stepping thought police in the minds of readers. In fact, if we have entered into the practices of refraining from all evil and accomplishing good, we have already stepped into the practice of purifying the mind. This is because we are forced to confront volitional impulses wherever they tend toward harm or away from benefit. Every time we override a contrary mental factor in order to adhere to a precept, we are deconditioning an unskillful habit pattern and thereby purifying the mind. Every time kindness or generosity inspires our good deeds, we are strengthening our tendency in that direction, and thereby purifying the mind. Even mixed motives, such as responding to peer or authority pressure, or just a sense of obligation rather than kindness, have a way of eventually giving way to purer motives.

For instance, there is a precept not to kill living beings. Maybe we do not initially, for the life of us, understand why the life of an ugly twiddle bug matters one snippet, but a twiddle bug is a living being, and we want to be good Buddhists, so we don’t kill twiddle bugs. After a few months we discover something that was not there before: a warm heart with regard to twiddle bugs—they have become our little friends—and not just toward twiddle bugs but toward other beings as well, even certain people that we had once put into the same category with twiddle bugs. Our mind has become purer. Try it! Let’s put away the twiddle swatter and the Twiddle-Enhanced® Raid and see if we don’t soften right up.

We have seen above that a number of precepts actually have little directly to do with refraining from evil, except insofar as they support this kind of purification of the mind. A precept against idle chatter, for instance, is rather victimless, especially given that cases in which it spills into disparagement of others are are covered by other precepts concerning speech. Nonetheless if we refrain from idle chatter over many months we discover a quieter mind, less prone to proliferation of spurious thought and therefore less prone to delusion. We have, through observing this precept, made the mind purer.iii The non-ethical/practice precepts develop purity of mind in the way as ethical precepts; they just lack their immediate external harmfulness.

Just as precepts and other physical practices define habit patterns that over time purify the mind, existing habit patterns that characterize our lifestyle may inadvertently depurify the mind. We do well to avoid those. A rather complex precept commonly observed by laypeople every quarter moon, and by monastics always, includes the following:

I undertake the rule of training to refrain from dancing, singing, music, going to see entertainments, wearing garlands, smartening with perfumes and beautifying with cosmetics.

These are activities that turn the mind toward lust and self-enhancement. Playing violent video games and watching violent television programs, or listening to hateful speech will turn the mind toward recurring thoughts of anger and fear. Channel or Web surfing will turn the mind toward restlessness and discontent. Entertainments that excite lust will tend similarly to depurify the mind, even while not doing outward harm. We do well to ween ourselves as best we can from such habitual activities. Today we are awash in unskillful habit patterns associated with the prevalence of electronic media, so the process of sensual restraint is more challenging, but more appropriate, than ever before. In summary, there are kinds of bodily or verbal actions that have few direct consequences in terms of benefiting or harming the world, yet bear karmic fruits insofar as they condition the mind.

Moreover, merit-making asks of us that we constantly monitor our intentions. Purifying the Mind benefits from this constant awareness of our thoughts, in particular of our intentions. For some it may be the first introspective encounter with the inner, subjective world. At the same time we note our basic intentions, we should notice when discomfort, such as stress or anxiety arise – this is suffering – as well as the moments of satisfaction and joy that come with giving to others. How is that different from the pleasure of buying new clothes, say, or an new electronic gadget?  We should observe when greed or neediness/lust arises, when hatred or aversion or fear arises. At what point do we feel satisfaction as we pursue sensual pleasures? We should observe when we fall into the cycle of lust and pleasure. How much suffering is there in that cycle, particularly the anxiety of anticipation, relative to pleasure? When we might be experiencing pleasure, are we instead already lusting after the next potential pleasure? We should observe delusion in the excuses and rationalizations we fabricate to explain our actions. These are delusive acts of mental karma that have their own intentions behind them; look at these. All this is the beginnings of wisdom.

The Buddha tells us there are three kinds of volitional actions, those of body, those of speech and those of mind. Refraining from all evil and accomplishing good have to do with actions of body and speech, things acted out externally in the world, but always with a mental source in our intentions. Some karma lacks bodily or verbal involvement altogether and is therefore purely mental. Mindfulness and concentration practices are primary examples of mental practices. These are also karmic, gain or lose merit and produce fruits, but are effectively disengaged from the world. Their ethical value is realized through the process of purification of mind not through direct harm or benefit, or any effect, to others, like tuning a running engine without actually shifting it into gear so that it moves the car.

The brahmavihāras, always known by their Pali name, which means abodes of the gods, are a class of mental qualities that have ethical implications and are largely developed though mental exercises. They are four in number:

• Kindness (mettā),
• Compassion (karuṇā),
• Gladness (muditā),
• Equinimity (upekkhā).

Kindness is the root virtue. Compassion is an expression of kindness in relation to those who suffer misfortune. Gladness is an expression of kindness in relation to those who experience good fortune; it displaces the envy most of us feel in such situations, like when our neighbor puts in a swimming pool. Equanimity ensures impartiality, that is, that the other virtues cover everyone, like rain that falls on goody-goodies and scoundrels alike, but also non-attachment to consequences of actions, lest we become frustrated when our compassionate or kind actions fail achieve their intended results. The brahmavihāras are often practiced through meditation, with special emphasis on the root mettā meditation.

Many of us are ill-equipped for the kind of introspection required to engage completely with the process of purifying the mind; we may barely be aware that we have an inner life. Asian cultures generally extol the inwardly directed mind, reflective and still, and Western cultures praise the outwardly directed individual, quick of response and versatile of task. Yet for both, the flash and dazzle of modern life challenge our capacity for developing introspective habits. For this reason, undertaking a routine meditation practice early on is highly recommended for modern people as a highly effective means of turning the mind inward. A simple practice of following the breath, for instance, might be undertaken from the beginning of Buddhist practice, long before there is any consideration of entering the higher path, for which meditation is an even more essential part.

To conclude, let’s see where we are in terms of the Buddha’s teaching of the gradual training, depicted in Figure 1. The first two steps constitute accomplishing good and refraining from all evil, respectively. The remainder is concerned with purifying the mind per se. The fruits of karma are the basis of purifying the mind, since karma leaves its trace on the mind and is the foundation of our practice.  The recognition of the shallowness of the life centered in selfish pursuits and the importance of giving up this way of being provide the motivations for undertaking the wholehearted practice of purifying the mind. Renunciation is always present where we make progress on the path. Once we are consummate in ethics and committed to purifying the mind, we are ready to understand the teachings of the Four Noble Truths and to undertake the higher practice of the Noble Eightfold Path. This is why refraining from all evil, accomplishing good and purifying the mind are invariably the teaching of all buddhas.

Further Reading

Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, 2000, Cambridge University Press.

Endnotes

i. Religious gifts made to the general public would, particularly in later Buddhist traditions, include contributions to building pagodas, Buddha statues and things along those lines. Otherwise gifts satisfy mundane material needs.

ii. Buddhism has not traditionally been as known for its enterprise-level efforts as has Christianity, for instance. But there is no reason that the ethic of accomplishing good should not scale up in this way. Probably social conditions in Asia have been, until recently, less conducive to enterprise-level efforts of this kind. On the other hand, Ven. Rahula (not the Buddha’s son, but the author of the widely read What the Buddha Taught) devoted a book to making the case, specifically for Sri Lanka, that the widespread reputation of monks as indifferent to social concerns arose during European colonization, in which the Sangha was systematically disenfranchised from responsibilities in which it had previously routinely engaged, such as running schools. In fact, in recent decades Buddhist communities have become quite socially engaged, often inspired by Christian example.

iii. Similarly, there have traditionally been practices of the enactment of accomplishing good – such as making food offerings to an inert and definitely not hungry Buddha statue – that serve to develop generosity and reverence and are found in virtually any later Buddhist tradition but quite make sense from the perspective of early Buddhism.

This is the Teaching of the Buddhas

In conclusion of the preceding posts on this topic, both the gradual instruction and the Noble Eightfold Path are oriented around ethics. Buddhism produces saints, by which I mean the highest exemplars of virtue. But where does awakening fit in? Are saints and arahants (awakened beings) the same? One would expect a saint to be a font of purely wholesome karma, a force of benefit incapable of any harm, without greed, hate or delusion, motivated purely by selfless kindness and clear wisdom. However, an arahant is said to produce no karma, to be beyond motivations, beyond good and evil, to be free of the cycle of birth and death. What gives?

The limit of the ethical perspective is that sainthood is not a complete resolution of the woes of the world. Even when pure of intention, we suffer, we suffer from sickness, from old age and from death, we still have lingering conceit and cling to results of our noble intentions, and so we suffer again. Ethics is directed at trying to fix samsara,  to ease the pain of an existence that with growing wisdom reveals itself increasingly as a sham calling for transcendence. It falls short of complete release from the drama of life … and yet, such release is possible, as illustrated in the Buddha’s awakening. What is remarkable is that the pursuit of ethical foundations, particularly in purifying the mind ever more sparklingly, seems to take us almost, but not quite, to liberation from samsara. In his essay “The Road to Nirvana Is Paved with Skillful Intentions,” Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes:

“As we work at developing our intentions to even higher levels of skill, we find that the most consummate intentions are those that center the mind securely in a clear awareness of the present. As we use them to become more and more familiar with the present, we come to see that all present intentions, no matter how skillful, are inherently burdensome. The only way out of this burden is to allow the unraveling of the intentions that provide the weave for our present experience. This provides an opening to the dimension of unlimited freedom that lies beyond them. That’s how skillful intentions pave the road all the way to the edge of nirvana. And from there, the path — “like that of birds through space” — can’t be traced.”

There seems to be a last-minute change of course that is required to reach nirvana.

This is where the Mahayana school raises a well-known complaint. A saint (in my terms) can bring enormous benefit to suffering beings life after life, whereas an arahant might bring enormous benefit in this life but then does not return. So, why squander such perfection of virtue on personal awakening? Mahayanists recommend to us the bodhisattva path, the development of the arahant path to a point just short of awakening, so that the world, still caught in delusion, can benefit from our continued presence. The arahant path, Mahayanists often state, is a selfish path in which personal awakening is favored over compassion for others. I don’t know about the reader, but this account makes my head swim. First, it is both clever and metaphysical enough to be dubious – is this really what happens? – though I will be darned if I know where the logical mistake might be. Second, the arahant has already taken the self out of selfish –  how can this possibly be a selfish choice? – so there must be a logical mistake somewhere.

The origins of the incongruity of two paths can perhaps be observed in a less inscrutable context if we look at the practice of refraining from all evil or accomplishing good on the one hand, and the practice of purification of the mind on the other. Although the two naturally reinforce one another, the former is fully engaged consequentially in the world while the latter benefits from withdrawal from the world. For instance, if we spend our days sitting on the cushion developing mettā (kindness) through meditative techniques, we might have little time to actually manifest kindness in a worldly way. In fact development of mind commonly becomes a concern of its own, independent of ethical concerns. This is probably why the Buddha insisted that monastics have daily contact with the laity through accepting alms, even when this satisfied no practical need. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of the hermit monk, disappearing into the forest, living in a cave, spending his hours alone in deep meditation, aspiring to full awakening, is one of Buddhism’s highest ideals. These lone pure minds could well be the ones that bring the most benefit to the world – Twentieth-century Thailand’s Ajahn Mun comes to mind – because they provide the greatest inspiration for the rest of us and thereby leave a thriving sainthood in their wake.

Purifying the mind

Well-makers direct the water;
Fletchers bend the arrow;
carpenters bend a log of wood;
Good people fashion themselves. (Dhammapāda 145)

Our actions, for harm or benefit, arise first in the mind, as thoughts with certain intentionality behind them. For most of us, as we attempt to refrain from evil and accomplish good, the mind is often contrary and unsupportive, agitated and rebellious; it has another agenda. Following the precepts and practicing generosity is something we need to struggle with. Occasionally, however, we may experience the enormous joy of mind and body coming into full alignment as our most virtuous intentions flow effortlessly into actions harmless and of great benefit. This is a moment purity of mind. There are those noble ones among us whose experience of life is like this all of the time. The mind for them has become an instrument of virtue, of kindness and compassion, wisdom and strength. They have become adepts in virtue through the practice of purifying the mind, and so walk the earth with unbounded good-will, equanimity and wisdom, selfless, beyond delusional views, with an unobscured vision of what is of harm and what is of benefit. They are, by the way, also among the happiest of us.

Purifying the mind begins with the practices of refraining from evil and practicing good, but also to a significant degree takes on a life of its own and in the end floods the practices of refraining from evil and practicing good with pure intentions.

The rationale of purifying the mind.

All that we are is the result of thought,
Thought is its master, it is produced by thought.
If one speaks or acts,
With corrupted thought,
Then pain follows,
As the wheel follows the foot of the ox.

All that we are is the result of thought,
Thought is its master, it is produced by thought.
If one speaks or acts,
With pure thought,
Then happiness follows,
Like a shadow that never leaves. (Dhammapāda 1-2)

The practice of purifying the mind belongs to virtue ethics. It sees ethics as a quality of mind, not specifically of physical action and its consequences for benefit or harm. We have seen that refraining from all evil and accomplishing good focus on the latter. Purifying the mind places the emphasis of ethics on the development of the kind of mind that naturally seeks benefit action and eschews harm.

Training the mind toward virtue might, at first, seem like a hopeless task. Most of us have a lot of activity rattling and buzzing around between our ears, and it is not clear how it might be brought into any reasonable order much less under control:

“Hubba hubba.” “That jerk!” “Out of my way!” “It’s his own fault.” “Oh boy! Beer!!” “Aha!” “There, there now; let me get you a paper towel.” “If I slide my sunglasses up my forehead I’ll look really cool!” “Good Morning, God!” “Arrrrgh.” “Yaaawn.” “What th…, huh?” “I’m gonna get even!” “Good God: Morning!” “Yikes!” “Yakity yakity yak.” “Relaaaaaax.” “Tomorrow … is another day!” “Let’s be logical about this.” “Mine, all mine! Haha.” “No more … Mr. Nice Guy!”

How do we sort through this, much less point it in the general direction of virtue? Exactly what is a pure thought as opposed to a corrupted thought anyway? Can we actually get rid of one and keep the other so that happiness will follow like a shadow instead of pain like a wheel? The Buddha reports that he had began with such questions early on:

Bhikkhus, before my enlightenment, while I was still only an unenlightened bodhisatta, it occurred to me, ‘Suppose that I divide my thoughts into two classes’. Then I set on one side thoughts of sensual desire, thoughts of ill will, and thoughts of cruelty, and I set on the other side thoughts of renunciation, thoughts of non-ill will and thoughts of non-cruelty. (MN 19)

The first set he deemed wholesome or skillful (kusala) and the second unwholesome or unskillful (akusala). Thoughts that are either skillful or unskillful have the potential for driving our choices about how to act, that is, they are volitional or intentional. For instance, among the thoughts identified as unskillful are restlessness, agitation, conceit, jealousy, guilt, pride, cynicism, greed, miserliness, thoughts of revenge, spite, envy, grumpiness, ill-will, anger, hatred, rage, sorrow, fear, bias, delusion, stubbornness, narrow-mindedness, torpor, complacency, affection, and lust. Among those identified as skillful are generosity, renunciation, loving-kindness, compassion, patience, intelligence, discernment, shame, rectitude, mindfulness, concentration, equanimity, pliancy, buoyancy, conviction, open-mindedness, composure, proficiency and gladness for the good fortune of others.

What criteria did the Buddha employ to create this dichotomy? Unless we understand this, we will never thoroughly understand the role of skill and non-skill in our own mind, we will continue to be driven by forces we do not understand, and we will never find satisfaction in our life. The Buddha discovered that several criteria coincide remarkably in these designations.

There are these three roots of what is unskillful. Which three? Greed as a root of what is unskillful, hatred as a root of what is unskillful, delusion as a root of what is unskillful. These are the three roots of what is unskillful. (Itivuttaka 3.1)

The roots of the skillful are the opposites: non-greed, non-hatred and non-delusion, also known as renunciation, kindness and wisdom.

Greed (lobha) is the desire, longing, attachment or lust for sensual pleasures, for reputation or fame, for wealth, for power, for comfort, for security and so on.  I would prefer to translate this as the more general “neediness,” but “greed” has become standard in English. Greed causes anxiety and restlessness, initially from not having what we desire, then later, if we have acquired what we desire, from knowing we will lose it, or from simply wanting more.

Hatred (dosa) is the aversion, dislike, dread or fear of pain, of discomfort, of enemies and so on. It includes thoughts of anger, revenge, envy or jealousy (these two also involve greed), resentment, guilt and self-hatred, disdain, judgmental attitudes. “Aversion” is probably better for “dosa,” though “hatred” has become standard. Hatred immediately manifests as anxiety and restlessness, in short, suffering, because it entails dissatisfaction with the world as it is. Often it arises when our desires are thwarted or threatened.

Delusion (moha) is found in erroneous opinions or justifications, misperceptions, ignorance and denial. Many of our delusions may be widely held beliefs in a given society, or even across cultures, for instance, that material abundance produces happiness, that unconditionally evil people walk among us or that one race or class is superior to others. These lead to endemically misguided decisions and actions. Others are often pervasive across cultures, manifesting particularly in the sense that certain things are unchanging, fixed or reliable, and that there is fun, happiness and beauty where in fact there is decay and suffering. The greatest delusion for the Buddhist is that there is an abiding self, a “me,” that in some way remains fixed in spite of all the changes that happen all around it, that is also the owner and controller of this body and mind. For the Buddha, delusion is the most dangerous of the three unwholesome roots.

But there is a taint worse than all taints,– delusion is the greatest taint. O mendicants! throw off that taint, and become taintless!  (Dhammapāda 243)

The root of delusion is also the basis of the other two roots, in fact the delusional sense of self is the source of it all and the basis of our resistance to ethical conduct. In the absence of the capacity to take them personally, greed and hatred do not arise.

This relation of delusion to greed and hatred is also reciprocal. The Buddha observed:

Greed, hatred and delusion, friend, make one blind, unseeing and ignorant; they destroy wisdom, are bound up with distress, and do not lead to Nibbāna. (AN 3.71)

Here we see that the arising of any of these is tied up with misperception, that is, they distort reality for those under their influence. They also cause personal suffering and are a diversion from the Buddhist path to awakening. The second of the Four Noble Truths (e.g., SN 56.11), that craving is the origin of suffering, should also be mentioned here, since greed is a kind of craving for the presence of something, and hatred for its absence.

Let’s consider anger, as an example, one of the great fountainheads of karmic intentions. Perceived through angry eyes the object of our anger, even a close friend or family member, easily appears as a  jerk or a schmuck if not a demon, but when the anger subsides will remorph back into its normal more amicable form. The level of dukkha (suffering) associated with the arising of even slight anger is astonishing and great anger plunges us into a hell-like state. We are all aware that habitual or sustained anger can even affect our physical health in a profound way. As anger becomes more ingrained through habit, it will become increasingly difficult to bring the mind into states of calm and insight.

The Buddha also discovered that an unwholesome/unskillful thought …

… leads to my own affliction, to others’ affliction and to the affliction of both; it obstructs wisdom, causes difficulties, and leads away from Nibbāna. (MN 19)

This reiterates the suffering, misperception of reality and lack of progress on the Buddhist path associated with the unwholesome, and adds to it the inflicting of harm on others. Harm naturally results when greed, hatred or delusion forms the volitional basis of our karmic acts. Consider how often violence or dangerous behaviors, such as road rage, arises from anger, or how our anger leads to fear in others. On the other hand, skillful thoughts bring proportionate success to the practices of refraining from all evil and accomplishing good. It is easy to see why this might be so: We misperceive reality under the influence of greed or hatred, our actions are like driving with a frosty windshield. We may spot our ignoble goals but don’t know who we might be running over as we head toward them. As we have seen, it is difficult enough to track consequences of actions into the future even when we see the present reasonably clearly.

To summarize the Buddha’s observations, unwholesome/unskillful thoughts are recognizable in terms of the following handy checklist:

1. They are grounded either in greed, in hatred or in delusion.
2. When they give rise to actions, those actions usually cause some degree of harm.
3. They give rise to misperception.
4. They cause personal suffering.
5. They subvert development along the Path.

Let me take lust as another example of an unwholesome mental factor. Like anger, lust is a major fountainhead of human intentionality. Although we tend to think of lust in our culture as a positive factor in our lives (unlike anger), in terms of the five factors listed above, we discover otherwise. Lust is grounded in greed, that is, in neediness. Lust also tends toward harm. For instance, stealing is often a result of lust, including stealing someone’s man or someone’s woman. Often it is even consciously self-destructive: people sacrifice physical health out of lust for food, drink, cigarettes and so on, and sacrifice mental health out of lust for electronic entertainment, drugs and so on. People are often propelled by lust from one unhealthy and unhappy sexual relationship to another. We lose wisdom under the spell of lust, sometimes sacrificing careers and marriages as well as health in the hopes that “love will find a way.”  When the object of lust is not attained or is lost, depression, and even suicide or murder can result. Lust is always at least a bit painful, sometimes so painful we can hardly stand it. It often flares up into a fever of longing. Relief is possible if the object of lust is realized, but otherwise lust may lead to bitter disappointment, itself a kind of aversion or hatred. Finally, lust diverts from the path to awakening: It agitates the mind, obstructing stillness and other skillful factors. It easily spins out other unskillful thoughts such as anger, jealousy, and greed for various instruments needed for satisfying lust such as those sporty clothes or that sexy sports car. It easily becomes ingrained as unskillful habit patterns, that is, addictions.

This is quite an indictment against lust, one that the Buddha makes repeatedly. Why, then, do we tend to think of lust as something positive? I think it is because we confuse lust with pleasure. Lust seeks pleasure, and pleasure often evokes lust for more of the same, or for an escalation of pleasure. Together they often intimately bound in a cycle of mutual conditionality, and are thereby identified with one another. However, the two are quite distinct: lust is painful, pleasure is, uh, pleasurable. Addiction is when this cycle spins out of control. The failure to properly understand the cycle of lust and pleasure, and to recognize which is which, has miswritten many lives, and even the histories of nations. The Buddha warns us,

There is no satisfying lusts, even by a shower of gold pieces; he who knows that lusts have a short taste and cause pain, he is wise; Even in heavenly pleasures he finds no satisfaction, the disciple who is fully awakened delights only in the destruction of all desires. (Dhammapāda 186-7)

Notice that the last two characteristics of the unwholesome, that is, 4. suffering and 5. retarded development, together tell us that virtue is its own reward. As long as we act with unskillful intentions we suffer. Moreover, since we also fail to make progress, in fact regress, on the path we sacrifice the future happiness enjoyed by those of advanced spiritual attainment, for when we repeatedly weaken the habit patterns that trigger skillful thoughts and strengthen the habit patterns that trigger unskillful thoughts, we ensure greater suffering in the future as well. In short, when we act with unskillful intentions, we suffer twice. This consistent with the law of karma tells us.

Whatever I do, for good or evil, to that I will fall heir. (AN 5.57)

While we make the world through our actions, we also make ourselves. While we perform virtuous actions, we become virtuous people. While we perform beastly actions we become cads. We therefore expect merit-making/good karma to adhere to the intentions, wholesome or unwholesome, behind our actions rather than to the form of the physical actions themselves.

Notice that the Buddha’s psychological observations anticipate many cases the law of karma, probably the bulk of cases. Recall that naïve understandings often see it as a rather mysterious cosmic accounting mechanism.  Additional examples of karmic results from the early texts also have applicable explanations: Our harmful actions tend to incite retribution to our detriment from those affected, because people are by nature vengeful. People tend not to like those of angry or greedy disposition. Habitual anger and other unwholesome mental factors are demonstrably associated with physical health problems. Even physical beauty adheres to the virtuous; kind people often exhibit a kind of angelic glow where hateful people often seem perpetually under a cloud. Remaining mysterious examples from the discourses, such as offering a monk alms in one life and then receiving great riches for oneself in the next, are fairly rare in the earliest texts and could well be entirely allegorical. Moreover, the very common misconception that everything that happens to us for good or evil – like winning the lottery or being run over by a truck – must have some kind of karmic basis in past actions, is explicitly denied by the Buddha (SN 36.21).

We might suspect that if we continue practicing generosity and precepts for many many years, the mind will eventually become perfectly pure when greed, hatred and delusion have completely disappeared as motivational factors in our actions. It is not quite so simple: There are points at which we will get stuck, largely related to recalcitrant delusional conceptualizations that need to be broken down. There are also certain shortcuts we can take, largely through practices that focus directly on specific dispositions or specialized mental skills. An example is the development of loving-kindness through meditation techniques. Purifying the mind therefore includes the practice of mental acts alongside physical (bodily or verbal) acts. Mental practices have direct value only with respect to purifying the mind, that is, they do not directly entail external harm or benefit in the world.

The practice of purifying the mind.

I hope none of this discussion evokes images of goose-stepping thought police in the minds of readers. In fact, if we have entered into the practices of refraining from all evil and accomplishing good, we have already slipped into the practice of purifying the mind. This is because we are forced to confront volitional impulses wherever they tend toward harm or away from benefit. Every time we override a contrary mental factor in order to adhere to a precept, we are deconditioning an unskillful habit pattern and thereby purifying the mind. Every time kindness or generosity inspires our good deeds, we are strengthening our tendency in that direction, and thereby purifying the mind. Even mixed motives, such as responding to peer or authority pressure, or just a sense of obligation rather than kindness, have a way of eventually giving way to purer motives.

For instance, there is a precept not to kill living beings. Maybe we do not initially, for the life of us, understand why the life of an ugly twiddle bug matters one snippit, but a twiddle bug is a living being, and we want to be good Buddhists, so we don’t kill twiddle bugs. After a few months we discover something that was not there before: a warm heart with regard to tweedle bugs—they have become our little friends—and not just toward twiddle bugs but toward other beings as well, even certain people that we had once put into the same category with twiddle bugs. Our mind has become purer. Try it! Let’s put away the twiddle swatter and the Twiddle-Enhanced® Raid and see if we don’t soften right up.

A number of precepts actually have little to do with refraining from evil, except insofar as they support purification of the mind. A precept against idle chatter, for instance, is rather victimless, especially given that cases in which it spills into disparagement of others are are covered by other precepts concerning speech. Nonetheless if we refrain from idle chatter over many months we discover a quieter mind, less prone to proliferation of spurious thought and therefore less prone to delusion. We have through observing this precept purified the mind. Similarly, practices of enactment of accomplishing good, such as making food offerings to an inert and definitely not hungry Buddha statue, commonly serves to develop generosity and reverence, and are found in virtually any later Buddhist tradition.  Beyond these are a range of mental trainings that do not so much take advantage of the intimate relationship of intention and physical action as a means to purifying the mind. Most of these are meditation practices, and all involve mental karma, deeds of mind, that provide purity as karmic results. For instance, mettaa meditation focuses on developing kindness as a personal virtue without having, for the time being, to do an actual bodily or verbal act of kindness for anyone.

The motivations for undertaking the practice of purifying the mind per se are quite a bit different than for precepts and generosity, because the focus shifts away from doing the right thing on a case-by-case basis, to the personal development of a quality of character. In taking purifying the mind to its logical conclusion, we remake ourselves, metamorphing into someone who reliably and readily does the right thing without hindrance, someone whom our friends, relatives, even mother will someday hardly recognize and that we ourselves cannot foresee. Generally a personal crisis or unshakable state of despair is necessary to give this practice depth, for  this will show us that the extend of the human dilemma dwarfs the meaningless distraction of sensual pursuits. In fully purifying the mind we commit ourselves to the renunciation of what common people consider indispensable to human happiness, even our sense of self, in order to realize what is most valuable and meaningful.

Let’s see where we are in terms of the Buddha’s teaching of the gradual training. Recall that the gradual training looks like this:

• Generosity, the practice of accomplishing good.
• Precepts, the practice of refraining from all evil.
• The heavens, which refers to the law of karma, most commonly conceived as an assurance of rebirth in a heavenly realm.
• The drawbacks, degradation and corruption of sensual passions.
• The rewards of renunciation.

When, from the understanding and pursuit of the foregoing, the mind is ready, malleable, free from hindrances, elated and bright, the Buddha recommends that the following should be taken up:

• The Four Noble Truths, including the Noble Eightfold Path.

The first two steps constitute accomplishing good and refraining from all evil, respectively. The remainder is concerned with purifying the mind per se. The law of karma is the basis of purifying the mind, the recognition of the shallowness of the life centered in selfish pursuits and the importance of giving up this way of being in this life provide the motivations for undertaking the wholehearted practice of purifying the mind. Renunciation is always present where we make progress on the path. Once we are committed to purifying the mind, we are ready to go off the deep end of practice, represented by the teachings of the Four Noble Truths and the practice of the Noble Eightfold Path. I will skim over the bare essentials of the Noble Eightfold Path here.

The Noble Eightfold Path itself largely reiterates and reinforces the ethics the Buddhist practice begins with. Three of the eight folds constitute the virtue group:

(3) Right Speech,
(4) Right Action,
(5) Right Livelihood.

These cover refraining from evil and accomplishing good, which apply to verbal and bodily actions. Right Livelihood avoids employment that compromises the other two practices. The ethics group is bookended by factors that also relate directly to ethics:

(2) Right Resolve,
…
(6) Right Effort.

Right Resolve is to uphold the values of renunciation, kindness and harmlessness, primary intentions underlying purity of mind, accomplishing good and refraining from all evil, respectively, intentions that should already have been developed early in the gradual training. Right Effort is the process specifically of cultivating wholesome intentions and discouraging unwholesome, the process right at the heart of purification of mind. This leaves three folds:

(1) Right View,
…
(7) Right Mindfulness,
(8) Right Concentration.

These function in support of the other five (ethical) factors in the Noble Eighfold Path. Right View lays out the law of karma, the relationship of suffering to craving and the matrix of interrelated mental factors that produce karmic actions. Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration are aspects of mental cultivation that extend the power of introspective examination, necessary for deep purification of the mind.

In summary, both the gradual training and the Noble Eightfold Path are organized around ethics; ethics is intrinsic to the logic of either. This raises an important question: Is there some part of Buddhism that is not about ethics? What I have in mind is awakening, Nirvana, the complete extinguishing of worldly concerns, final liberation, the ending of karma itself. I will discuss practice beyond ethics (inadequately) in our fifth and final episode in this series.

Accomplishing good

Go your way, monks, for the benefit of the many: for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, the benefit, the happiness of gods and men. (Vinaya, Mahavagga).

To accomplish good is to perform actions that have beneficial consequences. It is to make a gift to the world. One might see a turtle in the road, stop the car and carry it to one side lest it be run over by a less mindful driver; one might cook a meal to the delight and nourishment of one’s family; one might rescue a flood victim from perilous waters; one might teach Buddhism or offer a match to those in need of light; one might help overturn an unjust economic order for those in need of a bite. The practice of accomplishing good is also known as generosity (dāna). Note, however, that “generosity” is the translation of either of two words in Pali. Dāna is the physical act of giving something material or immaterial, including service, and therefore directly accomplishes good.  Cāga is the internal mental disposition that most typically underlies dāna, though kindness (mettā) and compassion (karuṇā) are also implicated and is thereby more relevant to purifying the mind. I will resort to “giving” as a translation of dāna when it is important to distinguish physical act from disposition.

A little reflection reveals that how much and what kinds of good can be accomplish is far more open-ended than how much and what kinds of evil we might refrain from. This is probably why the Buddha hoped that we might refrain from all evil, but only accomplish some good. Some people use all of their available energy to feeding the homeless, adopting rescue dogs, campaigning for universal health care, while others, for no apparent lack of good-will, sit at home, read the news and fret, … but don’t steal or lie. Sometimes people are lazy or just lack the imagination or self-confidence for intensive good accomplishment. Others are clever in finding an excuse that it is not their problem, while others readily take responsibility. While refraining from evil can be formalized reasonably effectively in a fixed set of rules, accomplishing good is practiced in an astounding number of different ways. It is not feasible to itemize all of ways to accomplish good in the way we can with refraining from evil.

For the most part the Buddha focused on generosity as it is practiced in the narrow context of the Buddhist community and of the household, on what we will call conventional generosity. The remainder of accomplishing good we will call unrestricted generosity. Conventional generosity lends itself much more readily to description and formalization and thereby to specific practice commitment than does the hugely open-ended unrestricted generosity.

The rationale of accomplishing good. Accomplishing good belongs to the class of ethical systems that philosophers call consequentialism. Whereas refraining from all evil is guided by the good or bad character attributed to the proposed action itself independently of context, achieving good is guided by the future good or bad consequences of the proposed action. The Buddha introduced this practice to his newly ordained son as follows:

“What do you think, Rahula: What is a mirror for?”
“For reflection, sir.”
“In the same way, Rahula, bodily actions, verbal actions, & mental actions are to be done with repeated reflection.
“… if on reflection you know that it would not cause affliction… it would be a skillful bodily action with pleasant consequences, pleasant results, then any bodily action of that sort is fit for you to do. (Similarly for skillful verbal and mental actions, unskillful actions with unpleasent consequences, etc., MN 61)

Our practice is in its broadest sense to aim for good consequences, and thereby to give to the world. The world carries a burden of great suffering; it needs people to accomplish good, now more than ever. The great challenge of accomplishing good is to trace as best as possible, with discerning wisdom, just what the consequences of our actions might be. We live in a very complex and highly interdependent world in which the consequences of the simplest action runs very deep, playing themselves out almost forever. We are like the famed butterfly (of the butterfly effect) who, by choosing to fly from one flower to the next, will, meteorologists tell us, trigger storms and hurricanes on the other side of the world in the decades and centuries to come that otherwise would not have occurred, or prevent those that would have. Similarly our actions may enable wars to happen or not to happen, and we may never know. We, like chess players, can only see a few moves ahead. We are at the same time nearly omnipotent yet almost totally blind. This is why the Buddha recommended that Rahula consider his karmic actions with great care.

Conventional generosity tends to confine accomplishing good safely to a context in which our actions have immediate and traceable beneficial consequences. It is prescribed for certain categories of recipients, certain categories of gifts, certain manners of giving and certain intentions around generosity. Generosity is often described in terms of merit-making, which refers to the amount of benefit that accrues for oneself through the law of karma, that is the fruits of one’s karmic actions. It is dubious that this can really be quantified in any verifiable way, though some aspects of karmic results are usefully highlighted in this way.

• Worthy recipients of generosity are ascetics and priests (who live on alms), destitutes, wayfarers, wanderers, the sick and beggars, as well as family members and guests. The purity of the recipient correlates with the amount of merit made. For instance, offerings to those of great spiritual attainment gain oodles of merit. (DN 5, DN 23, DN 26)
• The gift of Dhamma (dhammadāna) exceeds all other gifts, which tends to give monastics an edge in merit-making. Religious gifts made to the general public would in later Buddhist traditions include contributions to building pagodas, Buddha statues and things along those lines. Otherwise gifts satisfy mundane material needs. It is important to note that the merit earned correlates inversely with one’s resources, for instance, a meager offering from a pauper might easily earn more merit than a sumptuous gift from a tycoon. This is because it is the intentions that count. Although most gifts are material, the gift of service (veyyāvacca) is also very meritorious. (SN 1.32, Dhp 224)
• One might give with different intentions: out of annoyance, fear, in exchange, thinking generosity is considered good, to gain a good reputation, out of kindness, aware of the karmic consequences, or to beautify and adorn the mind. The last gains a truckload of merit. (AN 8.31) Again, we find intention to be critical, for merit ultimately is about purity of mind. In general it is best to give with no expectation of personal benefit. (AN 7.52)

The practice of conventional generosity is adapted to the structure of the traditional Buddhist community, in which the relationship of laity to monastic has played a central role since the time of the Buddha and still does in most Buddhist lands to this day. The Buddha gave great attention in the Vinaya to organizing and regulating the monastic community to a level that seems to have been unknown in other ascetic communities of the time, with full understanding that the lay behavior would shape itself to the behavior of the monastics. Alms-giving, the support of ascetics in various traditions, was already prevalent in India at the time of the Buddha, and is naturally a part of conventional generosity and merit-making for Buddhists. However, the Buddha did something interesting: he imposed on the monastic community through the monastic precepts an enhanced level of dependence on the laity, removing them entirely from the exchange economy and making their dependence a matter of daily contact with the laity. He made the monks and nuns as helpless as house pets or young children with regard to their own needs (but did not substantially restrict what monastics can do for others). The result is that monastics live entirely in what has been called an economy of gifts in which goods and services flow entirely through acts of generosity. Laity participate in this economy in their interactions with monastics, but the economy also naturally generalizes to the larger community. In Burma, for instance, I observed how readily this classical practice of generosity carries beyond the monastery walls, how people naturally take care of each other with a sense of obligation that requires no compensation. The Buddha fashioned an economy particularly conducive to the practice of conventional generosity. Although the same material benefits might be realized in an exchange economy, the economy of gifts affords more opportunity for merit-making, which is to say, for the improvement of personal development of purity of mind.

We have been discussing the practice of conventional generosity, which is handled in Buddhism rather formulaically. However, this is only a part of our hugely open-ended potential for accomplishing good. We can call the remaining range of generosity as unrestricted generosity, to distinguish it from conventional generosity. This would include addressing a range of local social needs such as giving alms to the poor, providing care for orphans, organizing education and other charitable projects, or addressing more global issues like ending wars, oppression, crime or ecological degradation, sometimes through advocacy for changing social, economic, political or cultural structures and institutions. Presumably because of its diverse range, the Buddha had few specifics to offer about unrestrictive generosity and no structured practice.

Nonetheless, the Buddha did leave us with quite a few examples of unrestricted generosity. In an incident described in the Vinaya (Mv 8.26.1-8) the Buddha and Ānanda come upon a monk sick with dysentery, uncared for, lying in his own urine and feces. After he and Ānanda had personally cleaned the monk up, the Buddha admonished the other monks living nearby for not caring for the sick monk, famously proclaiming:

“Whoever would tend to me, should tend to the sick.”

The Buddha’s design of the monastic order as a kind of microcosm of society gives a clear idea of many of the social values the Buddha felt should be upheld. The traditional Indian caste system completely disappears and almost complete gender equality is implemented within the monastic Sangha. Moreover, governance is decentralized such that major decisions are made by consensus only among monastics who are physically present in a local community. Detailed instructions sustain harmony within the Sangha.

The Buddha did not actively champion the similar reformation of civil society, but did have a bit to say about responsibilities of kings toward their subjects, sometimes describing the righteous or wheel-turning king as a kind of ideal. In DN 26 he even recommended that such a king seek ethical guidance from wise monastics:

“Whatever ascetics and Brahmins in your kindom have renounced the life of sensual infatuation and are devoted to forbearance and gentleness, each one taming himself, each one calming himself and each one striving for the end of craving, from time to time you should go to them and consult them as to what is wholesome and what is unwholesome , what is blameworthy and what is blameless, what is to be followed and what is not to followed and what action will in the long run lead to harm and sorrow, and what to welfare and happiness. Having listened to them, you should avoid evil and do what is good.”

This passage is significant in view of the common understanding that monastics should not get involved in political or social matters, and are perhaps ill-equipped to do so. It clearly opens a nonpartisan role for them as moral advisors. In DN 5 the Buddha describes a chaplain offering wise advice to a king concerning the relationship of crime, poverty and general prosperity:

“Your Majesty’s country is beset by thieves, it is ravaged, villages and towns are being destroyed, the countryside is infested with brigands. … Suppose Your Majesty were to think: ‘I will get rid of this plague of robbers by executions and imprisonment, or by confiscation, threats and banishment’, the plague would not be properly ended. Those who survived would later harm Your Majesty’s realm. However, with this plan you can completely eliminate the plague: To those in the kingdom who are engaged in cultivating crops and raising cattle, let Your Majesty distribute grain and fodder; to those in trade, give capital; to those in government service assign proper living wages. Then those people, being intent on their own occupations, will not harm the kingdom. Your Majesty’s revenues will be great, the land will be tranquil and not beset by thieves, and the people, with joy in their hearts, will play with their children, and will dwell in open houses.”

We do well to note here and elsewhere a characteristic feature of the Buddha’s method of ethical scrutiny: its uncommon tolerance and forgiveness. He thereby maintains unwavering kindness for all common participants in human society, whose worldly actions he sees as almost unavoidably conditioned by circumstances and as controllable to the extent that conditions can be adjusted, at least by kings. Underlying this understanding is the impersonal law of cause and effect found also in the seminal teaching of dependent co-arising, which the Buddha applies particularly effectively to the understanding of human psychology. The plague addressed in this passage arises from social conditions, not from some inherent evil, and therefore a hateful response is counterproductive. The Dhammapada reaffirms this attitude:

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world.
By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.
This is a law eternal. (Dhammapada 5)

The practice of generosity is limited by the practices of refraining from evil and of purifying the mind. We have seen that Buddhist ethics is a hybrid of three ethical systems, each related to what is generally found in isolation in other ethical traditions. Although accomplishing good is in itself consequentialist, it is tempered by its concomitant duty and virtue ethics.  Therefore, whereas a purely consequentialist ethics is generally subject to the rather radical principle, “the end justifies the means,” in the Buddha’s ethics the means cannot be violent, cannot be exploitive and cannot be deceitful, lest precepts be violated. Nor can they be motivated by greed, hatred or delusion, lest impurity of mind be fostered. This is fortunate given the practical difficulty, noted at the beginning of this section, in tracing the consequences of our actions, the butterfly effect. Whereas we can fairly clearly understand the means, the ends are rarely reliably predicted in any complex domain, such as in human social systems. It is very easy to inadvertently cause harm. Adhering to precepts and acting with pure intentions tends to offset the confidence we otherwise misplace in our own views and analyses..

This brings us to the questionable status of conceptualized views in Buddhism relative to direct verification, particularly direct verification in one’s own experience.

Come, Kālāmas, do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of scriptures, by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of a speaker, or because you think: ‘The ascetic is our guru.’ But when, Kālāmas, you know for yourselves: ‘These things are unwholesome; these things are blameworthy; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if accepted and undertaken, lead to harm and suffering,’ then you should abandon them. (AN 3.6)

Notice how this passage discounts almost every basis for a reasoned view in favor of direct verification. Consider that probably all of the great man-made evils of history have been ideologically driven, in which the means were justified in terms of allegedly beneficial but misperceived ends. These include many Communist programs, such as the Cultural Revolution in China and the attempt of the Khmer Rouge to impose a rural peasant society on Cambodia; the remaking of European society through ethnic cleansing by the National Socialists in Germany and like-minded Fascists elsewhere, the removal of democratic controls and adjustments over markets in neoliberal economic theory and the practice of the British colonialists in playing one ethnic or religious group against another, with unanticipated but devastating consequences that the worlds’ statespeople are trying to sort out to this day. Views are dangerous things: they tend toward delusion (that is, they tend to abstract from from reality), and we tend to become so infatuated with our own views that we refuse to acknowledge any conflicts with reality that might remain. Through views our efforts to accomplish good can go alarmingly wrong.

Entering into the practice of accomplishing good. The mix of incentives for undertaking the practice of achieving good is much the same as for refraining from all evil, that is, some blend of our our level of kindness of compassion, of our commitment to and identification with the Buddhist path of which accomplishing good is an integral and highly recommended part, and of our expectation of a karmic payback that will work for our future benefit. Moreover, conventional generosity, because it is practiced primarily in the context of Buddhist community, is also encouraged and reinforced in that community. Young children who grow up in Buddhist families traditionally learn communal generosity, including support of the monks and maintenance of communal facilities as an integral part of being Buddhist, along with refuge and following precepts. For many Buddhists conventional generosity will remain the primary practice for one’s entire life.

In practice, a family or an individual will commonly pick a particular practice of conventional generosity according to a daily or weekly schedule. This might be to prepare and offer rice or other foods for monks on alms round every morning, or to bring a meal offering to the monastery once a week, or to provide work for the community one day a week. In addition an individual might be routinely on the lookout for any Sangha or community need in order to play Johnny-on-the-spot when one  arises. Financial contributions to conventional projects also constitute conventional giving.

All of this works pretty smoothly in Asia at the village level, but is more difficult in cities where there is less sense of community, or in the West where there may not be a local monastery and one might not even know one’s neighbors. In these circumstances, efforts should be made to create local communities of like-minded people, often centered around temples to which dispersed community members must travel on special days. It is important that a temple or monastery operate without fee or dues, if this is at all possible, because any financial exchange is an opportunity lost for the practice of generosity. In the West, where the Buddhist ethic of generosity is seldom understood, implementing the economy of gifts may require educational effort.

Unrestricted generosity moves beyond the immediate religious community, but also is a matter of taking up projects in a persistent way. One might volunteer as a candy-striper at a local hospital, engage in hospice work, rescue abandoned puppies, pick up trash along the highway, mentor troubled youth, teach meditation in prison, offer sandwiches to the homeless. Regular volunteering is highly recommended as a means of fulfilling the practice of accomplishing good. Such volunteer efforts can scale up to enterprise-level efforts, like founding and funding hospitals, or advocacy for peace, social justice or environmental preservation.

Buddhism has not traditionally been as known for its enterprise-level efforts as has Christianity, for instance. But there is no reason that the ethic of accomplishing good should not scale up in this way. Probably social conditions in Asia have been, until recently, less conducive to enterprise-level efforts of this kind. On the other hand, Ven. Rahula (not the Buddha’s son, but the author of the widely read What the Buddha Taught) devoted a book to making the case, specifically for Sri Lanka, that the widespread reputation of monks as indifferent to social concerns reflects colonial history, in which the Sangha was systematically disenfranchised from responsibilities in which it had previously routinely engaged, such as running schools. In fact, in recent decades Buddhist communities have become quite socially engaged, often inspired by Christian example.

The practice of accomplishing good. A prominent feature of the practice  of accomplishing good is that in the Buddha’s teachings it is not enough to do something with beneficial consequences. Close attention must also be given to proper dispositions, intentions and manner in the act of giving. We will see that this kind of mental engagement brings the practice of accomplishing good and the practice of purifying the mind in alignment.

We might give with different intentions: to stop the nagging of our child, to avoid retribution (buying “protection” from mobsters, for instance), in exchange (giving money for a product or service, for instance), as a bribe or in repaying a debt. These are fairly neutral with regard to merit, since in each case one is generally taking as much as giving. We might give because it is proper, a family tradition. We might give out of kindness. If we give with no expectation of personal benefit our intentions are clearly pure (AN 7.52).

The Buddha recommends a degree of wisdom around giving: that we are aware of the law of karma, that is, that we accrue personal benefit when our intentions are pure, and that we are on a path of practice leading to the purity and ultimate perfection of the mind. We understand that if we feel happy before, during and after gift we are in the swing of this practice (AN 6.37). Also,

When this gift of mine is given, it makes the mind serene. Gratification & joy arise. (AN 7.49)

Accordingly, we should take care that there is later no resentment for having given (SN 3.20). The purest form of giving is with the attitude:

This is an ornament for the mind, a support for the mind. (AN 7.49)

Notice how the Buddha’s emphasis in discussing generosity moves freely from benefit for others to pleasant personal experience and back again. Pure acts of giving are expected to gladden the heart and contribute to the development of personal character. This creates some confusion concerning motives: are we practicing generosity for them or for us, out of benevolence or out of selfishness? The inescapable fact about generosity is that it is most rewarding personally when it is most selfless. It feels great, which is certainly why it is such a foundational practice in Buddhism. At the same time, it provides direct experience of the law of karma: personal benefit accrues from the most selfless intentions.

We have seen that the practice of generosity, particularly conventional generosity, is often accompanied by the notion of merit-making. Sometimes this notion is criticized as inherently self-serving, compared to squirreling away money in the bank. A more useful way of thinking about it is as score keeping, much as we might track our meditation practice by marking each meditation period on a calendar. The advantages of scoring merit are that it helps us stay relentless in our practice, and it reminds us that our practice is progressive. It is true that we can create a selfish attachment to our score, but this is a pervasive issue for all aspects of our practice life. I once, over one five and a half year period, never failed to meditate at least once every single day (I kept score), until I realized I had developed a degree of pride in that record, and so intentionally skipped a day. We can work with our attachments. Merit-making often assumes some rather specific metrics, which should clearly not be taken literally. The Buddha himself, for instance, offers:

If one were to feed one non-returner, that would be more fruitful than… if one were to feed 100 once-returners. … If one were to feed one arahant, that would be more fruitful than… if one were to feed 100 non-returners. … (AN 9.20)

The Buddha recommends that offerings should never be given in a callous manner, but rather respectfully, not in a way that humiliates the recipient and ideally with one’s own hands rather than through an intermediary. It is also best to give at a proper time and to give what is not harmful. (AN 5.148) Notice that these recommendations encourage direct engagement in, and full experience of, the act of giving. In this way, these measures encourage feelings of friendship, appreciation and interpersonal harmony in association with the act of generosity. They also enhance the benefit consequential on giving, to such a degree that one begins to lose track of who is the giver and who is the receiver in a particular transaction. For unrestricted generosity this manner of giving would suggest that it is better to be actively present at the orphanage one is donating too rather than simply writing out a periodic check, or arranging an automatic fund transfer. Notice that that would also allow us more closely to track the consequences, for harm or benefit, of one’s generosity.

It is significant that generosity is the first element in many different lists. In particular, it is at the very beginning of  the gradual instruction, which the Buddha presents in various discourses (Udana 5.3, for instance) to newbies who lack the prerequisites to entering the Noble Eightfold Path. It is helpful to review at this juncture the steps of the gradual path to get an idea of how the practice of generosity is foundational to the entire Buddhist path:

• Generosity, the practice of accomplishing good.
• Precepts, the practice of refraining from all evil.
• The heavens, which refers to the law of karma, most commonly conceived as an assurance of rebirth in a heavenly realm.
• The drawbacks, degradation and corruption of sensual passions.
• The rewards of renunciation.

Only when, from the understanding and pursuit of the foregoing, the mind is ready, malleable, free from hindrances, elated and bright, the Buddha recommends that following should be taken up:

• The Four Noble Truths, including the Noble Eightfold Path.

The reasons for beginning with generosity certainly include the ease with which the practice is understood and taken up, even by children; the traditional community support around conventional generosity that the Buddha had fashioned; and the immediate gratification that arises in conjunction with the practice of generosity, both on the giving and on the receiving end. Generosity can actually engender unwordly mental states of joy and happiness that are, like meditative states, quite independent of sense pleasures. The next factor in the gradual instruction, precepts (here, sīla), is sometimes categorized as a subtype of generosity. It is the gift of harmlessness and fearlessness.

Heavens, or the law of karma, follows closely the practices of generosity and precepts. Initially it provides a primary incentive for undertaking these practices, the accrual of personal benefit. Generosity, probably in particular, then provides direct experience of at least some of the paradoxical workings of the law of karma, since it feels so good, but less good to the extent selfish motives intrude.

The next two factors (drawbacks, degradation and corruption of sensual passions and the rewards of renunciation) are subtle realizations that arise from the practices of generosity and precepts. Together they provide the entry way into the entire Buddhist path, and at the same time, into our third ethical practice of purification of mind, which can be equated with the entire Buddhist path. Precepts and generosity force us to struggle and compromise with those mental aspects that attempt to divert us from those practices. Sensual passions are the primary human motivations when no ethical considerations are present. These are presumably what motivate animals almost entirely, but ethical practices repeatedly force restraint. Generosity, in particular, gives occasional rise to supermundane feelings of delight and joy, sometimes inexpressible delight and joy, which are not rooted in sensuality. This puts a new light on the efficacy of the pursuit of sensual pleasures as a path to personal well-being. In fact, at some point these considerations will throw us for a loop and make us wonder why we have been living the way we have. The more we investigate this, the more we discover the shallowness of  pursuing satisfaction in selfish pursuits. This begins the process of renunciation, the gateway to the remainder of Buddhist practice.

I should note that it concerns me that in the West we, more often than not, attempt a physical impossibility: we start walking the path at the far end. We tend to postpone the practice of generosity and precepts to some future stage, perhaps even after awakening, to dismiss renunciation from the range of Buddhist values altogether, to jump past the first six steps of the Noble Eightfold Path, and then to focus almost exclusively on meditation practice. We then often get hooked on Buddhist practice through the experience of unworldly states of joy and happiness in deep meditative concentration, but then we wonder how to make our practice relevant to the real world or how to involve our children in Buddhism. However, there should be little problem understanding the relationship of practice to the real world if our practice has its roots from the beginning in ethics, as the Buddha intended. If we start with generosity we can also get hooked through the experience of unworldly states of joy and happiness, and our children can get hooked at the same time. (This is not meant to diminish the ultimate importance of meditation practice in any way, just to nudge it into its proper context.)

Next week: Purifying the Mind

(commentary on Dhammapāda, 183)

This mind of mine went formerly wandering about as it liked, as it listed, as it pleased; but I shall now hold it in thoroughly, as the rider who holds the hook holds in the furious elephant. (Dhammapāda, 326)

Refraining from every evil is alternatively translated as the not doing of  any demerit (sabbapāpassa akaraṇaṃ) or the avoiding of “bad karma.” It is almost always practiced in Buddhism in terms of precepts, as rules of thumb that help us to become harmless. Precepts are similar to the Ten Commandments of the Bible, or to traffic laws, or to the bothersome things your parents told you to do when you were a kid, like not to watch more than seven hours of TV or not to eat the dog’s food.  They also might be compared to professional rules of ethics, such of those observed by psychotherapists (not sleeping with clients) or members of the scientific community (not faking data). Traditionally lay people throughout the Buddhist world observe at least the following five precepts:

1. I undertake the training step to refrain from killing living things,
2. I undertake the training step to refrain from take what is not given,
3. I undertake the training step to refrain from commit sensual misconduct,
4. I undertake the training step to refrain from falsehood, and
5. I undertake the training step to refrain from the headlessness of spirits, liquor and intoxicants.

Some people choose to extend this set in various way, for instance to include prohibitions against malicious, harsh or useless speech, sometimes for just one day a week. I am a Theravada monk, and Theravada monks take on a set to 227 precepts, all the time, forever.

Precepts are almost invariably stated as abstentions, things not to do, for instance, “Do not kill,” rather than “Protect life,” which is why they may be described with the phrase to refrain from every evil.  The violation of a precept generally requires intention; accidentally running over the neighbor’s cat cannot violate the precept against killing living beings. Refraining from evil, in other words, applies to karma, which means in Buddhism simply “volitional action.”

The rationale for refraining from evil. Philosophers would classify refraining from evil according to precepts a deontological or duty ethics. The advantage of its concise rule format is that this makes it reasonably clear when we are breaking a precept  or not, even when we are drawing a blank and cannot work out all the consequences of a proposed action . We are never sure if we are doing all we can to protect life, for instance, so it is nice to have a rule of thumb to commit us at least to causing no harm. Moreover, a precept is easy to learn and remember, even for the young or young at heart, or for the beginning Buddhist or the one with beginner’s mind. It tends to highlight a basic problem area in human conduct that the sages of past ages must have experienced and recognized, and it applies regardless of the complexity of the circumstances in which one proposes to act: Just don’t do it! Buddhist precepts pertain, at least in the most ancient tradition, to observable actions of body and speech, not of thought. (In contrast, thoughts may sometimes violate Christian commandments, such as coveting your neighbor’s house, cow or wife.) In short, a precept achieves power and clarity in stating minimal standards of physical (bodily and verbal) conduct. It is, in sum, very doable.

A particularly significant difference between Buddhist precepts and Christian commandments should be noted: Buddhist precepts are taken on in Buddhism entirely as training steps (sikkhāpadaṃ, in the Dhammapada verse), that is, they are undertaken voluntarily as an individual commitment, rather than as imposed by a God, a Pope, government or other authority. As a Buddhist, we vow to follow precepts, or not, or choose to take different sets of precepts. In contrast, violating a commandment in Christianity or other Abrahamic faiths is “bad” insofar as it insults the will of God. The one is a demeritorious act and the other a sin.

Although precepts and commandments widely overlap in content, the difference noted entails that one can logically commit a sin without doing or intending harm, or avoid a sin while doing and intending harm, for God’s will can work in mysterious ways. Murder, theft, bearing false witness and adultery are actions harmful to others and displeasing to God. Homosexual acts, on the other hand, making for yourself an idol, not keeping the sabbath or handling leather made from pig skin would seem harmless (“victimless crimes”), yet, we are told in the Old Testament, are displeasing to God. Stoning someone to death is clearly harmful to others and therefore demeritorious, yet might nonetheless be sanctioned by God in response to others’ deeds. As practical consequence, there are no “victimless crimes” in Buddhist ethics. Sexual misconduct in the third precept above, for instance, refers to things like acts of adultery or sex with a child, in which the harmony of standing human relations is violated, tending toward verifiable harmful results, and never to the perceived “kinkiness” that commonly adheres to sexual acts according to societal standards. Buddhist precepts are also to a surprising degree free of cultural norms and surprisingly universal.

Weaknesses of precepts (as well as commandments) as guides to ethical conduct are that they generally allow loopholes and they don’t permit appropriate exceptions, that is, precepts are porous and rigid.  There is the case in which the Gestapo shows up at your front door and asks you, gleefully aware that a Buddhist will not lie, if you are hiding Jews in the attic, or that in which you just happen to be returning from a softball game with a  bat in your hand and walk in right behind a man who has just “gone postal” and has begun shooting at fellow employees. There are, moreover, many harmful, generally mildly harmful, behaviors that simply are not covered in precepts, like taking up two parking spaces.

It is significant that the Buddha rarely sanctioned exceptions to precepts, perhaps because he wanted us to be fully aware of the dilemma of the human condition rather than regulating it away. The one example I am aware of in which the Buddha discusses the kinds of contradictions that may arise in following precepts is in MN 38 where the Buddha was challenged for his own use of disagreeable speech against Devadatta, his cousin, who had created a schism in the Sangha, had injured the Buddha in an assassination attempt and had committed other odious misdeeds. The Buddha’s response was that sometimes it is necessary to dig a pebble out of a child’s mouth even though it causes great discomfort. Providing a metaphor rather than loophole was wise: given the smallest loophole, many people might become quite creative in their exceptions to precepts, for instance, soon allowing exceptions in the case of people one does not like, or of those who they otherwise imagine to be undeserving.

It is important to note that precepts, as formal rules, sometimes serve purposes other than refraining from evil. The fifth of the common five precepts, for instance, might best be understood as sustaining certain qualities of mind (heedfulness and mindfulness) that are important in the overall project of purifying the mind, our third ethical project. Although it has ethical value in this sense, it does not have the direct relationship to harm that the other four precepts enjoy. . Similarly, optional sets of lay precepts include a prohibition against idle chatter, on the surface seemingly even more benign than inebriating oneself. This also contributes to the overall project of purifying the mind, for which its friend idle thought is understood as problematic. The very first precept in the monastic code prohibits monastics from engaging in sexual acts, a serious disrobing offense. Sex, in itself, is not necessarily harmful, but monastics practice, by definition, as renunciates. Maintaining a sexual relation is thoroughly in violation of a monastics’ practice commitments, the keeping of which are a part of the social contract with the laity that supports the monastic. If such a violation causes harm, it is an obscure kind of harm distributed over weakening practice commitments, unmet obligations, breaking of trust, weakening of the reputation of the Sangha and thereby of the Sāsana, and so on. The rationale is, rather, regulatory. Moreover, many minor monastic precepts are really rules of etiquette, and are actually exceptions to the cultural universality of precepts, in that they regulate socially acceptable comportment for the monastic community.

Entering into the practice of refraining from evil. As Buddhists we take on a number of practices and open our hearts and minds to understandings and values that may be initially unfamiliar. Taking on the precepts is one of life’s landmark decisions, like choosing a spouse, career path or dog.  We honor this decision with a sense of vow or commitment, dedication and devotion, with full awareness that, “This will be the shape of my life.”

In vowing to live according to precepts our intentions are most often mixed. A very pure motivation indeed for the practice of refraining from evil is one rooted in the virtues of harmlessness, generosity, kindness and wisdom. I think humans are born with a degree of innate goodness: people want to do good, to benefit and live in harmony with others. One sees this often even in small children and (as I observed in teaching Buddhism and meditation in prisons) to some degree in the most ignoble ruffians. To the extent that we already possess these virtues, we are already progressed in virtue ethics, the third ethics, that of purifying the mind. To the extent that these virtues are wanting, other intentions weigh in.

A second reason for becoming a precept practitioner is this very sense of vow or commitment to the Buddhist path, of which precept practice is an integral and highly recommended part. For the Buddhist born, this generally already has the great momentum of cultural and family tradition behind it, sustained already without question for many generations. It is on behalf of this kind of commitment and with the opening up to Buddhist practice and understanding that we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha. All of these practices are further reinforced for those active in a Buddhist community with the under the influence of its behavioral norms.

The third reason for commitment to refraining from evil is the law of karma.  Karma, we have seen, is volitional action and therefore the stuff of ethical conduct, and, in fact, the stuff of our entire Buddhist practice. All three ethical practices recognize that volitional acts have consequences for the future world, for good or bad, harm or benefit (except where some happen to be neutral). The law of karma recognizes that our volitional consequences have consequences for our personal future as well. It is roughly described as follows.

Whatever I do, for good or evil, to that I will fall heir. (AN 5.57)

Our karmic acts not only help make the world what it will be, but make us what we will be. Good deeds (meritorious karma, puñña) work to our own benefit as well as to the benefit of others. Bad deeds (demeritorious karma, pāpa ) work against our own benefit as well as against the benefit of others. The effects on oneself are often referred to as karmic results (vipāka) or fruits (phala). Now, exactly how and why the law of karma works is subtle and complex and will be discussed in psychological terms later in connection with the more sophisticated practice of purification of the mind. Nonetheless, the law of karma is taught in Buddhism, and was taught by the Buddha, even to newbies, to those who lack a theoretical understanding of the Dharma and even to children. The reason it is taught so early is certainly that its applicability to our personal situation is particularly cogent and that it therefore provides a powerful incentive for Buddhist practice, starting with the precepts. Most Buddhists see in the law of karma a system of personal reward or punishment for our karmic actions, or learn to see our actions as seeds that once planted will someday produce either sweet or bitter fruit. The actual payback may assume different forms but was most commonly related by the Buddha to circumstances of our rebirth (including possible rebirth in heavenly or hell realms). Beware that there are a host of naïve misunderstandings of the law of karma in circulation not supported in the early texts, probably exactly  because this theoretical teaching is introduced typically so early in Buddhist education.

We make decisions to shape our lives in many ways aside from taking on the precepts. Prominent among these is our choice of livelihood. Unfortunately certain livelihoods entail repeated evil behavior. Therefore a part of entering into refraining from evil is not to enter into certain livelihoods. The Buddha highlighted right livelihood by giving it the fifth position on the Noble Eightfold Path, the master checklist of Buddhist practice. Right livelihood is an enabling condition for fully entering the practice of refraining from evil.
The Buddha listed the following as livelihoods to be avoided (AN 5.177):

Business in weapons. This precludes hunting, soldiering (see SN 42.3 for more on this) or weapons manufacture. (I used to write software sometimes under Defense Department contracts, including for a project in missile guidance. This ended up being a major factor choosing my present way of life.)

Business in human beings. In the Buddha’s day this had to do with dealing in slaves and prostitutes. There may be modern institutional parallels in coercive labor markets.

Business in meat. This precludes raising animals for slaughter, slaughter itself or selling meat.

Business in intoxicants. This precludes tending bar, selling or producing alcohol, pushing drugs, growing opium, and so on. Modern allowances should be made for compassionate medicinal uses of intoxicants and poisons.

Business in poison. This would include manufacturing pesticides but also applying them to crops.

Notice that these for the most part evade the killing living things, and they are also broadened to avoid supporting conditions that might cause others to violate precepts.
Elsewhere (MN 117) the Buddha describes wrong livelihood as that which involves, “scheming, talking, hinting, belittling, pursuing gain with gain,” which sounds embarrassingly like conventional modern corporate business culture. In fact, modernity seems to provide fewer options for right livelihood than what was available to our ancient forbearers. Modern enterprises are much larger, decisions are distributed in such a way that obscure ethical responsibility and workers compensated through wages have little control over the product of their labor. For instance, given modern labor options we might be lucky to find a job at a retail store, in which we might be required to sell pesticides, booze, meat, and (especially in the USA) guns, with skillful whatever scheming, talking and hinting will close the sale. No religious exemptions are generally offered.

This raises an important question: If your act of selling pesticides to a customer (and convincing him he needs two cans, where one would do) is this your boss’s decision, or yours as his paid subordinate, that is, is it your bad karma? If your act of taking out an enemy combatant is your commanding officer’s decision, not yours, are you breaking a precept? If you don’t do it, someone else will, so aren’t you off the hook? The Buddhist answer is much like the decision of the Nuremberg Trial: you are not off the hook, orders are not just orders, you are the heir of your own deeds. This is also consistent with the role of such actions in the process of purifying the mind. Issues in right livelihood in our modern times may create dilemmas and and lead to compromises; a right livelihood may be elusive for the practitioner who us unwilling to let his family starve.

As a point of resistance to entering into the practice of refraining from evil, Westerner Buddhists often regard rules and regulations as infringing on personal freedom, or would like to keep their options open rather than to commit themselves to anything. These same Western Buddhists also often think of following ritual forms or sorting through what is skillful and unskillful in human thought as a kind of tyranny. This is a misdirected attitude:

First of all, Buddhism is not unlike many other areas in which we apply discipline in order to improve our skills. Becoming a master potter or a professional tennis player requires more than just doing our own thing, it requires years of training in technique and practice. Following a recipe in baking a pie could likewise just as well be considered an infringement on our right to cook anything we please, as we please, yet we keep buying cookbooks and following the recipes therein. In Buddhism our concern is to master the skill of life; this takes training, this takes discipline. It is not concerned with doing our own thing spontaneously in all situations. But at the same time it is an exercise of free will:  We decide to follow the discipline and take the vows in the first place. The Buddha can demand it of us no more than Julia Childs can demand that we follow her recipes.

Beyond this, the common notion of personal freedom referred to is actually almost always at odds with the Buddhist concept of liberation; the latter is not the freedom to do what you want but rather the freedom from having to want anything. The former is freedom for the self, the second is freedom from the self. In Buddhism we seek freedom from the tyranny of the self, with its endless desires and needs, dislikes and fears, that keep us stressed and miserable and that restrict the free flow of compassion and kindness to benefit the world. But then, this belongs to purifying the mind.

The practice of refraining from evil. Our incentives for following precepts compete with needy and aversive impulses rooted in the central importance of a misperceived self that must navigate a harsh, competitive and often abusive world. Without precepts we more often than not take more from the world than give, harm others, often unspeakably, as we accrue personal material advantages and become ever more entrenched in reprobate behaviors as a result of acting out our greed, hatred and delusion.

Bad deeds, and deeds hurtful to ourselves, are easy to do; what is beneficial and good, that is very difficult to do. (Dhammapāda, 163)

Following precepts requires discipline and mindfulness moment by moment, not to let our worst impulses overwhelm our vows. Most of all, it requires restraint.

The main challenge in following Precepts comes from the demands of one’s unskillful thoughts, which must often be brought under control in one way or another in order to act in accordance with the precept, for instance, in order not to sneak a cookie while struggling with an enormous sweet tooth. Following the precepts presents an opportunity to confront and begin to correct our worst impulses. As such, it actually provides a foundation in the third ethical practice of purifying the mind. The impurities of the mind largely reside in habit patterns that have been learned, traditionally over many lifetimes. Following precepts tends to thwart and break up these established patterns so that they begin to be unlearned.

In this way refraining from evil affords us an opportunity more closely to observe the contents of the mind: every time an existing pattern is broken through observing a precept, some unconsummated impulse is clearly left dangling. For instance, many Buddhist codes include a precept to abstain from gossip, which is a carefree pastime that many people enjoy without regarding it as harmful or particularly unskillful or stressful. However, following a precept not to gossip gives one pause as certain situations open up this otherwise alluring option. At that point if one looks one will see a bit of ill-will hanging unexpressed, and, peeling off of this, unmistakable stress. One will also take note that the unexpressed gossip has a dangling victim that has just benefited as a consequence of your choice not to gossip. We thus begin to see in what sense many of our thoughts and impulses are unskillful, in fact dangerous, and how renouncing or giving them up is quite appropriate.

As we break accustomed habit patterns, new kinds of mental factors arise to take their places. The results can be quite remarkable. For instance, we may start our practice with an established impulse to kill insects and other crawling “vermin,” an impulse that runs up against our new commitment not to kill living beings. As we repeatedly find ways to avoid killing living things, for instance by relocating snakes and scorpions or plugging up ants’ means of access to our living spaces, our ill-will fades and is replaced by a strong sense of kindness; we begin to feel that we are the protectors of our ugly or dangerous little friends. Impure mental factors are replaced by pure mental factors.

The precepts may feel like a box that you’ve put yourself uncomfortably into, one that affords little ability to move. Nonetheless, we are given an opportunity to observe and understand self’s needs and this understanding provides a basis for purifying the mind. There is a Zen saying that if one puts a snake in a bamboo tube it will finally become aware of its own shape. This works for us too. In summary, the practice of refraining from evil already begins to support the practice of purifying the mind. The opposite is also true. The practice of purifying the mind, which itself has a number of supporting component practices, supports the practice of refraining from evil. As the mind becomes pure, the impulses that challenge refraining from evil begin to disappear and refraining from evil becomes effortless.

We have seen that precept practice is often undertaken with mixed motives. In fact, weak, impure intentions for following precepts reinforce impurities in the mind. For instance, if we perpetually think as we apply a precept, “This makes me look good to others,” or even, “I’m making sure I will be reborn in a heavenly realm,” then indeed one is reinforcing an unskillful habit pattern, one rooted in self-centeredness and craving. However, it is rarely that simple. The desire to benefit others even if initially weak will likely be a growing part of the motivational mix as one practices with precepts, particularly as the joy that comes with pure motives continues to be experienced, and as the mind becomes purer through a variety of practices. As one’s motives center around the potential harm to others rather than around one’s own gain, one is also likely to go beyond the precepts, which are after all simply pointers for how to avoid harm, and consider every unregulated way one can avoid harm, like recycling one’s trash.

For five episodes we have been considering ways in which we might respond to a Buddhist teaching that we initially find unacceptable in some way or another from a modern perspective. We have looked at the consequences of everything from simply accepting it on faith to rejecting it out of hand and we have looked at the Buddha’s discussion of this very problem. A primary question that we have kept in mind throughout is, Why was this taught? If a given thesis plays an important functional role in the body of the Buddha’s teachings, some account, yet is nonetheless unbelievable, then perhaps its functional role can be preserved by other means.

Having sought an appropriate context for a teaching and having cleansed the mind of unexamined tacit views, unwilling to simply accept or reject it, the teaching nonetheless does not quite sit well. Perhaps it is just an archaic way of looking at things, has been superseded by modern understandings, contradicts modern norms of propriety or has simply not been interpreted properly. The teaching might nonetheless be rescued.

Series Index

How to upgrade a teaching.

The method here is to discover a modern expression for an archaic teaching true to the latter’s function.

When we view an ancient teaching with modern eyes, we can typically see that it permits a range of interpretations. We often don’t know out of hand, for instance, whether it was intended as myth or metaphor, allegory or actuality. Often it wouldn’t matter so much, as long as its intended function is upheld, and it may have been understood differently in different traditions in any case. When we view an ancient teaching with modern eyes, it may sometimes appear as a clumsy or naïve approximation of something we could state more precisely in terms of our often much more sophisticated understanding of science and psychology, history and humanities.

These considerations define the wiggle room that a skillful reading of ancient texts should exploit as one tries to wrap a modern mind around an ancient text, lest one ends up with the kind of literalism that characterizes modern fundamentalism. Having discovered modern expressions of ancient teachings, teachers will offer them to modern students to facilitate their learning. In this way a distinct modern understanding evolves. The key principle to bear in mind, though, is that an update should always be done with an eye on retaining the full functional integrity of the archaic teachings.

What follows is a couple of examples of the principled updating of Buddhist teachings, both historical and modern. I present these by way of exemplifying this final strategy for dealing with the believability gap.

Home-leaving in ancient China. The first example of update is historical, and also one in which a particularly recalcitrant presupposition was implicated. Early in the first millennium CE in China the Buddhist encouragement of home-leaving ran right up against the unshakably rock-solid value of family in Chinese folk culture. Monastics in India were home-leavers by definition, yet family and home enjoyed a solid place at the center of Chinese social values. The required update of this Buddhist teaching seems to have been a clever side-step, a high point in the annals of early public relations: Re-conceptualize the Sangha as a great big family, with family lineages, heritages and a very long history.

Tracing ordination lineages publicly established an analogy between the layperson’s parental relations and the monastic’s relationship to his or her preceptor/teacher. Monastics were given the surname Shì, for Sakyamuni. With a lot of fudging and creative imagination, family trees reaching indeed all the way back to the Buddha were drafted, spanning far more generations than almost any indigenous Chinese family history. The Sangha, now organized by ordination lineage, thus became a kind of family, such that an incipient monk or nun not so much left his or her family altogether as swapped his or her family, much as a young bride leaves one family to join another. In this way, otherwise bruised Chinese familial sensitivities seem to have been appeased, but the functional value of home leaving retained.

Actually, an analogous update seems to have been reached earlier in India, as early as the time of the Buddha or shortly thereafter, and to have involved a similar clever side-step, engineered either by the Buddha himself or later by his close disciples. The cultural presupposition was, in this case, patriarchy rather than the value of family. In a recent essay I argue that gender equality is as strongly articulated in the Buddha’s teachings as caste equality. However, it was inevitable that this way of thinking would stub its toe on the rock of patriarchy endemic in Indian folk culture at the time of the Buddha, and up to the present day, for that matter. The Buddha’s great concern must have been the acceptability of a women’s monastic order within the prevailing folk culture and even among his lay followers, particularly since the nuns, like the monks, would be dependent on receiving daily alms, and since the kind of independence he wanted to secure for nuns entailed a level of freedom from masculine control that was, in that culture, commonly identified with “loose women.” A solution would be to update his original intention by symbolically putting the nuns under the control of the monks, while ceding a minimal amount of real power to the latter. The result was the now infamous garudhamma rules (which I suggest actually postdates the Buddha himself). In this way, otherwise bruised Indian gender sensitivities seem to have been appeased, while the functional value of an independent order of fully ordained women was secured. (The irony is that those same garudhamma rules commonly bruise modern gender sensitivities. Modern disbelief in this case will likely necessitate an second update of some sort.)

Whether or not these analyses are correct, they illustrate an apt response to the inconsistency of an imported teaching with a local cultural norm that simply will not budge: update the teaching to accommodate the cultural norm while preserving as best as possible the original function.

Karmic payback. “We are the heirs of our own deeds,” the law of karma, has been explained and exemplified in various ways in different schools of Buddhism, and often described as a law of nature that eventually imposes justice for good and bad deeds. An unwholesome deed (karma) committed now, for instance, will eventually ripen by producing an unfortunate result (vipaka) immediately or at some later time, in this life or in a future life. For instance the following are some kinds of results found in the early discourses of bad deeds, in roughly descending order of frequency:

• An unfortunate realm of rebirth, for instance, as a hungry ghost or as a chipmunk,
• Unfortunate circumstances of rebirth, for instance, as a human, but born into a poor family, into poor health or into a displeasing body,
• Unfortunate circumstances in the present life, such as loss of wealth, bad reputation or declining health,
• An unfortunate incident in the present or in a future life, for instance, being struck by lightning a day after committing a theft.

The function of the teaching of karmic payback can be found in two equivalences it entails. The first is the equivalence of practice and benefit. We practice because we expect some benefit to ensue. Note that our practice is exactly karma, i.e, deeds or misdeeds of body speech and mind. Most other things that we “practice” – for instance, wood carving or ballroom dancing – we practice with the expectation of some personal advantage or satisfaction; Buddhism should be no different, and in fact it’s even more so. The second is the equivalence of personal benefit and benefit for others. Acts of generosity, kindness backed by wisdom are exactly what bring the most personal advantage and satisfaction. These two equivalences, of practice and benefit, and of virtue and reward, together encourage a life of practice rooted in the wholesome factors of generosity, kindness and wisdom.

Nonetheless, the law of karma is often found unbelievable in modern society specifically because it is unclear what kind of known mechanism might account for the various ways in which a deed might ripen. OK, Santa Claus may have young children covered on a year-to-year basis, but how could my act of generosity now possibly ripen as financial success in my next life? Who is keeping track for me? The following update of the law of karma might resolve this believability deficit.

Rather than presenting karmic payback as a law, let’s break the law of karma into a set of causal relations, focusing on unwholesome karma:

• Craving manifests as suffering. This is the second Noble Truth. Therefore unwholesome karmic acts driven by greed or hate experience an immediate partial payback as suffering.
• Craving is based in delusion. Therefore unwholesome karmic acts driven by delusion are also likely to lead to suffering.
• Repeated karmic acts of a given type turn to habit, and habits become definitive of character. For instance, repeated acts based in anger make one into an angry person. This ensures future acts rooted in anger, each of which, involving a kind of craving, will entail further future suffering.
• Habitual suffering (anxiety, stress, etc.) often manifest in physical health. For instance, an habitually angry person suffers almost constant stress, which famously weakens the cardiovascular system. An habitually needy person might likewise suffer from depression and alchoholism.
• Unwholesome acts often manifest as social censure. Few of us enjoy the company of an angry or needy person. Once cheated by a merchant we are unlikely to return to his place of business, nor recommend it to friends. Social censure even manifests as retribution in many cases. Unwholesome acts therefore often lead to unfortunate circumstances.
• Craving distorts perception. For instance, a person aflame with anger will see a his antagonist as a demon. The habitually angry person will live in a world of demons, a kind of hell realm. Living under social censure will only magnify this experience.

Our updated understanding of karmic payback posits that the archaic law of karma is a generalization over the effects of these principles, at least as a rough and easily formulated approximation. These principles themselves require no substantial update of the Buddha’s teachings. Furthermore, updating the law of karma in this way continues to uphold the functionality of the archaic law of encouraging a life of practice rooted in the wholesome roots of generosity, kindness and wisdom.

This leaves only the question, Does our update account for the specific examples of karmic payback found in the Buddha’s discourses? The most common of these examples make reference to conditions and realms of rebirth. However, these are consistent with our update of karmic payback: The latter traces much of human suffering to the development of the human character, with its ingrained habit patterns. Rebirth is taught as the force of that selfsame karmically formed character projecting itself into a new life. For instance, an angry character plagued by demons in this life will likely be reborn in a hell realm of his own making; he already lives in one even before death.

Unfortunate incidents – Mahamogallana is, in later teachings, said to have been murdered as a karmic payback for having caused the death of his parents in a previous life – are not accounted for in the update. Indeed it would be difficult to imagine what causal mechanisms might be at play in these cases in any account. However, we should note, first, that such incidents are relatively rare in the early discourses, and, second, that the discussion of karmic payback was there quite characteristically marked by allegory.

Allegory is well suited for explicating abstract principles, like the law of karma, by simple example, since the examples are chosen not for their factuality, but for their illustrative qualities. “If you do this bad thing, that bad thing is the likely result” is an optimal way of illustrating the law of karma; what could be more concrete? It doesn’t even matter if “that” is actually a bad thing, as long as people generally think it is. For instance, is being born in a wealthy family (as opposed to a middle class family) really a predictor of future well-being? Many Asian Buddhists think that by performing meritorious deeds they will improve their chances of winning the lottery. However, research tracing the fates of lottery-winners finds that these on average are very unfortunate people indeed. The early examples also tend to ignore cumulative effects of karma, for instance, the results of habitual actions, and to favor one-to-one correspondences of karmic act and result, for instance that offering this food to this monk in this life will result in vast wealth in the next. This balance makes no literal sense: we perform thousands of karmic acts in a day but suffer rebirth, the most common karmic result, only occasionally. But this balance is exactly what the allegorical nature of the discussion of karmic payback would suggest: a one-to-one correspondence makes a better story.

My intention here is not to provide an air-tight case that this is the optimal modern understanding of the law of karma – though I personally am rather partial to it –, but rather to illustrate how the principled updating of archaic teachings might work. I hope this example, like the ones before it, at least tells a good story. Updating teachings in this manner is, I feel, the most principled way in which Buddhism will adapt to modernity. Actually updating is an inevitable consequence of a Buddhist fully engaged understanding and practice. This is because we are not asked to accept teachings passively, but to examine them, put them to the test and relate to them in our own experience, that is, to reach an understanding that is our own. A modern mind will rarely arrive at the same understanding as the ancient Indian mind, nor of the variety minds that required the various historical updates of teachings still preserved in the various traditions of Buddhism. Updating is integral to the reasonable skeptic’s process of understanding.

Conclusion to the Series

I hope that at least two or three readers are still with me in what has turned out to be a rather long-winded discussion of Believability in Buddhism.

We are in a (rather exciting) historical process in which Buddhism, of Asian origin and historical development, is encountering modernity, essentially of European origin but spread with empire throughout the world. As these two great movements pass over and through one another, unbelievability stands as the most turbulent center of this encounter. Unbelievability is the “humbug” response, whose impulse is immediately and decisively to reject out of hand – to take the modernist’s perspective – any Buddhist teaching that conflicts with a modern world view. Among secular Buddhists the appropriateness of this impulse is even commonly accepted as a point of faith.

To my mind this unbelievability impulse is ill-considered because many of the teachings thereby rejected turn out to be body parts of the baby – not the bathwater –, that is, parts functionally integral to living, breathing Buddhism. To my mind this impulse is ill-considered also because there are more reasoned alternatives that – rather than making our own quick and easy Buddhism – will make Buddhism even more fully our own.

Making Buddhism our own is a natural and time-honored outcome of the tension in Buddhist between understanding (or theory) and practice. The Buddha describes how we understand the Dharma initially as a matter of faith, but then are challenged to discover the Dharma in our own practice experience, often as something quite different from what we had at first thought we understood. This is how we make Buddhism our own. The reasonable skeptic is perhaps in the best position to succeed in this endeavor: The naïvely credulous is likely to fix on an understanding that is unassailed by mere practice. The die-hard skeptic is unlikely to take the more challenging teachings seriously in the first place. The reasonable skeptic will take the teachings seriously, but, ever questioning, will allow experience and wise reflection to challenge what might have been an initially faulty understanding in any case. I identify the unbelievability impulse with the die-hard skeptic.

Most Buddhist teachings are quite readily acceptable to moderns, even when obscure, yet still in need of verification. Others are simply incidental and good candidates for rejection or ignoring. However some will be functionally significant in the system of the Dharma, yet difficult to accept or even unbelievable for many moderns. This case requires some kind of accommodation, either by adapting the teachings to modern views or by adapting modern views to the teachings. These are the the upgrade and reconsideration strategies respectively. An third strategy is contextualization, which is really a subtype of reconsideration, since it reconsiders the modern strict imposition of scientific standards on religious teachings. Reconsideration is significant in that it presents a challenge to the very widespread hubris that the the modern worldview is superior to alternative worldviews, including the Buddhist worldview. This is part of the reasonable skeptic’s challenge of engaging with Buddhist teachings completely

Series Index

This is the first of a six-part series on coming to terms with Buddhist teaching, particularly where it seems to conflict with common modern predilections. It relates to issues in faith and reason, Secular Buddhism, Buddhism and science and modern attitudes about religiosity.

Introduction

The ancient teachings of Buddhism sometimes raise skeptical modern eyebrows. For instance, which of the following might the modern Buddhist or would-be Buddhist find believable?

• Deities?
• Supernormal physical powers such as levitation, appearing in multiple places at once or jumping up to touch the sun?
• Supernormal knowledges, including reading minds or knowing others’ destinations upon rebirth?
• Rebirth?
• Heavenly realms or hell?
• The law of karma?
• Exalted states of consciousness, including complete awakening?
• The efficacy of bowing, of taking refuge, or of monks, robes and shaved heads?
• The admonition to cultivate renunciation, disenchantment and unnaturally wholesome qualities of mind?

I will assume that the reader finds at least consciousness and volition believable; otherwise your interest in Buddhism would have been very short-lived indeed (I have been told that there are behavioral psychologists who regard even these as unbelievable). In any case, all of the things in this short list are found in the earliest Buddhist scriptures yet commonly rejected in modern Buddhism, particularly eagerly in its “secular” wing(i). I will refer to these uniformly as “teachings,” even though some of are undoubtedly referenced casually in passing, until we can sort them out. My aim here is not to argue for or against any of these factors, but to offer practical advice on what considerations are important in integrating, or not integrating, such teachings into the understanding and practice of Buddhism as the student encounters them. Sometimes they ask to be worked with a bit. What I have to say belongs, to give it a fancy name, to prescriptive epistemology.

I should, before proceeding, acknowledge that eyebrow-raising seems to be relatively exceptional in Buddhism, in contrast to many other traditions of antiquity. Buddhism is sometimes described as thoroughly consistent with modern, scientific, rational thought, in spite of coming out of such a distant time and remote culture. There are a number of reasons that might be identified for this; it is not that the Buddha was a modern iron-age scientist. First, Buddhism’s concern is primarily in teaching a skill, as Ajahn Thanissaro(ii) likes to point out, in this case the skill of appropriate thought and action. This in itself makes it an empirically oriented endeavor, like woodworking or pottery, in which it is imperative to become deeply familiar with the medium as it actually presents itself, be it the grain and hardness of wood, the feel of clay between one’s fingers or the texture of human mind. Second, Buddhism’s empirical method is introspective rather than objective, which gives relatively little opportunity to disagree with results in modern science. Science has remarkably little to say about consciousness nor volition, nor about the other mental factors that form Buddhism’s primary subject matter, and Buddhism has little to say about the material world that forms the primary subject matter of science. Third, the Buddha scrupulously avoided pointless speculation about matters not relevant to spiritual progress.(iii) This gave Buddhism a relatively small footprint with which to step on modern toes. And fourth, Buddhism has often been intentionally repackaged for modernity for almost the last century and a half, to deemphasize those factors most likely to be found unbelievable by moderns.(iv) In spite of all this, Buddhism in its traditional and early forms has a distinctive transcendent dimension, much as pottery has an aesthetic dimension, as well as a characteristic dimension of ritual and communal religiosity. It is primarily in these dimensions that modern skepticism arises.

In approaching this topic, I want to focus specifically on unbelievability, which I take to be the phenomenon of rejecting something out of hand as an almost immediate response with little or no case-specific examination. Notice that something does not have to be unbelievable to be not believed, specifically when it is rejected after careful reflection rather than out of hand. Unbelievability is the “humbug” response, immediate and decisive, the die-hard skeptic’s first line of offense. Something might be deemed unbelievable, for instance, for being “paranormal,” “new-agey,” “woo-woo and way out there,” “religious,” “unscientific,” or for “going native,” and therefore deemed unworthy of further consideration. Of course, it might be likewise deemed unbelievable for exactly the opposite reasons, such as, “not woo-woo enough,” depending on the deemer. Standards of believability vary widely, though many are recurrent as modernity meets Buddhism.

As the reader might already suspect, I would like to discourage unbelievability in favor of careful examination. The danger of unbelievability is that something important might be inadvertently lost without due deliberation, to you and, in the case of wide-spread unbelievability, to future generations, something important to the functional integrity of the Dharma. I will assume that the reader would like to enjoy the fruits of Buddhist practice and understanding without hindrance, much in the way these were commonly enjoyed in ancient times when arahants roamed the earth.

Suppose you encounter a teaching that stretches your personal standards of believability. I want to offer and discuss five fundamental strategies – all of which I have personally tried, I think with some success, in my own Buddhist practice and understanding – to try out in order to ensure that that teaching receives due consideration:

• Accept it,
• Reject it,
• Contextualize it,
• Reconsider your standards for believability, or
• Upgrade its interpretation.

You might even apply more than one of these options at the same time. For instance, you might upgrade its interpretation to understand deities as referring to wandering cows, such that what was earlier solidly unbelievable becomes marginally believable, then accept or contextualize that. These strategies are widely applicable outside of Buddhism as well, in other faith traditions, in forming political views, or even in the study of science.

My intent here is not to advocate or indict particular options, but to make as much open-minded room for personal predilections as possible, with minimal offense to the functional integrity of Buddhist understanding and practice. My intent here is also to encourage deep processing of the Buddha’s teachings, not to readily accept or reject each teaching on first exposure, but to turn it over in different ways, to understand the variety of ways it might be understood, to understand its meaning and purpose, to integrate it into the overall body of the Buddha’s teachings, to integrate it into one’s personal world view and to resolve inconsistencies and make adjustments here and there. These things require a healthy, but not a die-hard, skepticism. Moreover, my intention is to avoid deal-breakers, the reaction to certain teachings that induce one to throw up one’s hands and abandon the Buddha way altogether, perhaps in favor of fly fishing or Sufi dancing.

I do not consider here the question of authenticity, that is, whether or not an encountered teaching has been correctly transmitted or interpreted – for simplicity I will assume that it has been. I have discussed the issue of authenticity elsewhere.(v) I should mention though that the kind of turning over and reflection advocated here for considering and integrating teachings in practice goes hand in hand with evaluating the authenticity of teachings as they are presented in texts that may have suffered unskillful reworking. Ultimately, if rejection of a given teaching seems unavoidable, it might not be because the student is unprepared or under the influence of modernity, but because it is something the Buddha never would have taught.

In the following sections I consider each of the five strategies in turn.

To be continued.

Endnotes

i. A particularly strong instance of this is the definition of secular Buddhist found at https://secularbuddhism.wordpress.com/definition/, though I imagine few secular Buddhists would actually endorse all of these points.

ii. For instance, in “Questions of Skill” (2001) available online.

iii. Consider, for instance, the “handful of leaves” simile in SN 56.31.

iv. Cintita, 2014, 104-107; Protero, 1996; McMahan, 2008; Snodgrass, 2003.

v. Cintita, 2014, 5-9.