This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: The Heart of Non-Harming; Dharmette: The Five Precepts (1 of 5): Not taking life. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: The Heart of Non-Harming; Dharmette: The Five Precepts (1 of 5): Not taking life - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 03, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning, friends. It's such a delight to be welcomed by you all. Gil has spoken of this Sangha as being a friendly, a friendly Sangha, and it certainly brings a smile to see everybody coming in with greetings. I just thought I'd open up a minute early to say welcome and express gratitude for your greetings to one another and to the Sangha. Very sweet. In the chat, I see old friends and many new friends. It's great to see everybody.

Gil spoke last week and provided an overview of Buddhist ethics. The intention this week is to continue with that and perhaps expand on it by taking a look at what are known as the five precepts. These are five commitments that we can make in our practice—commitments to avoid unskillful action in five areas of our lives. Commitments to bring our mindful attention to our actions and their consequences in the world in a way that cultivates a heart of non-harming.

At the end of his talk on Friday, Gil talked about this idea that from an effortful cultivating of virtuous action in our practice, there can be a transition to an almost effortless, second-nature way of meeting situations with an intention not to cause harm. In the spirit of that insight of Gil's, let's sit together. Let's dedicate this sit, let's bring the spirit of this sit and its inspiration around awakening the heart of non-harming, sometimes dormant in us. By bringing attention to the heart, we can sort of become attuned to it and awaken its potential for non-harm. So join me. I'm going to bring Buddha into the background here. Let's sit together.

Guided Meditation: The Heart of Non-Harming

We can take our meditation posture, move into a comfortable position that physically keeps us both relaxed and alert. A relaxed alertness, an alert relaxation. You can bring the eyes down if that's comfortable, bring them all the way down if that's comfortable.

And reorient our attention from the outside world, the responsibilities of the day, whether those are before us or behind us. Bring our attention inward and downward. Inward to this inner life, to this inner world. Downward into the body. And finding in this internal space the breathing happening. This breath right here is sufficient. Just noticing this in-breath, this out-breath, and then the next one. We can kind of keep our attention circling around this breathing thing happening, the motion of the body, the rise and fall of the abdomen, the shoulders lifting slightly, falling slightly. And we can keep coming back here to this here and now of our experience, the hereness and nowness of things.

Each time the mind gets caught up in things, snagged by things, each time we find the mind doing its things—looking into the future, considering the past, thinking about other people, thinking about ourselves, the usual—without judgment, with gentleness, we can nudge attention back to the breathing. Or we can let the breathing fill out, open back up to become the center of what's happening in our awareness.

The way we return to the breathing, the way we let the mind open back up to the breathing is so important. We don't have to hurry. We don't have to judge ourselves for having strayed away from the here and now. Maybe we can remind ourselves that it's the returning over and over again that creates a habit of mind to be here now. We create by this return, leaving the entanglement of thought, leaving the rapidity and some of the tightness of thinking, we return to the breath, to the here and now, to the body, where things are by their nature slower, simpler, more balanced. As we return, each time we return, we create a tendency, a momentum.

As we begin an exploration this week of five precepts, and given the intimate relationship between mind and heart, we can make each return to here and now, each return from thinking to the breath, for example, a return to the heart as well. Maybe when we return to the here and now, the heart seems tight, restricted, constricted. And if we find a heart a little closed off, maybe we can soften just a little around it. Maybe just by noticing what it's like, there's a softening. At least we're here with it, at least we're attending to it.

Perhaps we can notice that with returning from thinking, getting caught up in things—planning, remembering, all good functions of the mind, can't live without them—maybe we notice that with those activities of mind, the heart feels more closed or tight. And when we return to the breathing, to the here and now, there can be a subtle opening or softening. Maybe the heart feels a little more expansive, a little more generous when we return. And there too, we create a tendency. The heart in the present moment, the heart here and now, the heart at rest in meditation, like the mind can rest here in this meditative space, this can be the heart of non-harming.

As this meditation period draws to a close, having perhaps touched in with the heart, we can dedicate any stillness of heart, any peace we find, any openness, any generosity of heart to a broader benefit. In addition to being of benefit to ourselves, may it also benefit others. May it enrich our relationships, and may it spread out, ripple out to the benefit of all beings. May all beings know the calm and peace that come with the freedom from suffering.

Dharmette: The Five Precepts (1 of 5): Not taking life

So again, good morning and welcome. Wonderful to see everyone, wonderful to be with you all.

Last week, Gil provided an overview of Buddhist ethics, rather a large topic. In a sense, this week we can bring it down to a sort of an intimate size by taking a look at what are known as the five precepts: five areas in which we can make a commitment to adopt this heart of non-harming. We can commit to restraining from unskillful action. Today, we'll talk just a little bit about the five precepts in general, and then we can take a look at the first precept.

Before even listing the precepts, it may be useful to say that we undertake these commitments to skillful action, and particularly to avoiding causing harm, as supports of our practice. They help us be freer in the world. And as our practice deepens, we'll notice that there's a natural opening to this kind of action, this kind of response to the suffering of the world that moves us away from harmful action. Gil spoke of this Friday in his final comment, this idea of being ethical action—I don't remember exactly how he put it—instead of doing ethical acts. That is, finding that virtuous action becomes second nature as the practice deepens.

The way these five precepts are presented is very, very significant and very important. They are the following, and I'm going to provide them in the form in which they're chanted by those who undertake them, lay practitioners and others. They take this form, here are the five of them:

For the purposes of practice, for the benefit of practice, to support practice, I undertake a commitment to abstain from taking life. For the purposes of practice, to support practice, I undertake a commitment to not take anything not freely given. To support my practice, to support its benefit in the world, I undertake a commitment to abstain from causing harm with my sexual actions. To support practice, I make the commitment to abstain from harmful speech, unwise speech, unskillful speech. And finally, fifth, as a support for my practice, I commit to abstaining from intoxicated heedlessness.

So these are not commandments, they're not rules. They're not that simple. Instead, they ask us to—they're much more demanding in a way than commandments—they ask us to take every situation, every interaction, in the here and now of that interaction. They encourage us to see every interaction as presenting a different context. The common denominator in all of them is to avoid causing harm, and yet their expressions are myriad and variable. Something that might be an appropriate way of not causing harm in one circumstance may not be the way to respond the next time or in another circumstance or with another person, as we'll see.

So as Gil pointed to Friday, there's a doing here and there's also an allowing—allowing the practice to respond to situations, allowing practice to come forth. Whether that's pausing before we speak, not reaching out to take something and make it ours, kind of restraining ourselves from an acquisitive movement of mind and heart and body. But there's also, in this respecting practice and trusting, having confidence in the practice. Sometimes when we get out of the way and let the practice lead, let the practice respond, we're safer. We're less likely to cause harm.

And of course, Gil says this, and I trust Gil's judgment, but he says so on good authority. This is something that the Buddha points to, too, in one of the ancient texts that comes down to us as a foundation for the insight tradition. The Buddha says that somebody who's really awake, a practitioner who really is practicing well, really awake, becomes unable to take life, unable to speak unwisely, unable to take something not freely given, unable to engage in inappropriate sexual interaction, unable to engage in intoxicated heedlessness, as I've called it in the case of the fifth precept. So we can watch this in our practice: as the practice deepens, it's harder and harder to cause harm.

It's interesting, so much of this practice is about this same way of cultivating these aspects of mind and heart, of noticing, in this case of the precepts, how unskillful action feels, how skillful action feels, how the wholesome mind states that lead to skillful action feel, how the unwholesome state of heart that leads to unskillful action feels. And as in so many other aspects of the practice, when we bring attention to the state of the heart, noticing when there's an urge toward a tight-fisted selfishness, and then noticing a movement in the other direction towards greater generosity, towards giving back, towards giving away, towards letting go, we can lean into that. And in that leaning in, we can create a momentum, a tendency, a propensity to engage more frequently, more regularly, in that kind of action. And that's how it becomes increasingly second nature. That's how, as Gil put it Friday, we move from kind of consciously doing things that are ethical to just responding without thought in a way that supports ourselves, supports others, and avoids causing harm.

So let's take a look at the first precept. And in each of these, there will be a couple of emphases that I think, I hope, will come forward. One is that the focus in this is actions, not ourselves as actors. It's not about being a good person or a good Buddhist or a good actor; it's about cultivating actions that don't cause harm, avoid causing harm. That's the first thing. The second thing is the importance, the centrality of mental action. For the Buddha, it's actions of mind that are perhaps... I don't know if I want to say come first, but as we read in the first two verses of the Dhammapada¹, all action is preceded by mind. And when we act with a mind that's free and clear, the action that flows forth from it is skillful, is wholesome, doesn't cause harm.

The first precept is not taking life. This will be a brief look at the first precept. Again, it's not a commandment. And just because I'm not an ax murderer, for example, doesn't mean I can just check the box and say, "Okay, I don't take life on a regular basis," and I can move on to the second precept. It's an encouragement to notice any movement toward causing harm to other beings, to taking life. Sometimes it's best to move from the level of ax murderer, which I've just invoked, or global conflict among humans, down to the small examples.

Humorously, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about taking life and little things—I hope this works—is ants. Little creatures in our lives and the way we interact with them. We can notice, even as we approach the daddy long legs in the bathtub, the ants in the kitchen sink, our pets—we can notice the movement of heart. This is the practice: noticing the urge to harm, the urge to care, the urge to protect, and how that moves. It's interesting, somebody's just chatted about mosquitoes. Where I used to live, mosquitoes carried West Nile Virus, so it was really challenging. But the point is to challenge ourselves and notice how the heart feels when we have an urge to violence, when we have an urge to take life.

The famous entomologist E.O. Wilson was once asked in a lecture, an academic lecture, talking about his research on the chemical signaling with which ants communicate. Somebody in the back of the lecture hall raised a hand and said, "You know, this is great, very interesting, but I've got ants all in my kitchen. You know, what should I do?" And E.O. Wilson said, "Enjoy them." This is a response I love because it involves a change of heart. So you might experiment with this a bit with little things. It doesn't mean that we can meet all experience by just enjoying the little creatures around us or by not occasionally finding that we're in these moral dilemmas around ants. But what we can do is refrain, what we can do is avoid feeling complacent or smug that we're ethical actors because we have avoided gross physical harm or taking life, for example, of other humans, and focus more on the mind states that come up when we feel a temptation to harm.

The objective of undertaking a precept like this is not to act perfectly. We're likely to fall short. Not to beat ourselves up for falling short, but rather to become more aware of how our actions have consequences. We may find ourselves asking more frequently before we act, "Is this action likely to cause harm to myself, to others? Maybe will it cause harm to relationships?" Or, "Is this action in which I'm currently engaged likely to cause harm to myself or others?" Or, "Is this action that I just, without a great deal of thought, just completed—is this action likely to have caused harm to myself, to others?"

So to leave with a practice for the day, which I gather is something that Gil sometimes does: you might notice, till we get to the second precept tomorrow, the urge to harm when it comes up in our interaction with the little things, maybe. And the lesser life forms—maybe just seeing them as lesser is actually a movement of heart that we can correct a bit. We might notice an opposing urge to protect, and we might notice the actions that follow. How does it feel in body? How does it feel in mind? How does it feel in the heart? Which movement of mind and heart has greater stress in it? Which has greater ease? And as we notice this, we can encourage, we can incline, we can support the movement of the heart away from harm.

And as we do that, we create a tendency, a momentum in our practice and in our lives that allows us to be more fully awake to the consequences of our actions and more fully present in our experience.

So that's where I'll leave it for today. I very much appreciate being with everyone and appreciate your efforts to think and bring attention to the actions we engage in, the mind states from which they emanate, and our impact on the world and on one another. Do so with a light heart, do so with a smile, and we'll meet again tomorrow morning. Thank you and take care, everyone.