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Training in the First Precept - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 11, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Announcements

Good morning. I have a few announcements.

This Tuesday evening at 6:00 PM, I will be having a conversation with Mohsen Mahdawi for the Sati Center. Mohsen is a Palestinian student at Columbia University who was detained and almost deported back in April. It is a bit of an irony that he should have been arrested for being involved in terrorist activities when he was the president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association. He was probably the most active person on campus building bridges between Jews and Palestinians. He was valued a lot by the Jewish community on campus and actually denounced some of the more strident, violent language against Israel that was occurring at that time.

He is a wonderful practitioner and person, now involved with exploring and developing peace bridges around the world. I have had a few conversations with him; he is a very interesting man, and I hope that what he has to offer the world will come forth in that conversation. You can find the registration link on the Sati Center website. It should be recorded, though it will be his choice whether we post it afterwards.

Secondly, next Wednesday evening here at IMC, I will be teaching a five-week "Introduction to Meditation" course. These days I only do this once a year—for many years I did it three times a year. I love doing them, but with my schedule, I don't do it as often now. I delight in offering it. If you have never had the instructions the way we do it here at IMC, or even if you have, it might be interesting to come. That starts at 7:00 PM on Wednesday for five weeks.

Training in the First Precept

Last week I talked about the Four Noble Truths as one of the central, core teachings of the Buddha. There is an ancient analogy used for those teachings: the footprint of an elephant is the biggest footprint of any animal in the Indian jungle. All the footprints of other animals can fit inside the footprint of the elephant. In the same way, all of the Buddhist teachings can fit inside the Four Noble Truths. They encompass everything.

Today I want to talk about another centrally important aspect of Buddhist practice: practicing with the precepts—the practices of virtue or ethics. The first precept can be seen as just as important as the Four Noble Truths. In some ways, it may be even more important because it provides the motivation and context for everything Buddhism presents. Instead of thinking of it as a footprint of the elephant, maybe it is the elephant.

The Concept of Training

For lay people, the first precept is worded in a particular way that I want to highlight. It is called a "training precept." It is never said as "you should do this." It is taught as something you say for yourself in the first person: "I undertake the training precept." The motivation to live this way comes from you. It is a choice you make, not a choice made for you.

In English, it is often said that the five precepts—the five ethical guidelines—are not commandments. There is no one in Buddhism who has the moral authority to make a command or a moral judgment about how you should be living. This is very challenging for some people. Some people want that from their religion; they want to be in moral judgment of others, or they want a reference point to know with great clarity what is right and wrong.

Here, the first precept—usually defined as not killing—is offered as a training. It is something we train to be able to do, rather than a commitment that "I will never kill again." That is challenging. Shouldn't we all commit not to kill? Perhaps requiring that of people creates strife and becomes a recipe for moral judgment. It can lead to being righteous about what we think is right and condemning those who cross that line.

If it is a training rule, then we can cheer everyone on. You can learn how to do it. You can dedicate yourself to this. Maybe you don't always know how to do it; maybe you have questions, challenges, or even fail sometimes. That is the nature of training. If you are training to learn a sport, a musical instrument, or a job skill, you are not expected to do it right the very first time. It takes practice.

The Scope of Non-Harming

The precept is usually called "not killing," but it is probably broader than that. The word translated as killing, atipāta¹, literally means to strike out, to throw down, wrestle, fight, or hit. Some people limit it to killing, while others expand it to include any form of physical violence.

In ancient India, it is good to see it broadly. Other religions at the time of the Buddha, such as Jainism and the precursors to Hinduism, also had five precepts. Their first precept was ahiṃsā², which means non-violence or non-harming. Chances are this was just a different way of saying the same thing in Buddhism: we are not involved in actively doing physical harm to anyone, and we are training ourselves to do that.

Does this involve only not killing human beings, or does it apply to all life? The word used for what we avoid killing is usually translated as "living beings." I am touched that the more literal meaning is "breathing beings" or "breathing life." That makes it more visceral for me—I am one of those; I breathe. In Pali, the word is pāṇa³ (related to the Sanskrit prāṇa), used for both breathing and life itself.

So, the statement is: "I undertake the training precept to abstain from attacking, killing, or harming living life."

It is a simple, categorical statement: "I abstain from this." But the training involves not just following a rule, but engaging in a process of deep contemplation. We train to become ethical thinkers—someone who considers and contemplates, "How do I lessen harm? How do I avoid causing harm in the way I live my life?"

Monastic Rules vs. Lay Training

If we look at the rules for Buddhist monastics, we find a very legalistic document. The monastic community is a legal community in its own right, with many rules to ensure they live together harmoniously. They have case studies to adjudicate what is right and wrong, providing much more detail than the Buddha ever provided for lay people. Lay people did not form the same bounded, committed community, so the Buddha had no authority to tell them what to do. instead, he invited them to train.

What does training entail? It entails becoming an ethical contemplative who reflects deeply rather than running on automatic pilot.

In the monastic rules, the precept of not killing is only relevant if the act is done knowingly or with thought (sañcicca). In Western jurisprudence, we would say "intentionally." There are stories in the monastic case studies, for example, of someone tossing something over a cliff without knowing what was below, and it killed someone. The question was: is he guilty of murder? If he was, that is one of the most serious rules a monastic could break (a pārājika offense), resulting in expulsion from the order essentially for life. The Buddha ruled that no, it was not done knowingly. It might have been done stupidly, but it was not done with intention.

Another question is whether the precept applies equally to all living beings. For monastics, it is absolute that they cannot be involved in killing human beings, nor can they encourage suicide or facilitate death. However, killing an animal is a different offense; it requires confession to another monk. That is very different from losing one's status as a monk. This suggests that the value of life varies a bit by the life form, or the severity of how it violates the human conscience differs.

The Complexity of Lay Life

This distinction is important because lay people do not live the protected life of a monastic. Lay people have to farm, raise livestock, protect their country, police communities, or make decisions involving life and death. Or, consider a more common scenario: termites eating your wooden cabin.

I have known Buddhist monastics in Thailand who shared little huts with poisonous snakes. They tell stories of sitting there with the snake. They aren't going to kill the snake or harm it; they believe it has just as much right to be there. They could move out, and since someone else provides their housing, that is an option.

But for lay people, if termites eat your house, who will provide another one while you still have a mortgage to pay? Can you take care of your family properly without a roof over your head? If you call the exterminator, are you violating the rule?

It is not a rule; it is a training. Training means you stop to think about it. You consider carefully: Is this really what I want to do? Is it necessary? What are the consequences? Are there alternatives to poison? Maybe you prefer not to kill or use poison that might affect other animals or the environment.

Maybe there are alternatives, but they are more expensive. This is where we bring in the "heart scale." We weigh all the conditions, factors, and consequences on the scale of the heart.

The Heart Scale and Meditation

What we put on the "heart scale" has a lot to do with our other training: meditation. Meditation settles and calms us, bringing a kind of intimacy and deeper attention to ourselves. It gives us a reference point for the impact our actions have on us.

If you want to get rid of termites because you are angry—you hate them, and this is a chance to arouse that fury—then gassing them out of existence feels different. If you are meditating a lot, feeling the surge of red-hot anger or hatred feels like a form of violence to yourself. The commitment not to harm living life includes yourself.

If you sit and meditate, you get a different reference point for what you are willing to do in this world. Maybe you are no longer willing to do to yourself what hatred, fear, or strong desire does. Craving and clinging can be a form of suffering and self-harm.

In Buddhism, we stop for suffering—not just our own, but also the suffering of others. Underneath that, we see that craving and clinging are forms of suffering. As we settle and become peaceful, we get a different perspective on how we want to live—one we don't have when we are spinning in our thoughts and to-do lists.

When we put all the factors on the scale in our heart, where does it tip? If it costs twice as much to gently usher the termites to a "retirement home," maybe for my heart's sake, I am willing to pay that. The cost of killing might be too high for me internally; it might twist my heart in a way I only notice because I am listening.

Avoiding Moral Judgment

Maybe for one person, the scale tips one way, and for another, it tips the other way. One decides to fumigate; another does not. Is one being ethical and the other unethical? Is it our job to hold others in moral judgment?

If we look deep inside, does casting moral judgment make your heart sing? Does it bring delight? I hope not. What happens to your inner peace when you judge others? Why are you doing it? What motivates it?

The ethical training in Buddhism involves asking these questions. I don't think the Buddha encouraged us to cast moral judgment, but he did encourage us to look deeply at what is wholesome (kusala) and what is unwholesome (akusala)—what is healthy and unhealthy.

For the Buddha, it was clearly unwholesome to be involved in killing. He encouraged us to live a wholesome life. But how do we know what is wholesome for someone else? If a family is barely surviving, facing winter, and risking homelessness because of termites, is it wholesome to let the termites live? It is not for us to decide. It might be that, out of compassion and wisdom for one's family, the most wholesome action is regretfully to kill the termites. To abandon the well-being of the family might be even more unwholesome.

Who is to say how any individual should move in this direction? As a society, we spend too much time in moral judgment of each other. The alternative is to take on the precepts as trainings—ways to reflect deeply, get to know yourself, and consider consequences.

Deep Reflection on Life and Death

This training applies to difficult topics like euthanasia or assisted suicide. People often ask me for the ethical answer: "Is it okay to euthanize my pet?" or "What about assisted suicide?"

I do not want to be in the position of answering those questions or offering a moral judgment. What I cherish is the deep process of reflection. If I can be part of that reflection—looking at all the conditions and introducing considerations like love and compassion—then I am willing to participate. But I do not want to be the decider.

In Buddhism, the first precept is not to kill, not to attack, not to cause harm. This aligns with the ancient Indian orientation toward ahiṃsā. This concept was introduced to the West powerfully by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. It touches something deep in the human heart and can be very inspiring. But it only has real value if we take it seriously enough to train with it—to do the difficult work of figuring out how to live that way wisely and appropriately.

Buddhism offers a training around this, not a commandment.