This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Training; Intro to Buddhist Ethics (4 of 5) Ethical Training. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Training; Dharmette: Intro to Buddhist Ethics (4 of 5) Ethical Training - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 30, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Good morning, everyone. One of the surprises to me when I went to practice in Thailand, when I was first introduced to Theravada Buddhism and to Vipassanā¹, was that the topic of Sīla², or ethics or virtue, was one that brought people a lot of joy. It was a joy topic; it was something that brought happiness. That was not something I had ever imagined growing up or in the Western cultures that I had lived in. In fact, I grew up somewhat mistrustful of people who overemphasized ethics, that it was somehow a little bit too puritanical or dogmatic or judgmental of people or hypocritical even at times. But the idea that they would bring you joy was a surprise.

It wasn't just a surprise to discover people who had that orientation; it was a surprise that as I started doing long retreats in Thailand, something shifted inside of me. Something got cleansed, something got emptied, something got space for something new to arise that I had never felt before, that felt as something that brought joy for living a life of non-harming, living a life that avoided the kind of unwholesome behavior that felt like it did a kind of violence to this inner place that was developing through the practice.

The reference point of joy for ethics, for this kind of living this life of kusala³ and kalyana⁴—wholesomeness and beauty—is very central to the Buddhist teachings. The mind is malleable, and nowadays we might call it neuroplasticity. The mind can be transformed and made workable, wieldy, so that it's not stuck in a rut but can become soft enough, workable enough to be able to do the inner spiritual work that Buddhist practice is about. That's encapsulated in the idea of a training. Buddhist practice is about training. Ethics is about training in ethics, not about perfection.

We don't hold ourselves up against a standard of either/or—either we're doing it wrong or doing it right perfectly—but that we're training. Many skills, many things we do in our ordinary life, we train to become better at: riding a bicycle, playing an instrument, cooking a particular dish. We do it a few times until we feel like we can do it easily without continuing to look at the recipe and being reminded or something like that. So we're training, we're learning, we're developing.

To orient yourself around meditation that it is, in fact, not meant to be perfect; it's meant to be a training that we enter into with sincerity. A training where we do our best, knowing that we'll fall off the wagon and we'll just have to get back on again, or off the horse, I guess, and back on again and back on again, developing ourselves. As we do so, we're developing a wholesome attitude towards ourselves as a meditator, a wholesome attitude towards our meditation, a wholesome attitude to whatever experience comes up in meditation—a beautiful attitude, and one that we can understand has some quality of ethics in it. That it brings us joy and happiness to be training, to do our best to train ourselves to meet our situation with kindness and non-hostility.

So we're training, which means we do our best, knowing that our best is the best we can do and not have any more standard than our own ability to do our best. And our best is going to vary from day to day depending on our energy and our tiredness and life circumstances. This wonderful sincerity of living this practice the best we can, and seeing it as a training, seeing it as something that we're slowly developing over time.

Guided Meditation: Training

So, assume a meditation posture. And that also is a training. Your body is slowly shifting and changing over time as you repeatedly enter into your posture. Some people talk about developing a "yoga body" by how we meditate, and the body itself will make subtle shifts, stretch, become stronger in particular ways that support this posture. It's a training in posture, meditation posture.

Lower the gaze, close your eyes. See if you can adjust your attitude sitting here, from whatever attitude you find yourself sitting in, to an attitude of getting ready to train, to do your best at being here. An attitude of being at ease with non-perfection. As a training, you can't be perfect already; there has to be imperfection for training to have a role in our life. And so, an attitude of being gracious, generous, kind. Shifting from any unwholesome attitude we have to at least a mild, wholesome attitude of goodwill.

And then beginning the training by tuning in, attuning yourself with the body breathing. Breathing sits at the nexus of life itself in so many different ways—the nexus of our emotions, our mind, our body, our external world. And to sit there, gently, quietly, attuned to breathing, the body breathing.

To give yourself a little more fully over to breathing, you might take a few long, slow, deep breaths, just enough so it remains comfortable, relaxing on the exhale.

Then letting your breathing return to normal. For a few minutes here, if there's anything happening for you which is more compelling than breathing—you're thinking a lot, there's emotions and feelings, body sensations, sounds around you—be aware of them, while accompanying those experiences with your breathing. Breathe with them, breathe through them, where there's an emphasis on breathing right in the middle of these other experiences. It is a training in not being reactive or caught in these other things that are happening. Breathing is like a massage that softens the pull, the attachment, the way that we might be bothered by something else. Just breathing with it. A training in allowing things to be.

And then, in the middle of all things, center yourself more fully on the body's experience of breathing. Wherever in the body the breathing is easy to attend to, let there be a resting point there. Resting or centered on the ballast of the body breathing. A training in staying present. A training in beginning again when you wander off. A training in not being bothered by whatever is happening, that instead of being bothered, being aware.

And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, to gaze upon the world as an imperfect place, no expectations of things being perfect, but for us to practice, train in gazing upon that in an unbothered, kind way. Here to support ourselves, our world, to see it all as a work in progress, and for us to contribute the best we have to offer to improve and benefit the welfare and happiness of all beings.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we engage in a training and a development and a growth that that can be the case.

[Music]

Thank you.

Dharmette: Intro to Buddhist Ethics (4 of 5) Ethical Training

In this talk, I offer the fourth discussion about introduction to Buddhist ethics, and the emphasis for today is on training. The orientation that the Buddha had on becoming ethical, being ethical, is that it's a training, a continual training to be as ethical as we can, to live as harmlessly as we can. This idea of training is very different than the idea of right or wrong, or perfection and imperfection, or that there's absolute morality we are measuring ourselves against.

The way that the Five Precepts⁵ are worded in Buddhism is that they're worded to be trainings. Rather than committing to not killing, it's "I commit to train in not killing." "I commit to train in not taking what is not given." Or, "I engage in..."—the word "commit" might even not be in the Pali, maybe that's a strong kind of Western tendency I have to insert a little different idea of ethics—but it's, "I engage in the practice of training, I engage in the training steps (sikkhāpadaṃ)⁶."

The emphasis is on training, and training implies that you need to train, you need to cultivate and develop. So rather than being all or nothing, we're working towards something, we're developing ourselves. And it's not working towards behavior necessarily, but more deeply training the heart and mind in such a way that we live ethically, we live a life of non-harming, and we live a life that's wholesome, that's ethically beautiful because of the quality and nature of the heart. It's not the external formalities that we're trying to live by, but rather to be transformed on the inside so being ethical is a natural expression of who we are.

The training is training ourselves to appreciate and develop the inner qualities that support ethics, learning how to lessen and maybe even eliminate the strong forces within, compulsions within, attachments within that lead to unethical behavior, and to replace those with wholesome attitudes, wholesome orientations within. So that wholesomeness naturally gets expressed in behavior, which is what we'd call ethical.

But training means that we have training to do. We want to begin to understand that we're trying to develop ourselves, cultivate ourselves, more than we're trying to adhere to ethical strictures—to know what to do that's right and then behave accordingly. That might actually override and do a kind of violence (to use strong language) to who we are, what's going on inside. An ethical life is really based on a strong emphasis on mindfulness, a strong emphasis on awareness, self-awareness, so we see and know what's going on inside. So that we've healed some of the unresolved issues and emotions and challenges that we have on the inside, not to override them.

Sometimes I had the impression that some of the people whose behavior is strongly guided by the wording of the precepts, who are trying to best fit into that behavior, are sometimes overlooking and maybe even running away from or avoiding unresolved issues or deep forms of something inside that needs to be healed. Rather than doing the healing, taking a good look and resolving what's going on deep inside. The ethical training in Buddhism is not just training in what can be seen as ethical behavior, but really involves looking more deeply inside of ourselves to what needs to be resolved or worked with or liberated within us.

In that sense, the precepts are sometimes seen as mirrors. The ethical guidelines in Buddhism—we call them guidelines, not rules or commandments—are seen as mirrors. So if we go up against wanting to kill someone or harm someone, if we go up against wanting to take something not given, or being involved in sexual behavior which maybe causes harm to others or breaks the precept, we're stopping to say, "Wait a minute, what's going on here with me?" Not, "Wait a minute, I'm being a wrong person," but rather, "Wait a minute, I think there's something for me to check in to, find out about myself, understand myself." So it's a training of turning inward to see what's really going on here and clarifying that, and maybe transforming that into something that we feel really good by, are really nourished by. It's wholesome, something that we begin feeling is beautiful. And so that we have a reference point for how wonderful it is, how delightful it is, to live a life of non-harming.

To think of ethics as being something we train in, rather than something that's either/or. I think this is a very generous attitude towards ourselves because we're not expected to be perfect, ethically perfect. What we're expected to do, if anything, is to be sincere in doing the training, doing our best we can. And if somehow we mess up, somehow we don't live up to what we're training for, then rather than spend a lot of time berating ourselves or being caught in remorse, the idea is to take an honest look at what happened. We look at our mistakes, we look at how we've been unethical, to learn from it so we can do better in the future. Training has a lot to do with being forward-looking, not being stuck in the past. We learn from the past, we learn from our mistakes, so that we can do better in the future. The emphasis is on, "Let's see how we can do better," to be inspired, to be motivated. "Yes, I will try now to do better." And sometimes we have to restate that intention many times a day. "Okay, well that didn't work out well, but I will try to do better," as opposed to justifying what we did—"it's the other person's fault, they deserved it," or something. It's always kind of looking at ourselves and asking, "Can we do better?" and "How do we train? How do we become a person who naturally is going to be an ethical person?"

One of the interesting things about this is that for the Buddha, in these training precepts like not killing, not stealing, not involved in sexual misconduct, not lying, and not engaging in intoxication, for laypeople there's, as far as I know, I've never seen any teachings of the Buddha that describes or provides punishments for people if they break the precepts. The Buddha didn't have a relationship with laypeople that he was in a place where it was his job or his orientation to somehow intervene and judge people that way, or to punish people, or to advise that these people should be punished in any kind of way for being unethical. His monastic community had institutional ethics and behavior for which there were consequences, and things had to happen in order for the monks to be in good standing or have harmony in the community. But we have in our society institutional ethics. We have things that our government wants, and different institutions we're part of have ethical codes of conduct.

Buddhism has codes of training. And there's no sense in Buddhism that there's some kind of Buddhist idea that you're a terrible person or bad person and you will somehow be punished by the Buddhist Church or something like that, or that the Buddhist Church has a role in doing that kind of punishment. There might be institutional reasons why a Buddhist community might decide on certain things, but from Buddhism itself, that doesn't come from Buddhism. Rather, what the Buddha was involved in was to continue putting people away from living an unwholesome life, a harmful life, and training to live a good life, training to live an ethical life.

Training means that a synonym for training is cultivating ourselves, developing ourselves, growing ourselves into something different. And that's a slow process, and it's a wonderful process, and it's a really worthwhile process. And it's possible. This is part of the good news of Buddhism: that the heart, the mind, is valuable. It can be changed, and it can be changed for the better. And that involves practice.

Another synonym for training is practice. We're practicing something so we get good at it. We practice so we develop proficiency, develop skill in what we're doing. So there's proficiency in being ethical, one of which is to engage in ethical reflection. Some of the issues we're involved in in our life are ethically complex, and it's not obvious what the least harming thing is that we can do. So developing and training ourselves to begin reflecting on principles, reflecting on consequences, thinking things out, is part of a wise life. To train ourselves to be able to wisely reflect about the ethical impact of our lives, our decisions, how we vote, different things. An ethical life is not just simply a life that lives by the precepts, but in a complex society, it's also being able to be deeply reflective about what is going on in this wider world of ours.

It's a training. We grow into being ethical. And I think that's been one of my great joys of practice, is to slowly—maybe very pretty slow—but to slow-grow in an ethical sensibility, grow in an ethical clarity and wisdom about how to live and where to come from in such a way that our heart and our minds become our best friends. We like it there, we enjoy ourselves, because we know that we're not oriented towards causing harm to anyone, self or others. We've trained ourselves that way, to live wisely, effectively in this world in a way that is ethical, wholesome, beautiful, and beneficial for all beings.

The theme so far for this week as foundations for Buddhist ethics is the importance of non-harming, the importance of wholesomeness, wholesome qualities, developing wholesome states, looking at the issues of ethics from the point of view of is it wholesome or unwholesome, or skillful or unskillful. Then yesterday, I talked about beauty, this sense of inner beauty that can be developed that's closely connected to being ethical. And then today, the idea of training in it all, that it is something we train in and develop over time. And then we have one more talk tomorrow on the foundations of Buddhist ethics.

So thank you very much for this chance to talk about this. And I hope that you find opportunities to train today. You might think ahead into the day and think about situations that might be challenging for you, and how might you train to enter into those situations so that you train in being ethical or maintaining an inner beauty, your wholesomeness in what you do. Thank you.