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The Ethical Heart (3 of 5): Wholesome and Skillful

What I've been teaching about meditating—with how the mind wanders off and how you come back—could be understood and described as developing this skill of meditation, becoming more skillful. The development of skill is something we can cultivate like developing a skill for a craft; we get better and better at doing it as we practice. In learning a new craft or new activity that requires skill, we're not expected to know how to do it well at the beginning. But as we just practice and learn, it becomes a skill that maybe even becomes second nature and easy to do.

But in looking at how we could bring compassion or kindness to what's happening, how we can come back in a way that's peaceful and nourishing, this also has another aspect besides being skillful. I like the word "nourishing," a word that is often used as wholesome. Wholesome is that which is conducive to health; it's healthy to do this. These two English words, "skillful" and "wholesome," are represented by a single word in the ancient language of the Buddha and the Buddhist teachings, and this is the word kusala^[1]. It's an extremely important word, and some translators will translate it one of those two ways and some the other. So sometimes it is translated as skillful, and sometimes as wholesome.

"Skillful" has a little bit of the connotation that there is a goal, there's a purpose for what we're doing. So it has a skillful purpose: we're trying to do something, cultivate something, develop something; it's skillful for a purpose. "Wholesome" is just healthy in and of itself. It's kind of virtuous; it's good. There's a goodness to it, and it has more to do with the quality of what we're doing in the moment and how that quality is onward leading. The focus is not the purpose.

So depending on what we're talking about in Buddhism, sometimes we have this word kusala translated as skillful and sometimes as wholesome. But it's the same word, and it turns out that this word kusala is probably one of the primary candidates for us to translate the English adjective "ethical."

As I've been saying this week, there is no obvious word in the Buddhist language for our English words "ethics" or "ethical." It isn't because the ancient Buddhists were not ethical in our eyes. It's just that they didn't look at their experience through our Western English concept of ethics, which arose in a particular cultural, historical, and religious context to single out this one category called ethics and make it its own thing. It's okay to do that; it maybe has its value to do that. But it does make it easy to begin separating that from the rest of our lives. I've known people who thought that ethics were just a little bit too Pollyannish or hypercritical, and really turned away from ethics because, "If that doesn't count, we don't need those kind of judgmental, limiting ideas."

In the ancient world, they didn't have that word "ethics." They didn't tease it out from experience; it was integrated into the Dharma^[2]. And so, if you are really involved in understanding the Buddhist path or practice from the point of view of the Buddha, ethics is not something we can separate from the path. It's integral to the path.

One of the key little slogans of Buddhism—one of the shortest, pithy things you could say—is a four-line verse^[3] that goes this way: "Don't do what is wicked." Some people translate it as "evil," but I don't know if that's the best translation because of the heavy connotations of evil in English and Western thought. So: "Don't do what is wicked; do what is skillful; and purify the mind." This is the teaching of the Buddhas.

So the teachings of the Buddhas for many of us have a little bit of a connotation of ethics in our language: don't do evil, don't do harm, do what is skillful, or, if you translate differently, do what is wholesome, and purify the mind. Purifying the mind is skillful and wholesome; it's part and parcel of this whole thing that we're trying to do in Buddhism. That little saying kind of puts this idea of wholesome right at the heart of the practice.

There is a very famous sutta called the Kalama Sutta^[4], where a group of people come to the Buddha and say, "We've had a lot of spiritual teachers coming through town, and they all say that they have the right teachings, the true teachings. How do we decide between them? Who has the right and true teachings?"

The Buddha declines to answer the question that way, and instead, he offers a principle or a standard by which they can decide for themselves. But first, he says what not to do as a standard to understand what is true—spiritually true for the Buddha, always true for the purpose of liberation. He says this, and it's a remarkable passage because it really suggests not to use as a source of absolute, ultimate authority what many people use as their source of authority for religious teachings or for a lot of things in life.

The Buddha says to these people, the Kalamas, "Do not go by oral tradition"—there was only oral tradition back then, so in our days we could say don't go by scripture, don't go because it's just in the sacred texts. "Don't go by the lineage of teaching," just because it's in a particular lineage of teachers, traditions, or cultures; that doesn't necessarily make it true. "Don't go by hearsay. Don't go by logical reasoning. Don't go by inferential reasoning. Don't go by reasoning things out for yourself. Don't go by the acceptance of a belief after simply reflecting on it that it seems like a good idea, that it seems right. And don't go by the seeming competence of the speaker," like someone like me, or because you think that person is your teacher.

So that's a pretty impressive list of things the Buddha says don't do. And then he says what to do. I won't give you the whole thing now, but he says—and many people will sometimes translate this next piece into English as "go by your own experience." But that isn't really right; that's too broad, too vague, and actually dangerous to word it that vaguely. Here's part of what the Buddha actually said: "When you know for yourselves that these things are unwholesome, these things lead to harm; or when you know that these things are wholesome, these things lead to benefit; then avoid the unwholesome and do the wholesome, avoid the unskillful, do the skillful."

So here the assumption is that we can know for ourselves, go by our own experience in a particular way. And that is, we can know whether something is skillful and wholesome, and know whether it's not. We can know whether it's harmful and conducive to harm or not. And so we become our own teacher in this way. We develop the sensitivity, and part of the purpose of mindfulness practice is to develop that deeper capacity to see, to know for oneself, to sense this. That becomes a really reliable source of how to find our way: Is it skillful or unskillful? Is it wholesome or not wholesome? That's the substitute to going to scripture or just listening to a teacher for what is true.

We ourselves are the arbitrator. We ourselves are supposed to be able to have this ability. But to cultivate that ability takes time and practice. We must be very careful that we don't jump to conclusions in a surface kind of way of how we register things. As we become more deeply mindful, the stronger and stronger the mindfulness is, we become—in Western terms, in English terms—more ethical. As I said, the Buddha doesn't use the word ethics, but he does make a very clear connection and equivalence between the development of mindfulness and becoming a more ethical person, a person who does more and more wholesome things and is less and less likely to do things which are unwholesome.

And how do we know something is wholesome or unwholesome? We can know it for ourselves. We really feel it, and we feel it in different ways. We feel it both in terms of how nourishing it is, how healthy it feels within, or how harmful it is. We feel it by how conducive it is to being onward leading. If it's wholesome, it's conducive, onward leading to greater wholesomeness. If it's unwholesome, it's conducive to greater harm and shutting down.

So we're finding our way here in this practice, and the greater the wholesomeness we develop, the further along we are on the path of liberation. If you're not so interested in liberation but coincidentally you become more ethical, or if you're interested in ethics and being ethical, then the more you can live a wholesome life and become more wholesome from the inside out, coincidentally you're also developing on the path of liberation.

So these two, liberation and ethics, come together in the heart. I like to think that when we come to bow and put our hands together like this, it's a beautiful expression of the coming together of the best in our hearts: the wholesomeness of our hearts, and the care for the world around us. Because ethics in English has a lot to do with the relationship of how we live our lives. How we live our lives and cultivating the path of practice come together and are really the same thing.

Thank you for today, and I'll continue this topic of skillfulness and wholesomeness tomorrow.