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Avoid All Evil, Do Good, Purify the Mind (1 of 3)

Well thank you everyone. Whenever I hear how far flung we are, when we get together, it makes me very happy we have this online ability to meet. I'm really glad you could all join in.

So this, of course, is the title of our course that we're beginning tonight, and the verse from the Dhammapada: to not do any evil, to cultivate good, to purify the mind. This is the teaching of the Buddhas. That's a translation.

I thought I would just walk you through the Pali a bit, just to kind of have a sense of what these words mean. I know I'm not a Pali scholar, but I really feel like I benefit from sometimes knowing what the words mean so that I can have a richer sense of what the Buddha is saying.

So that first line, sabba means 'all'. Pāpa is 'evil', 'bad', something like that. And akaraṇaṃ is 'to not do'. Kara is 'to do', then we put an 'a' on the front and it's 'not', 'to not do'.

Good things and bad things, this is interesting because the Buddha doesn't use that here, he uses pāpa for actual evil, or very bad maybe. And kusala, good or skillful things. Upasampadā is the word that's actually used for higher ordination for monks and nuns, but here it just means to acquire something or gain something, to obtain, and to take something up, like pick up. The cultivation or the acquiring of good qualities.

Sacittapariyodapanaṃ is one's own mind. Citta is a word many of you have heard, I'm sure. Sa is really 'one's own'. And then, of course, purification.

Etaṃ buddhāna sāsanaṃ is 'this is the teaching of the Buddhas'. Etaṃ is 'just this', 'this is'. It's not just the Buddha, but it's all the Buddhas. And sāsana here in the dictionary is 'teaching, order, doctrine'. The sāsana is really not just the teaching, but it's the whole body of teachings and it's the community practicing. So the buddhasāsana is really the teaching of the Buddha: what he experienced, what he understood, what he communicated, and kind of all of us practicing. There is a place in the suttas where it says that the sāsana of a previous Buddha was declining, and it just kind of means the whole thing is declining. So this is kind of part of why this particular verse has a depth of meaning. It's very core to the Buddhist teaching, to the teaching of all the Buddhas.

Of course, what we're going to focus on tonight is that first line: to not do any evil. Another way to think of that is to abandon what's unwholesome.

One way we can look at this is that everybody, until we're fully enlightened, is dealing with some amount of greed, hatred, and delusion. And so this is the encouragement to abandon those roots or recover from them. We could think of it as like having a serious illness. We can recover if we can start to identify what those unwholesome things are, and turn away from them, abandon them, and not act upon them. We can also think about how we do this: as we're doing it, interrupting unskillful conditioned habits or patterns. On a very practical level, it's to resist speaking and acting from those roots. And here I'm including fear, because the Buddha does in some places: greed, hatred, delusion, or fear. When you're acting from those states of mind, that's when we are falling into this unwholesome side of things.

So, of course, I'm sure you know the Five Precepts. This is the baseline avoiding doing unwholesome things: to refrain from taking the life of any living creature, to refrain from taking that which is not given, to refrain from sexual misconduct, to refrain from harmful speech, and to refrain from consuming alcohol and drugs that lead to carelessness.

Okay, so anybody have any questions or comments so far?

Questions on the Fifth Precept

Questioner: The question I've had about the fifth precept for a while is about refraining from consuming intoxicants which lead to carelessness. It feels like it can be interpreted in different ways. There's one school that's like, fully abstain from all intoxicants, or is it just intoxicants which lead to carelessness, which I would read as a threshold?

Ayya Santussika: Yeah, and it gets tricky because where's the threshold? Actually, one of the beautiful things about the way the Buddha stated these precepts is that it's really clear when we're keeping them or not. Before I answer your question, sometimes people will want to rewrite them in a positive sense, like 'being harmless' or something like that. But then you don't know at the end of the day if you've actually kept the precept or not, because how harmless should you be?

You know if you've intentionally killed somebody or something. You know if you've intentionally taken something that's not really meant for you—intention has a lot to do with it. That last one, yes, it can get a little bit unclear, but it gets clearer as we practice with it.

What the Buddha meant was avoiding intoxicating drink and drugs. Really, the precept says alcohol, either hard liquor or wine. Both of those are in the actual Pali. I think the translator of these precepts—the way we chant them or read them in English from our tradition—included drugs just because it has the same effect. When there's an effect on the mind that reduces our mindfulness, our clarity.

It is true that some people say, 'Well then it's okay to have a glass of wine with dinner because my clarity isn't affected by that.' But when you start to practice more deeply, you start to realize actually it does have an effect. It has an effect energetically too, in my experience.

So what I tell people is, if you want to have a little alcohol... like someone recently said, 'I want to have champagne with my family. The family is going to get together and celebrate something.' I said, 'Okay, so really pay attention to how it feels.' These precepts aren't commandments. It's really for training. It's also just to protect us, to help us. Particularly in that last one, which is different from the other four because it's not actually immoral to drink alcohol. It's immoral to oppress someone sexually, it's immoral to steal or kill. But there's a high likelihood that harm can come from intoxicating drink or drugs. Being careful to see what it does to the mind, and holding the purity of the mind higher than whatever kind of benefit or pleasure you might get from indulging in these things, this is what I would recommend.

The Ten Unwholesome Actions

Then the Buddha also expands the five into ten wholesome and unwholesome things, and this he talks about in literally hundreds of suttas. The first four are the first four precepts. But then he expands on the precept on speech, which is to not lie, to include divisive speech, harsh speech, and frivolous speech—gossip, talking nonsense. Those many of you will recognize are part of the definition of Right Speech in the Noble Eightfold Path, so he held this as incredibly important.

And then covetousness or longing (it's a kind of desire), ill will, and wrong view.

So there are three bodily actions: killing living beings, stealing, sexual misconduct. Four actions in speech: lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, and talking nonsense. And then three mental components here: longing, ill will, and wrong view.

Basically, engaging in these or being affected by these is the top ten unwholesome things. Avoiding them is the top ten wholesome.

Any questions? Yes, Terry.

Questions on Wrong View

Terry: Can you please expand upon Wrong View?

Ayya Santussika: Oh yes, that is a really big topic. There are so many aspects to it that it could take up a lot. But basically, having an understanding of Dhamma, of the way things are, to a degree. Ultimately we don't have complete Right View, complete understanding, until we're arahants.

But the places where we make huge errors in Wrong View are to think it doesn't matter if I do things that hurt people or hurt myself. 'It doesn't matter if I do good things or not.' Having a view that's really off. The Buddha would include in mundane Wrong View thinking that there's a self, and there's a self that continues eternally, or there's a self that gets annihilated. Or to think that there's no rebirth, for example, is another Wrong View.

So these are some things, but the supermundane—or where Right View gets clearer—is when we fully understand the Four Noble Truths. Until that time, we're caught up in craving sensual pleasures, and we think that that's the right thing to go after in life. That's part of Wrong View.

Would you add anything to that, Sister? I've got my bhikkhuni^[1] sister here.

Bhikkhuni: [Inaudible] ...the Four Noble Truths... taking things up...

Ayya Santussika: Oh, this is a very good point. If you look at what's called the vipallāsa^[2], the ways in which we think something is beautiful that's actually ugly, or the other way around. The ways in which we think something is pleasant when actually it's painful. The ways in which we think it's happiness, but it's actually suffering. And the ways in which we think something is self when it's actually non-self. Those four are some strong areas of delusion, and it can be related to Right View and Wrong View.

Questions on Speech and Exaggeration

Lena: Thank you. I have a couple of questions. I should think that maybe it's the intention which matters, because otherwise we tend to be kind of very preoccupied by assessing everything as to whether what we're doing is actually fitting the category, and that actually leads to more papañca^[3] and more suffering for you. So I always thought if your intention is kind and compassionate and right, that's fine. What is the role of white lies and the role of exaggeration? Sometimes you talk and you exaggerate it without even knowing it, and by the time it's over, you realize, 'Oh Lord, that's not 100% true.' You try to explain it to a stranger and it doesn't really make sense because it's such a little thing. But then I realize, 'Oh Lord, that wasn't exactly true. I haven't really broken my shoulder, it was just a muscle tear.' Without getting dragged too much into it, how do we avoid white lies and exaggeration? Does it really count towards bad karma?

Ayya Santussika: Of course there's varying degrees of result from all of these different things depending on the severity. If you kill a spider, it's not good, but if you kill a human being intentionally, it's much worse. We can tell this from how bad it feels, how much effort it would take, and all kinds of things that go into the difference.

Sometimes when we're speaking, we might say something that's inaccurate. If we're intending to deceive someone, that's worse than if it just kind of happens because we're not being careful. But as we develop the mind, we start to pay more attention. Our feeling of it is something that can really give us a sense of whether this matters or not.

The more we practice meditation and all the other aspects of the Noble Eightfold Path, the more we recognize, 'You know, I don't want to be loose and frivolous with my speech. I want to be mindful.' But I hear what you're saying about there's no point in explaining it to someone else a lot of times. It's what we know for ourselves. If I'm exaggerating, I can look at, 'Well, why do I want to make this into more than it is?' It helps me understand better about my own mind, what I might be afraid of or clinging to, or trying to cover up or change.

Something I'm going to recommend as we go further is that it's really helpful to stop ourselves, even in mid-sentence, if we feel like, 'No, that's not quite right,' and then rephrase it to be as accurate as we can. Not in an obsessive way, but this should all bring us more relief, stability, groundedness, and confidence. What comes from this is a kind of confidence and a fearlessness, so that we're really living a blameless life. This blamelessness is something that we can enjoy, to feel happy about in ourselves and in our life.

Questions on Extreme Situations

Lena: Thanks for that, Ayya. Could I just follow that up with a second question? Suppose you have to tell a lie to save somebody's life, or you have to kill rats because there's a plague and hundreds of millions of people are being killed. Again, intention is good here because you're trying to save lives. What is your take on that?

Ayya Santussika: A lot can be done by putting our effort into a solution that isn't lying or killing. People come up with these extreme examples of, you know, how often does anyone actually find themselves in a situation where lying is going to save somebody's life? That's not usually what's going on. Learning how to practice speaking the truth will also help us, even in extreme situations, be more creative around how to be truthful without being harmful. Most of the time, truthfulness and harmlessness go together.

We have to go pretty far to think of ways in which it doesn't, especially if we're really able to let go of our own desires. We just had a situation here where we're being gifted with a statue for outdoors. It's a rather large, 400-pound statue, and we're trying to come up with a way of having it on a table or some kind of platform outside. We have this huge stump that's beautiful, old-growth redwood, that we thought maybe we could just use as a natural, beautiful stand for this statue.

Then we discovered there's a yellow jacket nest at the bottom of it, and we would have to get rid of the yellow jackets in order to do this. We've talked to different people, and there's no real way to do it without killing them. So our response is, 'Okay, we've got to come up with a different solution. We're not going to kill them, and we're not going to use that idea.'

Any other comments or questions? These are all really important issues to investigate. Everybody has different areas that become more prominent in our own life and our own conditioning, so it's very useful to investigate these further and see how it feels, especially as we become more sensitive to the purity of the mind.

There's this little sutta in the Numerical Discourses, the Anguttara Nikaya^[4], where the Buddha is giving us some encouragement:

"Mendicants (this is the monks and nuns, but it's also for all of us practitioners), give up the unskillful. It is possible to give up the unskillful. If it wasn't possible, I wouldn't say give up the unskillful. But it is possible, so I say that. And if giving up the unskillful led to harm and suffering, I would not say give up the unskillful. But giving up the unskillful leads to welfare and happiness. So I say, give up the unskillful."

Ah, yes, I can talk about hope. We've got a few comments coming up. We definitely need to use wisdom and compassion. In fact, there's a monk that we visit in Thailand named Ajahn Ganha^[5], who is amazing, and he often says, 'Wisdom solves the problem.' Wisdom and compassion have to go together.

What about using pesticides in pandemics? Again, there are some difficult situations sometimes that need to be evaluated, and it depends sometimes on where you're at with things. We want to have purity of the mind, which we'll talk about more in the coming months.

Frivolous Speech and The Actor Sutta

Talking nonsense or frivolously is something that's very important to look at. I used to think, 'How did that get into the top ten unwholesome things?' But there's a sutta in the Samyutta Nikaya^[6], the Linked Discourses. An actor comes to the Buddha, he's the head of an acting troupe, and he says:

"I've heard from the actors of old that if you are on stage and you're entertaining people with truths and lies, and you're making them laugh, and if you die doing that, then you'll go to the heaven of the laughing devas. Is that true?"

The Buddha says, "Don't ask me that question. I don't want to answer that question." And he keeps pressuring the Buddha. The second time, and then the third time, the Buddha says, "Well, I'm not getting through to you obviously about this, but since you won't let it alone, I'm going to tell you: no, you don't go to the heaven of the laughing devas, you go to the hell of laughter."

It's because when people have greed, hatred, and delusion in their minds, you're stirring up more greed, hatred, and delusion. And it's very, very serious to do that.

So the actor breaks out in tears. The Buddha says, "Look, I said I didn't want to tell you this." And he replies, "I'm not upset because you told me. I'm upset because of being deceived by the actors of old."

Well, that actor becomes a monk later. He writes one of the most fun poems in the Theragatha^[7] that there is! He definitely got it.

So what is frivolous speech? It's speech that's going to bring up more greed, or more hatred, or more delusion. And of course we do that a lot, and we listen to a lot of it. It doesn't mean that we turn away from the world entirely, because it's good to know what's going on. But when it gets to a point where the conversation is just stirring up defilements and perpetuating Wrong View or delusion, then it's good to stop, and try to find something that's valuable to say. Maybe that comes from a place of real kindness, compassion, and wisdom.

Question on Pornography

There's a question about pornography being a violation of the third precept, and I would say it is.

The fifth precept is about intoxicants like alcohol. It's not about coffee or other kinds of things that are intoxicating, but those other kinds of things that are intoxicating also need to be considered. Again, are we developing more greed, hatred, or delusion? Are we kicking up more lust? I have seen the progression in some people from pornography to inappropriate behavior, especially with children. It does have an effect on the mind, so one has to be very careful.

Really, the practice is about understanding our own mind and working with feeling. So if we want a certain kind of feeling, why? What kind of gratification are we really getting from that? What are we running away from in our own mind, in our own experience? These are the things we need to look at. Are we caught up in the sensual experience of life or not? The Buddha will tell you that's a real problem. So it's important to really look at.

Reflections and Breakout Groups

Now, questions and reflections. This is where I'm going to invite you to break into small groups for a bit.

[Breakout sessions]

Well, I hope you had a productive time there, whether you were meditating or you were talking with people. Any questions now at this point, or sharing that you'd like to do based on what you've been reflecting on?

Questioner: I was with Marilyn and Johnny, and I'm new to meditation. They clarified this for me because I was confused about where the Five Precepts fell in the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. If you could clarify that, because when I was reading the Dhammapada, I thought that passage 183 was the Five Precepts, but then when you started talking about not killing, not stealing, sexual misconduct, I thought, 'Oh, that's in the other reading of the Near and Far Shore.' If you could clarify that, it would be great.

Ayya Santussika: Sure. The Buddha talked about these things in many different ways in different places as they appear in the suttas. In the Noble Eightfold Path, you see them as Right Action. Right Action is basically the first three precepts: not killing, not stealing, not engaging in sexual misconduct. Right Speech is not lying, which is in the Five Precepts, but it's also those other three aspects of speech that we see in the list of ten unwholesome things. And then there's also Right Livelihood in the Noble Eightfold Path. So all of those comprise virtue.

But the Five Precepts are really listed as a basic set of standards that appears in various places. Like I said, a lot of times you just see the first four and you don't see the last one somewhere, but they're considered really the baseline of decent human behavior, refraining from really causing a lot of trouble in our life.

I hope that answers your question. There's not an exact match everywhere. You see the Buddha talking about this in different ways. It's connected in different ways to different structures that he provides to help us understand the Dhamma.

Homework: Reflecting on Behavior

We've talked about the Five Precepts and about frivolous or nonsensical speech. I think it's really useful to look at what kinds of influences cause you to move in the direction of what's unskillful.

Also, to really reflect on the things that have changed in your life in a good way. The Buddha really emphasizes reflecting back on what we're doing. At the end of the day, reflecting back: "I didn't intentionally kill any living beings. I didn't intentionally take anything that wasn't given," etc. Really encourage ourselves with all of the things that we do that are good, and all of the ways in which we avoid unskillful behavior.

So this is your homework for the month. First, bringing mindfulness to how it feels. I'll just tell you a quick story. A monk that I know was living in a Chinese monastery. Any of you who come to my teachings, you might have heard me tell this story before. He's an American and he was living and training in a Chinese monastery. He had started having real craving for blueberry pie. A nice Midwestern boy wanted some blueberry pie, probably tired of Chinese food!

One day, someone gave him a blueberry pie. As some of you may know, we're not allowed to eat after midday, and they gave it to him after midday. He really wanted it, so he thought, "Where can I go where no one will see me, so I can eat the blueberry pie?"

He thinks, "I know, I'll go up on the roof because there's a flat roof and nobody will be up there, and I could eat the pie by myself and no one will know." So he takes his pie and he goes up to the roof.

The Grand Master, the abbot of the monastery, is walking back and forth doing walking meditation up there. So he quickly puts the pie behind his back, and he goes behind the master and starts walking behind him. At one point, the master turns around and says, "How does it feel?"

This is a good thing to consider. Whatever we're doing, how does it feel? This is a very good way to help ourselves.

As I mentioned earlier, when we catch ourselves in a pattern that's unskillful, or maybe speaking in a way that isn't really the way we want to be speaking, we can stop ourselves and backtrack and do it over.

The Dressage Method and AFL

I call it the "dressage method" because this is what I've seen when people are jumping horses on a course and the horse balks at the jump. Instead of just walking off the field because they've already lost the race, they come around and jump the jump, and finish the course. Take all the jumps leisurely.

I started doing that with myself. If I stop in the middle, back up, redo it. Say what I want to say over again. Or even if it's after the fact, go through it mentally. Look back, "Okay, I want to do that differently next time." Really follow it through in my mind and do it differently, and train my mind in a new pattern.

When we're looking at our virtue and we're trying to improve it, it's very easy to become hard on ourselves. So we want to really use Ajahn Brahm's^[8] AFL method: Acknowledge, Forgive, and Learn.

It's true for ourselves, and it's true when we're engaging with others. Whatever happens, we acknowledge it—it's not like we cover it up or shove it under the rug. Forgive, go on, and learn from it. This is the important thing. This is about progress. Practice a lot of kindness and compassion for yourself and for others. That's your assignment.

If you have questions, you can write to me at info@karunabv.org, and you can always check out that email address on our website for Karuna Buddhist Vihara.

Alright everyone, time to say good night. I hope you rest well, and I hope you have a beautiful month of practice. I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you.