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Wise Speech (1 of 5) Is it True?

Monday morning, and we start a new theme for these next five days. The theme has to do with speaking—mindfulness of speaking, to pay attention, to use five criteria the Buddha gave for how to consider what to say, or how to say it, or when to speak.

The idea of talking about this is that it's really an extension of ideally what we begin to experience in meditation. Meditation is a vehicle or means to begin experiencing ourselves without being in conflict with anything. The experience in the moment, at least of meditation, of really releasing our resistance, our guardedness, the way we brace ourselves in our life. Or releasing ourselves from the push and the drive of desire, wanting, having, and getting, releasing fear as it exists in us, to begin to experience ourselves in some more peaceful, easeful way.

And that experience of more calm or ease, more intimacy with ourselves in meditation, is not meant to be only for meditation. It's really how we want to live our lives. We don't necessarily want to live bracing ourselves against life, being afraid, being caught in the grip of desires and craving. We want to be able to live our lives with ease, with a degree of freedom—at least that's the Buddhist idea. And if we begin to taste this in meditation to some degree, then we have a foundation, we have a reference point for what that might be like to do that in daily life as well.

So we want to go into our life and begin exploring how we lose that ease and how we might find it in daily life. One of the more significant places where this whole endeavor can be explored is in speech. There's a Tibetan Buddhist saying that says, "When in meditation, watch your mind; when in public, watch your speech." And that's partly because speech—what we say, how we say it—is really a window to understand what motivates us, what's the background within us for what we're going to say.

It isn't that you watch your speech because it's the ethical thing to do; we can really watch what we want to say and how we say it so that we can begin exploring: How do I get stressed? How do I get caught? How do I lose my freedom? Because a lot of our social interactions happen through speech, and if we want to find how to be free socially, speech is a fantastic place to bring mindfulness and study what's going on for us.

Speech is also an ethical place in the sense that our interactions with a wide range of people, real interactions, often happen through speech—through what we say, through what we write, or what we sign (if we communicate with our hands and fingers). If we want to have a beneficial effect on others, if we want to not cause harm, being careful with our speech, being mindful of it, is also very important.

Watching speech is important for the inner life, and watching speech is important for the outer life. The wonderful mutuality, or coincidence, is that the same care in not harming ourselves through speech involves the same care in not harming others. The two go together: we harm ourselves when we speak inappropriately, and we harm others when we speak inappropriately. So we care for both in watching our speech.

There are five criteria that the Buddha gave for how to study our speech: what to look at, what to look for, and what to guide us in speaking. Each of these five days, I'll talk about these five. For today, I want to talk about the first one, which is to speak the truth.

The idea is we can ask ourselves: is what we're about to say true? And if it's not true, then perhaps we shouldn't say it. Or if it is true, then the other criteria come into play to help us know, even if it's the truth, should we say it? Because not all truth should be spoken; some truth is actually hurtful for people and causes a lot of harm. But we begin with the question of truth.

Now, this is a little bit interesting because this is a guideline for speaking—to use the reference point of truth. In the five ethical precepts^[1] that Buddhism has, the precept around Right Speech is not a dedication to truth, but a dedication to not lying, to not speaking false words. There's an important distinction, I think, between these two. False speech is speech which is intentionally misleading. We're intentionally trying to say something that is not true, that is going to mislead someone about what's actually happening, what's actually going on. That's the precept.

It's easier to notice when we're intentionally, consciously going to mislead someone, when we're going to speak untruths, manipulate the situation, or something like that, than it is to recognize what is true. So the precepts have a clear standard, a clear idea of what we're actually doing intentionally that causes harm—consciously misleading people in a way that they would later feel manipulated, hurt, fooled, tricked, or even betrayed. That is often a much more serious complication for our social interactions, where people can't trust us because we're clearly misleading them.

The dedication to be true, to speak the truth, is more complicated because it's not always clear what the truth is. Different people have different philosophies of what it is that we call the truth. Some people talk about, especially these days, "I'm going to speak my truth," as if "my truth" is the truth. Sometimes what it is, is an interpretation. Sometimes it's a statement of fact based on strong, deep preferences we have. To call a statement "my truth" when it's an interpretation—my preferred interpretation, my preferred policy, my preferred pursuit—is not quite accurate for what the Buddha talked about as being true.

When he talked about not lying, not misleading, not speaking false statements, the reference point example he uses for that is—in our times, it would be considered a court of law—that we would not misspeak, not say things which are false in a court of law because of the huge impact it's going to have. There, the idea of what's false and what's not false doesn't often fall into philosophical questions about what is true and not true.

But when we start making statements about reality, about life, then oftentimes it's more complicated. What is actually true? How do we know what's true? Here's where the Buddha makes some very interesting ideas about truth. One is he has this wonderful teaching called "preserving the truth" or "safeguarding the truth". If you dedicate yourself to the truth, how do you safeguard it? He says you safeguard it by stating to people the basis upon which you make a propositional statement. The basis means the ground, the reason, or where it comes from that you have this point of view.

For example, if we believe something is true, but it's an article of faith, then we would preface our statement: "I believe X," or "It is my faith that X is true." Now, that is a true statement because you're saying, "This is my belief." We don't know if X is true or false, but we do know that you can reliably say, "This is my belief, this is my faith." For the Buddha, you preserve the truth that way. You're allowed to say what you believe, but to preserve the truth so other people have a clearer sense of what's going on and can responsibly respond to you, understand you, cooperate with you, and communicate effectively with you, you say, "It's my faith that this is true," as opposed to making a declarative statement, "X is so." When you make a declarative statement, there's no room for conversation; it's hard for people to be in dialogue. Sometimes declarative statements are even statements of aggression. But to say, "It's my faith" or "This is my assumption"—that's what we call the basis for what we believe or what we're going to say.

The Buddha gave five criteria for how to safeguard the truth, the five bases for making statements. It's possible these five have to do with more spiritual or philosophical truths rather than the kind of truths in everyday life. The first two, Bhikkhu Bodhi^[2] says, are more emotive, emotional. One is based on faith, and the other is based on our simple gut approval. It just feels right. We just approve of it because we think it's right. There's no reflection, no analysis of the situation, but we might say, "It's my assumption this is true," or "I approve that this is the case." Again, you safeguard the truth by saying, "It comes out of me, this is what I approve of. I haven't thought about it, I haven't reflected on it and analyzed it, but this is what I take my stand on because I believe in this." Then there's more room; it's not a declarative statement that is hard to be in conversation with.

The next one is reasoning based on analogy or reasoning based on anecdotes. I think that we have an epidemic of anecdotal claims of truth—meaning that there's one instance, one example of something happening, and then that becomes the proof that something is true. But if you say, "I've come to the conclusion based on this one example," then that's closer to being a truth statement, as opposed to saying, "This is true." There's a humility to our statements of truth. There's a willingness to not make declarative statements of authority—"This is true"—but rather, "Based on X, based on this anecdote or this analogy, I take this to be true."

The fourth one for safeguarding the truth is using logic to rationally work something out. So you could say, "My logic tells me that this is true." If you say it that way, then people can participate in the logic, or you can lay out the logic for other people, and they can participate in coming to that conclusion. But again, if you just make a declarative statement, they can't participate, they can't figure out what's going on.

And then the fifth one is based in the ancient language, when there was no written text. The literal expression is oral tradition. Based on tradition, I guess we could say, "This is what I've been told. This is what my religion believes, the tradition of my elders, this is what my culture believes. This is a traditional thing to believe." If you say it that way, there's a context for people understanding where this belief comes from, as opposed to a declarative statement.

In giving this teaching, someone asked, "Well, how do we discover the truth?" For that, the Buddha talked about how we discover it through our body—he literally uses the word "body" here—and we witness it through our body. What that is shorthand for is the truth that he's pointing to—not all truth, but the really true spiritual truth that he's looking for—is discovered through our direct experience. To be able to know and say, "Through my direct experience, this is what I know," also safeguards the truth. Direct experience is a particular reference point for understanding what's going on.

This care around truth, this care about the statements we make, is very important in our current world and society. There's a lot of willingness to spout opinions and make declarative statements that don't really allow for harmony, communication, or real dialogue. To be careful and speak about—first, don't mislead, don't speak falsehoods, ask yourself, "Is this true?" But then, more importantly, ask yourself, "On what basis do I believe this to be true?" And then share that basis with others. This is a way of safeguarding the truth.

Thank you for today, and I look forward to our exploration of this topic.