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Pāramīs (2 of 10) Virtuous Behavior

So today I'll continue with the topic of the pāramīs^[1]. For the second talk, the pāramī is sīla^[2], and sometimes sīla is translated as ethics or virtue, which is often instructive, inspiring, and meaningful to live with. But it also has a different meaning that is closer, I think, to the original, that is also relevant for the purposes of developing and growing with the pāramīs.

The pāramīs are these ten qualities of character that can be developed. The heart, the mind, character can be developed just like a muscle at a gym, and acting on the impulses for virtue develops the virtues, develops our capacity, our strength, our wisdom about how to live from these virtues and these qualities.

In places like Burma and Thailand, if a meditator runs into difficulties in meditation that are pretty big obstacles, especially on retreat, it's not uncommon for a teacher to think that that person really needs to develop a particular pāramī, a particular of these ten perfections, or maybe all of them, in order to have the foundation for meditation practice.

And so, the pāramīs are often seen as qualities that we develop in daily life. Some people actually choose different ones because they feel they're short on it, or they'd benefit from having it more, and really work on it. They make it a theme for a week, a month, a year to really develop and become wise about this particular capacity.

So they're a useful guide for practicing in daily life. It's more than just daily life practice. It's more than just showing up and being mindful, being aware in an open and clear way to what's happening in the present moment. But it's also how we show up for it, how we respond to it, and we can also respond through that present moment awareness with these pāramīs.

So yesterday the theme was generosity, and today the theme is sīla. The Pali word, as I said, often means ethics because sīla by itself basically means conduct or behavior. And in the context of talking about it in terms of Buddhist practice, it's the conduct that is virtuous or ethical. But Buddhism doesn't really use the words virtue and ethical; those are Western words. And so they might be complicating the discussion more than it needs to.

At its essence, what sīla is, is conduct, behavior that does not cause harm.

So in meditation, we're learning how to not cause harm to ourselves. The whole path of meditation can be described as deeper and deeper, fuller, more complete ways in which we're not causing harm. And it's a process. It's only with full enlightenment that a person really comes to the stage where there's absolutely zero inclinations, tendencies, activities of mind and heart that could be said to cause any self-harm. To be liberated from that.

So we sometimes will talk about being liberated from suffering, but the suffering we're liberated from is the suffering that somehow our mind and heart are generating. But then there's what we do in the world, and we want to live in a way that causes no harm for others, no intentional conscious efforts to cause harm to anyone.

And so that is sīla, that conduct. This generosity and this ethical conduct come early in the pāramīs because they're the ones that involve behavior, and we sometimes have much more of a choice about how we physically behave in the world than we do what thoughts we have, what feelings we have, what impulses arise more deeply. For example, the highest pāramī is equanimity. We might have less control about just simply deciding, "I'm going to be equanimous now." But even if you don't feel like giving something to someone, it's possible to give. It's not quite generosity yet, but it's a physical behavior that you can give.

Same thing with conduct. We have some control over it. It's obvious, we can see what our conduct is. We see what we do with our speech, with our hands. And sometimes we have at least in principle more agency with what we do with our body and what we do with our mouth in relationship to whether we're causing harm or not.

And so one of the important parts of sīla, of conduct, that's kind of like baseline—it's kind of like this is the bottom line that we really want to understand, that we don't go below this line—and that is the practice of restraint, that we don't do things that cause harm.

And in particular, for laypeople, it's the five precepts. Those are precepts of restraint. Some people complain that it's just not doing something; it's kind of a negative teaching idea, and life should be more positive, coming from beautiful qualities. We don't want to be only restricted and not do something, and that's true for sure. But we should remember what the baseline, the foundation is, and that we start there. Then from there we go further, and then we can develop these beautiful pāramīs, and compassion, and generosity, and other things.

But the bottom line is not causing harm in these five areas: through killing people or physically harming people, through stealing from people, through harming people through our sexuality, through lying or false speech, and from harming ourselves. The fifth precept is a little bit more variable in how we understand it. Here, it has a lot to do with self-harm, but it's said that all the other precepts—the first four precepts—are more likely to be violated, broken, if a person is intoxicated. So it's a way of taking care of others and being safe for others, to make it less likely that we're going to say and do things which we later regret, or which cause harm.

And so this bottom line is simply dedicating ourselves to not being a person who physically or verbally causes harm. That's the dedication of sīla. And if you're already good at that, there's no question, you're very straightforward, clearly absolutely someone who already causes no harm for anyone, then you are said to be a person endowed with sīla, possessed with this virtuous conduct. Then you don't have to listen too much to these kinds of teachings or think much more about sīla.

But if in meditation practice we're learning to notice the subtleties of what we do and the subtle movements of the mind, where there are ways in which we cause stress, tension, contraction, subtle forms of hurt, subtle forms of pain and distress. These are things that maybe we put up with and don't even notice in daily life; it just seems like normal life. We're distracted with what we're doing. In meditation, as we get quieter, we see these more and more subtle ways in which we enact dukkha^[3], stress. And we learn to let go of it and quiet the mind, or quiet those stressful activities.

But that sensitivity to the subtlety translates into daily life, to be aware of the subtleties in which we transmit hurt or we cause hurt. The subtlest ways in which we do this through our speech—especially through our speech for many of us—but also through our actions.

We interrupt people. Someone else is trying to go to a line at the same time as you, and then you go a little bit faster to cut them off. Is that really causing harm? Maybe, maybe not, but subtly, it might be. Maybe it's a very subtle disrespect, or maybe insisting that one should have one's own way because one should be free to do what one wants, not noticing that someone else then becomes afraid or distressed, and how uncomfortable they feel.

And it's a pity when we have the opportunity to not make them uncomfortable. People who have very good reason to be very, very concerned about the coronavirus—they have immune deficiency, they have all kinds of issues—they get frightened when they see someone who doesn't wear a mask. And do we just blow off their fear? Do we say, "My ability to do whatever I want and not wear a mask has priority"? We can make that policy, we can have that kind of politics, but if we're really attentive inside, we can feel how that attitude probably causes some kind of self-contraction. And also, we're concerned about the subtleties, and how we may cause other people to be afraid or contribute to that fear.

It isn't necessarily that we have a moral obligation not to make people afraid, but as we practice more and more deeply, there's a greater sensitivity to what this means—harm and not causing harm. It becomes more and more a natural tendency to be careful and sensitive, aware. And we discover that it's actually greater ease in the world not to do anything that asserts ourselves in a way that causes harm to others.

In fact, more often than not, if we assert ourselves in a way that's harmful or stressful for others, chances are we're also harming ourselves. I don't want to say that as a declarative statement, but I say it so that maybe as you meditate and discover this greater sensitivity to what's here, you become more sensitive to how asserting yourself over someone else—whether it's your opinion or other things—sometimes that is a kind of self-harm.

It isn't always self-harm; if other people are harming us, asserting ourselves is not a form of self-harm. But this deeper, deeper sensitivity to where the harm is, where the harm is not, and learning how to be careful with that—that has to do with sīla. And as a minimum, as I've said, it's the five precepts. That's considered the heart of sīla.

In terms of the pāramīs, there's no obligation to cultivate the pāramīs, but these are really held up as qualities that are amazingly supportive for the process of liberation. In fact, not only are they supportive for that process, they're also supportive for the process of compassion. If what we're interested in is a life dedicated to liberation for self and others, a life dedicated to compassion for self and others, these pāramīs are both the support for that and an expression of that. It's beautiful the way in which both support and expression are the same thing; it makes it seamless and beautiful to cultivate these things.

And so, if—and this is a big if, so this is not a "you should"—but as we delve into our intention for what we want our life to be about, the fundamental purpose or intention or motivation upon which we live our life, if that is liberation from suffering, liberation from harm, and compassion... The caring for suffering, caring for the way people get harmed, and trying to ameliorate and end that—those are beautiful motivations. In Buddhist terms, that's kind of the most important purpose of human life: to live for those two things. So if that's the purpose, that's what the pāramīs are for. That's what the pāramīs support and that's what they allow us to express.

So for the next 24 hours, until we do the next pāramī, I'd encourage you to really consider sīla, virtuous conduct. The conduct that doesn't cause harm for self and others. Maybe talk to friends about it. Reflect on it. Practice it the best you can. See what it's like to really live with this in the forefront. Write it on a piece of paper and carry it with you to remind you, or put a sticky note someplace, and maybe read about it, or listen to dharma talks about it during this next period.

The reason to encourage you to do that is that it's good for its own sake. But it's also that these pāramīs, as I said yesterday, are a journey—an unfolding that builds over time, one after the other. And so, if you spend 24 hours living with each one as we talk, maybe you'll start feeling the momentum and the growth, and the way they flow from one to the other. By the time we get to equanimity, equanimity will really have much more meaning for you.

So thank you very much. It would be an inspiring thing—if there are currently over 500 people listening to this—if there were 500 people today who we knew were going to live a greater life, a more thorough life of non-harming, what a great thing to celebrate and appreciate.

So I thank you all very much.