This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Liberating Speech: Uniting Those Who are Divided

What's on my mind for today's talk is to discuss particular teachings of the Buddha. It has to do with avoiding divisive speech and rather speaking words that unite those who are divided. To introduce this topic, there is one very important sutta^[1] where the Buddha talks about the truth. At some point in the text, he says that if you go looking for a Buddhist teacher, you should check the person out in three ways. You should see if what they say, what they do, or even what they think expresses any of these three qualities: greed, hatred, and delusion^[2]. The reason you want to check them out is that with the presence of greed, hatred, and delusion, people might not say what's true. They might say something different than what they know. But when they're free of these fires of greed, hate, and delusion, then you can know that they'll say what's true, or they're not going to be motivated to say what's not true. When you listen to Buddhist teachings, you're really trying to get to the truth and be with the truth.

This points to the idea that when someone has become mature in Buddhist practice, how they act is important, certainly important for others. How we act is so important that I'd like to say there are two major steps in the conclusion of Buddhist practice. There is having insight, and then there's acting on that insight. There is having deep, transformative insight, and then acting from the way we've been transformed. Becoming spiritually mature, having some fruit of this practice that's deeply satisfying and freeing, isn't some kind of spiritual retirement where we can just sit on our couch and look out the window. Acting is important. The actions we do and how we live our lives are important.

So there are two things: there's seeing and there's acting. That is true all along in Buddhist practice. Whenever we learn to see ourselves in a new way, see the world in a new way, and discover ourselves in new capacities that are more healthy, more wholesome, more freeing, and more authentic, then the task is to express that and to live that in our lives.

One of the most important places for many of us, where we act in the world and where it makes a difference—where we can be the medicine for the world or we can be the illness for the world—has to do with our speech. I suspect that most of the people who come and do Buddhist practice are not involved with killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct, causing harm. But the area of speech is something we do all the time, all day long. Many of us are talking plenty of times, plenty enough. And if not to other people, to ourselves. That is the action where most of us could spend more time looking and being careful with what we do. It is one of the hardest places to really bring a lot of mindfulness to, because often in speaking, we're absorbed or caught up in what we're talking about, making it hard to really see what's going on in a deeper way.

But the Buddha talks about four different ways in which we can speak well, or speak out of the practice. This idea of speaking out of the practice is such an important one. As we settle, become more connected to ourselves, more self-aware, and touch into places of freedom—places where we're not caught by our thoughts, our feelings, our motivations, our desires, and our aversions, where we get a felt sense of some deeper, freer, calmer, and more peaceful place to be from—then we want to be able to live from that place. If you're living from that place in relationship to speech, the Buddha said there are four skillful or wholesome ways of speaking.

These are: to speak the truth; to speak that which unites those that are divided and avoid divisive speech; to speak pleasing, gentle, kind speech—the things that people want to hear and remember—as opposed to harsh or malicious speech; and to speak that which is good, useful, and true, as opposed to speaking that which is frivolous and chaff. The word the Buddha used for this fourth one was a compound word. The first part was frivolous, and the other part was palāla^[3], which literally means the chaff of the grain. The essence of the grain is the seed; that's where the life and the potential are. The chaff at one point was protecting the seed, but at some point, the chaff is no longer needed and is not so important. You want to speak the seeds, the essence of things, what's useful, not what is useless. So, avoiding frivolous or useless speech.

I will talk a bit more about each of these, but I really want to focus on speech that unites and connects those who are divided.

Safeguarding the Truth

First, to speak what's true. There is no Buddhism, no Buddhist practice, without it being a truth-discovering process. This text that I referred to at the beginning, about checking out a Buddhist teacher to see if they are free of greed, hatred, and delusion, is called the Caṅkī Sutta^[4], number 95 in the Middle Length Discourses. It is one of my favorite texts in the suttas, and it contains this idea of safeguarding the truth.

To be brief and not tell you the whole story, a person comes to the Buddha and asks, "How can you know what's true?" The Buddha asks him how he knows what is true, and the person says, "It's true because I have faith in it, or because it's been told to me by my tradition." The Buddha then points out five things that sometimes turn out to be true, and sometimes turn out not to be true. Those are the things we take on faith. Let me see if I can remember them all. They are: things that we take on faith; on our approval, because we approve of it without any more reason than liking it; because it's the tradition, what people have believed for a long time, what my people or my religion believes; by reasoned analogy—and in the modern world, this is when you have just one example of something, anecdotal evidence (thank you, Olivia!), and based on that one situation you generalize and believe everything is true because of that; and lastly, reasoned reflection, where we think about things and accept them because we think our reasoning is accurate.

Whether you remember those isn't as important. But then the Buddha says if you want to safeguard the truth, you don't avoid those five ways of knowing. What you do is state clearly the basis upon which you say something, what the authority or basis is for your statement. When you safeguard the truth, you're not necessarily avoiding those sources of understanding, but you clearly explain to people where you're getting your understanding. If you have it on your own faith that this is so, you say, "I have faith that this is so." If it is based on just what you like, you say, "This understanding is based on my liking; this is what I approve of, and there's no other basis for approving it than that I approve of it." Or it's the tradition: "I read it in a book," or "This is what my elders said," or "This is what my religion says. I don't know if it's true, but this is the basis for it."

The idea^[5] of explaining to people how I know something is very freeing. One of the illnesses of our society is the use of declarative statements, like "This is true." It's phenomenal the degree to which people are opinionated these days and base their statements on very little solid evidence, simply having a belief because they like it. There is a kind of authority that can come in a simple declarative statement that some people want to gather around and believe, feeling like they're right and justified. But there's never any questioning: where did that belief come from? On what basis do we hold that as being true? "Oh, because my friend told me," or "Because I heard it in an opinion piece on the news."

The Buddha said to safeguard the truth by stating the basis upon which you know something. That would change our society dramatically if we had that kind of care. Then other people can participate with us more clearly. We can be in dialogue with people in a wiser way. If we don't make declarative statements saying "this is true," but instead say, "On the basis of this news report, this is what I understand," or "I have this piece of evidence, and based on that evidence, this is the conclusion I've come to through my reasoning," then people can be in conversation with us. It's easier for all of us to find our way to greater truth and better understanding.

Someone in the sutta then asked the Buddha, "Well, how can we discover the truth?" The Buddha goes on to say that you have to practice. You have to develop a higher degree of mindfulness to see more clearly, in a deep way, what is true. In this case, the Buddha is actually pointing towards the truth of personal liberation, not necessarily the truth of what's happening in the world and politics. But the Buddha emphasizes that someone who is spiritually mature speaks the truth.

There's a wonderful reciprocity that goes on: if you are spiritually mature, you can measure that by how truthful you are. If you notice you're not being truthful, that you're hedging the truth, that can be a time to wake up and say, "Oh, here is someplace for me to look at and practice with. This is worthy of my attention." Maybe in the moment or later, you can ask yourself, "What was going on for me? What honestly and truly was happening? Why did I feel like I had to lie here or not say the truth? What can I learn from this? How can I become a better person by learning from this?" It isn't just bad news to know that we're lying. It's actually the very material with which we can go further in our Buddhist practice, if that's what you want, or further in the movement towards freedom from greed, hate, and delusion. So, truth.

Healing Divisions

The second form of speech for someone who's spiritually mature is to be interested in healing the divisions between people, between friends, between families, and in society. That is the orientation. And that could be an orientation in all acts of speech. Is this way of speaking right now creating more distance or more connection? Is it creating more separation? Are people shutting down? Are they turning off? Are they stepping away? Or are we creating more connection here?

This comes from understanding the value of not having division, not having a wall between people, not having silence between people, and not having hostility between people. A lot of that understanding can come from recognizing how painful it is to live inside of ourselves if we're creating division between people, and how freeing it is to not have division, to not be part of that divisive world. Then it's easier for our mind, our hearts, our life, and our orientation to the world to be open, receptive, willing to step forward, kind, and supportive. As soon as there's divisiveness and we're living in that world of divisiveness, we're not really free. Even if the divisiveness mostly comes from the other person, it makes it difficult to be on the receiving end of that.

If we're being mindful, and if learning to be free is what we want to do, then at some point we start tuning into the impact our speech has. Is the speech we have creating separation, or creating connection? In this politicized world that we live in now, there are plenty of people who would rather be right than create harmony, unite people, or connect people. They'd rather criticize people righteously, point out how they're wrong, and try to use the hammer of their words to insist that they have to be different. "They're wrong, they're bad that way, they have to do something differently." Maybe in some ways, there might be a rightness to their point of view, but is there a different way of doing it? Is there a different way of participating in our world that doesn't attack people and doesn't make people wrong or bad, but rather enters in a very honest, clear, intentional way to make the world a better place, to engage in dialogue, to try to correct people if they understand things wrong? Can it be done without creating division? How can we do that so there's friendship and mutual support? People need to feel they can trust us, to feel that as we engage in the conversation, we have their best interests in mind. Even though we might feel they're wrong, we have their best interests in mind.

For many years, I served on ethics committees, working with ethical conflicts people had with each other. One of the approaches I had when in the middle of that was to try to consider what was best for each person involved. I wanted everyone who was involved to really feel that I was thinking of them, and that even if some really strong judgments needed to come down, everyone understood it was for the welfare of all involved, as opposed to being punitive.

This movement towards healing divisions in family and healing divisions in society is an expression of awakening.

Non-Malicious Speech

The third form of speech the Buddha emphasized is speech which is not malicious. This speech is not trying to cause harm, not trying to be hostile, goad people, irritate people, or exact revenge. This speech doesn't come out of hostility.

One of the reasons to avoid maliciousness is not just because it's the ethical thing to do, but rather because it is a way of harming ourselves as well. As soon as we're malicious in our speech, the maliciousness might be harming ourselves more than the person we're directing hostile words to. There's a kind of twisting, contracting, and wounding of our own self. If we pay really careful attention, we feel the alienation from what is most deep and good inside of us, the most satisfying inside of us. That's not easy to discover, because sometimes hostile speech does have a pleasure to it. It feels good to be right. It feels good to be doing something, to get revenge, or to feel effective because we think we're protecting ourselves or doing something important. If that's the momentum of the action and we're not really paying attention inside, we don't feel the impact it has on us personally.

We also probably don't pay much attention to the impact it has socially. Harsh speech can be effective in the short term, but it's not effective in the long term. It creates division, making people hostile towards us or afraid of us. It becomes more and more difficult to create friendly, harmonious, supportive, and mutually beneficial relationships in this world.

Meaningful Speech

The fourth kind of speech is avoiding useless speech and chaff, or frivolous speech. This takes some care to consider, because sometimes speech that seems very trivial and useless in and of itself does have a use when it creates a sense of connection or rapport with people. Talking about the weather doesn't do me any good or the other person any good, but it's a way of creating rapport, connection, and warmth between us—building a bridge to human connectedness. That, I would say, is not useless.

But there are ways of speaking which have no benefit and do not foster any deeper human connectivity between people. It's just filling the space, or it's a way of distracting ourselves from things, or staying busy so we don't have to face what's really important to deal with. It's an avoidance mechanism.

Someone who is spiritually mature, at least in the Buddhist world, sometimes has a lot of silence. They know how to pause because they don't have to fill the space with empty conversation. They're willing to feel the connection they have with people regardless of whether they're talking or not. There is a profound connection we can feel with each other when we're not talking. Having the ability to be silent together with people and feel connected is, I think, one of the great pleasures of life—to stop talking and just be present.

Reuniting the Divided

So, those are the four things. I'd like to share a few more words about avoiding divisive speech and bringing together the people who are divided. Here is how the Buddha says it: "Such a person does not divide people from each other. Rather, he reunites those who are divided, and is a promoter of friendships, who enjoys concord, rejoices in concord, delights in concord, and is a speaker of words that promote concord."

How do we become a person who supports reuniting those who are divided? One of the areas where this is happening in our society right now is within the very fabric^[6] of the American family. It's remarkable that so many Black people in this country are descendants of slaves who had white fathers back then; they share the same bloodline as white people. To a great extent, white people and Black people in this country are kin, our family. But they were divided. Some of them back in slave times were divided at birth. They were kept divided through Jim Crow and kept divided down through the ages.

How do we take this very fabric of the American family and bring it together to end this divisiveness that has existed for so long? This is where the other elements of right speech that the Buddha talked about are so important. The idea of truth is not just important for us personally; as we learn about the truth, it's only through the truth that there can really be reuniting or reconciliation. It's no accident that in South Africa, they had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The truth needed to come out. It continues to be a shock to me how much of American history I never learned, and how much is still coming out about the horrific aspects of what happened to African Americans and Indigenous people in this country. I feel we have to know about that history. Truth-telling is necessary to be able to go further as a society and begin to do the reconciliation, uniting the people who are divided.

Then we need to be devoted to non-malicious speech and learn how to have conversations that are not divisive. I don't think that's easy. But for those of us who are doing Buddhist practice, I hope we get a lot of practice in our ordinary, everyday life at using our mindfulness. Understanding that part of this path of liberation is to find ways to speak that do not create division and do not create walls between people, even between spouses or family members. How do we learn to speak honestly and truthfully, saying what we need to say and what's necessary, but in a way that doesn't alienate people or make them angry and shut down? How do we find a way to speak that is supportive for everyone, including ourselves?

That is a powerful skill well worth learning. We can learn a lot of it through mindfulness, just through care and attention to what motivates us to speak and what's really going on inside ourselves, so we don't do things which are unskillful. It's possible to learn and study all kinds of modalities and exercises for learning how to speak more wisely. Nonviolent communication is one of them. It doesn't take that much to learn, and then to practice it, and to become good at it slowly over time.

We develop our abilities through practice, and we can practice with our friends. If you have really good friends, you can say, "I'm trying to learn to speak in a different way and I'm going to do an experiment. Is that okay? Maybe you can be patient with me as I try to find a different way of speaking."

What I've tried to convey today is that this concern and care around how we speak is a powerful place for mindfulness practice to live. It is a way of learning to express the good, the benefits, and the ways we're growing through the practice. As we grow, develop, and become freer, it's really important to express it and live it. Freedom which is not expressed is not really freedom. So, this is the way to live it.

When we learn how to unite those who are divided and create deeper connection with each other, that itself is a mirror to help our own inner life develop. That is where our mindfulness can go to work out the kinks inside, the unresolved places, and the challenges we have. It's not easy to learn mindful speaking, but boy, is it worthwhile. It's a great thing to do. I am confident that if we as a community of practitioners can give care and attention to speech, it will be for the benefit of many, many people, and certainly for yourself as well. That is something our society needs these days, and I hope that your Buddhist practice can be a benefit to the world around you.

Thank you.