---
ai_generation_date: '2026-10-25'
ai_model: gemini-3.1-pro-preview
ai_prompt_hash: 2d625dd6
audiodharma:
  talks:
    - date: '2020-11-08'
      is_meditation: false
      mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/12390/20201108-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-buddhas_six_principles_for_love_and_concord.mp3
      section_slug: buddhas-six-principles-for-love-and-concord
      speakers:
        - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal
          speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
      talk_start_time_seconds: 0
      title: Buddha's Six Principles For Love and Concord
      url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12390
      video_unavailable: false
collapsed_sections: []
location_city: Redwood City, CA
video_unavailable: false
youtube:
  id: 7mPHkLoQyNs
  imprecise_upload_date: '2021-05-04'
  title: Buddha's Six Principles for Love and Concord
  upload_date: null
  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
  uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mPHkLoQyNs
---

# Buddha's Six Principles For Love and Concord - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1)

_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._

## [Buddha's Six Principles For Love and Concord](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12390)

Greetings from our Sunday morning in California, and welcome to the Dharma talk. I would like to read a passage from the Middle Length Discourses, discourse 48. I debated not telling you where it was from and just reading the passage, asking you to guess what it was about if you didn't know the context. But I'll read you the passage:

> "They had taken to quarreling and brawling and were deep in disputes, stabbing each other with verbal daggers. They could neither convince each other nor be convinced by others. They could neither persuade each other nor be persuaded by others."

Maybe you can think of occasions where this has been the case. For those in the United States, we can think of very recent or even current events where this is still going on. This passage opens up a discourse called the _Kosambiya Sutta_[^1], at a time when the monastic followers of the Buddha were in dispute.

## The Kosambiya Sutta

Sometimes we idealize both the Buddha and his early monastics. We have this idea that the Buddha was infinitely wise and compassionate, and whatever he said, people would just be enlightened and well-behaved. However, that wasn't the case in the ancient world. Certainly, he was an effective teacher, but not everyone got the message of what he was trying to teach. Sometimes his monastics behaved poorly.

Here is one occasion where there was a dispute over a monastic who may or may not have violated a monastic rule. Those who thought he did were arguing against those who thought he did not. They argued with verbal daggers, and they could not convince each other. It went back and forth, and they were stuck with each other.

Someone went to the Buddha and explained what was going on. He called them for a meeting and asked, "Is it true that you are doing this? Is it true that you are quarreling and brawling and deep in disputes, stabbing each other with verbal daggers, and that you can't persuade each other?"

The monks said, "Yes."

What I like about this is that the Buddha heard a story about the conflicts going on in his community, and the first thing he does is ask the parties to come. He asks them, "Is this what's happening?" giving them a chance to explain and find out for himself what was actually happening. He was not prejudging the situation, but waiting to hear from the parties.

But as it was, the parties said, "Yes." They were in fact doing all those things. So the Buddha then said to them, "When you take to quarreling and brawling and are deep in disputes, stabbing each other with verbal daggers, do you on that occasion maintain acts of loving-kindness by body, speech, and mind in public and in private towards your companions in the holy life?"

When you're arguing with each other, are you being kind? Do you have goodwill for each other? The monastics, being honest and direct people, said, "No. When we're arguing, there's no goodwill in our hearts towards the others."

The Buddha goes on to say, "When you're that way, quarreling and brawling and in disputes, stabbing each other with verbal daggers, what can you possibly know? What can you see that you take to quarreling and brawling and are deep in disputes? What is it that you know that makes it worthwhile or appropriate? What do you see that gives reason to be this way?"

The Buddha says, "In doing so, you lead to your own harm and suffering for a long time." He is rhetorically asking what they could possibly believe that makes it appropriate to throw verbal daggers at each other. If they continue this way without any loving-kindness, they are hurting themselves.

It is interesting that he points it back to the individuals. He doesn't say, "You're hurting other people and you shouldn't do that." He evokes something very personal, because no one wants to hurt themselves. By evoking that, it is not an obligation to be kind and compassionate. He is not shaming them for treating other people differently. He is reminding them that they are harming themselves, perhaps for a long time if they continue this way.

## The Six Principles of Cordiality

Continuing from this passage in the Middle Length Discourses, the Buddha says:

> "There are these six principles of cordiality, of friendliness... Six principles of cordiality that create love and respect, and conduce to cohesion, to non-dispute, to concord, and to unity."

Here we see the Buddha emphasizing social values of love and respect. The Pali word for love is _piya_[^2]. It has a slightly different feeling than the English word "love," which is so broad and vague in meaning sometimes. Love and respect each other—that is a social value the Buddha emphasizes in his teachings.

The idea of cohesion, togetherness, non-dispute, concord, and unity is extremely important for the Buddha. One of the principles of right speech is to speak what brings unity and concord to a community. Speaking in ways that are divisive is considered unwholesome in Buddhism. It is harmful to oneself and to others.

He then lists the six principles of cordiality that are conducive to love, respect, non-dispute, and unity. The first three I will abbreviate because they are almost the same thing. One has to do with bodily acts, another with verbal acts, and the third with mental acts towards others.

## 1-3. Acts of Loving-Kindness

"Here, a person maintains bodily acts of loving-kindness [or goodwill] both in public and in private towards one's companions in the holy life." He is talking to monastics about how to take care of their own community. This is a principle of cordiality that creates love and respect and conduces to cohesion, non-dispute, concord, and unity.

He then says the same thing for verbal acts of goodwill, and mental acts of loving-kindness or goodwill.

The idea that what we do in the privacy of our own mind is consequential is key. The Buddha doesn't think it's only about what you say and do. We want to appropriately generate goodwill towards others within ourselves. The art of it is to discover how to do it in a genuine way. For some people, it is only after we recognize our own suffering—how we're hurt, afraid, or angry—and really learn how to be present for it, that we can begin to break the frozen, stuck places inside. Then we can begin viewing others in ways that allow our goodwill to flow outwards. We begin by having goodwill towards our own places of anger and hurt, not making it worse by shooting second arrows[^3] at ourselves.

The Buddha says to do this both publicly and privately. Privately means doing it in ways that other people don't know about. If you are doing acts of loving-kindness—whether physical acts in the world, saying something, or thinking about people in particular ways—they might not know you are doing it. Perhaps you do it anonymously, or you speak well of them or do something good for them at a time when they don't recognize it. Maybe in your home you do the dishes when they're dirty in the sink, and no one ever knows you did it. You don't get any credit, but you are supporting whoever is in your house.

Private acts of loving-kindness might be driving in a way that is very respectful, making room for other drivers. They might not realize you aren't tailgating or that you've given them the right of way, but you are driving supportively. In your mind, you are doing it privately. You are just supporting others; your goodwill and generosity are going outwards.

For some people, practicing loving-kindness when you don't get any credit for it is hard. But in fact, we get a lot of credit in our hearts, and it makes a difference. We begin to transform ourselves through acts of goodwill.

The transformational power of goodwill and these principles of cordiality shifts the locus of our life energy from things that are unwholesome, harmful, and debilitating, to things that uplift us and move us on the path to freedom. That is such an important shift in this practice.

It takes time, and sometimes challenging time, to discover how to have genuine goodwill and caring for others—a generosity of spirit that doesn't feel like a burden, an obligation, or something forced. Spend the time to learn that, maybe in the smallest steps possible, so we are moving in that direction and awakening this possibility within us.

## 4. Sharing Things in Common

The fourth principle is that a person uses things in common with their virtuous companions in the holy life. One doesn't hold on to "just my stuff," but rather we share with others. Here it's with companions in the holy life, but who are our companions? Maybe the people we live with, our family, our relatives, our friends, our community, or maybe the whole world. It's a sense of generosity and sharing.

When I was 17, a formative experience for me was traveling around Yugoslavia and Greece with four friends in a Volkswagen van that only had front seats. Some of us were always sitting on the floor in the back. We had very little money. For the three or four weeks I traveled with my friends, I had maybe $50. We shared everything. There was no sense of "mine and yours," and it was quite inspiring to share whatever we had, get along, and make our way. We slept in all kinds of places—in the park underneath the Acropolis, sleeping outdoors, going over the dirt roads and passes in Yugoslavia.

This idea of sharing was a formative experience. It showed me that people can do this. It was actually very hard to come back to the United States and experience my friends not knowing how to do this, not being inclined to do this at all. It was a little jarring for me as a teenager.

## 5. Virtuous Behavior

_Note: The audio transcript skips forward here, moving to the fifth principle regarding ethical conduct._

...and conducive to concentration[^4]. Here they are behaving virtuously. They're living an ethical life, and living an ethical life is conducive to love and respect and to unity. Living unethically is conducive to breaking unity, causing harm and separation, and fracturing relationships. There is something very inspiring about meeting someone who has ethical integrity. You feel like, "Ah, yes, I can trust this person in all kinds of ways."

Two things about this statement: it is the virtuous behavior that is liberating. We don't often see virtue, ethics, and liberation together in the same sentence, but maybe they aren't so separate. They are intimately connected. The movement to being ethical is a movement to being spiritually free, heartfully free—the liberation that Buddhism emphasizes. To be genuinely, in a relaxed way, virtuous means we have let go of being non-virtuous, which is motivated by greed, hate, and delusion.

It is also very interesting that this state of being virtuous leads to concentration. This is a high value in Buddhism: to conduct your life in such a way that when you sit down to meditate, you can be settled. You don't sit with regrets, resentments, shame, guilt, or upset. We sit down and feel a certain ease and confidence.

The Buddha talked about a certain kind of happiness: the happiness of blamelessness, the happiness of being content to know I haven't caused any harm. It's a little bit hard sometimes, especially in the United States, where a lot of people feel guilty for no reason at all. They feel like it's a policy they inherited from society or family—some idea of being inadequate and wrong. They haven't really done anything, but it's an assumption. Then it's hard to feel the happiness of blamelessness because we feel we're to blame even though we haven't done anything. Just breathing, we're somehow wrong.

But to look deep inside ourselves and really recognize, "I haven't hurt anybody today. At least for today I can go to sleep content and happy that I haven't hurt anyone. I've been careful with what I say and what I do." The Buddha encouraged this kind of contentment. It doesn't have to be about your whole life; just let it be from now on. This too is a principle of cordiality that creates love and respect and conduces to unity.

## 6. Liberating Insight

Then we come to the sixth principle. This is an interesting one, and it is the heart of the Buddha's message of liberation.

> "They dwell both in public and in private possessing in common with their companions in the holy life that insight that is noble and emancipating, that leads one who practices in accordance with it to the complete destruction of suffering."

With mindfulness insight meditation, we come to a direct experience, a direct seeing of something about our life experience and what's going on here. That helps to release the places we are closed, holding on, clinging, stuck, contracted, and closed down. All that gets blown open. All that gets liberated and freed.

Having that liberating insight doesn't mean we are fully liberated, but that now we know how to keep opening. Once we've let go and experienced some liberation, we have a taste and a feel for it. Then we keep practicing and keep opening to that, realizing it more and more. Not because we have to or should, but because when there's a genuine feeling of freedom, of letting go of contraction and clinging, there is in that letting go an invitation, a call, a request to do it completely. Don't let it be partial, because partial means we are still closed in some way.

Liberation welcomes us, it beckons us when the first seed of liberation is strong enough. To follow that beckoning, to follow that yearning, is one of the great tasks of life.

Some people feel that liberation is a personal goal of Buddhism, that for each individual to become liberated and free is selfish. "Why would you do that? It's like you're abandoning people. What we really have to do is be supportive of other people and help the world." But here the Buddha offers it as one of the principles of cordiality that leads to the benefit of the world. It leads to love, respect, cohesion, non-dispute, concord, and unity. There is an intimate connection between liberation and love, respect, care, not wanting to be in dispute, and wanting to move towards unity and support for others.

In fact, the Buddha goes on in this text to say that of the six principles of cordiality, the last one is the highest. He uses the metaphor of the pinnacle of a roof of a house. This last one is the highest point, supported by all the others. All these other principles—loving-kindness, generosity, and virtue—are the support for the final one, the greatest one, which is liberation itself.

To live in liberation and to share that liberation with a community of other people leads to lots of love, lots of respect, and movement towards unity. It breaks down the artificial and painful separations we have between people. We learn to not be in dispute, but to be in conversation and creative tension, finding a way together with all the different points of view people have. We still have different points of view, but we don't have to be in dispute.

## Reflections

Love, respect, cohesion, non-dispute, unity, and concord: these are the principles, the goals, or the guiding lights of the teachings of the Buddha. They are attained and realized by practicing goodwill and loving-kindness. By practicing and living with generosity. By being virtuous—the kind of virtue that really feels liberating and helps us to get concentrated. And by developing liberating insight. The mindfulness of sitting really helps us to see right down into the depths of our hearts to that place where freedom is possible.

With that freedom, I am confident that you will benefit the world. I don't think it is possible for someone who has attained some degree of letting go of their clinging to not benefit others, whether they want to or not.

May you reflect on these six principles of cordiality and maybe practice them both publicly and privately. Especially privately, you might see what it's like to practice goodwill and generosity without necessarily getting credit for it. Just do it anyway, and see if there's some way that can nourish and support you. May it inspire you to greater and greater possibilities of love, respect, unity, and concord for this world of ours.

May we put aside our verbal daggers now and look for unity, non-dispute, and friendship with all beings.

Thank you.

---

[^1]: **Kosambiya Sutta:** The 48th discourse of the Majjhima Nikaya (Middle Length Discourses) in the Pali Canon, where the Buddha addresses a dispute among the monks of Kosambi.

[^2]: **Piya:** A Pali word often translated as "dear," "beloved," or "love," describing an affectionate, wholesome connection.

[^3]: **Second Arrow:** A Buddhist teaching (from the Sallatha Sutta) describing how we often add mental and emotional suffering (the second arrow) to unavoidable physical or emotional pain (the first arrow).

[^4]: **Concentration:** Translates the Pali word _samādhi_, referring to a collected, unified, and focused state of mind essential for deepening meditation and insight.