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Introduction to Buddhism Part 5: The Equivalence of Ethics and Enlightenment

Right hand and left hand washing themselves, washing each other. You take two hands and you want them to wash each other; they need each other. The intimacy or the compatibility of ethics and wisdom is that they're really working together to do the same task. They aren't so separate. It wasn't like one has a low status and one has a high status, but they have a certain quality, like two hands washing themselves.

Then there was a statement about a wise person. The Buddha once talked about who is a wise person. He actually talks about who is a wise person of great wisdom. So now we're back into wisdom. He said a wise person of great wisdom is someone who is concerned with the welfare of themselves—aha, this is the selfishness school [Laughter]—the welfare of others, the welfare of both self and others, and the welfare of the whole world. That's a wise person of great wisdom. This concern with welfare, maybe that doesn't associate directly with ethics for some people, depending on how we define ethics. But it does show that if ethics has to do with how we relate to the world, how we care for the world, that this is how wisdom is defined: as someone who has this kind of caring attitude and concern for the world. And the person of great wisdom is someone who is enlightened.

If someone asks you, "I'm involved so much in Buddhism, and that religion has enlightenment. What is it like to be an enlightened person?" Now you know what to say. Someone who's enlightened is concerned for the welfare of the whole world: self, others, both self and others, the whole world. These are interesting statements that are made.

It got more and more interesting the more I studied it, and at some point, it became inseparable: the Buddhist teachings about ethics and the Buddhist teachings about wisdom are inseparable. The path to liberation, the path to awakening and enlightenment, and the path to ethical maturation are the same. The path to enlightenment, which is clearly what Buddhism is about, is the same as the path to the maturation of being an ethical person. The culmination of becoming an enlightened person is to become completely, through and through, an ethical person. These two are not separate; it's not like one is kindergarten Buddhism. They really go together, and the way you know whether someone's maturing in enlightenment is if they live in a more ethical way.

Now, it's possible to be ethical in uptight ways. It's possible to be ethical and follow just strict rules and regulations. But if you're doing Buddhist practice, then all the different elements of the Buddhist practice have an ethical quality to them, a quality of developing a person's ethical life. I'll describe that a little bit.

First, I want to say something about the enlightenment goal. Why I say that the enlightened person is also an ethical person is that the early Buddhist tradition makes the claim that all unethical behavior—whether it's by physical action, by speech, or just how you think—comes out of three fundamental tendencies. They call them the roots, and those roots are considered to be unethical. The language that they use in the tradition is not "ethics," but they use the words "unwholesome" or "unskillful." There are three unskillful roots, bases, or foundations for all unethical behavior. Those are greed, hatred, and delusion.

The most common definition in this early tradition for what enlightenment is, for what Nirvana^[1] is, is the destruction of greed, hatred, and delusion. The very basis for being unethical is destroyed with enlightenment. If the roots for unethical behavior are destroyed, then the person has become ethical. They're not going to do anything consciously, intentionally to harm other people or to do something that's hurtful for others if greed, hatred, and delusion have been uprooted. This is how they really come together with enlightenment; they're inseparable.

The Buddha most commonly referred to people who were enlightened, or to enlightenment, or to Nirvana, in what could be called ethical terms: the destruction of greed, hate, and delusion. He didn't talk about it as cosmic consciousness or some great blissful state of mind. He had lofty terms for it like enlightenment, awakening, liberation, and Nirvana, but over and over again he actually explained what he meant by the destruction of greed, hate, and delusion. There are other words a little bit like that: the destruction of something, the ending of something, the letting go of something. All these attachments are the source for being unethical.

So then, what about the practices? Last week I talked about the Eightfold Path^[2]. These are eight sets of practices which are a way of organizing all the important practices in Buddhism that lead towards liberation. If we analyze these eight sets of practices, it's pretty easy, I think, to see how each one of them has an ethical quality and is ethical in nature.

The first one is called Right View. One of the ways Right View is understood is having an insight, a really clear understanding of the nature of suffering: its arising, its ceasing, and the way to its ending. Suffering is another way of talking about harm. If you understand suffering really well, if you're intimately connected and know it well, that's one of the jobs of Buddhists. We shouldn't put that in our public advertisement, or no one would come: "Come to Buddhism and become really intimate with suffering!" [Laughter] That doesn't sound like very much fun.

But to have a really clear understanding of the illness is a way to the cure. So to really understand not only suffering, but the origin, the beginning of it, how it arises, how it comes to be, and more importantly, that we're not stuck with it—that there's an end to it, it can stop, it can cease. To have some sense of how that works makes a person acutely aware of suffering and the possibility of its ending. That lends itself to that person now becoming very sensitive to suffering in others as well. With that kind of sensitivity, people don't want to cause harm. They don't want to be involved in causing harm. So Right View has built into it this idea of a view that wants to decrease harm production in this world.

The other thing that Right View is, is understanding that our conduct and how we act has consequences. Good behavior, ethical behavior, has good consequences, and unethical behavior has bad consequences. To be acutely sensitive to that is one of the ways of wanting to be more ethical, not because we follow rules that we should be ethical, but because we don't want to have those kinds of consequences for ourselves and others.

The second factor of the Eightfold Path is Right Attitude or Right Intention, and these are three sets of attitudes with which we do everything. Two of them seem explicitly ethical, which are having an attitude of kindness and compassion—the attitude of non-ill-will and non-cruelty. When you have those qualities in yourself as you go about your life, you're going to treat the world ethically.

The next three are explicitly ethical: Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood. With Right Speech, you don't lie. With Right Action, you don't kill, steal, or harm through your sexuality. With Right Livelihood, you don't have a way of living in the world that is causing harm. The presence and the ending of harm is the core definition of ethics in Buddhism. It's all about harm and the ending of harm. It's not about some kind of abstract ultimate rules coming down from the heavens that dictate you have to act a certain way. It's this very practical concern about not causing harm and causing benefit.

The sixth factor of the Eightfold Path is called Right Effort. That is the effort that if you notice you're doing something that is unwholesome, unhelpful, unskillful, or unethical—if you notice for yourself that this is harmful—then you would stop doing it. If it's skillful, wholesome, helpful, or beneficial, then you keep doing it. This is a little principle that applies in many areas of life. It's often considered to be the essence of meditation practice. If we're going to become our own teachers in meditation, this is the guideline by which we look at our inner life as we meditate: "Is what I'm thinking about right now, the attitude I have in my meditation, the way in which I'm practicing right now, skillful, helpful, wholesome, beneficial, or not?"

If you sit down to meditate and the whole time you're trying to calculate the best lottery numbers, Right Effort means you're supposed to look at what you're doing and see, "Is this helpful, is it skillful to do this?" Then you might discover it's not that helpful to spend meditation time thinking about lottery numbers, and you might stop doing it. Or you might look and see you're really trying hard to get concentrated so you can achieve some kind of wonderful bliss states. You look at yourself as you're doing this and you say, "Wait a minute, there's a kind of striving, a little bit of conceited effort to have really good bliss states. This is actually unwholesome; it's unskillful to do that." You feel that inside; you feel the tension of it, the strain of it. This doesn't feel good, and because you feel the tension, you let go. This whole valuation of whether something is skillful or unskillful lends itself to being ethical.

Then we come to Right Mindfulness, the seventh factor. This is where it gets even more interesting. There are plenty of people here in the West, teachers who have taught mindfulness with very little reference to ethics. The Buddha repeatedly talked about how the practice of mindfulness is an ethical practice, that practicing mindfulness makes a person ethical. The practice of mindfulness, paying careful attention in and of itself, diminishes these three roots of greed, hate, and delusion. The more mindful we get, the more difficult it is to act unethically. The more difficult it is to violate the Five Precepts^[3]: the precepts of not killing, not stealing, not engaging in sexual misconduct, not lying, and not getting intoxicated.

There's something about the careful sensitivity that comes with mindfulness where we are truly becoming our own teacher. There's nothing about rules anymore, nothing about being obligated to be ethical. It's all from the inside out, through being more and more aware of the impact of what happens to you on the inside. You realize, "Wait a minute, to kill someone feels really lousy." Even the motivation to do it is a kind of violence to me. To steal, to engage consciously and intentionally in sexual ways that harm people, just feels really bad. You can feel how we're knotted up or tight, how we're alienated from ourselves, caught up in states of mind which are not productive or helpful for ourselves or for someone else. We start feeling the stickiness of it, the unsatisfactory quality of all these different states. It's kind of like touching a hot stove—you don't want to touch it. Ethics at this point, through mindfulness, has an almost physiological, biological instinct as part of it. You get close to wanting to harm someone, and you pull your hand back: "No, don't. Why do that?" Because we're so sensitive.

Generally it's thought that, more often than not, maybe most of the time, the people who are doing unethical things in the world are actually out of touch with themselves. They're somehow dissociated from their feelings, their emotions, and the impact of paying attention to what's really going on. They're living up in their heads, living in their desires, projected forward into their goals and what they want, and a lust for power. The Buddha connected unethical behavior with the desire for power. Over and over again, the Buddha talked about how mindfulness cultivates ethical people.

The final step of the Eightfold Path is Right Concentration. Right Concentration is a beautiful practice of settling the mind so that it's unagitated. The mind is tranquil, clear, and undistractable. The attention can settle on something like the breathing and just be there easily, almost naturally, because there's no distractibility, there's no agitation. A mind that has no agitation and is tranquil and clear is a mind that has very little or no greed, hate, and delusion. It has very little preoccupation with wanting to kill, steal, lie, engage in sexual misconduct, or think about where the local liquor store is. Those are all agitated states to be involved in.

One of the wonderful functions of concentration practice is to give an individual a really clear inner experience of a kind of ethical purity, a clarity, a feeling of cleanliness inside the mind, the heart, or the inner body. It just feels so great. It's like waking up from the most refreshing nap you've ever had: "Oh, it's so good. I feel so clear, bright, and rested." To discover this kind of ethical clarity inside is one of the wonderful consequences of getting concentrated. If you experience that, then you're probably not going to want to be unethical, because it's a violation of this wonderful, healthy, wholesome, beneficial experience and way of being in the world. We learn that to be unethical, we have to become more agitated. You have to be agitated to some degree to be unethical. And the more agitated we become, the more alienated we become from the core of who we are, our core inner life.

So that's going through the Eightfold Path and seeing how each of those steps has an ethical quality to them. An ethical quality means it has to do with how we live in relationship to other people and the world around us. As we follow the Eightfold Path, it becomes a natural thing to want to live in the world with other people and not cause harm, and even better, to be concerned with the welfare of others, to care about people and want to take care of them. As I practiced and studied, I really started seeing more and more the convergence of wisdom and ethics, the convergence of doing the mindfulness practice and not only becoming ethical, but becoming more interested in ethics.

I believe that the deeper someone practices, the more thoroughly mature someone becomes in mindfulness practice or in Buddhist practice, the more natural it is for them to be an ethical person, to think ethically, to be concerned ethically. Again, what I mean by that is to be concerned with harm and benefit, the welfare of the world around them. To care for people and not want to cause harm becomes an orienting principle of a Buddhist life: not causing harm, but doing the opposite, promoting the welfare and well-being of oneself and others.

Back in ancient times, I think the Buddha was brilliant in seeing this connection between inner liberation and becoming ethical. He did this wonderful sleight-of-hand almost, where he had all these lofty ways of talking about enlightenment and practice, because that's what was expected back in his time of what spiritual practices offered: lofty goals. But he was constantly slipping in that it's an ethical goal, it's a practice in becoming more ethical. He seemed to have been one of the—maybe not the only person of his time, but he emphasized the religious life of ethics in ancient India. From the ancient literature that we have, ethics was not a big part of religion before him, but with him, it became center stage.

You don't see that very often. I think if you go read introductory books to Buddhism, they'll make passing reference to ethics. They might even have a whole chapter saying ethics is really important, but it's only one chapter, and then they move on to talk about all the other lofty things—emptiness^[4], dependent arising^[5], and all these wonderful philosophical things. But the impression I have is that the teachings of the Buddha were through and through ethical in nature.

To say that to some people, like I'm saying it here, could feel oppressive because some people have had oppressive experiences with people's promotion of ethics and telling us how we are supposed to live: "You should be this way." Some ethical teachings have been really detrimental to whole populations of people, where people are told, basically, "You're bad because of your sexual orientation, your gender," all kinds of things. It often comes with a very strong sense of obligation—that you're obligated to be ethical, you're obligated to be generous, you're obligated to be this way. I've been studying these teachings of Buddhism for a long time, and I don't see anywhere in the teachings of the Buddha where he obligates anybody to be ethical.

He's teaching people how to be ethical with no obligation as part of it. Isn't that a relief? I think it's great. You're not obligated. But watch out, because you'll become ethical! [Laughter] There's no obligation, but you should know it's coming. It's coming in through the back door. You'll end up being a good person, just watch out! But you don't have to. If you're serious, it'll happen anyway.

I think it's very important to emphasize the non-obligatory nature of all this because some people really have struggled under the sense of obligation, internalizing the sense that "I have to be a certain way to be a good person." There's a whole different attitude in early Buddhism around ethics. I like to think that if you start doing the practice of the Eightfold Path, then ethics gets awakened from the inside, and it grows and blossoms. It's not an external rule that you follow.

It's an integral part of the whole path of Buddhism. It's not kindergarten Buddhism. It's not just something you do a little bit at the beginning of Buddhism—the first year you practice—and then put it aside and get on to the real things. It is the real thing all the way to enlightenment. The path to ethical maturation in Buddhism is the same as the path to spiritual liberation. They're one and the same. And if you don't believe me, that's fine. There's no obligation. Do the practice and find out for yourself. I'm pretty sure that if you practice sincerely, you'll discover this is the case for yourself as well.

We have about ten minutes before the end. Do you have any questions about this, any comments, any testimonials, or any protests? [Laughter]

Q&A

Questioner: Thank you. I'm curious how much you think the emphasis on ethical practice in Buddhism can get in the way of more shadow integration work? An emphasis on a certain way of being causing a subconscious suppressing of different parts of you, and not being able to welcome and integrate them.

Gil Fronsdal: I think it depends how we incorporate ethics into our life. If we take it on as rules or as social norms that we're supposed to follow, then it can become shadows; it can obscure the parts of us that are not that. All groups have shadows. In Western Buddhism circles where I've been, the normative ethics is to be a kind person. But if that's what's approved of, then it's a little bit hard to come in here and be mean, or be angry, or be grumpy. Sometimes I'm grumpy, and I come down here and I feel, "Yeah, I'm the teacher here, I shouldn't be grumpy." So maybe I don't show my grumpiness that easily, and then it goes into the shadow.

Also, people in Western Buddhist circles tend to be conflict-avoidant, which is not so helpful, but it comes from this normative idea of what it means to be a good person or to fit into the group. All groups and all cultures have shadows, but that's why we have a practice. The function of mindfulness practices is to put light in the shadow. We can't help having these cultural things because we have to find some way to get along, but then it's really important to go and do this practice. I think then all that stuff gets looked at. It also means don't be too afraid of the shadows; they'll all come out if you're practicing mindfulness sooner or later.

Yes, all the way in the back.

Questioner: One of the writings you mentioned today said that an ethical person is concerned with the welfare of self, the welfare of others, the welfare of both self and others, and the welfare of the whole world. I'm interested in what you think the distinction he was making was between all those categories. It seems like the first two cover everything.

Gil Fronsdal: That's a great question. The one that I find the most interesting is the third one: the wise person is concerned for the welfare of both self and others. How is that different from the first two, which seem to cover it? These might be modern interpretations; I don't know what the ancients were thinking. But one idea is that "both self and other" is the "we," the relationship between us. It's "we" as a community. Like a family, a couple, or a group like this, it has a different dynamic. There are different kinds of patterns, networks of relationships, and agreements that are there because we're working together. So it's no longer just the individual, but it's the community, it's the connections. We're paying attention to that relationship and those connections. "Both self and other" is the "we."

As for the "whole world"—again, I don't know what they were thinking back then, but I like it because welfare for self, welfare for others, and welfare for both self and others is probably primarily human-centric. But as soon as you say "the whole world," you expand beyond being concerned just for humans, to the welfare of all the animals, the creatures, and the planet.

Questioner: I really appreciated the talk, and it's very timely for me. I was wondering if you could comment on the sorrow that you might experience when you witness someone who is suffering from greed, hate, or delusion and might be behaving in a way that's unethical.

Gil Fronsdal: As I said, the sixth step of the Eightfold Path is to learn how to make distinctions between what is helpful and not helpful. Do you think there's a distinction between sorrow that's helpful and sorrow that's not? What would that look like?

Questioner: Unhelpful sorrow might be something akin to despair, and a helpful sort of sorrow would be a kind of mourning.

Gil Fronsdal: And what are the conditions that have to be there for a person to experience something and feel despair?

Questioner: Definitely agitation.

Gil Fronsdal: Agitation.

Questioner: And self-concern.

Gil Fronsdal: Self-concern is a self-preoccupation. Rather than being concerned with that person having a hard time, I'm consumed with my discomfort around it, or my responsibility for it. And what would a healthy kind of sorrow be?

Questioner: A feeling of pain, a genuine concern for the other person without referring it back to oneself.

Gil Fronsdal: Thank you. I would think that if we can learn to distinguish between "good grief"—because that's what Charlie Brown had, good grief! [Laughter]—and bad grief, it would make a whole different world. We don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We're not going to reject all these things like sadness, sorrow, and grief, but we want to be able to distinguish between a healthy and unhealthy version of it. That's part of the function of mindfulness.

Are all your ethical issues settled once and for all? [Laughter] Yes? A mic, please.

Questioner: I don't know how well thought-out this question is, but I've been noticing about myself, having grown up in Brooklyn, that my personality is holding on to an edge. I think the edge sometimes is a protection from the fear that if I let go of that part of my personality, I will be more responsible for everything. There's obviously suffering involved, but that suffering protects me from stepping off the cliff. I just wanted to thank you for your talk first of all because it brought a lot of clarity to my understanding of how the two hands go together, and it makes so much sense for me. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: Thank you. I very much appreciate your self-understanding about this. To be able to be so articulate about this tendency probably took you a long time to come to that kind of clarity, and I appreciate that you understand yourself that way. Since you're here at a place where you're practicing mindfulness meditation, I could say that if you really give yourself to the meditation, you might discover that you can begin letting go of the edge and begin to explore more deeply what's really going on underneath there. You can go through the layers, and it's really worthwhile to go through the layers. It's possible eventually to put it all down, and you'll be safe.

Great, thank you everyone. I hope that my little attempt at a fireside chat was nice for you all. Thank you.