Without a doubt, in the Western world, meditation techniques have been the most popular part of what Buddhism offers. As Buddhist traditions have been increasingly imported and integrated into the Western world since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a growing fascination with meditation practice. The psychological and medical studies of Buddhist offerings, for instance, have almost entirely revolved around investigating the effects of a small range of meditative practices. This fascination with meditation makes sense, because it is the piece of Buddhist teachings that is the newest to our Western educational approach. But the Buddhist path is about much more than just sitting here. True, Buddhism offers extensive and detailed teaching on the nature of mind, and a huge variety of contemplative tools for working with a range of mental obstacles. If you wanted to simply study teachings on the mind as it is experienced in meditation, the tradition offers plenty to do for your entire life. But studying meditation alone is not enough.
Simply put, if you meditate ten minutes a day, what do you do with all the other hours? How do you bring self-awareness to every aspect of your life? Even those of us who meditate quite a lot would be at a severe disadvantage if we only made our path about meditation practice. Personally, when I’m not on retreat, I practice at most an hour to an hour and a half a day. What happens with the other sixteen hours of waking life? Shouldn’t I work with my heartmind then? For a committed practitioner, forming a healthy relationship between meditation practice and the cultivation of awareness throughout the day is crucial. Otherwise, the momentum and pace of the rest of our life overwhelms whatever insights we are able to experience through formal meditation. Ideally, a positive feedback relationship grows, a relationship of support and symbiosis between our formal practice and our life in the world. Our life teaches us as much, if not more, about how we can come home to our own heartmind as our sitting practice does. To frame this connection in terms of the video games of my youth, meditation ideally acts as a power-up for our practice throughout the rest of the day.
Meditation allows us to enter a kind of personal laboratory, in order to see our mind in a slightly more settled and clarified way and to prepare for how we are going to live life that day. Our life in the world can then also become a lab for our practice, just a much bigger, less defined lab, with infinitely more moving parts and sentient beings involved. For example, if you notice an addiction to a tech device, when you want to get up and grab your smartphone as you sit in meditation, the insight and awareness developed from feeling this impulse nonreactively can carry over to how you relate to your device throughout the day. In turn, the insight we develop from working mindfully with our device can then help us see more clearly how we latch on to and chase after our thoughts during our next meditation session. This back-and-forth relationship between practice and conduct in daily life constitutes a balanced and consistent approach to cultivating self-awareness. It really doesn’t take much on either front: just a little bit of practice, and a little bit of awareness of our actions throughout the day.
Eventually, if we are going to wake up and truly come home to our own heartmind, we have to turn the full scope of our life into a practice space. This doesn’t have to start as an all-the-time endeavor, but little by little it is said that our awareness practice can become a constant companion. It could start with observing just three more carefully chosen moments each day, three moments where we are actually contemplating and applying some mindful principles to our thoughts, expressions, and behaviors. This is what happens when we start bringing ethics into our journey of self-awareness. Our practice starts to be with us everywhere.
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In its complete form, as traditionally taught, the path of awakening involves eight distinct sections, known as the eightfold path. These eight practices condense into three basic life areas. These areas are (1) study of the mind and study of the world, (2) meditation practice, and (3) daily conduct in life (ethics).
In our lexicon, ethics refers to the principles, beliefs, and practices that govern our behavior in the world. Ethics is about asking the deep questions concerning how we make choices, especially when we don’t know definitively what we should do, which is pretty much always. How do we take care of our body? How should we speak to others? Does what you buy promote outcomes you want to support in this world? How do we use technology thoughtfully? Whom do we vote for? Do we vote at all? Because all of these questions affect sentient beings, all of these questions are part of the Buddhist path.
Ethics—our daily conduct—is primarily a practice of self-awareness, because we are fundamentally interested, at this stage, in how our actions affect our personal journey, our own ability to be at home in our own heartmind. At the stage of self-awareness, the practice of ethics is primarily about you. This is not some attempt to be a libertarian; it is an acknowledgment that the path begins with taking responsibility for your own mind. At the same time, the practice of ethics forms a crucial link among the various stages of our experience—the personal, the interpersonal, and the societal. In a way, our daily conduct is both the vehicle for and the passenger on our journey home. First, practicing ethics allows us to extend the healing work of the path beyond the meditation cushion. Further, making conduct a practice allows us to work for the benefit of others in our relationships, which is the topic of this book’s second section. Finally, exploring and deeply contemplating what to do and what not to do, what to participate in and what to avoid, what to purchase and what to protest, creates the basis for a systemic, cultural, and even political understanding of the Buddhist path, which will be addressed in the book’s final section. Our daily conduct must relate to our views of what we want the larger world to look like, because our own personal life is simply a microcosm of the cultural and political landscape we inhabit.
I find that when the conversation shifts to ethics, people tend to have three basic reactions that complicate the exploration. I’ve been guilty of having all of them at different times. They seem impossible to avoid, and are each worth examining with two parts seriousness and one part humor and irony.
Often, when we start talking about ethics, we either become (1) apathetic, (2) defensive, or (3) righteously judgmental.
Until a person takes an interest in some basic form of mindfulness and in the cultivation of self-awareness, it’s actually pretty hard to see the point of studying ethics. Without awareness, we can’t see an immediate correspondence between our actions and their effects, or how our choices affect how we experience our life. It’s often hard to see how our choices affect others. When we are caught up in apathy, the world seems like an insurmountable fortress of greed, hatred, and delusion, a dark place where nobody seems to hold themselves accountable for the choices they make. If no one else thinks about the hard questions, why should I?
If you notice yourself getting bored when the conversation turns to ethics, it might be helpful to reconsider what it means to be a contemplative person at all. To be contemplative means we are trying to think deeply about life, to grow more curious about the links between how we experience ourselves and how we act. To be a contemplative is to create a lifelong study of the interdependence between our views and our behaviors. If we want to step onto this path, we need to recapture the original purpose of both human philosophy and human psychology, which is to become a curious person, appreciative of our precious opportunity to be alive, exploring principles that have useful and specific applications. From this standpoint, ethics is no abstraction; there is nothing vague about it. Practicing ethics is about making our life tangibly better, because if we can learn to live fully in our own heartmind throughout the day, every day will feel infinitely more satisfying.
A discussion of ethics can also make us defensive, as though someone is personally attacking our lifestyle. Somebody starts asking simple questions about why we choose to eat meat, or why we hold the political beliefs we hold, and we don’t even want to hear the question. I am a Buddhist who occasionally eats meat, although I was a longtime vegetarian. If somebody questions my meat eating as a Buddhist, I shouldn’t just shake him off. Each time the question comes up, I should be prepared to explore the topic with the person who asks it. As I should if somebody asks at dinner why I keep looking at my smartphone instead of being present with him. I shouldn’t attack the person who questioned me by pointing out that he is often on his phone, too.
We might also become righteous and judgmental as the conversation shifts to ethics. Let’s face it—we’ve all made a ton of mistakes. I could fill other volumes with just a fraction of mine. Our leaders are flawed, too. One of the largest issues we face in the twenty-first century is that it’s become so hard to even trust in the idea of decent and honorable leaders. There is so much going on in this world that we don’t agree with, and we might not even agree with each other about what’s wrong. Because we don’t trust the openness of our own heartmind, when the going gets tough, we lose the flexibility that would allow room for mistakes. Without flexibility, we judge and condemn. Without trust in the goodness of the mind, mistakes cease to be occasions for learning. Instead, every mistake that comes before our Supreme Court of Righteousness becomes a condemnation, a death sentence. With this mistrusting mentality, we don’t allow space for learning from mistakes, and we certainly don’t allow room for the truth that the really hard questions in life almost always fall into gray areas, where righteousness can’t help us.
With righteousness, we try for sterilized perfection. We might expect ourselves and everyone else to become vegan, sober, antiwar, ever-smiling, never-biased, cannot-tell-a-lie, one hundred percent ecoconscious consumers, dedicating twenty-five hours a day and eight days a week to charitable causes, willing to give the shirt off our back to anyone who asks for it. When these standards aren’t met, we say things like, “Oh my God, I killed a mosquito—what have I done?” or, “I can’t believe you would wear that shirt and call yourself a Buddhist!” or, “You work at Goldman who? I can’t even deal with you.” Or, on the other hand, our friends might learn that we’ve taken an interest in studying meditation, and launch passive-aggressive barbs like, “Well, that’s not very Buddhist of you” when we aren’t doing exactly what they want us to do. I remember, throughout my teenage years, heavily judging my parents after their divorce, feeling, completely unfairly, that because they were Buddhists, they should somehow always be able to work things out. Where were my parents’ halos??!! Of course, this righteous anger was probably just a defensive posture against resting in the gap, feeling my own sadness that I didn’t have a nuclear family.
In this judgmental trap, we become unfairly angry at others, pissed off at the world, and full of secret shame and guilt toward our own inevitable mistakes. What gets lost? Trust and curiosity. We lose trust in the universe, and we lose curiosity about the process of exploration, which is the basis for any contemplative journey. Eventually, because this kind of righteousness can’t sustain the level of acrid energy on which it runs, we will probably become apathetic and tune out the whole conversation on ethics. Apathy, that cynical “whatever” mentality, is usually what happens after righteousness burns itself out. Sometimes this apathetic burnout happens to a whole generation of commuters.
For any of these three habitual reactions to ethics—apathy, defensiveness, or righteousness—the solution is really the same. If we bring the same outlook that we have to formal meditation—making friends with our experience, while slowly working to cultivate positive qualities over a long period of time—then we can introduce curiosity and a sense of exploration to our life. This path is more about engaging in a learning process, being a lifelong student of cause and effect, rather than always doing the “right” thing.
There are many frameworks for taking on the practical contemplation of ethics within the Buddhist tradition. Below is one of the simpler lists, a set of five basic contemplations that in my tradition are usually called the five precepts. When a student formally commits to Buddhist practice, she is asked to make an ongoing commitment to working with these principles. Thich Nhat Hanh calls them the five mindfulness trainings. These guidelines create a general template for a contemplative life, a life of self-awareness and a journey of becoming curious about our habits and their effects.
Working with the Buddhist teachings on conduct, the teacher always has a choice either to emphasize what positive actions should be cultivated and taken up or to emphasize harmful conduct that needs to be given up or refrained from. Sometimes this is called knowing what to “adopt and reject.” Typically, in the Hinayana, or self-focused teachings that come from the Tibetan system, the emphasis is on avoiding the negative, on refraining from harmful activities. However, it seems crucial that we learn to positively reinforce our successes, and therefore I choose mostly to emphasize the positive actions to be cultivated in each of these contemplations.
In terms of the actual “do” and “do not do” related to each of these precepts, there are about a thousand different interpretations among Buddhist teachers about what these contemplations actually mean, especially when they touch on harder subjects like eating meat, dating, or the right livelihood. Some teachers have interpretations that are strict and quite specific, while others have interpretations that are vague and more general. I think these precepts are most helpful as general contemplations that we each apply to our own life choices. That way, we avoid the pitfall of trying to live life by a robotic manual, which is impossible anyway. If we take these contemplations to heart, they become questions we ask ourselves day by day, moment by moment, as we try to apply them to what actually happens along our journey. Thinking of them as companions rather than as judgments, we avoid the tendency to burn out on our ethical exploration.
FIVE CONTEMPLATIONS OF ETHICS (PRECEPTS)
The five traditional contemplations of conduct in everyday life are: (1) promoting life, (2) generosity, (3) truthfulness, (4) responsible sexuality, and (5) responsible consumption.
Promoting Life
Promoting life stands in contrast to refraining from the negative action of mindlessly taking life, or killing. While the practical application and debate of this question often involves the consumption of meat, the question is actually much broader than that. In some Eastern traditions, vegetarianism is emphasized, and in others, not so much. Within this contemplation, we turn our thoughts to the basic question of how our habitual aggression causes us to thoughtlessly destroy or hinder the energy of situations around us. We also turn our attention to our participation in larger systems where the lives of sentient beings are disregarded. Instead, how could we help the health of sentient beings, especially human beings, flourish? By engaging in the promotion of life, we are thinking about little things we can do to become a more ecological human being in the deepest sense of what it means to live in harmony with one’s environment. We are working against the habitual tendency to reject and destroy that which we believe threatens us.
Generosity
How can we live a life of generosity? This practice of offering stands in contrast to the harmful action of stealing or greedily taking what is not offered to you. We often think of generosity as a practice of charity, of being a great tipper, or of helping those less fortunate than us in some way. However, at the level of self-awareness, each of these practices is meant to help us dwell more fully in our own heart and mind. Here, ironically, the practice of generosity is mainly meant to benefit ourselves.
When we conventionally consider generosity’s opposite—greed—we often think about what greed does to others. Activists condemn a greedy global elite that has consumed the world’s resources rather than creating a shared and sustainable future. I agree with a lot of the sentiments behind these critiques, but here we are more interested in what greed does to the greedy themselves. Greed keeps us trapped in the commuter’s mentality, as it trains our mind to seek safety by mindlessly latching on to passing fixes. Greed decreases our ability to empathize with others, because it inhibits our ability to even see them, and greed keeps the bar for our basic comfort level moving ever higher and higher. For any human, empathy is the very basis of mental health, and greed directly obstructs our ability to experience empathy and, therefore, love. When we practice generosity, what we are fundamentally doing from the standpoint of self-awareness is letting go of fixation on objects: again and again, we practice relaxing our tendency to objectify home somewhere “out there.”
On an interpersonal level, it is pretty clear that practicing generosity and making offerings whenever we can opens up our human relationships to a whole new level of shared appreciation. It’s a fairly simple rule that bringing flowers gets you pretty far in life. On a societal level, every act of letting go undermines the demonstrably false notion that greed is good, either for individuals or for society at large.
It is also important to note that if we think of generosity as letting go rather than as charitable giving, then it becomes a two-way street. Generosity is no martyrdom, no act of ignoring your own needs or value as a human. Generosity is every bit as much about being open to receiving, because one of the ways we avoid being present is by convincing ourselves that we aren’t worthy to receive what comes to us. One of the best ways I have found to practice letting go is to actually allow myself to accept a compliment openly when somebody says something positive about me. If someone praises you, just say thank you. It might be the hardest practice of all, and it’s actually part of practicing generosity.
Truthfulness
A life of honesty is the third practice. This contemplation asks the question: What does it mean to live a life without deception, a life of authenticity and truthful representation, both to ourselves and to the world? For me, this has been the trickiest and most challenging of all five contemplations. It’s often been painful to be a curious student of my own subtle deceptions. However, both internally and externally, honesty is the best tool we have to truly make friends with who we really are. Honesty is the vanguard of self-acceptance. At times we want to hedge our bets on honesty, or we try to shift truths just a little to make people like us or to avoid conflict and hurt feelings. Sometimes we are dishonest just to get what we want. While the practice of human communication will be addressed more fully in the next section of the book, the main aspect of the contemplation of honesty is the feeling that it’s actually okay to be who we are, without doubt or hesitation. With that in mind, we can begin to represent ourselves honestly to the world and to each other, saying what we have to say, clearly and straightforwardly.
Responsible Sexuality
The fourth ethical contemplation asks us to consider a mindful and compassionate approach to sexuality. Unfortunately, much of the teaching on how to use the energy of sexual relationships has historically been given by monastic practitioners who chose to no longer engage in them. This is sort of like asking an accountant to teach you how to paint. You might get lucky and end up with an accountant who is a great painter, but it’s probably better to ask someone you know has the kind of experience you are seeking help with.
Any relevant approach to sexuality would have to fully acknowledge the diverse scope of modern sexual relationships and identities, and also include an examination of how our society commodifies sexuality through entertainment and pornography. There is no traditional Buddhist teaching, for example, on the appropriate use of Internet porn. The main guideline on the journey of self-awareness as it applies to our ethical life is to always “minimize harm.” If we actually bring this intention—both to minimize harm and to help others—into our sex life, a whole new set of questions arises. Again, these are personal questions of practice and contemplation, not rules written in stone. The fundamental question is much deeper than those about engaging only in long-term relationships or discussing the spiritual validity of one-night stands. The fundamental question is one of manipulation and grasping. A one-night stand isn’t problematic because it happens out of wedlock. From the standpoint of karma, a one-night stand can be destructive if it causes us to solidify our habit of fixating on other beings as merely objects of our pleasure. In fixating on sexual objects, we avoid connecting with our own awareness and we also manipulate the other person, and this is what causes harm. But it’s also possible to spend the night with someone without falling into this trap. At the very least, we might consider that every sexual relationship is a relationship of cause and effect. There may be such a thing as sex without commitment, but there is no such thing as “casual” sex, if we think of “casual” as meaning “without effect.” There is always energy exchanged, and we should always pay close attention to how we use that sexual energy.
Responsible Consumption
Responsible consumption is the corollary to the practice of refraining from harmful intoxicants. What, then, is an intoxicant? In the ancient teachings, this of course meant alcohol. The list of possible ways to escape your own mind through intoxication was pretty short back then. Now, to limit the discussion to only alcohol would be to ignore the truth that a huge piece of modern life is all about escapism and intoxication. This doesn’t mean that the discussion of alcohol is moot or passé. We live in a deeply alcoholic society, and I know many people on the path of meditation for whom the appropriate number of alcoholic beverages is zero. But I also know some people—like myself—for whom that’s not the case. I also know quite a lot of people who are addicted to their technological devices, something that up until just a few years ago no spiritual or psychological teachings were able to address at all. With this contemplation, I would recommend an honest assessment of one substance or activity to which you feel a small level of addiction, and practice actually relinquishing its usage for a short period. With mindful periods of restraint—perhaps a weekend without our smartphones—we train our minds not to rely so heavily on quick fixes. By practicing responsible consumption, we become intimately familiar with the destructiveness of consumerism, and begin to truly witness how consumerism arises from our inability to rest comfortably with our own mind.
WORKING WITH ETHICS IN EVERYDAY LIFE
The five ethical contemplations above are huge, so broad that we could spend a lifetime figuring out how to put them into practice.
Day by day, moment by moment, so as not to feel overwhelmed, it might be more helpful to think of just one of them at a time. I would suggest that every day or every week, you think of one specific application of just one of the five areas above, such as the mindful usage of your tech devices or what honesty really means for you in a difficult conversation you need to have. Choose something that is relevant, and also that is manageable, meaning that your level of judgment or shame around the given activity is not so great that you can’t feel a sense of humor at your perceived mistakes. Just as you might use the breath as an anchor in mindfulness meditation, you can also create anchors for returning your mind to the present and noticing when you get caught up in evading the moment. This could be as simple as returning your attention to your body when you notice yourself itching to look at your device again. If we turn ethics into a mindfulness practice, we can avoid the extremes of defensiveness and righteous judgment, and avoid giving up the entire process by caving in to apathy.
If we take on one of these contemplations each day, and think about one specific application in our behaviors or actions, applying the contemplation to even three simple moments each day, the benefits will be huge. If we can do that, then our practice of self-awareness will truly become a 24/7/365 companion. Slowly, the path becomes completely integrated with life, and a curious awareness begins to touch everything we do.