3

RIGHT SPEECH

Some students of Buddhism who have gone on long silent-meditation retreats have had the opportunity to gain surprising insight into just how challenging right speech can be. On such retreats, usually the day before they end, teachers may give retreatants some practice in “reentry” skills by having them break into small groups and talk about their experience during the days, weeks, or even months of silence. At this stage most of the retreatants are hypermindful, and they are shocked to discover that in just a few minutes of conversation, they have lost their carefully cultivated awareness and are either swept away by mindless babbling or are suddenly very self-conscious. Experiences like this can help us understand why right speech has its own separate step on the Eightfold Path, preceding right action rather than being included as part of it. This separation acknowledges both how much of our waking time we are engaged in speech and its enormous power. Its importance is so noteworthy that the Buddha devoted not only one step of the Eightfold Path but also one of the moral training practices for laypeople (the Five Precepts, in Chapter 4) to speech.

Just how potent speech can be is illustrated in a story that Jack Kornfield—a teacher who often breaks silence at the end of long retreats in the way described—retells in Seeking the Heart of Wisdom. A master was healing a sick child with prayer when an onlooker began to challenge him. When the master called the skeptic a fool and told him he didn’t know anything about such matters, the skeptic became enraged. At that point the master said, “When one word has the power to make you hot and angry, why should not another word have the power to heal?” It is because even one word may have the power to cause suffering or to heal it that practicing right speech in our everyday lives is so important.

TEACHINGS

The Buddha defined right speech as “refraining from lying, refraining from slander, refraining from harsh speech, refraining from frivolous speech” (DN 22.21). He also stressed that right speech is “true, correct, and beneficial” (MN 139.10). Walpola Rahula, in What the Buddha Taught, summarizes all the Buddha’s teachings on right speech this way:

Right speech means abstention (1) from telling lies, (2) from backbiting and slander and talk that may bring about hatred, enmity, disunity and disharmony among individuals or groups of people, (3) from harsh, rude, impolite, malicious and abusive language, and (4) from idle, useless and foolish babble and gossip. When one abstains from these forms of wrong and harmful speech one naturally has to speak the truth, has to use words that are friendly and benevolent, pleasant and gentle, meaningful and useful. One should not speak carelessly: speech should be at the right time and place. If one cannot say something useful, one should keep “noble silence.”

Right speech thus includes not just the negative of refraining from harmful speech but also the positive of generating kind speech at the right time. Sangharakshita, in Vision and Transformation, describes right—or “perfect”—speech as “the Buddha’s ideal of human communication: perfectly truthful, in the fullest sense; perfectly affectionate; perfectly helpful; and perfectly promoting concord, harmony, and unity—or perfectly self-transcendent.”

IN PRACTICE

The Buddha’s discourses on “ideal communication” specifically dealt with oral communication. Today, when we look at how we can live these teachings, it is helpful to look at communication in its broadest terms—not just how we talk but also how we write, illustrate, gesture, listen, and even dress. In all of these forms of communication, we need to ask if we are creating or enhancing a sense of self, harming others, or bringing kindness and harmony into our world.

The Buddha’s son, Rahula, became a monk and joined the Sangha, and the Buddha gave one of his major discourses on how to practice right speech, “Advice to Rahula,” to his son. In this teaching (MN 61) the Buddha used a number of metaphors involving a basin of water Rahula had brought to wash his feet. After first emptying most of the water, then all of the water, then turning the basin upside down, the Buddha compared the diminishing contents of the basin to the integrity of a person who deliberately lies. After teaching this lesson, he urged Rahula not to tell a lie even as a joke. Then he held up a mirror and asked its purpose. “For the purpose of reflection, venerable sir,” Rahula responded. The Buddha then said, “So too, Rahula, . . . an action by speech should be done after repeated reflection. . . . You should reflect on the action by speech thus: ‘Would this action that I wish to do with my speech lead to my own affliction, or to the affliction of others, or to the affliction of both?’ ” (MN 61:8–9).

In right speech, then, we should avoid dishonesty and saying things that cause dukkha, including speech that is slanderous, harsh, or idle.

Dishonesty Is the Worst Policy

The foremost characteristic of right speech is refraining from telling lies. A popular T-shirt is emblazoned with the words “Always Tell the Truth—There’s Less to Remember.” That may be a practical suggestion, but trying always to speak truthfully has far greater and longer-lasting consequences than getting caught up in a “little white lie.” The dishonesty aspect of right speech often takes one of three forms: outright lying, exaggerating, or minimizing. Such dishonesty is usually inspired by some aspect of self-centered fear—fear that “it” is not good enough, or that we are not good enough, or that we are more “in control” if “they” do not know everything.

Honesty, like charity, begins at home, so we must begin our practice of right speech by being honest with ourselves. This takes us back to the “Eightfold Circle,” especially the nature of reality that we explored as right understanding in Chapter 1. When we can penetrate the nature of grasping, impermanence, karma, and nonself, we can begin to be honest with ourselves. This “internal accuracy” will, first of all, puncture the stories we tell ourselves and relieve our own suffering, but it will also enable us to be more “accurate” with others. And one of the things we need to be most accurate about is ourselves, with the very important cautions of choosing the right person, time, and place. When it is asked by different people, in differing circumstances, the same question—“How are you?”—may elicit a wide variety of responses. We might reply, “Fine, thank you,” in a strictly social gathering if we know what fine means and are quite certain the person asking doesn’t want to hear what Ram Dass, in Still Here, calls an organ recital. On the other hand, if our life partner or personal physician wants to know how we are, honesty involves a more precise answer. To give someone we are very close to an evasive “Fine, thank you” may involve denial on our part (lack of honesty with ourselves) or a control ploy of withholding information. When we go to see our physician, we want to give an answer that is as nonevasive, complete, and precise as possible, no matter how frightened we may be.

We clearly need to avoid exaggerating and minimizing when we are dealing with doctors, but it is much easier for most of us to slip into these two distortions in other aspects of our lives. Exaggerating reflects grasping and clinging, while minimizing, its opposite, hints at aversion. We tend to exaggerate things about ourselves or our environment when we like or admire them and want others to feel the same. Exaggeration may seem like a form of harmless bragging, for example, when it involves our scholastic achievements, our athletic ability, or the number of people who came to a demonstration for a cause we cherish. We damage ourselves when we exaggerate even such things, however, because doing so is habit forming and takes us further and further away from the reality we seek in spiritual practice. Ironically, the Buddha’s first rule for the monks in his Sangha was that they should not exaggerate by claiming to be something they were not: enlightened.

Minimizing can reflect fear, denial, or aversion to what is real, perhaps in the guise of humility. One definition of humility is “an accurate assessment of our personal assets and liabilities.” A fearful comment to ourselves or others might be something like “I don’t think it’s very important to anyone whether I go or not.” Denial might be expressed as “I don’t think she’s really angry at me—she’s just too busy to call.” After one is praised for a hard-won, significant achievement, false humility might be expressed as “Just good luck, I guess” or “It was nothing, really.” In the last circumstance, we do not have to go to the opposite extreme and brag; saying “Thank you” is well within the scope of right speech.

Clearly, outright lies intended to mislead or cause hurt to others are not right speech. But even the most seemingly harmless deviations from what we believe to be real are sources of dukkha, because they plant the karmic seeds of deceit in ourselves and make it increasingly easy for us to be dishonest in the future.

Slander: Building Ourselves Up by Putting Others Down

The term slander in Buddhism generally connotes divisive speech, originally referring to speech that caused division within the Buddha’s Sangha. In this usage, all slander is divisive, but not all divisive speech is slander. As the term is commonly used today, slander—or libel, its written equivalent—describes a kind of dishonesty in which a person intentionally tries to verbally malign, defame, or otherwise damage another person’s reputation.

Slander and libel are criminal actions today, but because slander was not a crime during the time of the Buddha, it is instructive to look at it in relationship to how it affects people in public life who realistically have no legal recourse. Under most circumstances politicians cannot (or will not) sue a person who has slandered them; mudslinging seems to come with that territory. But no one—not even politicians and least of all their families—is exempt from the dukkha that arises from slander. And that is the point: We do not slander or libel people because it causes them pain and puts some karmic seeds into our garden that we would be better off without.

Then what do we do if we think a candidate for public office is a crook? First, we do not go around telling everyone who will listen, “She’s a crook.” That’s slander. Some listeners will believe you, and if the woman is not their candidate, they will repeat the slander as widely as they can. If the candidate really is a crook and you have documentation that she took a bribe in exchange for a vote, say, turn that evidence over to legal authorities, and let them take over and prosecute the case.

When we take slander out of the public forum and consider it in relationship to our acquaintances or people we work with, the same dynamics apply. If they are guilty of a provable criminal act, the evidence should be turned over to authorities. But what if we only suspect that a coworker is, for example, cheating on expense reports? Here is a situation where we can talk to him but should not talk about him. Telling other employees, based on nothing more than our suspicion, that he cheats on his expense account is slander: It can cause irrevocable damage to his reputation and his relationships in the workplace. It may even affect his ability to get or hold a job in your industry (as happened with someone I worked with decades ago).

Slander clearly causes dukkha to others, but it also afflicts the slanderer in at least two ways. First, we plant those habit-forming karmic seeds and are likely to slander others in the future. But right in the very moment we slander someone, we are generating the sense of a separate, permanent self that underlies and fuels so much of our own dukkha. Avoiding creating this self at the expense of another being—building ourselves up by tearing another person down—is one of the ten training precepts for laypeople in Zen Buddhism (see page 85). In this way, slander is much like gossip.

Gossip: The Less Said, the Better

Slander is an action with legal implications, but gossip is one of the frivolous kinds of speech that the Buddha warned against. It seems less serious than slander, but whether it is intentional or mindless, gossip too, once it is out in the world, can afflict both others and ourselves with dukkha.

How difficult it is to “take back” gossip is vividly illustrated in a very old Jewish story: A villager who was filled with remorse for the damage his gossiping had caused a neighbor begged his rabbi to tell him how he could make up for the harm he had caused. The rabbi told him to go to the livestock market in the next village and buy a chicken and as he brought it back, pluck it completely. Several hours later the man returned and handed the featherless chicken to the rabbi. As the man stood there wondering what he should do next, the rabbi told him to retrace his steps and gather up every one of the scattered feathers. When the man exclaimed that it was impossible to gather up all the feathers dispersed between the villages, the rabbi merely nodded. The man understood that his words were no different from the feathers, and he vowed to never spread gossip again.

Since we can never really take our words back, it is critical that we develop such mindfulness about our speech that we do not gossip in the first place. In fact, in developing this aspect of right speech, we can set aside a period—a day, a week, a month—during which we do not speak of anyone who is not physically present. In Transforming the Mind, Healing the World, Joseph Goldstein describes what happened when he undertook this training practice:

When I was first getting into the practice of thinking and learning about [right] speech, I conducted an experiment. For several months I decided not to speak about any third person; I would not speak to somebody about somebody else. No gossip. Ninety percent of my speech was eliminated. Before I did that, I had no idea that I had spent so much time and energy engaged in that kind of talking. It is not that my speech had been particularly malicious, but for the most part it had been useless. I found it tremendously interesting to watch the impact this experiment had on my mind. As I stopped speaking in this way, I found that one way or another a lot of my speech had been a judgment about somebody else. By stopping such speech for a while, my mind became less judgmental, not only of others, but also of myself, and it was a great relief.

When I tried the same experiment, I too found that by imposing the criteria that my speech must be about something true and useful—and not about someone not present—I went nearly mute. It was an incredible learning experience about how much of my speech was “frivolous.”

Sylvia Boorstein makes a telling observation about right speech in It’s Easier Than You Think:

Entry-level Right Speech is speech that doesn’t add pain to any situation. This takes care of the obvious mistakes, like telling lies or purposely using speech hurtfully. High-level Right Speech maintains the balance of situations by not adding the destabilizing element of gossip.

Gossiping is talking about someone not present. Except on rare occasions when one might need to convey a need on behalf of another person, gossip is extra. Talking disparagingly about a third person is inviting the listener to share your grumbly mind space. Talking admiringly about a third person might cause your listener to feel unimportant. Why not choose to talk about current experience?

Boorstein’s observation that gossip is not in the present is an important one. Any time we are not in the present moment, we are literally not in touch with reality. Note also that neither Goldstein nor Boorstein put conditions on gossip by distinguishing true statements from false. Gossip is gossip.

Although we may, as a spiritual training practice, undertake to not speak of someone not in the room, as a practical matter we often must do so to maintain community and family bonds. But are we merely speaking out of boredom or to build ourselves up or tear others down? These are the situations in which we must be very mindful of Sangharakshita’s and Walpola Rahula’s emphasis that our speech be a force for harmony and unity. Here, when we are talking of others, we can cultivate kindness and gentleness in our speech.

Harsh Language: Whom Does It Hurt?

Harsh or abusive language is the opposite of the gentle speech with which we hope to foster unity. Such language separates us from others, giving us a sense of separateness and creating conditions for others’ aversion. Sometimes harsh language is the result of habit, sometimes ill will, sometimes anger, and sometimes the ignorance that causes both ill will and anger, as in this example given by B. Alan Wallace in Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up:

Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, “You idiot! What’s wrong with you? Are you blind?” But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped you is actually blind. He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern: “Are you hurt? Can I help you up?”

Our situation is like that. When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and compassion. Then we are in a position to heal ourselves and others.

Harsh language arising from habit, especially profanity, can be difficult to break because it is often mindless. How spontaneous and deeply ingrained profanity can be was demonstrated when researchers studied the last words of flight crews on the black box recordings made just before their planes crashed. Overwhelmingly, the last thing the pilots and copilots said was “Oh, shit!” Once when a reckless driver made a sudden U-turn and caused me to have a bad accident on my motorcycle, despite years of working with right speech, the words out of my mouth as I crashed were—you guessed it—“Oh, shit.”

We live in an era where harsh language seems all-pervasive. We read it in books, newspapers, and magazines, on walls, and on the Internet. We hear it on the radio, on television, in movies, on music recordings and videos, from other drivers on the highway, from people in checkout lines, amid cheers at sports events, and from our children. For most of us, the more we hear it, the more we use it. Out of habit. But we can unlearn this habit. The Buddha used the example of a child: “A young tender infant lying prone does not even have the notion ‘speech,’ so how should he utter evil speech beyond mere whining” (MN 78:8). He said that each of us can be like that child, but to break our “unwholesome habits,” which originate in our minds, we must practice the cessation of unwholesome habits through the zeal, energy, and all the tools of right effort discussed in Chapter 6.

We must begin to break unwholesome habits by having the intention to do so and by cultivating mindfulness. When we become aware of what we are saying and want to change it, we can. But why should we want to break such habits? Because they hurt us and they hurt others. Even when spoken out of habit, abusive language fuels anger in ourselves and elicits it in others. Harsh words express dukkha and cause it. The mind that produces harsh language is “impure.” When we revisit the first verse of the Dhammapada, we find the insight that when we speak with an impure mind, trouble will follow us “as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.”

Harsh language can produce aversion in those to whom it is directed. When the objects of such language do not have the “power” to withdraw, the verbal abuse may cause them very deep dukkha. In the middle of the twentieth century, ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s research indicated that the more someone beats a puppy, the more the puppy “feels” it deserves the beating. The same seems to be true of very young humans, prisoners of war, and spouses trapped in a cycle of spousal abuse. We can usually spot puppies—and people—who have been physically or verbally abused by their subtle gestures of cringing.

Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish harsh language spoken out of habit from words freshly produced by anger and ill will. In the late nineteenth century William James, author of Varieties of Religious Experience and an eminent early psychologist, coauthored a theory known as the James-Lange theory of emotion. In this scheme, a perceived event (for example, a car cutting you off) produces physiological and behavioral responses (you get red in the face and yell at the other driver), which creates an emotional experience (anger). That is, our physiological responses create our emotions. Research in the past hundred years has not fully proved or disproved this theory, but it has shown that through different patterns of physiological arousal, especially in the brain, if we act angry long enough, we become angry. And certainly continuously using harsh speech is acting angry.

The real difference between using such language from habit and using it from ill will is intention. This takes us back to the realm of karma. Habitual language that produces angry “seeds” eventually results in an angry person. On the other hand, verbal abuse that is intended to hurt another person might have immediate karmic effect. In one of his earthier metaphors regarding ill will, the Buddha says that a cowherd must learn to recognize flies’ eggs, then pick them out (MN 33). Similarly, in confronting ill will, we must cultivate mindfulness to recognize it, then use other techniques, such as meditation on the brahma-viharas, to help us remove it. If we do not, the ill will can rapidly become ill speech or action.

Listening as Right Speech

Because right speech involves communication and not just words, it is helpful to consider the art of listening as part of our practice of right speech. We also need to recognize the simple fact that most of the people we listen to do not use right speech. Consider a few examples:

Your child has a temper tantrum and screams, “Daddy, I hate you.”

Your mother whines, “You’re such an ingrate. You never call me.”

Your life partner complains, “You don’t know what loyalty is. All you want to do is get all the glory for yourself.”

Your friend says, “You’re so self-centered. You never have time for me.”

No matter how unskillfully expressed, each of these statements is trying to tell us something. When we can learn to listen mindfully, we can keep quiet long enough to respond rather than react. We can try to find out what the person is trying to say. Usually such angry comments are requests for more attention. The child may be asking Daddy to play with her rather than read the paper. The mother may want more contact with her child. The partner may want them to do more things together—or perhaps to do more things separately. The friend may want company to go to a movie or concert but does not want to ask and risk being rejected. In any case, when we are subjected to angry speech, we can usually end the situation by listening—really listening—rather than reacting.

Listening can be a compassionate, loving form of right speech. But there are also other ways in which “silence is golden.”

Silence May Be Golden— or Silence May Be Yellow

The Buddha described a number of conditions—truthfulness and usefulness, right time and place, kindness and fostering harmony—for speech to be right. Otherwise we are invited to maintain “noble silence.” When we take these conditions into consideration, we have some guidelines for dealing with even very difficult situations where right speech may seem especially elusive and silence may be the best course.

Although the Buddha insisted that honesty is the ultimate moral virtue, he also taught that speech must be useful or beneficial: We should remain silent or even lie if doing so will prevent harm to another being. If, for example, a drunken neighbor waving a gun knocks on your door and asks if you’ve seen his wife, common sense will tell you that even if she is sitting in your kitchen, you should lie and say you don’t know where she is.

The situation can be more challenging when the “silence” needs to be partial—for example, when a terminally ill patient asks his doctor what is really wrong with him. Here the doctor must rely on truthfulness, usefulness, and kindness. She can answer honestly that the situation is grave and that a difficult program of treatment lies ahead of him. But unless the patient asks specifically, she does not have to go into gruesome details about how this illness will affect his body or how the treatment itself will make him miserable. The doctor can take the lead from what the patient is asking and respond gently. When the same doctor replies to questions from the immediate family of the terminally ill man, she may give more details—for example, about how the illness usually affects sufferers, about the treatment and its side effects, about special needs that may arise for equipment or nursing care—but this information too must be rendered with kindness.

In other kinds of situations, silence is far from golden. It is downright “yellow” for us to fail to interrupt situations that can result in physical or emotional harm. If, for example, you overhear a child next door being physically abused, your silence could result in serious harm to the child, while calling 911 immediately could protect the child. Children in school situations also often feel powerless. For example, suppose your grade-school child tells you tearfully that a substitute teacher demands that students pray together at the end of each class. Your child is upset because the prayer is a Christian prayer and he is a Muslim. The teacher is not only breaking the law but also causing the children dukkha. Your silence is not golden, but how and to whom you speak out will depend upon the school and the structures in place in your community.

Sometimes situations demand that we break silence to try to thwart public actions that would harm communities—our own or perhaps others’. If, for example, the local zoning board plans to put a toxic-chemical site in or a four-lane roadway through a densely populated low-income neighborhood, creating pollution and a safety hazard for a nearby school, you can—and should— voice your objections within the bounds of right speech.

Sometimes we have to resort to the power of the purse to practice our commitment to right speech.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

When we are trying to cultivate right speech, it sometimes seems that we are bombarded by a culture that flaunts expressions of “wrong speech.” The conflict for us may be between a passionate belief in the constitutional right of freedom of speech and an equally passionate belief that words can truly hurt others. We are inundated, for example, with advertising that glamorizes smoking, drinking, and other activities that harm us, others, or the environment; radio talk shows that broadcast obscenely racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic, and aggression-provoking statements; television talk shows whose guests create divisive, angry, and sometimes even violent programming; commercial greeting cards—especially birthday cards—that have ageist, sexist, and generally unkind messages; T-shirts and automobile bumper stickers worded to incite disharmony and even belligerence.

In all of these situations, we can express our objection to “wrong speech” through the power of the purse, by simply not patronizing the products or the companies that make, sponsor, or sell them. But in the interest of right speech, we often can do more. As with other instances of wrong speech, we need first of all to develop the mindfulness to recognize it. Then we need to act on that awareness.

When I began cultivating right speech, I looked back with embarrassment at how thoughtless I had been in the past. I remembered looking at advertising that showed people in dangerous drinking situations and thinking they looked like fun. I reddened when I remembered sending a birthday card that said: “Want to lose 20 ugly pounds? Cut off your head.” I’ve worn T-shirts and put bumper stickers on my car that excoriated people whose political positions were different from mine.

This does not mean that we have to avoid talk shows that are genuinely informative, such as the ones on public broadcasting stations; that we cannot use bumper stickers that urge people to vote for our preferred candidates—even ironic ones such as “Reelect Gore”; or that we cannot wear message T-shirts about age such as “When Did My Wild Oats Turn to Raisin Bran?”

But when we encounter popular-culture communications that are untrue or not beneficial, we can be moved to do more than not patronize them. Money is the bottom line for such enterprises, and communicating by writing “love letters” of protest to the sponsors of such shows and products, with copies to the advertising agencies, the network airing, or the store selling the “wrong speech,” can be a powerful “stick.” Our “carrot” can be to patronize others selling right speech, which benefits both them and us.

Walking the Walk by Talking the Talk

When we speak mindlessly, as Zen master Seung Sahn says, “The tongue has no bone,” because it “can say one thing in one sentence, and in the next breath say an entirely different thing. The tongue can make anything. This is the source of all lies and gossip. By itself, the tongue has no direction, so it has no bone.” When we develop mindfulness of right speech, we give speech its “bone.” Considering all the many ways that communication is integral to our daily life, we see that we can, if we choose, make right speech our whole spiritual practice.