The Practice of Śīla: Ethics and Morality in Modern Buddhism
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA
ANDREW OLENDZKI
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER
Buddhism’s three trainings—śīla, samādhi, and prajñā—are often translated as morality, meditation, and wisdom. Let’s start by defining morality in a Buddhist context.
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: Thrangu Rinpoche explained śīla as meaning “cool.” He likened it to a cool breeze in a hot country. It brings relief and happiness, since it cools the fire of desire that’s burning us up. Since our runaway desire isn’t ultimately going to fulfill us, the contentment with what is and with what we have brings a breath of fresh air.
Paying attention to ethics brings us more in alignment with our true nature. It provides the conditions for awakening by aligning us more with our inherent buddha nature. Acting in an ethical way, having conduct that is beneficial to oneself and others, creates the karma and the conditions that help us awaken.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Actually, I prefer to define sīla as “integrity,” since the terms morality and virtue both have some baggage in our culture. “Integrity” carries more the sense of being something organic that expresses the quality of your mind. “Morality” is coming from outside; “virtue” is something you aspire to, and “ethics” is a big umbrella society puts over you. One of the core insights of Buddhism on this whole matter is that sīla, how you act, is an expression of your understanding.
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Ethics and morality are so fraught in our culture because they are generally treated as absolute rules ordained by the divine: You must behave in these ways and if you don’t you’ll burn in hell for it. Ethics in Buddhism is more about discovering how to live in accord with who we really are, as Palden so beautifully expressed.
I think it’s wise for Andrew to choose the word “integrity.” It’s in the territory but it doesn’t bring with it all the fire and brimstone that “ethics” and “morality” do in our culture. Instead of ethics as a set of rules imposed from the outside, śīla is understood as how a buddha would conduct herself or himself spontaneously.
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: It’s a sense of alignment with deeper principles of truth and reality and with our fundamental nature, which is basic goodness. In the traditions that most of us grew up in, there is usually the sense that there is some problem at the core of who we are.
Buddhism’s flowering in the West coincided with a flight from rules and convention. How has our relationship to śīla evolved over the years?
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: In the beginning of the Zen movement here, people were not that interested in śīla. They were interested in meditation experience and awakening. In the 1970s, morality was looked upon as conventional social wisdom, and everybody was trying to escape from that because it was restrictive.
That was very true for the first fifteen or twenty years but then there were spectacular ethical scandals alongside an overall maturing of the people who were in the movement. Now I would say there is a strong emphasis on precepts and ethical conduct.
Since precepts mostly have to do with how we conduct ourselves in relation to each other, Sangha and śīla go together. In our Everyday Zen groups, taking the precepts, studying them, and bringing them into the heart—not just as a set of rules to live by, but as a set of deep reflections—has become a tremendously important part of what we do. It is as important—or more important—than the emphasis on awakening.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: The vipassanā experience is very similar. There was a great infatuation with the meditative experience early on, although the retreats did always begin (and still do) with a formal taking of the precepts. In similar fashion, though, there has been an evolution as students have matured.
Sīla, samādhi, and paññā are interrelated and any one of them can lead naturally to the other two. Even if we come to practice out of an interest in peak experiences, we begin to see more clearly the stuff arising in our minds and we can’t help but attend more carefully to its ethical content. As our understanding of paññā deepens and we begin to better understand the impermanent and selfless nature of it all, an increase in integrity will naturally result.
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: In Vajrayāna in the West, I think there was always more emphasis on conduct and on the bodhisattva attitude and vow, and just fundamental basic conduct. There have been exceptions, but overall there’s been a less dramatic change than what Norman and Andrew have described. Śīla has been there all along as a vital component, sometimes more in the background, sometimes more in the foreground.
How do we relate to the traditional rules and vows that guided our forebears in the Buddhist traditions?
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: We need rules and precepts, but what we’re emphasizing here is the spirit behind those rules. If the spirit behind the rules is to align yourself with your true nature, then the rules are understood in a very different way. It’s a very different matter when you have rules held as guidelines for awakened conduct, where awakening, kindness, and cooperative living are the watchwords. You don’t have fixed principles so much, so you don’t debate over when does life start and end. Those debates are less important than finding out what is the kindest thing here, what will bring the most benefit to everybody.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Rules in the context of sīla also afford refuge. The laws of cause and effect mean that the harm you do is not only going to hurt the people around you but come back and hurt you. Even if you feel disinclined to obey them, having a set of rules gives you a kind of protection from yourself, as well as a protection for everyone else. It’s a gift of harmlessness that you give the people around you. Seeing sīla as a refuge and a gift takes some of the edginess out of the “you must obey the rules or else” point of view.
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: The core of Buddhist ethics is the motivation to not cause harm to any living being and to be of benefit to others.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: The Buddha emphasized intention as the driving force of karma. What you do is less important than the intention behind how you do it. That universal guideline is not bound to cultural vicissitudes. There’s a certain timeless quality around working from intention rather than on the basis of a specific set of actions.
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: The understanding of interconnectedness at the heart of the Dharma offered a huge breakthrough in human consciousness—a transcendence of the principle of preserving one’s tribe, which was the source of so many ethical codes. Today our interconnectedness is more relevant than ever. The highest alignment within our hearts is to understand our interconnectedness and appreciate that we really want to protect and enhance the life of every sentient being.
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: That is what our morality is based on in the biggest context, but there’s also a narrow context. In a training situation, practitioners often practice according to a rule. That rule can be very specific and strict, particularly in monastic contexts. If you’re following the traditional Vinaya as a Theravāda monk, you take a vow to live by these rules as an integral part of your commitment to being trained. In that sense, Vinaya rules are instrumental. Not eating after noon is not a universal moral rule of kindness. It’s a rule you undertake for the benefit for your training.
There’s still a place for those rules, and I feel great admiration for those who have adopted them, particularly Western monastics who are taking a great cultural leap. They’re preserving something very ancient for a beneficial purpose. At the same time, there’s a Buddhist morality that doesn’t depend on following the 250 rules. In Zen, we have sixteen bodhisattva precepts, which are in a way the opposite of Vinaya. They’re very broad and they’re understood in Zen as kōans—not so much specific rules as deep reflections about our conduct. So we have two poles in our practice of śīla: very specific training rules and a much wider sense of ethical principles.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: The Theravāda tradition has always employed a two-part system: very strict rules for monks and nuns as an integral part of their training and very broad precepts for laypeople. The good part of that broadness is that it leaves you a lot of personal responsibility for how you’re going to define the precepts. But that is often frustrating for people. Some just want to be told what is right and wrong, so they don’t have to figure out whether walking on grass violates the first precept not to kill because there are bound to be bugs in there.
But that’s the First Noble Truth: we live in a flawed system. Everybody is kind of left to their own devices in figuring out where to draw the lines. For some Buddhists vegetarianism is an important expression of not killing, but most Buddhists are not vegetarians, and neither was the Buddha. On almost any matter we can think of there’s a personal engagement of one’s own understanding about right conduct. There is also some natural growth and evolution in how to apply guidelines as one’s understanding deepens.
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: There are core rules in the Vinaya that deeply reflect and reinforce the principles we’ve been talking about, and ancillary rules that have more to do with relating to the mores in a particular cultural context. The ancillary rules are more situational. It’s important to make a distinction between the core integrities and those that we may change according to circumstances of time and place.
Of all the rules, the prohibitions regarding sexual misconduct cause the most confusion, since sexual mores seem so culturally based.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Once again, it’s easier for the monks and nuns—celibacy is nonnegotiable, end of story. But for laypeople, there’s a sliding scale.
In the ancient world this precept basically forbade premarital or extramarital sex. How you apply that today is different, because so many of the cultural definitions are malleable. However, if we’re engaging in a sexual act in a way that inflicts real pain or humiliation or is exploitative, we can be pretty sure we’re on the unwholesome side of the continuum. But if we’re doing a sexual act with an attitude of generosity and loving-kindness, we’ll probably be in more wholesome areas of behavior. It’s not exactly what you do with whom so much as the quality of mind with which you’re approaching what you’re doing.
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Sexuality is very powerful. It’s a heavy karmic act, more than you might think in any given moment of passion. At the time of the sexual revolution we had the idea that sex was just a thing you did, and that if you got over your hang-ups, it was really no big deal. It turns out that it’s not so simple to get over your hang-ups and that sexual activity is powerful—it has a powerful karmic effect.
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: Different Vajrayāna teachers have interpreted “sexual misconduct” differently. Some on the very strict side believe that you’re only supposed to have one partner for life. My own teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, interpreted it for us much more in the spirit of what Andrew was talking about. The cornerstone is that our actions be based on a loving, compassionate heart and that any repercussions that arise from one’s sexual activities are supposed to be looked into deeply.
As an exercise, I would like to pick a śīla guideline from each of the traditions and ask you to comment. We can start with an example from the Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts of the Zen tradition: “I vow not to misuse intoxicants but to keep the mind clear.”
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Intoxication means going beyond an aware and clear state of mind. I tell students that it doesn’t mean you can never drink alcohol, because it is possible to have a glass of wine with dinner and not become intoxicated. Some counter that one sip of wine has one sip of intoxication in it. Nevertheless, we would all recognize a kind of line you cross when you become a little tipsy. I say have a glass of wine or a social drink, but if someone said they would like to use marijuana or take cocaine or ecstasy I would suggest they not take that precept. I don’t want to give someone a precept that they will not follow, since those substances are always intoxicating. You don’t smoke marijuana without getting intoxicated.
Overall, the trouble with intoxication is that it can cause you to break other precepts. In my view, when you feel yourself coming close to intoxication you stop the drinking at that moment. Also, if you find you’re drinking frequently, you need to examine that. We try to talk over how we’re doing with our precept practice over time with fellow students and teachers. The precepts work best when there’s an ongoing sense of reflection.
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: In Vajrayāna there’s the monastic tradition and the yogic tradition. The yogic tradition is much more flexible in terms of intoxicants. Trungpa Rinpoche famously demonstrated a yogic way of life. In the yogic context, the consciousness of the individual and the individual’s deep integrity is harder to ascertain. Since it is not possible to judge whether the actions of an accomplished yogi emerge from a deep and uncompromising compassion, despite their external appearance, self-honesty is critical. Otherwise, people may delude themselves about their true progress on the path and believe their behavior is yogic when it’s really just harmful.
To continue the exercise, I’d like to ask Andrew to comment on the first precept, not killing, which some people regard as a no-brainer.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Again, the first precept is talking to quality of intention rather than the action performed. In Buddhist psychology, action is merely the active mode of the passive side, which is intention arising from disposition. The mind is constantly manifesting some emotional state. It could be a state of anger; it could be a state of loving-kindness—anything in the spectrum of the emotional manifestations of being human.
As I understand the first precept, it’s largely saying that some of those emotions are harmful to ourselves and others—especially the ones that are rooted in hatefulness, cruelty, or wanting to do harm to others. Whenever harmfulness arises—whether in a very strong form of hatefulness or in a very weak form of mild annoyance or judgmentalism—we should simply notice that. In the noticing, we see whether we can abandon it and let go of the hold it has on us.
The more we do that, at ever more subtle levels, we are purifying our mind. And as a result, our actions will be purified. So we’re not working to transform behavior as much as we’re working to transform the emotional quality of mind that we have while we’re behaving.
Part of the practice of śīla is that you commit to certain guidelines that can help you in the moment to not overreact, even though the deeper practice is to get to the bottom of it.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: Exactly. Buddhist psychology sees our emotional responses happening on three levels. The first is latent or unconscious; we can’t see it. The second is what’s arising in direct awareness. This is what we access in meditation. The third is what they call a surging stage, where it’s out of control. We get carried away, whatever the emotion is. Much of the time emotion moves from latent to surging without any awareness.
So meditation is working on the second level, learning to see ever more carefully what’s arising and falling away. Wisdom is working on transforming those latent dispositions so they’re not as powerful, while sīla has a lot to do with managing what’s already in or threatening to be in the surging state. If we control it in its grossest sense, that allows us to proceed gradually to controlling things in more and more subtle ways.
It seems like advanced teachers in all the traditions have demonstrated examples of breaking the rules. Ajahn Chah’s outer conduct caught some people off-guard, and there are certainly plenty of Zen and Vajrayāna stories of teachers acting in bizarre, outrageous ways. What does this rule breaking say about how Buddhism approaches the rules? They apply until they don’t?
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: This brings up a common question about the relativism of Buddhist ethics, since in the cases of teacher behavior it boils down to an assessment of their genuine level of realization. There’s no blanket rule about external behavior. Certain behavior might be based on teaching nonconceptuality or cutting through fixed beliefs and ideas about reality.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: I would distinguish things that are unusual from things that are harmful. If you’re making the disciple carry bundles of rocks into one pile and then another, and he doesn’t see the point of it, I could see that as being a higher wisdom that the teacher sees but the student doesn’t. But if the rule breaking is somehow gratifying to the rule breaker, in some direct way, I’m frankly much more suspicious.
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Some might say that the higher the degree of enlightenment, the more flexibility one has to use rule breaking as teaching. But I would say the opposite. The more you are serving as an example to the community, the more it behooves you to practice stronger ethical conduct as an example.
From a bodhisattva path perspective, there is the possibility of breaking rules, not to flout convention and teach people, but for purposes of compassion. Breaking a training rule to be kind to someone is permissible when the clear motivation for it is kindness. What becomes more problematic is when rule breaking is destructive. That does happen. In fact, it seems to always happen that someone who thinks they are awake does something thinking, “I know it’ll cause a fuss but it’ll be good for everybody.” That is almost always self-deceptive. Nobody is awakened enough to be hurting people “for their own good.”
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: There is an example often quoted in Vajrayāna about breaking the most fundamental precept—not to kill another human being—in order to do benefit. In the ninth century, King Langdarma was systemically stamping out and destroying Dharma in Tibet to the point of near elimination. At that point, a monk named Palkyi Dorje took on the karma of killing the king. He’s seen as a hero because when the greatest good for the greatest number of people supersedes one of the precepts, it would be self-centered to not break a rule. But one must be willing to bear the difficult karma that may ensue if one does break a precept.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: I don’t disagree with you, but I do worry about the slippery slope that that sets up. If we start thinking it’s all about doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people, it becomes a kind of utilitarianism. There are stories about people in Southeast Asia who executed their wounded friends so the enemy would not torture them. Those are magnificent examples of courage and fortitude, but there’s no sense that the law of karma has been altered. If for a greater good someone is willing to spend incarnations in hell to pay for it, that can be a noble sacrifice. But it’s very different from saying that killing is therefore right in some cases.
LAMA PALDEN DROLMA: That’s a key point. Śīla is not about rules given by a divine authority who also can grant dispensation. It’s about deeply understanding the laws of cause and effect.
ANDREW OLENDZKI: These are descriptive laws of nature, not prescriptive laws of a higher authority. Something is unwholesome or unhealthy by definition if it leads to suffering for self or others, and leads away from seeing things clearly. It’s by definition wholesome or healthy if it does the opposite. Sīla describes the quality of the event and its effect, rather than saying what you should or should not do.