Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Ethical behaviour - foundation or result?
DairyLama
Veteran Veteran
Some regard ethical behaviour as a necessary foundation for meditation practice, others regard ethical behaviour as natural result of meditation practice.
What's your view?
P
What's your view?
P
0
Comments
It is certain that a regular meditative practice will develop an existing ethical foundation.
and most do. at the very least at the beginning, most are torturing ourselves with guilt and greed and punishing ourselves, putting ourselves through really bad mental states for no reasons etc...
It's just that eventually people understand what they are doing and how much suffering they create in themselves and others...
so yes.
Yes, technically that is possible, but it is also a grand waste of time. One isn't going to make any progress at all in meditation without first having established a foundation of good ethical conduct. It's like building a house without a foundation. Outwardly, there may be peace, but underneath the mind is still disturbed and agitated. Meditation is reduced to superficial relaxation technique at that level.
It takes several years of sila practice with at least a firm commitment to the five precepts, before one can hope to break through to deeper levels of concentration. Of course, sila and samadhi can be developed in tandem, as they do support each other. All of the eight branches of the eightfold path support each other. However, neither can sila be developed by samadhi alone, nor can samadhi be developed by sila alone.
Cheers, Thomas
I've seen many cases where the opposite of this is true. Through meditation, the harmony of sila is realized, and characteristics that flow counter to sila are abandoned, because cultivated mindfulness quenches them quite naturally, not because of ethical prescriptions.
In fact, how could we even see the difference between cultural conditioning and right action without developing mindfulness in meditation?
I think that many Western practitioners have it backwards, because meditation is seen as a kind of therapy in the West. People use meditation to deal with anxiety, irritability, sleep problems, and what not. While this is all beneficial and helpful in a therapeutic sense, it is -at best- only half of what Buddhist meditation is REALLY about, namely the deep transformation of the mind that comes with the investigation of the self (and phenomena), in particular the development of pañña. This can only be undertaken once a minimum of sanity is already established, which implies firm commitment to the precepts. If one keeps indulging in sense pleasures, immersed into the world, with no firm ethical commitment, meditation is a pointless exercise and ultimately a waste of time, because it cannot go beyond the stage of superficial pacification. Without ethical commitment, it is just a fad.
However, it is important to keep in mind that people have very different dispositions and that some people start meditation quite naturally and progress easily while others have difficulties even with the basics. There is no judgement here. We are all different. It is likely that those people who find meditation easy to sustain, even without good ethical conduct and renunciation, benefit from accumulated merits that provide them with a starting advantage. Yet, if they don't commit to sila and nekkhamma in time, they will run out of luck at some point and their practice will collapse. So, in the end even these people will find that they cannot sustain mental development without ethical development.
The sequence is more or less given by the three-fold division of the eightfold path: first comes wisdom and insight, because without even a tiny spark of insight nothing changes and everything just remains static. Then comes ethical development, which in the beginning means tackling gross defilements, and then comes mental development. After this, it starts over, because mental development leads to new insight, and so the eightfold path picks up again at the beginning, moving upward in a spiral-like motion.
Cheers, Thomas
This sounds a little magical to me.
Meditation (samādhi) does by itself not develop sīla. However, samādhi helps developing wisdom (pañña). You can gain a lot of insights in meditation, some of them irrelevant, others relevant to ethical issues. If someone gains insight about an ethical issue and applies this to his/her own situation -bingo- one revolution of the eightfold path is accomplished. But it is important to note that this is not a consequence of samādhi, but a consequence of wisdom (pañña) and effort (vāyāma).
Frankly, many people cannot see the difference.
Mindfulness (sati) is yet another thing. It is connected with samādhi, and while samādhi clearly supports sati, the former is not strictly necessary to develop the latter. That is to say, one can develop sati in other ways than with formal meditation, which is a practical concern of some importance, because sati can be practiced in normal day-to-day situations. For the development of wisdom, however, all three mental components are necessary. At least that's my understanding.
Cheers, Thomas
That's a neat way of describing it.:)
P
An important aspect of mindfulness is that it increases our awareness and understanding of others, leading to a more considerate attitude and therefore more ethical behaviour.
P
can you tell me what you mean by "sustaining meditation"? And also, what insights can be gained that aren't relevant to ethical issues?
What insights can be gained that aren't relevant to ethical issues? --- I am not sure how to interpret this question. Of course, there are plenty of things that don't relate to ethics and about which insights can be gained through samādhi. Realising subtle forms of grasping, subtle forms of aversion, realising obstacles and ways to surmount them, seeing correlations that were previously unseen, and so on... What does your question imply?
Cheers, Thomas
truthseeker, the problem is that one cannot really understand ethical behaviors unless he has cultivated some wisdom and experienced, seen the effects of his behaviors in himself through meditation.
if you had to have purely ethical behaviors before meditation, no one would be able to do so simply because they cannot truly understand them.
and if you did only display purely ethical behaviors, you would not suffer much and likely to not have much interest in Buddhism to begin with.
well, you had said that insight is gained through meditation that doesn't affect one's ethics, so I'm asking for examples. All the things you just mentioned can't help but affect one's sense of ethics.
Is it even possible to be free of cultural conditioning? (honest question)
I agree with you that sila is the foundation. :-)
we can free ourselves from all suffering, the terrible anger fits, dark and depressed decades, demons that consume us from the inside... but not from the almighty cultural conditioning?
I suppose it is unskilful to say that culture is something that entraps us, as suffering is only personal. However, I was making the distinction between acting from a sense of taught tradition vs acting from clear mindfulness. In this case, I consider it quite possible and helpful to transcend our cultural patterns. Obviously, there is no need to deny or forget them, but when deciding, you pull from a different place than the patterning.
To me, I see 'taught ethics' in much this same way.
Its like the difference between walking around your well known house with your eyes closed. Perhaps, with proper remembering and decisions, you'll avoid certain behaviors that might lead you to bump into things. When you open your eyes, you don't have to remember the specific ethical obstacles, because you can see the things right in front of you that you don't bump into, because they're painful for ourselves and others. Then your walking becomes natural and ethical, because you're deciding not to hurt yourself and others from what you're actually seeing, not from what was told to you.
Magical? I'm not sure what that word means to you... the way I see the development is not as rigid as yours. I accept you see a specific pattern to things, but to say "meditation does by itself not develop sila"... to me it sounds as though you consider sila to be a solid thing... a knowledge of right action that must be passed from mind to mind. I do not see this. I see sila as an expression of right action, not in a memorization sense, but as people sit and see the world in front of their eyes they begin acting more compassionately.
What I have seen is that ethics don't necessarily come from knowledge, it can also come from a stable connection to reality, unclouded by troubling emotions.
For instance, my girlfriend and I were having a dispute of an ethical kind, and I was sitting mindfully and watching her upset and aggressive. When I offered my view, her anger would flare, and her defensiveness prevented any kind of communication. So I shut up, and took her in my arms, and held her. As she again felt loved and accepted, her anger melted, and she naturally resonated to the ethical view.
This is not magic, its right understanding. Once relief from pain is obtained, such as with a hug or through meditation, we have a natural goodness that expresses itself as skillful interaction with our world. We don't have to obtain ethics, we need to clear that which prevents it, and for that, there is no better vehicle than meditation... although hugs are nice, especially when mindful.
With warmth,
Matt
Yes, it's dismissive in the sense of "I don't think so" rather than "I don't know." My apologies if this sounds conceited.
As previously mentioned, and Richard seems to agree, ethical and mental development support each other and can be developed in tandem. However, one must analyse this really carefully in order to see what happens and how this works. To say that sīla is developed by samādhi is an oversimplification, because it misses some important steps that introspection should reveal.
Yes Matt, I believe I understand what you are saying. I take this "stable connection to reality" you speak of to be based on upekkhā and sati. These seem to be the qualities on which you relied in the example of the argument with your friend. Yet one must find that upekkhā and sati are NOT samādhi, and although samādhi helps developing these qualities, it does not follow that it therefore automatically develops sīla, because the absence of upekkhā and sati is not per se unethical. You see, I am trying to tackle this from a analytical point of view. The essence is that your decision not to get into a fight is based on sīla (a moral decision) with upekkhā and sati as supporting conditions.
The three direct props of sīla are right view (to know what is right/skilful and wrong unskilful), right intention (the intention to act accordingly) and right effort (mental energy sustaining right intention). Good moral conduct is directly based on these three path factors and it emanates from them without intermediate steps. The direct result of sīla in turn is a huge reduction in immediate (aksuala) kammavipāka, the type of kamma that comes right back at you, like remorse, lingering emotional pain, brooding, defiance, aversion, retributive actions by others, and so forth. These in turn are hindrances to the mental development path factors, including samādhi.
Let me illustrate this by the practical example you mentioned. If you had chosen to fight with your friend instead of calming her down, it may have ended with hurt feelings on both sides. In this case, the basis for samādhi and the other mental path factors would have been withdrawn instantly, because at once the mind is flooded with painful emotions, perhaps regret, and perhaps with overwhelming streams of thought about what went wrong and how to set things straight, and such. In other words, a tremendous amount of mental energy would have been wasted on the issue and its consequences, which in turn would have drained the capacity for mental development and meditation. This, however, was prevented by skilful action. And that's why sīla is the basis for samādhi, and not the other way round.
Yet, because the factors of the eightfold path proceed not in a linear chain, but in an circular motion like an upward spiral, it can be said that all the factors are intertwined and support each other.
Cheers, Thomas
I wonder if your analytical point of view is shooting at air. You are bound to hit and miss, no matter where you aim. I agree you are hitting some points that are logical, and yet you're also missing them as you apply rigid form like "this is that and leads only to this, propped up by that." Those sound to me like spokes of a wheel you draw back to a central self that never existed.
For instance, the condition that supports equanimity is disturbance. The condition that supports mindfulness is chaos. The condition that supports meditation is distraction.
As you described, those pieces are interconnected, so drawing on a sense of self in order to teach morality is a normal practice... as seen with monks and laypeople. However, stating "Because my self has right speech and right view and right livelihood, my self has sila" seems to me to be a backslide of understanding from "Sila is a natural expression of resonance once self is out of the way." I could shrug and see either statement as true enough.
With warmth,
Matt
You had me thoroughly confused for a moment. :crazy: You appear to say that equanimity, etc. logically depend on their respective opposites to create the dichotomy in the first place. While this is true, it doesn't connect with what we were talking about earlier, namely psychological relation rather than the logical relation.
I agree with the last paragraph.
Cheers, Thomas
Introspection has not revealed these steps to me. Could you be more explicit, please?
I point at what I see to be the conditions in order to help pull the ideological notions away from a progressing, developing self. This is said as direct response of what I see as the crux of my disagreement with your explanations.
With warmth,
Matt