What does it mean to live ethically when life isn’t always clear or simple? In this Dharma talk, Lisa Kring explores Buddhist ethics as a practice of staying open, humble, and willing to learn.
There is a practice that dates back to the Buddha called Sila Nusati. Nusati means to reflect on, and sila is the Pali word for ethical conduct. It’s the practice of reflecting on one’s own beautiful ethical conduct. It’s learning to appreciate your own goodness. The Buddha would constantly refer to ethical conduct as beautiful.
For lay practitioners, the Buddha offered five simple ethical instructions: refraining from lying or harsh speech, refraining from taking things that aren’t given, refraining from intoxicants that cloud the mind, and refraining from sexual misconduct. These ethical teachings are intentionally simple, but they’re not always that easy.
For many of us, the mind has a deeply ingrained habit of paying more attention to where we act unskillfully than to where we act skillfully in life. Because of what’s called the negativity bias, which is a survival mechanism, we often only focus on what we did wrong. Nobody needs practice support for that.
We need to also focus on and embrace what we’ve done that’s good, and to know that in a healthy way. The Buddha offered a practice for this. Here’s the passage:
When wise people sit on the chair or bed or rest on the ground,
the beautiful actions they have done in the past,
beautiful bodily, verbal, and mental actions,
cover them, overspread them, and envelop them.
Just as the shadow of a great mountain at the end of the day covers the earth,
so, too, their beautiful actions cover and envelop them.
Isn’t that a beautiful image? The richness of it. He doesn’t merely say that wise people need to remember their goodness or write it down. He says, goodness covers them, envelops them, shades them. He’s asking you to feel that as a refuge.
I invite you to practice this in your own way at the end of the day: reflect on kindness that you offered, honesty you practiced in any way, generosity that you expressed. Even the unkind words you chose not to say. That also counts as goodness.
Let that goodness spread over you like the shadow of a mountain. Feel it, the shade…like a cool evening shadow. There’s something nourishing about that, and even protective. To be enveloped by the goodness. That’s the language.
But it’s not always easy to do that. That’s why we must practice: to offset the negativity bias, to weaken that tendency. When we are more enveloped in our own goodness, then we’re able to show up in the complexity of things more.
It’s much harder to honestly look at your own actions if you’re contracted in a lot of negativity. Reflecting on goodness resources you to look at your actions and be honest and accountable; to be able to feel the complexity without thinking anything’s wrong with you.
This lays the foundation for the next practice, which is to honestly reflect on our actions, and be open to learning from them. It takes a lot of strength to do that without collapsing into shame, denial, or defensiveness. If we can learn, then we can change, and continue to grow.
This is the intentionality at the heart of Buddhist ethics. Our intentions shape all of our lives, moment to moment. I love this quote from the Buddha, which points to intentionality as the forerunner of how things unfold:
The thought manifests as the word,
the word manifests as the deed,
the deed develops into habit,
the habit hardens into character.
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
and let them spring from love, and care for and concern for all beings.
As the shadow follows the body,
As we think, so we become.
The first thing is to give ourselves permission to explore what’s our intention before we act. Taking some time, and slowing down. Often when I’m in a complex situation, I slow down and have to sit with it and find out where I’m really coming from. Is my intention coming from fear or generosity? Is it resentment or kindness? Is it grasping? Or is it truly compassion?
If you give yourself permission, you’ll know. Sometimes the intentions are clear, sometimes they’re mixed in some way. Generosity might be accompanied by wanting to be appreciated in some way, or wanting something in return. That’s just the human condition.
We’re inviting ourselves to know the truth, so that we clean up our actions, because as we think, so we become. That’s the karmic cause and effect of reality. It’s always playing out, right now. Right this moment. It’s part of being human that we’re going to have a mixed intention. No shame in that. If we can catch and remedy the intentionality before we act, that’s great.
But then we get into some complexity. You can act from a sincere and skillful place, and harm still happens. You can try to help someone by unintentionally neglecting someone else. Ethical practice then becomes a much larger question than just intentionality. The Dharma teacher Robert Bayer says, “It’s a mark of ethical maturity to be able to hold uncertainty and complexity. To embrace that, and still show up.”
The Buddha offered his son, Rahula, a wonderful practical way of approaching complexity. He taught him to reflect on an action before doing the action, while doing the action, and after doing it. The Buddha is saying, it’s not clear a lot of the time. The right and wrong isn’t so black and white. So practice before, during, and after.
Oftentimes, I’ll be in a situation in relationship to someone else, and in the midst of it I have to course correct. I’ll think, okay, I’m going try this—but then it doesn’t feel right. Then I’ll do my best to shift as I’m in that experience. That’s what the Buddha’s offering you: permission to course correct, not just to blindly stay the course. It’s a wave that we’re riding. You don’t have to do it perfectly, just stay in it. Stay awake.
Rarely life goes in a neat and tidy way. Does it ever? It’s messy. We’re invited in practice to go into the mess, and to learn from it. With humility, with love, with our own goodness. We have our intentions, we practice, but we don’t know how it’s going to unfold, do we?
It’s an aspiration in this practice of truly caring, to act as wisely as we can, fully knowing that we act in darkness…but holding light, our own light, in there.
Thank you for reading,
Lisa Kring
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