The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives

Buddhist Hour
Script No. 439
Broadcast live on 3MDR 97.1FM
9 PM to 10 PM
On Friday 4 August 2006 CE 2550 Buddhist Era

This script is entitled:

"Lifetimes of Learning "
Class 6 - Exploring the Perfection of Morality Part 1

This evening we will talk about the Perfection of Morality.

All religions teach morality as a principle tenant in their systems of practice. Historically in Australia, we have looked at morality primarily from the viewpoint of the Christian religion. There are certainly similarities between the precepts that are taught in Buddhism as the fundamental morality to be practiced by Buddhist laypersons and the Ten Commandments for Christian lay practitioners. So how do the teachings differ?

In Christianity the moralities are called commandments, therefore the perception is that morality is a process of obeying a set of rules or commands provided by a higher being, the Christian God. The Christian God through his compassion states commandments are for the welfare of the individual and the society.

In Buddhism there are no commandments or similar authoritarian type rules of behaviour. This is because at the very heart of Buddhism is the principle that the individual is solely responsible for his or her own welfare. Happiness or unhappiness arises just as a result of each persons' own actions.

Buddhist morality does not accept that our life and wellbeing are the outcome of the will of a supreme or higher being. The basis of a person choosing to maintain moral behaviour, therefore, is not because it is a commandment of the religion but because there is a clear understanding and comprehension that morality is our first and best defence against creating more suffering for ourselves in the future.

As the practitioner's mind becomes clearer and brighter, knowledge comes as to the profound nature of the morality teachings. It is possible to know directly, each within our own minds, what Buddha Dhamma Teacher John Hughes said to his students on numerous occasions; that all the sufferings we have experienced in our life came from not keeping the moralities.

Buddhism or more specifically Buddha Dhamma emphasises that we should learn and realise directly about things, rather than to follow them as a simple directive of the religion. If we learn something in our own minds through our own insight wisdom then our ability to practice that thing becomes unshakable.

We need a lot of good kamma or merit, good actions, to understand things like this directly with insight wisdom. Insight wisdom is much deeper than an intellectual appreciation. It leaves a knowledge in your mind that you do not forget. Insight wisdom is the superior target of Buddhist learning or Buddha Dhamma.

When we come to understand something intellectually or emotionally it is knowledge on a weaker level. We may recognise that intellectually we need to practice something to overcome or remove a mental habit that is causing us a problem, however our intellectual understanding alone is often not powerful enough for us to apply the new method consistently and successfully to abandon our old behaviour.

To use a recent example, how many people said this to themselves today? "My life is going extremely well". You may recall on a previous program we talked about this very teaching. It is a really useful method for overcoming useless worry, tension and undue concern about the daily trivia and inconveniences we all experience through our work, family life and so on. Some participants from our recent Dhamma talks on Tuesday evenings at the Dandenong Ranges Community Cultural Centre in Upwey put it to the test for their own happiness and said how effective and helpful they found it to be.

Yet how many of us continue, after being introduced to a simple but highly effective practise or method like this use it for the first week or so and then stop? For those who have now colonised this new learning well done! For the rest of us, it is useful to analyse what may have happened.

When we learnt about this new skill of saying "My life is going extremely well" our learning was at the level of an intellectual appreciation of the subject. It could have been a life-changing event in the context of being able to live more happily, however for some we all weren't able to sustain the understanding we had and incorporate the new skill into our everyday lives.

This is a common experience, even for those Buddhist practitioners who have practiced for many years. If we could follow the instructions perfectly the first time we heard them we would have made ourselves perfectly happy a long time ago.

There is a sort of addiction to our old way of doing things. It is mental weakness in the sense that we want to change our behaviour but we are almost stuck playing the same old tune over and over. It's so familiar..."I know it so well," goes the saying.

So, we need to do more than intellectually understand the need to change; we need to manage the change deliberately, resolutely.

Again it is a new skill that can be learnt. As this course, "A Do-It-Yourself Approach to Happiness" is all about finding new ways to act to make our lives happier it becomes obvious that we need the ability to sustain a beneficial change in our behaviour to make significant inroads to us becoming happier.

As we go on to the next part of this course, which is about the Perfection of Morality, when you see or note something that you want to change about yourself please accept the challenge and manage the change to your new behaviour so that it really sticks. Do this and you're bound to succeed. Having found something that can help us become happier we don't want to waste that new learning as if it were just another thing of minor consequence.

You need to support the new behaviour so it doesn't shrivel up and die before it gets established in your mind. You need to nourish it and tend to it like it were a small beautiful, but delicate, flowering plant that is beginning to grow in the garden of your mind. Our job is to stop supporting the old weed that is causing all our problems!

We will use the precept of no lying as an example of how to manage, nourish and support the new wholesome behaviour so that it becomes well established in your mind. You can use this approach for just about any new wholesome method you wish to cultivate as an antidote to mental negativities or a defilement you wish to conquer.

First, before we begin the explanation of the precept to refrain from lying, decide that you wish to find out something new about your conduct that you can use everyday, a new knowledge that will protect your well being and happiness from now on. You think like that. As you listen see it as vitally important to your own happiness that you capture some new learning and understanding about this subject, the precept to refrain from lying, as you listen. Something which makes sense to you and is something that you want to apply from today onwards. This is called generating the intention to learn.

Using our example of the precept to refrain from lying, now listen attentively to the following summary of some of the reasons for keeping this precept:

We can say through Buddhist practice that we wish to be able to understand the truth of the way things are. The act of lying is an act of distorting the truth or distorting the reality in a way that suits the person doing the lying. The act of distorting the truth creates kamma for the person lying so that in the future they will find it more difficult to receive the truth in their own minds.

For example, either people lie to them, or they get poor information about things they wish to know, or if they are told the correct information they will tend to not believe it, they discount it or mistake what they have heard. Even in a worldly sense it is important to find out the truth about things.

It is a common occurrence to find that a person has believed you said something; but it wasn’t what you actually said. Quite frequently we find out we have acted on some incorrect information about something and so we have wasted a lot of time, or bought something we didn’t need, or went somewhere to meet someone and got the time or the place wrong. And so on. It happens to us regularly. These types of examples of mis-information we get in our minds are caused by giving out mis-information from our lying to others in the past.

For a person who is trying to understand the truth and intending to create good causes for learning and becoming happier it is a necessity to keep the precept to not lie.

Having heard that information you may decide you really do wish to practice that morality precept, to refrain from lying. You may think it is important enough that you want to change your speech so you no longer lie at all, for any reason. If you don't take a position like that, which is uncompromising, you generally will not succeed. It is like saying I'll give up smoking - but then saying "Oh maybe I'll just have an occasional cigarette". It'll never work. Therefore to truly succeed, you decide to give up lying completely, right now.

We already know it can be difficult to give up an old bad behaviour because of its habitual nature so it's not much use applying the new behaviour half-heartedly. This would be planning to fail because you are not applying enough mental will power or energy to overcome the invested energy of the old behaviour.

Therefore you apply yourself wholeheartedly, with determination to the new behaviour. Take the "shotgun" approach; you advance on all fronts by applying a whole raft of things so that the old behaviour is completely overwhelmed by the new. Here are some good examples to help you succeed:

- Write on your daily planner at the start of each day - "Today I will keep the precept to not lie".

- Pick a person you will talk with today and decide before you have the conversation "While I am talking with this person, make sure to say their name, I will maintain my guard so I don't lie at all to them"

- Before every conversation you remind yourself that in this conversation you will consciously refrain from lying. This type of practice is called applying restraint. You restrain yourself from doing the negative behaviour.

- Pick a period of time, say one hour, and decide for the next hour I will keep the precept to refrain from lying. Tell yourself it's not negotiable.

- Give yourself rewards. If you do not lie during the next two hours you will reward yourself with a cup of tea for example. It's something you were going to do anyway so why not use it to help you change for the better.

Actually doing this can be quite enjoyable because you are challenging yourself, testing yourself, charting and managing your behaviour as you change from the old habit of lying which you dislike to the new habit of truthfulness which you want to become part of you.

- Next, approach a conversation you will be having with the conscious intention to be truthful in everything you say. Consciously do not exaggerate the facts about things, don't bias the information you are saying to make yourself look good or demean someone you don't particularly like, talk truthfully having respect for the truth. This type of practice is the opposite of restraint we mentioned earlier. In this case you are generating the wholesome behaviour afresh with your will and volition.

- Recite the precept to yourself 21, 108, even 1,000 times a day - "I will refrain from lying". Better still learn the precept in the ancient Pali language and chant it each day in Pali as follows: musavada veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami.

- Plan that tomorrow you will tell someone one good reason why it is better not to lie. Why it is better to tell the truth.

- Reflect on how good it would be to understand things the way they really are, to know the truth about what is what with clarity, so you can see how to become truly well and truly happy.

- Send yourself up. John Hughes once taught one of his students a really good way to correct his habit of becoming too tense or too serious. The student relayed the story like this: "If I caught myself becoming tense I should take a cigarette (I was a smoker at the time) and then bend it half way along its length to a right angle. The cigarette then had an L shape. I would smoke it that way, even in public. As you can well imagine, it was very difficult, maybe impossible, to remain tense and continue smoking this cigarette. Everything about the situation was turned into fun."

- If you find yourself lying stop right there. A really powerful practice is to admit you lied to the person, correct the lie and then apologise. You only have to do this a few times to sober yourself up and to stop lying!

- Every time you realise you have lied write it down in a book. Then write how you will behave in a similar situation next time to avoid lying.

Actually all these suggestions are just possible methods you can use to back up your change of behaviour. Each of you could probably sit down and write a list of another 10 or more ways that could assist your transition from the old behaviour to the new. And that is the point, you need to keep the process alive and fresh, live with it, manage it, nourish it, tender it, so that the new behaviour can become well established in your mind and you never fall back.

May you identify your old negative habits and with skilful means eliminate them from your mind.

May you practice and develop good habits that bring you true happiness.

May you be well and happy.

May all beings be well and happy.

This script was prepared and edited by Julian Bamford, Anita Carter, Frank Carter, and Alec Sloman.

1. Carter, F., Carter, A., Sloman, A. 2006. Lifetimes of Learning, A Do-It-Yourself Approach to Happiness. Volume (class) 6. Published by the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., 33 Brooking Street, Upwey, Victoria 3158.

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