The World as Emptiness, Part 5: The Five Good Conducts

Every Buddhist in all the world, practically, as a layman—if he’s not a monk—undertakes what are called pañcaśīlā, the Five Good Conducts. Sīla is sometimes translated ‘precept.’ But it’s not a precept because it’s not a commandment. The formula when Buddhist—you know, these priests, they chant the precepts, you know?—panatipata veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami. And that means: panatipata; pana is, in Pali, this thing, prana—life; tipata, taking away; ‘I promise to abstain from.’ So the first is that one undertakes not to destroy life. Second, not to take what is not given. Third—this is usually translated ‘not to commit adultery.’ It doesn’t say anything of the kind. In Sanskrit: kamesu micchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami; kamesu micchacara means: ‘I undertake the precept to abstain from exploiting my passions.’ Buddhism has no doctrine about adultery; you may have as many wives as you like.

But the point is this: when you’re feeling blue and bored, it’s not a good idea to have a drink, because you may become dependent on alcohol whenever you feel unhappy. So, in the same way, when you’re feeling blue and bored, it’s not a good idea to say “Let’s go out and get some chicks and have some sex-fun.” That’s exploiting the passions. But it’s not exploiting the passions, you see, when drinking, say, expresses the conviviality and friendship of the group sitting around the dinner table, or when sex expresses the spontaneous delight of two people in each other.

Then, the fourth precept, musāvāda: ‘to abstain from false speech.’ This doesn’t simply mean lying. It means abusing people. It means using speech in a phony way, like saying ‘all niggers are thus and so.’ Or ‘the attitude of America to this situation is thus and thus.‘ See, that’s phony kind of talking. Anybody who studies general semantics will be helped in avoiding musāvāda; false speech.

The final precept is a very complicated one, and nobody’s quite sure exactly what it means. It mentions three kinds of drugs and drinks: sura, meraya, majja, pamadatthana. We don’t know what they are, but at any rate, it’s generally classed as narcotics and liquors. Now, there are two ways of translating this precept. One says to abstain from narcotics and liquors. The other, liberal, translation favored by the great scholar Dr. Malalasekera is, “I abstain from being intoxicated by these things.” So if you drink and don’t get intoxicated, it’s okay, you see? You don’t have to be a teetotaler to be a Buddhist. This is especially true in Japan and China—my goodness, how they throw it down! Once, a scholarly Chinese said to me, “You know, before you start meditating, just have a couple of martinis, because it increases your progress by about six months.” Well...

Now you see, these are—as I say—they are not commandments. They are vows. Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by some kind of cosmic lawgiver. And the reason why these precepts are undertaken is not for a sentimental reason. It is not that they’re going to make you into a good person. It is that, for anybody interested in the experiments necessary for liberation, these ways of life are expedient. First of all, if you go around killing, you’re going to make enemies, and you’re going to have to spend a lot of time defending yourself, which will distract you from your yoga. If you go around stealing, likewise, you’re going to acquire a heap of stuff, and you’re going to, again, make enemies. If you exploit your passions, you’re going to get a big thrill, but it doesn’t last. When you begin to get older, you realize “Well that was fun while we had it, but I haven’t really learned very much from it, and now what?” Same with speech. Nothing is more confusing to the mind than taking words too seriously. We’ve seen so many examples of that. And finally, to get intoxicated or narcotized—a narcotic is anything like alcohol or opium which makes you sleepy. The word narcosis, in Greek, means—narc is ‘sleep.’ So if you want to pass your life seeing things through a dim haze, this is not exactly awakening.

So then… so much for the ‘conduct’ side of Buddhism.