Let's wrestle with Buddhist ethics—together, in public

Listen to Episode 1 of the Ask a Buddhist Ethicist podcast

Dear friends,

How’s your week going? I worked on the first episode of Ask a Buddhist Ethicist and made a makeshift recording studio in Bo’s playroom. I’ve never recorded a podcast before, so let’s just say, I’m no Krista Tippett.

It’s really Bo’s podcast

For all that I don’t know about podcasting, I make up with my love for Buddhist ethics.

The precepts are my favorite part of the dharma—I find them inherently demanding, revealing, and rewarding. Promote life? Speak truthfully? Woof. These are tough, but in my experience, worth trying.

There are so many resources on meditation and the Buddha’s core teachings, but when it comes to moral discipline? They’re few and far between. Practitioners might consult a teacher if they have one, but if they’re new to Buddhism or don’t have a sangha yet, ethical questions are often grappled with in isolation.

Well, my friends, that’s where this podcast comes in.

Let’s grapple with the precepts together!

I recorded with a blanket over my head (but I’ll spare you that picture)

The purpose of the Ask a Buddhist Ethicist podcast is to dive into big, thorny ethical questions on community, politics, culture, and social change, and explore those ideas out loud with each other.

I want to have honest conversations about the challenges of engaged practice, alongside other meditators and Buddhists. More than anything, I want to learn, grow, and wrestle with the applied dimension of the dharma—together, in public.

I’m not an expert or a monastic. I’m a layperson and parent who’s been grappling with how to live in alignment with the precepts in my own life for over a decade. Does that resonate?

Here are just a few questions I’ll be tackling:

• What does it really mean to be part of a sangha? What do healthy student-teacher relationships look like?

• Are some types of intoxication more acceptable than others? Is a spiritually insightful mushroom trip just as much a violation of the fifth precept as getting drunk?

• Is casual sex a violation of the third precept?

• When is violence—if ever—justified?

These questions make me uncomfortable, and that’s exactly why I’m excited to explore them. Do you have similar questions? If so, I hope this episode feels like a warm voice note from a good friend as we explore them together.

Please enjoy the first episode, and if reading’s more your thing, below you can find an AI-generated transcript.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—questions, comments, or anything that resonates as we explore these topics together.

xx
Adriana

P.S. Paid subscribers: Do you have a question you’d like me to research and explore? Comment or reply back to this email.

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Listen to Episode 1 of the Ask a Buddhist Ethicist podcast:

In this episode, I dive into:

• My own relationship to the precepts and why I believe they’re the secret sauce for practice integration

• What the Buddhist precepts really are—and why they matter

• How Buddhist ethics differ from Western concepts of morality

• The importance of talking about ethics openly in Western Buddhism across traditions and how it can strengthen and expand our understanding of sangha

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AI transcript:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Ask A Buddhist Ethicist, a monthly podcast where we dive into big, thorny ethical questions regarding community, culture, and social change and wrestle with them from a Buddhist perspective. My name is Adriana DiFazio, and I'm our host. I'm a Buddhist meditation teacher, practitioner-scholar, chaplain, facilitator, parent, and student of Buddhism that wants to explore ethical questions with other meditators and Buddhists.

So this is the first episode of our podcast, and I thought I'd give us a little background on my dharma practice and how and why I'm so interested in ethics and find Buddhist precepts to be so interesting. And then give us a little bit of just an overview as to what Buddhist ethics really are, how are they different from western notions of morality, and why I think grappling with ethics out loud in public on something like a podcast format like this is important and possibly helpful for Western Buddhist communities.

So I started practicing meditation back in 2012 when I was still a college student. And at the time, I was dealing with a lot of existential angst, disillusionment, and heartache, and meditation really helped alleviate some of that suffering for me. But more than that, I was really intrigued and found the Buddhist worldview very compelling. The teachings on Buddha nature, the fact that we could actually assess the root of our suffering and the three poisons of craving, aggression, and delusion, and that there was a path of training.

And even though I knew that there was a holistic path, I never really engaged the precepts until 6 years into my meditation practice. And when I did, it felt like it was this secret sauce, you know, that allowed my practice to really feel integrated. Because for a long time, I felt like my daily meditation practice and study on programs and retreats felt so separate from really applying the dharma to the nuances of having a regular life, being a student, having relationships, working. And I felt like drawing the connection from these values and principles that I knew the dharma had and that I admired, how to actually translate that into my actions was a little confusing. And so I was really grateful for the precepts because they gave me structure and a container to translate the values I held into my actual actions and how I went about my life.

I had heard a talk from Sharon Salzberg years ago in which she had mentioned that many many Buddhists in Asia practice with the precepts first and foremost, and that meditation practices is actually something that's reserved for monastics. And that here in the west, many, practitioners start with meditation through some form of secular mindfulness and then discover the precepts later on in their path. And it's fascinating because I think traditionally traditionally, the Buddha offered moral disciplines first and foremost for practitioners to engage in, and it was purposeful and intentional. It wasn't arbitrary. The idea behind engaging moral disciplines or the precepts was actually to purify one's own mind, to purify one's own actions, to accumulate good merit so that when you actually did sit down and meditate, you know, you weren't ruminating over the fact that you did all these bad things during your day.

Your mind was actually, clarified in some respect by the fact that you had simplified your actions, had some continuity in mindfulness through engagement with the precepts. And so it's interesting because, obviously, that's very much not the case here in the west for a lot lot of folks that come to Buddhism through mindfulness meditation, through secular mindfulness. And so, you know, why is that so? I think, first and foremost, we live in a culture in the West that really values autonomy and individualism. And so anything that resembles rules or dogma, religious dogma in particular, there's I think there's perhaps maybe a healthy sense of skepticism.

And I think it's specifically in more radical political spaces too. There's a lot of anti religious or anti institutional sentiment because of harm that's been caused by religious institutions, and I think that's very fair and valid. But I what I think is really important to recognize is that Buddhist precepts are distinct from our common perceptions of western morality, because western morality is based in a theistic notion, in the sense that there's a god, and there are laws and rules that one must follow and be obedient to. And Buddhist ethical codes are not so much rules per se, but rather, they're mental trainings. They're trainings in the same way that sitting down to meditate is a training. It's just an embodied form of training in terms of how we act and behave in our everyday lives.

So what are the precepts? Like I said before, the Buddha offered the threefold training in terms of integrative path to enlightenment, and one of the three parts of that training is morality. It's commonly referred to as sila in Pali or shila in Sanskrit. And both those terms, sila or shila, are translated commonly to moral disciplines.

So within the moral disciplines, we have the precepts. What we imagine as these lists of ethical codes. And the amount of precepts there are differ based on where you are in your Buddhist path, whether you've chosen to become a monastic or you are practicing as a layperson. So monastics can take up to 250 to 300 precepts, but lay practitioners can take 16, 10, or only 5 precepts. The 5 core precepts or ethical trainings are observed across Buddhist traditions, and those are the ones that we'll primarily be focusing on for this podcast. So oftentimes, the precepts are presented in the negative, a do not do x, y, and z, but they also all have a positive direction as well, and so I'm gonna offer both of them.

The first precept is to abstain from taking life. Another way of the positive contemplation for it is to promote life. The second precept is to abstain from taking what is not given or to abstain from sealing. The positive of that is to promote generosity. The 3rd precept is to abstain from sexual misconduct.

The positive is to honor the body, to honor relationships. The 4th precept is to abstain from false speech, to abstain from lying. The positive is to manifest the truth, to speak truthfully. And then the last one is to abstain from intoxicants. And the positive is to proceed clearly, to not cloud one's mind.

So these 5 precepts seem pretty basic when you first read them. They seem like most other ethical codes that exist in other religious traditions. But what I find so interesting about each one of these is that there's so much nuance and so much richness in each precept to discover. You know, you can take all 5 precepts as a vow and choose to try to abide by them in your everyday life. You can choose 1 precept to engage in for one day, or to focus on, but underneath the seemingly very simplistic language of do not kill, do not seal, do not lie, is so much nuance.

For instance, this first one, do not kill. The first thing that comes to mind is, like, oh, okay. We should not kill other animals. We should definitely not kill other human beings. Maybe that means, like, we don't kill an insect too, but we could also think about not killing in respect to the ways that we cut off energy, cut off life and interactions, in relationships.

So it's never as clear cut or simple as it initially seems on the surface. Another example is for do not consume intoxicants. The first thing that probably comes to mind is, okay, I shouldn't drink or I shouldn't use drugs. But another way to contemplate intoxicants is the media that we consume, information, entertainment even.

What are things that we're consuming through body, speech, and mind that are coloring our perception, coloring our awareness? And what's planting seeds of generosity, of patience, of loving kindness, and what's encouraging our seeds of craving, aggression, and delusion. For me, the precepts are really an opportunity, a context, and a container for practice, for us to observe the ways that our mental defilements, our mental formations translate into the nuances of how we actually show up and behave in the fabric of our lives.

So I ultimately love Buddhist ethics and the precepts for two primary reasons. 1st and foremost, I think I love the way that it rubs up on my own western preferences and conditionings, that I wanna do what I wanna do, because I think it's very intentional.

Right? Like, it's it's chipping away at my ego and my selfishness and my self centeredness. And it's actually demanding something of me, not out of a sense of punishment, but actually a sense of faith and confidence in my own Buddha nature. Like, I'm capable. I have agency over my actions, and I can actually choose certain ways of being in the world that not only reduce my own suffering, but but could possibly reduce other people's suffering too.

And so with that being said, I also love the Buddhist ethics because they can be really confusing for practitioners. And so there's so much to grapple with. I mean, it's the one of the primary reasons why I wanna start this podcast is, the precepts seem like behavioral absolutes, but they're guidelines, and the fact that they're guidelines opens up a lot of wiggle room in terms of negotiation for practitioners when trying to interpret it for themselves and how they go about their lives, and I think that can be helpful, but also dangerous. And so, obviously, having a teacher and a sangha necessary for what is right view? What is our intention when we're engaging in actions being the thing that actually dictates whether an action is virtuous or nonvirtuous.

I think there's a there's a lot there in and of itself. There's the story of the Buddha in which he kills, you know, a what not a captain. A, one of those people on boats, a pirate. He killed a pirate, to save 500 merchants, and he lied. And even though he did that because his intention was to save all these people, it didn't end up or accrue all this negative karma.

And I don't know. I mean, I think there's so many instances in our, you know, political or social life where people can indicate that they have good intentions, and then that not necessarily be the impact or case. And, yeah, I think ultimately, the precepts in implying ethics, Buddhist ethics, really forces us to face our own contradictions, to face the ways that we are inconsistent with our values, the way that we covertly may be lying to ourselves about, our intentions or motivations behind certain actions, it really forces us to see ourselves clearly. And as a result, I think it allows the dharma to really come alive, become relevant, and, hopefully, have the impact of actually reducing suffering. So that's my love letter to Buddhist ethics.

So before we officially close, I just wanna say one last thing. A huge part of this podcast is that I really wanted an opportunity for a nonsectarian Buddhist discussion, on ethical questions as they pertain to our lives, our worlds, our social engagement, our culture. And I think this is, ultimately needed in the sense of having different sanghas and traditions learn from one another, but also expanding our sense of what sangha really means for Western Buddhism as it evolves over the next few decades into the rest of the century. And so I'm really excited and honored to have the opportunity to dig into some of these questions with all of you, to have some guests, dharma friends and siblings join me in conversation as we figure some of these things out together. That being said, I am a practitioner first and foremost, and so I don't expect to have any concrete or definitive answers, nor do I necessarily think that my understanding or interpretation of the precepts is necessarily correct.

I think my biggest hope for this podcast is to really wrestle and grow and learn out loud together and to model what that can look like for all of us as myself and also for us generally as practitioners. And so some of the questions we'll be tackling, one of the first ones will include what does it really mean to be part of a sangha? What do healthy student teacher relationships look like? When is it okay if ever to leave your teacher or tradition? This question is personal to me in respect to my own tenuous relationship to my spiritual tradition, Shambhala Buddhism, which we'll get into in that episode.

Are some types of intoxication more acceptable than others? Is a spiritually insightful mushroom trip just as much a violation of the 5th precept as getting drunk? I have to thank my classmate from seminary, Emma Markham, for this question. Again, here, for all these questions, I'm not so interested in us coming to definitive, this is the right way or this is the wrong way. I'm really interested in hearing the thought process of what it means to actually ask ourselves these questions as practitioners.

And so, I'm pumped. I'm really excited. This is gonna be a monthly podcast. Episodes will be 30 minutes and under, so short and sweet. And I'm really excited to hear some of your questions, your comments, your own grappling, and the comments on this post.

If you'd like to message me too, I'd love to hear from you. And I think that's it for our first podcast episode. Oh, last thing. I do wanna talk about karma and its relationship to precepts, the precepts and ethic ethics because it's I think it's really important. I may do another episode about karma specifically or do a blog post about it.

But it's it's kind of impossible to really talk about the precepts without talking about karma, but I had a time limit for today's episode. So, I hope I'll see you I guess I'll see you soon. I'm gonna become less, awkward, on these podcast episodes in the for the future.