The Three Principles of Buddhism

Gabriel Lafitte - Moderator: The theme of this forum is 'The Three Great Principles of Buddhism', which include ethics (sila), meditation (samadhi) and wisdom (prajna). I am going to invite all of our speakers to discuss this topic very briefly and then it will be over to you to raise whatever questions you have.

Glen Mullin: In Dharma we say everything is tendrel jungba (rten 'brel 'byung ba) - interdependent origination - borne on the basis of concepts, or some other phenomena. When we discuss the three great pillars of the Dharma, the three unique or transcendental trainings, we are also talking about something that is tendrel jungba. They have their existence only in relationship to other things.

A great Kadampa master once said that the enlightenment tradition is like a cushion. Whatever part of the cushion you grab, you get a bit of the whole cushion. Sometimes we talk about the eighty-four thousand teachings of the Buddha, we talk about the nine Yanas or the three Yanas and so on and so forth; we make these different categories of Dharma. These are not based upon what is Dharma. These are really based upon the practitioner. The Dharma is an integrated whole. When you touch one of the three or the nine or the eighty-four thousand, you get a taste of all the teachings. However, because our practice of Dharma is only done in relationship to ourselves, we make up those categories to help us understand.

The Buddha broke the teachings into these three categories: ethical training, meditation or samadhi and wisdom. He begins with ethical training, which Nagarjuna likened to making yourself into a little tree and then putting a fence around it for protection. If you practise ethics it gives you a little bit of peace and stability; it gives you a little bit of space, like having a fence around you. Nagarjuna then likened samadhi to giving yourself some force and power, and then said that wisdom is the actual training that you want.

If we look at it like that, it might appear that wisdom is higher than meditation and meditation is higher than ethics. That is not the meaning however. The meaning is that we think about ourselves in those three ways - firstly, how to give the mind some space; secondly, how to give some stability to the mind; and thirdly, how to understand reality. When we speak of these, we say that all the teachings of the Buddha come into one of these three categories, are touching upon one of these three transcendental or higher trainings.

I think that for us in the West, ethics is the one which is the mostly frequently misunderstood or the most difficult to translate. In the Buddhist world, words and rules are formed as methods for giving space to the practitioner, not as some kind of divine injunction or ultimate reality. As Nagarjuna put it, 'Putting a little fence around a newborn tree so the goats do not eat it'. The Buddha himself said that it is like a finger pointing at the moon with all of these things. We can easily tend to look at the finger and forget to look at the moon. The Tibetan word for 'ethics' is tsultrim (tshul khrims). This means 'holding to the truth', or 'holding to the way', which is so much better than 'discipline' or 'morality' or 'ethics'. In that context, it has a deeper or more stable meaning.

Venerable Buddhadasa: Sila, samadhi and prajna - this really is a lovely little nugget of a teaching. In fact, these three words sum up the whole of Buddhist doctrine. The whole of the Buddhist teaching can be contained within these three little words, morality, meditation and wisdom - it is all there. You can also unpack it a little bit too, because they contain the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. We can correlate these three perfections, as they are also called, with the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. For instance, perfect vision and perfect aspiration can be correlated to wisdom; perfect speech, perfect action and perfect livelihood can be correlated to morality; perfect effort, perfect mindfulness and perfect samadhi can be correlated to meditation.

This is an example of how most Buddhist teachings and doctrines can be correlated and compared. In Buddhism we find that there is a great deal of overlapping between one teaching and another. For example, the threefold way was originally the path of the monk or the full-time practitioner. Naturally, a full-time practitioner, in the early days, was expected to be moral, he was expected to practise meditation and she too was expected to attain wisdom. The path of the laity was a little bit easier. They were not expected to attain wisdom, but nevertheless, they were expected to follow generosity, practise meditation and cultivate morality.

Later disciples did not really like this distinction between the laity and the monks. They believed that both these threefold paths were essential to spiritual development so they combined the two and gave us a path of generosity, morality, meditation and wisdom. Then they added two more essential spiritual qualities - patience and vigour - which culminated in the six perfections of the bodhisattva path.

Laurence Mills: There is a famous verse which all Buddhist traditions know, from the Dhammapada, which sums this subject up very well. There are these three ways of training oneself and this verse mentions them all. I translated it is like this: Every evil never doing and in wholesomeness increasing and one's heart well purifying. This is the Buddha's teaching. Now, 'Buddhas' here is plural because it refers to all Buddhas, not just the one that we know about. Everybody who has that status, who has reached the awakened state; this is the way they teach. The phrase 'Every evil never doing', means that one keeps the precepts and tries to live one's life without harming oneself or others. You cannot say that a person who harms himself or herself is wise. You cannot say that a person who harms others is compassionate. So a person who keeps the precepts is already on the beginning of the path of wisdom and compassion.

The excellence of sila, of 'moral conduct' - and there is no good word for it in English - is really this: one refrains from harming oneself and others and attempts instead to benefit oneself and others. That standard of conduct is not just confined to the individual; it also has a great significance for the state of our society. If we get enough people who really try to keep something like the five precepts in everyday life, then we have a good society to live in.

The next phrase says, 'and in wholesomeness increasing', which means that you increase the wholesomeness in your heart through meditation and other beneficial ways of conduct. That certainly includes meditation, which is the way wholesomeness can be best increased. Why is that? That is so because everything starts from your mind, from your heart. If you start to increase the wholesomeness in your heart and mind it follows that what you speak, what you do and the way that you think will become purified. So meditation is a very valuable thing.

Then the Buddha says, 'and one's heart well purifying', which means that meditation alone does not necessarily purify the mind to the ultimate degree. That is because people have many different kinds of views and very many diverse understandings. If they have wrong ideas in their hearts, their practice will not go to liberation. So you need prajna, you need wisdom - panna in Pali - you need wisdom in order for your heart to be really purified from the stain of wrong views, so that there is no reminder of selfishness in any sense at all.

Venerable Tejadhammo: I would just like to say that sila, samadhi and panna are a very useful scholastic division but they do not actually exist. They are simply words. You cannot go and buy a packet of sila and, to the disappointment of many, you cannot go and buy a packet of wisdom. You might like to look into your own heart and mind and just check to see which brand of Buddhist you are. People often take these three things - sila, samadhi and panna - and turn them into three types of Buddhism in their own life.

Particularly in the West, you meet Buddhists whose principal concern in life is sila. In particular, their expression of this is to be very concerned about everyone else's observance of sila. These are the 'sila Buddhists'. Then you meet those people whose principal concern is samadhi. These are the people who finish up with a kind of meditation sickness, because their meditation is totally isolated and is not taking place within their own hearts. These people can often have very little time for anybody else. That is the 'samadhi Buddhist'. Then there is the wisdom type Buddhist, which is the most deluded of all. This is the Buddhist who stalks Buddhist bookshops and Buddhist centres.

I am simply asking you, look into your own heart and mind and ask yourself this question. 'Am I in balance or am I out of balance? Is my practice of the Dharma somehow restricted or limited to one of these scholastic divisions, or is the Dharma actually in balance within my own heart and mind?'

Venerable Chi Kwang Sunim: There was a very famous monk by the name of Hua-hai in China who said, 'To perfect the teachings all you must do is perfect the first paramita, which is the paramita of generosity'. If we give in our hearts, our bodies and our minds from moment-to-moment, the sila, the samadhi and the prajna will be there in completion in that moment.

I was once asked to be part of a conference called: The World is a Single Flower. We were all given a flower and asked to say a couple of words. Until the moment I picked up the flower and opened my mouth, I had no idea what I was going to say. When I picked up the flower I said, 'When you perceive this flower, when you look at this flower, all you perceive is beauty. It is life, it is colour, it is everything that we would classify as beauty; we see it in a beautiful form.'

That is the value of a flower in one sense. If you put it to your nose and smell it, you smell a fragrance. This is the fragrance of precepts. When somebody practises in the present with the openness of all their senses vibrating, and clarity is there, this is the practice of precepts. When we touch a flower or put it to our face, it is very soft. We know the texture of such a flower; it is so refined; it is so soft. These are the subtleties of samadhi. We know the subtleties of samadhi; we know the craving for more of it, the peace, the bliss.

A flower is telling you about it, but it is something that is beyond words. This is where wisdom arises. It is only in this moment that we open ourselves up, that we are present in whatever we are doing.

Meditation goes far beyond sitting on the cushion, it goes far beyond just that twenty-four hours a day of practice. It goes into the fullness of each moment, which is beyond time, which is beyond shape and form, to that moment of creativity that everything comes from. This is what we are trying to bring ourselves back to.

Geoff Dawson: I will just say a few brief words about each of these aspects. Meditation is not about any particular special state of mind. Meditation is simply the practice of being in the present. That is simply what it is. Ethics, in Buddhism, is not simply a matter of being right or wrong. If we cling to being right as opposed to being wrong, it builds up arrogance and pride and rigidity. That is obviously not something we want to cultivate, from a Buddhist perspective. There are choices that we need to make in our life, ethical choices, but it is not about inflating the ego and holding onto that in any rigid kind of way. It is also refreshing to consider ethics - whether it is Buddhist ethics or Christian ethics - in this day and age. We live in a culture where 'victimism' is becoming more and more predominant as a way of experiencing our life. Victimism - and I come across this a lot in my other role as a psychologist - is about 'what the world does to harm me', 'what my parents did to harm me', 'what institutions did to harm me' and so on. Now these things do happen; we are the recipients of other people's negative behaviour. But Buddhist ethics is not just about looking at what happens to 'me'. It starts, fundamentally, from the position of looking into our own heart to see what we may do to harm others. This is a more difficult aspect to look at. It is an unpleasant truth that we may need to look at in ourselves. However, it is where the kernel of Buddhist ethics lies.

Wisdom does not just refer to book knowledge. Anyone can quote the Buddhist sutras and sound wise and profound with a capital 'P'. Wisdom is really something that comes out of 'no mind'; natural wisdom is something that we all have, along with natural compassion. They go together. We often think of wisdom in terms of being something verbal - of wise words that are said. However, wisdom is much more than that. It may come out in a verbal kind of way, but wisdom is also the most simple of actions. One way of defining it, if you could define it, is to say that wisdom is just simply appropriate action, moment-to-moment. When you are thirsty you drink water - that is wisdom. When you are hungry you eat - that is wisdom. When the kookaburra laughs - that is the kookaburra expressing kookaburra wisdom. It is not necessarily something that is verbal and intellectual. We have to cut through that intellectual wisdom to a natural wisdom, which is inherent within us.

Venerable Traleg Kyabgon, Rinpoche: As you would all know, there are many different kinds of Buddhist schools, traditions and practices. When it comes to the notions of the three trainings - sila, samadhi and prajna, in Sanskrit - there is a sense that all these different traditions and schools of thought can actually come together. There is a meeting point amongst and between the various Buddhist traditions - the Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana or Tantrayana.

The reason for this, I think, is that Buddhists of all traditions have the same aim, the same goal. That particular spiritual goal is known as enlightenment, Buddhahood, meaning 'to become awakened'. To awaken from a delusory state of being, which is what we are subject to. We have to learn how to free ourselves from that. How do we do that? We do that by training ourselves in the principles of sila, samadhi and prajna - moral precepts or ethics, meditation, and wisdom or insight.

I think that when we start to think about enlightenment in that way - as Buddhists coming from all different traditions - we can agree on the point that we need to apply ourselves in order to attain enlightenment. We cannot wait around and think that someone else is going to do it for us. It does not matter whether we are discussing morality or ethics, or meditation, or wisdom, it is all about applying ourselves. It is about self-transformation, it is about elevating ourselves, it is about saying, 'I have had enough of my old habitual way of being in the world. I have had enough of my way of dealing with myself. I have caused enormous problems for myself and others, due to the habits, due to the misunderstandings, due to the illusions and delusions, which are so prevalent and so pervasive in my life. Only I can change myself. I have to do something about that'.

That is why the three trainings are important - otherwise, it would not be important. We could just sit and pray to the buddhas and the bodhisattvas - in Tibetan Buddhism we can pray to a myriad of deities, peaceful deities, wrathful deities, semi-wrathful deities - and ask them to alleviate our suffering, to extinguish our pain. 'I can't stand it any more, Chenresig. Please get rid of it'. It does not work. Tibetan Buddhists know that, even while they are praying to Chenresig. At the core of the practice is the notion that it is how we relate to things that changes everything. It is not 'what' we relate to, but 'how' - in what way, with what attitude - we relate to things, including practices of visualisation, visualisation of deities. In that way, the three trainings are so crucial and so important to Buddhist practice.

Amongst those three, I think it is meditation that is most important, precisely because one can learn how not to hurt other people. One can learn how to be a good person, how not to hit another person, or shout and scream. You are driving in the street and while you are not a violent person by nature, someone cuts you off or something and you are outraged. You are shouting obscenities at this person, out of nowhere! Gradually, we can learn how not to do that. We can learn how to restrain ourselves, how not to be an obnoxious person and how not to come out with all kinds of obscenities as soon as something upsetting comes along.

However, that alone is not enough. We have to learn how to gain some kind of understanding about ourselves. Not hurting other people and not harming ourselves is insufficient to be a fully-fledged spiritual person, according to Buddhism. That is why meditation is so important, because meditation allows us to look into ourselves and see the kind of person that we are or have become, and the kind of person that we may be able to become in the future. All kinds of possibilities begin to be revealed through the practice of meditation. Without meditation, it is practically impossible to develop wisdom or insight - panna or prajna.

Why? If our mind is governed by hatred, jealousy, resentment, bitterness and all kinds of powerful negative emotions, how can we have wisdom? We will only have bias, partiality, prejudice, dogmatism and opinionatedness. We will think that all these varieties of ways of forming belief systems reflect reality. That is what people think. To dismantle that, we have to do meditation. That is why, in Buddhism, we talk about the three trainings. If you go to a Buddhist Centre, they will always encourage you to do meditation. They do that precisely for that reason, because meditation is at the heart of Buddhist practice.

Question: The points of view that seem appealing to me in Buddhism are first of all, the idea of compassion. It is a billion light years ahead of me at the moment but it seems to me that this is one of the things I would value most of all in Buddhism. The second thing would be the idea of no self. Enlightenment is about getting rid of self; it is not about achieving anything to do with the self. Would any of the speakers like to comment on that?

Laurence Mills: Since you do not have a self, you do not have to get rid of it.

Question: Is compassion so fundamental to Buddhism that one could almost say that complete compassion is the endpoint of the path?

Ven. Chi Kwang Sunim: I think compassion is the path, the beginning and the end. The action is very clear - the clarity of action comes out of an aware, open mind, which has let go of selfish ideals and selfish needs. There is only that which is suffering in front of you, which needs your attention and help. If compassion comes from a slight lacking of wisdom, but a very good motivation, we can get a lot of the 'do-gooding' concepts where we think that we have to do good works. There is this constant need to run around and look for what we have to do. There is a certain amount of compassion there, and compassion will develop further out of that. Nevertheless, there is a much deeper compassion, which is not just generated toward anyone in particular. It is there all the time, to aid the suffering of others. That type of compassion comes out of your meditation and your wisdom.

Glen Mullin: I think it may be useful to say something about what, in Buddhism, draws your attention. What you like about it and what you do not like about it. I think the Buddhist attitude is that every great spiritual tradition of the world has a lot to offer sentient beings, in that they are all presented as some sort of conceptual language framework. Language is how humans communicate and it has it has its limitations.

The way the Tibetans put it is that every spiritual tradition is taught by enlightened beings in accordance with the karmic predispositions, intellectual strengths and weaknesses and so forth of sentient beings. As Buddhists, naturally we think that our history is great, that we have done a pretty good job of packaging and bringing enlightenment forth. However, I do not think that you will ever find any Buddhist master who would say this to the point of denigrating any of the other religious traditions. It is the same inside the Buddhist tradition itself. Some people are attracted to one particular teacher, one particular school, as opposed to another teacher, another school. We never think of that as meaning that that teacher or that school is somehow superior to other teachers and other schools. It has to do purely with the karmic predispositions, capacities and inclinations of the students.

Question: What is the ontological status of one's subjectivity in Buddhism? How does Buddhism understand the awareness that one has that one is seeing, thinking, feeling and whatever? I recently read the Bhagavad-Gita, which says that this awareness is sort of divine or an expression of God. Where does that quality of self-awareness fit?

Venerable Tejadhammo: As I understand it, the Buddha is not concerned with the question of ontology. That is a particular kind of questioning that comes out of a particular tradition. Your question, in a way, illustrates what I was trying to point out before. All these words and terms and concepts and ideas that are whirling around in this space are very much like knives. They are very useful sometimes if you need to cut and divide something, but when they are whirling around in this room someone is going to get hurt and someone in the room, or maybe many of us in the room, will be cut to ribbons. That is the real danger of engaging in too much division. I am not suggesting that we all sink into a kind of quietism, but we need to be aware of this. The gentleman over here was talking about compassion being 'out here' as a goal. If it is out here as a goal, it is utterly useless. Since you mentioned ontology, someone in the Western tradition, Thomas Aquinas, a scholastic theologian who was very fond of the ontological questions, I would remind you that at the end of his life, after writing the Summa, he is reputed to have said, 'Everything that I have written is as straw'. So perhaps be careful of questions concerning ontology.

Question: I understand that Buddhists do not believe in a personal God in any way. If it is possible to briefly enlighten me about that point, I would be very interested.

Geoff Dawson: My understanding of what the Buddha said on this subject is that he was not really interested in enquiring whether there was a God or not. The point of practice is really a very pragmatic one, which comes back to developing wisdom and compassion. Do we really need to believe in a God or not believe in a God to take up that practice?

Question: So it is irrelevant?

Ven. Traleg Rinpoche: I think what you are saying is that Buddhists are agnostics.

Geoff Dawson: I am not even sure if it is agnostic.

Ven. Traleg Rinpoche: You see, both theists and atheists have a particular position. The theists say there is a God and atheists say, with equal conviction, that there is no God. However, the Buddha himself and Buddhists generally, do not actually take one position or the other. Therefore, it is agnostic. We do not have to worry about whether God exists or does not exist.

Laurence Mills: If I might say a few words about this. There are quite a number of references in what you could call 'Buddhist scriptures', where the Buddha shows that holding onto views about things which cannot be substantiated is harmful for practice. People who have such views as, 'There is a God,' cannot know the truth of that. It is some words that people have in their minds. Maybe they feel something in their hearts, but they can never actually know that. There is no path to discover it. Views then, necessarily come into conflict with other views. We see in this world - particularly amongst people who believe in some kind of God - that there are lots of conflicts, lots of troubles and lots of bloodshed. For Buddhists, who are not really concerned with that, we do not have this kind of trouble. Maybe that has got some kind of connection. It is a point worth thinking about anyway.

Question: It seems that once ethical behaviour or guidelines for morality are written down, they are then open to interpretation by lots of different people from lots of different traditions. If you try and use your own inner guide to behaviour, it often seems to be subject to your own particular history about what seems right or wrong, or good or bad, or useful or not useful. Looking at things that way, what sort of guide might we use to direct our behaviour in a morally useful direction?

Ven. Traleg Rinpoche: In all of the Buddhist traditions - and I am sure that everyone on this panel would agree with me in saying this - there are the five precepts of not killing, not lying, not stealing, avoiding sexual misconduct, and avoiding intoxicants. These are the moral guidelines provided by Buddhism. Killing is not justifiable in any circumstance, in any culture; lying is not justifiable in any circumstance and so on. However, Buddhists again, would make exceptions. When you take Buddhist precepts, you are saying, 'I'll abide by these rules to the best of my ability, but certain awkward situations may arise where I may have to kill someone or I may be compelled to lie because of the prevailing circumstance'. That is not ruled out in any of the Buddhist traditions that I know of. However, to the best of our ability, we have to stick to these rules and that is the guideline. However, they are not like Moses' laws that have been handed down to us etched on a stone tablet. First, it was etched on a gold plate, wasn't it? But he lost it. What a fool! Being a Jew, he should have hung onto it for dear life! Sorry. Really, I think that is the common consensus though. We have to have moral precepts, but they are not absolutistic in their ground, so to speak.

Glen Mullin: There is also a long tradition of testing the limits of precepts in Buddhism, because as the Venerable said earlier, we can easily become a 'precept Buddhist', a 'meditation Buddhist', a 'wisdom Buddhist', as opposed to an integrated Buddhist. There is an example in Traleg Rinpoche's school of Tibetan Buddhism - the Kagyu School - where Gampopa came to his teacher Milarepa for training. Gampopa was a monk, and monks should not drink alcohol. One of Gampopa's precepts or vows as a monk was not to drink alcohol. When he came to meet Milarepa, the first thing Milarepa did was pull out a big jug of wine, give it to him and say, 'If you want to be my student you have to drink this wine'. I think what the Venerable was saying earlier, is that the emphasis with Buddhism is always on the context. The context is about what is right for ourselves and for others.

I think something His Holiness the Dalai Lama said put it very succinctly,

If it benefits self and if it benefits others it is ethically right. If it harms self and harms others, it is ethically wrong.

We have got thousands of examples of that with precepts, because people can so easily be morally right and completely wrong. In the West, we have the expression, 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. A perfect example, I think, is Tibetans living in India. The Tibetans in Tibet, they never wrote anything down about their ordinary living. They led a very non-bureaucratic life; you got married, you got divorced and all of these things, without any paperwork. Then you get to India and everything is completely based upon paperwork. Tibetans living in India will fill out anything on a piece of paper, so long as it works to satisfy the purpose of that bureaucracy.

In Canada, one of our greatest lamas - he is a fabulous Tibetan lama - had to fill out a form when he immigrated to Canada. When it asked how old he was he did not want to put his real age because he was about twice as old as he looked. He thought, 'Oh, they'll never let me in if they think I'm so old'. However, when he arrived in Canada, he finds out that he could be receiving an old age pension on the basis of his real age! I think it's like Buddha himself said,

'Putting a boot on the head of the Buddha, taking a boot off the head of the Buddha, both are equally morally positive depending on the mind of the person'.

Venerable Tejadhammo: We need to be very careful in a gathering such as this, that we do not make the kinds of generalisations about other traditions that we would not want other traditions to make about Buddhism. When we talk about, for example, the Christian tradition and talk about Christian morality and so on, we should bear in mind that we are referring to individual human beings. If you want to talk about institutions, that is a different question. We should be very careful not to be dismissive when we make references to other traditions. If we go down this path, it is a very serious failure and one that the Buddha himself pointed out.

Ven. Traleg Rinpoche: I think you were making that comment in relation to what I said about Moses, but I was not making any sort of judgement personally. What I was saying was that there is a difference. Personally, I also think we should be looking at individuals and not at institutions and dogma and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, equally, we have different traditions within and without Buddhism in terms of our spiritual orientation, there are differences. I do not think that should be played down. However, just to say that there are differences does not mean that we are making a value judgement. We are not saying that the Judeo-Christian traditions, which believe in an absolute foundation for their moral beliefs, are inferior to us. I am not saying that. What I am saying is that there are differences and actually, if we look at the differences we might be able to cultivate a sense of openness and say, 'Yes, there are differences but I'm willing to open myself up to you and accept your belief. Even though it is not in total conformity with what I believe in, it is your belief and I respect that'. I think that is also a very good thing to do and, from a Buddhist point of view, it is a morally commendable thing to do.

Glen Mullin: Just to come back to the actual question here, I think with all the precepts in the Buddhist tradition your question was, 'How do you know if your interpretation is right or wrong?' I think the Buddha did emphasise that our job of looking into that question is as important as the answer to it. There is no final answer. For that reason, Buddha gave these four conditions for every precept. You have to have the presence of the negative mind; you have to have recognition or awareness during doing it; you have to have an object to which it is done; and finally, you have to have a completion of the action. I think Buddha purposely introduced that aspect to the ethics question, so that people would not become rigid about it. Instead, they would understand that ethics, as Nagarjuna put it, is like putting up a fence to protect self and others. It is not something that has any divine connotation or any ultimate connotation. It is purely a tool for happiness living.