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Ethics is an Expression of Humanity

Broadcast on:
08 Nov 2012
Audio Format:
other

In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Ethics is an Expression of Humanity,and#8221; Dhammadinna reminds us that human birth is not accidental but is due to past skilful karma.

What does it mean to be human? Dhammadinnaand#8217;s gently balanced and encouraging talk explores various perspectives on one of the fundamental questions, and clearly lays out various Buddhist approaches to the nature of our existence and consciousness, especially in relation to the other realms of the Tibetan wheel of life.

From the talk and#8220;The Preciousness and Rarity of Human Lifeand#8221; given at Tiratanaloka Retreat Centre, 2005

[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. So, that's a sort of general look at some of the qualities of the precious human birth. And traditionally, it's also said that we don't have a precious human birth just by chance. So, I think in exploring this mind-turning and the other mind-turnings, we are looking at experience within a perspective of not just karma and karma and karma and rebirth. So, I don't know if you believe in karma and rebirth, if you believe in a cycle of rebirth, but maybe for the present, sort of try and take it provisionally. This is one of the frameworks we're looking at, and we'll explore it more in depth later. But traditionally, because we've got this model of the different realms, in which one's born due to karma, you're not just born into the human realm out of chance. You're born there because of your previous skillful actions. And if we continue to practice ethically, well, then we can kind of become more and more human, more and more truly human, and then enlightened. So, that's, I think, just interesting in terms of looking at the nature of Buddhist ethics. Vanti makes a couple of points that come with which seminar it's in, which I find quite interesting. He's talking about both ethics and the ideal of human enlightenment as natural. So, he says in Buddhism, ethics isn't something that's kind of imposed from the outside artificially. It's something which kind of is implicit in our self-reflexive awareness, in our consciousness. And ethics really is a natural expression of our humanity. So, if we were truly human, we would act in an ethical way. If we're happy, if we're aware, if we're sensitive, then why would we choose to harm other beings? Surely, we would respect life and have empathy for other life forms and understand that they suffer as we do. And you can follow that through all the precepts. So, you can take the precepts as rules of training and guidelines, but essentially they're a natural expression of our human nature. So, again, another sort of pointer to how traditional Buddhism sees human nature. And what he goes on to say that in the same way was sometimes called the ideal of enlightenment, that traditionally this precious human birth is the crucial realm of birth from which to attain enlightenment. So, from that point of view, again, it's that the ideal of enlightenment is a natural ideal. And I think we can do quite odd things with ideals. We can be naively idealistic as we know, and we can kind of make ideals as a sort of whip, you know, to beat ourselves with, can't we? We can sort of alienate them from our kind of natural experience. So, he was trying to point out that we may do that, but it's not really like that. But, again, it's a natural ideal. It's not artificial. It's not imposed from the outside. It takes the person into account, and it goes back to that statement in the beginning of the dual ornament that all beings have put in nature. So, we have the potential for enlightenment. So, the ideal of enlightenment is to kind of activate our potential. You know, we can grow towards that idea. We have a natural affinity with enlightenment. It may be, you know, from some points of view, a long way away, or deep within, depending how you look at it. But there is an affinity. If there wasn't that affinity, if we didn't have but in nature, some potential within us, we couldn't resonate with the truth. We couldn't resonate with the dharma. So, there's a very, very positive focus in traditional Buddhism on the precious human birth, on the human realm, on the precious human body. And I don't know if that, you may have come across these teachings. I don't know if that's surprising to you, because also we come across other teachings, certainly in Buddhism, which says the body is a rather cheaper filth. Shanti Deva, who also says the body is the elexia of immortality. So, I think it's important to kind of, if you've come across that one, to try and kind of see it in perspective. And sort of as Shubhavana methods of kind of looking at the body and analyzing the body into its component parts, it's a method really. It's a method for breaking our attachment to the body, in a particular kind of way, where we're not, well, where we think, you know, we need lots of pleasures for the body, to make us ultimately happy, not that we shouldn't look after our bodies. We're trying to break an attachment to the body in a way that's going to lead to suffering. So, those two things are usually held in balance. You have those kind of methods, but at the same time, you value your body, your life, as your basis for enlightenment, because you haven't got anything else. You can't sit and meditate, you can't, you know, your mind should be floating off somewhere. Yeah, this embodied mind doesn't seem to work that well if you think about the body. So, we value the body as the basis for enlightenment and treat it as pressure. So, the body is not to be despised in Buddhism, not to be punished or treated badly. And it's worth mentioning that in terms of the method of analysis of the human body, that method is applied to the mind as well in Buddhism. It's not just applied to the body. We look at our mind analytically and see what mental states it's made up of. So, it's a method to see that there isn't kind of an enduring self or soul. And that's what leads us to suffering. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]