In todayand#8217;s Dharmabyte the lovely Dhammadinna reminds us that we are not hear by chance: Human Birth is Not Accidental but a result of our previous skillful actions. A quick look at the nature of ethics and human enlightenment as natural from the talk The Preciousness and Rarity of Human Life.
Talk given at Tiratanaloka Retreat Centre, 2005
This talk is part of the series The Four Mind-Turning Reflections.
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. [music] 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 turning, 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 chilli human, and then enlightened. So that's I think just interesting in terms of looking at the nature of Buddhist ethics. Banti 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-reflects of 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. The tradition of 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 not a natural ideal, it's about, it's not artificial, it's not imposed on 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 point through 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, anyway, in Buddhism, which says the body is a rather sheep of filth. Shanti David, who also says the body is the ecstasy 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 us, Shubha Baba, are 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 and that's going 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 these 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 flirting 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 precious. 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. So it's not just applied to the body, we look at our mind analytically and see what mental state 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 the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
