Your Status as a Decent Human Being

In the practice of moral discipline, the five precepts are the training rules we observe. Together they constitute an excellent field of training.

The five moral precepts are: not to kill, including not only human beings, but animals as well; not to steal; not to indulge in sexual misconduct; not to use false speech, lies, slander, gossip and so on; and not to take drinks and drugs. These five rules of training form the basis of a decent human being. If you can’t even adhere to these, you become less and less human. And the end result, well, I’ll leave it to you to guess.

Unfortunately, very few people have any real understanding of the way morality works. When people misunderstand the nature of morality, they do all the wrong things, thinking they’re doing the right ones. In the West, this tendency is very prevalent now. Lack of moral virtue is a problem that’s causing a great deal of trouble. And that’s due to a complete misunderstanding of the way morality functions.

People say: “Why should we be moral anyway?” Many of them do not believe in any kind of higher moral authority. They think that no repercussions will follow from their actions. Therefore, if they do immoral actions they will get away with them. They fail to understand that they change themselves every time they do an immoral act. They change themselves in a manner that inevitably steers them into a situation where they will receive the consequences of those actions.

When it comes to the practice of Buddhism, it’s like the Buddha said: only a few people have little dust in their eyes, only a few. We can’t expect most people to be in a position to progress quickly and easily along the path. The best we can expect for most people is that practicing the basic teaching on morality will remove a little bit of the dust from their eyes. In that way, more people will be in the position to understand.

As it is, ordinary people in the world are not capable of much understanding. They go the way of their kamma: they behave badly when they feel inclined to and they are dragged down by it. It’s been going on that way for an extremely long time, and the momentum of kamma will keep it going like that indefinitely. Those people who have enough understanding to see the nature of the world clearly realize that this is not a good situation. They know they should try to get free. For them, keeping the moral precepts strictly is very important. They will not compromise on them at all.

In truth, morality is a practice that maintains your status as a decent human being. It maintains that status by keeping your actions within the bounds of what’s going to bring you beneficial results in the future. If you choose to do actions that bring unfortunate consequences, you’ll just go down and down and down. And the more you go down, the duller and more stupid you become, and the less you are able to see the rut you’re in. Acting blindly, you do more harmful actions, causing you to go down further, until the end result is very unfortunate indeed.

This reflection by Ajaan Paññāvaḍḍho is from the book Uncommon Wisdom, “Basics,” (pdf) pp. 171-172.