Buddhist Ethics


I recently began reading "For a Future to be Possible: Buddhist Ethics for Everyday Life" by Thich Nhat Hahn. Contained within is what the author calls The Five Mindfulness Trainings. These five things are kind of like a Buddhist version of the Ten Commandments, with the premise being that, put into practice, one can endeavour to work toward a good life that helps our planet holistically. It is a well worthwhile read and I will personally commit time in my daily meditation practice to think through these things and try to adjust my life accordingly. The Five Mindfulness Trainings are also serving as the cornerstone in the sangha that is being formed by me and a few of my dear friends.

Being a teacher affords me a wonderful opportunity to put forth the teachings that I am reading. There is nothing subversive in any of the lessons. My purpose is to teach my students to love and show compassion to all things while drawing an awareness to their being. I teach special needs children at the junior high school level, but must stress that these students possess insight and are capable of profound pronouncements.

In this morning's Language Arts classes I posed the following question to my students: "Why do you think society sometimes uses violence as entertainment? Explain your answer." After having the kids write a response, I opened the floor up to discussion. I was amazed by some of the statements that these students made. For example, they differentiated between instinctive violence in the context of "fight or flight" and "learned" violence. They also made the observation that "violence" is "violence" regardless of whether it is in the context of a movie, mixed martial arts bout, school yard brawl or car bomb in Iraq, and therefore violence can never be a good thing. Perhaps we are stretching things when we associate violence in movies or rap music to violence on the streets. One might argue that a normal person can distinguish between real violence and the controlled violence of the cinema or WWE Wrestling. My point is that "normal" is a myth and therefore we ca not let the status quo rule our morality simply because more people prefer Coke over Pepsi.

Can we live a life with no violence? I don't know. I do know that violence has been a part of my life throughout, whether in the abuse dealt to me by my Mother growing up, the bullies who beat me up as a kid, my career in Rugby and as a Correctional Officer, my enjoyment of contact sports in general, years of Martial Arts and my love of films. Part of me is haunted by the remains of PTSD spawning from the physical and psychological abuse I suffered as a child, augmented by five years in a maximum security prison, while the other part of me enjoys films such as "Pulp Fiction" and "The Godfather". We are complex beings. Perhaps we can live and still enjoy these things, but I wonder if that enjoyment is in the spirit of a smoker who really enjoys sitting in the sunshine, smoking with a nice cup of coffee – we know that our actions are causing damage, yet there is a perceived pleasure in our dependence on such things. I suppose that this remains up to the individual to decipher for themselves.

With that I will close. The rest remains up to the reader to make their own way and to question…

Namaste.