Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this guided meditation session, Thubten Chodron walks through the ten destructive actions described in Buddhist teaching, using the framework that these are called negative not because the Buddha declared it, but because they produce suffering. She opens with what destructive action means in general—anything done under closed mindedness, clinging, or anger—then systematically examines each of the ten: killing, stealing, unwise sexual conduct, lying, divisive speech, harsh words, idle talk, coveting, maliciousness, and wrong views. For each, Chodron emphasizes concrete personal reflection: remembering specific examples from your own life, understanding what mental states drove you, and how circumstances enabled the action. The final three are purely mental acts requiring no external conduct. Throughout, she stresses that this self-assessment builds genuine understanding of how our minds work and how our actions affect others. Suitable for practitioners developing ethical awareness and self-knowledge.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 21 GM.mp3
UUID: 6a7bbcca-df1d-45e0-99b1-68a51f5eb269
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~1,058
Now we may start to wonder what is a destructive action because we have to understand what they are in order to avoid them. So in general, destructive action is anything done under the influence of closed mindedness, clinging attachment, or anger. And there’s also a list of ten destructive actions that the Buddha described that are very useful as a reference point to help us assess our actions. So remember that these things are called negative actions not because the Buddha said so, but because the Buddha was able to observe that when we do these actions, we generally have negative mental states, and thus these actions bring suffering. So as we go through and contemplate these ten, make examples from your life when you’ve done them.
Remember specific situations and try and understand how you got involved in those actions. What were you thinking about? How is the environment influencing you, and how are you going along with that influence that resulted in your acting in these ways? So this kind of contemplation can really help understand ourselves much better. So remember to make specific examples.
So the first one is killing, taking the life of any sentient being. So maybe we’ve gone hunting or fishing or eaten live lobsters or killed animals and insects. So remember times where you’ve done that. Try and understand what your mind was thinking that made you take the life of another living being. The second one is stealing or taking things that haven’t been given to us.
So this can include not paying taxes or entry fees that we’re supposed to pay, using resources at our workplace for our own private interest without asking permission. It includes borrowing things and not returning them. So check up when you’ve engaged in taking things that haven’t been yours. Remember specific examples and check why you did that. The third one is unwise sexual behavior.
So this principally refers to when you’re in a relationship going with somebody else or even you’re single going with somebody else in a relationship. But it also refers to any careless use of our sexuality that harms others, either harming them emotionally or harming them physically by spreading disease. So try and look and understand how you use your sexuality, if it’s used wisely and kindly or if it’s used recklessly and with self indulgence. The fourth one is lying. That refers to deliberately deceiving others.
So when have we lied and why? And lying also includes exaggerating the truth, presenting things in a way that’s just slightly tilted so it points out our viewpoint, our position more, not really giving an accurate account. So, again, check when and how we’ve done this. The fifth one is divisive speech or causing disharmony. And here is when we talk about others behind their backs so that we make one person not like another person or make somebody mistrust somebody else.
So it can be slandering others, but also it can be telling the truth about somebody but with the motivation to create disharmony in their relationships with others. And it also includes when two people are not getting along, if we aggravate their disagreement and prevent them from reconciliation. So, again, check when we’ve engaged in this. The sixth one is harsh words, and this is insulting others or verbally abusing them, ridiculing them, teasing them, making fun of them, anything that deliberately hurts somebody else’s feelings. And it can include even saying very sweet sounding words that we know will really hurt somebody.
So it ranges from out and out losing our temper to very subtle sarcasm that’s designed to hurt. So it’s important especially to check this one because it’s the cause of a lot of our problems with other people. Seventh is idle talk, and this is talking about unimportant topics for no particular purpose. So sometimes we find ourselves on the telephone with somebody who chatters on and on while we have other things to do. But when have we ever been that person who chatters for no particular purpose without thinking how our words influence somebody else?
So, of course, it’s important to keep up casual relationships and chat with people, but we have to be very aware of our motivation for doing so and not just talk idly. And we also have to check up how much of our idle talk is gossip about other people that isn’t designed as just an exchange of information, but as a way of making ourselves look better because we can subtly put other people down when we gossip about them. And then the last three destructive actions are ones that are done mentally. So we don’t have to say anything. We don’t have to do anything in order to actually engage in these.
So the eighth is coveting others’ possessions and planning how to obtain them. So we could go to somebody else’s house and like something they have and try and figure out how we can get them to give it to us. So just thinking in this way is coveting. Or we could go to the shopping center, spend a lot of energy coveting, trying to figure out how to buy lots of things that we don’t really need. And then the ninth one is maliciousness.
So, again, this is simply mental. And here we plan how to hurt somebody else’s feelings or how to get our revenge. So we can actually spend a lot of time in just having negative thoughts about other people. And tenth is generating wrong views. So these are very stubborn, cynical views that deny the existence of important things.
For example, we think that people are inherently selfish and it’s impossible to be enlightened, or we deny completely in a very stubborn way the existence of rebirth and karma. Or we say very strongly that there’s no such thing as the path to enlightenment. There’s no such thing as enlightened beings, so we deny the triple gem. So these wrong views, although only mental, can actually be extremely dangerous. Because if we deny the existence of cause and effect, for example, it opens the way for us to act negatively in so many other ways because we don’t think that our actions will have a result.