Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this guided meditation on the second of the six far reaching attitudes, Thubten Chodron explores ethical discipline as the genuine wish to abandon harming others—not merely through external restraint but through a transformed mind. She guides practitioners through three dimensions of ethical discipline: refraining from the ten destructive actions (killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, causing disharmony, harsh speech, idle talk, coveting, malicious thought, and wrong views); joyfully engaging in constructive actions that build positive potential; and direct service to others in eight specific contexts—the sick, the confused, those pursuing goals, the afraid, the grieving, the poor and homeless, those seeking reconciliation, and those interested in the Dharma. Throughout, she emphasizes specificity and imagination, encouraging practitioners to visualize themselves actually performing these acts. The meditation closes with a reminder that all three aspects—actor, action, and recipient—exist interdependently and are empty of inherent self-nature, grounding the practice in bodhicitta, the altruistic intention underlying the far reaching attitudes.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 40 GM.mp3
UUID: c3704a0e-f64b-4176-97dc-b1c0a72b6eb4
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~741
The second of the six far reaching attitudes is the far reaching attitude of ethical discipline. And so ethical discipline is the wish inside of ourselves to abandon harming others. So the ethical discipline isn’t just what we say and do, but it’s especially the mind that’s completely given up all wish to harm others or to retaliate. There’s three kinds of ethical discipline. The first one is refraining from destructive actions.
So abandoning the ten destructive actions that we meditated on before. Just think briefly in your life how you can do this, how you can implement it, and make a very strong determination to give up the ten destructive actions of killing, stealing, and misusing sexual behavior, lying, causing disharmony, speaking harshly, idle talk, coveting, malicious thought, and wrong views. So make a strong determination to abandon those and think of how you can do that in your daily life. The second type of ethical discipline is the ethical discipline of engaging in constructive actions. And so this is joyfully taking the opportunities to act constructively.
So think of things you can do each day or from time to time that are constructive actions that enable you to directly benefit others and to create a huge store of positive potential. Think of specific things you can do and how you do them and make the determination to do that. And then the third type of ethical discipline is the ethical discipline to benefit others. So here we’re thinking of people who are undergoing specific difficulties and how to help them. So first, helping the suffering or the sick.
Think of who you can help, how you can do this. Might be bringing a meal for somebody who’s ill, might be visiting somebody in a hospital. Think of how you can do that. And then how to help those who are obscured, who don’t know means to help themselves. Think of people like that and then being able to give them advice or counsel and get them going in a proper direction.
So imagine yourself being able to help others in this way. And then helping those who need aid in order to realize their goals. So maybe they’re moving houses or maybe they’re working on a big project, but people who need help to do what they want to do. So imagine being able to help them. And helping those who are afraid, people who are in danger, who are going to be killed or injured.
So we help them by protecting them. So again, think of being able to do that. And then helping those who are grieving, perhaps a relative or a friend died. Maybe they lost their job or their social position. But being able to offer comfort and to console those who are grieving so that they can make that transition smoothly.
Then helping those who are poor and needy, How we can do that? And helping those who are in need of a place to stay. So perhaps people who are poor are dharma practitioners, travelers, people who need a place to stay or who need help getting where they’re going. And helping those who are seeking to be in harmony. So maybe people who have quarreled or groups who are quarrelling, and you’re able to step in and help them reconcile.
Then those who want to practice the Dharma, who want to learn how to act constructively and to pacify their own minds, people who are interested in the Dharma. So how can we help them? And then helping people who are acting negatively or who are about to do something harmful, being able to stop them from doing it and showing them another way to act. So it’s very helpful to think in specifics here about these different groups of people so that we can do the ethical discipline of benefiting others, make it something real in our own lives. And so as before, remember that to make this the far reaching attitude of ethical discipline, we have to do it with the motivation of bodhicitta, that altruistic intention.
And at the end, we have to remember that we use the person acting, the ethical action we’re doing, and the recipient of our action all exist by depending on each other and by depending on being merely labeled by mind, that all of them are empty of existing from their own side.