Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute public talk given at Buddha House in Adelaide, Ven Kaye Miner, a Buddhist nun from Tārā Institute in Melbourne, explores the meaning of life from a Buddhist perspective. She begins with a guided 20-minute meditation on breath awareness, teaching posture, hand placement, and the mechanics of settling a scattered mind, then shares her own path to Buddhism—from initial skepticism, through a career in computing, to recognizing spiritual practice as the missing element in her life. The core teaching centers on karma and the long-term development of mind across multiple lifetimes: material possessions cannot be carried forward, but the imprints on consciousness persist and shape future rebirth. She explains how recognizing habitual negative behaviors—such as anger or lying—empowers us to change them, and introduces the Buddhist ten non-virtuous actions as a framework for ethical conduct that generates happiness rather than suffering. The talk emphasizes personal responsibility, the unlimited potential of mind, and compassion for others alongside self-interest. Aimed at newcomers and general audiences seeking practical answers to life’s meaning.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 1995 07 07.mp3
UUID: b86f3c94-7ee5-4db2-a685-8a13c14f54ca
Teacher: Ven Kaye Miner
Collection: Public Talk (Ven Kaye Miner)
Date: 1995-07-07
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.6 minutes
Words: ~6,080
Good, so we can hear very well now, can we? Excellent! I’ll start by introducing myself. Obviously you must know that my name is Kay Minor and that I’m a Buddhist nun. I think that’s rather obvious by the way I’m dressing.
I’ve travelled over from Melbourne today. I live at Tārā Institute, which is the sister centre of Buddha House in Melbourne, a rather large, maybe more than rather, a very large centre in Brighton in Melbourne. We have around about forty residents and a very active program over there. I coordinate that program at Tārā Institute. I’ve been there about four years now and I’ve been a Buddhist nun five years.
I’ve been around Buddhism, what I would call seriously, which means that it’s not sort of a fleeting thing, that I’ve actually been trying to practice meditation probably about twelve, thirteen years now. So I’m not saying that to make you think that I’m qualified or anything, but just to give you a little bit of a background as to where I’m coming from. Interestingly enough, I think I actually came into contact with Buddhism here in Adelaide the most because some friends of mine who had travelled to places like Nepal and India and done meditation courses actually came from Adelaide. So it was on one of my visits to my friends here that I met my first Buddhist nun and went to my first Buddhist meditation and thought it was extremely weird and that I didn’t need this. This was their trip.
I didn’t need it at all. Well, something changed. Something happened, obviously, come in please to see where I am today. So I feel a great deal of joy actually to be back here at Buddha House and to be able to spend some time with people here and to share some of my experiences, which I hope won’t be too boring for you. So I came into contact with Buddhism here and then I went off travelling and living a very busy life.
I have a background in computing and have managed fairly large computer installations and installed computer centres around Australia. I was really very much tied up with the work, the career and all the normal kind of things. Following a spiritual path was definitely not on the agenda. But it came to a point where I realized that there were things that were missing in my life, that I wasn’t really that happy with the way things were going. And so I started looking around for finding some meaning in my life.
As I say, I’d come into contact with Buddhism here through some friends. Even though I had rejected it at the time because I thought it was rather weird all these kind of pictures around and people dressed in different clothes and things like that, it still had struck a chord. And so when I was looking for some meaning, I couldn’t help but say, well, maybe I should have a second look, even though in the beginning it didn’t make much sense to me. Maybe we should just check it out again. And I don’t know whether you call it growing a bit older and maturing and maybe perhaps a bit wiser.
But when I came back for a second look at Buddhism, it really started to make a lot of sense to me. It was incredibly practical. It wasn’t anybody telling me to do this or do that or don’t do this or don’t do that. It was something that was very practical, common sense and really struck a solid chord within me. So that’s sort of to give you some idea of how it is that I’ve got to be at this point now.
As I say, I found that Buddhism had a lot of practical, I don’t know about answers, but solutions anyway to the different things that were going on in my life, the things that I wasn’t so happy about. Over a number of years, I’ve been trying to study, I’ve been trying to practice. I think we all know that sometimes it’s just so hard with our lives. We have to survive, don’t we? We’ve got so many things to deal with in our lives families, relationships, work, just the sheer art of survival.
So it’s always a question of how much time you can put into following a spiritual practice. But I’ve tried to consistently allow at least half an hour for meditation each day. And gradually over time, I’ve been able to hopefully, what I think anyway, try and consolidate more into a regular practice. Does that kind of give you an idea of where I’m coming from? Okay.
Yep. Good. So what I thought tonight to do was to talk a little bit about the meaning of life. And as I mentioned in my introduction then, I was looking for some meaning in my life because I found, well, I didn’t find it in work, I didn’t find it in relationships, I didn’t find it in travel. There had to be something else.
So that’s what I want to talk about tonight. From a Buddhist perspective, what is the meaning of life? And I’d be very interested also to hear other people’s ideas of what the meaning of life is. So the way I thought we’d break up this evening is that, we’ll do a short ish meditation. Would people like to meditate?
Yeah. Has everyone meditated before? Anyone here who hasn’t meditated before? Oh, good. Okay.
Well, I’ll go through the whole thing because I like to be reminded actually, even though I might say that I meditate regularly, it’s still so important to go through the basics on a regular basis, to reinforce in your mind how we meditate, why we meditate, what meditation is, what meditation isn’t. Okay, so that’s good. I think we’ll go through all that tonight. So we’ll do, a short ish meditation. Think twenty minutes.
Do you think you can cope with twenty minutes? Yeah, probably do better me. I’ve got one of those inbuilt alarm systems. My leg goes to sleep at twenty minutes exactly. So we’ll do about a twenty minute meditation.
Then I think I’ll talk for about another twenty minutes, if you can put up with me for that long. And then we’ll have an opportunity at the end to ask any questions and hopefully provide some answers and to discuss any of the things that we’ve discussed. And then, of course, cup of tea at the end out the back there. How does that sound? All right.
Now, I want this to be really relaxed. I want to enjoy myself as much as you can enjoy yourselves. So I think we try and feel comfortable, feel relaxed, don’t feel that we have to be perfect or that if we’re trying to meditate and we can’t kind of keep the object of concentration in the meditation that we’re a failure, we’re not to think that. We’re just trying to relax and to bring a little bit of calmness and clarity in our minds tonight. So we’ll begin the meditation by just trying to find a comfortable meditation posture.
And that varies. We’re all so different, you know. A lot of people meditate in incredibly contorted positions to my mind with what they call having their legs in the full lotus posture. Does everyone know about that one? Well, I tell you, I find it incredibly hard.
I might be able to do it for a few moments, but then the leg springs out and, you know, it’s not very comfortable. And the mind gets so caught up with the way that you’re sitting that the mind’s not doing any meditation. So I think it’s important that we try and find a comfortable meditation posture. The thing that they say is probably most important when you’re meditating. Well, there’s a lot of most important things.
But one of the important things is to actually have a straight back. Now, that’s not to say that your back should be really kind of tight, you know. And I notice whenever I say to a group of people, oh, let’s meditate now, everybody goes like this. And it’s sort of almost like the opposite to the way you should be approaching a meditation because automatically you’re starting to tense up and to stiffen. So the idea is to have a straight back, but to have a relaxed back.
Anyone heard of the Alexander Technique? Yeah. I had one lesson, but I think I’m an expert now. But the Alexander Technique, I found very effective for when I’m thinking about meditating because the idea is that you maybe even repeat to yourself a few times, relaxed and released, relaxed and released. And that the head, that you imagine the head is like a helium filled balloon that’s on a string, and it’s like your backbone is the string.
And so as the helium balloon floats up, the back straightens and kind of tautens. Is that the right word? That’s not a word, is it? Tortens? But I didn’t want to say tight because we’re not tense and tight.
But anyway, it straightens, straight up, but it’s not tense. And so it’s kind of very natural and very, very light. So the head is like this balloon floating up and the backbone automatically sort of extends and straightens. Does that make sense? So they often use other examples of imagining that your backbone is like a stack of coins, you know, and a straight stack of coins.
Other people say you imagine that there’s a hook coming out of the ceiling and it’s hooking into the crown of your head and kind of pulling you out. But I get a sore head when I think about that one. So I like the helium filled balloon one to imagine. So it’s useful just to, when we go to meditate, that we scan through our bodies, that we become aware of how our body is feeling and just be aware of our posture. I’m also of the school of thought that you can lie down to meditate.
A lot of people don’t agree with me there because there also is the tendency to fall asleep when you lie down. But if your mind knows that you’re going to be meditating and you’re very clear about that and do try and hold your concentration, then lying down can often be one of the best positions to meditate in. I think especially if you have any illness or if you have problems with your back or if you’re very physically tired. I work, what I think, quite hard and a lot of hours. Sometimes when it gets to the end of the day and I always do some meditation before I go to bed, my back’s had it.
To go and sit cross legged for another hour or so is just really beyond me. So to lie down can be a very effective position to meditate in. I guess I’d recommend, though, if you’re going to lie down to meditate, that you don’t do it in your bed because bed you associate with sleep. And just be very aware that you’re actually going to meditate. So you can either be lying down to meditate, you can sit in a chair.
If you’re sitting in a chair, it’s often good to have a cushion underneath your feet so that your feet are firmly kind of placed on the floor. I think I mentioned that mostly because I’m only five foot tall. If I sit in a chair, I can never place my feet firmly on the floor. So it is useful to have a cushion underneath your feet. So then if you’re sitting on the floor, the legs should be comfortable.
If you are really flexible and you can do this full lotus position, then fantastic because it’s a very stable sitting posture. If you can’t, you can sometimes do just like, can you see my arms here? I’m kind of pretending they’re the feet and legs. So you can have one foot up on a thigh and the other one out a little bit. I think if you have them crossed like we normally cross our legs when we sit down like we learned at school, we won’t be able to hold that position very long.
Or you can have them just sitting next to each other like this. So it’s up to you. There’s no hard and fast rule about how you must sit. You have to find the position that’s most comfortable for you. I vary.
I think I tend to probably have one leg in front of the other. It just depends on my mood and the cushion, I think. Okay. So you find the comfortable sitting posture. You have the helium filled balloon on the head.
That’s the head. You’ve got the straight back. Then you’ve got the hands, okay? And the hands are resting in the lap with the right hand on top of the left and the thumbs just gently touching. They form a little bit of a triangle that goes in towards just a couple of fingers below the navel.
Why do we hold our hands like this? Well, there’s certain energy that runs through the body. It’s just like you know you’ve got pulses in your thumbs. You know, they say never read a pulse with your thumb, you use your fingers. Well, there’s certain sort of energy that’s going through the body.
And when the thumbs are meeting, it’s making a complete circuit. So it means that when you’re meditating, that energy is making a complete circuit and being very kind of controlled in the body, not sort of dissipating. So the hands like that. And the arms shouldn’t be too close to the body or too far apart, but just sort of a natural kind of distance. That means, especially when you’re meditating in summer, if you have your arms too close to the body, then there’s a tendency to start to feel overheated.
It’s a good, just comfortable position there. And just remember always to drop the shoulders. That’s another thing we kind of straighten our backs and pull our shoulders up around our ears. And again, that’s tightening the muscles which is not so effective when we’re meditating. So we’ve got the sitting posture, we’ve got the arms, we’ve got the head, we’ve got the hands and the lab.
We can either have the eyes open or closed or half closed. The ideal is to have the half closed, but that’s incredibly difficult, I find. Why is it ideal to have the eyes half closed, half open? Well, that’s because it prevents you from falling asleep or getting too drowsy. And if you have them wide open, you can be really distracted by the visual objects around you.
Half closed is the best. But I think most people are probably like me and find that it’s much easier to meditate with their eyes closed. So you can do that now. Just join me in closing your eyes. Right.
And then the mouth should be closed. The lips just gently touching, the jaw relaxed. Don’t clench your teeth. And it sometimes helps to have the tip of the tongue resting on the roof of the mouth behind the front teeth. That just helps any saliva to naturally flow away or dissipate whilst you’re meditating.
And your head shouldn’t be sort of too far forward or too far back, but just tilted slightly forward so that if you did open your eyes, your gaze would be about fifteen inches in front of you. And sometimes it helps just to rock, you know, from side to side and back and forth a little just to find that center of equilibrium. So then once we’ve found comfortable position, we can turn our minds inwards. We can try to let go of all the distracting thoughts, all the sounds, the feelings of getting here tonight and what we’re going to do later, all the memories of what’s happened in the week and the projections of what’s going to happen over the weekend. The best technique for doing for letting go of all of those things, is to focus the mind on the breath.
We focus our mind on the natural coming and going of the breath. And there’s two handy places to to focus that concentration. One is around the nostrils where the breath enters the nose and leaves the nose, And the other is the rise and fall of the abdomen. And I think whenever we’ve got a stuffed nose or a bit of a cold, then it’s much easier to try and concentrate on the rise and the fall of the abdomen. But at other times, we can concentrate on the sensation of the breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils, and that becomes the most convenient.
So now let’s just spend a couple of moments breathing very naturally, not trying to control the breathing at all, But just concentrating on that sensation of the breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils. Don’t follow it all the way through into the lungs, but just that sensation at the entrance of the nose, at the nostrils. So let’s spend just a few moments now concentrating on that sensation. Bit of a stretch, and slowly open your eyes. We’re all ready to go to sleep now.
It’s a very simple technique that just concentrating on the breath coming and going and then using that visualization of imagining all the problems going and then all the good qualities coming. Very simple technique that you can actually take away and do at home without too much effort at all. I was saying earlier that I don’t think there’s any great secret to meditation. I don’t think you have to pay a lot of money or do a lot of courses to learn how to meditate. The techniques are actually very, very simple and it’s really just a matter of trying to practice them and, making the effort in your own time and at your own pace.
That’s how you get the rewards. Do people find that too difficult, that meditation? Very good. I often find that one, just concentrating on the breath, one of the hardest things for me because what it does is it shows up very clearly how the mind is racing around all the time. They talk about the monkey mind.
It’s amazing how one thought leads to another, to another, to another, and it’s just it’s incessant. And it’s when we meditate that we actually start to give our mind some space. We start to see the way we normally behave. And when we give ourselves some space, then we have the ability to actually become aware of ourselves, become aware of our own minds, become aware of how we react to things. When we have that awareness, it’s like the first step to be able to do something about the difficult things that we face in our lives.
What I mean by that is that, for example, if you’ve got a problem with anger, if you don’t recognize you’ve got a problem with anger, then you don’t realize you’ve got one and you just behave in a reactive way, losing self control, going into rage, getting all hot and flustered and yelling and screaming at people and retaliating. But once you realize that that’s how you react, that’s how you behave, and that you do have a problem with anger, then you can do something about it. It’s having that recognition in the first place that empowers you to change the situation. So that’s what meditation does. I mean, not just with anger, but with just about everything that you face in your life.
If you can give yourself some space, some calmness, some clarity, then you start to have the recognition of perhaps the unwholesome activities or the unwholesome state of the mind that you have, and you’re empowered then to do something about it. So this brings me into what I wanted to discuss tonight, which is about the meaning of life. What do people think the meaning of life is? I’m always interested to hear. Hear.
Finding meaning in yourself. Finding meaning in yourself. What do you mean by that? Mhmm. Any others?
Right. Making the universe a happier place. To love. Mhmm Caring and sharing Anymore? Oh, you’re an interesting group.
Very interesting because I think a lot of people think that happiness is having a new car, getting a promotion at work, having the right partner, having a new house. Often people think that happiness is something that it’s external. But from what I’m hearing tonight, a lot of people feel that it’s something more internal and it’s more of a giving out to others. I think that most of us would say that the most important thing in our lives is to be happy and to not have any suffering or to have any problems. Do we all agree with that?
Whenever I ask this question, I don’t think there’s one person in a room that’ll say, oh no, no, no, I want to have suffering and I don’t want to be happy. That’s the basic thing. I think we’re all completely equal in that, in that we want to be happy and we don’t want to have any problems or suffering. The interesting thing is to how we achieve that. And I think that there are a lot of different ways about how we achieve happiness.
And so it’s identifying what happiness really is and then being able to determine, well, what are the ways that we can bring about that happiness? So certainly, if you think that happiness is succeeding in work, then you set about trying to improve your skills. You set about trying to get the right jobs that will kind of help you move up the ladder. Is that right? Okay.
So if we think that happiness is well, what do people think happiness is? You think it’s sharing and caring? And joy. And joy. Mhmm.
Right. I think from a Buddhist perspective, when we’re talking about happiness, we’re not talking about some fantastic blissed out feeling that we have all the time. I think it’s more in terms of developing a contentment or developing a level of satisfaction. And in Buddhism, we’re not talking about just this life. Everybody realizes that in Buddhism we’re talking about many lives?
So it really changes the boundaries, I guess, when you’re talking about many lives. Because it means that the things that you said about or you think about as the causes for happiness in this life, when you’re talking about many lives, then it makes no sense. For example, if you think about that you’re going to be happy by having a lot of money, then next life, well, you can’t actually take the money you make in this life with you. So it really doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? So that whole concept of many lives really changes the complexity, doesn’t it?
It really starts to show you what’s important and what isn’t important. From a Buddhist perspective, we’re talking about the long term. Now that’s not to say that having happiness now is not valid. It’s not to say that succeeding at work is not valid. It’s not to say that having money is the wrong thing to do.
But it’s all dependent upon our attitude towards it. That thought about many lives, as I say, it puts things into perspective and makes you think about really what is important in life and what isn’t. So when we think of that, then we start to think about, well, what can we take on to the next life, to future lives? Well, we know that we can’t take material possessions. We can’t take our money.
We can’t take our nice car or our nice house. We can’t take our friends. We can’t take our academic qualifications along with us. What do you think we can take? What we can take is the development of our mind.
Because from a Buddhist perspective, what happens is that when you die, and I know we talk about death a lot in Buddhism, but it’s very important. It’s one of the most well, what do they say? It’s the only definite thing apart from taxes, isn’t it? What’s that saying? There’s two definite things in life, death and taxes.
Is that the saying? Okay. So when we die, our body kind of disintegrates. We either get buried in the ground or we get cremated. But from a Buddhist perspective, what happens is that there’s this very subtle consciousness or this mind that passes on into the next life.
That’s how they explain about people that remember past lives. How does that happen? It’s because the mind, the consciousness from the previous life, has passed on. I mean, in Tibetan Buddhism, you hear a lot about reincarnated lamas, don’t you, or reincarnations? We’ve been associated with a Spanish boy called Lama Osel, and he’s the reincarnation of Lama Yeshe, who was the founder of this center.
And he’s about ten years old now. And when he was, I think, about eighteen months, two years old, he was able to identify possessions that he’d had in his previous life. That’s just like the Dalai Lama. And that’s how they of give an indication of who they were in their previous life. So how does that happen?
How are they able to identify things from a previous life? Why do you think it happens that some children at two and three years old are able to play incredible piano concertos. Some people have incredible talent at a very young age. Why is this so? Well, that’s because all of our actions layer imprints on our mind stream.
And it’s that mind stream which is not a physical thing. It’s not something that when the body dies, kind of cut it open and say, ah, here’s the mind. It’s not something sort of tangible. The mind is actually it’s formless, it’s shapeless, it’s colorless. It’s probably odorless as well.
That it’s something very, very subtle that definitely exists. And when the body dies, that very subtle mind is able to pass on to the next life. I just wish I could remember it happening last time, but I’m determined to next time. Okay, so that’s what we can take on to the next life. That’s the important thing to concentrate on if we want to have happiness, not just here and now in this life, but for future lives.
That’s the thing we need to develop. It’s not all that swag of things of possessions and the things that I was talking about before. It’s the mental development that is the passport, I guess, to future happiness. Am I making sense? Okay. Good.
So again, as I was saying, once you have the recognition, once you start to see that that’s how things happen, then you can start saying, right, I’m going get into this. So if we want to have the mind that’s going to have happiness later in this life and in future lives, then we have to look at how the mind is right now. A lot of people, when they talk about reincarnation and many lives, oh gosh, they get so curious to know what they were last life. A lot of people really feel fantastic to know that they were some princess or something like that. And then they’d like to know, well, what’s going to happen to me next life?
What am I going to be next life? Well, in Buddhism, they say, and I think there was one famous Indian master who said, if you want to know what you were in your last life, then look at your life now. If you want to know what you’re going to be in your next life, look at your life now. So what they’re meaning by that is that where you are today is definitely a result of actions that you’ve created in the past. Where you’re going to be tomorrow, next week, next year, next life is very much dependent on the actions that you are creating now.
So what Buddhism is saying is that, look, it’s in your hands. It’s entirely up to you. You can take responsibility for whether you’re going to have happiness in the future or whether you’re going to have problems. And in ways that’s incredibly liberating. Because if things aren’t working out too well for you at the moment, rather than thinking, well, that’s going to be the way it is forever, you know that you’ve got the ability to direct it.
You’ve got the ability to set the course, so to speak. Because as I mentioned before, you know this mind that’s very subtle, that is formless and shapeless, it also is unlimited. It has this unlimited potential. This unlimited potential to be able to grow, to be able to develop, to be able to generate the good qualities. And it’s just us being able to link into that.
How we link into it is by through things like meditating, we become aware. We understand how our mind works. We understand the kind of habitual behaviors that are so entrenched in us. I mean, I used to be considered an angry person. I probably still am considered to be an angry person by some people.
But I had a sort of a set way of reacting in situations that was almost not a part of me. Yet it was a part of me. It was almost something that I watched happen each time. And it was just such a habit which had to be broken. When I started to become aware of how I would react all the time, and I could see the negative consequences, then I had the ability to turn that around.
Because again, as I say, we have this incredible potential. And that potential is developed through meditating, through understanding the nature of our mind, and then turning it around and directing it towards a more positive state. So when we’re talking about developing the mind, when we’re talking about, trying to practice a spiritual path, When we’re talking about happiness and abandoning suffering, the key things that we have to look at is the way we behave. Whenever we talk about behavior, we start to think, uh-oh, this is kind of being goody two shoes or living a very ethical, moral kind of life, which when we talk in terms like that, we don’t have such a good feeling about it. We feel like it’s a bit being too constrained.
But what I’m talking about is having an awareness of our behavior, having an awareness of what actions bring about a positive result and what actions bring about a negative result. So I’m talking about actions and results here, aren’t I? Have people heard of the word karma? We have lots of ideas about what karma may be. It’s a word that’s used very freely.
karma is basically the law of cause and effect, or cause and result. Actions yield results. We’re talking about how some actions yield a positive, happy result, whereas others yield a suffering result. Would anyone like to give me an example of an action that can yield a suffering result? Lying?
What do you think happens when you lie? That’s probably the worst one, isn’t it, getting caught out when you’ve been lying? Okay. Well, would someone like to suggest an action that would yield a positive result, a happy result? Someone?
What kind of happy result will come from that? So for you, that brings about some kind of happiness. Do people hear that up the back? Okay. So we can see, if we look, we can see how our actions have these results or these effects.
We certainly know that if we go up and we punch somebody in the face, that we’re likely to get punched back. So that’s not a very kind of satisfactory outcome, is it? We know that if we practice love and kindness towards other people and generosity, then that comes back on us as well. I had a great little scheme going a couple of years ago where I was I used to offer flowers to my teacher every week. I used to bring a bunch of flowers.
And do you know what was happening? Every time I bought him a bunch of flowers, someone gave me one. And I thought, wow, this is a good scheme. I wonder if I started offering one hundred dollars Whether I’d start getting there doesn’t necessarily work like that. But you can see actually how if you practice kindness towards others or generosity, then that does repay.
Have people found that experience in their lives? Yeah. And so we also know that if we do actions that are harmful to others, then we get the harm back. It may not be immediate. As I have to say, we’re talking about many lifetimes here.
It could be in some lifetime in the future. But certainly, there is this law of cause and effect, and it means that whatever action you create, whether it’s an action of body, speech or mind, then it will yield a result at some time in the future. Which is great if you’re practicing lots of nice actions, isn’t Good actions because you know that that means that you’re going to have happiness in the future. But sometimes it’s a little bit daunting if you think that you do a lot of bad things and you’re definitely going to get the results sometime later. But the beautiful thing is that you can do what we call purify those negative actions.
And how you do that is by having some regret for them and doing some kind of meditation practice to actually purify. So we’ve got it clear that we want to have happiness, we don’t want to have problems. And then we’ve got it clear that we’ve got to recognize, well, what of the things that cause happiness in the future? What are the things that cause problems in the future? And so then we set about modifying our behavior so that the things that create happiness, we do a lot more of.
And the things that create problems and suffering, we do a lot less of. So in Buddhism, we have the Buddhist Ten Commandments. Well, it’s really not like that. It’s not a thou shalt do this or thou shalt not do that. But we have what we call the ten non virtuous actions, which are the ten things, the ten acts of body, speech and mind that we try to refrain from in order to stop that kind of suffering.
And so I always try to remember these off the top of my head. I’ve They’re pretty straightforward things, really. And also, when we’re thinking about this, it’s not just for our own personal happiness, but for happiness for other people. Because if we’re unhappy, it really impacts on others, right? You know what it’s like if somebody’s really kind of so negative and depressed and unhappy around you.
It rubs off, doesn’t it? So we often talk about having a motivation to bring about happiness not just for ourselves but for others as well. Buddhism is very much founded on this premise of, if possible, benefiting others, but at least not harming others. So these ten non virtuous actions are sort of ways of preventing suffering for ourselves in the future, but also cutting off, stopping this harm to others. So we start off with three actions of body.
The first one is killing, so refraining from killing. Now we can see that makes sense, can’t we? I mean, if you go around and and kill people, then