No I don’t. There’s nothing to kill nor any intent to kill.
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In order to break the 1st precept, a living being must have its life faculty terminated.
In “Going for Refuge & Taking the Precepts”, Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi describes that a being must have a breath and a consciousness, in order to be classified as a “living being”:
“The first of the five precepts reads in Pali, Panatipata veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami; in English, “I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking life.” Here the word pana, meaning that which breathes, denotes any living being that has breath and consciousness. It includes animals and insects as well as men, but does not include plants as they have only life but not breath or consciousness”.
He goes on explaning that one must have the intention/volition to take the life of a living being:
“The first important point to note in this definition is that the act of taking life is defined as a volition (cetana). Volition is the mental factor responsible for action (kamma); it has the function of arousing the entire mental apparatus for the purpose of accomplishing a particular aim, in this case, the cutting off of the life faculty of a living being. The identification of the transgression with volition implies that the ultimate responsibility for the act of killing lies with the mind, since the volition that brings about the act is a mental factor. The body and speech function merely as doors for that volition, i.e., as channels through which the volition of taking life reaches expression. Killing is classified as a bodily deed since it generally occurs via the body, but what really performs the act of killing is the mind using the body as the instrument for actualizing its aim”.
Furthermore, in order to break the 1st precept, Five factors must be fulfilled. If one of those factors is not fulfilled, the precept is still intact:
“A complete act of killing constituting a full violation of the precept involves five factors: (1) a living being; (2) the perception of the living being as such; (3) the thought or volition of killing; (4) the appropriate effort; and (5) the actual death of the being as a result of the action”.
Addressing the question:
“I’m wondering is masturbation the same thing as breaking the first precept”.
No, it is not.
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That, however, involves special Taoist practice / training, which isn’t at all easy.
It’s also documented from not much more than about 2000 years ago. (Chinese have a s/w mythic sense of history.)
I think this is a medical condition more than any spiritual practice.
if you let the sexual energy go out … this mastrubation will harm your health.
what happens in this case of vinaya, is a person who stays a long time in celibacy and with a little pleasure she is happy and her appearance improves. but it is only her to continue with this little pleasure and she will miss celibacy. will want to return to the holy life.
some Taoist or people who teach about vitalism explain that there is a difference between orgasm and ejaculation. we can have orgasm and not ejaculate.
is very easy.
we can compare with meditation. many people think it’s difficult but everyone here knows it’s very easy.
It’s very simple, we complicate it.
The Multi-Orgasmic Man: Sexual Secrets Every Man Should Know
please!
not compare thousands of years of Chinese medicine with the medicine of our time.
to summarize
Masturbation with ejaculation does not kill only sperm. much of our vital energy is also going away.
getting attached to multiple orgasms is another problem as well.
gratification: pleasure and joy. danger: impermanent, unsatisfactory and suffering. escape: detachment.
Verse 186. Sensual Pleasures Never Satiated
Not by rain of golden coins
is found desires’ satiety,
desires are dukkha, of little joy,
thus a wise one understands.
Explanation: Insatiable are sensual desires. Sensual desires will not be satisfied even with a shower of gold. The wise knows that sensual pleasure bring but little satisfaction and much pain.
http://www.buddhanet.net/dhammapada/d_buddha.htm
I think this is a super interesting idea, Gabriel! I don’t really have an answer for you, but just to speculate, perhaps one of the reasons why masturbation is not acceptable (aside from the obvious sensory pleasure indulgence) is because it can be used like a misused medicine. Just like being prescribed an opioid, it can be effective at treating pain, but if one becomes addicted and starts misusing it, then it becomes more of a danger than a medicine. In a similar way, masturbation might elicit similar effects to that of a medicine (at least initially) but as one continues to use it, it may do more harm than good.
Thusly, I don’t think masturbation is anywhere near the same thing as killing, but (obviously) one should be quite wary of both.
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Yes, I hope that at this stage of this discussion it’s clear that it will be hard to use EBTs to support a view that one is as serious, problematic as the other.
The topic’s opening question in itself approaches both actions from a very weird perspective.
It makes more sense to me to ask what does one have to assume to see killing equivalent to self-induced orgasm?
I can only see this equivalence making sense from non-Buddhist perspectives such has original sin-based spiritual traditions.
Even so, I can’t believe that in those one would treat and punish for example, a young teenager going through a discovery of his body, fantasies and sensations the same way someone who is giving to the unjustifiable cruelty of consciously and directly ncausing life to cease in other sentient beings. 
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Mantak Chia is a popularizer – of course it’s presented to be “easy”.
This is even more dubious than ManTak Chia’s claims.
“Originally the Taoist sexual exercises were known as “Kung Fu.””
Nonsense. Modern fabrication. Earliest Taoist practices were known, in the original historical documents, as DaoYin (or TaoYin) – where ‘dao’ is a different character than that for ‘dao’ as “the Way”, and ‘yin’ is a different character than the ‘yin’ in ‘yin-yang’. The characters in ‘Daoyin’ mean something like ‘leading and guiding’; it could be called “moving meditation”.
He goes on explaning that one must have the intention/volition to take the life of a living being
There’s nothing to kill nor any intent to kill.
But monks are not allowed to travel during the rain retreat because they may harm crops and small animal. They avoid unintentional killing:
The Vassa tradition predates the time of Gautama Buddha.[1] It was a long-standing custom for mendicant ascetics in India not to travel during the rainy season as they may unintentionally harm crops, insects or even themselves during their travels.[4]
The quote is the same as thread I created “purpose of vassa rain retreat”, but I’m just wondering if it is all about intention then why Buddha prohibits monks to travel during rainy season? And why would they avoid harming crops? Why would Buddha “adopt” social pressure to his teaching?
Why would the Buddha not acknowledge the social and cultural context he found around and not conform with the harmless practice of annual rains retreat?
Just for the sake of making a point? Or just for the sake of indiscriminately denying whatever may be a meaningfully well intended practice?
I just don’t understand how people like to think that awakening has some sort of relationship with rebellion to whatever is established around just for the sake of disruption and not only when it is harmful.
I believe MN139 sets precedence for a Buddha who may have simply choosen to avoid polemics and withhold truths, as in the end of the day despite being true and correct they’re simply unbeneficial.
“When one knows covert speech to be true, correct, and unbeneficial, one should try not to utter it.
But when one knows covert speech to be true, correct, and beneficial, one may utter it, knowing the time to do so.”
To me the Buddha was besides many things a master in the art of cost benefit analysis. He must have used his sharp wisdom and deep understanding of the human mind to calculate what habits and patterns were better to be kept at the gate to the path in the form of training rules and observances, in a way consistent with the cultural context he found himself and as well in a format replicable and acceptable for many generations to come.
A similar thing happens with the observance of uposatha, which apparently was as well an originally Jain tradition (see AN10.46) and nowadays is a very important aspect of lay Buddhist life in traditionally Theravada countries. Note as well that the very concept of dhamma retreat, in which lay individuals take for a set amount of time 8 or 10 precepts and intensify the study and practice of Dhamma is in itself an contemporary derivation of uposatha observance!
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This topic was about if masturbation was killing. Vast majority are saying it isn’t. Is the subject now about when monks harm crops or animals?
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If masturbation is not killing then why harming crops is avoided, is plant/ sperm a sentient being?
No, it’s because having their crops trampled upon is detrimental to farmers’ livelihoods.
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So there’s no understanding that in the EBTs that plants or at least trees might have some kind of ethical standing by themselves?
I know that’s a Jain view that plants have consciousness. Was the Buddha’s view a hard “no” on that or was it more nuanced?
The origin stories to the Vinaya’s prohibitions against damaging plants and digging the earth relate that these rules were established in response to complaints by people who believed plants and the earth to be “one-facultied life.” But in laying down the rules the Buddha didn’t give any explicit endorsement to these beliefs, while the Vinaya commentary appears to regard them as alien views:
“Ekindriyan” ti kāyindriyeneva ekindriyaṃ, nigaṇṭhānaṃ acelakānaṃ mataṃ.
“One-facultied” means having just the body-faculty as their one faculty, as supposed by Jains and naked ascetics.
Lambert Schmithausen seems to be the go to guy on this topic. To judge from all the papers and books he’s published on the ontological status of plants in Buddhism I guess there’s a lot more to be said than what I’ve written above, but I haven’t yet got around to reading any of his work.
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