+1. Armchair Buddhists can afford to get by with the “bare minimum” approach. Frontline combat troops or MMA fighters in the octagon cannot. They’ll get killed or maimed with that kind of approach, for in combat, utmost effort to gain just a tiny edge makes all the difference between life and death, or unscathed and maimed.
I agree Santa.
But even for a armchair Buddhist, trying to bend the fifth precept rule is a big No, No.
Perhaps you can get away from eating lot of sugar to get high.
Refraining from expanding the 5th precept to include things which it simply does not include, cannot logically be labelled as ‘bending’ it.
Perhaps you are right.
Precepts are practiced in many levels.
The five precepts practiced by a lay person is not the same as the five precepts practiced by a monk or an Arahant.
At Abhayagiri, when the precepts are taken, they are translated from Pali as “I undertake the vow to refrain from consuming intoxicating drink and drug which lead to carelessness”. I take that as meaning that any substance which causes intoxication that could cause carelessness is included. Important for me personally to have a clear understanding, because I have struggled with alcoholism. I frequently, before getting help, would try to find ways to get around this precept. Lots of mental gymnastics can be done, of course.
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I’m not talking about levels. I’m talking about linguistics. You can’t for example say that the 5th precept includes not participating in cyber-bullying, regardless of what ‘level’. Why not? Because that’s not what the 5th precept says! It doesn’t matter if we think the Buddha would be against cyber-bullying. That, is irrelevant in this context. On this matter we are concerned with the meaning of the 5th precept, not with speculations about what else the Buddha might have prohibited if we were to ask him.
If anyone has any actual evidence that majja refered at the time of the Buddha to anything other than alcohol I would be very interested to examine that evidence. However, without any such evidence I suggest it is absurd to claim that the 5th precept refers to anything other than alcohol.
Who cares really? If you think the point of the precepts is to dish out a legal code, like the Ten Commandements, violations of which will get you punishments from the Kamma System, then I guess this kind of obsessive legalism is important. But the precepts are part of a training system that one voluntarily undertakes to follow because it is good for you and conducive to your liberation. But clearly the letter of the precepts, strictly interpreted, are not the only restraints on behavior conducive to liberation.
It seems to me that if you get high and are reduced temporarily to a spaced out, distracted, heedless dope, that is not good for your spiritual progress, for the same reason all that other stuff is bad for spiritual progress. Focusing on “Is this a violation of the letter of the official silani?” seems like missing the point. It’s not as though there is some strict literalist divine law clerk following you around marking you up for violations.
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That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. In my translations, I have also been translating it as “alcohol and drugs”. But I am not sure about it; I understand the objections, and will probably change this. Perhaps something like “intoxicants such as alcohol” would be better.
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bhante @sujato do you have anything to add in relation to the pali term majja, which is defined as “intoxicants”. Here is my post from above for reference.
so the idea I think is to know if majja is used in the texts in relation to drugs or intoxicants besides alchohol.
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No I agree, I don’t know anywhere it refers to anything other than alcohol. Obviously it applies to recreational intoxicants by analogy, but as to how it should be translated, I think there is room for different approaches.
It is historically curious, given the apparently universal desire to get high on pretty much anything, but we simply don’t seem to have any reference to other recreational drugs.
I’m not sure if this has been noted in this thread, but medicinal cannabis is explicitly allowed in the Vinaya. In Kd 6 we have:
Now at that time the venerable Pilindavaccha had rheumatism in the limbs. “I allow, monks, the sweating-treatment.” He got no better … “I allow, monks, sweating by the use of all kinds of herbs.” He got no better. “I allow, monks, the great sweating.” He got no better. “I allow, monks (the use of) hemp-water.” He got no better. “I allow monks, (the use of) a water-vat.”
From the context, “hemp-water” would seem to be cannabis leaves put into the water that is steamed in the sauna. How this might be extended to other medicinal applications, or to other potential intoxicants is something I will leave for the experts.
Note that there are two different words for hemp in the EBTs. It would seem that sāṇa is “sunn hemp”, which has no intoxicating properties:
Bhaṅga is most likely cannabis, i.e. bhang.
Of course it’s not necessarily the case that the EBT usage exactly lines up with modern biology, but anyway this seems the best fit.
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Mada is a common word used in Sri Lanka. We say it as “Math”
This include any intoxicants including cannabis.
In Sri Lanka we say “Ganja”
so did bob marley. also herb.
[quote=“cjmacie, post:42, topic:5928”]
After a recent talk, I asked one of the organizers how it is that a Chan (Mahayana) group takes an interest in Theravada speakers. He replied that such a distinction doesn’t apply to (at least some) Chinese Buddhism.
Do we, in the West, have a perhaps simplistic view here? (Or do the Chinese tend to resist Western conceptualizations?)
[/quote]Absolutely. Sectarianism is massively leavened by the Internet, also, IMO.
[quote=“dharmacorps, post:65, topic:5928, full:true”]
At Abhayagiri, when the precepts are taken, they are translated from Pali as “I undertake the vow to refrain from consuming intoxicating drink and drug which lead to carelessness”. I take that as meaning that any substance which causes intoxication that could cause carelessness is included. Important for me personally to have a clear understanding, because I have struggled with alcoholism. I frequently, before getting help, would try to find ways to get around this precept. Lots of mental gymnastics can be done, of course.
[/quote]At the same time though, participants in this study are not necessarily struggling with the struggles you outline above. Participants chose to trust the scientific credentials of certain people running a certain study. Beyond that, none of us can say.
How is that ‘obvious’ @sujato? If we have a compound of 3 terms, all of which we specifically know refer to alcohol, and we have no evidence at all of any of the terms ever referring to anything apart from alcohol (even if the chosen English word as one of the options for the last term can have a more broad meaning), I do not see how it is ‘obvious’. And here I am talking about not what it may have come to mean, but what it meant in the Buddha’s context.
Thanks for giving this nice example of cannabis being allowed. And I assume that there is no evidence for cannabis coming under ‘majja’. That seems to be more evidence against this idea that majja refers to any drugs other than alcohol.
The very fact that the first two terms are known to specifically be types of alcoholic drink, and the last term is also know to refer alcoholic drink but some seem unsure if it might refer to other things as well - this evidence would in my opinion most logically suggest this to be a compound referring to all alcoholic drinks, by specifying the 3 main (or only?) categories of drink. Just to be clear, since perhaps there was no clearer phrase like our ‘all alcoholic drinks’ or in fact this was their equivelent term. It makes much less sense that 3 alcohol terms would together as a compound refer to all drugs, since it leaves out any non-alcohol drug term, and we know they had other drugs, such as bhaṅga. If that were really the case, should we not expect a compound more like alcohol-cannabis-opium? Or a longer explanation? But not simply 3 alcohol terms surely.
I think it’s important to remember that this is 2,500 years after the Buddha’s time, and may be based on a reinterpretation of the precept, or possibly an unrelated evolution which in turn changed Theravada’s understanding of the precept. Words certainly evolve over time.
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I’ll weigh in. It’s obvious in the application of the purpose of the precepts as training rules. It’s obvious what the intent of the precept’s language is. The precepts, it seems to me, are integral to the path of practice of the Eightfold Path, for example. The Eightfold path culminates with mindfulness and samadhi, both of which cannot be held and practiced if one is using any kind of intoxicant, be it an alcoholic beverage or grinding up a Benadryl and snorting it. So, the statement that this use of Benadryl by analogy is included in the precept is a sound analogy. Your training on the path will be impeded if you’re snorting Benadryl, whether you include Benadryl within an interpretation of the original “majja” precept, or not.
I feel that Right View is part of this analysis. If we start to quibble about what majja/mada literally means, we lose our perspective. As part of a translation that is meaningful, it may be useful to include a general word such as “intoxicant” in a translation, so as to include other forms of drugs other than alcohol. This may be done not because it is literally a pure translation, but it is a proper translation that embraces the intention of the precept. Part of Right View, it seems to me, is this willingness to understand the intention of the Dhamma, and not being hung up on pure legalistic interpretations. It is this quality of developing a pure and sensible perspective of the training rules; the wise will understand this nuanced approach and their path will be aided by this Right View.
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I can see your point of view but I would counter your argument with what I said above - there are many things which we may assume the Buddha would prohibit, such as cyber-bullying, or supporting the horendous torture of animals by buying meat from standard modern meat production. But we can’t say that they are covered by the 5th precept. That doesn’t mean that we should not refrain from doing those actions! It just means they are not covered by that rule. And we are free to make up new rules for ourselves!
OK, that sounds fair enough. But now that we are using this English word intoxicant (which according to the evidence presented so far seems an entirely different word to majja in that it applies not only to alcohol), we should consider what we mean now by ‘intoxicant’. It can’t mean all drugs. My Oxford Dictionary provides this definition for intoxicate which would seem applicable:
[ with obj. ] (usu. as adj.intoxicated) (of alcoholic drink or a drug) cause (someone) to lose control of their faculties or behaviour.
Buddhists across Asia seem to be able to maintain mindfulness while on tea, for example. Personally tea is too strong a drug for me to drink after 4pm, I simply can’t get to sleep at night if I do. But drugs like tea, coffee, yerba mate, kola nut and other similar drugs may even help mindfulness for some people, generally increase alertness, and can hardly be considered intoxicants, even though they are all very definitely psychoactive drugs.
Many Buddhist monks chew pan, and this seems to increase alertness. Nicotine also. Cocaine in moderate doses also does not cause one to loose control of ones faculties. Neither does MDMA (which by the way has amazing use in curing chronic depression, PTSD and so on, thus aiding in decreasing heedlessness, which is the whole aim of the 5th precept) unless taken in excessive doses. Psychadelics at high doses can make one loose control of ones faculties, though at low doses can increase alertness (and at high doses also have amazing therapeutic value, thus being in line with the aim of Buddhism), whereas downers (like alcohol, opium, heroin, barbiturates etc.) generally do dull the senses and alertness and would thus fall into this category of ‘intoxicants’.
So taking ‘majja’ to refer to all intoxicants (regardless of whether or not it did at the time of the Buddha) is still in no way justification for giving any blanket ruling against all drugs.
Furthermore we might consider how much our cultural conditioning effects our perception of this issue. In the West, and also in the East now largely due to the imperial domination of the East in the recent past and more recent Western pressures, most psychoactive drugs are illegal. One of the most harmful, alcohol, is not legal, but many quite harmless drugs are illegal, and that tends to give perceptual bias towards these substances. I think it should be quite informative that cannabis is viewed simply as a medicine in the EBT. It was potent enough to relieve pain, and suttacentral’s definition includes usage as “narcotic nerve stimulant” and “analgesic and sedative”, so it was indeed psychoactive, as it is today. I am not saying I recommend cannabis use for meditators - I do not! But we must, I feel, be very cautious about pushing our modern interpretations however they have come about, onto the EBT’s categories.
I read your post carefully, Justin, and I can’t say that in concept I disagree with the points you’re making. Yes, some chemicals or compounds do aid in mindfulness. I am writing this post after two cups of French pressed dark, molasses like coffee. Caffeine, at the moment, is my friend. At other times, not my friend.
blanket ruling against all drugs.
Part of what i’m trying to say is that it helps me not to see the precepts as “blanket rulings,” or ordinances. Part of Right View is cultivating this ability to draw proper analogies, or make proper assumptions about what conduct is in furtherance of our goals on the Path, and what conduct is an impediment. It is our training path, and we hold the keys to the outcome.
This is maybe a poor analogy, but I can say I violate the First Precept regularly. Maybe this makes me a terrible person, or a terrible trainee on the path. But, I hate mosquitoes. I live part time in Chiang Mai, and there is a bit of a rise in the presence of Aedes aegypti mosquito, which transmits Dengue Fever. I know people from BKK and CM that have caught dengue from these little city dweller bastards. It’s an awful experience, I am told. So, if I see one of these black spotted daytime bloodsuckers, I promise you I am not going to lift it gently and release it outdoors, as I do with all other insects. I am not going to let it land on my shaved head, and have a meal, as one monk told me once to do while meditating. Sorry, not gonna do that. I am going to squash it immediately.
How this affects my training and my ethics ( and my kamma) I am unsure. Some may say I am a terrible Buddhist, and a terrible 8 precepter. But, it’s my training path, and I have a sense that Right View may involve some measure of nuance and wisdom. Perhaps I will make some merit that day to make up for killing one these little monsters. I will confess this as a negative act, but maybe not entirely unskillful act.
So taking ‘majja’ to refer to all intoxicants (regardless of whether or not it did at the time of the Buddha) is still in no way justification for giving any blanket ruling against all drugs.
I agree, just as I agree that we must use our judgment to determine how the use of any intoxicant affects our progress on the Path. This is one of the wonders of the Buddha’s Dhamma. He gave us the keys to the jail. Our views, intentions, and actions determine the outcome.
Great. That’s nice to hear - thanks AnagarikaMichael.
May I suggest that there could be a useful way to change your position on this matter. Hatred would in this case be perhaps the greatest downfall in what you have shared, in my opinion. I think it would be useful to consider that the mosquitos have no negative intention towards you. If you really contemplate that, then I feel that you will no longer view them as ‘bastards’, and your hatred towards them should dissolve. They too, want to feel good, and do not want to feel bad. Nor do they want to die. You are the same as them in that regard, and contemplating that could hopefully bring compassion and love to your heart for them.
From what you have said here, it would seem that your downfall on top of hatred may be laziness. If you 1) consider that your killing them will have statistically effectively zero effect on their overall numbers, 2) train in compassion and loving kindness towards them, which will surely aid your own path the enlightenment, and 3) train in patience by removing them as you do with other insects, which will have the same result to your physical body as killing them, but will have a far more skilfull effect on your mind by enhancing this fundamentally important quality of patience - then I suggest that not only will your kamma be ‘cleaner’, but also your mind will become far more imbued with skillful qualities, making your own path so much swifter.
Fantastic!
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