I thought I’d share this first and excellent wiki page from Bhikkhu Anigha about virtue and precepts. It is a bit gloves off with no compromise but it gave me a lot of food for thought.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HillsideHermitage/wiki/virtue/
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I am not aware of any ‘mental’ precepts in the Suttas or Vinaya.
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Well it’s because there are indeed no mental precepts !
And likewise there are no mental precept in this essay. He is showing how the precepts should not limit themselves to exterior acts but also to the mental and speech domains. Something crucial if we are to take sila to the next level.
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Sila is not something mental.
But Right Intention is part of the Eightfold Path and it’s a strong foundation to Right Sīla. Intentions of Contentment/Renounce, Non-Aversion and Non-Violence.
In the Ten Wholesome Kamma/ Actions, there’s three kinds of wholesome “mental action”- right views, thoughts on non-greed and thoughts on non-hate.
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I do hope you read the whole essay before commenting though.
Things are simple, sila is way more mental that actions. if you limit your understanding of it to external behaviour you will not tame your mind. I can be the nicest person outwardly yet be eaten internally by lust and anger.
Or you can be harsh externally yet do it with best intentions such as a doctor or a parent.
Intentions precedes all of your actions, once you have your external conduct under control the natural development it to remain watchful of your mind like it is written basically everywhere in the sutta.
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Isn’t it?
Does Buddhist sīla consist in the mere non-performance of unwholesome actions of body and speech or in the intentional (which is to say, mental) refraining from their performance?
For example, if one person, while awake, intentionally refrains from killing the ants and mosquitoes that are biting him, while another, while fast asleep, unintentionally refrains from killing them because he’s unaware that they’re biting him, would you expect both instances of non-killing to generate sīlamaya-puñña?
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Looks like the Suttas need to be quoted to support this Visuddhimagga view. I already quoted MN 44 to support what I posted. Does the Vinaya contain any mental transgressions?
I don’t know where this is coming from, since I neither cited nor even had in mind the Visuddhimagga when writing my earlier post.
In a different thread you quoted from MN44, in which the nun Dhammadinnā states:
Yā cāvuso visākha, sammāvācā, yo ca sammākammanto, yo ca sammā-ājīvo, ime dhammā sīlakkhandhe saṅgahitā.
Whatever, friend Visākha, is right speech, whatever is right action and whatever is right livelihood, these things are included in the aggregate of moral habit.
But I don’t see how this has any bearing on the questions that I raised in this thread.
The Vinaya doesn’t have rules in which the state of mind by itself would amount to an offence. Rather, it has acittaka training rules, in which the mere performance of the prohibited action is an offence, and sacittaka training rules, in which culpability depends upon either the monk’s saññā or cetanā or both. The latter, which are both more numerous and concerned with morally weightier matters, have an essential mental component to them.
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