Book Peek: Kleshas, the Pāramitās, the Brahmaviharas, and Karma

Buddhist guidelines for a happier, more satisfying life

Welcome to From the Pure Land’s 200th post in the 263 days since its launch on June 5. We now have almost 1,000 followers and 400 subscribers. If you’ve been reading the posts and would like to get them regularly in your email inbox, click the button below. If you choose the free option, you’ll get all of the regular posts. If you choose to pay $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll also receive the longer pieces I’ve been releasing on Sundays.

These longer posts, like the one below, are draft sections of the book I’ve been working on, tentatively titled The New Middle Way: A Buddhist Path Between Secular and Ossified. Everything I plan and write now is tentative. It’s a long way from a final book. Today’s draft is the complete chapter on Buddhist ethics. You may have read the beginning, which I sent to all subscribers on February 14.

The complete draft includes sections on kleshas, the pāramitās, the brahmaviharas, and karma. You could call it a guide to skillful living. I welcome your comments below or by email if you prefer to keep them private. Now is your chance to contribute to the book’s success.

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All subscribers will see the previously published part of this draft chapter before reaching the paywall.

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You might say Buddhism replaces commandments and sins with “skillful” and “unskillful” (kusala and akusala in Sanskrit). Skillful actions reduce suffering and lead toward awakening, while unskillful ones perpetuate suffering and hinder spiritual progress. This framework emphasizes pragmatism over rigid moral rules, focusing on intentions and outcomes rather than notions of good or evil.

Translations of the Buddha’s words into English are fraught with opportunities for misunderstanding. Some translations have him using the word “evil.” Although I’m no linguist, my understanding is that the words he used might be better translated as unskillful or unwholesome.

In Second Wave Buddhism, the word upaya begins to be used as a slight variation on kusala. Upaya is translated as skillful means, usually used to help others, like a teacher changing appearance or language to reach the specific group needing guidance. In the Lotus Sutra, a key text for the Second Wave, the parable of the burning house demonstrates upaya. Here’s a very abbreviated overview of the sutra:

The Buddha tells of a very rich man who has a huge house that’s ablaze. The man is safely outside, but his children are playing inside and are hard to entice away from their toys and games. It’s impossible for the man to run in, gather his many children, and safely remove them, so he shouts to them that he has brought them three carts that are outside the gate to the house. He describes the specific type of cart appropriate for the age of each child. The children find no carts outside, but the man eventually gives each child a large, bejeweled carriage drawn by a pure white ox. The Buddha makes clear that the father is not guilty of falsehood.

In telling the parable, the Buddha also explains that he tailors his teachings to each level of student.¹

Buddhist ethics are about living skillfully and employing skillful means to reduce the suffering of all beings, which emphatically includes you. You can’t heal others if you are broken, although you can serve others while in pain. Jane Wilhelm, a wise and dear friend now long gone, was once asked what she did in her times of despair. Her reply:

I go out and find someone worse off than me and help that person.

I suspect that Jane—an American who had spent her childhood years in what was then called Burma and always remembered fondly the Buddhist culture—knew in her times of despair that she was not broken. She may not have named it, but she understood how to access her Buddha Nature.

Many stories in Buddhism stress that rigid rules need to yield to skillful ways of living. This is one of my favorites:

Two monks—one senior to the other—encounter a young woman stranded at a riverbank. Despite their monastic precepts forbidding physical contact with women, the elder monk carries her across the rushing water. They continue to walk on for hours until the junior monk confronts his mentor:

How could you break our vows and touch her?

The senior monk replies:

I set her down on the other side of the river. Why are you still carrying her?

The lessons from this story are many:

• Letting go of attachments: The senior monk could let go of his vows to solve an immediate dilemma. Then, he let go of the woman physically and mentally. The younger monk ruminated judgmentally, which only weighted him down.

• Living in the present: The past can’t be changed. Rumination is pointless, bringing more suffering.

• Compassion over dogma: I like this story because of its everyday nature. The story doesn’t tell us the woman was starving or in danger of never reaching where she needed to be. She wanted help, and the senior monk gave it. He weighed her mundane need against his mundane precept.

• Discernment: The younger monk took a transient distraction and treated it as a moral dilemma.

Lay Buddhists generally have fewer precepts—just five. We endeavor not to take life, take what is not offered, misbehave sexually, lie, or use intoxicants. These are guides to help us live skillfully. My experience in Buddhist communities is that we don’t judge each other’s interpretation of the precepts. Some of us don’t drink or use other intoxicants, some of us are social drinkers and pot smokers, some of us believe that psychedelics are an enhancement along the path.

We are sometimes too laid back for the good of the sangha and the larger community. You’ll find more on that in Chapter Ten.