How to Live
the ethic — what it asks of a life
The Five Precepts.
No killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, intoxication — the lay floor of the path.
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The Eight Precepts.
On observance days a layperson takes on three more: nothing to eat after midday, no music, dancing, perfume or jewellery, and no comfortable bed. A monastic life rented for twenty-four hours.
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The Eightfold Path.
Right view through right concentration — ethics, meditation, and wisdom as one program.
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The perfections.
Generosity, ethics, patience, effort, meditation, wisdom. Six qualities to be developed without limit — where the precepts say what to avoid, these say what to build.
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The Vinaya.
Two hundred twenty-seven rules for monks — the monastic constitution, recited in full twice a month.
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The bodhisattva vow.
Beings are numberless; I vow to free them all. Taken out loud, in ceremony, by people who can do arithmetic — the impossibility is doing the work.
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The four immeasurables.
Loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity — trained deliberately, extended without limit.
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Dana — giving comes first.
Generosity is the first perfection and the first instruction, and it is deliberately placed before ethics and meditation: the tradition holds that a mind that will not open its hands will not open at all.
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Right livelihood.
No trade in weapons, living beings, flesh, poison, or intoxicants — the path constrains the wallet too.
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The ten courses of action.
The precepts pushed outward into speech and inward into mind: not just no lying but no divisive speech, no harshness, no idle talk — and not just no stealing but no coveting.
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The meat argument.
The Buddha ate meat and refused to ban it; East Asian Mahayana banned it anyway. Two and a half thousand years later this is still the most-argued ethical question in Buddhism.
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The fourteen precepts of Engaged Buddhism.
Thich Nhat Hanh's twentieth-century additions, written under a war: do not be idolatrous about doctrine, do not look away from suffering, do not accumulate while others starve. The first one applies to the other thirteen.
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