Sila: Avoiding Sexual Misconduct, Abuse of Intoxicants, as a Path to Nibanna

Date: 2025-03-06 Thursday

As many of you know, Buddhist ethics -  sila in Pali – isn’t exactly a moral code but rather a way of cultivating healthy actions of body, speech and mind that support us and others in life. Also, it’s not a crisp boundary of right and wrong, but rather a training, a core part of our Dharma practice.

For the first session we explored the three most straightforward of the five:  training in not killing, training in not lying, training in not stealing. We saw how subtle these three can be, and how much these become a diamond edge in our practice.

For this second session, we’re going to be exploring the far more ambiguous last two – training in not abusing intoxicants and cloud the mind, and training in avoiding sexual misconduct. These are more ambiguous because they’re so  connected to activities that to some of us, some of the  time, are acceptable, because these are conditioned by cultural standards, and because they have so much to do with intent.

Click here to listen to or download the talk on the Seattle Insight page.