Human Values
October 12, 2023

We’re born in this human realm. We have the opportunity to develop the good qualities of human beings. And as we live here, we can share those good qualities with others so that when we leave, we’ve left good things behind.

So we want to make sure that we don’t go off course. The Buddha listed four ways of going off course.

One is through partiality. In other words, there are certain people you like. And so you treat them in an unfair way because you like them—unfair in the sense that you give them more than is their due, simply because you like them. And where do you get that “more”? From the people that you don’t like.

That’s the second way of going off course—are the people you dislike, so you treat them in an inhumane way, an unfair way.

There are cases where you’re deluded.

And there are cases where you go off course out of fear. You’re afraid that you’ll lose the things you depend on—your wealth, your health, your relatives. And you end up doing things that make it difficult to maintain wealth. Because the Buddha said you don’t gain wealth by fighting, you gain wealth by being generous. You don’t look after your health by fighting. You look after your health by holding to the precepts.

And the same with your relatives. We all know that we’re going to have to leave our relatives at one point. Either they go first or we go first. As the Buddha said, if you want to live together again in the next time around, you observe the precepts—both sides observe the precepts. People who have precepts, the Buddha said, can make vows and their vows tend to come true.

So the Buddha’s sense of how we protect these things is very different from the normal sense that we have in the world. But the Buddha’s way of doing it is the human way. The humane way. In other words, you look for safety and security in life through being generous, through being virtuous, through developing the mind.

So these are the qualities that were trying to develop again, and again, and again. These are the qualities that you hear over and over again in Dhamma talks throughout the Buddhist world in Asia: generosity, virtue, meditation. When they talk about meditation, they start with meditation on goodwill, realizing that we live together, and if we have ill will for somebody else, we’re going to do unskillful things, and those unskillful things then become our karma. So we’re harming ourselves as we harm others.

So we do our best to provide protection, at least from our quarter. Maybe you can’t prevent other people from doing harm, but you make sure that you don’t do any harm to anybody at all. The Buddha said that’s a form of universal safety that you give to the world. When that safety is universal, then you have a part in it, too.

So look for your opportunities to do good in the world. And when you take advantage of those opportunities, learn how to appreciate how good it is that you can do this. That will encourage you to do it more. At the same time, you’re setting a good example for others. It’s this way that goodness survives in the world—and that’s the kind of survival that matters most.