Do Unto Others...

...and you know the rest. And so I sit, feeling somewhat morally compromised. I’m not a huge fan of moral relativism. Mostly it’s just an ego-driven, smarty-pants way of justifying actions that at their root are wrong. We’ve all been there. But what really constitutes “right action”? According to Buddhist tradition the following does:

1. To refrain from destroying living beings.
2. To refrain from stealing.
3. To refrain from sexual misconduct (adultery, rape, etc.)
4. To refrain from false speech (lying).
5. To refrain from intoxicants which lead to heedlessness.

Hmm. I’m not a Buddhist, don’t study it, not particularly religious in fact. Yet monkhood has always appealed to me in a basic way. Human beings are complicated, messy creatures to be sure. It seems to me that monks basically try to not make a mess. I admire that quality greatly. The flipside of that precept or argument is that out of chaos is born new life and ideas, sometimes revolutionary in scope. Things change and can never be what they were, new layers of thought and emotion emerge, for better or worse. And the dry response to that is that of course they do. And the almost indifferent response to that is that none of it matters to begin with.

I don’t believe that nothing matters, really. Just that the things that really matter are often the most unglamorous and unrevolutionary. Do I think that reliability and consistency of thought and action matter? Yes I do. More than in anyone else, in myself.