Donald Rothberg: Practicing the Wise Speech Guideline of Truthfulness: Four Dimensions of Practice

Thank you, Liliana. And welcome back, everyone. And if it works to have your video on, it's nice to be able to see people. So if that can work for you, I'd be very much appreciated. So today, I want to talk about the guideline in practicing wise speech of being truthful. So I'll be talking about wise speech in a few different ways. And a reminder that of the importance of ethical practice, wise speech is one of the elements of ethical practice. Sometimes we focus, as I've often taught so much on meditation, but Buddha really gave three areas of training in wisdom, in meditation, and in what we can call ethical practice. And probably for our daily lives, wise speech may be the most fundamental dimension of our practice, because if we're focusing on practicing wise speech, which can include speech when we're online, digital speech and so forth, how many of us complain, oh, it's hard to get in half an hour a day of meditation? Anyone sometimes complain to yourself like that? Well, you take on wise speech, my friends, we have two hours, three hours, five hours, ten hours of speech. Does anyone have multiple hours of speech a day? Yeah. And so this is really an invitation to take that more fully. And I've talked often about how, in a way, ethical practice has sometimes been marginalized in the West. We focus so much on meditation, which I personally love, and I've spent a good chunk of my life in meditation. But as some of you may remember this clearly, ethical practice has generally been somewhat marginalized in the way Western Buddhism has developed. Wise speech hasn't been so emphasized. The ethical guidelines haven't been so emphasized. Some people might take them very seriously, but they've often not been so central. So I want to talk about one aspect of wise speech today, which is the guideline of being truthful, speaking the truth, and point to it its importance in a few different ways. I want to talk about what it looks like individually to practice with the guideline of truthfulness, which is just one aspect of wise speech, but often thought to be the most important. In the Mahayana tradition, truthfulness is thought to be the most important aspect to practice. It's said that a bodhisattva who is not truthful has violated the core of the practice. So being truthful is very crucial. You can find something very similar in other traditions. The ones I know of where truthfulness is so crucial are Christian and Jewish and Muslim traditions. Being truthful plays a very, very central role. You can just think of the ninth of the ten commandments. These days, typically interpreted in terms of being truthful. First, I'll look at how do we practice this individually and personally? Secondly, I'll probably spend half of the talk on that first part. I'm going to have four parts to the talk. The second part will be on how traditionally was there also a social dimension to being truthful? That it also is a guideline for developing a good community and a good society. I'm going to talk secondly about sort of a social reading of the guideline and what we see, both in terms of how truthfulness is helpful and also how it's obviously not always kept. And then thirdly, I want to look into using truthfulness as a way to look at our society and world in terms of whether the guideline of truthfulness is being followed. Some of you know the answer ahead of time to that one. And then fourthly, what to do? How do we have a sense of the guideline of truthfulness being a guide not just for what we do personally in our relationships, but also how might we bring more truthfulness into the world? So four aspects. Most of the time, maybe not most, but the bulk of the good portion of the time, I should say on the first teaching about truthfulness and wise speech. And wise speech is a practice I love. For people who want to go deeper with it, I did give on these Wednesday mornings a series of four talks on the foundations of wise speech. A little different from what I'm doing today. In July and August of 2023, which are on the website, Dharma Seed, if you want to go into more depth with those. And I looked at really four main aspects of wise speech, working with the guidelines given by the Buddha, which include truthfulness. Secondly, how in our speech practice to stay present, how do we have presence and awareness in the midst of speech? You know, for many of us, it's the question of how does our speech not be purely mental? How do we keep awareness and mindfulness in our speech? That was the second area. A third area that I explore was how to develop empathy as a key practice in speech with others. How do we bring empathy to ourselves and others? And then the fourth aspect was how do we bring all of these foundations to working with difficulties and conflicts in speech? Those were the subjects of that longer coverage. Today I just want to focus in detail on truthfulness. Truthfulness is the first of the guidelines. And again, as I mentioned from many of the most central, the other guidelines, we want our speech practice to be truthful. We want our speech to be truthful, helpful, come out of a kind heart, and be appropriate. The Buddha especially talked of good timing. So sometimes it's not the right time to talk about something. So we want to keep asking that question. And what's really interesting is that all four of the guidelines have to be there together for there to be a skillful speech. I can be really truthful, really helpful, come out of a beautiful heart, and if my timing is off, it can be a mess. Anyone experience that at times? You can have wonderful, careful speech, but we want to really look for timing. And similarly, I can be really truthful, but actually not be interested in being helpful or being kind. We sometimes call that dumping. Dumping might, people know that term, know that we might be truthful in a way that's actually designed to hurt someone. Right. So the key here, very interesting is that all four of the guidelines have to be in play, play together. This is from the Buddha. A statement endowed with five factors is well spoken. And you'll hear two versions of the kindness. A statement endowed with five factors is well spoken, not all spoken. Which five? It is spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken affectionately. It is spoken beneficially. It is spoken with a mind of goodwill. Can you hear those guidelines of truthful, helpful, good heart, good timing? Another quotation from the Buddha. This is particularly about being truthful. Abandoning false speech, one abstains from false speech. One speaks truth, adheres to truth, is trustworthy and reliable. One who is no deceiver of the world. So you can start to see that there is a social dimension coming in. No deceiver of the world. The Buddha once was speaking with his son, Rahula. And he said, never tell a deliberate lie, even ingest. Very strong statement. Truthfulness really, most deeply, is an expression of our mindfulness and our wisdom. My colleague, Agulu, who sometimes teaches on Wednesday, once said in one of his talks on wise speech, every time we lie, we devalue the truth. Again, very crucial in other Buddhist traditions. I mentioned that it's the most central for the Mahayana Bodhisattva, one who is trying to gain awakening and help others at the same time. It's said that the Bodhisattva can break at times any of the precepts, except for the precept of truthfulness. Very, very, very central. As a guideline for our practice, we can remember it in the morning. Maybe you want to put a piece of paper or something on your computer or your phone to remind you of wise speech and following the guideline of truthfulness. Because what I'll do for people who resonate with this, I'll invite us to practice this for the next week. See if you feel cold in that way. How do we practice the guideline of truthfulness? I think most basically it's both a kind of behavioral guideline and also a spark for mindfulness. So we can use it as a guideline and at a key moment when we're speaking, and maybe something in our mind develops something not entirely truthful, we can say, I'm not going there. And especially we can use the guideline of truthfulness as a way to notice when we in some way violate the guideline, which can actually happen if we go deeply into it in a number of different ways that we can violate the guideline by outright lying, telling an untruth. More frequently we may notice that we violate the guideline in a few other ways, maybe by exaggerating, right? Exaggerating maybe for the sake of self-image. Has anyone ever done that? Looks like about half of us have raised their hands. We can exaggerate. We can tell half truths. We can really not follow the guideline of truthfulness by omission. Maybe we don't say something. Again, all of this has to be balanced with helpfulness, care, and timing. But can we really invite it to look for when we go against the guideline? When am I not following truthfulness? If we can, we can stop and be mindful. Or maybe we come back to it a little while. I just had a discussion. I wasn't entirely truthful. A little bit after it, I go, OK, let me be with what was there. Typically we would find some kind of reactivity linked with violating the guideline of truthfulness. Typically I want something, or I don't want something. Two forms of reactivity, grasping for something, or pushing away something more unconsciously or habitually. And maybe just one last qualification about being truthful. Truth being truthful doesn't mean being overly nice. If you look at the Buddha, often very truthful but very strong to help someone. So we can be very firm. We can say, no, that's not OK. We can really speak up quite strongly. So truthfulness doesn't mean being overly nice. That's a really, really crucial point. And again, as I mentioned, the guideline of truthfulness is there and other traditions. In the Jewish tradition, the Talmud says, God's signature or seal is truth. And there's, again, the ninth of the ten commandments. Originally it was about not giving false testimony against one's neighbor, but it came to be interpreted really as being truthful, as telling the truth, avoiding lying. So we find that same guideline is very central. In the Christian Bible it said that God is the God of truthfulness. That God never lies. Very strong focus on speaking honestly and avoiding. And avoiding, yeah, avoiding any violation of that. So let me move to the second area. That's really how we practice, how we practice, how we practice truthfulness. There's also a social dimension to being truthful. As I gave an earlier quote, abandoning false speech, one speaks the truth, holds to the truth, is no deceiver of the world. And the Buddha thought that truthfulness is really the basis for all human ethics. The Buddha once said, someone who feels no shame at a deliberate lie, the Buddha said, there is no evil that person cannot do. So it's like lying opens up other kinds of wrongdoing in the world. I've mentioned sometimes the emperor of what's now India, King Ashoka, about 250 years after the Buddha, who brought Buddhist ethical guidelines into the whole society. I mentioned that he renounced war, that he set up aid stations for the poor and the elderly, abolished capital punishment and so forth. He also held truthfulness as a very important guideline for the whole society. He said that speaking the truth was a basic civic duty, really required to have coherence in the larger society. And he said, we teach the dharma, what constitutes the dharma or the dharma. It includes little evil, much good, kindness, generosity, truthfulness and purity. We must have noble deeds which include being truthful. And so more broadly we can think that being truthful is really connected in our communities and our larger society with a kind of safety and trust. When we don't have truthfulness in the society, who can we trust? How can we feel safe? Social relationships without truthfulness may be much more strategic. People are out to get what they want, right? Not so much community, not so much safety, not so much care. Looking out for number one becomes the basis. And you can see how that is actually, you know, significantly there. How do we have truthfulness in our media? How do we have truthfulness in our larger society? And I think we know that there are often all sorts of ways that governments don't tell the truth. Have you noticed one or two ways that governments don't always tell the truth? More than one or two? Yeah, I mean we look to the history and it's pretty intense. I remember reading a story about a US citizen whose husband was killed in Central America by the CIA. And she wasn't given the truth by the government. This was 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago. And she developed a suit which went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme, you know, she was basically saying governments have a duty to tell the truth to their citizens. She lost the case. And the representative of the government said government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information. And the Supreme Court said, we agree with the government. Individuals cannot sue government officials for lying. Is that a shock? No. That's right there. That's in current law. So when you go back through US history, and I think probably similar with all countries, you go back to US history, many of the wars that have been fought were based on lies. I think people know that. I look back at some of the history. It goes back to the Mexican-American war, so called, in the middle of the 19th century, was based on lies. It was based on lies that Mexico had invaded the US, which was not true. And that led to the war happening and the seizing of, you know, much of the western part of what's now the US. The US annexed about 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory based on lies leading to a war. Very similar with the Spanish-American war and the war in the Philippines based on lies that led to about 200,000 people dying. You know, and probably more up to date people know about the whole experience with Vietnam and the lies, how many people are pretty aware of the lies connected with Vietnam. Right, and only really fully revealed with the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower, right, who has actually lived right near me. I got to meet him many, many times, which was kind of sweet. But most of the basis for going to war, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, some of you may remember that based on lies, you know, all sorts of, you know, the Pentagon Papers showed that many, many things were lies. You know, what was happening in the war, success. You know, there was a review 50 years after the Pentagon Papers were released in the New York Times. The summary said, with the Pentagon Papers revelations, the US public's trust in the government was forever diminished. You know, and you can see the same thing with the war in Iraq. You know, need I say more? You know, there are, you know, that the weapons of mass destruction. Again, you know, Vietnam, 3 million people were killed because of the lack of truthfulness or related to lack of truthfulness, I should say. Very similar in Iraq, probably 500,000 to a million Iraqis died with that war. Now people, presumably just like us, right, were killed related to, related to lies. One study by the Center for Public Integrity said that the Bush administration officials, including the president and vice president, made at least 935 false statements in the two years leading up to the war. You know, where I also think of the phrase, the big lie, which was a phrase that you find in Adolf Hitler's mind comp. Hitler, you know, told, you know, all sorts of lies which led to power, you know, consolidating power. I think people know most of these, probably, you know, they deliberately set the governmental building called the Reichstag on fire, and then claimed that other people had done it. And that was the basis for eliminating civil liberties. They also had actions that similarly would temporarily amend the Constitution so that there were no powers. And Hitler said that this was only temporary, but it was permanent and the Constitution was abolished. There was no other government power other than him. So all power was based on whatever he wanted. He became a dictator. But this only was because he convinced other people that that wasn't his intention. Yeah, so you can see that history. So what happens when we look to the contemporary society? Are there any lies by the contemporary US government? Anyone have heard one or two lies? The Washington Post documented, they didn't call them lies, they called them falsehoods. But they documented in the first presidential administration of the current president, they documented 30,573 falsehoods, an average of 21 a day. And they said, for the second term, we are not going to do this. It was too exhausting to document it. So it's not happening, but people are still noticing falsehoods. What do we do with a society based on falsehoods? I heard whether it's about voting. And again, I'm saying this without making this a partisan issue. Because the Vietnam War lies were mostly from democratic administrations. So it's from both administrations. But what do we do when we have falsehoods about climate causing harm or the big lies about voting? That there was fraud, all sorts of fraud in the 2020 election, which has not been substantiated. Or more recently, did you know that Ukraine started the war? The current president has said that several times, that Ukraine started the war with Russia. So I probably don't need to say too much more about that, really. Is that well known? I'm not trying to be partisan here. So if we are committed to following the ethical guidelines, is there a meaning for trying to bring about more truthfulness in the society? And how would we act? We want to act individually to be truthful. How do we act at the level of our communities or at the level of the whole society? I just want to mention a few and then we can open things up. Obviously, we might speak up in community forums, write letters to the editor, really clarify when something is not truthful. And really try to keep up with that guideline. Speaking up in various ways for the importance of truthfulness, both in terms of individual actions and in terms of the whole society. We could support organizations that do fact-checking, that support the guideline of truthfulness. There are fewer than when I researched it, there are fewer than I found, that one of them is called PolitiFact, which tracks statements in terms of their truthfulness. Another one is called factcheck.org. There are other organizations which track what's truthful or not in terms of healthcare. One of them is called the Kaiser Family Foundation. Others track what's truthful in terms of civil liberties, the Brennan Center for Justice. So we might look at organizations and individuals, including newspapers, that are supporting truthfulness and try to have that be more strong there. That we might, in various ways, counter the various kinds of falsehoods that exist. But I think it would be just listening for oneself. Is there one way that I could help bring about more truthfulness in the world? Even in a small way, even giving some donations to organizations that support truthfulness. Speaking up in various ways and so forth. So this is a further dimension. With other dimensions of ethical practice, it might be a little bit easier to see ways that might be effective. We want to prevent harm in the world, one of the other ethical guidelines. We might say, okay, I want to act on climate issues. There might be other ways of acting. But I think for all of the ethical guidelines, it's helpful to see how do I practice individually? How do I understand this ethical guidel