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19 Virtues without Rules Ethics in the Insight Meditation Movement Gil Fronsdal introduction Observers have commented that for Buddhism to take firm hold in the West it needs to develop a well-articulated ethic. This chapter is a study of how Buddhist ethics is taught within one rapidly growing movement of Western Buddhism: what I will be calling the Insight Meditation movement . While the movement has so far published no overview of its ethics, enough material is now available for us to discern some general points. Among Buddhist movements in the West, the Insight Meditation movement is unique in that it is not simply a transplant of an Asian Buddhist tradition. Rather, it can be seen as a new tradition taking shape in the West around particular meditative practices of vipassanā, often translated as “insight meditation” or colloquially as “mindfulness practice.” Vipassanā practice is clearly derived from the Theravāda Buddhism of South and Southeast Asia, where it has a central soteriological role. However, in bringing this meditation practice to the West, the founders of the Insight Meditation movement have consciously downplayed (or even jettisoned) many important elements of the Theravāda tradition, including monasticism , rituals, merit-making, and Buddhist cosmology. Without these and other elements, the Insight Meditation movement has been relatively unencumbered in developing itself into a form of Western Buddhism. In doing so, it has retained only a minimal identification with its Theravāda origins. Ethics, morality, and virtue have central roles in the Asian Theravāda tradition. All three of these English terms can be used to translate the Pāli word sı̄la that appears in the important three-fold division of the Therava ̄din Buddhist spiritual path: sı̄la, samādhi, and paññā (ethics, meditative absorption, and wisdom). The primary question I ask here is: In what ways has the Theravāda concept of sı̄la been translated in the Western Insight Meditation movement? Other questions asked are: How central is ethics to 285 the Insight Meditation movement? How are Buddhist ethical teachings understood ? Are there innovations or developments particular to the movement or to its Western setting? My hope is that addressing these and other issues will contribute to an understanding of the major cross-cultural issue of how ethics and codes of conduct travel from one culture to another. One of the unique features of this movement is that it consists predominantly of laypeople engaged in meditative practices traditionally associated with monastics. Historically, the Theravāda tradition’s teachings on lay ethics were addressed to people who, by and large, did not meditate. Teachings to the laity did not, therefore, emphasize a relationship between ethics and meditation. Lay ethics was advocated by stressing the benefits and merits , or the harm and demerits, that various actions would bring in this or future lives. For the majority of Western lay Insight Meditation practitioners , however, the ideas of merit and rebirth hold little sway. Rather, meditation is the primary Buddhist activity providing the basis for understanding Buddhist teachings. How then, does the movement view the relationship between meditation and ethical behavior? The next section will give a general introduction to the Insight Meditation movement, including a definition. This is followed by a study of the movement’s ethical teachings, including a detailed discussion of the role of the five lay precepts. While these precepts do not always have a prominent role, the way they are handled provides a useful reference for understanding the movement’s approach to ethics. the insight meditation movement Currently no clear institutional, doctrinal, or membership boundaries exist for the wide range of Western practitioners of the Theravāda practice of vipassanā, that is, the meditative cultivation of undistracted, and at times highly concentrated, attentiveness to what is being experienced in the present . However, the subject of this study and what I am calling the Insight Meditation movement are those vipassanā practitioners, teachers, institutions , and publications with either formal or close informal affiliation with the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, California. This includes the meditation centers and sitting groups led by teachers or practitioners affiliated with these two. IMS and Spirit Rock are the most visible and active vipassanā centers in North America. Furthermore, the largest, best organized and most clearly bounded groups of Western vipassanā teachers are those associated with these centers.1 In defining the Insight Meditation 286 / Gil Fronsdal [3.143.218...

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