Nothing much
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The Five Precepts of early Buddhism are often presented as a set of ancient prohibitions: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t misuse sexuality, don’t lie, don’t cloud the mind. They were shaped in a world where harm was immediate and visible, and where ethical restraint was the foundation of practice. But if these precepts are to…
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The ethical code of early Buddhism is to be found mainly in the strands of the Eightfold Path concerned with Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood (sīla), together with the Five Precepts for laypeople. They present an ancient blueprint for avoiding harm (ahimsa). But beneath this clarity lies a framework that is both ingenious…
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Emptiness (sūnyatā) explains the nature of everything. The explanation was already implicit in the earliest teaching of no-self (anattā) – that humans have no permanent, unchanging ‘self’ (or soul), but instead consist of five aggregates: the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Another early teaching looks to the nature of experience, concluding that nothing…