Greetings,

This month we are talking about Right Livelihood, which is the third aspect of ethical conduct. Ethical conduct is an interweaving of right speech, right action and right livelihood. This interweaving represents the various ways we move in the world. Livelihood doesn't just mean your job. It also involves what you give your time, energy and resources to. This is where our personal desires intersect with the wider world. Right livelihood is probably the least talked about of all the factors and yet it has the biggest impact on the wider world. This is where our wider views, beliefs, opinions, and assumptions impact how we move through life. For example, your views on climate change (whether you think it's real, how important it is to you, or how significant you think your contribution is) determine whether or not you recycle and/or how much effort you put into recycling. Some people's whole life centers around their carbon footprint. For others, they don't even think about carbon footprint. Who's to say which is right? For the person concerned about climate change, they are right. For the other, the climate change argument doesn't make any sense because they don't see the significance of their small actions.

This is why I think practicing with right livelihood is a big deal. It is not a practice about fixing the outer world. It is a practice about whether you are keeping in right relationship with your own sila (ethical conduct). Is your relationship with the world congruent with your own practice? So often we spend our waking days looking outside of ourselves judging how the world is existing and imposing our views on the world. This practice is the flip side of that. This about imposing your views on yourself and making sure that you are moving in alignment with those views, regardless of whether the rest of the world is so moving.

The other thing I love about this practice is that we have to do it in isolation. It is so much easier to move in ethical conduct when everyone around us is doing the same thing, like on a retreat remaining in noble silence is a fairly easy thing to do. But if everyone is talking and you're in noble silence you get irritated with everyone else talking rather than just resting in your own noble silence. This practice strengthens our internal capacity by supporting us in cultivating trust and faith in our own relationship with the practice of sila.

This is why I picked the above picture. I loved it at first sight. To me, it points out that our individual views impact the whole world through our sense of responsibility and interconnectedness. Bhikkhu Bodhi, in his book The Noble Eightfold Path, gave a really good commentary about right livelihood that I have divided up into three approaches. First, at a basic level, right livelihood means no dealing in weapons/killing, no dealing in the trade of living beings, no dealing in the production of meat/butchery, no dealing in poisons, and no dealing in intoxicants. This isn't about the use of intoxicants, meat, poisons, etc. This is about these five areas being your means of income. These five areas cause great harm to many, many beings. If your income depends on this type of work, then you become conflicted around your need for work and the harm that work causes. For monastics, this basic level makes sense. But for lay practitioners, it could be more problematic because this may be the only work available for you. If that's the case, then your practice is more aligned to the second way of relating to right livelihood.

The second way to relate to right livelihood is less about the kind of job you have and more about how you show up at work. This is about paying attention to whether your actions around work cause harm. This includes sila in relation to your actions at work, in relation to your relating to people at work and in relation to your transactions at work. This is really pointing to whether you are fair, honest, respectful, and responsible at work. This is about whether you take advantage of situations, whether you're dependable, and treat those around you fairly. You may work in a dog-eat-dog world, but right livelihood is pointing to how you exist in that world.

The last way to practice or contemplate right livelihood is through a more altruistic way of relating to the world. It means we acquire wealth legally, peacefully (without coercion or violence), honestly (without trickery), and in ways that do not cause harm. This last aspect of right livelihood is really pointing to the consequences of overall karma and intentions in the practice. We are householders and as such we need to make money. Most of us don't want to just barely get by. We want to live comfortably and have the means to be generous. Buddha was very supportive of lay practitioners earning wealth. He recognized that it was the laity that was going to support his monastics. Often, as lay practitioners, we go on retreat and then begin to question whether we should stay in our job because of the corporate nature of the work, which seems counter to a practitioner's energy. But, acquiring wealth within the framework of sila is blameless action and therefore in keeping with right livelihood.

This is what we'll be exploring this month. Hopefully you will be able to join us. With the amount of diversity this group has, we should be able to have some deep and complex discussions around this topic.

With a deep bow,

Tuere