The Five Precepts

Overview

Recall questions on the Five Precepts as training rules, intoxicants and sexual misconduct, their positive counterparts, whether all breaches are equally serious, lay and monastic observance in Theravada and Mahayana, and Harvey and Bodhi on the precepts.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What are the Five Precepts?

   Model answer

   To abstain from taking life, from taking what has not been given, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, and from drink and drugs that cloud the mind. Buddhists undertake them as a set, usually reciting them after the refuges.

2. 2

   Why are the precepts described as training rules rather than commandments?

   Model answer

   Because they are undertaken voluntarily, in the first person, and no deity issues them. A Buddhist takes them on as a discipline that supports meditation and reduces harm; breaking one is a failure of training with karmic consequences, not disobedience to a lawgiver.

3. 3

   What does the fifth precept forbid, and why is it there when drinking harms nobody else directly?

   Model answer

   It covers intoxicants that lead to heedlessness. The usual reasoning is that it protects the other four, since a clouded mind is far likelier to break them, and that it works directly against the mindfulness the path is trying to build.

4. 4

   How do Buddhists read the precept on sexual misconduct?

   Model answer

   Traditionally it rules out adultery and sexual behaviour that exploits, deceives or harms, including sex with someone under another's protection. Interpretations vary: monastics take a further precept of celibacy, and contemporary teachers in different traditions and cultures apply the lay precept in noticeably different ways.

5. 5

   Do the precepts only tell a Buddhist what not to do?

   Model answer

   They are phrased as abstentions, but the tradition pairs each with a positive quality to cultivate: kindness in place of harming, generosity in place of taking, contentment and restraint in place of misconduct, truthfulness in place of lying, and clarity in place of intoxication.

6. 6

   Is breaking one precept as serious as breaking another?

   Model answer

   No. Buddhist ethics weighs intention, the effort involved and the being affected, so killing a person deliberately is far graver than killing an insect carelessly, and a malicious lie graver than a trivial one. The precept is the same; the karmic weight is not.

Other ways to work this

The same content, four other ways.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.