1 00:00:01,111 --> 00:00:02,614 First sex, now murder. 2 00:00:03,676 --> 00:00:05,621 So now we have a question about killing people. 3 00:00:05,661 --> 00:00:07,765 What would you rather do? 4 00:00:07,905 --> 00:00:12,876 Kill one person to save a thousand or let one live and one thousand must die? 5 00:00:16,822 --> 00:00:18,584 one of these what-if questions. 6 00:00:18,604 --> 00:00:21,227 No one has books full of these that you're supposed to torture yourself over. 7 00:00:21,268 --> 00:00:21,908 It's really silly. 8 00:00:21,948 --> 00:00:25,953 I mean, there's no, I'm not causing a thousand people to die if I let one live. 9 00:00:26,915 --> 00:00:33,943 I mean, yeah, I could go around hunting out serial killers and shooting them and so on. 10 00:00:35,826 --> 00:00:43,335 I mean, it's such a long and complicated answer, but this is the argument that we had over buying meat and so on. 11 00:00:44,125 --> 00:00:47,361 The point is you're only responsible for the actions that you do. 12 00:00:48,567 --> 00:00:52,768 An action is only unwholesome, is only bad. 13 00:00:54,284 --> 00:00:57,850 because of the nature of the mind of the person who performs it. 14 00:00:57,971 --> 00:00:58,311 That's it. 15 00:00:59,373 --> 00:01:02,198 There's no God telling us this is wrong. 16 00:01:02,258 --> 00:01:04,282 There's no society telling us. 17 00:01:04,983 --> 00:01:09,751 Just because God tells you it's wrong, just because society tells you it's wrong, doesn't make anything wrong. 18 00:01:10,012 --> 00:01:11,855 Socrates pointed this out. 19 00:01:11,875 --> 00:01:15,702 Socrates said, or Plato, however, but Socrates said that 20 00:01:17,892 --> 00:01:22,498 this man was going to take his parents to court because he thought it's what the gods wanted. 21 00:01:23,479 --> 00:01:29,827 And so Sakriza asked him, well, so is it right to take your parents to court because the gods say it's right? 22 00:01:30,108 --> 00:01:32,651 Or do the gods say it's right because it's right? 23 00:01:34,413 --> 00:01:38,078 And either way, you can't evoke the gods. 24 00:01:39,961 --> 00:01:43,265 There is no entity that could tell you that something is right or wrong. 25 00:01:43,846 --> 00:01:46,549 Murder could be perfectly right, 26 00:01:46,816 --> 00:01:54,470 There's nothing intrinsic about the act of killing someone that is in any way wrong. 27 00:01:54,610 --> 00:01:57,014 If one person kills another, it's meaningless to you. 28 00:01:57,275 --> 00:02:02,384 If this person kills that person, it's totally unrelated to your state of mind. 29 00:02:02,884 --> 00:02:05,449 You can just watch it and say, seeing, seeing. 30 00:02:05,429 --> 00:02:25,227 There's no relationship And this is scientific This isn't Buddhist theory If you're thinking about this logically And removing your emotions from it If you're thinking of it scientifically This is why scientists have a real problem with ethics And why they cut up rats And poison rats And wind up horrible people 31 00:02:25,207 --> 00:02:31,575 Because they are unable to develop a clear code of ethics. 32 00:02:32,136 --> 00:02:34,959 Simply because from a scientific point of view there's nothing wrong with killing. 33 00:02:35,040 --> 00:02:36,321 Killing is the end of a life. 34 00:02:36,421 --> 00:02:37,082 What does it mean? 35 00:02:37,122 --> 00:02:38,124 It means nothing. 36 00:02:38,884 --> 00:02:46,354 Their only understanding of ethics is a religious concept that has no basis in reality. 37 00:02:47,701 --> 00:03:03,826 So Buddhism just points one thing out, that not only does the physical exist and go by laws of physics, but the mind also exists, and it goes by laws of how the mind works. 38 00:03:03,846 --> 00:03:08,133 At the moment when you kill someone, you're creating a problem in your mind. 39 00:03:08,293 --> 00:03:11,578 When you let someone kill someone else, you're not creating a problem in your mind. 40 00:03:12,720 --> 00:03:13,962 This is the only... 41 00:03:15,916 --> 00:03:27,695 ethical principle that exists in Theravada Buddhism anyway, that the actions that you perform will affect your mind, the choices that you make. 42 00:03:27,755 --> 00:03:36,229 So if you're watching someone kill someone else or kill a thousand people creates anguish in your mind, then you're responsible for the creating of anguish. 43 00:03:36,770 --> 00:03:43,020 If you could save those people and you choose to not save them, 44 00:03:43,000 --> 00:04:02,477 if all you had to do is tell them run that guy's got a gun or something like that or someone's coming with a gun go hide and you don't do that then you're responsible for that you're not ever responsible for the killing unless you're the one pulling the trigger or unless you're the one telling a person to kill if you say to this person kill that man 45 00:04:03,503 --> 00:04:05,388 I mean, you're still not responsible for pulling the trigger. 46 00:04:05,428 --> 00:04:08,476 You're responsible for telling that person to do something. 47 00:04:08,496 --> 00:04:17,298 You're responsible for the ethical qualities of mind, the greed, the anger, and the delusion inherent in the mind at that moment. 48 00:04:17,859 --> 00:04:19,403 So, 49 00:04:19,383 --> 00:04:28,293 If you don't kill the person who's going to kill a thousand people, then it may be that unwholesomeness arises in your mind as a result. 50 00:04:28,934 --> 00:04:35,020 You think, let those people die, good, nothing to do, not my problem. 51 00:04:35,080 --> 00:04:38,364 And so as a result, you create some kind of worry and anguish afterwards. 52 00:04:38,424 --> 00:04:41,828 I couldn't save them, all I had to do was kill that one man. 53 00:04:43,189 --> 00:04:45,492 But on the other hand, if you kill that one person, 54 00:04:46,535 --> 00:04:48,038 then you have to say, what is different? 55 00:04:48,218 --> 00:04:49,360 What is worse? 56 00:04:49,941 --> 00:04:57,794 This guilt that I have over those thousand deaths, which weren't a result of my actions. 57 00:04:58,295 --> 00:05:05,667 And so the only reason it comes up is because of some intellectualizing, or some minor feelings of guilt, or the feeling of pulling a trigger. 58 00:05:06,969 --> 00:05:11,597 I think the real reason why people have a problem with this, and a problem with... 59 00:05:12,978 --> 00:05:17,182 with understanding things like hunting in general, is because they've never done it themselves. 60 00:05:17,842 --> 00:05:33,376 If you've never killed a significantly large being, like my example is a deer, because that's how far I went, or even more a human being, then you have no real right to argue this question. 61 00:05:34,097 --> 00:05:42,985 And I don't have the right to argue, but if you've read the books, if you've read accounts of people who have killed, and how it affects them, 62 00:05:42,965 --> 00:05:44,247 any of these books. 63 00:05:44,267 --> 00:05:47,912 The book I was referring to earlier was Crime and Punishment. 64 00:05:47,972 --> 00:05:57,725 It's just an excellent, excellent description of the torture that goes through the mind of someone who kills another human being that we can't even fathom. 65 00:05:58,265 --> 00:06:00,288 Most of us, we think, well, it's just intellectualizing. 66 00:06:00,348 --> 00:06:02,391 So you kill someone, what's the problem? 67 00:06:02,371 --> 00:06:04,655 totally different when you actually try to do it. 68 00:06:04,715 --> 00:06:06,559 It's an incredibly powerful act. 69 00:06:07,360 --> 00:06:10,887 The only comparison I have is with, as I said, with hunting, with killing a deer. 70 00:06:11,868 --> 00:06:19,482 I had no compunction, no problem with killing and I, you know, I killed insects and small animals and no problem with hunting. 71 00:06:19,522 --> 00:06:21,526 I got my hunting license trained and so on. 72 00:06:22,388 --> 00:06:25,273 And then I sat up in the tree and when the deer came, 73 00:06:26,536 --> 00:06:32,985 raising this crossbow, ready to pull the trigger, and suddenly my whole body started to shake. 74 00:06:33,506 --> 00:06:34,787 The deer was no threat to me. 75 00:06:34,828 --> 00:06:36,029 There was no fear. 76 00:06:36,069 --> 00:06:37,672 There should have been no fear in my mind. 77 00:06:38,172 --> 00:06:49,388 It wasn't like there was some danger to me, but I just got this incredible dread and revulsion to it, and my whole body started to shake, and I could barely pull the trigger. 78 00:06:50,269 --> 00:06:52,392 That's how powerful it is. 79 00:06:52,372 --> 00:06:59,043 This was totally not intellectual because I had no feelings of hesitation. 80 00:06:59,423 --> 00:07:01,166 I was perfectly ready to do this. 81 00:07:02,028 --> 00:07:07,917 And yet when it came time to do that, because I had never done it, because my mind was still pure of that, 82 00:07:07,897 --> 00:07:36,942 it had an incredible effect on my mind and this is what you're looking at if you kill someone if you're just talking about the guilt feelings of not having prevented other people's death when actually in the end all of those people are going to have to die anyway whether it be from a bullet wound or whether it be from old age everyone dies and in horrible ways you can't possibly save even a small portion of the people who have to die in horrible ways 83 00:07:36,922 --> 00:08:00,313 If it's just a matter of feeling that kind of guilt from not having prevented the inevitable, or put off the inevitable, then it's far preferable to the horror of having killed a human being, even an evil human being. 84 00:08:01,897 --> 00:08:05,644 You know, there are other, you know, I've read other accounts of this. 85 00:08:06,245 --> 00:08:17,425 I can't remember where, but people, you know, police officers who have had to kill humans, and they can have, or, right, the one is post-traumatic stress disorder. 86 00:08:17,405 --> 00:08:22,954 soldiers who go to war and will come back and just don't want to ever talk about it again. 87 00:08:23,676 --> 00:08:25,779 They've just locked off that part of their mind. 88 00:08:26,360 --> 00:08:27,442 It's just so horrific. 89 00:08:28,344 --> 00:08:35,616 If you've never been to war, you can't imagine the horrors of war and people who are not able to sleep at night. 90 00:08:35,596 --> 00:08:38,281 because of what they've seen and what they've done. 91 00:08:40,244 --> 00:08:48,299 Sumeda was telling us about these caravans that they had to drive from point A to point B and they weren't allowed to stop for anything. 92 00:08:48,319 --> 00:08:53,728 A man, woman, child standing in the middle of the road had to be run over, basically. 93 00:08:54,409 --> 00:08:55,071 This kind of thing. 94 00:08:56,513 --> 00:08:59,258 Maybe that's going quite far afield, but... 95 00:08:59,238 --> 00:09:06,058 the horror that is involved with these visceral acts or these 96 00:09:07,085 --> 00:09:11,394 real acts of body. 97 00:09:14,440 --> 00:09:16,203 There's an incredible power there. 98 00:09:17,506 --> 00:09:20,472 But the point is that there's no intellectualizing in Buddhism. 99 00:09:20,492 --> 00:09:24,319 Buddhism is experientially based on experience. 100 00:09:24,439 --> 00:09:28,006 You can't come up with a theory of morality and call it Buddhist. 101 00:09:28,026 --> 00:09:29,329 Buddhism is 102 00:09:29,309 --> 00:09:38,340 You are responsible for your own actions and you can never escape that responsibility and you're responsible for nothing else. 103 00:09:39,350 --> 00:09:42,435 And that is scientific. 104 00:09:42,455 --> 00:09:44,898 It's verifiable. 105 00:09:46,301 --> 00:09:51,088 You can never verify what is the guilt of letting someone kill someone else. 106 00:09:52,230 --> 00:09:58,620 You can only verify what is the guilt or what is the suffering involved in your own actions. 107 00:09:58,640 --> 00:10:02,666 So if you choose to feel guilty about it, that's going to create suffering for you. 108 00:10:02,686 --> 00:10:06,792 If you choose to kill a person to not feel guilty, then that's going to cause 109 00:10:06,772 --> 00:10:16,489 I would say as well, or even more intense feelings of horror and nightmares because now you're a murderer. 110 00:10:17,771 --> 00:10:21,017 Whether it was a justified murder or not, it was murder.