The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So welcome to this second talk on an introduction to Buddhist ethics and trying to provide you with some of the foundational attitudes, approaches, principles

that supports Buddhist ethics. And yesterday I talked about the role of harmlessness, non-harming.

Today I want to talk about harmlessness, non-harming.

Today I want to talk about two very important terms.

I'll give you the Polly, the ancient Buddhist word for it first and then discuss them.

And these two words are K-U-S-U-L-A and A-K-U-S-L-A and A-K-C-S-L-A. So, K-C-S-L-A-C-S-A, so K-C-S-A-C-S-O-L-A, so K-C-S-O-L-O-S, is, and K-C-C-C-C-S, is, Kusala is generally translated as either skillfulness or wholesomeness.

Different translators translate them in different ways.

But if you look for a Paldi word,

ancient Buddhist word, that most closely matches

the English word ethics, this would be the word.

It is very hard to find a good word that matches the word ethics really well in

Polly with the kind of the more sophisticated way which ethics is understood.

But the closest I believe is this Kusala. So it's a very important word and it's very significant that the word for ethics can also mean wholesomeness and it could also mean skillfulness. So skillfulness refers to that it's so useful,

it's skillful, it's one can develop a skill that is onward leading to something beneficial.

So this is the word skillful is the best translation in the context of meditation. We want to develop the skill

of meditation, the skill of spiritual practice, and it's a skill that we develop over time.

It's like a training that we're training over and over again.

We're practicing to become skillful in something,

so skillful in something.

So skillful in attention, skillful in concentration,

skillful in mindfulness, skillful in equanimity.

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