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 third talk on introduction to Buddhist ethics,

or the foundations for Buddhist ethics, and bringing together the topics of the first two days

that of non-arming and wholesomeness. Those two coming together are living in us, point to or evoke

beauty, a kind of inner beauty or an ethical beauty, and that one of the reasons to be ethical

in Buddhism is not because of some ethical strictures and you know

commandments or righteousness or sense of, you know, that purity maybe, depending how you mean, what we mean by

purity.

But rather to be ethical because we're inspired to stay close to feeling, a sense and understanding of our own inner harmony, beauty.

What is beautiful within us is not harmed, is not covered over by living in ethical life and that we can

feel that when we do something out of hate or greed or if we lie or want to cause harm to

someone else it's we lose touch with this beautiful, wonderful capacity within,

a wonderful possibility within of feeling our own loveliness, or own goodness.

And so one of the words in the Buddhist teachings that can be translated as ethics or ethical

is the word yesterday, Kusala.

And today the word that also can mean ethics is a word that also can have mean ethics is a word that some people some of you know

it's Kalyana and now we know it through the expression Kalyana mita, often translated as good spiritual friend.

However, the word Kalyana, its first meaning in all kinds of ancient dictionaries

and modern dictionaries is that it means beauty, beautiful. It also means a

transparent, the dictionaries say can mean excellence and sometimes it means good but good is a little bit

kind of cheapening something which is really spectacular and wonderful.

And often in the ancient Buddhist teachings,

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