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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Good morning, good day.

And so this is the second talk on the five criteria that Buddha used for why speech.

And these five criteria can be taken as questions that we ask ourselves before we speak.

And yesterday I talked about where the question is, is it timely?

So the right time to say what we want to say, to ask what we want to ask.

Today the topic is, or the question is, is it truthful?

Are we speaking the truth?

And I kind of like it that this is the second that we ask as a timely first.

That's kind of like the high end.

Even the truth might not be timely, might not be the right time to speak the truth.

If we start with truth, then maybe we speak inappropriately at times when it doesn't help, maybe even harms.

It makes things more difficult.

So is it timely? Then today is it truthful?

And of course the topic of what is true and how do we recognize the truth can be philosophically or linguistically complex.

But a simple way of understanding it is that the minimum that the truth involves an absence of the seat.

There's no intention, no effort to deceive anybody with what we're saying, what we're doing.

And because with deception we're clearly not speaking the truth.

Other times we might be attempting to say what's true.

We think we say what's true.

But it might not be true.

...