The Selfish Case for Being Ethical | Eugene Cash

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.6 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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Virtue is a tricky topic. It's often sold to us by religious leaders who are thundering judgmentally, and sometimes hypocritically, down to us from the mountaintop. But from the Buddhist perspective, there is actually a deeply self-interested case for ethics and virtue. The Buddhists are not trying to get you to follow a bunch of very specific rules: they are trying to get you to do no harm because that will make you happy.

This is part two of our series on a venerable Buddhist list called the Noble Eightfold Path. The three middle items on the list all have to do with ethical conduct. They are: right speech, right action, and right livelihood.

Our guest today, Eugene Cash, is gonna talk about this stuff in super practical, non-dogmatic and non-preachy ways. Cash has been a Buddhist teacher since 1990. He's the founding teacher of San Francisco Insight and a senior teacher on the Spirit Rock Teachers Council. His teaching is influenced by many streams of Buddhism— Theravada, Zen and Tibetan.

In this conversation we talk about:

How to make terms such as virtue and ethics more attractive to skeptics
Eugene's case that being ethical is in your self-interest
His idea that kindness can actually be hard-nosed and tough
How the Buddha could be hard on people when it was helpful for those people
How to use right speech skillfully
Why he says that practicing right action all day long is his idea of fun
The technical versus the holistic understanding of right livelihood
The difference between "being present" and "presence"
And what has kept him devoted to the eightfold path for so many years

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/eugene-cash-595

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:20.3	Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Virtue is a tricky topic. It is often sold to us by
0:27.6	religious leaders, thundering judgmentally and sometimes hypocritically down to us from the mountaintop.
0:35.0	But from the Buddhist perspective, there is actually a deeply self-interested case for ethics and
0:40.9	virtue. And as you will hear, this approach is quite flexible and open to personal interpretation.
0:46.8	The Buddhists are not trying to get you to follow a bunch of very specific rules. They're trying
0:51.3	to get you to do no harm because that will make you happy. This is part two of our series on a
0:57.5	venerable Buddhist list called the Noble Eightfold Path. You can think of this list as a kind of
1:04.0	recipe of eight practices that will get you toward enlightenment. To put it in a way that will appeal
1:10.3	to skeptics, people who aren't sure that enlightenment is a thing, you could just think about this
1:14.7	list as a bunch of ways to help you do life better. The three middle items on the list all have to
1:21.1	do with ethical conduct. They are right speech, right action and right livelihood. As you will
1:27.3	hear, our guest is going to talk about this stuff in super practical and non-dogmatic non-preche
1:33.0	ways. Our guest is Eugene Cash. She's been a Buddhist teacher since 1990. He's the founding
1:38.7	teacher of San Francisco Insight and a senior teacher on the Spirit Rock teacher council. His
1:44.4	teaching is influenced by many streams of Buddhism, Teravada, Zen and Tibetan. In this conversation,
1:50.4	we talked about how to make terms such as virtue and ethics more attractive to skeptics.
1:55.2	Eugene's case that being ethical is in your self-interest. The idea that kindness can actually be hard
2:01.2	and knowsed and tough. How the Buddha could be hard on people when it was helpful for those people.
2:07.2	How to use right speech skillfully. Why he says that practicing right action all day long is his
2:14.0	idea of fun and the technical versus the holistic understanding of right livelihood.
2:22.6	Before we get started with today's episode, if you've been around TPH land for any length of time,
	...

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