Right Speech, Inside & Out

There’s something of an anomaly in the noble eightfold path. Right after right view explains the causes for suffering — the three kinds of craving: for sensuality, for becoming, for non-becoming — you’d think that right resolve would focus on abandoning those three kinds of craving. But it doesn’t. You resolve on getting rid of sensuality, but then also on getting rid of ill-will and harmfulness, two types of unskillful qualities, which are precisely the qualities you have to get rid of in order to get into right concentration. So that’s the purpose of right resolve: to steer the mind into right concentration. But the path doesn’t go straight there.

The next step is right speech. That, of course, is also connected to right concentration in the sense that the first jhāna contains directed thought and evaluation, and directed thought and evaluation are the way you talk to yourself before you break into speech. So to train your attitude toward the mind’s thoughts as it talks to itself, you focus on noticing: What exactly you break into speech about after you’ve thought about it, after you’ve evaluated it?

This is an important part of the practice. This is one of the reasons why we don’t have vows of silence around here, and why the Buddha never really encouraged vows of silence.

There’s a story of some monks who spent the whole rains retreat not talking to one another. At the end of the retreat, they came to see the Buddha, and he asked them how their retreat went. They said, “Oh, it was fine. We had a very fruitful retreat.” Then they added, “We didn’t talk to one another at all for the three months.” The Buddha said, “How can you say that was a good retreat? You were living like dumb sheep.”

Just because you’re not breaking into speech doesn’t mean your mind isn’t breaking into speech inside. And learning some intelligent restraint on your external speech is an important part of having some intelligent restraint on your directed thought and evaluation as you try to get the mind to settle down.

So it’s good to think about the principles of external right speech and how they apply internally to the practice of concentration. First off is that you don’t say anything you know to be false. This is, of the principles of right speech, is the one that the Buddha actually put into the precepts. In other words, this is something you hold to across the board, because you learn a lot when you find yourself tempted to cut a few corners on the truth, dress it up in ways that are not really accurate. The principle of right speech is that you don’t say anything that you know to be false. Whether you intend to deceive other people or not is not the issue. You want to make sure that your speech is in line with what’s true.

As you take this as a precept, you start learning how there are various ways in which you tend to cut corners, and you’ve got to see through them. The desire to please other people, the desire to look good in their eyes, the desire to get past inconvenient facts: Why should these have priority over your desire to be virtuous, to be truthful? What are your priorities?

That’s what it comes down to. If you’re willing to bend the truth for the sake of something else, that means that that something else is more important than the truth. And here we are on a path seeking the truth, trying to find the truth, yet if your karma is such that you’re burying the truth, how is that going to help you? What do you really want out of your speech?

So it’s important that you hold to this precept across the board. This is one of those everywhere-and-always kinds of precepts, because you want to protect yourself from being told falsehoods. As the Buddha said, if you don’t have any lies in your record, you’re going to be less likely to be exposed to lies in the future. As whatever lies you do have in your past, you don’t want to keep adding more. So you hold to truth.

Now, there are times when the person who’s asking you a question might take the information you give and abuse it. If you suspect that that’s the case, it’s okay not to respond, or to change the subject, or to find some way around giving that information, but without lying. That’s the important thing. This is where the precepts teach discernment.

In the Mahayana, they say the precepts teach discernment in figuring out when to hold to them and when not to hold to them. Well, that’s not teaching discernment. That’s just the ordinary way of people around the world. The Buddha’s precepts teach you discernment in how to hold to the truth always, but to minimize the damage that might come by holding to the truth. That’s a skill. And it’s a skill worth mastering.

Then there’s the principle against divisive speech: when you see that two people are becoming friendly and you feel threatened by their friendship, so you say things to break them apart. Notice that this is not a hard and fast rule. That’s because there are cases where you see that person A is becoming friendly with person B, but you’ve seen person A act as a predator in the past, and you want to warn person B. But you have to be clear about your motivation.

The same with the next principle of right speech, which is the principle against harsh speech. You don’t want to say things to hurt people’s feelings just for the sake of hurting their feelings. But there are times when you have to use strong language in order to make people take notice. So again, this is one of those areas where you have to use your discernment in that direction.

Finally, there’s the principle against idle chatter. This is the hardest one, because a certain amount of friendly chatter is an important part of friendship. It keeps people working together well. Think of it as social grease. But as with any grease, if you have too much grease in the engine, it mucks up the works. So you have to know how much is needed and not add any more than that.

This is one of the areas where Ajaan Fuang was especially careful. As he said, Ajaan Lee pointed out that when you speak Dhamma that’s way over people’s heads, that counts as idle chatter. The definition of non-idle chatter is that you speak words that are reasonable, useful, beneficial. If something’s over other people’s heads, you’re just trying to show off, which is not really beneficial. So you have to look at your motivation for speaking.

Ajaan Fuang liked to talk about taking the forest, the jungle, the wilderness as your teacher. And one of the lessons he reported was that, staying up in the forests of northern Thailand, he began to notice that if in the course of the day he said things that were not necessary, he would get sick.

There was one time when he was on alms round with another monk. The layperson putting food in the other monk’s bowl asked him a question. Ajaan Fuang said to himself, “Well, there’s no need to answer that question.” But the monk answered it anyhow. Later in the afternoon, the monk had a bad case of diarrhea. So it seems like the devas up there were enforcing a very strict sense of what counts as idle chatter, what doesn’t. You can imagine what life would be like down here in the kitchen if everybody had diarrhea when they said things that were unnecessary. But maybe it would be useful to go through a short period of time like that just to be brought to your senses.

There was a low-level prince one time who came to see Ajaan Fuang. He liked to appoint himself as a defender of the Dhamma and he would go around asking different ajaans very high-level questions, basically to test their knowledge. So he asked a question of Ajaan Fuang—again, high-level Dhamma, on a high level of practice. Ajaan Fuang asked him, “Has your own practice reached that stage yet?”

“Well, no.”

Ajaan Fuang said, “In that case, I’m not going to answer, because whatever I say would just be perceptions in your case. It wouldn’t be a tool to actually help you.” So he was very strict with himself about what should be said, what shouldn’t be said. As he said, “If what you’re going to say isn’t necessary, don’t say it.”

Now, all these principles are also very important for your meditation practice. When you’re talking to yourself about the breath or talking to yourself about the state of your mind, you want to be truthful—in other words, not blowing things up more than they are, but also not denigrating what you’ve been able to accomplish. You want to be fair and truthful and accurate in how you observe what’s going on, in how you talk to yourself about what’s going on.

The next two principles apply to your inner critic—the critic who’s trying to divide you from your breath, basically discouraging you with regard to your ability to practice, in hopes that you’ll give up and just think about whatever that inner critic really wants to think about. The voice of the inner critic can often be the voice of defilement, even though it dresses itself up as a very high-level Dhamma master with strict, strict standards. It’s usually there to defeat you. You’re trying to make friends with your breath. You’re trying to make friends with the chatter in your mind — the good elements in your mind. Don’t let anything come in to divide those things from one another.

Just be very careful not to start associating with things that are not good. That’s when you learn to talk to yourself about how you’re developing a dangerous friendship. Your friendship with your greed, with your aversion, with your delusion: Those are friendships you want to break. So here again, you have to be very discerning in how you apply this principle.

The same with harsh speech: You don’t want to beat yourself down; you don’t want to discourage yourself and say that you’re hopeless. But there are times when you have to be stern with yourself. When you’re getting a little bit too loose in the precepts, too loose in your determination to really stay with the breath, then you may need to use some strong language.

Finally, with idle chatter: For the sake of concentration, this is probably one of the most important. You want to get used to saying No to your idle chatter outside because otherwise internal idle chatter is going to fill your mind. The same mind with which you were sitting and talking with other people this morning at breakfast is now the mind sitting here meditating. And you have the same habits.

So as you guard your speech, ask yourself, “Is this true? Is this beneficial? Is this the right time? Is this really necessary?”

Think about that old Peanuts cartoon when Lucy’s saying, “If you go around watching everything you say, you never get much said.” Well, maybe that’s a good thing. Make sure the few things you do say are really worthwhile, worth listening to, worth treasuring. If you treat your speech as if it has no value, if you’re just scattering it all over the place, how are other people going to treat it as something of value? When you’re sitting here meditating, you want to talk to yourself in ways that have value, that are true and beneficial and timely. If you’ve gotten used to cutting off your idle chatter outside, it’s going to be easier to cut off the idle chatter that wants to go out and think about greed and distress with reference to the world.

So see the importance of right speech as a principle in the practice as it applies not only outside but also inside. It makes a direct connection between right resolve and right concentration. It helps bring all the factors of the path together. It’s when they’re brought together that they have an effect, and that effect is strong.