These Five Things Are Killing Your Relationship!
Comparing your current partner with a former relationship is a guaranteed disaster. The comparison is unfair. No one person is the standard for all relationships. If they were so great why did the relationship not work out?
These five things are killing your relationship!
Testing your current relationship, based on a prior one, is a good way to kill your relationship before it begins. Relationships are complex because of timing, maturity of the partner, and emotional stability. These factors change over time.
Are these relationship killers present in your life? If so, acknowledge them, and set a time to discuss with your partner. This will ensure long-term health, happiness, and stability in all your relationships.
Track these metrics, collect feedback from customers and other internal teams, analyze your sales handoffs on a regular basis, and seek to improve the process. You can also tap into these insights to train new members of the team.
The five precepts (Sanskrit: pañcaśīla; Pali: pañcasīla) or five rules of training (Sanskrit: pañcaśikṣapada; Pali: pañcasikkhapada)[4][5][note 1] is the most important system of morality for Buddhist lay people. They constitute the basic code of ethics to be respected by lay followers of Buddhism. The precepts are commitments to abstain from killing living beings, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication. Within the Buddhist doctrine, they are meant to develop mind and character to make progress on the path to enlightenment. They are sometimes referred to as the Śrāvakayāna precepts in the Mahāyāna tradition, contrasting them with the bodhisattva precepts. The five precepts form the basis of several parts of Buddhist doctrine, both lay and monastic. With regard to their fundamental role in Buddhist ethics, they have been compared with the ten commandments in Abrahamic religions[6][7] or the ethical codes of Confucianism. The precepts have been connected with utilitarianist, deontological and virtue approaches to ethics, though by 2017, such categorization by western terminology had mostly been abandoned by scholars. The precepts have been compared with human rights because of their universal nature, and some scholars argue they can complement the concept of human rights.
The five precepts were part of Early Buddhism and are common to nearly all schools of Buddhism.[31] In Early Buddhism, the five precepts were regarded as an ethic of restraint, to restrain unwholesome tendencies and thereby purify one's being to attain enlightenment.[1][32] The five precepts were based on the pañcaśīla, prohibitions for pre-Buddhist Brahmanic priests, which were adopted in many Indic religions around 6th century BCE.[33][34] The first four Buddhist precepts were nearly identical to these pañcaśīla, but the fifth precept, the prohibition on intoxication, was new in Buddhism:[30][note 3] the Buddha's emphasis on awareness (Pali: appamāda) was unique.[33]
The precepts are normative rules, but are formulated and understood as "undertakings"[60] rather than commandments enforced by a moral authority,[61][62] according to the voluntary and gradualist standards of Buddhist ethics.[63] They are forms of restraint formulated in negative terms, but are also accompanied by virtues and positive behaviors,[12][13][25] which are cultivated through the practice of the precepts.[16][note 4] The most important of these virtues is non-harming (Pāli and Sanskrit: ahiṃsa),[37][65] which underlies all of the five precepts.[25][note 5] Precisely, the texts say that one should keep the precepts, adhering to the principle of comparing oneself with others:[67]
Upholding the precepts is sometimes distinguished in three levels: to uphold them without having formally undertaken them; to uphold them formally, willing to sacrifice one's own life for it; and finally, to spontaneously uphold them.[75] The latter refers to the arahant, who is understood to be morally incapable of violating the first four precepts.[76] A layperson who upholds the precepts is described in the texts as a "jewel among laymen".[77] On the other hand, the most serious violations of the precepts are the five actions of immediate retribution, which are believed to lead the perpetrator to an unavoidable rebirth in hell. These consist of injuring a Buddha, killing an arahant, killing one's father or mother, and causing the monastic community to have a schism.[25]
However, Buddhists vary in how strict they follow them.[49] Devotees who have just started keeping the precepts will typically have to exercise considerable restraint. When they become used to the precepts, they start to embody them more naturally.[81] Researchers doing field studies in traditional Buddhist societies have found that the five precepts are generally considered demanding and challenging.[79][82] For example, anthropologist Stanley Tambiah found in his field studies that strict observance of the precepts had "little positive interest for the villager ... not because he devalues them but because they are not normally open to him". Observing precepts was seen to be mostly the role of a monk or an elderly lay person.[83] More recently, in a 1997 survey in Thailand, only 13.8% of the respondents indicated they adhered to the five precepts in their daily lives, with the fourth and fifth precept least likely to be adhered to.[84] Yet, people do consider the precepts worth striving for, and do uphold them out of fear of bad karma and being reborn in hell, or because they believe in that the Buddha issued these rules, and that they therefore should be maintained.[85][86] Anthropologist Melford Spiro found that Burmese Buddhists mostly upheld the precepts to avoid bad karma, as opposed to expecting to gain good karma.[87] Scholar of religion Winston King observed from his field studies that the moral principles of Burmese Buddhists were based on personal self-developmental motives rather than other-regarding motives. Scholar of religion Richard Jones concludes that the moral motives of Buddhists in adhering to the precepts are based on the idea that renouncing self-service, ironically, serves oneself.[88]
Several modern teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh and Sulak Sivaraksa have written about the five precepts in a wider scope, with regard to social and institutional relations. In these perspectives, mass production of weapons or spreading untruth through media and education also violates the precepts.[94][95] On a similar note, human rights organizations in Southeast Asia have attempted to advocate respect for human rights by referring to the five precepts as guiding principles.[96]
Interpretations of how Buddhist texts regard warfare are varied, but in general Buddhist doctrine is considered to oppose all warfare. In many Jātaka tales, such as that of Prince Temiya, as well as some historical documents, the virtue of non-violence is taken as an opposition to all war, both offensive and defensive. At the same time, though, the Buddha is often shown not to explicitly oppose war in his conversations with political figures. Buddhologist André Bareau points out that the Buddha was reserved in his involvement of the details of administrative policy, and concentrated on the moral and spiritual development of his disciples instead. He may have believed such involvement to be futile, or detrimental to Buddhism. Nevertheless, at least one disciple of the Buddha is mentioned in the texts who refrained from retaliating his enemies because of the Buddha, that is King Pasenadi (Sanskrit: Prasenajit). The texts are ambiguous in explaining his motives though.[115] In some later Mahāyāna texts, such as in the writings of Asaṅga, examples are mentioned of people who kill those who persecute Buddhists.[116][117] In these examples, killing is justified by the authors because protecting Buddhism was seen as more important than keeping the precepts. Another example that is often cited is that of King Duṭṭhagāmaṇī, who is mentioned in the post-canonical Pāli Mahāvaṃsa chronicle. In the chronicle, the king is saddened with the loss of life after a war, but comforted by a Buddhist monk, who states that nearly everyone who was killed did not uphold the precepts anyway.[118][119] Buddhist studies scholar Lambert Schmithausen argues that in many of these cases Buddhist teachings like that of emptiness were misused to further an agenda of war or other violence.[120]
Early Buddhists did not adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. Indeed, in several Pāli texts vegetarianism is described as irrelevant in the spiritual purification of the mind. There are prohibitions on certain types of meat, however, especially those which are condemned by society. The idea of abstaining from killing animal life has also led to a prohibition on professions that involve trade in flesh or living beings, but not to a full prohibition of all agriculture that involves cattle.[122] In modern times, referring to the law of supply and demand or other principles, some Theravādin Buddhists have attempted to promote vegetarianism as part of the five precepts. For example, the Thai Santi Asoke movement practices vegetarianism.[62][123]
Keown describes the relationship between Buddhist precepts and human rights as "look[ing] both ways along the juridical relationship, both to what one is due to do, and to what is due to one".[176][177] On a similar note, Cambodian human rights advocates have argued that for human rights to be fully implemented in society, the strengthening of individual morality must also be addressed.[176] Buddhist monk and scholar Phra Payutto sees the Human Rights Declaration as an unfolding and detailing of the principles that are found in the five precepts, in which a sense of ownership is given to the individual, to make legitimate claims on one's rights. He believes that human rights should be seen as a part of human development, in which one develops from moral discipline (Pali: sīla), to concentration (Pali: samādhi) and finally wisdom (Pali: paññā). He does not believe, however, that human rights are natural rights, but rather human conventions. Buddhism scholar Somparn Promta disagrees with him. He argues that human beings do have natural rights from a Buddhist perspective, and refers to the attūpanāyika-dhamma, a teaching in which the Buddha prescribes a kind of golden rule of comparing oneself with others. (See Principles, above.) From this discourse, Promta concludes that the Buddha has laid down the five precepts in order to protect individual rights such as right of life and property: human rights are implicit within the five precepts. Academic Buntham Phunsap argues, however, that though human rights are useful in culturally pluralistic societies, they are in fact not required when society is entirely based on the five precepts. Phunsap therefore does not see human rights as part of Buddhist doctrine.[178]