Welcome to The Good Life!
Throughout this course, you'll find a transcript or summary of the video content beneath each talk or meditation. You don't need to read these, but they may contain tables, diagrams, or other visual aids. These transcripts will be collected for download in each unit's workbook.
Welcome to The Good Life!
Living the good life brings happiness for ourselves and others
This course will place ethics at the center of Buddhist practice. Living the good life is related to living an ethical life. It is aimed at bringing us a degree of happiness—but not just for ourselves. It's a happiness that spreads to others in our community and those around us.
A question that might occur to you is "Why?" "Why should I do this course? Why should I be interested in ethics?" Well, from a personal perspective, I can say that ethics is the most valuable, most important, the most exciting part of the Buddhist path. And that's a very personal reflection I'm sharing with you. But why is that? Why is it so exciting? Well, it takes what's often is seen as merely a set of rules and turns it into a quest, an inquiry, and a deep engagement with our lives. Thus, we turn our lives from something fairly monochrome into something rich, vibrant, and textured.
We invite you to join us in an exciting exploration of a topic that's not very well understood.
Hopefully by engaging with this course and the various investigations we'll do together, you'll begin to see the centrality of ethics within Buddhist practice. And the key component of this, of course, is that our meditative, contemplative practice makes no sense unless it's engaged totally with the ethical world.
A deep inquiry into how we live
Our methodology for this course is to shed light on a number of different components of ethical teachings. One aspect of this teaching is about inquiry. One aspect is about trying out different strategies around how to understand and enact ethical teachings. Another aspect will be about self-reflection and a continued form of growth along the path. The Buddha's teaching is famous for making growth and development an ethical path, and intentionality on that path is one of the key pieces that he brought to ethics.
We hope that by joining us in this inquiry into ethics and its role in Buddhist teaching, that you will arrive at the broader, more practical vision of ethics that the Buddha envisaged for us.