Five Precepts · Pāli: pañca-sīla; Skt: pañcaśīla

The Five Precepts are the baseline of Buddhist lay ethics, and they are training rules taken up rather than commandments handed down. Access to Insight gives the recitation in the first person: “I undertake the precept to refrain from destroying living creatures”, and then from “taking that which is not given”, from “sexual misconduct”, from “incorrect speech”, and from “intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness”. The same page calls them “basic training rules … observed by all practicing lay Buddhists”, usually recited after “the formula for taking refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha”.

Their canonical setting is the Abhisanda Sutta (AN 8.39), where each abstention is presented as a gift. Of the first the Buddha says that a disciple of the noble ones, “abandoning the taking of life, abstains from taking life. In doing so, he gives freedom from danger, freedom from animosity, freedom from oppression to limitless numbers of beings”, and the same formula runs through the other four. The precepts belong to sila, which Access to Insight defines as “Virtue, morality”, including “the training precepts that restrain one from performing unskillful actions”.

Lay and monastic practice diverge here rather than tradition by tradition. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the two main systems of moral discipline as “the Five Precepts, which apply to lay people, and the Vows of Individual Liberation (Skt. prātimokṣa) which apply to monks and nuns”, the latter being “stricter, ruling out all forms of sexual activity”. Keeping the five, it adds, “is said to lead to rebirth as a human and prevent rebirth in one of the lower realms of suffering”. Our full guide covers the Five Precepts one by one.