Saccanurak

I read something in a book about the Jatakas the other day that really struck me. In the Jatakas, the bodhisatta, the Buddha-to-be, through his countless number of lives throughout the myriad realms and different kinds of birth, broke every kind of precept except for one.

The Buddha-to-be never told a lie or spoke a mistruth. There is no Jataka story, as far as I am aware, where you find the bodhisatta misrepresenting the truth. Sometimes he may kill; on some occasions he steals, commits adultery, and gets drunk, but nowhere throughout the Jatakas does the bodhisatta consciously lie. Truth is power. In many lifetimes the bodhisatta harnesses the power of his speech through an adhitthana, a resolute determination:

‘I have never in my life done this or done that. By the power of these words may such and such happen.’ And it happens. In some profound inexplicable way the truth exerts a tangible impact on the physical world. It can affect events in the most marvellous kind of way. When one has built up that power of truth, one can draw on that power of integrity with a sincere, solemn declaration.

So in the path of awakening we take a joy and wholesome pride in caring for the truth. We contemplate a word the Buddha would use, “saccanurak”, having fidelity to the truth, loving the truth, being devoted to truth, and being careful to be honest about what we really know.

It means having the clarity when you speak, to only utter words that we know to be accurate; being open to receiving others viewpoints and not thinking that what we presently know is timeless absolute truth; learning to distinguish between what we know, what we believe, what we think, and what we perceive — not confusing them.

Often when people say they know something, they mean they believe it. Religious people may often consider their strong faith to be direct knowledge. The Buddha said that we care for the truth by being very scrupulous in distinguishing what we know as a direct experience from what we believe to be the truth.

This reflection by Ajahn Jayasaro is from the teaching, “The Beauty of Sila.”