The fifth fold of the Eightfold Path comes with a list. I am on it three times. Somebody was going to do that arithmetic on a website called Baptized Buddhist, and I would rather it were me.
Most of the Eightfold Path is stated as a direction rather than a rule. Right livelihood — sammā-ājīva, the fifth fold — is the exception. In the Vaṇijjā Sutta the Buddha names five kinds of business a lay follower should not engage in:
Every monk in Surin has that list by heart. It is not obscure. It is the kind of thing a Thai grandmother knows.
Before I came to Thailand I spent about twenty years in Oregon building businesses. Over those years I owned or ran eighteen adult entertainment venues, most of them licensed to sell alcohol. I spent five years selling pork at the Portland farmers' market. I was president of the company behind the World Famous Cannabis Café in Portland, the first of its kind in the United States, and I made a great deal of money from all of it.
Intoxicants: yes. Meat: yes. Human beings: the honest answer is that adult entertainment is a business in which people are the product, and I am not going to pretend the category doesn't touch me by hiding behind the narrowest reading of it. Poison: no, and only because nobody offered. Weapons: no.
Three of the five. That is the arithmetic, and I have done it in public so that it is not done to me.
I am not going to argue with the text. Every argument is available — the law permitted it; cannabis is not an intoxicant in the relevant sense; the customers were adults; the fifth precept is about heedlessness, not a list of substances — and some of them are even good. But every one of them reads as a man negotiating with a scripture, and the whole point of this site is that I have stopped doing that. A tradition I respect condemns a large part of what I did for a living. Two things can be true. I can think the trade I know best has a legitimate place, and that people who run it honestly do nothing wrong, and I can say in the same breath that the Pali Canon does not agree with me. I would rather hold that contradiction openly than pretend the text says something it doesn't.
For what it is worth on the other side of the ledger: I do not drink. In a Theravāda frame that matters more than it would in an American one, because the fifth precept is about heedlessness — the loss of the mind that governs you — rather than about any substance in particular. But I am not offering that as a defense. I am offering it as a fact.
A man is not his livelihood. That is not a Christian idea or a Buddhist one; it is the one thing a Christian, a Buddhist and a logotherapist all three insist on, in different words. Frankl called it the last of the human freedoms:
"…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1963), Part I
The freedom of the will is the freedom to take a stance toward conditions you did not choose, or chose badly, and cannot now unchoose. I cannot un-run those venues. I can decide what the man who ran them does next, and I have. The Buddhist word for that decision, as it happens, is the one I opened this site with: not sin, a stain, but akusala, a bad shot. Where was I aiming? Not at this. What am I aiming at now? This.
A former club owner in a Buddhist village writing about meaning, who raises the objection against himself before anyone else does, is a serious man. One who is caught out by it in the comments is a hypocrite with a domain name. I know which one I would rather be, and this page is the difference.