A person contacted Bhavana facebook with questions related to the 5 precepts. I thought the questions in my experience were very common among lay Buddhists and I thought that my response to his questions might be beneficial for some, so I have decided to cut and paste my email response, minus any personal details:

Sir, I’ve combined both of your emails with all of the questions into a response in this one. I will have your quoted questions in bold above and my answers below it.

I just wanted to say a few general words about the 5 precepts before getting into the meat of your questions. Firstly the five precepts as you can see below, are training rules. What this means is that they are not commandments, they are not things you must follow and never break or else you will go to hell forever like in Christian religions.

What they are is as the Buddha called them “ 5 faultless gifts to the world”. You are giving a gift of fearlessness in your training attempt to follow these five precepts to the best of your ability. People have nothing to fear from you and they begin to trust you, because you are honest and forthright in your determination to follow the precepts. If you are trying to do your best to follow these training rules then you are practicing what the Buddha taught, none of us unawakened beings are perfect and we will make mistakes, and we may even have trouble understanding all the little intricacies involved in the precepts.

That brings me to the next point, that there is no black and white, with these precepts,there are many many shades of grey. You will not be able to neatly fit every situation into one of the slots of the five precepts and sometimes you will just have to do the best that a person can do in the situation presented to you. The most important thing is the intention to do your best, the rest will follow.

Panatipata veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami - I undertake the precept to refrain from destroying living creatures.

Adinnadana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami - I undertake the precept to refrain from taking that which is not given.

Kamesu micchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami - I undertake the precept to refrain from sexual misconduct.

Musavada veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami - I undertake the precept to refrain from incorrect speech.

Suramerayamajja pamadatthana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami - I undertake the precept to refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness.

I will start with the fourth precept.

Person’s Question: For example, we are invited to a party but we want to politely decline the invitation therefore we say “I’m busy”. The same with “I don’t know”, it can mean I don’t know about something or I don’t want to talk about something. It is another way to tell other people that we have little or no interest over something. Some people said it is lying because we speak something untrue, but for some other people it’s not lying. Is this actually considered lying or breaking the fourth precept?

What does your gut feeling tell you about this situation? If you’d rather not even take on the niceties of social speech because you consider them lieing, then just be fully honest with the person. If you don’t want to be fully honest because you are afraid to hurt the person’s feelings, then mindfully remind yourself that you are indeed twisting the precept and realize your intentions behind your actions. It may not be as unskillful as telling a blatant lie, but it is telling an untruth. This is where the grey I spoke about comes in, there is no black and white.

This is all related to right speech, so I highly suggest you read this link from accesstoinsight with various sutta snippits about right speech. - http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma-vaca/

These have always been very helpful to me in the past, especially this:

Five keys to right speech “Monks, a statement endowed with five factors is well-spoken, not ill-spoken. It is blameless & unfaulted by knowledgeable people. Which five? "It is spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken affectionately. It is spoken beneficially. It is spoken with a mind of good-will.”

and this :

The criteria for deciding what is worth saying [1] “In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial (or: not connected with the goal), unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them. [2] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them. [3] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, but unendearing & disagreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them. [4] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial, but endearing & agreeable to others, he does not say them. [5] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, but endearing & agreeable to others, he does not say them. [6] "In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, and endearing & agreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them. Why is that? Because the Tathagata has sympathy for living beings.” — MN 58

Person’s Question: An animal trainer who trains a dog to catch or attack a thief would pretend to be a thief in order to assess the dog whether it is successfully trained or not. Pretending to be a thief is obviously a deceptive act but his purpose as a trainer is to train dogs. Similar with above example, is this considered lying?

in this situation the person pretending to be a thief would be doing so in a training scenario most likely at a training facility, and it is highly doubtful that the person would actually be trying to steal something that doesn’t belong to the person.

even if the dog was being trained for a person and the trainer gave the dog to said person and pretended to break into the new owner’s home, it would still be with the owner’s consent and with the intention to test the dog, not to steal.

Next Email

Person’s Question: From what I understand, taking someone’s wallet is obviously stealing because that person deprives the owner’s belonging and claim it to be theirs. But how about downloading material (music, picture, article, etc.) from internet? Some people say it’s stealing, some other people say it’s not stealing. Normally people download music only for his/her personal use, not to sell the downloaded material and earn profit from it.

This is a very good question with no easy answer, even monastics disagree as to whether this is stealing with regards to the monastic rules. In the end for me it came down to me feeling that it was stealing, and I stopped doing it. I had been downloading video games, movies, and the like, since the birth of the internet, and making copies of movies I got from netflix, but my practice brought me to the point where I just could no longer justify myself doing it, so I stopped.

here is an article by Bhante Sujato about it : https://sujato.wordpress.com/2015/05/20/copy-this/

here is an answer by Bhante yuttadhammo: http://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/does-illegal-downloading-or-viewing-of-copyright-material-violate-the-second-pre

Person’s Question: Sometimes there is food recipe on food package sold in supermarket, we see this recipe and idea comes up “Oh, how if I use this recipe to start a food business”. In other occasion, we walk on the street and see some house designs, the designs look interesting therefore we decide to use some of the designs on our own house. In library, there are many people sitting around us, we look to the left and to the right. Accidentally, we see someone is working on something interesting on their computer i.e. making a resume. From that moment, once in a while we look at their computer and get some idea from there. Are all these actions considered stealing?

“Oh, how if I use this recipe to start a food business”. - this could get you sued, because it technically under the law would be stealing if the recipe is covered under another business or trademark etc. If it is someone else’s recipe and you are going to use it to make money off of it, it could most definitely be seen as stealing from that person. just like using someone else’s writing could be considered plagiarism.

getting ideas from the world around us is different however depending on the situation. We are not looking for some kind of financial gain, nor harming other’s livelihood, with our personal house design or an idea for your resume. When it comes down to it, ask yourself if you are harming others or yourself in the action you wish to perform, before performing it, just as the Buddha taught Rahula in the right speech link I gave you above.

Go with your gut feeling and see how that turns out, was it a wrong or right decision? My final advice is not to get so caught up in looking too deeply into every intricate little possibility, because you could just examine all of those possibilities for the next million lifetimes and not get anywhere in the practice. Deal with a situation as it comes up, not trying to figure out every possible infinitesimal situation before it occurs, which it most likely won’t.

it is in the moment that we practice, it is there where we learn, where we perform actions that create our future, actions that we can learn from to then act more skillfully in the future. Continue your practice and take every situation doing the best you can do in following the precepts. If you make a mistake then you can acknowledge that you did so, forgive yourself, learn from it, and move on, this is how we make progress in the Buddha’s Dhamma and Discipline.