What is stealing?

Among Buddhist practitioners, how many can strictly observe the five precepts without the slightest violation and achieve a perfect score? How many can score eighty points with only minor deficiencies in the five precepts? How many can score sixty points by keeping most of the five precepts? Probably very few. As for the precept against false speech, I estimate that hardly anyone can keep it—or perhaps not even a single person. Thus, people are not completely honest and cannot be fully trusted.

Does everyone completely abstain from killing? As for stealing—also called taking what is not given—if you take something without the other person's consent or nod of approval, that is stealing. If something does not belong to you, yet you regard it in your mind as your own, that is stealing. This includes people: if someone who does not belong to you as your spouse arouses deviant thoughts in your mind about them, that too is stealing. When one's thoughts are improper, when one's intentions are insincere and unwholesome, all of this falls under "deviant." Eating and drinking other people's things at will, without their consent, all constitutes stealing. Many people act very casually, following their own whims, heedless and inconsiderate. Some even use schemes to force others into having no choice but to agree; when the other person agrees verbally but disagrees in their heart, it still constitutes stealing. Stealing also includes reputation—deceiving to gain fame, deceiving to gain status and power—all of these constitute stealing.

People always love to chase after conditions, acting selfishly for personal gain. They do not accord with conditions, do not guard their minds, are not sincere and kind-hearted, and crave many things. As a result, they violate the precepts, their minds become scattered, and they cannot attain meditative concentration (samādhi). And how many people have not taken the five precepts and have no intention whatsoever of taking them—they do not even want to receive the precepts, let alone keep them—yet they want profound meditative concentration and wisdom? That is impossible. It is even more impossible for them to attain realization of the fruits or enlightenment through deluded thinking.