For those of you who don't know what the Five Precepts are, they are Buddhist training guidelines.
Not to be confused with the Ten Commandments, "thou shalt not do this..." but more of a set of training guidelines as to things that are good to do to help you with your development. The five are: not to kill other living beings intentionally, not to steal intentionally, not to speak wrong words intentionally, that includes lying and gossip and so on intentionally, not to have sexual misconduct intentionally, and not to take drugs, alcohol and such things that can confuse the mind intentionally.
You will notice that I intentionally said the word "intentionally" with each one. This is important. Because as most, if not all, of you grew up in a Judeo-Christian society and with the Ten Commandments, it's like, "You should not do it no matter what."
Buddhism teaches that in order for the precept to be broken it has to be an intentional act.
If you do it unknowingly, for example, you're walking down the path and you accidentally step on a little ant, then it was not intentional.
On the other hand for some kids when they see ants on the ground, they go and step on them for fun, that was intentional.
To know the difference of intention is very important.
So the Five Precepts are training guidelines, and it's a broken precept if you do it intentionally, not unintentionally.
The Five Precepts become something we want to do, if we see the Dukkha of not doing them and if we see the happiness of doing them.
So if you see the problem caused when you lie a lot or you gossip about somebody, etc. and you feel Moral Shame about it, "Ah, that was not a good action, I wish I had not said that, it was a wrong speech, etc." And the more you develop that Moral Shame for wrong action, the more that you see that it was something that created Dukkha, then the more you don't want to do it in the future. And that's Moral Dread's job.
Moral Shame and Moral Dread are a pair, in Pali they're called the Lokapala Dhamma. In English they call them the "Two virtues that protect the world", Moral Shame and Moral Dread.
OK, what's the difference with how they work?
Moral Shame looks into our past and it says this was not right, that was not right. It just looks over everything and says what was not right. Now there's not a big guilt trip here, we're just clearly looking at what we did that was not right, based on our wisdom of today.
To a certain extent Moral Shame is like just a recording, a tabulator, a filer of history, it just records things objectively. That's Moral Shame's job. Be careful of remorse and regret. They can be helpful initially, but if indulged then it's just going to be self-hatred.
Now if that's all Moral Shame does is record everything unskillful, you have this nice memory of all these bad things, but if you repeat the same thing, then you're missing out on Moral Shame's partner, which is Moral Dread.
Moral Dread's job is to take all the information from Moral Shame, look at it, understand it, and guard against doing it in the future or in the present moment.
Now the word, Dread, if you don't understand that in English, it's like fear, it's a type of fear. Moral Dread is a wise fear. When we dread, we're afraid of doing the same thing again, because it's going to cause more Dukkha again. So Moral Dread is the very active part of these two virtues.
Moral Shame is active in the sense of remembering what's happened in the past. Moral Dread is what starts right here in this moment and it says, "What I am doing now, is it for my benefit or not? Is it for other's people's benefit or not? Will it cause harm for me in the future, will it cause harm to other people in the future?"
Moral Dread is very much like Sati Sampajanno, we have more wisdom of the results of things.
So Moral Dread works really hard to prevent similar Dukkha in the present and future.