Ethics affect the seeds you plant. If your seeds are bad you will not even have the opportunity to learn meditation.
Meditation is for going beyond all that.
> I am a practicing Zen Buddhist
Who?
Meditation is for going beyond all that.
> I am a practicing Zen Buddhist
Who?
It is.
The story of Shakyamuni Buddha achieving enlightenment after 49 days of meditation under the Bodhi tree is pretty well known. There, of course, are a lot more antecedents to contemporary Buddhist thought and ethics than that one incident, but it's fair to say it's a pretty core part of the historical tradition, and precedes essentially everything that came after.
For context in this discussion, I am a practicing Zen Buddhist.