Meditations6 by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Author:Thanissaro Bhikkhu [Bhikkhu, Thanissaro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dhamma, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Meditation, Jhana, Pali Canon, Thai Forest Tradition, Theravada
Publisher: Metta Forest Monastery
Published: 2014-01-25T08:00:00+00:00
An Apprenticeship in Integrity
July 9, 2011
There’s a term that the Buddha often yokes with the phrase “the noble ones” and that’s “people of integrity.” A large part of the training is learning how to develop integrity. It’s not just learning a few ideas or a few protocols. It’s a quality of the heart, of your behavior, of your character. And it takes more than just understanding words to develop integrity. You need a well-directed intention, and some good examples to absorb.
There’s a passage where the Buddha talks about seven qualities of a person of integrity. Of the seven, two have to do with things that you can learn from books or from listening. But the other five have to do with things you can pick up only by being around people of integrity and trying to become a person of integrity yourself.
The two qualities you can learn from books or from listening are knowledge of the Dhamma and knowledge of the meaning of the Dhamma. You can learn the Dhamma by listening and by reading, and a good part of the meaning you can pick up by trying to figure things out: reading one sutta and then reading another one, comparing what they have to say, trying to get a sense of what the Buddha meant when he was talking about, say, suffering or emptiness or any of those big terms that play a major role in the way he taught. But even here, it really helps to live around a person who has practiced the Dhamma, for it helps to put your ideas about the purpose and meaning of the Dhamma into perspective. Emptiness may seem to mean one thing in the abstract, but when you sense emptiness as it’s embodied in another person it can mean something else entirely.
As for the other five qualities, the first is having a sense of yourself: where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are, where you can trust yourself, where you can’t trust yourself, where you need to work on yourself. You could look in a whole library of books, you could look through the entire Internet, and you would never find that kind of knowledge. You have to look at yourself in action and you also have to be around people of integrity so you get a sense of where you do and don’t measure up—and how they see where you do and don’t measure up. It’s not just a matter of your own opinion. You have to listen to their opinions, be sensitive to their standards. You have to read not only their words, but also their behavior and their body language.
This is why the Buddha put so much emphasis on choosing a good teacher. You want a teacher who has high standards and holds to them, lives by them. That way you get to pick up high standards, too. The sense of your own strengths and weaknesses—and particularly this issue of where you can trust yourself and where you can’t—takes a lot of time and sensitivity to develop.
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