Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Playlist Link: YouTube
Integrity is based on the principle of truthfulness: keeping one’s word. Integrity has to be based on something real; thus integrity cannot refer to a corporation, religion, nation-state or other abstraction. Integrity is meaningful only in the context of an individual: ‘a man or woman of integrity.’ Integrity is how to live with a clean conscience.
Video link: YouTube
Āya Bhuwan: may you live long! Welcome to Being Integrity. This is going to be a series—quite an extensive series, I think—about integrity and the Buddha’s teaching.
Now integrity is based on truthfulness. We hear these days a lot of talk about ‘integrity in business’. But this is actually an oxymoron. For those of you who aren’t on good terms with your dictionary, an oxymoron means a self-contradictory statement, like military intelligence or integrity in business.
Because what’s the first thing you do when you start a business? You file a fictitious name statement and then you incorporate, and your incorporation is simply some words on paper and signed by a few people. And then suddenly you have this entity that has all the rights of a person! Of course a corporation isn’t a person; it’s a lie, and so is the name. The whole thing is a fabrication.
So in that context how can you have any integrity? It’s just self-contradictory, oxymoronic to have integrity in the context of a corporation. It’s just impossible.
Of course one can have personal integrity himself. But then to work for a corporation is definitely a breach of personal integrity, because that means you’re recognizing an entity that’s fictitious! Anyway, so we’re not going to talk about integrity in the context of business and we’re not going to talk about it in the context of religion either.
Because religion is also a fabrication. You might say well you’re a monkey or in the ‘buddhist’ religion, but actually there is no such thing as ‘buddhism’. As another ‘buddhist’ monk, Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu has kindly pointed out, that religions are also fabrications. They are also abstractions; they also have no real physical existence. They’re just information, they’re just software. So what to speak of talking about corporate context, it’s meaningless to talk about integrity in a religious context as well.
What is meaningful, however, is to talk about a man of integrity, a person of integrity; and Buddha used the word sappurisā. Sappurisā is a combination of sat and purisā. Sat means truthful or actually, eternally existing, and eternal is real being. A temporary being is only fabricated, phony being; but eternal being is real being. So that kind of man, purisā, who is eternal who has eternal values, eternal verities and truths, is known as a sappurisā.
Sappurisā is a man of integrity. So we’re talking here about how to transform your being into that of a sappurisā, a man of integrity. Because integrity is not something you have—that would make it a virtue. And that would make it disposable, dispensable or changeable. But we’re talking about a type of integrity that is so deep that it’s integrated with your very being: integral integrity, wholeness; sappurisā, eternal truths.
It’s based on something beyond this temporary existence, temporary being and temporary meanings. And what is that? Well, the Buddha’s teaching, of course. But there are also very specific things that we can use to measure a person’s degree of integrity, and we’re going to be going into this in great detail in subsequent episodes.
Being Integrity is based on the teaching of the Buddha. But what is the teaching of the Buddha? I already said it’s not a religion. Some people claim that it’s a philosophy, but it’s not really a philosophy either. The teaching of the Buddha is something unique. It’s something that has never existed before. It’s something that we don’t even have a word for in western languages, because it’s completely transcendent. It’s not based on the concept of God, it’s not even based on the concept of the Complete Whole of monism or oneness; it’s beyond even that.
So the Buddha has gone to a dimension that nobody has reached before—at least in historical times—and this is his unique contribution to the welfare of all humanity. So this teaching, the teaching of the Buddha, being beyond everything else, it doesn’t really have a proper name. The only thing you can call it is the Dhamma.
And dhamma, as we’ve discussed in two other videos in this series, dhamma is simply what is. Not only what is—the way it is. And not only the way it is, but why it is the way it is. This is the Buddha’s Dhamma and this is what he was teaching to his disciples. That’s going to be the basis of this entire series.
In fact it’s not even correct to call the teaching of the Buddha a spiritual path, because the Buddha makes no distinction between material and spiritual, the way to dualistic Western religions and philosophies do. For the Buddha, what is, is; and it’s neither material or spiritual—it’s just what is. It’s just dhamma.
So the Buddha, the path of the Buddha, the teaching of the Buddha, is not really a religion, a philosophy or even a spiritual discipline. It’s something that is unique and has no equivalent in any other path. That’s why we call it simply the Dhamma, the way it is.
Now a lot of people criticize Buddhism because it has so many rules, or precepts as we like to call it. There are ten basic precepts, starting with no lying, no stealing, no killing and so on. Well, why do we have so many rules? The monks follow 227 precepts, and even those don’t really explain everything.
So there are rules because there is karma or kamma, as it’s called in Pāḷī. Kamma is simply the result, the equal and opposite result of any action. So if I harm someone, if I hurt someone, if I steal from someone, then that’s going to come back to me, and I will suffer the identical pain that I have caused.
And also there’s good kamma as well, but the art of creating good kamma is very difficult for most Westerners, because it involves “religious” or spiritual activities, and we don’t want to believe in something. So we’re going to give a scientific basis for right and wrong—a scientific basis based on the theory of kamma or more technically correct, Dependent Origination (paṭicca-samuppāda) as it was described by the Buddha.
The law of kamma has very scientific principles behind it—and they begin with our intention, and our conception of the world and ourselves. These form causes, which produce effects. Among those effects are becoming, and being and birth.
So the birth that we have, the existence that we have, the being that we have, is because of a process of becoming. And this process of becoming has certain definite laws and rules. And we can learn these, we can use them to create a more ideal form of being for ourselves; and in this way we can rise above the problem of kamma that causes suffering and rebirth.
That’s basically the essence of the Buddha’s path. So the benefits of precepts like mindfulness, purity, meditation and so on… “Well, what are the benefits of these things? Can they be measured?” Yes, it’s a fact, they can be measured.
When we see a person who’s receiving the results of good kamma, we want to emulate them; we want to follow them, because we see that they’re enjoying life at a higher standard than ours. So, how does a person get into that position? How do they get into that situation, where their kamma is so good that they get the things that we want in life: love, attention, money, power, and so on—beauty, intelligence—like that.
These things are all the result of a good birth. And to get a good birth, one has to create the causes for that birth. So there’s a scientific process of creating kamma, and the benefits of that kamma are measurable, not only in the next life but even in this one.
It’s said, for example, that ‘virtue is its own reward’. I would change that a little bit I would say, “Integrity is its own reward.” Integrity gives a kind of personal satisfaction that cannot be replaced by any amount of sense enjoyment. After all, sense enjoyment comes and goes. It’s nice when it happens; and when it doesn’t happen, then if we’re desiring it we’ll miss it, we’ll feel incomplete and will be consumed with the suffering of desire, another kind of suffering.
So by adopting the rules and regulations of the Buddha’s path, we shield ourselves from creating bad kamma, and we also open the door to creating good kamma, subha-kamma, or auspicious or beneficial kamma, that in the future will give us tremendous well-being and an increase in all kinds of happiness and felicity.
So right and wrong, good and bad aren’t just beliefs; they’re not just morality, at least in the Buddha’s teaching. Maybe in some other teachings or other cultures they are, but in Buddhist culture all these things are based on scientific conclusions of the Buddha’s self-observation.
You might say, “Well, that’s fine for the Buddha, but what about me?” The answer is, you can carry out the same observations on your own self, in your own life, and in your own time, by following the Buddha’s methods. They still work today, and they work for everyone. Everyone has access to a laboratory where they can perform the same experiments as the Buddha, and in that way verify the principles of the Buddha’s teaching that will give us the integrity that we seek.
We know you have a lot of questions. I had a lot of questions when I first came in contact with the Buddha’s teaching, and we all have a lot of questions about integrity. But this seminar, this series of videos, is designed to provide clear, satisfying answers to all those questions. Believe me, I had many questions come up, and I had to research all these things over a period of about two years.
It was driven by necessity. My whole life fell apart because of lack of integrity, and lack of knowledge of leadership and so on. So I had to look into these things very deeply to salvage my own sanity. Believe me, I had to research down to the bedrock, what is wrong with our lives. And the fact is, without integrity our lives just don’t work.
So the intention of this Being Integrity is not to give you a bunch of rules to follow, and then you can say, “Well, I have integrity.” That would be artificial, that would be phony: an act. A lot of people are doing this act right now, especially in the business world, saying, “Well I have integrity,” you know? It’s just a false front, because they’re cheating. They’re working for corporations, and corporations are fabrications. Their whole personality is simply a fabrication. And that’s one of the things that the Buddha teaches us.
So what we really want to achieve is Being Integrity—to have the being of integrity, to have the being of an honest man. That’s why the Buddha calls it sappurisā—sat meaning honest and purisā meaning human being—a human being in the full sense of the term. So that you don’t have to act like you have integrity; in fact you don’t even have to have integrity, because you are integrity; you have the being of integrity, and so integrity manifests spontaneously in everything that you do, in everything that you are.
You don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to follow rules, you don’t have to look up case studies or examples of how to behave with integrity—you simply automatically behave with integrity because you have the being of integrity. So how do you change your being into the being of integrity? That’s what we’re going to cover in this series.
So integrity, the being of integrity, is authentic being, honest being, sincere from the core, from the heart being. And who you are when you are being with integrity is your authentic self. This is an enhanced state of being over the typical being that most people have, where they’re trying to follow something outside of themselves: some set of moral rules or something like that.
Now you might say, “Well, there’s so many rules in Buddhism, what is that?” The rules in Buddhism are simply a way of measuring a person’s integrity, because we have found through long experience that if a person has integrity, if a person is being with integrity, they will automatically follow these rules. Because they will no longer cause harm or suffering to themselves or others.
The rules prohibit activities that cause bad kamma. So if you’re a person of integrity, you’re going to want to only do good kamma, and not cause suffering. So you’re going to avoid those activities automatically. You don’t even have to think about it. It doesn’t become a rule for you, it becomes simply the way you are: your being. Actually it’s a context—a certain context. And we’re going to show you exactly how to create that context in this series.
Now our experience of life—human life on planet Earth—is usually that our life is broken. It’s broken in so many ways. Like for example, broken promises, broken dreams, broken hopes and aspirations, broken plans. How many times have you planned to do something with somebody and then they break their promise. They don’t show up, or they don’t do what they said they were going to do, or they don’t do it on time, or they don’t do it in the way that you expected them to do—and so on and so forth.
These are all breakdowns, these are failures: failures of integrity. And in our own life, how many times have we said, promised ourselves we’re going to do something, or we’re going to be a certain way, and that we didn’t do it? Alright. Well, I love that saying by Yoda, “There is no try: do or not do.” So every time you hear somebody saying, “Well, I’ll try…” No. That means you’re not going to do it; that means you’re not making a commitment from your being to be or do that thing in the way that you’re expected to do.
So unless a person has integrity, they’re going to try to get away with saying, “Well, I’ll try. Well I’ll, you know, try my best…” No! That’s nonsense! That’s not integrity; that’s trying to act like you have integrity just to please other people. But the truth will come out. So either you have integrity or you don’t have; either you are integrity or you’re not integrity.
The idea is to be integrity, so that your integrity is spontaneous. You don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to follow a bunch of rules in some book; you just are integrity and you behave with integrity by nature, spontaneously, effortlessly. That’s real integrity.
There’s also a lot of integrity issues around leadership. In leadership—well, there’s many different forms of leadership—but the leadership we’re talking about is the leadership, the quality of leadership, that makes people automatically want to follow. That makes people automatically enthusiastic to participate in whatever initiative the leader is proposing.
And so, the quality of a leader that is based on integrity is irresistible. People love a leader who has integrity, because they tell the truth. They actually keep their promises: they actually do what they said they were going to do, when they said they were going to do it. This is integrity—or, this is a way of measuring integrity. There are other measures of integrity, and we’re going to go deep into that subject in the seminar.
What makes a person have integrity? First of all they decide. They make the determination within themselves, “I’m going to have integrity.” And then they adjust their being until they actually are being with integrity. And the way you do that is by creating a context, and we’ll show you exactly how to do this in the series.
Now why is integrity so important? Why is integrity such a vital part of being human? To the extent that if you don’t have integrity, or if you don’t act with integrity, or if you’re not being with integrity, that you can’t be said to be a human being in the full sense of the term.
Well, another way of measuring integrity is by the reduction or elimination of suffering. A person with integrity, a person who is being with integrity, does not cause suffering, either for themselves or others. And if they do, they immediately correct it and make up the damage. That is the nature of a person of integrity. So a person of integrity—a sappurisā in the Buddha’s language—is going to be a person whose life is committed to the eradication of suffering for themselves and others. And everything they do is going to be aimed at reducing or eliminating suffering in their own lives and in the lives of people around them.
So in essence, being with integrity is an intention: a specific intention to reduce or eliminate suffering. And that leads us to the definition of integrity that we’re going to use in our seminar.
Let me lead into this subject by reading some of the things that Buddha said about integrity.
“A person of integrity would know of [another] person of integrity: ‘This is a person of integrity.’ A person of integrity is endowed with qualities of integrity; he is a person of integrity in his friendship, in the way he wills, the way he gives advice, the way he speaks, the way he acts, the views he holds and the way in which he gives a gift.
“And how is a person of integrity endowed with qualities of integrity? There is the case where a person of integrity is endowed with conviction, conscience, concern; he is learned, with aroused persistence, unmuddled mindfulness and good discernment. This is how a person of integrity is endowed with qualities of integrity.” — Cūḷa-puṇṇama Sutta (MN 110)
So we’re going to analyze these statements by the Buddha, and we’re going to go into each of these qualities that he mentions, and define them very scientifically and completely, and answer any questions that you might have about what is the definition of a person of integrity.