Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video link: YouTube
Āya Bhuwan: Welcome to the next installment of Being Integrity, where we’re going to talk about the definition of integrity used in this series, and also discuss the cultural limitations or assumptions that cause most people to misunderstand, not only integrity, but the entire teaching of the Buddha.
Buddha spoke on integrity often. It was a favorite theme of his. He used the word sappurisā, which means sat or a truthful purisā, man or person. So a sappurisā is one who speaks the truth.
In our modern society there are so many excuses for lying, or fudging the truth, or telling little white lies. But they’re not really white because we deceive ourselves, as well as others. And once we get in that habit it’s very difficult to break. So part of integrity is being truthful; but there’s a lot more to it than that.
The dictionary definition of integrity is not very useful for our purposes. Let’s go over it though, just so we have a baseline for comparison. Integrity is defined as a noun, “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness,” and the example is: ‘He is known as a man of integrity’. The second definition given is “the state of being whole and undivided,” and the example is: ‘upholding territorial integrity and national sovereignty.’ Third is, “the condition of being unified, unimpaired or sound in construction,” for example: ‘the structural integrity of the novel.’ And finally, “internal consistency or a lack of corruption, [as in electronic data]: ‘integrity checking’.”
Well, this definition is OK; but until only about 20 or 25 years ago the second definition—wholeness or completeness—was actually the primary definition of integrity in the English language. Why did it change? Well, language changes as society changes, and the rise of fundamentalist religions has contributed to reinterpreting the word integrity, instead of meaning wholeness, to mean ‘following some moral standard.’
Now what is the problem with this? Whose moral standard, which moral standard? and when? Morality is a relative thing; it’s external to the personality. So if we’re following some moral code it means it’s imposed on us from outside, number one; and number two, morality changes over time—it’s relative. So the morality of New York in the 1920s, is completely different from the morality in a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka in the 17th century. Which morality are we talking about?
And it’s unfair to make an assumption and say that we accept this morality or that morality as the morality, when actually there are so many contradictions in different moral teachings that it’s basically a useless standard. A much better standard is completeness, consistency, wholeness, fully functional.
Let’s look a little bit into the etymological derivation of the word integrity. Integrity is from Latin, integritatum, integritas: soundness, wholeness, blamelessness—I really like that one, blamelessness—from integer, whole. For example we call a whole number an integer.
So I really like the definition of blamelessness, because being without blame means that one does not harm others: no one can blame him; no one can say, “He hurt me, he injured me, he harmed me,” and “He hurt my feelings,” or whatever. A person who has integrity does not cause suffering. This is the key: the sense of wholeness, in perfect condition is from about the mid-15th century [from Online Etymology Dictionary], and as an outgrowth of theological commentaries on the Bible, and so on like that.
Now all this taken together leads to a very interesting, powerful functional definition of integrity as “a state of being leading to reducing or eliminating suffering for oneself and others.”
A person of integrity does not cause suffering, either to himself or others. And suffering is defined by the Buddha as “any kind of pain, any kind of inconvenience, any kind of anxiety.” So a person of integrity does not cause anxiety or pain, either to himself or others. That means he doesn’t do anything that has a bad kārmik result; he does not participate in the causes of suffering. And that has extensive implications as far as the process of becoming which is given in paṭicca-samuppāda or Dependent Origination. And we’re going to go deep into this teaching in this series, and show how suffering develops from our intentions.
Basically, as soon as we have a selfish intention it creates suffering, both for ourselves and for others. So the suffering is a result of kamma, which is a result of our intentions. Our intentions or our desires have to be pure; they have to be based on reducing or eliminating suffering for ourselves and others. To go on: “Defining integrity in terms of reducing suffering also allows us to render it as an objective state, which is measurable by the external activities it inspires.”
In other words, a person of integrity is not going to cause anything that injures others. We can measure this, because it’s very easy to set up a system of values that eliminates all possibility of harming others; and the Buddha has done this. Vinaya is a set of laws, principles or precepts followed by Buddhist monks. Laymen, or people getting ready to become monks, follow five or eight or ten of these principles. But fully ordained monks follow 227 principles.
And yet these are not rules—that’s why we don’t call them rules, we call them precepts. They are ways of measuring integrity. If a person’s intention is properly aligned with the intention of the Buddha to eliminate suffering, then he will automatically not transgress any of the precepts. In fact, 227 precepts isn’t even enough to describe everything. But the point is with our intention. If our intention is to reduce or eliminate suffering, then we automatically will avoid activities that cause pain to ourselves and others. So if we observe ourselves carefully, we can see what these are—and begin to reduce the causes of suffering.
“An essential factor in our definition of integrity is that the activities undertaken to reduce or eliminate suffering must not generate additional suffering as a byproduct.”
Let me give you an example: a fundamentalist religion which says, “You just believe in this religion, and after you die you’re going to go to heaven; and you’ll be with God, and there won’t be any suffering.” Well what’s wrong with this picture? Well number one, it’s a post-dated check: “You believe now, you follow the rules now, and in the future you get the result—in the next life or after you die.” This is called a ‘post-dated check’. If I’m going to buy your car, would you take a check from me dated one month from now? Then if you’re going to select a spiritual or religious path, then why would you accept one that only gives you benefits after you die? Well what about now?
So the Buddha’s teaching is not like that. In the Buddha’s teaching, as soon as we begin to follow the principles, as soon as we understand the method by which the teaching works, we immediately experience a tangible reduction in suffering. I experienced this myself last year, when I began to practice Buddhism seriously. As soon as I began to seriously practice the principles, the precepts and the meditation, I experienced a tremendous reduction in suffering, and that continues to the present day. And the more advanced I become in understanding and following the Buddha’s method, the more that reduction in suffering continues and increases. So the Buddha’s method gives a tangible experience of reduced suffering in the present, here and now. No post-dated check.
Second, religion requires us to believe in something that we cannot verify with our senses or mind. We have to have faith. The Buddha’s teaching does not demand faith; well, maybe a little faith, just enough to go into the laboratory and try the experiment. And each of us has the laboratory required to perform the experiment that verifies the Buddha’s teaching. That is, our own minds and hearts.
So if we go into our own minds and hearts, and observe according to the Buddha’s instructions, we’ll see the same things going on that he described. And if we perform the activities of cooling down the senses and so on that the Buddha gives, then we’ll automatically experience the result. Just like when you go into the lab in chemistry or physics class, and you actually investigate the principles you’ve been taught, you’ll see that they work. It’s the same thing; it doesn’t require a whole lot of faith, just enough faith to try the experiment.
The third thing that’s different between the Buddha’s teaching and the religion, is: religion requires you to obey an external authority; whereas the Buddha’s teaching does not require an external authority—you simply try the process given by the Buddha in his teachings, experience the result, and that’s it. You have no obligation, you don’t have to pay a monthly tithe, you don’t have to belong to any organization, you don’t have to follow a particular teacher, you don’t become dependent on or obligated to anything outside yourself.
Of course if you have integrity, then you’re going to act in such a way that other people’s suffering will also be reduced; and there will be some external interaction due to the process. But it’s strictly on your own terms; you don’t become obligated to some external organization, unless you choose to cooperate with others, as I have by becoming a monk. But still, the objective becomes to reduce or eliminate suffering, both for oneself and others.
This leads to a very interesting definition of integrity. Thus in this series we define integrity as:
“The objective, measurable state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, in perfect condition—born of compassion: the intention to eliminate suffering for self and others without creating dependence.”
Compassion means that we see the suffering that, both for ourselves and others, that human life makes happen to us. And then we also go deeper into it—we see the cause of suffering, we see the process of Dependent Origination, the process of becoming, and how that works. Then we go further than that, we start to create intentions to reduce or eliminate suffering, both for ourselves and others. And finally, we actually get on that path, and we walk that path until we get the result.
So these are the Four Noble Truths discovered by the Buddha: one is that life is suffering: existence and suffering go hand-in-hand. Birth is suffering, life is suffering, old age, disease, death—so many other things in our lives cause suffering. And the second is the cause of suffering: the Buddha gives detailed knowledge of the process of becoming. He calls it paṭicca-samuppāda or Dependent Origination: how the process of becoming begins from desire, and proceeds through a series of interrelated causes and effects, actually winding up in our being the way we are. This is the second thing, the cause of suffering.
The third noble truth is the cessation of suffering. Cessation of suffering is possible; it’s not outside the realm of possibility, it can be done. And finally fourth, the Noble Eightfold Path, or the path to the cessation of suffering, which is Nibbāna. So these four truths—suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering and the path to the cessation of suffering—are actually the essence of being a person of integrity.
Now actually, everybody knows that there’s suffering in life. Even little children are very well aware of it. But nobody knows the actual cause. And we can be certain of this, because if we knew the cause, we could stop it. Yet after thousands of years, none of the plans that people have come up with have stopped suffering—have actually resulted in the cessation of suffering—except the Buddha’s teaching.
For example, let’s take government. A government is originally a plan to prevent, or at least reduce suffering. But actually government results in more suffering than anything! Look at all the wars; look at all the unnecessary nonsense involved in politics. All of this is suffering. We use punishment to try to prevent people from causing harm to others. And we’ve been using punishment for thousands of years. We’ve been using government and politics for thousands of years. We’ve been using policies and religions and morality for thousands of years. And none of it has worked! None of it has stopped people from doing bad things that cause suffering to others.
The only thing that has worked is the Buddha’s teaching. Anyone who follows the Buddha’s teaching becomes harmless, becomes blameless, becomes a person of integrity, a sappurisā. A sappurisā is one who is on the Eightfold Path. A person of integrity is one who has formed the intention to reduce or eliminate suffering, both for himself and others. A person on the Eightfold Path is cognizant of the Four Noble Truths, and this is the definition of a human being in the full sense of the term. A person of integrity is one who understands that life is suffering; therefore one should be kind. He understands the cause of suffering, therefore one should act to rein in desire which is the cause of suffering. A person who has integrity realizes that the aim of life is cessation of suffering, and that it’s possible. And finally, he should be willing to do whatever it takes to walk the path to bring this about. This is a real person of integrity.