The Practice of Virtue
I’ve been threatening for a while to write a book about the practice of virtue. I’m not claiming to be the most virtuous person you’ll ever meet. But I have been trying to do the practice for a long time, so I hope I have some useful experience to share. My primary motivation for doing this work is that there really aren’t a lot of good resources on the practice of virtue that are non-religious and yet actually convey the important information from the lineages.
The book will consist of four primary sections:
The Six Perfections
The Ten Non-Virtues
The Bodhisattva Vows
Monastic practices that are relevant for lay practitioners
The Six Perfections describe six aspects of the practice of virtue that act to bring about the perfection of each practice. These include the Perfection of Patience, the Perfection of Generosity, the Perfection of Joyful Effort, the Perfection of Virtuous Behavior, The Perfection of Meditation, and the Perfection of Wisdom. Each of these perfections are synergistic: if you practice one, the results of that practice will help you with the others. My goal in presenting these is not to give detailed information on how to practice them, but rather to use them as a context for thinking about the practice of virtue as a whole.
The Ten Non-Virtues are killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive talk, harsh words, useless talk, wanting what others possess, wishing harm on another, and failing to check for and correct invalid cognitive biases. The Ten Non-Virtues, as you might gather from the name, are all about restraining oneself from unskillful action: action that are known to lead to unhappy consequences.
The bodhisattva vows are too many to list here, and may well be the bulk of the book. The essence of the bodhisattva vows is the opposite of the ten non-virtues: practices that, when followed skillfully, will be of benefit, both to oneself and to others.
Finally, while this book is not intended for people who want to become monastics, there are quite a few monastic practices that really aren’t specific to monastics, and that are quite beneficial to anyone who is pursuing the practice of virtue. These practices aren’t unique to Buddhism—I’ve encountered them in Jewish, Muslim and Christian texts.
There will also be a section that’s more of a sales pitch on why you might want to engage in some practice of virtue. For me, the main motivation for engaging in this practice was that I realized at some point that I really wasn’t a very nice person, and that I wasn’t a joy to be around. At the time I didn’t have enough self-awareness to realize that this was causing me problems, but I could see how it affected those I cared about, and I very much wanted to change. I’ll go into that in a bit more detail over the course of the process of writing the book.
What you should expect to see here is a post roughly once a week, referring back to this post. These posts will not be in the final form that I intend them to be in in the book—they’ll be blog posts, and will probably reference current events or what’s going on in my own practice.
I would very much appreciate comments, both on this post and on those posts. Your comments will help me to produce a book that’s more useful. Please do not feel like you need to be gentle with me—if there’s something about this post or any other that rubs you the wrong way, don’t hesitate to share it. I would appreciate it if you could reflect on what rubs you the wrong way, and not just tell me that it rubbed you the wrong way. If you see something that you think is wrong, please don’t hesitate to point it out, whether it’s grammar, or whether you just think I’m explaining something incorrectly.