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.

Watch the video: Being Integrity 0—Introduction

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.