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’.”

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.

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.”