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Cultivators should value virtue in the spiritual Path., Such virtue takes the form of benefiting others. Put aside the concern for helping yourself and devote yourself to helping others. Be willing to take harm upon yourself in order to protect others from harm. In other words, if you want to benefit others and not harm them, it is essential to cultivate virtue in the Path. The Path is external, whereas virtue is internal. Externally, you nurture the Path by cultivating various paths. Once you are in accord with the Path on the outside, a sense of great happiness wells up within. You have attained virtue in your mind.
When you have virtue, everyone admires you.
When you are in accord with the Path, everyone respects you.
Once your conduct is virtuous, everyone thinks well of you. If you are virtuous, then people will be delighted even if you were to scold or beat them. If you lack virtue, then even if you make obeisance to people, they will want to kick you. Virtue wins everyone’s respect. Therefore, it is of the foremost importance. All of you should keep the words “virtue in the Path” firmly in mind, so that you see them as soon as you open your eyes.
Some people have no concern for virtue or the Path. It could be said that they have forgotten what is most fundamental. The most fundamental thing is virtue in the Path. Without virtue, one cannot follow the Path to its end and realize Buddhahood. Buddhas are adorned with the myriad virtues. Having perfected and realized the myriad virtues, they were able to become Buddhas.
Virtue in the Path represents righteous energy. It can be compared to the sun and moon. It is equivalent to heaven and earth. Therefore, no one can afford to overlook virtue in the Path. Virtue in the Path also serves as our place of practice. Virtue in the Path requires cultivation. If you cultivate, you can be virtuous. Without cultivation, there is no virtue.
Therefore, if cultivators fail to consider virtue, they will not be able to cultivate. Virtue in the Path consists of renouncing oneself for the sake of others. Forgetting about ourselves, we should help others; we should do that without harboring even a single thought of selfishness and without ever thinking of our own benefit. A mind devoid of selfish and self-benefiting thoughts is a virtuous mind.
Thus, in everything they do, cultivators should pay attention to virtue. Do everything within your capacity to help others. Therefore, each of you should use your utmost ability to perfect your virtue. Then, you will have some accomplishment.
Don’t be so preoccupied with yourself that you cannot forget about yourself. To practice the Bodhisattva Path, you must forget yourself. While it is important to enlighten yourself, it is even more important to enlighten others. As students of the Buddhadharma, we ought to realize this and never forget about helping others.
As God is simple goodness, inner knowledge and light, he is at the same time also our will, love, righteousness and truth, the innermost of all virtues.
The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.
I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to lie in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not overanxious about your personal place; that makes you tolerant because you realize your own comic fallibilities; that gives you tranquillity without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself.
If one is to come through difficult experiences unembittered, unspoiled, still a real person, one needs deep resources. Not alone in such experiences as sorrow and failure does this need arise but in man's search for the indispensable spiritual requirements of a satisfying life—inner peace, for example, some serenity in the soul to come home to at night and go out from in the morning. But no one can get inner peace by pouncing on it, by vigorously willing to have it. Peace is a margin of power around our daily need. Peace is a consciousness of springs too deep for earthly droughts to dry up. Peace is an awareness of reserves from beyond ourselves, so that our power is not so much in us as through us.
The man whom destiny positions in an epoch without a foreseeable end, the character of which wounds the deepest fibers of his being, cannot heedlessly sacrifice his repugnance to his boldness, nor his intelligence to his vanity. The spectacular, empty gesture earns public applause, but the disdain of those governed by reflection. In the shadowlands of history, man ought to resign himself to patiently undermining human presumption.
It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.
Confucius
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