In Praise of Virtue

Exploring Theravāda's connections to other paths - what can we learn from other traditions, religions and philosophies?
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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The love of power is natural. It is insatiable, it is whetted, not cloyed by possession. Power renders man wanton, insolent of others, and fond of themselves.
Cato
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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We need to be careful about our every thought. If every thought is virtuous, then our lives will be brighter.
Master Hsuan Hua
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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Birth, old age, illness, and death
are like pictures we have sketched ourselves,
while Māra, Lord of Death, sits still
like a heron waiting for fish.
Buddha
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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Monks, one who encourages his unbelieving parents, settles and establishes them in faith;
who encourages his immoral parents, settles and establishes them in moral discipline;
who encourages his stingy parents, settles and establishes them in generosity;
who encourages his ignorant parents, settles and establishes them in wisdom—
such a one, monks, does enough for his parents:
he repays them and more than repays them for what they have done.
AN 2: iv, 2; I 61–62
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that shall make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
Marcus Aurelius
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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He who sees a self will always
adhere to what he refers to as “I.”
Through that adherence there’s craving for happiness;
through that craving faults are obscured.

There is strong craving when excellence is seen.
The “mine” is grasped as that which achieves it.
As long as there is attachment to self,
one will thus revolve in cyclic existence.
Dharmakirti
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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From Rabbi Kook's essay on "Nearness of God":
The aspiration for the nearness of God will not cease to act with
its strong and constant stirring in the hearts of people. The inclination
to freedom, which comes so naturally to the developed sensibility of
humanity, will always safeguard the fundamental freedom of the psyche,
enabling its forces to expand in the direction to which it is disposed,
for which it aspires, by its very nature. Since the aspiration for the nearness
of God is a central fact of human nature, it will not be possible to imprison
this spirit in any iron walls with which it may be surrounded by the
imaginative speculations of narrow-minded people.

We may thus conclude that the freedom of the human spirit presses
for the aspiration for God's nearness in all aspects of life, that in the fullness
of its expression this is the highest ideal of freedom, to which the best
people are drawn and to which the human soul, generally, and social
life, in all its aspects, yearns so avidly.
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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From James Allen (d. 1912) As a Man Thinketh:
A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them. . . . Act is the blossom of thought, and joy and suffering are its fruits; thus does a man garner in the sweet and bitter fruitage of his own husbandry. . . .

A man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall therein; and will continue to produce their kind.
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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More from James Allen:
Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to
be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a
creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of
his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful
master of himself. . . .

Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bad fruit.

A man will find that as he alters his thoughts towards things and
other people, things and other people will alter towards him. . . . Let
a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the
rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.
Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are. . . .
The divinity that shapes our ends is in ourselves. It is our very
self. . . . All that a man achieves or fails to achieve is the direct result
of his own thoughts. ... A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve
by lifting up his thoughts. He remains weak and abject and miserable
by refusing to lift up his thoughts. . . .
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
John Milton, Areopagitica
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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Won’t you be walking in your predecessors’ footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I will blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren’t our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone, it has not been monopolized.
Seneca, Moral Letters; from bestseller Daily Stoic Meditations.
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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Gradatim
by Josiah Gilbert Holland

Heaven is not reached at a single bound;
But we build the ladder by which we rise
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies,
And we mount to its summit round by round.

I count this thing to be grandly true,
That a noble deed is a step toward God,
Lifting the soul from the common sod
To a purer air and a broader view.

We rise by things that are 'neath our feet;
By what we have mastered of good and gain,
By the pride deposed and the passion slain,
And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet.

We hope, we aspire, we resolve, we trust,
When the morning calls us to life and light;
But our hearts grow weary, and ere the night,
Our lives are trailing the sordid dust.

We hope, we resolve, we aspire, we pray,
And we think that we mount the air on wings
Beyond the recall of sensual things,
While our feet still cling to the heavy clay.

Wings for angels, but feet for men!
We may borrow the wings to find the way;
We may hope, and resolve, and aspire, and pray;
But our feet must rise, or we fall again.

Only in dreams is a ladder thrown
From the weary earth to the sapphire walls,
But the dreams depart, and the vision falls,
And the sleeper wakes on his pillow of stone.

Heaven is not reached at a single bound;
But we build the ladder by which we rise
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies,
And we mount to its summit round by round.
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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One online source of Virtue quotes:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Category:Virtues
The brave and bold persist even against fortune; the timid and cowardly rush to despair through fear alone.
Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), II. 46.
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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To be sure, in face of the great forces of evil and stupidity, this
kind of genuine faith in the Good requires a certain amount of
courage. But no progress of any kind is possible without courage.
Progress means to overcome the natural inertia of present
unsatisfactory conditions in the individual and in society. It
certainly requires courage to take the first step in breaking through
that resistance of the natural inertia and the self-preserving
tendency of things and minds. But just that courage is the
preliminary condition of success.

The ancient teachers of the Buddhist doctrine were well aware
that courage is an essential feature of true faith. They therefore
compared faith to a strong and courageous hero who plunges
ahead into the turbulent waters of a stream to lead safely across the
weaker people who timidly stop at the shore, or, excitedly and in
vain, run up and down the bank engaged in useless arguments
about the proper place to cross.
Nyanaponika Thera
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: In Praise of Virtue

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To live is to be useful to others.
Seneca
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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