| | I like what Jack Kornfield has to say about the role of virtue in Buddhist practice…
"Virtue in on one level a training. It's learning to speak, to act, in our sexual life, in our business life, in our family life - to train to act more consciously, more mindfully, more compassionately. And it takes practice. It is also, quite wonderfully, an expression of our awakening, a foundation of our awakening. You can't awaken if you're involved in killing, lying or stealing. Even in the more subtle levels of it, it's hard to pay attention. Your mind is caught up, busy, and paranoid. So it's a foundation for a clear mind, and the training of it is a foundation for being more mindful. But even more beautifully, it's the expression of an awakened heart and an awakened mind." (The Eightfold Path for the Householder, page 51 (54 on the PDF), http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/ritepath.pdf)
So then, the training of Morality can be seen in at least three ways: (1) as a path of itself, (2) as a foundation for the other two trainings (Concentration and Insight), and (3) as an inseparable aspect of the complete human experience.
The relationship between insight and morality can be compared to that of music theory and improvisation. Music theory can be learned. It is what it is. There are numbers, intervals, pitch, tone, timbre, harmony, dissonance, etc. In contrast, improvisation cannot be 'mastered', per se, because it is always fresh. What notes will you play in response to this or that chord? How can something beautiful, thoughtful, spontaneous, and creative arise right now? There are basic guidelines, for sure, but you can't play the same riff over every progression. There are far too many combinations of progressions for their to be any set rules of how to respond. Though it's not a perfect (or perhaps even the best possible) analogy, morality, for me, is like improvisation. |