The Modern Background

At the heart of the current ideology is the concept that everyone is God incarnate and so since each person is God incarnate certainly there couldn't possibly be any rules that apply to anyone. Basically we live in world of immediate feedback, immediate feeling and sense data. In that context, what is my criterion of truth? Whatever I feel like doing today! What is my goal? My goal is to feel good today and tomorrow! And hopefully I will feel good for my whole life. The perspective is very hedonistic, very scientific, very individualistic. You couldn't really say it is capitalistic in the sense of the laws of the country because it is very liberal and so it has some values like compassion and concern for the environment.

You have to know what you are working with in terms of the criteria. The environmental issues are there because these kids are a little bit concerned about the environment. They have a little bit of compassion. They are a little bit more humanistic than the average student in the country as a whole because they have a little more liberal edge to them.

I am going to give you the context first and then show how I relate to that. I think the first thing you have to understand about teaching kids anything about virtue is to know your context; to know the people you are working with and to deal within that context.

Let me mention some other characteristics that you are dealing with. You have to be very careful because you are in a secular school at a religious school context. You must take care to talk about things within the same terminology as they are living in. Even though this school is in a religious setting, still most of the kids here I think have a very worldly side; most of them are very connected to the outside.

To Teach by Virtue Rather than by Authority

Values that I deal with in Berkeley and in the kids here at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas have a lot of overlap, despite the fact that the ones here have come from backgrounds in which the parents have given them stronger value systems by comparison. This is true particularly in the scientific area. I think that, in the modern world, you have to come to everything with at least some scientific reference in order to be pragmatic. So in teaching something like virtues, you have to take into account certain criteria. Pragmatism is very important; a scientific approach is very important. You have to be psychological. Remember: nothing is taken for granted because of authority. So, if you are using authority, forget it, because outside authority in terms of virtue requires that that authority has been agreed upon. Remember that when you are dealing with authority, there is always an assumption with authority that whatever authority you are using has already been agreed upon by everyone. If the authority has not been agreed upon, then you have no basis. A kid can nod his head yeah, yeah, yeah, but it doesn't mean anything unless the basis for the criteria on which you are operating has been established. The use of authority is a question of virtue and is pretty much useless with kids. The reason it is useless is just because all the assumptions would have to be worked out first. You have to agree to the same assumptions of authority. Working those out, however, gets into a huge philosophical problem.

If you want to sit down and to figure out with a kid the basis of using authority, you will have to spend a lot of time. I am not talking about authority now in terms of how kids act in the classroom or around school with each other. I am referring to actually teaching virtue. It has to be something they believe in, something in themselves. There are two issues here. One is running a school administratively. We are not talking about that. My job here today is to talk about teaching virtue.

The only way that anyone can actually do virtue is if they themselves see it in themselves.

Virtue by definition is something I believe in and act upon because it is an internal process. If it is an outside process—we call that law—we say “They broke the law.” That's different. If it is a law, that means they are not supposed to do a particular thing or such and such will happen—that is not virtue. That is not the basis of what I am talking about.

Authority and laws are external. What we are going to talk about is trying to teach virtue: which must be something that they totally see and agree upon in themselves. If they do not agree upon it within themselves; if they do not actually see how it operates within their own lives, then as soon as they leave this place or are in another situation, they just act according to whatever context that is.

To be continued