Integrity — American Zen Association

A talk given at Stone Nest Dojo by Richard Collins, 28 May 2023

An integer is a positive natural number or a negative

number, with no fractional part, and includes zero.

One thing that we see in the Zen masters whom we read about from long ago is that they had integrity.

This doesn’t mean that they were perfect, or morally upright, certainly not confined by some rigid ethical code. On the contrary. It means that they were wholly themselves, authentic, vivid, unique, unpredictable, possibly eccentric.

The root of the word integrity is integer, from the Latin, which means “intact,” whole, undivided, entire, and in that sense perhaps even “pure.” An integrated society is an intact society, a society not split up or torn apart by internal divisions. Integral wheat or grain is whole wheat, whole grain, wholesome. And a person of integrity is one who commands respect for being uniquely who they are.

Think about the people you admire. Isn’t this true of every one of them? I think this is true of anyone we really admire. They are a whole person, well-rounded. They may not be perfect, indeed they are often exquisitely imperfect, but they are authentic. They are comfortable in their own skin, we say. They are able to act spontaneously in the moment from a certain center or core, whatever that core might be. And that core is rarely a belief; it is more likely to be a lack of any dogmatic belief and a realistic openness to possibility.

Sometimes sitting in zazen we can feel conflicted, torn apart by our thoughts and feelings, our urges and our hesitations. Even more so in everyday life. Being drawn-and-quartered is how I envision it, like the medieval torture that tied each of your limbs to a horse and had them go off in different directions, to dismember you limb from limb.

We are constantly torn in different directions by whatever has been drummed into our conscience by parents, church, education, society, whose gifts to us are their prejudices and myopia. We are also torn apart by our own fears, desires, ambitions, regrets — what we should not have done, what we should be doing, what we hope to do, and so on. And when this happens we are not whole anymore, we lose our integrity.

That’s why it’s very important to reconnect with your self here in the present during zazen. Not the self that’s been drummed into you or the one that appears on your driver’s license or your permanent record, but the one that has infinite potential. The no-self. Like the enso that represents emptiness but also represents wholeness, people with integrity can take in the moment and do what needs to be done. Not because they have some default dogma or code to fall back on, but because they have a certain openness, an emptiness — no preconceptions. They are empty, not full of themselves.

We too can become this open, this whole, this integrated with ourselves — if we take in and accept and embrace all of our current situation, whatever that might be, without distorting it with our hopes and fears. Not so that we can admire ourselves of course, but so that we can do what needs to be done. Not just for ourselves, but for others, for all existences really, in our modest way.