Five basic personal qualities that are prerequsities for the Path

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Lombardi4
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Joined: Sat Jan 10, 2009 2:53 pm

Five basic personal qualities that are prerequsities for the Path

Post by Lombardi4 »

To succeed in Buddhist practice (and in life), one needs certain basic qualities and traits, which serve as a foundation for the development of higher and deeper qualities.

For example, first of all, you need honesty and sincerity - acceptance of truth - whether of your current state or whether the truth of reality itself. And that is a basis for the future development of wisdom and insight. A supporting condition for that is also having good intelligence.

Next, you need basic integrity and decency, being morally upright and scrupulous. Backed by the two guardian qualities of moral shame and moral dread (i.e. having conscience and fear of wrong-doing), one would then easily proceed to keeping firmly to the moral precepts immaculately.

A third basic quality is that of kindness and caring. Kindness is the foundation for love and caring for compassion. Since our lives are intertwined with everyone else's, we need to have a basic empathy and friendliness for all, including ourselves.

Fourthly, you need to have a certain level of mental purity and reason. Although this could be developed with time, you need to be a sensible person if you want to achieve progress in mindfulness and concentration and other meditative states.

And last, but definitely not least, you need to be an energetic and self-disciplined person. The key to the whole development of the path is effort and putting the teachings into practice, and its foundation is basic non-laziness.

So if you have these five prerequisites: honesty, integrity, caring, sufficient mental stability, and self-discipline, then you have all that you need to start developing higher qualities and you won't find it tremendously difficult. In other words, you have the potential to develop the Path and attain the highest.
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