Morality as religious practice

Our last reading in Exploring Religious Ethics is one of the wisest. Have a taste:

The emphasis in Buddhist morality is on the cultivation of a personality that cannot but be moral, rather than focusing upon the morality of particular choices and acts. But it is not the will that can create such a personality, no more than I can pick myself up by my own collar. It is to the training that the will must be applied, from which virtue will naturally flow. "Hit the horse, not the cart," as the Zen saying puts it. The exercise of the will is, of course, needed by all of us from time to time in order to avoid doing harm to others or ourselves; the impulse to act wrongly is blocked short of action, but, if possible, there should be an open, nonjudgmental awareness of the feeling that has flared. This requires much practice... Willing virtue into one's life is a notoriously unsatisfactory way to bring about changes in behavior. Whether we fail or succeed, either way we lose. The ego and the superego live in fear of one another; when ego is indulged there is guilt; when ego is repressed, there is a nagging feeling of self-deception arising from knowing that one's "saintliness" wan not genuinely obtained. The saintliness achieved by willpower alone is obsessed by evil and depends for its existence on evil. ...
The authentic moral personality emerges through the ripening of wisdom/compassion. This ripening takes place through a system of spiritual training that includes the practice of morality as a part of the practice of mindful awareness. Through trying to conform to the moral precepts, we incite an emotional revolt. Without either suppressing that revolt or being possessed and carried away by it, we open ourselves in full awareness to containment of that upsurge.

Ken Jones, The New Social Face of Buddhism: A Call to Action
(Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003), 128-9

A great many of the themes we've discussed in the class are touched on here, and in a way which many of our Christian ethics texts could harmonize with.