This is the most directly usable chapter for anyone who hires. The teacher's screen is character-first: three qualities that make a person worth having, and five patterns that make a person worth removing. The striking move — anticipating a modern instinct by decades — is his insistence on separating a mistake from actual badness.
People are all the same; it's goodness that differs — some more, some less. And it's goodness that sorts people into ranks, with no limit of nationality, class, caste, or religion.
— the book's pull-quote for this chapterDoes Buddhism see everyone as the same, or does it sort people into types — and is there a method for screening whom to work and live alongside?
Physically, everyone is the same. It's goodness that differs, and goodness is what divides people into ranks — regardless of nation, class, caste, or creed. As for screening, Buddhism holds that the good person everyone wants has at least three qualities.
1. Not harmful — "not trouble"
In worldly terms this begins with not touching the "roads to ruin" (apāya-mukha — the vices). Once a person is into the vices, there's no other wrong they can't do. The old saying he quotes: a burglar seven times is better than one house-fire (the house is still there); a house-fire seven times is better than gambling once (the fire leaves you the land; gambling leaves nothing, because it intoxicates so deeply). The familiar four are drink, philandering, idleness, and gambling — where there's drink there's division; where there's a philanderer, governance fails; the idler drags progress; where there's gambling there are thieves. When something goes missing in the office, he says, the first question isn't "who's a thief?" but "who's been gambling?" — because the easiest way to cover a loss is to steal. In dhamma terms, the hardest of the five precepts to keep is not lying: a person who will lie can do any evil, since to lie to another once you must lie to yourself at least three times — prepare the story, tell it, and remember it — and it is the root of losing faith in yourself.
2. Not foolish
Worldly: enough sense to support yourself and carry responsibility. Dhamma: at minimum, knowing good from bad, merit from harm, right from wrong. And in choosing managers he cites Prince Damrong's warning: a good manager must clearly separate badness from a mistake. A person who errs is not necessarily bad — a mistake can be mere carelessness. But a bad person is one who knows what's wrong and does it anyway.
3. Not lacking in kindness
Help whoever you can, especially neighbors and coworkers who genuinely need it. Most people take their own side — "if I can look after myself and trouble no one, that's enough" — and that, he says, isn't quite right. Look at a tree: a mango planted five years ago with no fruit. If you're kind you water and feed it a while longer; if it still gives nothing, or you need the land, it gets cut down. A heartless person is the same. In dhamma terms he puts it plainly: support your parents, know how to give and make merit, help the work of the community, even public charity. For a role like a janitor the bar is lower — stays clear of the vices, can take responsibility, has reasonable people skills. But if someone is so heartless they won't even support their own parents, cut ties — look that deep — because work ability you can train, while a person sunk in the vices is hard to train and already in love with the wrong things: even their intelligence gets aimed at harm.
In short, he says, screen on three things: the vices, responsibility, and gratitude. Other tests exist, but they all sit inside the frame of the Eightfold Path.
And five types to remove
If you're deciding whom to let go, he offers five patterns:
- Those who lead others astray — drawing people into the vices, into breaking the rules, into needless disruption.
- Those without discipline — especially the chronically late and the careless about cleanliness.
- Those who bristle even at kind words — including the habitual deflectors and excuse-makers.
- Those who meddle in what isn't theirs — the nosy who step on others' responsibilities (this one takes a while of working together to spot).
- Those who applaud wrongdoing — praising others' misdeeds as clever, and, when they err themselves, congratulating their own cleverness instead of feeling shame.
Anyone with one or more of these, if they can't be corrected, has to be let go — "cut the fire at the source" — before the trouble spreads.
The three qualities are a character-and-integrity screen that any values-based hiring process is reaching for — with the useful reminder that skill is trainable and character mostly isn't, so weight the latter. The mistake-versus-badness distinction is quietly ahead of its time: it's the foundation of blameless-postmortem culture — treat honest error as information to learn from, and reserve real consequences for people who knew better and did it anyway. And the five-to-remove is a field guide to managing out the genuinely toxic — note that four of the five are about effect on others (leading astray, meddling, deflecting, applauding wrong), not about raw performance. That matches the modern finding that a "brilliant jerk" who corrodes the people around them usually costs more than they produce.
- Hire for three qualities: not harmful (free of the vices, and honest), not foolish (knows right from wrong), not heartless (cares for parents and helps others).
- Character over skill — skill is trainable; a person in love with the wrong things is not.
- Separate a mistake from badness: honest error is not the enemy; knowing-and-doing-wrong is.
- Five to remove — and four of the five are about damage to others, not weak output.