Loyalty

Loyalty is following a superior steadfastly, and it rests on three things: discipline, affection and a shared fate.

You may follow a commander out of discipline, which means you are deeply obedient to that commander.

Or you may follow out of affection, which means you are deeply fond of that commander.

Or you may follow with a commitment to share that commander's fate, binding your life to theirs through happiness or hardship.

Loyalty is a great virtue in a person's life. Some people have no one to be loyal to in their whole lives. In fact, to have someone you can give your loyalty to is a great happiness. Most relationships involve only a passing interest in one another, sometimes closeness or respect. A bond that inspires wholehearted loyalty is very hard to find and very rare.

Loyalty as a virtue goes only with some noble cause. Apart from that, there are only working relationships and keeping your word to each other. Business needs credibility. Friendship needs a sense of honor. Loyalty, when we speak of it, has reached the importance of a life's fate. It is the relationship between leader and follower, pursuing a high ideal together.

Usually, when people work together for the country, fight for a just cause, practice a lofty spiritual path or protect the Earth's environment, they have the strength of an ideal. That strength needs the virtue of loyalty to keep an organization stable and lasting. So a loyal person has great merit, having done a great good: helping the organization stay stable and lasting.

An enemy who wants to destroy a country first has to incite and draw many people into betrayal and disloyalty. One who wants to destroy a religion has to work the same way. Anyone without enough loyalty becomes a destroyer, and carries a heavy burden of wrong.

To choose a leader, a teacher, an organization or a homeland, and then commit to being loyal, is a noble and meaningful life. But that commitment takes great inner strength. An ordinary person cannot be loyal to anyone.