What you have heard here you do not repeat there to cause dissension; and what you have heard there you do not repeat here to cause dissension. That way you can unite those who are divided. Harmony gladdens you and you spread this through your words.
The Noble Eightfold Path
Buddhist teachings outline a way to live in which every area of life becomes a practice. As we learn to act with greater awareness and kindness we find ourselves progressing along the path and coming nearer to Enlightenment, the state exemplified by the Buddha.
Buddhist teachings formulate the path in a variety of ways, which can be a little confusing, but they all describe fundamentally the same process. The Eightfold Path is one of the most important of these formulations because it includes so many areas.
Here are the stages of the path, with the equivalents in the Pali language. Sangharakshita and some other teachers prefer the term ‘Perfect’ to ‘Right’, and the English translations of these terms differ in some other ways.
- Perfect Vision or Right Understanding (samma ditthi)
- Perfect Emotion or Right Intention (samma sankappa)
- Perfect Communication or Right speech (samma vaca)
- Perfect or Right Action (samma kammanta)
- Perfect or Right Livelihood (samma ajiva)
- Perfect or Right Effort (samma vayamaya)
- Perfect Awareness or Right mindfulness (samma sati)
- Perfect Samadhi or Right Concentration (samma samadhi)
Each of these areas requires attention, effort and understanding. Some are described in more detail elsewhere on this site as the Threefold Way of Ethics, Meditation and Wisdom.
Although the Buddha spoke of a path, we shouldn’t think that we that the elements follow one after the other. In fact, they are called ‘limbs’ rather than stages.
Perfect Vision / Right View or Understanding
Imagine that you hear about another country and become interested in it. You learn about its history and geography and speak to people who’ve been there. You study it so much that you start to feel you know the place already, but you want to actually go the country. You look at a map, plan your trip and set out.
After a long journey full of adventures, you eventually arrive and only then do you realise that nothing you learned prepared for the sights, smells and atmosphere of being there. The guidebooks and the histories make more sense now because you know what they’re describing.
This is an analogy for the first limb of the Eightfold Path: Perfect Vision or Right Understanding. The initial impulse to know the new country is a glimpse, or ‘view’, of what is possible, and our efforts to understand it are the equivalent of gaining a theoretical or intellectual understanding of the Buddhist teachings.
Next, we need to check out those teachings in our experience. Perhaps you experience a death in the family that shocks you into feeling for yourself the truth that we all die. You look at the Dharma – the Buddhist teachings – and find they present this as a part of the much larger truth that everything is impermanent. Or you experience an overwhelming feeling of inspiration while travelling in the mountains and sense, just for that moment, that human consciousness contains a vast dimension beyond our usual experience. That leads you to take up Buddhist meditation as a way to develop your consciousness.
‘Right View’ can mean an understanding of the Dharma on this level: knowing what the teachings say and recognising their truth as an account of life. That may stimulate us to put the teachings into practice; but the Dharma is still like a guidebook’s account of a foreign country. It’s the map, not the territory.
Next we need to follow the path that takes us from where we are now to that country –this is where the other stages of the Path come in. Finally, when we arrive in the country we have ’Perfect Vision’ in the full sense of seeing the truth for ourselves.
Perfect Emotion / Right Intention or Resolve
The process of transformation starts with our intentions, or aspirations. In the Buddhist way of thinking, the value of our actions depends on the mental or emotional state behind them. We need to make a change from states of mind that are driven by the three unskillful roots, which are craving, aversion and ignorance, to the equivalent skilful roots of contentment, non-hatred loving kindness and wisdom. Skilful states of mind allow us to see the life as it really is.
Renunciation is the equivalent of leaving behind the familiar comforts of home when we set out on a journey, and it is dramatised in the Buddhist tradition by the Buddha’s decision to exchange the luxurious life of the palace for the harder but more rewarding life of a holy man.
I reflected: what if I, being subject to ageing, illness, death, sorrow, defilement and seeing their drawbacks were to seek the unageing, deathless, sorrow-less, unexcelled rest that is Nirvana? So, while I was still a black-haired young man endowed with the blessings of youth, even though my parents cried with tears streaming down their faces, I shaved off my hair and beard, put on the yellow robe and went forth from the home life into homelessness. The Buddha, Aryapariyesensa Sutta
More fundamentally, renunciation means recognising that the things we crave can’t bring us lasting satisfaction. As well as understanding that life is impermanent, unsatisfactory and insubstantial, we feel dissatisfied with our current way of living and determined to find something better. This desire to turn away from worldly concerns and towards the Dharma is bound up with Faith, which Buddhists understand as an intuitive response to the qualities embodied in the Three Jewels.
Loving kindness (metta) is a heartfelt desire for the happiness of others, while compassion is a deeply caring response to those who are experiencing suffering.
The next three elements of the path are concerned with Ethics, the first stage of the Threefold Way, so we can look at them together. Having set our outlook and intentions, this is how we start the journey; we must begin with our actions before coming to the subtler matter of developing our minds.
Perfect Communication / Right Speech
Speech, or communication, is the main way we interact with other people, and therefore the main way we affect them for good or ill. For this reason, Buddhism identifies four aspects of communication that require our attention. The first is abstaining from false speech, or lying, and practising truthful speech or being honest. This is the fourth of the five Buddhist precepts and the basis of any skilful communication.
Next we have abstaining from harsh speech and developing kindly speech. Harsh speech springs from ill-will and means speaking in anger to cause pain to another person. The alternative is kindly speech that springs from care or concern for another person.
Then we come to abstaining from frivolous speech, or ‘idle chatter’ that communicates nothing of real value. The positive counterpart is engaging in meaningful speech. This is an important consideration in many social situations and even more relevant in the era of streaming services and social media.
The fourth aspect is abstaining from slanderous speech that causes division between people; the positive counterpart is harmonious speech. The world is filled with conflict polarisation, animosity and misunderstanding that is often fuelled by words, so we need to look carefully at the motives behind our speech and its effect on others. As the Buddha put it:
Perfect Action / Right Conduct
After speech we come to the guidelines for ethical action in general. The basic expression of this teaching is the five Precepts – the Buddhist ethical guidelines for Perfect Action – which are described in the Ethics section. Here are the precepts, in both negative and positive form, as they are expressed in Triratna.
1. Not killing or causing harm to other living beings / With deeds of loving kindness I purify my body.
2. Not taking the not-given / With open-handed generosity I purify my body.
3. Avoiding sexual misconduct / With stillness, simplicity and contentment I purify my body.
4. Avoiding false speech / With truthful communication I purify my speech.
5. Abstaining from drink and drugs that cloud the mind / With mindfulness, clear and radiant, I purify my mind.
Perfect Livelihood / Right Livelihood
If speech is the main way we affect others, for most of us, earning a livelihood is the main way we spend our waking hours. The Buddha urged people to avoid activities that clearly harm others such as dealing in arms or meat, and to earn a livelihood only by legal means, not illegally; peacefully, without using any form of coercion; and honestly, avoiding any form of trickery or deceit. In Triratna, many people have developed their own livelihoods, either independently or working together in Team Based Right Livelihood businesses, as ways to practice Perfect Livelihood.
This stage of the Path stands for the transformation of our whole collective existence – our whole social and communal life – and not just for the economic aspect alone. In other words, it stands for the creation of an ideal society in which it is easier for us to follow the Path. Sangharakshita
Perfect Effort / Right Effort
Following a path means overcoming the inertia that’s such a strong force in human life, and that means we need effort or exertion (virya/viriya) at every stage of Buddhist practice. Seeing effort as a practice doesn’t mean that all effort is good – making lots of money or robbing a bank, for instance, would require a great deal of effort. Perfect Effort means applying our energy to the path, especially by working on the mind.
Better than a hundred years lived lazily and with inferior energy is one single day lived with energy aroused and fortified.
The Buddha also taught that we need to follow a ‘balanced’ middle way between an overly forceful effort and making too little effort.
We also need to know where to direct our efforts, and transforming our consciousness, requires us be aware of our mental states by practising mindfulness. We need to know what are ‘skilful’ and which are ‘unskilful’, and that depends on the emotions underlying them. When we recognise that we are experiencing unskilful states, Perfect Effort means removing them and preventing fresh unskilful states from developing. Conversely, we should cultivate skilful states and then sustain them.
This stage of the path marks a transition between ethics and the inner realm of meditation and mental development.
The mind is subtle and difficult to control, alighting on whatever it pleases. It is good to tame the mind. A tamed mind brings happiness.
Perfect Mindfulness / Right Mindfulness
Mindfulness or ‘awareness’ is an important part of all Buddhist practice including Buddhist meditation. The four domains in which mindfulness is particularly applied in classical Buddhist teaching are the body, feelings, thoughts and what are called dharmas – which essentially means seeing experience in light of the Buddhist teachings. These can be developed either within meditation or outside it.
And what is right mindfulness? Herein, a person dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief concerning the world. They dwell contemplating feelings in feelings... states of mind in states of mind... phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief concerning the world. The Buddha, Satipatthana Sutta
Sangharakshita includes in his account of mindfulness a number of levels or dimensions of which we can become more aware. Along with self-awareness he suggests that we can become aware of our surroundings, people and reality.
By means of energy, mindfulness, self-restraint and control, let the person of understanding make of themselves an island that no flood can overwhelm.
Perfect Samadhi / Right Samadhi
Samadhi is one of the words in the classical Buddhist languages that is hard to translate. It can mean the state of being absorbed in meditation, and for that reason this stage of the path is often translated as ‘right concentration’ in the sense of ‘centring of the mind and mental factors rightly and evenly on an object’. Samadhi includes the whole range of meditative experience, including states of profound absorption and deeply positive states such as loving kindness and compassion.
In this sense, the final element of the Eightfold Path marks the doorway to Wisdom or realisation. But samadhi can also be understood as another term for realisation or Nirvana. This is how samadhi is understood in Mahayana Buddhism and, according to Sangharakshita, ‘samadhi proper is the state of being established in reality.’
In this way, the Eightfold Path includes not just dimensions of experience that we need to practice all the time, but the goal towards which the path is leading.
