Basics of Buddhism - 3 - The Eightfold Path

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Based on the translations found in Awakening the Buddha Within, these eight practices are:

1.      Wise View: Seeing things as they truly are, not through the filters of our past experiences.

2.      Wise Intentions: The Buddha emphasized, "As we think, so we become." Changing our intentions changes the way we see and experience the world.

3.      Wise Speech: Speaking in a way that supports us and others on their spiritual path.

4.      Wise Action: Acting in ways that are wise and compassionate.

5.      Wise Livelihood: Working in a way that supports oneself and others on their spiritual journey.

6.      Wise Effort: Having a passion for enlightenment.

7.      Wise Mindfulness: Practicing mindfulness by being fully present in each moment.

8.      Wise Concentration: Practicing meditation to train our minds.

These eight practices are designed to invigorate our daily lives with compassionate awareness, honesty, and curiosity. These practices are usually translated as a “path”, but in the original teachings, they were described more like a wheel with eight spokes or an eight-limbed concurrent process. It's not necessary to start at the first step and end at the last, but rather to incorporate each as the situation arises.

For me, wise implies what is most skillful—in other words, what does the most good and the least harm.

The Eightfold Path can be broken down into three sections: wisdom, ethics, and meditation. Let's look at these three separately.

Wisdom:

The first two steps are part of the wisdom training: wise view and wise intention. We all have a certain view of the world. We may hang on to the view that our parents told us, or we may have come up with our own perspectives through our life experiences. If I were to ask you, "How do you describe the world?" what would you say? What would your parents have said? Is it a scary place? A difficult place? A wonderful place? An unfair place? A beautiful place? We often view the world from our past experiences and the vision that others have ingrained in us.

Wise intention is how we decide what to do. What are your intentions in your life? What do you value? If you could describe your values in three words, what would they be? Now, think about your thoughts, words, and actions this last week. How well did those match your values that you just described? The Buddhist path is designed to help us live our values. The first step is being clear about what we value, then putting those values into practice every day.

Ethics:

Ethics include the next three steps of wise speech, wise livelihood and wise action. 

Wise speech is about being more careful with how we respond with words (internally or verbally, via e-mail or text, etc.). We can learn to create a gap between stimulus and response by asking ourselves these five questions: "Is it true?" "Is it helpful?" "Is it inspiring?" "Is it necessary?" "Is it kind?" They neatly form the acronym THINK. Answering these five questions may cut out about 75 percent of what we say to ourselves and to others!

Wise action is about acting in ways that encourage and inspire. With greater awareness, we create more options for how to respond to any stimulus. Habit and past experience are not the only ways to choose how to act. Wise action can come from a place of reflection and intention for good. What action will ease suffering? What action will create the most good?

Wise livelihood can sometimes be thought of as limited to only a few jobs that really "do" any good. Instead, wise livelihood includes not only what you do to make a living but also how you do it. How do you show up for work? How do you interact with your coworkers? We can practice working in a way that supports ourselves and others on their spiritual journey.

Meditation:

Lastly, we have the meditation training of wise effort, wise mindfulness, and wise concentration.

Wise effort is about having a passion for awakening. It often feels easier to just do what we have been doing, even if it causes us suffering—there is usually some short-term payoff that makes us forget about the pain down the road. Conditioning and habits sometimes lead us in the wrong direction. The practice of wise effort encourages us to reach within and find that passion for happiness and, as the Dalai Lama proclaims, to "never give up!" Dig deep within you to find the power, strength, and inspiration to change—it is in there! We all have it—no one is left out. In the coming weeks, there will be moments when an old way of thinking will arise, a craving to go back to the old ways; it will at times seem far easier to go back than to practice these darn teachings. But! Within each of us is an amazing ability to change. Find that motivation now so you'll have it at your fingertips when the going gets tough.

Wise mindfulness and wise concentration are such a big deal that we'll save those for next time...

One Intention and Two Activities

I’m continuing the series of talks about the Lojong or Mind Training teachings.  This group of 59 pithy slogans is a great place to start your practice or to deepen your practice, wherever you are at.  In fact, a good reference book is Pema Chodron’s entitled,  Start Where You Are.  A reminder that these teachings are about opening our heart, getting comfortable with the power we have to transform the way we relate to  ourselves and others.  This week, we’ll talk about a couple of the slogans in the Seventh Point which focuses on mind training guidelines.

39.  All Activities Should Be Done With One Intention

Pema Chodron’s teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, said it well.  "The one intention is to have a sense of gentleness toward others and a willingness to be helpful to others - always. That seems to be the essence of the Bodhisattva vow. In whatever you do - sitting, walking, eating, drinking, even sleeping - you should always take the attitude of being of benefit to all beings."

Buddhism has been around for 2500 years, and millions of people have practiced these teachings, and found them to work, and have become deeply happy from using them.  Also, these teachings have now been scientifically studied through MRI and Brain scans, and we can confirm that the practices have positive impact on our ability to be deeply happy.  So, if all this is true, why doesn’t everyone just practice these teachings?  Why don’t we all have as our only intention, a sense of gentleness toward others and a willingness to be helpful to others - always.

What are earth is stopping us from doing all activities with this one intention?  What’s stopping me? What’s stopping you? 

This slogan provides a great opportunity to discuss the five hindrances, because, as all those millions of people who have practiced these teachings can validate, most of them were just like you and me, and most of them had the same obstacles and issues that we have trying to do this practice.  For example, the Pali Canon is the earliest surviving original teachings of the Buddha to be written down and preserved, and the five hindrances are discussed frequently. SO, these hindrances have been obstacles for over 2500 years!  

(From Wikipedia)

*Sensual desire (kāmacchanda): Craving for pleasure to the senses.

*Aversion (byāpāda, vyāpāda): Pushing things and people away

*Laziness or boredom (thīna-middha): We do things Half-heartedly action with little or no concentration.

*Restlessness-worry (uddhacca-kukkucca): An inability to calm the mind.

*Doubt (vicikicchā): When we question for no other reason than to avoid change.

Desire: Not all bad.  We desire to be enlightened, We desire to help others, we desire to be a good person.  But isn’t much of our desire is just to please our senses.  Buddhists aren’t against pleasure, but often we aren’t even present when we’re seeking pleasure we think we so desperately need.  After the fourth hour sitting in front of the TV, are you still getting that same zing of pleasure you got when you first sat down.  After the fourth drink, or fourth cigarette or tenth cookie or whatever your particular vice might be.  Is it really bringing you all that much pleasure or is it standing in the way of being fully present?

And Aversion:  Not all bad.  We push away unskilled behavior.  We push away things and people that hurt us.  But when we look closely, we might find a lot of aversion in our life that is more about trying to get to this completely comfortable external world, so we don’t have to deal with some unpleasantness in life.  We avoid tough conversations that we know we need to have.  We avoid seeing our actions and the results that they cause.  What are you avoiding that needs to be looked at? 

Lama Surya Das says that we need to pay attention to our intention. When we truly pay attention to our intention, we can be more aware of what our true intention is. 

Third and fourth are opposites:  Restlessness (worry) and boredom:  Often when I sit down to meditate, I’m so restless that it feels uncomfortable to sit still, my mind is racing, I’m physically uncomfortable, I start to worry about all sorts of stuff.  Our minds have been trained to be constantly entertained, and when we take away that entertainment, the mind continues to try and busy itself.  Or the opposite happens, I sit down to meditate, and immediately feel like I want to take a nap.  Now, I might be actually tired and need more sleep, but often it feels like just boredom.  My mind has been trained that if it’s not busy doing something, it just wants to go to sleep.   Recognizing these two games that our mind play with us to avoid be fully present, recognizing them helps us overcome them. 

These teachings help us recognize when our minds our goading us to shut down or to be distracted.  If my intention is to wake up, because I know that is where deep happiness lies, I use my attention to be aware when my mind is getting me off-track.

We can make a game of seeing these hindrances arise.  "Oh, here comes restlessness again."  "Here comes aversion." Recognize the games that your mind plays with you being questions.  "What's really going on with me?  Examine the obstacles, and even being willing to sit with not knowing and see what comes up.

The last hindrance, and often the most challenging, is doubt.  The Buddha taught that we are not supposed to take these teachings at face value.  We are not supposed to blindly believe them.  We’re supposed to have a healthy dose of skepticism.  But doubt can also be a way that we avoid changing.

When we question things just to keep from changing, then doubt itself becomes an obstacle, a hindrance to happiness.

When you are having doubt, I can’t tell you whether it’s healthy skepticism or change avoidance.  ONLY YOU KNOW which kind of doubt it is, and you will only know if you’re willing to examine your doubt more closely. 

So, how do we overcome these five hindrances of Desire, Aversion, Restlessness, Laziness and Doubt?

 

The 41^st slogan gives some good advice, about examining them

41.  Two Activities: One at the Beginning, One at the End

Pema Chodron encourages us to begin each morning, saying, “May I see what I do. When things happen, may I act with an awakened heart and may that be a way of life for me.”

Then during the day,   If good things are happening to you, you wish that all beings would have this happiness.  If bad things are happening, we recognize that all beings suffer in this same way.  We seek to broaden our perspective.

And at the end of the night, you reflect on your day.  How did I do?  Here is an important caveat:  Not in some punishing way, like I was bad, but we must examine our life, in order to change.  What could I do differently tomorrow?

In all the commentaries on these two slogans, there is wonderful advice to use whatever is happening in your life as fuel for waking up.

Watch for and examine desire, aversion, restlessness, boredom and doubt….and pay attention to your intention

“May I see what I do. When things happen, may I act with an awakened heart, and may that be a way of life for me.”

The Power of Intention

The second step on the Eightfold Path, is Right Intention. The power of intention is discussed in the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings by the Buddha,

The thought manifests as the word;

The word manifests as the deed;

The deed develops into habit,

And habit hardens into character;

So watch the thought and its ways with care,

And let it spring from love

Born out of concern for all beings…

As the shadow follows the body,

As we think, so we become.

So what is this thingl called intention? Of course, we’ve all heard the saying that the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, implying that our intentions are irrelevant and that our actions are the most important demonstration of our lives. Actions are important, but this common saying doesn’t take into consideration where actions come from in the first place. Imagine that you are standing over a person with a knife in your hand. Your intention is to harm them, you stab the knife into their heart and begin slicing into them, and they die. Now, imagine the very same action, but you are a surgeon and your intention is to heal them. Something goes wrong during the surgery, and they die anyway. The outcome is exactly the same, but the motivation for your action was extremely important to understanding the situation.

Jack Kornfield says that intentions are the seeds you plant in your heart that grow to become how you live your life. The stories you are telling yourself about your life are the foundation of how you experience life and how you react to any situation that you find yourself in. If you wake up in the morning, and something goes wrong, and you decide that it’s going to be a crappy day—then you’ve set your intention to find the crappiness in life. And we usually find what we’re looking for. Buddha recognized the power of intention. In the New Testament of the Bible, Paul said that we shall reap what we sow. And sowing actually begins with our thoughts and intentions.

In this moment, right now, ask yourself “What is my primary intention in life?” “Why do I get up in the morning?” When you think about getting older and reflecting back on your life, what do you want to see? In Buddhism, we are encouraged to start with a clear intention, not settling for just sleepwalking through life reacting in old conditioned ways.

“Breathing in, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting—whatever we’re doing could be done with one intention. That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our love and compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go, we want to realize our connection with all beings. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.”

-Pema Chodron, from Comfortable With Uncertainty (Shambhala Publications)

When we’re feeling stressed or depressed or anxious or happy or cheerful or silly or whatever state of mind might arise, in that moment we can recognize these states of mind, and we can ask ourselves: “What is my intention?” “What do I want out of life, and what do I want to put into life?” We can wake ourselves up. We can use the rising of any emotion or thought to better understand ourselves and to recognize the power of clarifying our intention. An emotion or thought is NOT who we are! We always have a choice about how to respond to anything and anyone in our life. Bring to mind a time in your life when you felt stuck in a bad situation, when you had that feeling of having no choices, feeling that there was no way to escape some particularly difficult situation. When you think about those times, even when things might seem at their worst, we still have the ability to set our intention towards waking up, to being curious about the situation, not judging ourselves for whatever we’ve done in the past, giving ourselves the gift of forgiveness and clear seeing. Waking up enables us to see the world with fresh eyes, to see new options that we might have missed before.

Naturally, there will be times when we have to admit we’ve fallen back asleep, that we didn’t act with good intentions, or even times when our intentions were kind and compassionate, but the outcome was still less than desired. Even in those situations, we have a fresh opportunity to set our intention to waking up and getting back on track.

Sometimes it might seem like too much effort. Our limited minds might tell us that it’s just easier to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. Living a life without any specific intention can at times seem very alluring. Let’s just smoke that cigarette or have that drink. Let’s watch TV until our brains turn to mush. Who cares? In those moments, when mindfulness seems like too much trouble, that is the most important moment for practice. That is the moment to remind ourselves of the deep, long-lasting happiness that can be found in waking up and staying awake. We can remind ourselves how wonderful life can be.

“Action isn't a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. More than some moral imperative, it's an awakening to our true nature, a releasing of our gifts. This flow-through of energy and ideas is at every moment directed by our choice. That's our role in it. We're like a lens that can focus, or a gate that can direct this flow-through by schooling our intention. In each moment our intention gives this energy direction.”

–Joanna Macy, from “Schooling Our Intention,” Tricycle, Winter 1993

So, First, in each moment, we can set our intention. And Second, in each moment, we can remind ourselves of why it’s worth making the effort. And third, we can identify the choices that we are making in our lives. It can often seem like there is just one answer, the old conditioned response, to whatever is happening in our lives. But that simply is not true. We live in arguably the free-est country on the planet—and yet we can fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t have choices. The Buddhist teachings encourage us to use our intention as a litmus test against which choices can be evaluated. Then, we can choose consciously. We can decide what we want our life to be about, and can then choose our thoughts and actions based on that intention.

Last year, a friend of mine was facing some very difficult challenges in her life. I asked her if it was okay for me to share some of her story—she said yes. She had always been a good saver and smart financial planner, but then she found herself in financial crisis: she and her husband were both out of work, having a mortgage that they were struggling to pay, savings having been depleted, no end seemed to be in sight. As she and I talked about the dire circumstances, I was struggling to find a way to help relieve her pain. But my friend had found her own inspiration. She said that she was ready to explore all the options, even ones that had once seemed inconceivable to accept. She said that she knew bankruptcy and foreclosure were options, that she could live in her dad's basement and start her own business. She talked enthusiastically about the joy of moving in with her dad and starting fresh. She had taken the blinders off of what was possible and found there to be possibilities that, not only could she consider, but that she could even see as positive.

Our intentions color the stories we tell ourselves. In the face of the worst financial situation of her life, she knew she had choices, and that it was up to her to decide what to do, that life was not happening to her. She was creating the life she was living, and no matter how dire things seemed, she could set her intention on making new choices, set her intention on seeing the world as a place of possibilities and those new choices could include joy and happiness. That is the power of intention.

So each of us gets to choose, not once in a lifetime or once a year, but we are choosing in each and every moment, how we are going to live our life. We are choosing whether we live with clear intention or whether we allow ourselves to get dragged down in the mire of old habits and old ways of seeing the world and old ways of seeing ourselves. It is a choice. And no matter how many times we might think that we fail, we always, every one of us, have a new moment to start fresh.

There’s a wonderful William Blake quote that says, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it actually is—infinite.

So, we can be encouraged that the work of waking up is an opportunity to see the world come alive. We can wake up to this truth, we can recognize our unique gifts and manifest those gifts in our everyday actions. We can recognize the flow-through of energy from intention to action. We can recognize that every moment is a moment to start fresh. In each moment, we can set our intention to living our true purpose.