The Eightfold Path

I’ll begin with the Noble Eightfold Path. In 2024, I took part in an Upasaka training through Birkin Forest Monastery, and as part of that year, we were able to read sections of Bhikkhu Bodhi’s book, The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to the End of Suffering. It’s this tiny little brown book about ye beg and very thin but very, very dense.

And this and the Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness by Bhante Gunaratana are really the main books that I received pretty early on in practice and have returned to over and over again because they really go into this topic quite well. I mean, I know there’s many others on this, but those complement each other. In good ways.

Bhante G’s book, quite a bit thicker and covers things in a, I don’t know, a little funny lighter tone. And Bhikkhu Bodhi’s book is quite dense, again, like I said, but very on the nose about things. And this training program, the Upāsaka program, focused on this path as a way of life, um, And really its emphasis on the Eightfold Path is an aspect of that.

Each of those path factors is about our lived experience. And while we’ll hear about each of them individually, my goal tonight is to kind of show how they weave together and form a whole. And the Eightfold Path is probably only maybe second, uh, on the list that it could be helpful to remember after the Four Noble Truths.

If you In Buddhism, there’s lots of lists, and lists are good as a memory aid. And so the Noble Truths are important here too. The Noble Truths lay out that, one, there’s suffering in life.

Two, that that suffering is caused by craving. Three, that by eliminating craving, we can eliminate that suffering. And 4, that there’s a path of training to eliminate that suffering.

And this path, that fourth thing, is the Eightfold Path that we’ll be talking about tonight. You know, it’s the Noble Truth via the Way to the End of Suffering. It’s the subtitle to Bhikkhu Bodhi’s book.

So when these other Noble Truths posit that suffering is caused by craving, by eliminating craving we can eliminate suffering, The Eightfold Path is put forward as the route by which we can do that, the route by which we can eliminate craving. Thus, it’s our path to the end of suffering. And the suttas give some instructions about each of these truths, about what we’re supposed to do with them.

And the Noble Truth, this Noble Truth of the path, the instruction for the Eightfold Path is that it’s to be developed. It’s guidance for how to be in the world, but in the service of this goal of awakening. And it’s from that topic that you get the word that precedes each of these, which in Pali is sama.

And sama is often translated as right or skillful. Bhikkhu Bodhi chooses right, Montague chooses skillful. And, you know, my— one of my fundamental teachers, Ajahn Sona, has put a lot of emphasis on this preceding word to each of the path factors.

We can have intentions, but are they right, skillful intentions? We can have mindfulness, but is it right, skillful mindfulness? And ultimately, this comes down to the question: is it leading us towards awakening? Is it leading us out of our craving into a reduction of suffering? If it is, then that’s right and skillful. So this Eightfold Path is presented and taught in a few different orders of these different factors, and there— these are generally grouped into three big bunches. It’s probably, if you come away with anything, Tonight, that’s probably helpful to think about, are these three big bunches.

And one of these is sila, or virtuous conduct, good conduct. And this is skillful speech, skillful action, skillful livelihood. That’s one basket.

The next basket is samadhi, or meditative concentration. And that consists of skillful effort, skillful mindfulness, and skillful concentration. Second basket.

Then the third basket is paññā, or wisdom, as skillful view and skillful intention. So we have this virtuous conduct, meditative concentration, and wisdom. And one way to teach them is to go out of order but in these groupings, because the ethical conduct is actually numbers 3, 4, and 5.

The meditative absorption is 6, 7, and 8, and then wisdom is 1 and 2. So you’re starting with 3 the way most of these lists go. But that’s because in one view, a person has to start with ethical conduct as the foundation of their spiritual life and practice.

From there, proceeding to the meditative practices and then getting a glimpse of some of the wisdom aspects that reinforce your interest in really drilling down on your conduct, which then allows your meditative practice to ease, which then gives you a little more view of some of these, a little bit more wisdom, and so on and so forth. You know, it’s a virtuous cycle and it starts spiraling upwards and upwards and builds on itself. The other way to follow this is to just go in the order in which they’re typically presented.

That, you know, to embark on a spiritual path, you need to understand the view and the intention of said path. You know, you have to have— where the heck are we going? It’s kind of the first question. And after that’s clear, we may be more willing to see what it asks of us in relation to others.

That’s getting into this ethical conduct, the Sila portion of things. And then if that’s amenable, we look at what it asks of personal cultivation. And after working with this personal and interpersonal cultivation, we get a new viewpoint on those original teachings that deepens, and then we want to do it a little bit more.

Gives us more encouragement. So one example could be, for people who’ve been here, you know, a con— if you see this process as you come here to a meeting, you may hear a teaching about, say, the Buddhist practice of loving kindness, and that inspires you. That might encourage you to be a little nicer throughout the week, to those people you speak with and act with, people at your job.

And then that trickles into our meditation practice. We’re not sitting there in silence thinking about the things we maybe could have said or shouldn’t have said or whatever else may have happened throughout the week. And that starts to give some depth to the practice.

You start to notice the changes in life and how that lets things be a little nicer for you. And then you want to understand a little bit more, you get back into the view, and then you get back into the practice, and it starts to cycle again in that way. So to go into each of these baskets a little bit, ethical conduct encompasses skillful speech, skillful action, and skillful livelihood.

And these are not commandments to break or abide by, but this it’s a graduated path, it’s a voluntary undertaking about how we relate to other people. And these function as the whole of our outward life. You know, we, we speak to people, we act on people and things, and we have to earn ourselves a livelihood.

And so they have to square up with our general resolutions to move away from greed and hatred and delusion. So these are endlessly refinable, and you can really start as small as you need to. Speech is often the most challenging, both including speech directed at others, but also speech directed at ourselves, the mental stories and diatribes we tell ourselves.

Skillful speech is stuff, you know, we, we think about what to speak. Speech should happen in the right time. Speech should happen when it’s truthful, when it’s given to the other person affectionately, when it’s beneficial, and with a mind of goodwill.

A pretty high bar for speaking. But again, you can start small. It’s like, can we just say things when we actually mean them affectionately? Just that changes speech quite a bit.

Has the potential to. So we also can look for what we’re already doing. And build on that.

It’s very easy to be critical. It’s very easy to seek perfection. But again, this is, this is a gradual path.

We see what we’re already doing and start to build on the places that we see we need to work. Skillful action is the list of the five precepts. And so the people who were at the retreat, we chanted these five precepts at the start of our retreat.

They’re also on our little board over there for one of our little introductory boards as you come in. And these are having a reverence for life. We’re not here to harm each other physically or mentally.

That we have some safety around our possessions. We don’t take things that aren’t freely given. The safety we give to others, the safety from unwanted sexual attention.

Again, we get back to truthfulness. We’re repeating truthfulness a second time, both in the way we act but also in our speech, and keeping a clear mind. So unskillful actions arise from habits and conditions that can be trained.

So as we work to train these habits and conditions we can slowly refine our— these actions. And again, these things can come in very subtle ways, like do you stomp the roach in your house, or do you find a little cup and put it over the roach and slide a paper and release it outside? Is there some reverence for life? So Right Livelihood is the last of these, and it deals with how we live. And it’s one of the things that the fact that it is one of these factors in the Eightfold Path shows this isn’t just a path for monastics who are holed up in a monastery.

This is their life. It’s, you know, all of us here are in the lay life, and we have to earn livelihoods. And so do we do our job with right speech? Do we leave fields of work that may involve things that harm life, things like selling weapons, dealing in the sale of humans, intoxicants, poison? We make our living peacefully and legally and safely and honestly.

So the next— so that’s again one big basket: speech, action, and livelihood. The next basket is samadhi. This is skillful effort, skillful mindfulness, and skillful absorption.

And this is probably the one you’re most familiar with. That’s some of what we just did for 30 minutes. Is some of this skillful effort is this bridge between our mindfulness practice and our daily life, between the mindfulness practice.

We sit here on the cushion, we cultivate these things, and then, okay, now we have to talk to somebody. Okay, how do we— we have to apply some effort. We have to really— this isn’t a passive process, you know.

It brings awareness to those things that are beneficial and to act on developing them. And it brings awareness to those things that are unbeneficial and to cease doing them. We notice that things make us angry.

We notice that things get us absorbed in desire. Maybe we try to calm those things down. We’re around people that really bring us joy.

If we’re in spaces that really uplift us, maybe we should go do that a little bit more. And slowly, you know, but to do those things, we have to be mindful. We have to pay attention to how we are, how we are in these spaces, how we are in these moments.

And skillful mindfulness is this meditation practice. We do this every Monday, but it is just this one part of the whole path that’s laid out here. And, you know, it’s this practice being focused and having clear comprehension of the present moment.

As you know, if we don’t have— if we don’t train our ability to have clear comprehension of the present moment, how can we speak skillfully, act skillfully, have a skillful livelihood, apply this effort, notice when we’re— when things uplift us, notice when things are dragging us down, if we aren’t paying attention, if we aren’t really able to notice. And that takes practice, as all these things do. And skillful absorption is this ability that we can unlock with our meditative practice to really, really go into some deep levels of stillness.

And It incorporates these states that are called jhanas. It’s the places where we can really, really let the mind and body settle down in the meditative process and achieve some joy that’s separate from the things of the world. And there are many different ways to go and work with this.

But it’s often meditation with a single topic, a single subject with intense focus. So that’s second basket. The third basket is the basket of wisdom.

This is skillful view and skillful resolve, or skillful intention sometimes is translation. And these are the path factors that make up this paññā, this wisdom or understanding. And so they set our course, and they are kind of our reference points.

When you come back and you’re like, why am I sitting here on the cushion? Why am I trying to speak to people well? Like, okay, you go back to the— you go back to the wisdom basket. And skillful view is really this understanding of the Four Noble Truths that I laid out at the beginning, that we understand suffering where it’s present. We’re understanding where that suffering is coming from.

We see where we’re grasping and craving for things, how that leads us into this suffering. We see how we can use skillful effort to release ourselves from that grasping and thus release ourselves from the suffering. And then we see this path of practice that’s available to us.

Skillful resolve. So that’s— there’s kind of a real knowledge part of that, but then skillful resolve is just about our intention. It’s kind of this this North Star of the intention of the whole path, that as we do all of these things, we’re moving towards generosity, we’re moving towards goodwill, and towards clear comprehension.

You can also say that as loving kindness and generosity and mindful awareness. Like, these are kind of the three guiding things when we’re acting. Are we acting out of goodwill? Are we acting out of generosity? Are we acting out of clear awareness and clear comprehension, and that we’re moving away from greed and hatred and delusion.

And it’s— that’s our commitment, to move towards the things that are good for ourselves, to move towards the things that lower our suffering, and away from the things that do us harm. So another good way to evaluate practices and attitudes with this is, you know, does this lead to goodwill? Does it lead to a lessening of craving? Does this allow me to see things as they are, or does it cloud the mind? So each of these individual factors, I mean, they, they can be laid out in the normal path, 1 to 8. They can be laid out in these 3 baskets.

You— I mean, they all cross into each other. They all interrelate, and with the main goal again of disentangling ourselves from different self-defeating attitudes and behaviors. So again, this is a gradual path.

It’s a gradual experience. We put drops in week after week, day after day, experience after experience. And so you, you know, these ethical factors, they can be the foundation, the base we build on, but they require some wisdom to discern what’s ethical.

Mindfulness helps us be observant and notice those things. And then, you know, it helps us notice when we might get caught. Concentration begin— can begin to arise more easily when all these things aren’t bubbling up in the mind.

And all of this requires skillful effort, continues to need that effort to maintain this concentration, to maintain the drive to kind of move this path forward, to turn the wheel. So effort along with mindfulness and a mind inclined towards concentration, inclined towards goodwill, towards clear comprehension, towards generosity. You know, we can start to see these things, these insights in the mind.

Builds wisdom, it builds interest in continuing this further. So the goal again of this Eightfold Path is a direct development that leads to the reduction and eventual elimination of craving and the hindrances. And, you know, it can be really helpful to know this intellectually at some point, to kind of try to memorize the— at least again, there’s ethical conduct, there’s the practices of mindfulness, and there’s some wisdom behind it.

But ultimately, it’s about a path that’s lived. It’s about a path that we do each and every day, and it’s really a fundamental part of the Buddhist teaching. Thank you for your kind attention, for listening to this this evening, and welcome to hear any questions and thoughts people may have.