The Buddhist Religion: The Noble Eightfold Path
The Noble Eightfold Path is the eight basic principles of Buddhism. It is often shown as a wheel with eight spokes.
Right Understanding
This means finding out about all the basic Buddhist teachings and then checking with your own experience to see whether each teaching makes sense. Buddhism says that for real understanding you need to see for yourself that Buddhist teachings are true.
So one part of Right Understanding is finding out about all the basic ideas in Buddhism.
The other part is testing them in your everyday life to see for yourself if they make sense. You should not just try to believe what you are told.
Elsewhere in the Noble Eightfold Path, in Right Speech and Right Action, you will see guidelines for behaviour like avoiding telling lies and avoiding killing insects. This is not to please any god, since there are no gods in Buddhism. Right Understanding means that you try out following these guidelines and see how they affect you and other people. Only then can you truly understand why they matter.
Right Motivation
Naturally many people first get interested in Buddhism because they are seeking peace and happiness for themselves.
But Buddhism teaches that, to obtain long-lasting peace and happiness for yourself, you need to help the people around you to obtain peace and happiness too. One reason is that we all affect each other so much. Other people’s troubles can soon become your troubles.
If you are to truly follow Buddhism, your motivation needs gradually to change. You need to become less interested in how Buddhism can make you happier and more interested in to how Buddhism can enable you to make other people happier.
It takes time to develop this more unselfish motivation and it’s only natural that many people don’t have it at the beginning. Buddhism teaches methods for encouraging yourself to want to benefit other people.
Right Speech
- Buddhism teaches you to train yourself to be truthful.
- Likewise to train yourself not to speak to anyone in a wounding, hurtful way. Sometimes people can be hurt very deeply by things which other people say to them – sometimes more than by physical blows. Whilst you should always speak the truth, Buddhism teaches that you should think up ways of doing this which are not hurtful.
- Also, it’s important never say things to people in order to stir up anger or suspicion against someone else or to break up someone else’s friendship.
- When you’ve nothing to say, it’s fine to be silent. It is not helpful to fill up other people’s minds with pointless chatter.
Right Action
- Buddhism teaches to try hard to avoid killing any living creatures, including insects. While you cannot always succeed in this, you should show consideration for living creatures whenever possible. You should let wasps out of windows, for instance, rather than killing them. If you see a line of ants across a path, you should take the trouble to step over them. Buddhism is against all killing for sport, like hunting.
- You should not take from anyone else anything which they do not want to give you. This means much more than not stealing. It also means that you don’t pressure or trick people to give you things or do you favours which you know they don’t really want to give.
- Buddhism teaches that when men and women have close relationships, like marriage, this should be with only one partner at a time. Only if they have ended a relationship, should a person seek another partner - not at the same time.
- Another Buddhist teaching is not to get drunk on alcohol or other drugs. One reason is that, once drunk, people much more easily get angry or speak hurtfully to other people or do other harmful or destructive things.
Right Livelihood
This means a way of earning money and a lifestyle which does not harm other beings and, preferably, benefits them.
Buddhism teaches that the following ways of earning money are wrong.
- Anything to do with making weapons and warfare.
- Any business which exploits its workers or controls them like slaves.
- Any business which produces poisons or pollutes the environment.
- Trade in meat, fish or the killing of living creatures.
- Trade in alcohol or addictive drugs.
- Any job which involves telling lies or deceiving customers or misleading advertising or high-pressure salesmanship.
Buddhism teaches that you should do what you can to reduce the harm you do to the environment and the natural world.
Buddhism also teaches that you shouldn’t seek lots of expensive things which you don’t really need. The latter can lead to you wasting your life working for these possessions or looking after them or running up debts which then mess up your life.
Right Effort
To put Buddhist teachings into practice, a special type of gradual effort is needed.
It is much too difficult to put all Buddhist principles into practice perfectly at once. People who try to do this will probably give up in days. Instead, you need to make small improvements, one at a time. Then, once an improvement has become a habit, adding another improvement till you are living more and more of the Buddhist life by habit.
For instance, an improvement might be to remember to do a kind deed every day. To keep this up till it becomes a habit is enough to keep anyone busy.
So right effort is about making improvements gradually but then keeping them up forever. It is about making improvements at a pace which is easy enough for you to keep up. It is like a long-distance runner, who deliberately runs at a slow pace which it is possible to keep up for miles. It is the opposite of a sprinter, who can run very fast during a short race but cannot keep this up for longer.
Right effort also means paying equal attention both to doing more good, kind things and to doing fewer harmful things.
Right effort can also involve praising yourself and rewarding yourself for progress in following Buddhist teachings.
Right Mindfulness
This means remembering to apply Buddhist teachings in everyday life all day long – keeping Buddhism in mind all the time.
For instance, it means remembering to treat each person you speak to in a kind and pleasant fashion. It means remembering to be truthful.
It also means remembering to apply Buddhist teachings to any difficult situations. In difficult situations, sometimes Buddhists ask themselves, ‘What might Buddha do in this situation?’ so as to help themselves to decide what to do.
Some Buddhists spend some time each day when they think back about how well they have followed Buddhist teachings so far that day. They can praise themselves for things they have done well. Concerning anything they regret doing, they can think through what went wrong and work out how to do better in the future.
Right mindfulness also means training yourself to keep your mind on whatever you are doing and not drifting into daydreams. One such Buddhist training method is ‘Walking Meditation’, when you practising keeping your mind on each step you take when walking. Buddhism teaches that, when we are daydreaming, we can build up beliefs and feelings, which then can create difficulties for us. This will happen less if our mind is occupied instead with whatever we are doing.
Also, if we are fully paying attention, we will notice more, understand more and be able to handle situations better.
Right Meditation
Right Meditation means using mental exercises, like learning to concentrate on your breathing or on your walking, so as to calm your mind down. A calmer, clearer mind can help you to respond more thoughtfully in everyday situations. Through making you more awake to what is happening all the time, it can help you practice all parts of Noble Eightfold Path.
A calmer, clearer mind leads on to another stage in Buddhist meditation when you simply watch what your mind does. This helps you to understand your mind better and notice how your mind sometimes make things up, which you then risk believing are true. This is part of waking up to the true nature of reality.
Concentration exercises on your breathing are the starting point for Buddhist meditation but not the whole thing. Buddha warned against spending too long doing concentration exercises. The latter can make your mind totally still, so that you do not feel bothered by anything. But this is not true Buddhist peacefulness, which comes from using a calm mind to understand things better.
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