Eightfold Paths

Last night we talked about the four determinations, the set of values that the Buddha has you determine on in order to bring some order to your desires and point them to the goal of putting an end to suffering.

Tonight we’ll begin talking about the strategies he recommends for carrying through with those determinations.

You may remember the Buddha’s solution to the problem of having many desires is that you hold to one overriding determination. So you have to use discernment to bring knowledge to the process of how desires are formed and judged. Instead of basing your decisions on a definition of who you are in a particular world, he proposed wishing for the best thing possible, and then ordering your sense of self and the world around that. Along the way, you’ll be using many different becomings and many different senses of who you are and what the world is, but then, when you reach the goal, you abandon them all.

The framework for this approach is the four noble truths.

In the first two truths, basically the Buddha is describing what you’re already doing.

In describing the first truth, he starts by listing many forms of suffering: There’s the stress of birth, aging, illness, and death. The stress of not getting what you want. The stress of having to be with what you don’t like. The stress of being separated from what you do like.

Then he boils all the forms of stress on the list down to one common denominator, which is passion and desire feeding on the five aggregates. These aggregates are:

The form of your body.

Feelings—and here we’re talking about feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

Perceptions, which are the labels that you apply to things: “This is a microphone.” “This is a lectern.” “This means this or that.”

The fourth aggregate is fabrications, when you put your thoughts together.

And then finally consciousness, which is consciousness at the six senses—the five physical senses plus the mind as the sixth.

So our passion and desire for these things, feeding on these things: That’s the essence of suffering.

The second truth, the cause of suffering, is the passion and desire that wants to feed on these things. The Buddha describes three kinds of craving that want to feed on the aggregates: craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, and a craving for non-becoming.

We’ve already explained sensuality—your fascination with sensual fantasies—and you may remember that becoming means taking on an identity in a world of experience. Craving for non-becoming means wanting to destroy whatever becomings you already have.

Those are the first two truths, things you’re already doing.

As for truths number three and four, the Buddha describes what you need to learn how to do in order to put an end to suffering. The third truth is the cessation of suffering, which mean the end of passion and desire. It’s an all-around dispassion, even for dispassion itself.

The fourth truth, however—the truth of the path to the cessation of suffering—involves passion and desire for the steps that will lead you to that third truth. For example, in right effort, which is one of the factors in the path, you generate desire to develop skillful mental states and to abandon unskillful ones. But then as you arrive at the goal, the path itself becomes an object of dispassion, too.

There’s a passage in the Canon that describes this dynamic. A brahman comes to see Ven. Ānanda, who’s staying in a park. He asks Ānanda, “This practice you’re doing, what’s the goal?” Ānanda replies, “One way of describing the goal is putting an end to desire.” The brahman says, “Is there a path leading to that goal?” And Ānanda says, “Yes, there is.” Then he describes a set of teachings called the four bases for success, which we’ll be discussing in another day or two.

One of the bases for success is desire. So the brahman says, “That’s impossible. You can’t use desire to put an end to desire.” Ānanda responds, “I’ll ask you a question in return. Before you came to this park, did you have a desire to come to the park?” “Yes.” “But now that you’re here, where is that desire?” “The desire’s gone.” And Ānanda says, “It’s the same in this case: When you practice correctly in line with desire, you can put the desire aside when you’ve arrived at the goal.”

In the same way, the fourth noble truth requires passion and desire in order to put it into practice, but when it’s done its work, you can put the passion and desire aside—because your desire has been fulfilled.

Those are the four truths.

Each of those truths has a duty.

The texts, as they describe the duties of comprehending and abandoning, basically define them as dispassion. In other words, you comprehend suffering enough to the point where you can have dispassion for it. However, for the third and fourth truths, you start out with passion and delight for them to give you energy for the path. Then, when you realize the third truth through having developed the fourth, you can develop dispassion for those two truths, too.

When the Buddha describes the path, he calls it the noble eightfold path, because there are eight factors in the path. When we look at them, we see that they’re the same eight factors you’d have to use to acquire anything you really desire. As the Buddha says, we have many possible paths that we can follow in life. Some of them lead to suffering, and some of them lead away from suffering. But in each case, they would involve the eight factors. So there are some ignoble eightfold paths, with eight wrong factors. The Buddha calls paths like that “ignoble” because they lead to goals that can’t escape aging, illness, and death. He called his path the noble eightfold path because it contains eight right factors that lead to the noble goal: a happiness that’s free from aging, illness, and death.

So let’s first look at the factors in a neutral way, neither wrong nor right.

We start with views. When you make an effort to attain a desire, you have a working hypothesis, a view about how the world works relevant to the goal that you desire. Then you decide on what imperatives follow from that hypothesis: in other words, what needs to be done in order to get what you want. This view also defines your place in that world, usually expressed in terms of becoming: you as an agent, a consumer, or a commentator in that world.

The second factor is resolve. You decide that you’re going to focus on that aim, making up your mind to abandon any thinking that would get in the way of attaining that aim and to develop patterns of thought that would help in attaining it.

Then you have three factors on how to speak, how to act, and how to pursue your livelihood in order to gain what you want in that world.

Then there’s the factor of effort, which involves motivating yourself to develop the mental qualities needed for the task and to abandon those that would get in the way.

Then there’s mindfulness. You focus on what needs to be kept in mind and also what has to be ignored in order to attain the goal.

Finally you need some concentration to stay focused on your aim and to find joy in staying focused.

We can illustrate these eight factors with worldly examples. Take the desire to become wealthy. You start with the view about what constitutes wealth and why it’s worth pursuing. Then you have views about what would be proper or improper ways to succeed in attaining wealth. You also need views about your own ability to do those things.

Then you have to have the resolve to abandon any thoughts or habits that would get in the way of gaining the wealth you want.

Then you have to think about what you’re going to say, how you’re going to act, and how you’re going make your livelihood in a way that will bring about wealth. In other words, you think about you as an agent in the world devoted to obtaining wealth.

Then you have to motivate yourself to make the effort to think in ways that would promote wealth and to put aside thoughts that would call that goal into question.

You have to remember things you have to keep in mind in order to get wealthy.

And then you have to stay focused on this aim and find joy in staying focused on wanting to be wealthy.

Those are the eight factors of any successful path for attaining the wealth you desire. But because wealth is subject to aging, illness, and death, those factors make up an ignoble eightfold path.

The noble eightfold path takes eight similar factors and aims them at a noble goal: the end of suffering.

Right view—“right” in the sense of leading to the goal of ending suffering—starts with a version that’s called mundane right view. In this version, the Buddha talks about you as an actor in the world. He also talks about how the world works in terms of the principle of kamma. When you adopt right view, you realize you have to learn how to master that principle of kamma. Then you develop a view that you as an agent can actually master this principle, and you as the consumer will enjoy the good results that come from making good kamma. Then you, as the commentator, notice how your actions are actually following in line with this principle and how they can be improved.

But you have to note that even here, you, as an agent, are defined in terms of the goal, which is to put an end to suffering.

This view of the path, as involving desire and becoming, goes against some simple-minded false views you may have heard about the desire on the path. For instance, you may have heard that you need to have the view that there’s nobody doing the path. Or that you get to the goal by not wanting it. Or you may have heard the desire that wanting things to be different from what they are is to suffer. Or you may have heard that the goal is already there, so all you have to do is relax into it.

The Buddha, however, taught more strategically. You have to use desire and becoming, in order to get beyond desire and becoming.

We can illustrate the actual role of desire on the path with reference to one of the items in the list that defines suffering: not getting what you want. On the surface, this sounds as if the Buddha’s saying, “Stop wanting and you won’t suffer.” In one sense that’s true, because once you’ve arrived at the goal, you don’t need to desire anything anymore. But that attitude doesn’t get you to the goal.

To make this point clear, we have to look at some of the passages in the readings.

The actual definition of not getting what you want reads like this:

Now, notice: The problem here is simply wanting without knowing what to do to solve the problem. Actually the Buddha’s whole quest for awakening was motivated by the desire not to be subject to these things.

This is what he had to say.

So the desire that motivated the Buddha-to-be to search for awakening differed from the ordinary desire that leads to suffering because it included a dedicated search. He didn’t just sit there wishing. He searched for the practice that would lead to what he wanted. He called that search the noble search, in other words, the search for the deathless. This is in contrast to the ignoble or erroneous search which, as we’ve said, looks for happiness in things subject to birth, aging, illness, and death.

In other words, the problem with the original desire is not that it was a desire, but that it was aimed at a goal—to be free from aging, illness, and death—without doing what was needed to attain the goal.

Now, it wasn’t the case that his desire to go beyond birth and these other things was limited just to the beginning of the path. Even on the night of his awakening, his continued desire to find the deathless explains why he wasn’t satisfied with the first two of the three knowledges he gained that night.

The first knowledge was knowing his previous lives. He saw how he had been reborn many, many, many times over many eons. As he noted, there were many people who had gained that knowledge and then set themselves up as teachers. But he wasn’t satisfied with that because it didn’t lead to the deathless.

In the second knowledge, he saw how beings die and are reborn in line with their kamma. That, too, didn’t lead to the deathless, but it did give him some insights. He saw that your kamma, your intentional actions, determine how you’re going to be reborn, but kamma can be complex. He saw cases where people had done good all their lives and then were reborn in good places. And he saw some people who had been engaging in a lot of unskillful actions throughout their lives and then went to bad places.

But he also saw cases where people did unskillful things, but then had a change of heart—and sometimes that change of heart was right at the moment of death—and that change of heart actually took them to a good place. Now, it didn’t wipe out the past kamma they had done, but it gave them a chance to develop better kamma in the meantime before the bad kamma started giving its results.

Then there were opposite cases: people who had done good things through their life and then had a change of heart: “To hell with good kamma.” That took them to a bad rebirth. This showed him the importance of your present-moment kamma. Even if it’s right at that moment of death, it can have a enormous impact.

So he decided to look more carefully at present-moment kamma—his intentions—in his own mind. And it was through examining his intentions in the present moment that enabled him to see beyond intentions into the deathless. Seeing the importance of intentions in the present moment to keep the process of birth and death going, he saw how he could abandon all intentions. The understanding that allowed him to abandon all intentions was expressed in the four noble truths. That was what led to his experience of the deathless. And only when he found the deathless did he end his search.

So you can see that the desire for the deathless kept him on track all the way through to the moment of awakening.

Let’s listen to what he had to say:

He uses the word “unprovoked” here because they had a belief at that time that experience was based on various latent properties that could be provoked into action—like the fire element we talked about. When you provoke the fire element, fire appears. When it’s unprovoked, the fire goes back into a latent state. This means that anything that’s provoked is impermanent. Things that are provoked can change. However, the release the Buddha gained on the night of his awakening was not provoked, which means it’s not going to change.

Then he goes on further and says,

So, having made the deathless his overriding desire, he didn’t just stop with the desire, he also tried to figure out the way to fulfill this desire. When he found the way, he then taught his students to give rise to the same desire for the deathless. Then, rather than simply wishing for the deathless or abandoning desire and resting content with things subject to death, they were encouraged to focus their desire on the path of action leading to the deathless and to follow through with it until they had reached the goal.

This is why the Buddha noted that one of the secrets to his awakening was being “discontent with skillful qualities.” Although he taught contentment with material things, he didn’t teach a blanket contentment with all things. Contentment with material things allowed him to focus his discontent on the real source of his problem, which is the lack of skill in his mind. As he described his quest for awakening, when he followed a path of practice and found that it didn’t lead all the way to the deathless, he abandoned it “in search of what is skillful.” He kept trying to raise the level of his skill until it yielded the results he wanted. Only when he reached the deathless was he content.

He illustrated this principle with an analogy. Suppose a person has need of the heartwood of a tree. He shouldn’t content himself with the leaves, the twigs, the bark, or the sapwood of the tree. He has to keep on searching until he finds the heartwood that will serve his purposes.

So lets look at the noble eightfold path in light of this picture of the Buddha’s own quest.

Start with right view: Actions are real. They have consequences. They can be chosen. And the best actions to choose are those that lead to the end of suffering. You take as your working hypothesis the idea that the end of suffering can be attained through your efforts and then you take on the duties of the truths in light of that.

This is called transcendent right view. Unlike mundane right view, it doesn’t deal in questions about who you are or the world you live in. It focuses directly on actions and events in the mind. In this way, it avoids the terms of becoming. It gets you used to thinking in terms of actions in and of themselves.

Now, the ability to get totally into this noble right view will develop as the path progresses. Sometimes you can manage looking at actions just as actions, and sometimes you need a sense of yourself as an agent who’s responsible in order to be able to get those things done, in order to behave responsibly.

That’s right view.

As for right resolve, you resolve to abandon sensuality and the pleasures of unskillful attitudes, such as ill will and harmfulness, in favor of the pleasures of right concentration.

Then there’s right speech, right action, and right livelihood. These concern you as an agent engaging with the world in harmless ways.

Then there’s right effort, motivating yourself to develop skillful mental qualities and abandon unskillful ones for the sake of getting the mind into right concentration.

Then there’s right mindfulness, getting focused on the themes that need to be kept in mind to get into right concentration. These are the four frames of reference: body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities, all in and of themselves. You try to be sensitive to events in your body and mind simply as events, fostering skillful ones and abandoning unskillful ones, like the gatekeeper who keeps unskillful enemies out of the fortress and lets skillful people in.

The final factor is right concentration: finding joy in a still, unified state of mind that allows you to see events in body and mind most clearly. In particular, you’ll notice how you shape your present experience with the three fabrications. This is what enables you to do what the Buddha did. You see how your intentions shape your experiences and you get to know your mind so well that you can abandon all intentions. That’s how you, too, can find the deathless.

Now notice, there are some features of becoming involved in this. You select which parts of the world are relevant to your goal. You keep them in mind. You select a sense of self that’s capable of doing the work, dis-identifying with selves that get in the way. All these strategies are necessary to perform the duties that get you to the goal. But then they’ll be dropped when the goal is reached. At that point, you won’t have any need for any more desires—because the deathless will be so satisfying that you won’t want anything else.