Simply Buddhism (Week Five)

The fourth of the principle assignments that was set out by the Buddha is an eight-fold themed journey. It is not a stage by stage path where you progress from one stage to the next. It is an on-going unfoldingtat has no beginning and no end. It is one where you are working on each of the eight themes in unison and explore ways to refine those themes. It begins with a commitment to change. Irrespective of what caused you to connect with the Dharma, you make a commitment to yourselves that you will deal with it, by practicing the Dharma, within a particular context. This, according to the Buddha, is the appropriate response to your initial commitment or vision.Once you have established that initial commitment, the next thing thatyou need to do is to develop the appropriate level of emotional input into your practice. One of the greatest tasks of the Dharma practitioner is to find an emotional equivalent for their intellectual understanding and until you have done this, very little progress can be made. This is possibly why you find that ‘appropriate emotion’is the second step of the journey. When you engage with appropriate emotions, youstart to explore the origins of any emotional thoughts that arise. You observe how connected these emotional thoughts are to your conditioning, and how many of them arise as a result of your habitual patterns of behaviour. If the emotional reaction is an unhelpful one, you can seek clarification fromthose that you have reacted against, to see if you have read the situation correctly or not. If all else fails you can apply appropriate view and recognise that it is just a thought. It is not permanent. You can engage with it. You do not need to hide from it or suppress it. Youcan see it for what it is and either wait for it to subside or let it go.

The third theme of the Dharma journey is the development towards the ideal of ‘appropriate speech.’Speech is something you engage in all the time. Your work here is to develop your speech so that it becomes the type of speech that is not only accurate but kind and leads to harmony and unity. The problem that wehave in doing this is that wetend to pad things out a bit, exaggerate a little, or bend the facts in the direction in which we would like them to go. How often have you heard that a little white lie won’t do any harm? You’d be surprised how difficult it is to be totally truthful, especially when you begin to combine truthfulness with other ethical principles such as doing less harm. How often do you repeat what you have read or heard without knowing how accurate the information is? To learn to speak honestly, you have to learn to observe your motivation and what drives you. This means you need to start by being totally honest with yourself. When youengage with appropriate speech, youwill need to consider whether what you are saying is an attempt to support your beliefs or your sense of identity, or whether you just want to be proven right.

Theme four is the development towards ‘appropriate action.’This brings you to the very basics of living a Dharma life. It involves adopting a set of guiding ethical principles for you to engage with fully. Whether you like it or not, you have to act out every moment of your life. The only question you have to resolve is how to act in a way in whichit puts kindness above everything else. Here you are encouraged to experience for yourselves the direct correlation between everything you think, say and do and your moment by moment physical, emotional and psychological experiences. Your actions, after all, are simply an expression of your mental states. As your practice develops, you notice, on ever more subtle levels, that there is always more that could be done to refine those mental states. When you engage with appropriate action you are able to observe your motivations. You can examine what precedes your thoughts, speech and actions.You can work to lessen the protection of the self-biased, by seeing beyond the surface. You can look, at an ever deeper level, at your ethical lifestyle and see whether what you think, say and do is in accord with appropriate view.

Theme five is a bit of a problem for those of us in the west. Our society is based on materialism and consumerism and thereforewehave little option but to enter the world of employment so wecan pay the bills, but this is no excuse to justify or rationalizeour decisions. Whatwedo to make a living has immense ramifications for us in relation toour well-being. The aim is to move towards the ideal of finding and then working within an ‘appropriate livelihood.’ The occupations set out by the Buddha as those that can never be reconciled with Dharma practice were stated 2,600 years ago, but they may be equally valid today. If we were to accept them as an initial guide, and then seekother occupations that relate to 21st century living, then we would be on the same page as the Buddha. The Buddha’s list consists of the following:

  1. Trafficking in living beings whether human or animals.
  2. Dealing in animals for the purpose of slaughter.
  3. Butcher or seller of meat products.
  4. Seller of poison which includes anything that has a stupefying effect on the mind.
  5. Involvement in the selling of weapons of war.
  6. Earning from palmistry, fortune-telling, spiritualism, astrology etc

Whatweneed to explore within our practice,even if we are employed in an occupation that is not included on the list, is what effect our employment is having on us, others and the wider world. Whilst it is true that we need to earn money, wealways have the opportunity to find meaningful work that helps us to develop on thejourney. This will often require us to stepback from the drive for more material wealth and exchange it for an existence that is much simpler but happier and more personally rewarding. This prospect can be quite scary for many.

The sixth theme is the development towards the ideal of ‘appropriate effort.’Being a Dharma practitioner is a thing in action. It is not enough to sit back and read books, attend classes or be part of a Sangha. There is always something for the individual practitioner to be doing to move them in the direction of reaching their full potential within the experience of clarity. Generally speaking, people begin with lots of enthusiasm. They want to take in more knowledge and they really get into meditation. Very often it quickly wears off. This is becausetheirhabitual patterns of behaviour are so strong that they overtakethe resolve to practice. Even in simple matters like getting up half an hour earlier to meditate or finding a space during the day or evening to do so.They might succeed once or twice or maybe even three times, but by the fourth morning the warm cosy bed seems more appealing, especially in the winter months. The same problem applies to study and ethics. Other things seem to just get in the way and your Dharma life is put on the back burner for a while until you hit another patch of enthusiasm, or more often than not, when something else goes wrong with your lives and worryingbecomes a bit more uncomfortable than usual.

The sevenththeme is the development of ‘appropriate concentration.’This is where you engage in a systematic program of meditation that will necessitate the development of a daily practice if you are serious about making significant progress. Meditation and ethics are the two fundamental components required for the development of insight. It is in meditation, the Buddha points out that the breakthrough moment is more likely to happen. When you engage with appropriate concentration you can apply appropriate view by understanding that the Buddha did not teach meditation as an exercise in relaxation, or as a means to reduce worry. He did not teach meditation as a means to make us nicer people. These may be helpful bi-products of meditation but that is not why he taught it. That is just an example of inappropriate view. The appropriate view is that he taught meditation because it was meditation that gave rise to the experience of clarity.

The eighth theme is the development of ‘appropriate mindfulness.’ This simply means developing ways to pay attention and respond appropriately to sensory experiences, as opposed to reacting on the basis of our conditioned habitual patterns of behaviour. When we engage with appropriate awarenesswe can apply appropriate view by observing everything we see, hear, taste, touch or smell as it is, without conditioned labelling. At the same time we can be aware of wanting to change any experience into something else because we find it unpleasant, or even neutral. We can allow appropriate view to just be present when sight, sound, taste, contacts and smells occur. There is no need to judge these things, They will change of their own accord. We can just let them be.

We now find ourselves back at the very start of the eight-step journey. ‘Appropriate view’ has three very different aspects to it. In brief there is appropriate view that is formed by an intellectual understanding of the law of causality. There is appropriate view that has been formed on the basis of irreversible insights that have happened. Thirdly, there is the appropriate view of not holding a view, becausecausality is fully realized within the experience of clarity.

The principal component of the experience of clarity is the realization of causality. It is this insight that started the Buddha on his teaching ministry. It was the answer to the question that had plagued him for years and to which he was so determined to find an answer. This is why he left home and became a wanderer. It was this realization experience that dictated his entire life’s communications. Yet, it is the one topic that many on the Dharma journey avoid taking a good look at because it seems too difficult to comprehend, even intellectually. It is by developing the other seven themes of the journey that we will actualize that first commitment to change that arose with our first glimpse of the opportunities to do something about our worries.