An approach based on the Eight Path factors

Right Understanding

The traditional gloss on Right Understanding focuses on the Buddha’s understanding that our actions have inescapable consequences, and that those consequences are determined by the ethical intention behind the actions—the law of kamma. The canonical description of that law states that “beings are the owners of their actions, heirs to their actions; their actions create them, bind them, sustain them. Among beings, their actions distinguish the superior from the inferior.” (Cula-kammavibhanga Sutta, Majjima Nikaya 135)

So, if we want good results for our lives and the lives of others with whom ours are intertwined, those results will only come from our actions. It’s not enough to hope and pray; we can’t wait on others. If our situation is to improve, we must bring about the improvement through our actions.

Inherent in the premises outlined in Part One of this essay is that Right Understanding of our predicament recognizes the seamless nature of that predicament. We’re all in this together, and what we find ourselves in has no clear boundaries; any thing that we change with our actions changes all the other things in the situational mix. Not only do we have the responsibility to improve our situation, but when we do that, because of our intertwined condition, we improve the situation of all beings.

Right Intention

The Buddha defined Right Intention as the intention of renunciation, the intention of good will, and the intention to do no harm. In terms of social engagement, we might understand that as the intention to drop the shield of privilege, power, and wealth that separates us from others, to use whatever resources we can muster to help relieve those who are suffering, and to do nothing to create more hurt.

Our impulse, confronting a situation full of pain and suffering, is to protect ourselves and our own—to remove ourselves from the events creating the pain or somehow barricade ourselves against the fallout from a disastrous event. So those of us who are able to do so may live in gated communities, send our kids to private schools, join a boutique medical practice, and consider that we have thereby evaded the Crime Problem, the Education Problem, the Health Care Problem. If we truly have Right Understanding, it will be clear to us that such strategies will not resolve our common predicament. More importantly, all Buddhist teaching, from the Pali Canon’s imperative to abide in karuna, compassion, through the Mahayana’s Bodhisattva vow to save the numberless sentient beings, tell us that Right Intention, in a situation where there is suffering, is the intention to help those whose suffering is greater and more immediate than ours. Our intentions, in any social engagement, must be driven by compassion. If they are not, we will not only fail to ameliorate the pain and suffering inherent in the situation, but we will ourselves become worse people and more likely to experience dukkha because we have turned away from compassion.

Right Speech

The commentaries on the Pali Canon tell us that Right Speech comprises speech that is not intended to deceive or to divide one group from another and create social discord, speech that is not hurtful, and speech that is not idle—not gossip or speculation about what happens next; in positive terms, Right Speech is truthful, inclusive, gentle, and focussed on deepening understanding of the Dharma. In light of our premises, that pretty much means that we don’t use issues-oriented language in speaking about our shared predicament: we don’t identify ourselves or demonize others as being on one side or another of a particular issue; we don’t claim certainty regarding any notion that particular problems can be abstracted from the whole, or that particular actions or policies will serve as solutions; we don’t separate those who share the predicament into victims and oppressors, winners and losers, good guys and bad guys. Looking at our predicament from any particular point of view, we are honest about what we see; we don’t falsify the data, ignore what doesn’t fit our preconceptions, or indulge in flights of fancy about what might happen next. In discussing any situation, the language we use keeps attention focussed on dukkha, the particular nature that dukkha assumes in that situation, the craving that underlies the dukkha, and the poisons that hinder our abandoning of the craving.

Right Action

The teachings tell us that Right Action involves abstention from killing, from taking what’s not given, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, and from substances that make us careless and stupid. With reference to our premises, and to our Right Understanding of our common predicament, and to our Right Intention to relieve the suffering of all beings, with Right Action as our guide, we will understand that our purchase of sweatshop goods may increase the pain of people, or even cause someone’s death, a long way from here; that taking more than we need, whether it’s energy, clean water, space on the subway seat or in the bike lane, cash or credit, leaves a little less for others, and that, for some, that little may be all that sustains them; that no lies are white, if white means blameless; that sobriety is a joyful state and that frivolity is the simulacrum of joy.

It seems to me that operating in this world as a socially engaged Buddhist requires that I act always (or as close to always as my strength and mindfulness permit) in ways that do not put more pressure on a fragile system or add more pain to the pile of pain that already exists. If I can act in ways that positively relieve the suffering of others or that strengthen the parts of the system that sustain us—that feed us, protect us, link us, heal us, teach us, bring joy into our lives—that is wonderful. But first, and right now, and this evening when I have dinner, and after dinner when we’re watching TV, and tomorrow morning when I walk to the coffee shop, and next week when we leave for vacation: do no harm.

Right Livelihood

This is a particularly tough one in a highly interlinked and increasingly complex world, especially for those of us who came relatively late to the Teachings, after we had settled into a career that involved our learned skills and creative powers, and while we were still obliged to fulfill our duties as householders. The Teachings tell us that Right Livelihood rejects dealing in living beings, including both the slave trade and prostitution, as well as the raising of animals for slaughter or other misuse, dealing in weapons, in meat production and butchery, in poisons, and in intoxicants. The teachings further identify as wrong livelihood practices that involve trickery or exploitation, including fortune-telling and usury. But what about working as a night clerk at a convenience store to pay one’s way through college? That involves selling beer and cigarettes, charging exploitative prices for things like phone cards, selling lottery tickets, and handling a variety of publications that are full of lies, sexual pandering, and ill will. And just about any employment with a multinational corporation, no matter how benign one’s job duties might seem to be, involves one with an organization that is almost certainly, in one place or another, with one arm or another, dealing out poison, deception, exploitation and environmental degradation. Even a job in academia is on shaky ground with regard to right livelihood, as colleges and universities succumb more and more willingly and completely to operating models based on continuing growth and the blind imperative of profitable revenues.

What we can do, I think, and perhaps, as Buddhists, must do, is use whatever power or authority we have gained in our position to keep the problems of right livelihood under active consideration within the organizations that employ us, and to insist that the motivations driving the practice of Right Livelihood are honest and honorable and based on an accurate understanding of how the world works; moreover, if a corporation were to accept the directives of Right Livelihood and alter their operations to reflect that acceptance, their long-term success would be more certain, their customers would be better served, and their workforce would be healthier and more productively involved. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for energetic action for someone working as a clerk or a server, but it doesn’t leave those people paralyzed either, especially if they can act with imagination and compassionate understanding of their co-workers.

Right Effort

We have to keep at it. Dukkha keeps coming back; oppression, injustice, violence, epidemic illness, fraud—it takes new forms, strikes different people, changes its mask, appearing now as security, now as law, now as love, now as the will of God, now as the will of the People. So we have to be diligent, neither giving up when the struggle seems hopeless, nor resting when we have achieved a temporary advance. We have to maintain the energetic striving to see dukkha through its current disguise, to challenge its necessity, and to step in to give help or comfort to those caught in its grip.

Bhikkhu Bodhi points out that the aroused energy (Pali viriya) that powers our Right Effort also powers those actions, in others and in ourselves, that are violent or cruel and deceitful and that increase dukkha rather than ameliorating its effect. It’s easy to confuse the one type of action with the other, to believe, because we are mustering the same energy in the effort, to confuse a violent confrontation with the forces of oppression with Right Action and to confuse guerilla warfare with Right Effort. But Right Effort, if it is to be effective in the amelioration of dukkha, must embody Right Understanding, Right Intention, and Right Speech. If we are rightly diligent, we will find ways to engage the human actions that increase dukkha with compassion, responding, not simply to the unskillful actions, but to the humanity we share with those who act so unskillfully and to the delusory notions that underlie their actions.

Right Mindfulness

Engagement with the world involves subjecting ourselves to a constant barrage of impressions and events, many of them (most of them), threatening, sorrowful, delusive or tempting. Responding to those skillfully, i.e. responding to the reality behind the appearance, to the causal condition rather than the result, requires constant presence of mind. The more quickly we can recognize an emerging situation, the more quickly we can call it out: identify it, determine its place in the welter of contingent reality, analyze its origin and its probable result, alert others to whatever danger it represents, and prepare ourselves to deal skillfully with its presence in our lives.

Right Mindfulness is maintained by practice—not only meditative practice, although that is a large part of it, but also practice at maintaining a deliberate watchfulness as we move through the day, breathing, eating and drinking, defecating and urinating, speaking and listening, conducting our affairs. Throughout, the maintenance of Mindfulness allows us to be alert to conditions of our life in samsara, the endless round of contingent existence. Mindfulness practice prepares us to watch, without being startled or upset, the continual arising and subsiding of perceptions, emotions, feelings of attraction and repulsion, concepts and ideas—what the Buddha called the khandas, the clusters of events and experiences to which we cling in an attempt to preserve the illusory notion that we have distinct and separate selves. The teachings represent a kind of Field Guide to Samsara, identifying the khandas and describing the forms in which each presents itself, the relationship of each to all, and the camouflage each adopts to escape recognition. The more practice we have in using that Field Guide, the more able we are to know our selves, to understand that the self that each one knows is a conceit, an illusion, and to experience our essential involvement with the whole suffering world.

Right Concentration

In the teachings, Concentration (Pali samadhi) is the way to achieve a singleness of mind. It is one thing to be mindful of the constant flux of impressions and ideas, and quite another to maintain concentration on just what matters and not be distracted by the racket. The Buddha linked Right Concentration to the meditating bhikkhu’s ability to remain centered in one of the series of meditative absorptions (Pali jhana) that lead to eventual enlightenment. In light of our premises as Engaged Buddhists, perhaps it’s possible to see Right Concentration as referring to the ability to maintain focussed attention, intention, speech, action, and diligence on a particular eruption of dukkha—the dukkha of suffering animals, for example, or the dukkha of displaced peoples, of people trapped in war, of surviviors of rape and torture, of those captured by predatory institutions of commerce—and to be able, in that concentrated state, to see clearly how the part of the situation on which we are focussed fits into the whole and where and how we are most able to expose the situation and respond skillfully to the particular forms of dukkha inherent in it.

If the first factor of the Path, Right Understanding, reveals the wholeness of our situation, then Right Concentration, finally, allows us to focus whatever skill we’ve developed on a single aspect of the situation in a way that completes Right Understanding through an engaged response involving every Path factor.

Premises and Path factors are well and good, but they only set the foundation for action. When it comes to the specific actions we can take to ameliorate suffering, how we can work effectively to liberate ourselves and our fellow beings from the predicament we share, we have to engage our creative facilities—our imagination and our reason—to devise a list of possibilities. And then we have to decide, individually and as a functional sangha, which of those possibilities we have the strength, the skills, and the will to undertake and realize through our actions.

That process—the process of deciding what to do about the mess we’re in—will be the subject of the final installment of this three-part essay.