The Noble Eightfold Path to the End of Dissatisfaction: The Beginning
We started this week a long dive into the Noble Eightfold Path (8FP), the Buddha's brilliant scaffolding for integrated individual and collective liberation, which would take us from May 2022 through December 2023. Because the materials gathered for this series were so extensive, and the talks proceeded in sequence, we have put it all into a course for ease of navigation and tracking your way through it. It’s offered on Gift Economy like all of these talks.
The Noble Eightfold Path to the End of Dissatisfaction
130 hours of audio talks & meditations
Here’s the beginning:
We start, as is traditional, with Right View: the turning of the heart toward reality and away from delusion.
Right View is both the prerequisite for wisdom to arise and the manifestation of wisdom when it matures. It is described many ways, all of which illuminate a facet of wisdom in action:
Right View is understanding actions that are wholesome and unwholesome. Right View is understanding craving and its objects. Right View is understanding the Four Noble Truths. Right View is understanding aging and death, birth, being, clinging, craving, affect, contact, the senses, mind and body, consciousness, volitional formations, and ignorance [...that's the wheel of Dependent Origination in reverse]. Right View is understanding the defilements of sensory desire, being, and ignorance. And when the defilements are understood, they're uprooted and you're done.
This sequence is from the Discourse on Right View (MN 9), where the Buddha's disciple Sariputta lays out the whole path in kaleidoscopic detail and then drops the mic. Read it here in Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation.
So we'll start with some portion of this, and then unfold into the 8FP map.
Right View starts with willingness to turn toward the truth
To get to the start of the 8FP sequence, we start with the process Gotama went through as he found his path: raised in wealth and privilege, he gives that up, then studies with two respected yoga teachers to learn deep formless concentration, then sees that although useful, those meditations don't by themselves lead to liberation. Then he does the bodily mortifications of the ascetic path, and goes further than anyone, only to conclude in the end that those don't liberate either. Then he remembers his childhood ease under the rose-apple tree, and intuits the path.
Why is this story the basis of Right View? Because the whole thing starts with seeing. With seeing old age, sickness, and the inevitability of death, and feeling the fear and anxiety that coming out of denial brings. This is the first hint of Right View: turning toward suffering, especially the existential suffering of these deep truths of embodied existence.
Talk: The Buddha's path, turning toward reality, and the birth of Right View (5.21.19)
The Noble Eightfold Path to the End of Dissatisfaction
130 hours of audio talks & meditations
Because we’ve put the Eightfold Path sessions into a course, the archive mostly skips a year and a half here. See you on the other side!
