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Posts about the practical and theoretical aspects of meditation

Buddha’s Eightfold Path: A Yogi’s Practical Analysis

Buddha and Buddha's Eightfold Path

An excerpt from The Dhammapada for Awakening, available for free online reading here, or as a paperback and ebook here.

“Of paths the Eightfold one is best, and of truths the Fourfold. Dispassion is the best of mental states, and of human beings the best is the seer” (Dhammapada 273).

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: “Of paths, the eightfold is best. Of truths, the four sayings. Of qualities, dispassion. Of two-footed beings, the one with the eyes to see.”

The Eightfold Path of Buddha

The Eightfold Path was mentioned in verse one hundred ninety-one, but for some reason it did not occur to me to include it in the commentary. Now it should be, because many people may not have read an exposition of it or memorized it. (As a Buddhist nun once said: “If you like lists, then Buddhism is the religion for you.”) It is very important, because in the next verse Buddha declares that this is the only path to the purification that enables us to attain Nirvana.

The Eightfold Path consists of:

  1. Right View;
  2. Right Intention;
  3. Right Speech;
  4. Right Action;
  5. Right Livelihood;
  6. Right Effort;
  7. Right Mindfulness;
  8. Right Concentration.

All of these are interrelated to some extent.

1. Right View

View–drishti–literally means the faculty of sight, but also includes a person’s view, opinion, or perception of something, and is right view of the right thing, namely the way to live so as to lead to Nirvana. The trivia which occupy the minds of nearly every human being ultimately mean nothing, and Buddha is not concerned with that. Right view is the right evaluation of things as well as the right understanding of them.

Right view is seeing things as they really are, and knowing which matter and which do not. Naturally this includes a right response to right view, including the right way to live. It is obviously a function of the buddhi, the intelligence, and not the sensory mind or the emotions. The mind is like a mirror, and if there is any distortion of the mirror then all perceptions will be distorted. So Right View presupposes right condition of the mind. Each of the eight parts of the path is psychological, even if some of them include external modes of behavior.

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Build a Foundation for Understanding Yoga

A selection on Yoga, from Perspectives on Yoga, a new book to be published later this year.

Keeping in mind that the body and the self are not the same is not just a matter of holding a philosophical concept. Rather, it is a matter of maintaining spiritual awareness throughout external experience, to center our identity in the Self and not in the body. This is accomplished through yoga.

“Knowing thus, the ancient seekers for liberation performed action. Do you, therefore, perform action as did the ancients in earlier times” (Bhagavad Gita 4:15).

In the thirteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna speaks of the difference between the “knower of the field,” the Self, and the “field,” which is the body, saying:

“The knowledge of the Field and the Knower of the Field I consider to be the knowledge” (Bhagavad Gita 13:2).

The only truly learned person is the one who has learned the secret that he is the jivatman, one with the Paramatman. As the Skanda Upanishad says: “Jiva is Shiva and Shiva is Jiva; when bound by husk it is paddy, unbound it is rice. Thus the bound one is Jiva; released from karma he is eternal Shiva. Bound by ropes, he is Jiva; unbound, Shiva” (Skanda Upanishad 6-7).

The school of true education is yoga. We enroll as jiva and graduate as Shiva.

Yoga and Dharma comprise the spiritual and material psychotherapy that all human beings desperately need. One of the reasons so little comes of people’s becoming yogis is their assumption that their life is fundamentally sound and all right, that yoga will be the oil that stops their life-wheels from squeaking so they can be peaceful and “happy.”

The real truth is that human beings are spiritually insane, actually not just potentially, and need profound correction and reorientation of intellect and consciousness. But this must not be taken in a mistaken way. Yes, we are “crazy” in the superficial levels of our being, but in our true Self we are always perfect, and it is the discovery/recovery of our Self that is the answer to our dilemma.

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Perspectives on the Subtle Anatomy of the Yogi

seven chakras illustration

A selection on the Subtle Anatomy of the Yogi, from Perspectives on Yoga: Living the Yoga Life, now available at Amazon.com.

It is good for the aspiring yogi to have some theoretical knowledge of his subtle anatomy, for that is the inner mechanism which comes more and more into function on the conscious level as he progresses further and further toward enlightenment.

The three major channels within our subtle bodies, Ida, Pingala and Sushumna, carry not only the movements of the highest, rarefied spiritual energies which evolve us, but through them consciousness itself moves and manifests.

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The Ida, Pingala and Sushumna are found united in the head (brain), the Sahasrara or Thousand-Petalled Lotus. There is the Chidakasha, the Space of Consciousness, the Heart Space. Meditating there is meditating in the heart.

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The supreme center of conscious in the individual is the Sahasrara, the thousand-petalled lotus located in the head, corresponding to the brain, for it is the astral and causal brain. As a consequence, meditation should take place in the head, as it is the place where Self-realization takes place, and where we should keep our awareness centered. For in the head we find the Brahmanadi, the channel in which the consciousness rises upward from the body into the head, through which it moves as liberation is attained, and through which we ascend beyond the bodies into Spirit Itself at the time of death.

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