Thoughts on Right View
The last of the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha’s fundamental teaching, is the Eightfold Path. It’s not a linear path we follow step by step, but rather a comprehensive, lifelong practice that can help us achieve liberation from suffering and bring us into joy, gratitude, peace, and ease.
Pretty cool.
I’ve been at this for 29 years, and as many practitioners find and rejoice in, the growth and learning are infinite! Transformative, richly rewarding, nourishing, and beneficial.
The steps on the Eightfold Path are: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration. (Another way of thinking of this is “Wise” View, etc.)
Right View being the first, the place we start, seeing what’s right in front of us.
I love these reflections about Right View written by the teacher Sean Oakes, PhD, that Regina Flanigan shared in her class at The Center for Mindful Living last week. (Thank you, R!)
Sean says, “Right view points to the innermost orientation of the heart: how I understand the world. If I see the world through right view, I see what causes suffering and what doesn’t.
“I start to understand what helps and what hurts; what leads to liberation or further into confusion and pain. As wise view matures, it grows into this beautiful softening of the sense of separation between myself and others. Then moment to moment, seeing clearly what’s happening, and who’s here, all I want to know is “given the choices available to me in this moment, what’s likely to help the most?”
Beautiful.
One thing we learn in Buddhist practice is that we have a choice. You might try asking this question as events, disturbances, tensions, and opportunities arise, in that pregnant pause between stimulus and response.
Further reading:
Lion’s Roar, Eightfold Path—an articlefrom their Buddhism A - Z series, linked to related readings. Helpful.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path—120 exquisitely, precisely written pages illuminating the Buddha's philosophy with powerful clarity. Superb.
Love,
💛
Jo
Photo by Aurora Fox
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