Notes on The Buddha-s Noble Eightfold Path

... also emotion. Emotion is much less conscious. Unconscious mind contains
many things, including lots of resistance and negativity. And emotion is stronger than reason.
What we want to do motivates us far more strongly than what we feel, or think intellectually, that we ought to
do. It is very hard indeed for us to go against what we want to do.
Yet in a way, the Path is a whole set of ‘oughts’, and ‘shoulds’. The Dharma is just a huge collection of
different methods. It’s all practice. It’s up to you to practice the methods or not, but if you don’t, you don’t get
the results. So if you want Enlightenment, if you see your need for spiritual growth and development, you
naturally want to put the methods into practice – practice sila, samadhi and prajna. So you feel you need to do
this, need to maintain awareness of that, reflect on this, reflect on that.
But you don’t always want to.
That’s rather tough at times.
But at least in Buddhism we can’t say that we’ve been told to do these things by God. No one has said that we
must do this, and we now have to obey, or else. It is just that our awareness has made us realise that we need
to develop such and such. In Buddhism, it’s our choice, every time. We have to make the decision, the
commitment, again and again at different levels of our being. There’s no one out there going to make us do it.
Now perhaps we sometimes wish there was. Perhaps not having someone to obey sometimes just makes it
even more difficult. Because it’s entirely up to us whether or not we practice the Buddha’s teaching.
And sometimes, of course, we encounter resistance. Our emotions get in the way. So this is the area, this is
the field, and occasionally it’s almost a battlefield, within which the second aspect of the Buddha's eightfold
path comes into operation. Emotion is stronger than reason – reason may be much clearer and much more
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path comes into operation. Emotion is stronger than reason – reason may be much clearer and much more
straightforward, but emotion usually wins the contest.
This, you could say, is the area of resolve. The term for right or perfect emotion is samyak samkalpa
(Sanskrit) or samma sankappa in Pali. Samkalpa really means will, the volitional side of our nature. Samyak
means right, whole or perfect, so samyak samkalpa means the harmonisation of the whole volitional or
emotional side of our nature – as opposed to the rational.
This transformation of volition affects the whole of the rest of the Path of transformation, affects all the other
stages of the path. So it’s sort of mid way between the path of vision and the rest, it’s the turning point you
could say.
Emotional transformation is the crucial point for us, because we need to make the path real. The path is
abstract to us. Sunyata, the four noble truths, are mostly abstractions. We need to turn them into emotional
realities. We need emotional equivalents for our intellectual understandings. In other words we need to be
emotionally involved in the Teaching. We need to involve our emotions in our practice of the Dharma.

But how to involve our emotions in our practice of Buddhism? It’s not a matter of involving our crude
emotions – for example getting very worked up and shouting with anger because we can’t meditate. That is
getting emotionally involved but it is not what we are talking about.

What we are talking about is a transformation of our volitional life, a transformation in what we want. How
does this take place? It isn’t something we can think ourselves into. It won’t be enough just to see that the
transformation is necessary. That’s why the first stage of the path isn’t just right view. The first stage of the
path is that flash of spiritual vision, and it is only that flash which can change us emotionally.
You can see the transformation negatively or positively.
Negatively:
renunciation
Renunciation means wanting to give certain things up. You see something in your life, something that needs to
be changed, some addiction or other. You are subject to craving, and you see what that is doing to you. And
you see that it will help that tendency to craving if you give something up, you renounce it. It might be a kind
of behaviour, physical or mental, or vocal. It might be something you own. But the desire to let it go comes
quite naturally. It might be a little difficult actually to give it away or give it up, when it comes to the crunch,
but nevertheless you do it, and it makes you happier. You’d grown out of it, you didn’t need it anyway. In
other words your tight grip on the things which once brought you security has relaxed a bit, and you don’t
mind if you have them or not.
There’s no uniform pattern to renunciation. You can hardly get annoyed with someone for not being a vegan,
for example, if you are totally addicted to designer labels, and vice versa. People have different concerns,
different conditionings. Most Buddhist monks aren’t even vegetarian, but they give a lot of other things up. So
there’s no point in making yourself give things up in a forced kind of a way. It shouldn’t be a sacrifice. It
should come relatively naturally, though of course some conflict will be involved. When it does come
naturally, it shows that there has been some emotional transformation as a result of the vision which fires your
spiritual efforts.
Patience
Or non-hatred. The negative emotion of hatred is caused by the frustration we feel when we don’t get what we
want. We hardly ever get what we want, in fact, and if we aren’t careful we can, quite unconsciously, be
deeply resentful of this. Not only that, we may seek revenge on the rest of humanity – an attitude which will
make life much more frustrating, because others will pick it up straight away, unconsciously of course, and turn
away from us. But practising perfect emotion, we see through this tendency in ourselves, and we are able to
give up that kind of retaliatory attitude. We become patient, more understanding of others and ourselves. We
become less inclined to cruelty.
Positive aspect of perfect emotion
1. Dana
2. Maitri
3. Karuna
4. Mudita
5. Upeksha: tranquillity of mind. Especially as a result of seeing that all beings have to experience the
result of their actions.
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result of their actions.
6. Sraddha: confidence trust, seeing the value of the Three Jewels
The sevenfold puja as an expression of positive emotion, and also a practice to develop it.
1. Worship
2. Offerings
3. Going for refuge
4. Confession of faults
5. Rejoicing in merits
6. Opening to the teaching
7. Transference of merits
PERFECT SPEECH (Samyak Vaca)
Vaca = speech.
Significant that speech is considered to be a separate limb of the path.
In a way, just a kind of action. But Buddhism sees communication as especially important.
Buddhism sees each person not just in terms of body and mind, but in terms of body, speech and mind. Speech
comes between body and mind. In terms of the main chakras or psychic centres which are brought more and
more alive through spiritual practice, the throat centre is associated with speech and communication; and the
throat centre is located midway between the centre associated with the physical body – which is at the head,
because the body and senses are centred on the physical brain – located between the head centre and the centre
located at the heart, the heart of course being the seat of the emotions. Between head and heart lies speech.
The head, that is the brain, is also associated with the intellect, with thinking. So speech, which lies between
head and heart, you could also say bridges head and heart, it shares the nature of both. With our speech we can
express ideas. With our speech we can also express how we feel, we can express what we want, what is in our
heart.
We cannot not communicate. We have to communicate. We use speech a lot of the time, we also write, which
is also a form of verbal expression, and we also speak in our heads, speak in our imagination. We speak in our
dreams. Speaking is one of the main things we do, it’s something we identify very strongly with. It is a major
part of our ego-identity. It matters to us whether we are heard, it makes a big difference whether or not we are
understood, we care whether or not we can communicate what we think and feel. It can be a crucial issue
whether or not we can communicate something that is actually happening. In short, if we can’t communicate,
we have a problem. Communication is something that can be well done, it is something that can be poorly
done.

And speech is something that is particularly human. Maybe some animals have a form of speech, I’m sure
they do, but human language is something extremely rich and really quite wonderful, if you start thinking
about what poetry and literature can do. Literature opens up for us a far greater appreciation of what it means
to be human than we can expect to find in our ordinary ...