The Burmese lay teacher Satya Narayan Goenka, said: “This is the Teaching of the Buddha as it affects the lay-person’s life. It is at once an ideal and a method. As an ideal, it aims at the evolution of a person toward the attainment of Nirvana — in this very life itself, by one’s own efforts. As a method, it teaches us that the ideal can become real by the practice and development of the Noble Eightfold Path. Each of us develops according to our own ability; according to our needs, using our own minds, by our own efforts come to know ourselves, train ourselves, and free ourselves from craving and attachment, aversion, and most of all — from ignorance.”

In the Buddha’s teachings all people unite “even as do the waters of the rivers that flow into the sea.” He also said that society, as with all conditioned phenomena, “has no finality of form and therefore changes with the passage of time,” and, “the layperson’s objective [is to] live a long and dignified life with the wealth obtained through rightful means.”

Arun Pandit wrote that there are ultimately two aspects to Right livelihood: “making a living by doing something which doesn’t inhibit your own ability to realize peace and making a living doing something which doesn’t inhibit others ability to realize peace.”

Knowing that the economic aspect of a community profoundly affects its other aspects, Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “The layperson’s objective [is to] live a long and dignified life with the wealth obtained through rightful means.” He said that society, as with all conditioned phenomena, “has no finality of form and therefore changes with the passage of time.”