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The Wisdom Trainings consist of Right of Wise View and Wise Thinking. The Ethics Trainings are Wise Speech, Action and Livelihood. The Meditation Trainings are Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness and Wise Concentration. From the connected discourses on the path #6, called “A Certain Bhikkhu” (Monk) comes this teaching:

At Savatthī. Then a certain bhikkhu approached the Buddha…. Sitting to one side, that bhikkhu said, “Venerable sir, it is said, ‘the holy life, the holy life.’ What, venerable sir, is the holy life? What is the final goal of the holy life?”

“This Noble Eightfold Path, bhikkhu, is the holy life; that is, right view through right concentration. The destruction of greed, the destruction of hatred, the destruction of delusion: this is the final goal of the holy life.”

We start our study of the Meditation Trainings with Wise Effort, which is essentially the intentional and sustained practice of the Noble Eightfold Path. When we make a commitment to master anything in life we need determination and perseverance. The “Holy Life” is no different. With wise effort we develop mindfulness and concentration as well as wisdom and ethics.

The Dalai Lama was giving a talk one day while sitting under the Bodhi tree, and the pilgrims had come from miles and miles on foot from the high Himalayas to be with the him in Bodhgaya, and he said to them, “Okay, you’re here, and you think you’re very fortunate because you have the blessings of being under this Bodhi tree where the Buddha was enlightened, with all these famous lamas, and the Dalai Lama himself, and you have the teachings, the sacred meditations, and mantras, and all these things. It won’t do you any good. The only thing that makes it work is if you take the trouble to practice it. All the rest of it is very nice, but you might as well watch Dallas or something like that. It’s not so different. Maybe you would learn more from Dallas, I don’t know. At least it wouldn’t be pretentiously spiritual.” What is needed then is “effort.”  

Effort is central in our spiritual practice. It’s the effort of learning how to cultivate or generate that which is skillful – which means awareness, loving-kindness, or caring for the world around you, or living more in the present, the effort to abandon the habits, the fears of things that we get caught in that create suffering and that keeps us in the muck. This is wonderful because it’s a teaching that we can apply to our daily life; it’s not just a retreat teaching; it’s small habits and all the little pieces of life. Our life is made up of little activities, little habits, and little ways.

The third principle or training in the Noble Eight-Fold Path is Samadhi: concentration, reflection, inquiry, mindfulness, meditation. This training includes the final three steps of Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness, and Wise Concentration. These are the Buddha’s instructions that help us cultivate the energy and courage to engage our thoughts, emotions, and bodies in a way that is open, compassionate and non-judgmental.

The journey of the spiritual seeker in meditation is compelling and challenging. As we sit, we begin to notice our thinking, actually hear what we tell ourselves moment to moment, and discover that these thoughts guide our lives. We begin to have a deep experience of the suffering we create for ourselves. We experience the noble truths of suffering and the causes of suffering. Because of this experience in meditation, we are able to let go of our habitual ways of thinking. Consequently, the wisdom and ethics trainings of the noble eight-fold path become more natural. We cause less harm to ourselves in the ways we speak and act.

Sharon Salzberg, wrote in her book Faith, “It is a great turning point in our spiritual lives when we go from an intellectual appreciation of a path to the heartfelt confidence that says, “Yes, it is possible to awaken. I can, too.” A tremendous joy accompanies this confidence. When we place our hearts upon the practice, the teachings come alive.”

This is the power of meditation. We begin to embody the Dharma and live from it’s truth. Our mistakes become teaching tools rather than weapons we use against ourselves. Our skillfulness, an indication that we are living from our innate wisdom. The inevitable ups and downs of life are more easily met. Our experiences help us awaken to our own Buddha-Nature.

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.” The great thing about the Buddha-Dharma is that it is a teaching for everyone. The Buddha’s teaching opened the doors of social freedom to all, regardless of caste, color, sex, or class. In his teachings all people unite “even as do the waters of the rivers that flow into the sea.” Our religion or our parentage or social class doesn’t really matter, what does matter is the skillfulness of our actions.  In many, many of his talks, the Buddha gave practical guidance for the lay life and sound advice to cope with life’s difficulties.

Knowing that the economic aspect of a community profoundly affects its other aspects, he 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.” People are driven to action by beliefs and desires; so social change is created by ideology and economics… And aren’t we seeing that now… how quickly our ideas and behaviors change… we all have the right to work, to feed and house our families.  A hungry person is an angry person. When we’re restless, irritable, and discontented we can hardly be in a condition to develop our spiritual or our ethical life. Economic insecurity leads to all kinds of problems not just tension and irritability, but loss of self-respect…isolation…

So, the Buddha taught that there are Five Aspects of Right Livelihood. These are:

• One should have “a peaceful occupation” and should not gain from harming living beings or violating their rights.
• Growth and awareness – We can use our livelihood to grow in consciousness
• Simplicity – To have spiritual aspirations and build on those in our work without complicating either
• Service – To help others, to serve with love and compassion no matter what livelihood we have chosen; and
• One should have an appropriate happiness. There are five aspects considered conducive to an appropriate happiness:
• To have work and to be skilled, efficient, energetic, earnest, and learned in whatever profession on chooses;
• To earn a living wage;
• To be content and live within one’s means; to conscientiously protect one’s income and family’s means of support;
• To have good work that is honest and contributes to the well-being of all
• To make a steady effort and work well to make a useful contribution to society

I read this, by Krishnan Venkatesh, today as I was preparing for this talk: “Many of us crave careers about which we can be wholeheartedly enthusiastic, but it can be a good thing to be in two minds about our jobs and to not identify with them too strongly. In Pali, the prefix samma means “complete, perfected,” rather than simply “right,” with its connotations of orthodox correctness. Thus, samma-ajiva may mean something more like “livelihood fully understood and rightly conducted, with all its tensions.” This would involve a saner relation to our work lives, in which we strive to be the best we can, and yet do not expect our jobs to give us the impossible, namely complete happiness and fulfillment.”

Then the Buddha taught that there are Three Positive Aspects of Right Livelihood:

• Rightness regarding actions: as workers we should fulfill our duties diligently and conscientiously, not wasting time, claiming to have worked longer hours, padding the expense account or pilfering from the company’s goods.
• Rightness regarding persons: due respect and consideration should be shown to employers, employees, colleagues, and customers. An employer, for example, should assign his workers positions according to their ability, pay them adequately, promote them when they deserve a promotion and give them occasional vacations and bonuses. Colleagues should try to cooperate rather than compete, while one should be equitable in one’s dealings with customers.
• Rightness regarding objects: business transactions should be presented truthfully, without misrepresentations of the work to be provided, the quality or quantity of work, deceptive advertising, or subterfuge. Even when we present ourselves, we should be honest about what we can do, how we’ll do it, and when we’ll have it done.

And finally The Four Standards for Gaining Wealth:

• One should acquire wealth only be legal means;
• One should acquire wealth peacefully, without coercion or violence;
• One should acquire wealth honestly – not by trickery or deceit, and
• One should acquire wealth in ways which do not entail harm and suffering for others.

Thich Nhat Hanh taught that Right Livelihood is not just a personal matter…but that it is our collective karma.  We humans have created an elaborate civilization in which we depend on each other for everything. Our work provides goods or services to others, and we get paid to support ourselves and our families. Maybe your work brings you great joy and fulfillment; maybe it’s just a way to pay the bills, either way we can appreciate the value of our work.

Jack Kornfield wrote, “You know, you can work and treat each person you meet as somebody else to deal with in your work, or you could treat each person you meet as your brother or your sister, or you could do what Mother Teresa did in her work and treat each person you meet as Jesus, and care for them, and wash their feet, or love them, or do whatever you do in the same way you might love Jesus or the Buddha. You can work on one day and just get through the day or the night. And you can work on another day and have each person that comes to you, and each person you meet, be a place where your heart really opens, and where you share a love and a caring and a tenderness.”

We have come to Right Action in the Ethics Training, or sila, in the Noble Eight-fold Path. Sila, which means a state of normalcy. So when we practice sila, we return to our own basic goodness, our Buddha-nature. We train in preserving our true nature, not allowing it to be modified or overpowered by negative forces.  These precepts are a means to an end, they’re observed for a specific objective.  On the personal level, they serve as the foundation for the spiritual path. Without ethics or morality, we can’t attain our highest spiritual goals, and they are the foundation for a peaceful and secure society.  Most of the problems in society today are connected, directly or indirectly, with a lack of good ethical conduct.

For our lives to be meaningful these issues must not remain theory, they have to be translated into practice. We are asked to give up those things that will harm others and be of benefit to others. It’s not enough to know what’s good or what’s not, we also need to take action around them. We need concrete guidelines to follow. Every spiritual practice has them and the Buddha-Dharma is not different. These are provided by the Five Lay Precepts. The precepts help us to live our ideals; they teach us to do the beneficial things and to avoid the harmful.  The basis of the Five Lay Precepts is mindfulness.  They teach us to have reverence for life, demonstrate generosity, practice sexual responsibility, practice Right Speech and deep listening, and practice mindful consumption.  They are formally explained as:

1. I undertake the precept to refrain from destroying living beings.
2. I undertake the precept to refrain from taking that which is not offered.
3. … to refrain from sexual misconduct.
4. … to refrain from incorrect speech.
5. … to refrain from the use of intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to heedlessness.

The Buddha gave these Precepts to laypeople as recommendations, that are voluntarily observed, by those who want to lead a peaceful life while contributing to the happiness of family and society. They aren’t commandments that are about sinning or punishment. Breaking a precept is seen as an “unskillful act” due to the lack of Wisdom. AND we’re never encouraged to disregard circumstances and follow them blindly without wisdom and understanding; there are times when upholding them might create more suffering for others. At these times, a precept might have to be bent. (For instance, we might have to lie to protect someone in danger – this is “bending” the Fourth Precept which is against lying. Think of the four people who helped the Frank family and all they had to do to protect those lives.) But we need to remember that whenever any of the Five Precepts is not upheld, it should only be for the welfare of others and not for selfish gain.

We have come to Right Action in the Ethics Training, or sila, in the Noble Eight-fold Path. Sila, which means a state of normalcy. So when we practice sila, we return to our own basic goodness, our Buddha-nature. We train in preserving our true nature, not allowing it to be modified or overpowered by negative forces.  These precepts are a means to an end, they’re observed for a specific objective.  On the personal level, they serve as the foundation for the spiritual path. Without ethics or morality, we can’t attain our highest spiritual goals, and they are the foundation for a peaceful and secure society.  Most of the problems in society today are connected, directly or indirectly, with a lack of good ethical conduct.