the "ariya aṭṭhangika magga or the "Noble Eightfold Path"3 (see aṭṭhangika). It is mentioned at many places, & forms the corner — stone of the Buddha's teaching as to the means of escaping "dukkha" or the ills of life. It consists of 8 constituents viz. sammā — diṭṭhi, sammā — sankappa, ˚vācā ˚kammanta, ˚ājīva, ˚vāyāma, ˚sati, ˚samādhi, or right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right rapture. The 7 first constituents are at D ii.216 M ;iii.71 enumd as requisites for sammā — samādhi. The name of this table of ethical injunctions is given as "maggam uttamaŋ" at Sn 1130, i. e. the Highest Path.

Part I: The Context

As an overview, the first class or two will cover the life of Siddhata Gotama, the son of a tribal leader in Northern India, who was born toward the middle of the 6th Century BCE, attained enlightenment after a difficult spiritual quest, and, with that enlightenment, became the Buddha. We’ll look at what we know of the Buddha’s life and times, at the intellectual and spiritual movements that formed the background for the doctrine which he formulated and taught, at his long teaching career, and, briefly, at the way in which his teachings were preserved and passed on after his death. We’ll take a specially careful look at the four Truths he expounded in his first teaching and see how the Eightfold Path gives shape and closure to that teaching.

Part II: The Path

Through the main part of the course, we will look at each of the Path factors in order, trying to see what each factor demands of the person who would practice the Buddha’s Path, how that factor relates to all the others, and how it can be understood so as to be meaningful and relevant to the interdependent lives we lead in our crowded, compromised world. We’ll look at each Path factor separately, but we’ll also try to understand the traditional three-fold grouping of those factors.

The Wisdom Group

• Right Understanding. The Path begins and ends with Right Understanding: a clear-eyed and fearless acknowledgment that all experience is corrupted by dukkha—pain, frustration, dissatisfaction, disillusionment; that the sufficient cause of dukkha is craving—wanting things to be other than they can ever be, wanting the good stuff to go on forever, wanting the bad stuff to end right now; that with the cessation of craving, dukkha will cease; and that the way to the cessation of craving is just this Noble Eightfold Path: Right Understanding, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.
• Right Intention. This factor, often translated as Right Resolve, establishes the practitioner in a condition of not constructing a sense of self that depends on having new stuff, building new relationships, holding particular ideas; with Right Resolve, we will not be driven by anger or hostile thoughts, or lured from the Path by delusional promises or wishful thinking.

The Action Group

• Right Speech. It is not enough that we are resolved not to lie. Right Speech is not only honest but also kind and generous, bringing people together and not driving them apart from one another. Recognizing the distracting nature of frivolous speech, gossip and idle chatter, Right Speech maintains its purpose, attempts to illuminate the Dhamma, helps both the speaker and the audience to see the path clearly and live accordingly.
• Right Action. It is necessary that our actions not create harm for ourselves or others, that we take only what clearly belongs to us, that everything we do is done openly and forthrightly, that we act with a clear head and accept responsibility for what we do.
• Right Livelihood. This is perhaps the most difficult Path factor for us to cultivate in the world we’ve inherited. In a world dominated by corporations, which have their own delusory, legalistic selfness, those whose livelihood involves selling their skills and their talents to those corporate entities too easily lose control over the purposes to which those skills and talents are turned. We will examine the difficulties of Right Livelihood in a corporate society, and we will also look at what Right Livelihood might mean to those of us who are retired from the kind of activity normally understood as livelihood.

The Concentration Group

• Right Effort. Buddhism is too often understood as a quietist kind of practice, the caution against craving being taken to mean a rejection of all desiring and all action to attain a goal. In fact, the Buddha emphasized, time and again, that diligent effort, “striving”, was necessary to the effective cultivation of the Path. Under the rubric of Right Effort, the Buddha emphasized the steady effort required to nurture and maintain wholesome qualities—generosity and kindness, honesty, energetic persistence—and to abandon and avoid harmful and unwholesome qualities.
• Right Mindfulness. This is perhaps the most distinctively Buddhist factor in the Path. We are advised to cultivate constant awareness of what’s going on around us and in our heads: our perceptions of the world via the senses, our emotional responses to what we perceive, the concepts we develop to bring order to the perceived world, the impulses and intentions and reactive feelings that emerge—in short, the entire complex of experience. We’ll look at what’s involved in maintaining mindfulness, the techniques the Buddha recommended for developing mindfulness, and the benefits that accrue from living mindfully.
• Right Concentration. Established in mindfulness, the Buddha teaches, one is then able to focus his or her concentration on a series of absorbtive states, through which it’s possible to abandon all of the distractions that prevent our experiencing the Dhamma directly. The series of absorbtive states are described vividly and consistently in the teachings; they culminate in the direct experience of unadorned reality—untranslated, unglossed, undistorted. And that reality, not surprisingly, consists of the direct experience of the Four Noble Truths with which the whole process started, and the Right Understanding of the Noble Eightfold Path.

Part III. Wrapup

At the end of the course, we will try very hard to protect some substantial time for questions and discussion, with a special focus on the resonance of what we’ve been studying with the individual experience of the people taking the class. We will be particularly interested in exploring how the truths of the Buddha’s Dhamma and the practice outlined in the Eightfold Path can be understood in the light of the spiritual traditions in which the members of the class have been brought up and the religious practices which they’ve followed through their lives.