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Day 109 of OU studies

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Edited by Casper Smith, Saturday, 30 Jan 2021, 23:20

                                                            Buddha

                                     The Noble Eightfold Path


  1. Right View: our actions have consequences, death is not the end, and our actions and beliefs have consequences after death. The Buddha followed and taught a successful path out of this world and the other world (heaven and underworld/hell). Later on, right view came to explicitly include karma and rebirth and the importance of the Four Nobel truths, when "insight" became central to Buddhist soteriology.
  2. Right Resolve or Intention: the giving up of home and adopting the life of a religious mendicant in order to follow the path; this concept aims at peaceful renunciation, into an environment of non-sensuality, non-ill-will (to loving kindness), away from cruelty (to compassion).Such an environment aids contemplation of impermanence, suffering, and non-self.
  3. Right Speech: no lying, no rude speech, no telling one person what another says about him to cause discord or harm their relationship.
  4. Right Conduct or Action: no killing or injuring, no taking what is not given, no sexual acts, no material desires.
  5. Right Livelihood: beg to feed, only possessing what is essential to sustain life;
  6. Right Effort: preventing the arising of unwholesome states, and generating unwholesome states the bojjhaga (seven factors of awakening). This includes indriya-samvara, "guarding the sense-doors", restraint of the sense faculties.
  7. Right Mindfulness (sati; Satipatthana; Sampajanna): "retention", being mindful of the dhammas ("teachings", "elements") that are beneficial to the Buddhist path. In the vippasana moment, sati is interpreted as "bare attention": never be absent minded, being conscious of what one is doing; this encourages the awareness of the impermanence of body, feeling and mind, as well as to experience the five aggregates (skandhas), the five hundreds, the four True Realities and seven factors of awakening.
  8. Right samadhi (Passaddhi; Ekaggatasampasadana): practicing four stages of dehyanna ("meditation"), which includes samadhi proper in the second stage, and reinforces the development of the bojjhaga, culminating into upekkha (equanimity) and mindfulness. In the Theravada tradition and the Vipassana movement, this is interpreted as ekaggata, concentration or one-pointedness of the mind, and supplemented with Vipasanna-meditation, which aims at insight.


WWG1WGA



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