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Right View on the Eightfold Path
To find our solution, we must first see the problem
We’ve looked at the Buddha’s Four Nobles Truths, with a promise to explore his Eightfold Path in some detail. Here, we begin with an explanation of the beginning of the Path, Right View. Sometimes people prefer the phrase “Wise View” to avoid causing bristle. But since we are talking about the direction of our lives, I’m sticking with the word “Right.” I’m using the word not in terms of opinions or judgments, but in terms of right or wrong direction. When you have been walking in the woods for a long time and are not seeing the benchmarks you expected, you begin to ask if you’re going the right way. The Buddha has given us a Path that can be developed to bring us to out of the woods of suffering; i.e., mental/emotional anguish, and our direction matters.
Right View on the Eightfold Path, as the Buddha taught it, includes four long-term projects:
1) to understand what suffering is and recognize when we’re engaging in it;
2) to loosen our grip on the clinging we do to create suffering;
3) to realize that it’s possible for a human being to let go completely of that clinging to be free;
4) to cultivate a way of living that trains us to let go habitually of that clinging reaction, time and time again, until…
