--The Dhammapada, Chapter 20: "The Path"

I doubt that anyone practicing Dharma is unfamiliar with the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path.  As the foundation for every practice in every school of Buddhism that's developed over the last 2,600 years, they're usually the first thing addressed by any introduction to Buddhism.  But because they're so central to our practice, it's helpful to re-familiarize ourselves with the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path periodically. 

The First Noble Truth is that life contains suffering.  We get sick, we grow old (hopefully), we die.  Everyone.

The Second Noble Truth is that we suffer needlessly, however, essentially because we're always trying to make permanent that which is impermanent.  And everything is impermanent.  We don't want to get sick, grow old, or die, but we do.  We don't want to be separated from the things we love, but, inevitably, we will be.  And the endless unskillfull ways by which we constantly try to avoid these facts are doing no small bit of damage to us, our fellow beings, and this little planet we live on.

The Second Noble Truth is often translated along these lines:  "Desire brings suffering.  We suffer because we desire."  But can we rid ourselves of all desire?  If we had absolutely no desires, we'd die.  Or worse, we'd leave the same stinky diaper on our two-year-old until the state came for her.  No, "desire" isn't so accurate a translation of the original Sanskrit, tanha, which is more literally something like "thirst." 

I love video games.  Love them.  If I owned an XBox, I'd be playing it right now, probably halfway to the state taking me away.  Which is why I don't own an XBox.  Some years ago, we spent Thanksgiving with my wife's extended family, and her cousin brought his XBox.  He and I would wait patiently until the aunties had gone off to bed, having watched their day's quota of Telugu films.  And then we'd make popcorn and fight aliens until the wee hours of the morning.  One in the morning the first night.  Three the next.  Six a.m. the following night.  By the end of the visit, I couldn't close my eyes without seeing those stupid aliens, and was plotting how to extend our stay so I could keep playing.

This is tanha.  Maybe what hooks you are cigarettes (which I also quite like).  Maybe what hooks you is American Idol and enough beer to make you pass out.  Then waking up and blogging about American Idol until the day after tomorrow.  Then chasing sex.  Then more t.v. and beer.  Another cigarette.  So our tanha grows and grows until we're completely owned by our habits and addictions.  The more video games I play, the more I want to play.  Pretty soon, I'm calling myself a "Gamer" and it's become who I am.  This is suffering. 

The Third Noble Truth is that there's a way out of this suffering.  Because suffering has its origin in tanha, by learning to deal skillfully and directly with tanha, suffering can be uprooted.  When asked why she never drank even a little, I remember [Still Point's Founding Teacher] P'arang saying, "Because I can't have three drinks if I don't drink the first one."  When I spent four days one Thanksgiving playing video games, I was just about dreaming them.  But now, since I hardly ever play them and don't keep any around, I can't remember the last time I thought about them at all. 

So the Fourth Noble Truth is the Truth of the Eightfold Path, every aspect of which is a direct challenge to tanha.  The first aspect is Right View.  "Right," not as in "right" versus "wrong," but more like upright, accurate, or correct.

Right View.  Practice starts with the realization -- ever deepening -- that our typical view of things as being separate and self-existent is pure fiction.  Even a cursory investigation reveals the absurdity of thinking that I, for instance, am at all separate from anything else.  This body is nothing more than borrowed matter, the air in these lungs, the Cheerios eaten for breakfast. . . .  Even the language that I'm using here is a kind of agreement between us about the meaning of otherwise abstract, meaningless grunts and noises.  With Right View I realize that to mis-treat you is to deeply harm myself.    

The next part is Right Intention.  This is sometimes translated as Right Motivation.  Why practice?  Why do anything?  These are very important questions.  There's an old Sanskrit term you may have heard of called bodhicitta.  Bodhi means "awake" or "awakening"; citta means "heart / mind."  (It's interesting to note the split in English between "heart" and "mind," which we then necessarily view as different.  Citta recognizes no such distinction.)  So bodhicitta means "heartmind of awakening."  In practical terms, it's the intention to engage in spiritual practice for the benefit of all beings.  Practicing only for ourselves is a kind of attachment, a kind of tanha maybe, whereas practicing for others is a real act of love.  I think it's important to recognize that these two -- love and attachment -- will always compete with each other.  If we're honest, we see that even the best of us is sometimes motivated purely by self-interest.  In our practice, in our lives, we dance back and forth -- sometimes in a matter of seconds -- between love and attachment.  Yes, even that lama or guru or roshi or ajahn in the long, flowing robes, who knows all the chants and bows a thousand times every morning, is sometimes motivated by self-interest.  But with continued practice we do tip the scales.

Next is Right Speech, which in some respects may be the most difficult for us, because it's so much easier to speak carelessly than it is to act carelessly.  For me, I often  think that unless I'm functioning on a certain amount of sleep, I should just keep my mouth shut.  Lying; casually criticizing our ex-wives or -husbands to our sons or daughters; praising ourselves above others -- everyone of us knows these to be harmful.  But some practitioners also sometimes mistake Right Speech to mean endless flowery platitudes and "compliments," never ruffling anyone's feathers, never saying "no."  Right Speech is loving speech that doesn't harm, but this is different in every situation -- every once in awhile, "piss off" may be the absolute kindest thing to say (although situations that warrant it are far more infrequent than many of us seem to realize). 

Right Conduct is spelled out in the precepts:  Don't harm, steal, misuse sexuality, lie, or indulge in intoxicants.  Last week, visiting Dharma Teacher Frank Levey talked about the Buddha's teaching of the Five Rememberances, the last of which is, "My actions are my only true possessions."  Our body decays, our loved ones depart, our cars rust.  Our actions are the only things we own.  Right Conduct means taking this very, very seriously.

What constitutes Right Livelihood is not as clear-cut as it may seem at first glance.  Often, people come to me saying "My job is okay and I don't feel like it's harmful, but my company is harmful in certain ways, and I feel like I'm kind of upholding this by working there."  As the influence of the corporations we work for spreads further around the globe, we're hard-pressed to find one that's not harming something or someone somewhere.  Or maybe the non-profit we work for, the one with the stated goal of serving the community, seems far more concerned with serving the interests of a select few at the top of its own structure.  And whether or not we choose to work there is, rightfully, complicated by the fact that we have families to feed and keep warm.  There seem to be few easy answers, but I think a starting point for Right Livelihood is found in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement, "If you're a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted chapel ceilings." 

There's a woman who serves as a school crossing-guard kitty corner from Still Point.  Every morning and afternoon all school year long, whether it's raining or snowing or hailing golfballs or warm and sunny as a Carribean cruise, she's there helping children arrive safely to school and back home again.  I don't know her name, because when I asked her one time, she said, "Everyone calls me 'Grandma'," so I do, too.  Grandma is always waving to everyone.  Always smiling.  People who just drive by this corner on their morning commute slow down to wave and get one of Grandma's smiles.  When the traffic light goes out as it sometimes does, Grandma is there doing the job of three police officers.  When the large asphalt patch over a recently repaired water main caves in a good two or three feet, she's calling me over to help direct traffic around it.  When Grandma is at her post, this whole neighborhood is kinder.  Palpably kinder.  Every morning, when I see her, I think of Dr. King's message.  And I slow down a bit for one of those smiles.

The next aspect of the Eightfold Path is Right Effort, which I think Grandma also just explained to us.  Right Effort is moment-to-moment wholehearted effort with no gaining idea.  Period. 

Shakyamuni Buddha laid out what he called the Four Foundations of Right Mindfulness.  They are "Mindfulness of the body within the body.  Mindfulness of the mind within the mind.  Mindfulness of feelings within feelings.  And mindfulness of phenomena within phenomena."  The emphasis on "within" cannot be overstated.  To be mindful of our feelings is not to stand outside of our feelings, judging them against the narratives we hold about things, or maybe just wishing they'd go away.  Mindfulness means no separation.  Too often, we seem to mistake mindfulness for self-consciousness, so we're sweeping the porch thinking, "Here I am, a real Zen practitioner, sweeping, I sure am being mindful, am I being mindful?, what if I'm not being mindful?"  Just sweep!  As I said before, the Sanskrit term citta doesn't recognize a distinction between heart and mind, so what we usually translate as "mindfulness" could just as easily be translated as "heartfulness," wholehearted activity.  Leave nothing out. 

And finally, there's Right Concentration.  We can mistake concentration as a kind of rigid narrowing of focus, teeth clenched, body tensed in effort.  So with sitting meditation for instance, maybe as we concentrate on our breath, we aggressively push away all thoughts and feelings, trying to empty our minds with the anxiety of someone emptying a canoe that's been punctured in the middle of a lake.  But concentration here is almost the exact opposite -- concentration is a relaxing into our breath, a relaxing into what is, with the willingness to let the mind settle of its own accord.  Another way of saying this in practical terms is that if "mu" is our practice, we throw all thoughts and feelings into "mu" over and over again without the attachment or aversion that has habitually come to accompany so much of our experience.  Just "mu."  Just this breath.  And we find that as we become more skilled at resting in just this breath, just this "mu," what is called concentration here actually has a quality of spaciousness, of expansion.  This is the opposite of tanha.  It's something more like Grandma directing traffic.