My Take On The 8 Fold Path Of Buddhism

The four noble truths were some of Buddha's first teachings and they gave way to the eight-fold path or otherwise known as the middle way. This is an introduction to how they relate to us as meditators and those who practice awareness. This is for everyone no matter what age or level there's something for all in this track.

Transcript

The Truth of Suffering The Truth of the End of Suffering The Four Noble Truths lead to Buddha's first teaching to his disciples,

To his practitioners,

Or the people that would listen to him at first.

To understand that a little bit,

Let's go way back to when Buddha was enlightened.

Buddha traveled extensively,

And he studied from every master that he could study from.

But he studied hard,

And he studied long for six years.

And in those six years,

It's said that at one point he was living on one grain of rice a day,

And he withered away to almost nothing.

And he went through all these ausitories and all these tortures to the body and to the mind and the soul,

All on the hopes of attaining.

But I don't think he even knew what this attaining was until the very last day when Buddha dropped everything.

He got so fed up with all of the teaching and all the practicing and discipline that he had endured that one day he just sat down and relaxed and said,

Forget it,

Just drop it.

And he did.

And he went to bed that night,

Very relaxed,

For the first time in six years,

Very,

Very relaxed and very comfortable.

And he slept really well.

And he woke up early,

So early that it was probably like the witching hour or something,

Three or four in the morning.

And he watched the sky,

And he watched the stars slowly disappear.

And the story goes that as the last star disappeared is when Buddha became enlightened.

Now to describe this enlightenment to other people is almost impossible to do because you could probably write a whole book the size of a dictionary on something that happens within just a few moments.

So giving my best attempt towards explaining what happened,

Buddha was basically a drop that fell,

You could say from a waterfall and then back down into the ocean,

Or even as a raindrop made its way up into the sky,

Got absorbed into the sky and the raindrop fell.

And maybe our lives are just like that.

We are this raindrop that's falling from the sky and on our way,

Our journey back to the ocean.

But the magical thing,

The mystical thing that happens is that somehow the drop of water disappears into the ocean.

And at the same time,

The ocean disappears into the drop.

So they swap places for a very short period of time.

And then you somehow regather all the water that was that that was the drop before you were enlightened.

And now you exist with this knowing of this knowledge of the whole ocean.

You have this understanding of what God is and what you are.

You've come home.

And I call it coming home.

I call it being welcomed back to the Garden of Eden.

Because in a sense,

Eden never went anywhere.

God never went anywhere.

God's always been here surrounding you.

And Eden is all around you too.

You just don't have the eyes to see it,

Or the nose or the ears to hear it.

It's beyond your perception because it's almost like it's in another dimension.

But it's here.

It's all around us.

And Buddha was stuck with this dilemma now.

He experienced this peak experience.

And with that peak experience,

He felt like he couldn't convey it.

Words would never do it justice.

So for seven days,

It said that Buddha remained silent.

Siddhartha remained silent and didn't share what happened with anybody.

And the story goes is that the gods got kind of upset but a little worried about this because something like this doesn't happen very often.

Once every 10,

000 years,

Does someone obtain this like total enlightenment?

And it said that one of the gods sent an angel down to Buddha to talk to him and say,

Why don't you share?

And Buddha said,

No words can do it justice.

And even if I tried,

I would fail at doing so.

So what happened was the angel said to him,

But what if you could get through to just one person?

Or what if you can get through to many people?

Just but nothing will happen unless you share your experience.

The world will not know this beauty,

This this truth that you've come to know.

The world cannot know it if you don't share.

So Buddha thought about that very intensely.

And after seven days,

He started to share his his experience.

And,

And I don't know if Buddha,

I mean,

Buddha was a very intelligent man.

He was a prince,

So he had to have been intelligent.

He was raised by royalty.

And he lived a life of indulgence,

Complete indulgence all the way up to this moment where he left the kingdom and decided to go on this search of this journey for what happens after death.

The story goes is that Buddha's father found out from astrologists when he was very young before Buddha was born that that Buddha was going to either grow up to be a great king,

Or a great mystic.

So Buddha's father was a little bit scared because he wanted somebody to carry on for his legacy because he had no other children.

Buddha was his only son.

So our sister says,

Our Siddhartha was his only son.

So he did everything he could to create a path that were wherever Buddha went,

He never saw death,

He never figured out that that people get older in life and people die.

He,

Buddha's father kept that from him his whole life.

So anyway,

What happened was,

At one point,

Buddha,

Buddha must have been in his mid 20s,

I would assume because he did have a child that was just born when he decided to venture out into his spiritual journey.

But anyway,

He was driving along and the chariot was with this charioteer.

And they came upon a man that was dying or dead on the side of the road.

And Buddha saw the man and it really disturbed him very much.

And he asked the chariot,

What's wrong with this man?

What has happened to him?

And the chariot man said,

My father would,

Your father would kill me if I told you,

But I cannot lie to you.

I must tell you that this man has passed away.

He's now dead.

And when Buddha found out about death,

It really shook him to the core,

Maybe more than anybody else at that time in life.

It just shook him to his core.

So he thought about it,

I guess,

In the middle of the night,

He packed his belongings,

Everything that he could carry with him,

And left his wife and left his newborn child and went out on this journey to find out how can you avoid death?

Or is there anything beyond death?

I guess he didn't know exactly what he was searching for.

But he knew that it was something he didn't have at that point,

Something he didn't feel,

Something he didn't know.

And that disturbed him.

Anyway,

That's a little bit of history as to how the story of Siddhartha became about.

And then Buddha became enlightened.

And he had this period of silence,

Like I said,

Where he felt like he couldn't share it because what words can convey the ultimate?

I mean,

All words are part of the ultimate.

They're all a small part of it.

And using words alone could not describe it.

So I think that's why Lao Tzu basically said that the truth cannot be told,

That if you tell the truth,

Then it becomes a lie.

And what he means by that is it has to be experienced.

Truth has to be experienced to know it.

Love has to be experienced to know it.

You could write a whole treatise on love,

The size of a dictionary.

And still,

If you've never known love,

Then it's beyond you.

It's something you have to experience.

So now we kind of know where Buddha was coming from when he says that the Four Noble Truths,

The first is the truth of suffering.

And suffering can happen in many ways.

But the true suffering is this feeling of aloneness,

This feeling of separation between you and your Creator,

You and your Maker.

There are many interpretations as to what the Four Noble Truths could be.

They're very broad in spectrum.

And basically,

There are three types of people that might listen to the scriptures of Buddhas and interpret them in their own individual ways.

There's a person of indulgence and there's a person of repression.

And then there's the person who Buddha basically discovered as the person of the middle path.

So Buddha's first teaching of the Four Noble Truths also led to the induction of the Eightfold Path.

And the Eightfold Path is very simple.

But like I said,

There's three types of people,

The people of indulgence,

People of repression.

And then there's this third generation,

This new category of people,

The people that live in the middle.

Taoists live this way,

Zen monks live this way,

Buddhists live this way.

Many of those in the East believe in this middle path because Buddha experienced both repression and indulgence.

And he realized that none of those led to this enlightenment that he had experienced.

So how do you talk about something like that?

How do you share things of the beyond and bring them into words?

So even with the right words,

The right understanding,

And when we start about the right understanding,

We talk about the Eightfold Path.

And the Eightfold Path is basically right understanding is the first one.

Right thought,

Right speech,

Right action,

Right livelihood,

Right effort,

Right mindfulness,

And right concentration.

And like I said,

There are the three types of people that would look at the situation.

Like say if a woman passed by,

He was very beautiful and attractive.

The person of indulgence might say,

Hey,

I'd like to be with that woman.

And he has all these thoughts of being with this woman.

And to him,

That might be his way of obtaining Buddhahood is through his indulgence.

While the person of repression might say,

Oh,

I should never even think about this woman.

I shouldn't even look at her.

I should just look away and think of other thoughts.

Think something else besides this.

And you think about it,

The person of indulgence and the person of repression,

It's like a spring.

And the spring can be pulled tight,

End to end,

Or it can be pushed tight,

Real close to us,

Really called a tight and strong.

The tight and strong pushing ends together is this tension,

This constant tension that always exists on the spring.

And if you let the spring go and just let it fling out of your hand,

It'll boing and it'll go zing all the way into the opposite direction.

It'll go to its fully extended point for a very short period of time,

And then it'll come back to being compressed.

And if you let the spring go and let the spring rest for a moment,

It'll stop going from both ends.

So the person of repression is the spring condensed and in a tense state,

And it can't stay there for very long.

If it does,

It just goes crazy,

And the spring will just lose its buoyancy and become dull.

So one end is repression,

And one end is indulgence.

So right in the middle is where the relaxed state of the spring is,

And its natural state.

And this is the essence of the Eightfold Path,

To be in your natural state,

To find that middle path,

That middle way.

Not to be repressed and not to be overindulgent in any way.

Just relax,

Just normal.

Like Patanjali says,

Loose and natural,

Be loose and natural.

So in a way,

It was all three that happened,

The indulgence,

The repression,

And then finally the transcendence,

The living in the middle and going beyond the life of the indulger or the repressor.

What does Buddha mean when he tells us to live the Eightfold Path,

The right understanding,

Right thought,

Right speech,

Right action,

Right livelihood,

Right effort,

Right mindfulness,

And right concentration?

We have to ask,

What does the word right mean?

And what does it mean to you?

How do you interpret what I'm passing on and what Buddha's trying to convey in this teaching of the Eightfold Path?

So if we understand the Eightfold Path,

Right understanding,

Right thought,

Right speech,

Right action,

Right livelihood,

Right effort,

Right mindfulness,

And right concentration,

But at the same time,

You don't come to the middle path.

You don't come to this moment of transcendence until you're almost utterly exhausted from trying everything else,

From indulging to repression.

You have to try everything.

And when that doesn't work,

When religion doesn't,

When it loses its flavor,

Because eventually if you keep indulging all the time,

You come to a point where you realize that it's not the answer.

It's not the goal.

It's not the goal.

And even those who have become very rich,

Like Buddha was very rich,

Or Jim Carey,

A famous actor in America now,

He became very rich and he realized that it wasn't the way,

Because there's not happiness there at the end of that road.

You're still left empty,

Wondering how you miss when they've realized that they've come to realize that there is no happiness at the end of that road.

So if there's no happiness with indulgence,

There's certainly no happiness with depression either.

It is void of anything beautiful.

Even looking at a flower could be considered a sin to the person of repression.

So when Buddha talks about right effort,

Then he's saying,

Go through these experiences,

But do them with awareness.

Adding awareness is the key element to stabilizing your life.

Without it,

You become unbalanced and you'll either lean to the left or you'll lean to the right.

And you'll always be off balance and you'll never make it to the end point,

The destination until you learn to bring awareness in and make that the key factor.

Awareness and practicing meditation and allowing your consciousness to grow and expand.

And these are the keys.

And Buddha talks about right mindfulness.

If you're aware of all your thoughts,

If you're aware of what you're about to say and what you're about to think,

Then this is right mindfulness.

Even if it comes out wrong or even if it's the wrong thing to do,

You learn from it through awareness because without awareness,

Then you'll just be keep on missing and you'll keep on missing.

And I've heard that the definition of sin basically is one who's basically missed the target,

Like an arrow shot from a bow towards the target and you missed the target totally.

And this sinning,

This missing all the time,

That is wrong mindfulness because it doesn't have that key factor of awareness to it.

And finally,

Right concentration.

When Buddha says right concentration,

I think he's referring more to those moments where our minds are wandering and not focusing on being aware or focusing on silence.

Because when I think of right concentration,

It reminds me of Buddha's teachings of the meditations where you're following your breath and you're using your concentration and just following the breath leads you down to a focal point where there's just that oneness that exists.

It's really two at the moment before you dive in and dissolve into existence and have no thought at all.

But that right concentration means that it's narrowing down.

And even Patanjali talks about this in the yoga sutras,

About right concentration,

But basically using discipline.

And when I say discipline,

I mean something that you want to or you love to do very often.

When I studied Aikido,

It just took me out of a bad life that I was living and into a better life.

But it was through discipline and wanting to be better and wanting to be better at the art and focus and concentrate using right concentration,

Right focus,

Right mindfulness,

Right thought.

You evolve as an Aikidoist,

But you can also evolve as a real person using these same techniques.

And that comes through the love of doing something.

When you meditate and you concentrate and you focus all your energies into your breath and your focal points right between your eyes as your eyes close,

Then it's easy to launch from that into nothingness and dissolve into no thought,

Into this mindless state where the mind can be completely still.

And that's the goal.

Because that's how Buddha attained is he came to this space where he dropped everything and dissolved into existence.

And then he returned from his journey and his enlightenment and he shared this eightfold path and the four noble truths with all the people that were surrounding him at the time.

They became his behekus,

His followers.

But anyway,

Thank you again my friends for joining me.

I really appreciate your time and your discipline to listen to these words that I'm sharing with you.

And namaste to all my beautiful spiritual friends and aloha to all my great surfing friends around the world.

I've met surfing friends from everywhere in the world.

And blue skies to all my skydiving friends.

I love you guys and I hope you take care of your lives and I hope you go through all this.

Thank you.

Bye.