The Eightfold Path
Siddhartha Gautama second sermon
The Noble Eightfold path is Siddhartha Gautama’s second sermon, and it is based on the first understanding of his first sermon, The Four Noble Truths. So, to understand the Noble Eightfold path Sermon, you have to first understand The Four Noble Truths. See my video on the Four Noble Truths.
Right Understanding/View
How we apply our understanding of our Suffering, our Spiritual wounds, is absolutely critical so that we may bring to full illumination, to view, the Spiritual wounds we hold.
Right Insight
The suffering we hold that we illuminate with our vision is now revealed in how those Spiritual wounds have become malignant, creating a cascade of karma and causation.
Right Doctrine
A doctrine is a foundational knowledge that one must hold true; that knowledge that heals our Spiritual wounds is that of The Four Noble Truths.
Right renouncement
Our spiritual wounds fester in our dark deeds committed, the cravings we hold, and the longings we feel for this world. Thus, we must disembody from these things and renounce our held attachments for them. This is also known as Right Speech.
Right unity of wholeness
The spiritual wounds we hold, fracture our soul creating a manifold plurality of what we see as our existence. We must unite that what is fractured in conjoinment to bring about the soul’s wholeness. This is also called Right action.
Right resolve of salvation
To heal our spiritual wounds and to rejoin the fractured soul, we must make a great commitment, a resolution of salvation (the way out), to rejoin the soul and to end the causes of our festering spiritual wounds. This is also called Right livelihood.
Right resolution of unity
We rejoin our fragmented soul to unity, eradicating the causes of the festering spiritual wounds; there the origin of the True Self, the unstained soul, is known before phenomenon’s arising. This is also known as Right mindfulness.
Right liberation of the soul
The True-Self now completed, forever liberated from the arisings of phenomena, knows true bliss. Eradicated the causes of suffering, and to not be reborn in back into the manifold-existence-suffering, the True-Self returns to the eternal Light.
A liberation ontology based in wisdom
Siddhartha Gautama, the Shakyamuni (Great Sage of the Shakya clan) only produced two sermons, The Four Noble Truths, and The Noble Eightfold Path.
Everything after that was hearsay and latter-day Brahmayana, or what we know as Buddhism today.
The True Brahmayana (Path to the absolute) is a liberation ontology based in wisdom
The two sermons is about the Liberation of the soul from phenomena, this worldly existence.
It is unfortunate that the Eightfold path has been reinterpreted to take an outwardly meaning, for such interpretations are useless and does not help the spiritual seeker reach salvation.
The dishonorable Eightfold path
In Zen Buddhism, the two sermons are a foundation of the core of our efforts, and without properly understanding them, then everything else is folly (foolishness and lacking purpose).
To deny the Buddha’s teachings is then to then say there is ‘no way out’ of the manifold-existence-suffering, and that would suggest that there is nothing to liberate and nothing to be liberated from. This is the nihilism of the Therivadans (Materialist), a pre-Brahmayana philosophy. This is akin to teaching that the manifold-existence-suffering is all there is, and saying ‘just get use to it and learn to like it!’
The Wrong/dishonorable Eightfold path is often presented to Zen students, for its based on disbelief and suspicion of the Buddha’s teachings, and rooted in nihilism. For such teachings themselves and those who teach them only create more Spiritual wounds on themselves and others, evil (intentional infliction of spiritual wounds) and twisting of souls they are.
Source Material
