The Eightfold Path and the Gospel: 1. Right Understanding

A few weeks ago, towards the start of this series, we looked at the Fourth Noble Truths, which are the most basic distillation of Buddhist thought. As a reminder, they go something like this: Dissatisfaction or suffering is everywhere; the cause of this suffering is our attachment; suffering can end by severing those attachments; and the way to do this is the Eightfold Path. It’s this Path that we’ll be looking at over the next eight posts.

As one might expect, the Eightfold Path contains eight steps:

1. Right understanding (Samma ditthi)
2. Right resolve (Samma sankappa)
3. Right speech (Samma vaca)
4. Right action (Samma kammanta)
5. Right livelihood (Samma ajiva)
6. Right effort (Samma vayama)
7. Right mindfulness (Samma sati)
8. Right concentration (Samma samadhi)

It’s important to note at the outset that these are more like eight spokes of a wheel than eight rungs of a ladder. That is, they are mutually reinforcing characteristics, not linear steps taking one progressively higher. All eight steps on the path can and indeed must be undertaken at the same time, as they arise.

Some thought must also be given to the meaning of ‘right’ in this context. While in the West we tend to think of rightness in terms of morality (right vs. wrong), in the context of the Eightfold Path it’s more helpful to think of it in terms of skillfullness. The goal is behaviour that is skillful, practiced, beneficial, and on-point.

Today we’ll focus on the first spoke in this wheel of life, right — that is, skillful — understanding.

Right Understanding in Buddhism

Right understanding is all about having the correct framework through which to understand our lives:

Correct views have the the ability to lead us to liberation, while incorrect views increase the delusions of our mind … This is why we need a proper orientation or correct view when we embark on the path. Correct view is in fact our spiritual vehicle, the transport we use to journey from bondage of samsara [karmic cycles of rebirth] to the liberation of nirvana.” (Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, cited by cited Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 109)

While Right Understanding is important in every area of life, it also requires us to act on it, especially through sacred practices such as meditation. As the nineteenth-century poet Jamgön Kongtrül Lodrö put it:

The one who meditates without the view
Is like a blind man wandering the plains.
There is no reference point for where the true path is.
The one who does not meditate, but merely holds the view
Is like a rich man tethered by stinginess.
He is unable to bring appropriate fruition to himself and others.
Joining the view and meditation is the holy tradition.

There are two sides to this. First, having the right understanding means we have to act in the world. It does no one any good if we correctly see the world and its sufferings but do nothing to help (even if just ourselves). The poet aptly compares this to a person who has money but refuses to spend it. The asset is only useful and beneficial when used. Hoarding anything, including wisdom, is not ‘skillful’.

And second, right understanding provides the proper interpretive lens for understanding what we experience in the world:

“There isn’t just meditative experience per se — that simply does not exist. There is meditative experience plus the interpretations you give it. And this means, among other things, that we should choose our interpretations, view, and framework very carefully (Ken Wilber 112).

What Jamgön Kongtrül Lodrö and Wilber say about meditation is true about anything and everything in life. There is no pure experience that does not get interpreted. Our worldview acts as the window through which we look at the world and our experiences in it; if that window is too small, is tinted or broken or dirty, it will limit and skew what we see. It’s true of the world as a whole, and it’s true of our sacred practices. So it’s critically important for us to have as expansive and clear an understanding as possible.

For the Buddha, this right understanding amounted essentially to the ideas we’ve covered so far in the series: the Four Noble truths, about attachment as the root of suffering and dissatisfaction; karma, about the importance of our actions and their consequences; impermanence, the realization that everything is temporary and in a constant state of flux; non-self, the truth that this impermanence includes our very selves; and the middle path, that the skillful life is one that avoids extreme lifestyles, attitudes, and beliefs. Together these ideas create the worldview that, according to the Buddha, frames existence in a skillful and therefore beneficial way.

Christian Response

A lot of this should sound awfully familiar if you’ve been following along with this series. The importance of the right understanding in order to properly interpret the world, including spirituality, promoted by Buddhism is once again very similar to the New Testament’s language of the nous, our interpretive faculty, and how it needs to be renewed and restored: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds [nous], so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12.2). While it’s not exactly a central passage in the New Testament, it’s a clear a comment on the need for a ‘right understanding’.

For Christians, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth is both the source and content of that understanding. I often say that the Apostles came to see the world, including their own Scriptures and traditions, through ‘Christ-coloured glasses’. His incarnation, humility, teaching, lifestyle, and death and resurrection came to be determinative for them of ‘right understanding’. As Paul put it “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2.5).

And, like the Buddhist right understanding, having this renewed mind ‘in Christ’ must be lived out. Belief in Christ is empty without faithfulness to him and his way. Inasmuch as one truly has faith in Jesus, a life of prayer, thanksgiving, forgiveness, compassion, grace, and active, sacrificial service will naturally follow.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen over the past few posts, there are some important parallels in this Christ-focused attitude to the elements of the Buddha’s ‘right understanding’. He too warned against attachments (even some ‘healthy’ ones, such as attachment to family), especially to things of this world that are impermanent, and insisted that actions have far-reaching consequences beyond what we can see in the here and now. But again, unlike Buddhism, Christianity is not primarily a way of understanding human psychology, and so these teachings are important but not the point. Any psychological benefits are secondary to the spiritual aim of being remade in the image of Christ.