Written by Ben Graffam.
If you’ve been in a sangha, you’ve had conversations about the nature of Buddhism. Perhaps they have been deep and reflective and moved your practice forward.
But perhaps they were, on occasion, dismissive. People comment that Buddhism is long on lists, that learning the ropes amounts to memorizing the Characteristics, the Paramis, the Four Noble Truths, the Eight-Fold Noble Path, and the Five Remembrances (among others). To some degree, those thoughts aren’t wrong.
But given the connotation of lists, those thoughts aren’t right, either.
Lists imply step-wise processes toward an outcome. They are understood as linear frameworks to be used in a particular order. But that’s not the nature of Buddhist practice.
The Four Noble Truths are set in stone, but flexible understanding of Buddhist nature is not an ordered list.
This is where Bhunta Gunaratana, in his 8 Mindful Steps to Happiness, does a great job of explaining a clearer, fuller nature of Buddhist practice.
I’m going to paraphrase Gunaratana’s description of a process we have all experienced, that of feeling physical pain during a meditative session. My paraphrasing attempts to capture the nonlinear movement through the Noble Eight Fold Path. Hopefully, you’ll understand how it isn’t memorizing, but practical application, that makes for wholesome practice.
Imagine beginning your meditation session, sitting on your cushion. Imagine a pain in your leg and becoming unhappy about the pain, which makes it worse. Gunaratana suggests drawing on the Eight Fold Path to deal with your pain.
You recognize the pain by using skillful mindfulness, which makes you aware of your suffering, confirming the first Noble Truth—there is suffering.
This confirmation brings you to skillful understanding, where you recognize that the more you try to avoid the pain, the worse it becomes.
So you use skillful effort to overcome this avoidance, which allows you to release aversion by cultivating a friendly attitude toward your pain, making it another bodily sensation. That means you are using skillful thinking.
Still, your pain and suffering linger, even rise, in part because you do want to feel better. That’s a natural state, and it confirms the second Noble Truth, desire causes suffering. This acknowledgement returns you to skillful understanding.
As you sit with the knowledge of desire’s connection to suffering, you become alerted to your skillful mindfulness, which allows you to investigate ways to deal with your desire. You apply skillful effort in order to discern how to let go of your craving. Doing that is a way to feel better.
This letting go of a craving is a kind of renunciation, which is a process of skillful thinking.
Of course, disappointment may be present—there is pain—perhaps giving you some thoughts of self-blame. You return to skillful effort to let these feelings go. It is possible you try too hard here, depending on how you understand self-blame, but you will see this extended effort if you are using skillful mindfulness, and because you see it, you can apply skillful thinking.
Let’s recap: you experienced pain during your sit. With skillful thinking, skillful mindfulness, skillful effort, and skillful understanding your mind has been able to settle down. It wasn’t a linear approach to those components of the Eight Fold Path, but rather a practical understanding that each component offers a function and a set of connections for your use. All of this should help you settle more deeply into your meditation, and with that settling, you should be able to express skillful concentration.
Once you move into skillful concentration, your pain should diminish.
As the pain goes away, joy and tranquility will lead to deeper concentration, which will strengthen your mindfulness.
In that mental state, through skillful understanding of what has occurred in dealing with your pain, you will see that the third Noble Truth becomes clearer: ending desire helps end suffering.
Bhunta Gunaratana writes it much better than I do, surely because he understands it much better than I do. But it is a very good lesson to embrace. Knowing the qualities of the many lists of Buddhist practice is a good thing, but being able to use them flexibly, spontaneously, and fittingly is a much better way to improve your practice.
We must live the dhamma, not just know it.