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Eightfold Path: Right View (2 of 3)

Warm greetings to you all, and we continue the series of talks on the Eightfold Path. For these three days—today being the second day—the topic is the first factor of the eight-factored path, and that is Right View. Right View, as I said yesterday, is not a belief in the usual kind of way, like a proposition or a tenet of a creed. Rather, as the word view suggests, it's a perspective, an orientation, or a way of seeing—a frame of reference for our experience, for our life.

In the discourses, the Buddha distinguishes between two kinds of Right View. I call them conventional and liberative Right View. The Buddha calls them mundane and supramundane Right View. The conventional one has to do with understanding that actions have consequences. Some actions are helpful, supportive, skillful, and wholesome, and some are unhelpful, unskillful, and unwholesome. Some lead to what is wholesome; some lead to what is unwholesome. Some lead to suffering, and some lead to happiness. Appreciating that lets us choose the actions we do—what we say, what we do—and we start doing things more skillfully. One of those things is to meditate. The same applies in meditation, that our actions have consequences. So, we have some care in how we engage in meditation.

The liberative Right View, the Right View that brings liberation, has to do with a sensitivity to change. Sometimes the Buddha calls it, "Things will be different than they are. Things will change." This is sometimes called in Pali anicca^[1]. Anicca is often translated into English as "impermanent," which more literally means "inconstant."

If we understand "impermanent" to mean that something is going to die at some point or no longer be here, that's one understanding. It's true that so many things will just end completely. But the flow of life, the ongoing river of life that we're in, is inconstant. The waves on the river, the current on the river, is in constant change and shifts its directions in all kinds of ways; it's not steady and constant. But it does not simply end. The river doesn't just stop. The current of life—maybe when we die, but as we live, it continues. So, this sensitivity to things that are changing, Right View, is the orientation, the frame of reference, the insight into the changing nature of this life of ours.

This is such an important point. I can't underscore how much this is emphasized in the teachings of the Buddha. This is probably more important for the Buddha than anything you would believe. Some beliefs are okay, like believing that actions have consequences. But what we're looking for in Vipassana^[2] practice is to get quiet, concentrated, and steady enough in our meditation to have the changing nature of our experience revealed to us.

Experience is changing much more than we think. That's a little bit of a pun, because it's thinking that will often give things assumed permanence, or relate to things as being permanent and unchanging. I might think that I'm having a lousy day. The concept of "lousy days" is an idea that I could repeat to myself and hold on to. Every time I think about the day, I think it's lousy. Because my thinking is that way, it can seem like the day is lousy. But if I get more fine-tuned, not to the global day but to what's happening moment by moment, I discover that it's not a constant lousy day. I step outside into the sun on a cool day, and it feels really pleasant for a moment or two. I look at the blue sky, and it's pleasant for a moment or two. Then I go back to having the lousy time and thinking about something else.

If I look more carefully, the lousy day has a lot to do with my evaluation of the day, my predictions, my fears, and my remembering in the way I have critical thinking about something, maybe myself. To see that those kinds of thoughts are also coming and going and changing all the time is key. I'm having a negative thought about myself, and then I get hungry and I start thinking about how nice it would be to have oatmeal for breakfast. For a few moments, I'm not thinking that negative way. As long as we are caught in the thoughts, always oriented towards seeing through the filter of particular thoughts, it's easy to assume that things are constant or have a certain permanence to them, that "this is the way it is."

We might define ourselves in one way, but things are changing, and we're changing all the time. If we're holding on to an old idea—one of the curious things in my life, and I don't know about other people, is that my self-image is usually a few years behind. I usually think of myself or see myself as being younger than I actually have become. So the idea I have is that I change less than I'm actually changing. If I'm holding on to the idea or resisting the change because I think it should be a certain way, then there is resistance. There is suffering; there is stress that builds up from it.

The idea of Right View is to become attuned to the changing nature of phenomena, for the purpose of no longer being caught in ideas. We often have ideas that impute more permanence than things actually have. And more than not being caught in ideas, not being caught at all. "Caught" is a word for being tied up, being entangled with ideas and concepts and stories and memories and predictions of the future. Sometimes we use the word clinging for it—grasping, holding on, or resisting and stopping something. All those movements are a very strong drivenness or compulsion. Craving, clinging, and attachment are understood in Buddhism to be forms of stress. They are forms of suffering that debilitate us, undermine us, limit us, and keep us from being free.

As we tune in and become attuned to change, if you really see how changing things are, it's hard to keep holding on. Say I have a lousy day, but I go for a nice walk through a park. There are kids playing, beautiful flowers, it's a sunny day, there are nice birds, and maybe turtles come up from the pond. Maybe there's an unusual bird, a white heron standing there gracefully. As I walk through the park, I've begun to let go of all those thoughts of the day, and I'm free of them. I come to the end of my lunchtime, I go back, and then I pick up all those thoughts again. But if I see their inconstant nature and how these thoughts come and go, then I might not pick them up. The thoughts might return, but I don't pick them up. I don't get involved with them. I don't feel them. I learn how to be free.

The Right View the Buddha is talking about is the view of change, the view of impermanence, in such a way that we don't hang on to things so much. We don't come to temporarily fixed conclusions like "this is the way it is" in such a way that we hurt, suffer, or stress ourselves. There is much more fluidity and ease with how things are. Things might still be difficult, and they still might be challenging in deep ways, but they're a lot easier to navigate if we're not picking ideas up, holding on, and imputing more permanence and fixity to things than is actually there.

That is my attempt to explain why the Buddha's emphasis on experiencing and gaining insight into change and impermanence is such an important part of what he has to teach. I'll say more about it tomorrow, but I like to say that as we begin to see change in such a way that we start experiencing more freedom, then Right View—the view of change—leads onward to the other factors of the Eightfold Path. It leads us to change how we want to live and how we behave. Freedom begins changing our priorities and what drives and motivates us. In a natural way, the next steps of the Eightfold Path flow out of this liberative Right View, the insight into the changing nature of our experience.

I'll talk more about this tomorrow and about how to come to this insight. It's not meant to be a belief. You're not supposed to go around and just remind yourself, "Oh, everything's impermanent, everything's impermanent." The idea is to really see it. It's one thing to believe that the river always flows; it's another to be in the river, or on the edge of the river, and see it flow. That's where we want to be. We want to see the flow or be in the current, in a sense.

I'll end with a little story. The belief that things change, to know that things come and go, can be a very useful idea to carry with you in your back pocket. I know people for whom something happens, like they go out and discover they have a flat tire. Their first reaction upon seeing it is to say, "Of course, everything is impermanent. Everything changes," as opposed to the first reaction being, "Oh no, this shouldn't have happened." This reminder that things are constantly changing, shifting, and being impermanent can bring a little more ease to life when we encounter things that have changed in ways that surprise us.

There is a Sufi story of a man who goes to a Sufi teacher and says, "I have this ring here. Can you engrave something in the ring, some statement that whenever I look at the ring, it will always help me to be happy or to be free?" The Sufi master takes the ring and has it engraved. When the man comes back for his ring and puts it on, on the ring is written the phrase, "This too will pass."

Sometimes knowing this principle as an idea can help keep us fluid and keep us from getting entangled. But for the Buddha, the point was to have insight—to be in the river, or at the edge of the river, and really see that that is what's happening.

Thank you, and I look forward to our time tomorrow.