Practicing Buddhism’s Eightfold Path This Lent
I’m always glad when Ash Wednesday and Lent arrive each year at the waning of winter and on the cusp of spring. It’s a time for me to pause — to “take more time, cover less ground,” as Thomas Merton once said. It’s also a chance to clear out the dust and ashes that have accumulated in my inner life over the course of a year.
I try to set a goal for myself each Lent that combines both giving up certain habits that need to go and moving toward actions that better nourish my soul. This past week, I received an unexpected gift of a possible road map to guide me through this liturgical season.
Thanks to my dear friend Boston poet Lisa Breger, I have been meeting monthly online for the past three years with a prayer group guided by interfaith chaplain and Zen meditation teacher Lama Yodsampa Tsering. Lama Tsering is a wonderfully joyful little man with a shock of white hair and an infectiours laugh who was born in Tibet. His teaching this past week focused on what Buddhists call “The Noble Eightfold Path,” a series of disciplines encompassing mind, body and deed, aimed at ending suffering in ourselves and others.
The Eightfold Path took on even greater significance for me because this coming week also includes the one-year mark of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine , a tragic, useless war that has claimed more than 8,000 civilian lives to date - 438 of them children - forced 2.9 million people to flee from their homes and reduced wide portions of a once beautiful country to rubble.
Surely the people suffering in Ukraine will be front and center on my mind this Lent.
Briefly, these are the steps of the Eight-fold Path:
Right Conduct — Showing love, charity, tolerance and kindness toward all living beings. (Think: love your enemies; pray for their well-being).
Right Speech — Abstaining from telling untruths and from engaging in back-biting, slander or any speech that might engender hatred or disharmony. Refraining from using harsh, rude, malicious or abusive language as well as idle, useless talk and gossip.
Right Livelihood — Choosing work that in no way harms others, but rather promotes a happy, harmonious life for both oneself and society.
Right Effort — Ridding ourselves of unwholesome or evil states of mind that cause us to enter into disharmony with others and replacing them with good and wholesome states of mind. This reminds me of a practice the early monks and monastic sisters of the Egyptian desert used to nip angry or other negative thoughts by redirecting those thoughts toward something positive, life-affirming.
Right Mindfulness — Keeping watch over our body, thoughts, feelings, ideas and perceptions. Do we become too easily distracted? Are we given to hateful thoughts? Are our perceptions the only ones that might be correct?
Right Concentration — Working to discard thoughts of ill-will, worry and restlessness and replacing them with thoughts that bring us joy and tranquility.
Right Thought — Practicing a certain detachment toward events that allows us to replace our worries, thoughts of ill will and selfish desires with thoughts of love, generosity and nonviolence.
Right Understanding — Working to perceive a person or an event by its true nature. This allows us to understand another’s perceived bad behavior as being due to a certain suffering they are experiencing.
These actions of the Eightfold Path resonate resoundingly with the prescription for right living that St. Paul gives us in his letter to the Romans:
Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection; anticipate one another in showing honor. Do not grow slack in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the holy ones, exercise hospitality.
It is hard to do all that St. Paul and the Noble Path ask of us — and to do them all at once. These are the practices that take a lifetime. I intend to focus this Lent on those areas where I feel the most need for change. “Right Understaning” is one that speaks to me at this point in my life. It is all too easy to ascribe negative motives to people who have hurt me in the past. What if I tried to better understand the suffering inside them that lurks behind their behavior?
I don’t expect some grand transformation to result within myself as I focus on these steps. As a desert father once said of the spiritual life, we rise and we fall, we rise and we fall. Still I will watch for small, barely perceptible changes, the way water slowly, over time, etches its way into stone. This Lent, I will try to do as St. Paul urges and “hold on to the good.”
Will you join me?
