[courlerwele]

I found a mention of The Eightfold Path in a 'Community of Interbeing Manual of Practice'.


Thây emphasises smiling, friendship, the beauty of nature, warmth, hugging, and identifying the positive qualities in ourselves, our friends and our lives.

The mind is full of habits: sometimes we are unhappy because our mind is focused on unhappy experiences or fears about the future. We fail to see that suffering is often the result of wrong perception. By focusing on and practising positive states of mind, we encourage our own mind to make new habits and transform our lives. Buddhist practice provides a form of fitness for the mind: if, when you are running to catch the post, you find yourself out of breath, you might decide to undertake a programme of exercises to give yourself the sort of body you want to have.

This fitness programme teaches us the skills to limit the damage of negative energies, and to have the sort of mind that we want to have. In short, to free ourselves from the prison of negative habits. Thây teaches us to regard words merely as useful conventions rather than getting caught up in the dogma of concepts and notions, and that rather than generalising and abstracting, it is better to speak from our own direct experience.

These teachings do not imply that it is possible to be happy all the time. Thây gives the analogy of a flowerbed: even the most skilled gardener cannot keep flowers blooming all the time. At some stage we have to go through a composting period. This understanding allows us to accept periods of dullness and depression and not give any another significance to them other than that they are our composting periods. The winter of our discontent is a natural part of the cycle.

The Buddhist Path

The most commonly known formulation of the Buddhist way is the Eightfold Path. Thây also often refers to a threefold path of prajna (wisdom), samadhi (meditation or mindfulness) and sila (ethics). The relationship between this and the Eightfold Path is laid out in the table below.

This does not imply that the three sections are separate from each other: rather, they are mutually dependent and accessible. A practice which does not embrace all three components is not a complete practice. To gain deep understanding of the teachings it is necessary to practise both mindfulness and ethics, and to have insight into the meaning of wisdom in Buddhism. Thây has even renamed the Precepts as Mindfulness Trainings to illustrate this inter-dependence. See chart at the link below.....

http://interbeing.org.uk/manual/

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