Buddha's Eightfold Path - 2 - Reflections On Right Action

Dear friends,

In our meditation today we are going to encourage one another by looking at Right Action.

Right Action is one of the principles which we find in the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path.

Right Action encourages us to look at our activities and our lifestyle,

And to see that they are having a good rather than a bad effect.

Let's begin by taking a few conscious breaths.

You might like to close your eyes for this.

This exercise is to help us to become really present,

To help us to bring our minds and our bodies into the same space,

Leaving the events of yesterday where they belong,

In yesterday,

And leaving the worries of tomorrow where they belong,

Tomorrow,

And just becoming present,

Here and now.

To help us with this we use words such as Breathing in,

I am aware that I am breathing in.

The same as we breathe out.

Breathing out,

I am aware that I am breathing out.

So for the next minute,

Just 60 seconds,

Let's see if we can try and remain focused on our breath.

If we become distracted,

If our mind wanders,

There is no need for worry.

This is just a practice in concentration,

And it reminds us of how many thoughts arise in our minds all the time.

This is why you will have heard the expression,

The monkey mind.

So I won't say if,

Instead when you notice the distraction,

Don't beat yourself up.

Just gently return to concentrating on the breath.

So for one minute,

Breathing in,

I am aware that I am breathing in,

And breathing out,

I am aware that I am breathing out.

This is just a practice in concentration,

And it reminds us of how many thoughts arise in our mind all the time.

So for one minute,

Breathing in,

I am aware that I am breathing out,

And breathing out,

I am aware that I am breathing in,

And breathing out,

I am aware that I am breathing out,

And breathing out,

I am aware that I am breathing out,

And breathing out,

I am aware that I am breathing out.

Welcome back.

The Noble Eightfold Path consists of eight recommendations for living a good life and a happy life.

They are not commandments in the Christian sense.

They are more origins from the Buddha,

Based on common sense.

And the Buddha himself makes the point that we shouldn't accept things just because they are given to us in a book or from a teacher,

Even including the Buddha himself.

What we are told is that we should try to apply these principles in our lives to see if they make a difference.

If they work,

Then common sense tells us that we should continue to apply them.

If they don't,

We look somewhere else,

We practice something else.

So now onto the question of right action.

Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist tells us,

We are travellers on a cosmic journey,

Stardust swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity.

We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other,

To meet,

To love,

To share.

This is a precious moment,

He says,

A little parenthesis in eternity.

Now these words are our invitation to right action.

And the possibilities begin when we wake up each morning.

They remain open to us until we fall asleep at night.

All the events of the day give us an opportunity to make this a kinder,

More agreeable world.

Every day is full of opportunities,

And what we need to do is not let these opportunities slip through our fingers.

I imagine one of the greatest regrets that we face as we grow older is not so much any harm that we have done.

Hopefully we won't have done very much harm.

It will be more a case of the missed opportunities,

The idea of having wasted time in trivialities.

Annie Dillard tells us,

How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.

What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.

Annie describes a schedule as a net for catching days,

A lifeboat on which we find ourselves decades later still living.

Now it's not that we need to spend all our time on duty every day without ever a break.

That would be an unendurable challenge.

But to take an extreme example,

What sort of a life would it be if we spent our days watching television and nothing more?

Or playing video games and nothing more?

That type of thing.

Never lifting a finger to make a difference to anyone.

Now these are extreme examples and unlikely ones,

But they do remind us of the possibility and the danger of letting life slip by.

Missing opportunities to make things better for ourselves and missing opportunities to make things better for other people.

This existence of ours is a gift that is really beyond belief and yet we can take it so much for granted.

Days come and days go,

Especially when we are young we feel that we have an endless supply of them.

We can allow these opportunities for goodness to slip by,

Putting off to tomorrow the opportunity to do a good deed today.

Maybe having the sudden inspiration to do something useful but yet not taking the ball on the hop and not doing the good deed while the idea is fresh in our minds.

And it's not for lack of opportunity.

We are surrounded by opportunities for goodness.

These chances to perform right action are present all around us.

They pop up as we step outside our door in the morning.

When we come across a neighbour who might need help or simply a word of encouragement.

The people we come across as we drive along in the car.

Letting people out in traffic.

Driving with consideration for other people.

Getting up to offer a seat on public transport.

Helping a blind or an infirm person cross the road.

Saying hello to someone begging on the street and maybe asking his or her name.

Giving the person an identity.

How we treat people serving in a shop.

Phoning a friend who has been bereaved or facing hospitalisation.

The list goes on and on.

Our interactions with people give us the opportunity for carrying out right action every single day.

Steve Maraboli in his book The Truth and Being Free encourages us in this poem called Dare to Be.

You must have come across it.

When a new day begins,

Dare to smile gratefully.

Dare to be the first to shine a light.

The first to condemn injustice.

We are urged to dare to find hope.

To keep going.

To love hurts.

We are to dare to love again.

Dare to help people.

Dare to help people find a way.

Steve Maraboli encourages us to dare to be.

That poem offers us a good number of examples of how we can perform right action.

Let's have a pause now for one more minute.

This is so that we can think of opportunities that might present themselves to us today or tomorrow to make a difference to the people around us.

Let's think of the day we're going to have ahead of us.

And let's think of what we might do to make this a better day for someone else.

A one-minute pause.

A one-minute pause.

A one-minute pause.

Welcome back.

Before the break we were thinking of different people we might come across in our day-to-day lives.

And how these people might give us an opportunity to perform right action.

There's also the question of what the right action might be.

For instance,

If we are an employee,

We have the opportunity of doing our work to the best of our ability.

Cooperating cheerfully with the people we work for and with.

Pulling our weight.

Being fair.

Giving encouragement to new people.

The people in a job will find it a challenge.

They must.

And we can help these new people become familiar with the work.

Help them become familiar with the processes that they need to know and to master so that they can do their work effectively.

If we own a business or if we are an employer,

We have the opportunity to carry out right action as well.

Providing fair pay.

Decent working conditions.

Opening opportunities for people.

Giving people a chance.

Not taking advantage of people.

Some of us may have heard of situations where an employer takes someone on trial for a day or a week.

And then having taken advantage of their time and their labour,

Letting them go without any pay,

Any reward for their efforts.

And then taking advantage of somebody else on the same basis the following day or the following week.

Now,

Happily that doesn't happen too often,

But it shouldn't happen at all.

It should never happen.

Right action involves the commitment to honesty,

Whether we are an employee or an employer.

Right action involves us being honest and decent and responsible in all our relationships.

Personal relationships.

Business relationships.

Not letting people down.

Not using people for our own benefit.

Not taking advantage of others.

Obviously not killing,

But also not hurting or exploiting people.

Think of all the ways in which people can be hurt or exploited.

Child labour.

We hear of this in far away countries.

Happily not in our own countries,

Or so we hope.

But even in our own countries we hear of exploitation of non-nationals.

Working for low pay and living in cramped conditions.

It's hard to believe that modern day slavery exists,

But yet it does.

Think of the exploitation of sex workers.

Right action means not only stealing,

We should refrain from taking anything that has not been offered.

So not stealing means an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.

Fair pricing for a job.

Giving the correct change.

Finding something on the street and trying to find the owner.

In all this,

What we're trying to do is to take into account the feelings of other people.

Having compassion for other people.

Taking the common good into account.

The message of right action is that we try to live our lives in a way that's not harmful to other people.

Better still,

We try to live in a way that's positively helpful to others.

That is why we try our best to live lives of loving kindness.

Showing compassion for other people.

Putting ourselves in their shoes.

How would we feel if they did that to us?

We work to try to eliminate any selfishness on our own part.

Giving our time and our talents to help other people.

Not just working to our own agenda,

With only our own selfish interests in mind.

Instead we have to realise that we are all in this together.

In the Christian tradition you may have come across the doctrine of the mystical body of Christ.

According to that doctrine,

What we do to one another is considered to be done to Jesus Christ himself.

You know the saying,

As long as you did it to one of these,

The least of these brothers of mine,

You did it to me.

Which ties in with the scientific fact that we are all part of an interconnected web.

Whatever happens to one of us affects all of us.

It reminds us of a quote by John Greenleaf Whittier,

Pluck one thread and the web ye mere,

Break but one of a thousand keys,

And the paining ger through all will run.

Now all this is a tall order.

We are not going to get it right every time.

Sometimes at the end of the day we look back.

We realise that this was not a good day when you consider it from the point of view of our concern for other people.

But hopefully those disappointing days will be few and far between.

Hopefully,

Mostly when we look back,

We will be able to recall something that we did for someone else with an attitude of unselfishness.

There are two things that will help us along the way in our wish to practise right action.

First of all,

The making of a morning resolution.

If we can begin the day with some minutes of mindful reflection,

It will help us to approach each day in a compassionate way.

If we don't,

There is a danger that we just drift into the day without having made any firm resolution or good intention.

This won't be the helpful start that we'd like to have.

And then at the end of the day,

It's useful to look back over the day and see what lessons have been learned.

Is there anyone sleeping a little easier tonight because of the fact that we were living in this world today?

Have we lent a helping hand to someone?

Have we lifted someone's burden even a little?

And we must of course end each day with some pause to allow time for gratitude.

All of us have so much going for us.

If at the end of the day we can list even five things for which we are grateful,

Jot them down in a notebook.

It will remind us of some of the goodness coming our way every single day of our lives.

And that will encourage us to be people who offer a little goodness to other people tomorrow.

Each day is such an amazing gift.

This thought was captured by Chesterton in the following words,

Here dies another day,

During which I've had eyes,

Ears,

Hands,

And the great world round me.

And when tomorrow begins another,

Why am I allowed to?

We could easily ask ourselves with Chesterton,

Why am I allowed another day tomorrow?

Now as we encourage one another to be a little better today than yesterday,

And a little better tomorrow than today,

We must not get discouraged by our failures.

Just like right speech,

Right action can be very challenging.

It's easy to talk about right action when we are sitting here in meditation,

When we are discussing it in theory with people who are on the same wavelength as ourselves.

It's another matter and it's more difficult when we're trying to practise these ideals in the real world.

So in all this we have to remember to be easy on ourselves.

Make up our minds to simply try to do our best.

Leave perfection to the perfectionists if they want to struggle with it.

And a reasonable best will be just fine.

So if now and again we slip into a moment of selfishness,

If we fail to come to the aid of someone because we are hurrying somewhere else,

Don't let us beat ourselves up.

Let's just learn the lesson and decide to do better next time.

We mustn't allow ourselves to be discouraged by these slip-ups or failures.

In right speech,

Right action is important,

Far too important to allow ourselves to be discouraged by failure.

Any slip-up in right action can be just like having a fall on the road.

What do we do if we have a trip and a fall?

We get up,

We brush ourselves off and,

Most important,

We begin again.

But of course,

Having fallen,

We look out and try not to fall again.

We are nearing the end of this meditation now,

So let's have another 60 second pause,

A pause for reflection,

So that we can think about right action.

And what I'd like you to do in the next 60 seconds is to call to mind situations where you managed to perform some act of unexpected generosity.

Some situation where you came to the aid of someone in need.

I want you to think of how you felt at that time.

These good feelings that we have when we do something good,

They are the reward of good actions.

This is what you call the feel-good factor.

And think of how you feel now even by recalling these good actions.

They've become part of your history,

Leaving you with the happy feeling that somewhere,

Somehow,

Someone is better off because of the fact that you've lived.

That's an encouragement to keep on trying.

So for one minute now,

For 60 seconds,

Think back on one of those good deeds that made a difference to someone else.

Welcome back.

Our final quote today comes from Rita Clint.

Now for this,

We need to imagine for a moment that we have done our best.

Just imagine that we have made a difference to someone,

To anyone.

And if we have done that,

This is how Rita Clint would describe us.

Sometimes people appear in your life unexpectedly like a gift from the universe.

You didn't even know you needed them or that you had called out silently to them.

They appear when you needed them most,

To lift you,

To educate you,

To wake you up or shine a light on your path.

They sprout the seed that was in you and patiently watch that seed emerge from the soil.

Then one day you blossom and awaken to the beauty around you and rejoice.

Just imagine if that could be said of any of us,

That we have caused someone to blossom.

And that could be said of any of us here,

Provided we make it our business to cultivate this practice of right action.

Sometimes people appear in your life unexpectedly like a gift from the universe.

If that could be said of any of us here,

Wouldn't it make our entire lives worthwhile?

That we had appeared in this world like a gift from the universe.

What a happy feeling that would be looking back over the years.

It is possible for you,

It's possible for me.

May we be inspired with good intentions and through right action may we bring these good intentions into reality,

Adding a little warmth and a little kindness to the world.

It's such an exciting possibility.

Namaste.