Buddha’s Teaching: Why Right Livelihood is Essential

Описание: Buddha’s Teaching: Why Right Livelihood is Essential Noble Eightfold Path.
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We’re often impatient with the practice. We want to go straight to insight, straight to the solution of all our problems, so we can then go back home and get on with the rest of our lives. But you first have to put the mind in good shape before you can gain any insight, and that takes time. You have to feed it well: That’s what concentration is all about. As the Buddha once said, if you don’t have the pleasure and rapture that can come from at least the first jhana, you’re always going to be tempted by sensuality. Even if you understand the drawbacks of sensual pleasures and sensual desires, if you don’t have this alternative way of finding happiness, you’re going to go back to your old ways. No matter how much Dhamma you may have read or how precise your understanding of the intricacies of the Buddha’s teachings, when the time comes to feed, you’re going to go back and feed on the same old roadkill you’ve been feeding on all your life.

It’s like Ajaan Chah’s simile: Westerners, he once said, are like vultures. When they fly, they fly very high, but when they eat, they eat low. That’s one of those quotes you don’t normally see in books about Ajaan Chah, but it hits home. We in the West tend to overlook our need for the groundwork provided by concentration. The Buddha himself compared the happiness, pleasure, and equanimity that come from concentration to food. His image was of a fortress at the edge of a frontier, with different qualities in the path corresponding to different aspects of the fortress.

"There’s discernment, which is like a slippery wall that the enemy can’t climb up. Learning is like a range of weapons to fight off the enemy. Mindfulness is like the gatekeeper who remembers who to let in and who not to let in. And jhana, he said, is like stores of food."