Stephen Batchelor on a ‘Secular Perspective on the Eightfold Path’

November 16, 2020


Stephen Batchelor led a meditation and offered a dharma talk to the Community Meditation Center (CMC) on 15 November 2020. CMC is an Insight meditation center based in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in New York City, USA.  Stephen's talk was on a 'Secular Perspective on the Eightfold Path.'

The traditional Buddhist account of the eightfold path divides the path factors into three sections:

WISDOM
1. Right understanding (sammā diṭṭhi)
2. Right thought (sammā saṅkappa)

ETHICS
3. Right speech (sammā vācā)
4. Right action (sammā kammanta)
5. Right livelihood (sammā ājīva)

MENTAL DISCIPLINE
6. Right effort (sammā vāyāma)
7. Right mindfulness (sammā sati)
8. Right concentration (sammā samādhi)

In his talk at CMC Stephen not only presented the path factors in a different order than the standard account but offered a new interpretation of each path factor's role in the path. Stephen's iteration of the Eightfold Path is:

(1) Perspective (diṭṭhi)  (2) Imagination (sankappa)   (3) Application (vāyāma)   (4) Mindfulness (sati)   (5) Focus (samādhi)   (6) Voice (vācā)    (7) Work (kammanta)   and (8) Survival (ājīva)

In integrating these dimensions of our life as an ethical being who participates in a community, the Eightfold Path facilitates individual human flourishing and a culture of awakening.

In the Bhavana Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya 7:71) , the historical Buddha, Gotama, compared the eight limbs of the path to eight fertilized eggs that the mother hen turns and rearranges with her feet to ensure that all will be kept equally warm. Stephen noted that the cluster of eight shifting eggs has no intrinsic order and thus the sequence in which the limbs of the eightfold path is traditionally presented is just one of many possible iterations.

By reordering the limbs to end with work and survival – rather than mindfulness (sati) and focus (samādhi) – Stephen's secular reconfiguration of the Path focuses on the way in which the dharma helps us face our uncertain future on earth. Emphasizing work and survival highlights the challenge of living on together in a world of 'fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles.'


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One Reply to “Stephen Batchelor on a ‘Secular Perspective on the Eightfold Path’”

a.c.

This is a comment many years since the note above was posted.

In my own practice, it seems like in the beginning (and I am still very much at the beginning) the following sequence is in play, or seems to be…

With diligence, discipline, effort and endurance (i.e. mindfulness, concentration and effort), a being is embodied that uses this body, speech and mind in everyday living (speech, actions and livelihood) to be able to be free of conventional thought and finally experience-understand a self-less reality; undifferentiated and essentially empty (i.e. to see!).

…and then…in the Mahayana sense, one would hope to be able to return to this world, in reverse order…

Being able to see, and to not be a slave to ones thinking, therefore truly natural in body, speech and mind (and thus to have a giving approach to ones livelihood, which turns to service rather than sustenance) so as to then be a vehicle for others to see what may result from a practice in endurance, effort, discipline and diligence.

…therein lies the warm hand to warm hand transmission of the Dharma, for we are then but interconnected links in this chain. My reading is that this is perhaps what Dogen meant when he wrote of no trace of realization remaining, and the no-trace continuing endlessly…one link to the next…

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