The Noble Eightfold Path is the right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.. The development of the
Trang 1The Noble Eightfold Path is a set of personal
quali-ties that must be developed It is not a sequence of
steps along a linear path The Noble Eightfold Path is
the right view, right resolve, right speech, right action,
right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right
concentration The development of the right view and
right resolve, wisdom, and discernment facilitate the
movement of right speech, right action, and right
liveli-hood, the three factors associated with virtue As virtue
develops, it is thought that the factors associated with
awareness, right effort, right mindfulness, and right
con-centration are further developed Buddha taught that the
practitioner is then lifted in an upward spiral of spiritual
maturity that eventually leads to enlightenment
As the practitioner begins the Noble Eightfold Path,
an individual’s well-being is not predestined by fate, nor
is it left to the whims of a divine being or by random
chance Responsibility for happiness is only dependent
on the individual With this realization it is taught that
habitual ignorance is replaced with awareness The
practitioner is then mindful of his or her actions and
chooses them with care At this point some followers
make the personal commitment to become enlightened
and become a Buddha
Buddha died at around the age of 80 His last words
were “Impermanent are all created things; strive on
with awareness.” Naming the religion and philosophy
he founded the Dharma-vinaya, the doctrine and
disci-pline, Buddha created a social structure supportive of his
practice The monks and nuns who followed his
teach-ings organized and preserved his teachteach-ings for
prosper-ity, although none of his teachings were recorded until
hundreds of years after his death
Buddhism is sometimes criticized as a negative, or
pes-simistic, religion and philosophy in its assertion that life
is suffering and disappointment The Buddha based his
teaching on what is considered a frank assessment of the
plight of human life Practitioners believe that the Buddha
offered hope for an end to suffering His teachings were
thought to offer the reward of true happiness and the
cycle of rebirth Although release from the cycle of rebirth
means to become extinct after death, this extinguishing is
considered the ultimate freedom from suffering
Assimilating Hindu, Persian, and Greco-Roman
infl uences, Buddhism grew across India, Central Asia,
and Eastern Asia into the fi rst century b.c.e In the third
century c.e the emperor Ashoka of India converted to
Buddhism, sponsored several monasteries, and sent
mis-sionaries into neighboring countries During this period
the practice spread across India and into Sri Lanka
As Buddhism spread, differing interpretations of the
Buddha’s original teachings emerged, which led to the differing schools of Buddhism One of these gave birth
to a sect called Mahayana (the Greater Vehicle), and from it emerged Theravada (the Lesser Vehicle, also the Teaching of the Elders) Due to the pejorative nature of the terms and the historical regions in which the two branches became popular, the two sects are often called northern Buddhism and southern Buddhism
THERAVADA BUDDHISM
Theravada Buddhists believe that they practice the orig-inal form of Buddhism as it was handed down by the teachings of Buddha The doctrine of Theravada dhism corresponds with the recorded teachings of Bud-dha and is based on the Four Noble Truths Through the practice of the Eightfold Noble Path, an individual can eventually achieve nirvana However, Theravada Buddhism primarily focused on meditation, the eighth
of the Eightfold Noble Path, and emphasized a monas-tic life removed from society In addition, Theravada Buddhism required an extremely large amount of time
to meditate These strict ideas were not practical for the majority of people The Theravada texts are written in a language called Pali, which literally means “text” and is based on a Middle Indo-Aryan dialect probably spoken
in central India during Buddha’s lifetime Pali was origi-nally a spoken language with no alphabet It is thought that Ananda, Buddha’s cousin and personal attendant, committed the Buddha’s teachings to memory After the Buddha’s death, Ananda and 500 senior monks recited and verifi ed the sermons they heard Because the teach-ings were committed to memory, the teachteach-ings begin with the words “Thus I have heard ”
Teachings were passed down orally within the monastic community The body of classical Theravada literature consists of Buddha’s teachings arranged and compiled into three divisions The Vinaya Pitaka, “bas-ket of discipline,” concerns rules and customs The Sutta Pitaka, “basket of discourses,” is a collection of ser-mons and utterances by the Buddha and his disciples The Abhidharma Pitaka, “basket of higher doctrine,”
is a detailed psychological and philosophical analysis of the dharma Together, these are known as the Tripitaka,
“three baskets.” By the third century c.e monks in Sri Lanka created a series of commentaries on the Tripitaka, and by the fi fth century they were translated into Pali as the Tipitaka Since then the Tripitaka has been translated into many different languages However, many Thera-vada students commit to learning Pali in order to deepen their understanding of the Tripitaka and related com-mentaries
462 Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism