A Whole-Life Path

A Lay Buddhist's Guide to Crafting a Dhamma-Infused Life

Gregory Kramer

• Editorial: Insight Dialogue Community
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780966672725
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Buddhism

Many lay Buddhists struggle to carry the benefits of their studies and meditation practice into their twenty-first-century lives. How might our daily experience of both life and the Buddha's teachings shift if there were no separation between them?

In A Whole-Life Path, Gregory Kramer invites us to see the noise, complexity, and challenges of today's world as doorways to fully embodied Dhamma wisdom.Drawing on decades of meditation, study, and teaching, he explores the essence of each factor of the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. He then looks at modern life with fresh eyes, calling out the myriad opportunities it offers to put all the Buddha's teachings into practice-individually, relationally, and socially. More than 50 experiential practices allow us to test his guidance-right here, right now.

Anywhere the Buddha's teaching meets our unique life circumstances, our whole-life path is born anew. With A Whole-Life Path as a starting point and touchstone, our lives and our spiritual path can become one.

Chapter 1

The Need for a Whole-Life Path

The Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path provides a wiser way through life than any offered by our conditioning. It’s an intentional path through life’s tangle. And intention is necessary. Any change for the good must face the momentum that made things as they are now. Old habits run deep within us; we complicate, palliate, protect, and meander. Norms are sustained in relationships. Patterns are perpetuated by family and social precedents. Organizational structures are built around ignorance, greed, and aversion. When we feel threatened or enticed, personal and social responses like aggression or lust often overpower reflection or compassion. Things big and small call for our attention, and mindfulness and self-awareness are not givens.

Although the Eightfold Path is an intentional path, designed specifically to counteract the ways in which our lives are compacted, we usually miss out on the full extent of the freedom the Path offers. Why? Because we apply the Buddha’s teachings to our lives in only a semi-intentional way. If we truly aspire to ending our personal ignorance and craving, supporting relationships rooted in mettā and compassion, and contributing to human flourishing and to a just and humane society, then we need a fully immersive, always-on engagement with the Noble Eightfold Path. We need to engage the Buddha’s Path as a whole-life path.

The Human Predicament

You and I are so sensitive. Virtual clouds of nerves wrapped in skin, we are drawn to or repelled by every touch. The slightest changes of light trigger responses in the eyes; the slightest changes of air pressure alert the ears to the unexpected. Molecules from afar touch the nose; those nearby touch the tongue. Electrochemical changes in the brain register as thoughts that touch the mind. And when what contacts our senses is perceived as another person, neural and hormonal processes that evolved with the brain itself activate. All of these things are happening right now, as you read these words. Your sensitivities and mine are meeting right here.

This is how we meet the whole world. Placed in an environment in constant change, we organisms seek air, food, safety, and the comfort of others. Affection and loneliness, competition and fear, anger and isolation join the sharp and soft touches of the material world. But that world is out of our control. Hungers drive us, but we can’t have what we want. The fragility of the body assures a constant flow of pleasure and pain, injury and illness, aging and loss. We feel belonging and isolation, protected and traumatized. This sensitive life culminates in our own death and the death of those we love.

The body-mind’s sensitivity is the seedbed of longings and their occasional gratification. The entire organism tenses against the world’s sensory and social onslaught, hungering in vain for stability and settling instead for temporary pleasant stimulation. We interweave with others to satisfy cravings and enhance protection; relationships and groups also become loci of action. Pings of pleasure cause a reflexive grasping as we struggle, individually and collectively, to hold on to what we like and avoid what we don’t like. This tension forms into a core sense of self, an “I” or a “we” that would be protected and satisfied. The self’s appetite keeps us off balance as it clings to one thing (or person or group) and then another. Gripped by its project of satisfaction and becoming, the body-mind is blind to the fact that its suffering is self-inflicted.

There are no moments, no events, no interactions, no relationships that do not affect the body-mind. Every thought and action, here and now, combines with all we have done and said to determine the direction and tenor of our individual lives and society as a whole. Learning, memory, and family and cultural conditioning collude to form how we perceive the world. There is no moment when we, as individuals and as a society, are not navigating the body-mind’s responses to the world, because every moment conditions the next.

The question is, how are we navigating these responses? If we choose to let wisdom guide us, our responses are intentional, and our movement through this life is conscious. If we choose to ignore our power to learn, our responses are habitual, and our movement through life is unconscious. Depending upon which choice we make, there is suffering or there is peace; there is cruelty or harmlessness.

The Promise of the Noble Eightfold Path

The Buddha recognized the suffering born of the body-mind’s endless appetite, and despite the enormous challenges presented by his own untrained mind, he found his way clear to setting down the burden.

He described the human predicament in the Four Noble Truths. The first noble truth is the suffering (dukkha), at once blunt and subtle, of the driven life. His second noble truth recognized that suffering is born of the sensitive body-mind’s endless appetite. The organism’s longing for pleasure and stability is the urgent energy, the hunger (taṇhā), that drives suffering. His third noble truth, that cessation of this hunger will free us from the self-inflicted pain of dukkha, provides a wholly new vision of human and social possibility: we need not be prisoners of our own ignorance and craving; a profoundly better life is possible for ourselves and for all. The fourth noble truth names the Noble Eightfold Path as the wisdom that, when applied intentionally, leads to a diminishing and even cessation of the ignorance and hunger that has been so painful for ourselves, so limiting to our relationships, and so harmful for society. The wisdom inherent in the Buddha’s path allows us to navigate the body-mind’s responses with greater dignity, choice, kindness, and the joy and equanimity intrinsic to awareness.

The Noble Eightfold Path, described by the early Buddhist texts and carried forward in multiple Buddhist religions, draws from the exceptional experience of an exceptional teacher. These teachings were offered as practical guidance for navigating the tangles at the intersection of the human organism and its changing environment, and the perspective is offered by someone who successfully traversed the path from bio-psycho-social reactivity to freedom of response within this very body and mind.1 The Buddha’s eight path factors — right view (sammā ditṭṭhi), right intention (sammā saṅkappa), right speech (sammā vācā), right action (sammā kammanta), right livelihood (sammā ājīva), right effort (sammā vāyāma), right mindfulness (sammā sati), and right samādhi (sammā samādhi) — provide guidance for developing the mind and acting in the world. The teachings have been tested for millennia. They offer a wiser, more effective navigation system than whatever we might cobble together from our family, cultural, and formal education.

A Whole-Life Path: An Immersive Path for Buddhist Laypeople

How much of the Path’s full promise we experience depends on how we engage it. When we dabble in the teachings, we can experience a fraction of its liberative power, but not enough to fully escape from the body-mind’s relentless habits or offer our highest gifts to a suffering planet. To bring about the profound shifts we aspire to, both within ourselves and in our world, we must bring the teachings into every corner, every facet, every moment of our lives.

Historically, an immersive life has been available mostly to monastics, whose vow essentially stipulates a whole-life engagement with Buddhist principles and practices. But the Buddha’s eight path factors can be applied to the totality of our lives as laypeople if we break down each path factor to its essences, then recast it with the assumption that each must encompass life as we actually live it today — with other people, sex, money, social injustice, technology, jobs, complex financial systems, and so on. A whole-life path is one in which the eight path factors are understood and intentionally applied in such a way that, taken together, no moment and no aspect of our individual or collective lives is left out.

The purpose of this book is to help you skillfully craft a whole-life path for yourself. It will point you to the breadth and depth, and the particulars, of the Dhamma’s liberating possibilities and how they can be applied to every aspect of life — personal, relational, and social. You might think of it as a layperson’s guide to a life inspired by monastic immersion, but that also values the challenges and opportunities of living in the cultured wilds of humanity.

Chapter 2 provides six tenets of a whole-life path. These tenets convey a sense of possibility and basic principles for applying the Dhamma in a whole-life way. They will help you absorb a sense of an always-on path and of how the riches of the early Buddhist teachings can come alive in your life.

Chapter 3 continues with a short look at “the path to the path.” The Buddha taught that the practices of giving, morality, and true friendliness (mettā) come first, before the Dhamma of the Four Noble Truths. These are all relational practices, and none of them are optional. We then look at some basic frameworks for assessing the whole-life path to see whether we’re on track. What does “right” mean in right view or right speech? What is wholesome and skillful? What is Dhamma, and what is not Dhamma? These frameworks will provide reference points throughout the remainder of the book.

Chapters 4 through 11 are dedicated to the eight factors of the Noble Eightfold Path. Each chapter includes a summary of the traditional understanding of the path factor. Then it exte...