Developing the Path
February 09, 2023

The duty with regard to the noble eightfold path, the fourth noble truth, is to develop it. Think about the implications of that: a truth that you develop. It’s not already true for you. It’s not sitting out there some place, already true that you can verify without giving rise to it within yourself.

It reminds you of William James’s distinction between truths of the observer and truths of the will. With truths of the observer, the more you want something to be a certain way, the less likely you are to see it as it actually is. Truths of the will, though, require that you want them to be true for them to actually become true. For example, suppose you want to become a musician. For that to become true requires work on your part. It requires that you want it enough to do the necessary work. If you just sit around waiting for it to become true, it’s not going to happen. This is why, when the Buddha was asked how many people would follow the path all the way to awakening, he didn’t answer because it was going to depend on each person’s choices.

So the fact that this is a truth that you develop means that you have to do it. Which is why the Buddha said that you don’t simply go by texts, what’s said in the books. Say you learn about right view. When you first learn about it, it’s just words. The words seem to make sense, but to know whether they’re true, whether they point you in the right direction, you have to put them into practice.

When the Buddha was talking to the Kalamas, he told them, “Don’t go by texts, don’t go by teachers. Also don’t go by what seems reasonable to you.” These things can inspire you to practice, but you can’t take them as the final arbiter of truth. It’s when you put a particular teaching into practice and see what kind of results you get that you know whether you’ve found something truly good or not.

Even though the path begins with right view, right view doesn’t become really right until you’ve developed the path as a whole. Right view is something you develop. It’s not just sitting there. How right it is, you’re not going to know until you’ve completed the duties for all the noble truths. That includes developing all the factors of the path.

You see this in some of the other ways that the Buddha lines up the factors of the path, as when he talks about the five strengths and the five faculties. For discernment to become a faculty—in other words, a dominant factor in your mind—you have to actually develop conviction, persistence—which includes developing virtue—and then mindfulness and concentration. In other words, all the factors of the path have to be developed for right view to really become strong, to have a good solid foundation.

Not only do you have to do the path, but you also have to be true in doing it. A while back, I was reading a piece by someone saying that the Buddha was a good post-modernist. He didn’t claim that anything was particularly true. He believed that each person had to find his or her own truth. But you look at the way the Buddha taught. He wasn’t just spinning out ideas. He had actually tested these things and saw that the truth was one: the same for all people. There is such a thing as the truth.

He also gave a training in being true.

You see this in the Vinaya. There are three areas in the Vinaya where truth is really important. One is being true in your perceptions. In other words, there are rules that really depend on how truly you perceive the object, how truly you perceive the situation. That will determine how serious the offense is if you break the rule or come close to breaking it. So you really have to be careful about how you perceive things.

Then there’s the issue of accusations. On the one hand, the person who’s being accused has to give a truthful account of what he did and what he didn’t do. The person who’s making the accusation has to give a truthful account of what the basis is for his accusation: Is it based on something he saw, something he heard, or simply something he suspected? He has to be truthful in accounting for that.

These three kinds of truths carry over into the practice. Think about the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula. The very first instruction is about being truthful: observing truthfully what you’ve done and reporting truthfully what you’ve done. As he said, if you lack the quality of truthfulness, then your quality of a contemplative is meager, thrown away, turned over, empty.

The image he gave was of a water dipper. Rahula had set out some water for the Buddha to wash his feet, and the Buddha left a little bit of water in the dipper. He said, “Do you see how little the water is in the dipper? That’s how little the goodness there is in someone who tells a deliberate lie with no sense of shame.” Then he threw the water away. “See how that’s been thrown away?” Then he showed him the empty dipper. “See how empty it is?” Then he turned it over. “See how it’s turned upside down?” In each case, it was a symbol for what happens to the goodness of someone who tells a deliberate lie with no sense of shame. So truthfulness is the right basis of the practice.

Then he tells Rahula to look at his actions: before, as he’s intending an action; while he’s doing it; and after he’s done it. In each case, if he anticipates harm, he shouldn’t do the action. If he sees that the action is causing harm while he’s doing it, he should stop. He looks over the long term, after the action is done, to see if there was some harm done. If there was, then he should resolve not to repeat it and he should develop a sense of shame around that action, a healthy kind of shame.

Now, all this depends on the ability to notice exactly what’s happening. That ability to make sure your perceptions are in line with the truth gets borne out here. Your ability to give a truthful account of what you’ve done so that you can know what cause and effect are—what really is skillful, what’s not skillful—gets borne out here as well.

There’s that other introductory instruction that the Buddha gave to Rahula before he taught him meditation: to make his mind like earth. He’s not telling Rahula simply just to sit and watch and do nothing. But he is saying, “Make your mind strong so you can really be a good observer.” It’s an important part of truthfulness, too. Remember that.

The Buddha commented elsewhere that what he wanted in a student was that the student, one, be observant and, two, be truthful. In teaching Rahula, he’s giving instructions on how to do that. Part of that is to make your mind really solid so it’s not perturbed by pleasant or unpleasant things. You’re not running away from what’s unpleasant; you’re not running toward what’s pleasant. If you’re running around, you can’t see anything clearly. You have to make the mind stand still, solid and unshakable, if you want to see the truth.

As for giving an account of where your knowledge comes from, it’s very important that you know, when you believe something, that you have to be true to yourself and ask, “On the basis of what do I believe this?” There are some really strong true believers whose knowledge is based on what they’ve heard or what they’ve read. But that’s not knowledge. It’s hearsay. So you have to be very careful yourself to make sure that when you believe something, you know clearly why you believe it. The Buddha calls this safeguarding the truth. It’s a quality you need as you practice so that you can look objectively at your opinions. Ask yourself, “How solidly based is that particular opinion? Do I really know it?”

When you’re following the path, it’s not simply a matter of following instructions. As the Buddha said, the Dhamma is nourished by committing yourself—in other words, truthfully practicing it as best as you can, as honestly as you can—and then by reflecting: What are the actual results you’re getting? It’s in the reflection that you learn. You can actually see: You did this, you got these results. When you’ve been trained in giving a truthful account of what you’ve done, and being clear about your perceptions of things, making sure they’re accurate, then your reflection will bear fruit.

Think of the Buddha’s instructions in mindfulness: learning how to recognize states of mind as they arise and figuring out, if something has arisen, whether it’s something that should be abandoned or something that should be developed. You have to have a clear perception. When a hindrance arises, you have to recognize it as a hindrance. When something connected with the factors for awakening arises in the mind, you have to recognize that, too, because then you know what to do with it. Otherwise, you start listening to your desires or to your ill-will or to your doubts. Or you stomp all over whatever mindfulness or concentration you may have because it doesn’t fit in line with what you thought concentration should be like.

I suffered from that myself in the very beginning. I was pretty sure that if your mind got concentrated, you had to have visions. But there were no visions. I told myself that I must have wrong concentration. So I just threw away what I had and tried to find something else. It took me a while to realize the concentration was there. It just wasn’t doing what my pre-conceived notions had told me it would do. I was throwing away things I should have developed.

So you’re dealing with a truth that you do and you have to be true in doing it if you want to find the truth, if you want that truth to become true within you. The word for developing in Pali—bhavana—basically means “making become,” “bringing into being.” You know the Buddha’s image is of a path. We think of a path as something that’s already there and you just follow it. And it is there in the sense that you follow the instructions. But it’s a path where you have to build bridges over valleys and other obstacles. In other words, you have to do some construction work here, which is why the Buddha also uses the analogy of the raft. You put together the raft out of what? Twigs and branches on this side of the river—in other words, your fabrications of the five aggregates. You put them together in a way that will take you across the river. And while you’re crossing, you hold on.

Then, when you get to the other side, that’s when you let it go. After all, in either case, whether it’s a raft or a path, it’s a means to an end. And the end is something very different from the means. The path is fabricated, put together. The goal is not. It’s unfabricated. So there will come a point when you’ll have to put the path down.

But before you do that, you have to make it true. So, one, you do it. Two, you’re true in doing it. That’s how you guarantee the truth, because no one’s going to come into your mind and say, “Bing, you got it!” You have to learn how to make yourself trustworthy so that you can trust your judgments about what’s happening, your judgments about what you’re doing and the results you’re getting.

This is one of the reasons why we have the Vinaya for the monks and the precepts for the lay people. They give you practice in being true on a day-to-day level: being true in your perceptions, true in your accounts of what you’ve done, and true in your acknowledgement of the basis of your knowledge. When you can develop those kinds of truth, then you’re in a position where you can judge: Does the noble eightfold path actually lead to the end of suffering? That’s something that only true people can know.