The Noble Eightfold Path

The eight factors are traditionally grouped into three trainings rather than presented as eight sequential stages. Panna, wisdom, comprises right view, understanding the four truths and the working of karma, and right intention, a disposition free of ill will and cruelty. Sila, ethical conduct, comprises right speech, avoiding falsehood, divisive talk, harsh speech and idle chatter, right action, avoiding killing, stealing and sexual misconduct, and right livelihood, avoiding trades that cause direct harm, traditionally including the trade in weapons, living beings, meat, intoxicants and poison. Samadhi, mental discipline, comprises right effort, the sustained work of abandoning unwholesome states and cultivating wholesome ones, right mindfulness, sustained attention to body, feeling, mind and mental objects, and right concentration, the four absorptions, jhanas, that steady the mind.

The Pali term samma, usually rendered right, carries a sense closer to complete, thorough or well-directed than to a moral pass mark, and the eight factors are described as mutually reinforcing rather than sequential: right view orients the other seven, and progress in ethical conduct and concentration in turn deepens right view. The path is also called the Middle Way, positioned by the Buddha's own account between the sensual indulgence he left behind as a prince and the extreme asceticism he abandoned after nearly starving himself in pursuit of it.

Mahayana Buddhism keeps the eightfold path but folds it inside a larger structure built around the six or ten paramitas, perfections, and the bodhisattva vow to liberate all beings before entering final nirvana oneself; ethical conduct and concentration in the eightfold scheme map onto sila and dhyana among the perfections, while the wisdom factor expands into the systematic study of emptiness. Zen and Chan traditions, working from the same base, place unusual weight on right concentration and right mindfulness as cultivated directly in seated meditation, zazen, sometimes treating extended doctrinal analysis of the other factors as secondary to direct practice, a position associated with the slogan that Zen is a transmission outside the scriptures.

Tibetan Buddhism absorbs the eightfold path into graded-path literature, lamrim, where it appears as the practice appropriate to a practitioner seeking personal liberation, one of three capacities the texts describe before moving on to the bodhisattva's motivation and, for initiates, tantric method. Right livelihood in particular has taken on distinct emphasis across cultures: the prohibition on trading in living beings and meat shaped debates over vegetarianism differently in Theravada Southeast Asia, where almsfood is eaten as offered, and in Mahayana East Asia, where several traditions expect monastics to abstain from meat outright.