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Eightfold complete path - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 12, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Well, good morning everyone. Is the volume okay for you all? Thank you. Thank you for being here.

Yesterday, I hosted a conversation between a Palestinian and an Israeli insight teacher. One of the things that sparked the topic for today was that one of them described some of the difficulty of Palestinians going into mostly Israeli insight meditation groups and retreats, which are quite common in Israel. They have a retreat center that hosts 100 people and they do 45 retreats a year. So it's a quite a big, active place.

But one of the challenges, I was told, was that it's almost inherent in the Buddhism that's presented—this is more my language—that the ethos, the way to package or organize or present Buddhism, was very much shaped by the founders of the Western insight movement. There was a group of Western teachers like Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and others who had practiced in Asia. In Asia, most of them had practiced in traditions of Buddhism where mindfulness meditation was emphasized more than anything else. It was a retreat tradition where people would go and do retreats. In the context of Buddhist Asia, they were teaching in a wider context where all of Buddhism was included, so you don't have to include everything.

I don't know if this is a silly example, but maybe in a country where there are no roads yet and no cars, no signs, no traffic lights, driver's ed has to include a lot. But in a country where all those things are established, driver's education can be much more focused and narrower in what people are taught. So in these Buddhist Asian countries, so much of Buddhism was included. But these Westerners who came and practiced there were introduced to just this intense mode of being on retreat.

So these teachers from the Middle East were saying that for people not acculturated in a kind of Western ethos, or a white, post-60s counterculture kind of world, it doesn't quite work to just emphasize mindfulness. What's useful is to emphasize the Eightfold Path, which is much broader. It's not just about sitting with your eyes closed and being mindful, but an orientation of how to live your life amidst its challenges. And the challenges that exist in Israel and Palestine are huge. Both of these teachers talked about the ongoing physical danger they have living in Israel, with rockets flying literally over their homes. One of them said that rockets fly over their home about 10 times a day, living one mile from the Lebanese border. So in that context, what does Buddhism have to offer?

I'm very happy that here at IMC, one of the really strong offerings we have is a year-long program on the Eightfold Path. A hundred-plus people sign up for it every year, and a lot of the senior practitioners and teachers at IMC are involved in mentoring people through it. I feel like it's a foundation for what we have to offer here. We have a book on the Eightfold Path that we've done, so I think we offer it somewhat, but it's been a while since I've talked about it on a Sunday. So inspired by yesterday's conversation, that will be the topic: the Eightfold Path.

Eight fold complete path (link)

The context for the Buddha's first teaching, the Eightfold Path, is important because it was apparently the very first thing that came out of his mouth as a teaching after he was awakened. Before he had gone forth to seek awakening, the legend is that he lived a luxurious life in a palace. He was the son of a king and had this life where he was very protected from the suffering and challenges of the world. Maybe it's like someone growing up in some of the mega-estates here on the peninsula, in neighborhoods where you don't see much beyond the neighborhood and private schools and things like that.

So he left that behind. What was available to him at the time? There were no universities to go to. There was no one offering an Eightfold Path program you could take for a year once a month. There was very little of the kind of things that we're used to. The only avenue for him to go forth and find a whole different way of living was to become a renunciant. The renunciant tradition was a place intensely engaged in learning, study, and exploration, trying to engage in some of the major existential issues of human life. That's where you went to study it, and you could do it and be supported because the culture at the time wanted to support people in that engagement. In the modern world, maybe we provide college scholarships for people to be able to go and study and develop, go to medical school, or what have you. But they were living in the Bronze Age, so many of the institutions we know that support people were not available. But there was this cultural norm that people who went forth as renunciants were supported with the basic necessities of their life. So it was a way of studying and practicing that was supported culturally.

He said that one form of that renunciant life—there were two major versions of it—was to be an ascetic and practice asceticism. This involved denying oneself pleasures, food, and all kinds of luxuries. He did it to the point of coming to the edge of death. He ate so little. The ancient texts say that some people actually found him lying on the ground, emaciated, and thought he was dead. He realized himself that he was on the edge and said, paraphrasing, "If I take just one more little step in the ascetic direction, I'm going to die for no purpose." There was no value in it. So he decided, "There has to be another way."

During that time of exploring, he also went to study the second major form of renunciation that he knew about, which was not asceticism but rather meditation practice. But the meditation practices that were known back then, at least the ones he studied, were ones that disconnected the meditator from ordinary, everyday life. In fact, it disconnected oneself from one's own physical and emotional life, taking people into very rarified states where there was very little perception, no sense of the body, no sense of the world around you. It was a deep state. Some psychologists would hear these descriptions and say, "Wow, that's dissociative." In fact, I meet people who, because of their tremendous difficulties growing up, have learned to dissociate, and they actually go into some of these rarified states as a way of being safe or protecting themselves. So whether the Buddha was dissociating exactly is not so clear, but these were deep states he learned that had no connection to our embodied life, our emotional life, our psychological life, or the life we have around us.

So that was the background for him: a life of luxury, a life of radical asceticism and self-denial, and a life of this kind of meditation which, while profound, disconnects us from our embodied life.

It's said in these ancient stories of the Buddha that when he realized these three ways weren't the way forward, he was thinking, "What do I do?" And then he remembered a time when he was young when the conditions were just right. It was a comfortable spring day, he was sitting in the shade of a nice rose apple tree, and there were nice activities around him that didn't require anything of him that he could watch, a kind of festival going on in the distance. And he somehow dropped into a deep state of unification, of harmony, that was connected to the body, connected to the world, but provided him with a lot of peace. He gave it the name the first Jhana¹, the first level of absorption.

He remembered having that experience as a child and he realized this is not asceticism, it's not disconnecting from the world and myself, and it's not caused by luxury. There's a joy and a well-being here, but it's not one that is born from living a luxurious life, getting a massage, or having endless Netflix to watch. He said, "This is actually healthy. This is a safe and appropriate well-being to have," in this deep state of embodied connection to myself, settled here and coming into a deep harmony with our inner state. "This is the way forward. This is the way to the freedom from suffering I was looking for." And so with that intuition, he followed those states and what opened in them to his awakening.

Then he set forth to find someone he could teach what he had learned. He had five companions, other renunciants with whom he had practiced the ascetic life. When he decided to stop the ascetic life and eat some rice, they were disgusted with him because now he was living a life of luxury. They rejected him. But he thought that they would understand him. And in fact, when he found them, they first rejected him. But there was something about his peace, his joy, his disposition, the way he appeared to them, that they couldn't ignore him. He was so radiant.

At first, they wouldn't listen to him. He said, "I've experienced awakening. I've experienced what we were looking for." They kept rejecting him. And he said to them something like, "Have I ever made this claim before? Have I ever lied to you before?" They said, "No, no, you've never." "Well, maybe you should listen." So then they were willing to listen.

And the first thing he said was, "There is a middle way between luxury, self-indulgence, and asceticism. There is another way." That's how he began. The word for way, patipada², can mean a practice, a way, a manner, a method. Was he teaching them a method to awakening, or was he teaching them a way of living the awakened life? It wasn't so much a way to something, but how to live in this world. And that's the middle way between self-indulgence in pleasures and asceticism.

What is this middle way? For many years, I thought the middle way was the midpoint of a range between sensual indulgence and asceticism, the fulcrum in the middle, the balance point you had to find. But I don't think there's any reason that's the reference point. It was called the "two extremes," so maybe that's why I thought that way. But another way of understanding this word "middle," which goes along with other things the Buddha taught, refers to the middle of the forest, of the jungle—the path, the way forward, the place to walk. An opening, a path in the forest, is a clearing, an absence of obstacles. If you go any other way into the forest... I've been in forests where it was actually dangerous to walk because there were no reference points for knowing where you were. I was once on a side river to the Amazon, in the middle of nowhere, and on my own, I left the river, which was a clear place, and walked into the Amazon. After about 50 feet, I became afraid. I looked around and said, "Wait a minute, there's nothing here that will tell me where I am and what direction to return." Everything was homogeneous, so similar. And the canopy was so strong I couldn't see where the sun was. It's like, "I'll never find my way back." When I was younger, I was relatively good at being in the wilderness, so I came back. But there was no path to follow.

So this opening, this clearing, is the place to go forward where there are no obstacles. Whereas if you take the path of sensual indulgence or the path of asceticism, it's full of traps. You'll lose yourself in that world and you won't find your way out.

So then he said, "And what is this middle way?" And then he described it as eight different things. It's called the Noble Eightfold Path. "Fold" just means it's all one big thing, but you fold it up into eight folds. You have to think of it as a whole, not as different parts. The word used in the ancient language is anga³, which means eight members or eight appendages, like arms and legs. It's all part of the same body.

And then each of these eight he refers to in the ancient language as samma⁴, which in English is usually translated as "right." It's rare that an English speaker loves the word "right," and then we have to explain, "Well, it means this and that," just to make it right for us. I like to translate it as: Right View, Right Attitude, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Lifestyle, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Samadhi⁵ (unification or concentration).

But it turns out the word samma has deeper, richer meanings in Pali and Sanskrit than the word "right" does in English. Another word, maybe one we don't want to use but is a fair translation, is "consummate." It's complete. It's fulfilled. It's the fulfilled folds of the path. It's the fully entered into, the complete. We become complete with them in a certain way. And it refers in this sense not to individual practices we do, but rather to a kind of experience of fulfillment or wholeness or completeness that a person has who enters into this Eightfold Path. This idea of "entering into it" is part of the language, as opposed to, "Let's get busy, there's eight things to do."

The Buddha taught this as the first thing he discovered. And there are two ways that he taught this Eightfold Path in the 40 years that he taught. One way he taught it was as practices you can do that lead to awakening. The other way he taught it is that it's how an awakened life is lived. There are eight ways in which awakening is expressed or manifested in a person who is awake, who has been liberated. And that's probably what he was saying when he first started teaching his five friends. He had just been awakened, and he was now offering a radically different way to live life than people had known. "This is the way that we can live. This is the way you can live." And maybe he knew right then and there that it had two functions: it was both a way to awakening and an expression of that awakening.

It's a life of action, of being connected to this world. The middle sections of it—Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Lifestyle—have to do with how we live in this world. It's not radically becoming an ascetic and stepping away from this world. It's not getting lost in all the temptations of the world. It's smack in the middle of it, but in a different way, in a way where there's an open path of freedom through it.

The last three—Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Samadhi—are more about the inner world. Right Effort is usually considered the psychological effort, the mental way in which we engage. Mindfulness and Samadhi are more the inner world. But all three of these involve a very deep, clear connection to oneself. It's not a disassociation; I would like to say it's the opposite of that. It's a complete association, completely being present, knowing oneself thoroughly inside, not disconnecting but discovering and expanding and growing into all of who our potential is.

And then the first two are called the wisdom factors of the Eightfold Path: Right View and Right Attitude. The core way in which the Buddha taught Right View is fascinating. And this is also where we see that the Eightfold Path has these two different orientations: it's the expression of someone who's free, and it's also the path to becoming free.

The first, Right View, the right orientation or perspective, one teacher I know calls it the right "frame of reference." There are many frames of reference you can have in your life, and many of us have unconscious frames of reference for how we find our way in the world. This is a frame of reference that the Buddha offers that can help you find that middle way. And I'll paraphrase it here: pay attention, really pay attention, take seriously your suffering. If that's a frightening word, take seriously the stress you live with. If anything, the bumper sticker in Buddhism is "I stop for suffering. I stop for stress." We're not supposed to tolerate stress. We're not supposed to tolerate our personal suffering in Buddhism. We want to stop and pay attention to it and see it clearly so that we can see the alternative. We can see where there's no stress, that space, that clearing in the forest where there are no obstacles.

The suffering we're trying to address in Buddhism is the suffering that is a result of an obstacle that we have created—the jungles that we have created for ourselves through grasping, clinging, craving, through tightening, through shutting down, through narrowing the scope to our preoccupations. So the orientation, the frame of reference in this first step of the Eightfold Path is, "Hey, pay attention to stress and the absence of it." Right there, there's a very powerful lesson. And then take seriously that you have the capacity to live without stress. Or if that seems like too grand an impossible goal, maybe you can live without some of your stress. Maybe there are some small things you can relax and let go of. Maybe you don't have to go look at the next Netflix film when you've already been up until 2:00 in the morning. Maybe you can let go of that. There's less stress in that. So you can lower your standards so that it's doable. If your standards are too high for what the absence of stress is, that's stressful.

But look and notice. And when you know where you're not stressed out, that highlights when you now get stressed. That is a key, central insight in insight meditation: when you're not suffering, when you're not caught, to notice when you do get caught, when that stress of being caught happens. And then you can ask yourself the question, "Is this worth it? Is this appropriate? Is this helpful? Is this useful?" If you answer yes to all of those, then you have to ask one more question: "Am I going to harm anyone if I do this?" Don't harm anyone. But if you answer, "Yes, this stress is good for me, it's healthy, and it's not harming anyone," then maybe go ahead and do it. And it's true, sometimes there is stress. Exercise is sometimes stressful; you're tearing your muscles. That's what they say these days, that you need to tear your muscles apart so they can grow. When I first heard this idea, I said, "What? I'm injuring my muscles so they get stronger?" So there might be appropriate stress to have in life.

But the goal is to understand more and more all the unnecessary, harmful stress that we carry. It's one of the primary illnesses of modern society. I call it an illness because it's contagious; we pass it on to everyone else. If we don't care for it, it grows and develops and expands, and it has all these secondary effects, like a heart attack and other things. All kinds of illnesses happen, and I think part of the source is the stress that people live under—chronic stress, chronic physical tension.

So to begin really becoming your own expert, to really see where there's a lack of stress—and that's one of the benefits of meditation, though other things can do that as well—and then you see where you add stress to it. That's important. "Look at that, I didn't have stress, and now I do. What do I believe? What am I doing? What's my fear here? Is there another way?" And the Buddha was saying there is another way. There is another way to be in the world, to act in the world, to participate in this world in a full, complete way that can be done without stress, without suffering.

For a person who is liberated, fully matured in this practice, they're not going to do anything based on clinging. Clinging is finished for them. And so these other factors of the Eightfold Path are often described as the absence of something. Right Speech is the absence of harmful speech. It's hard to intentionally engage in harmful speech without clinging to something. Someone who doesn't cling, it's going to be very hard to deliberately use speech to harm, to lie. Someone who doesn't cling, it's very, very unlikely that they're going to deliberately kill someone or steal from someone or engage in sexual misconduct. And if someone is not clinging to anything, chances are their way of living, their livelihood, is not going to be based on clinging.

Then we come to the sixth step, Right Effort, which is all about having the deep inner sensitivity to recognize how some mental activities—thoughts, intentions, purposes—fuel our speech and drive our actions in the world. Are those mental states causing stress or the absence of stress? Are they nourishing us or are they undermining us? That's one of the roles of mindfulness: to be really attentive to the source of how we speak and act, which begins in our mind.

And there again, the idea is a radical absence of clinging. Someone who's liberated is not going to have any clinging in their mind, so they're not going to pick up and engage in the kind of mental activities that lead to harmful speech and actions. Right Concentration has a lot to do with what we don't do. The first instruction I got when I went to Thailand in concentration practice was that it's mostly letting go. You get concentrated by just letting go, thoroughly and well. Letting go of what? Tension, attachment, clinging.

So someone who's awakened, this is how they live. This is expressed in the ancient teachings that when someone has the first real, deep transformation inside where they understand how stress works and the absence of stress is possible, it's always going to be a reference point for them. It's said they've "entered the current," they've entered a stream which is going to start carrying them to greater and greater freedom, greater and greater letting go of clinging and stress. Someone asked, "Well, what is this current we're entering into?" And he said, "It's the Eightfold Path." At some point, the experience of non-clinging manifests itself in this current within us, of behaving and living by these beautiful qualities. It's not what we do so much, but how we are.

However, the Eightfold Path is also what we do. And there are two ways in which we do them as practices. One, we just do them out of blind faith. We've heard it's a good idea, and we trust this Buddhist stuff enough—not to believe abstract truths, but to believe that maybe if I behave this way, this is good for me. Let me try it out. And it's safe to try it out because it involves activity that I can see the results of for myself. So if it doesn't work, I'll stop doing it. I'm going to get the proof that this is useful.

Or, it's not done on faith, but rather we start having this glimmer of insight about stress and the absence of it, watching what we're doing when we cling and grasp and how this is not a good deal. We know for ourselves it's not a good deal. And because of that, the other seven steps of the Eightfold Path make total sense. "Of course I don't want to act in the world in a way that involves clinging. Of course I don't want to continue with the mental habits that cause more stress for me." Of course, it's not that easy to do. But now, the Eightfold Path becomes something that you take ownership of yourself because it's obvious to you. No one has to tell you. It's not an act of faith. You actually see the cause and effect that's going on, and you know, "This is how I want to live. These are the practices I want to live by."

So the big emphasis I wanted to make here today is that these first teachings the Buddha gave highlighted not a life of disassociation from this world, but a life of really being connected to yourself, connected to this world. How we live and act in the world and how we respond to the world is center stage for what Buddhism is about. It might look a little bit like we're leaving the world behind if we go on a mindfulness retreat. The thing that becomes a bit of a surprise is how much you bring with you. And sometimes you realize you didn't even know you were carrying the world so heavily on your mind.

For example, the longest retreat I did, where I mostly stayed in a room by myself, was eight months. It was one of the best times of my life, really phenomenal. It had its challenges, but it was pretty wonderful. And in the depth of that meditation, when I was really, really still, peaceful, quiet, I kind of felt like I'd reached the depth of my mind. And I was still having all these thoughts about my status, my place among my friends, what people thought about me. And I said, "Wait a minute, how did my social life, all my friends and activities and places I worked, how did they make their way into the depth of my mind? They shouldn't be in there." I was caught somehow. So I said, "Okay, I'm not going to go back to that world until I get all those people, all those things, out of that deep, peaceful, personal place in my own mind." So I made this vow. And then I came back, and now I'm part of this world. But hopefully without too much of all of you somehow caught in the depth of where I can be free.

So those are my thoughts about the Eightfold Path today. We have a few minutes if anyone wants to make any questions or comments or protests.

Q&A

Questioner: Hi Gil. There's this phrase, Sama-sambuddha⁶. Is that the same samma?

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, it is.

Questioner: Because that is "complete" there, right?

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah.

Questioner: Cool. Nice. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: Are we complete? [Laughter]

Questioner: Thank you for your reflections. Could you say something more about when silence is not right speech?

Gil Fronsdal: Well, yes, silence is a fascinating topic. I've thought sometimes we should have a dictionary of all the different things silence means. Sometimes it's very harmful. Sometimes it's a way of profound disrespect of people, a profound denial of their existence. Sometimes it's passive-aggressive. Sometimes it's lying, avoiding talking about the truth. So yes, silence should be done wisely. Maybe silence can be considered socially as an act of communication. Even if you think you're in a large group of people and no one notices you're there, it's a way of communicating something. Maybe it's the right thing. Maybe you're communicating interest; you're not speaking because you're really interested and curious. But you might be communicating something else. You might be communicating fear, and fear is a little bit contagious. Is that an okay answer?

Reflections

Okay. So we have a few minutes before the tea will be ready and before the formal ending. Those of you who'd like to stay for tea, or those of you who'd like to stay for a few minutes, it would be lovely if you would turn to someone near you—it could be one or two or three people—and just say hello. Did this talk touch anything interesting for you? Or maybe just introduce yourself. Whatever you'd like to do. If you do stay, look around and make sure that no one is left sitting there alone. We want to be inclusive of everyone here. And everyone's welcome to stay for the tea. It'll be ready in a few minutes. And I look forward to saying hello to more of you. So, if you can, say hello to each other.