Читать книгу 20 MINUTES TO MASTER … BUDDHISM - Kulananda - Страница 14

Translators usually render the Pali word samma, which is prefixed to all of the eight limbs or aspects of the Noble Eightfold Path, as ‘right’, but this can give the wrong impression, as if there were a simple ‘right’ way of doing things as opposed to the ‘wrong’ way, and that one could easily get the path ‘right’ and have done with it. But the Buddhist path isn’t quite so simply divided into ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. It is more developmental than that, for it is a path of practice, where there is always room for improvement. Rather than ‘right’ we can use the word ‘perfect’.

The Noble Eightfold Path therefore consists of Perfect Vision, Perfect Emotion, Perfect Speech, Perfect Action, Perfect Livelihood, Perfect Effort, Perfect Awareness and Perfect Samadhi.1

The Path isn’t traversed in simple consecutive steps. We don’t start with vision, move on to emotion, then speech, action, livelihood etc. Rather, one works in different ways on different aspects all the time. But there are various ways in which the different aspects of this path can be grouped. One of the most basic is to divide it into the Path of Vision and the Path of Transformation.

The Path of Vision consists only of the stage of Perfect Vision. It begins when we catch a first glimpse of an entirely different way of being. The Path of Transformation comprises the other seven aspects of the Path and is the means by which we completely reorient every facet of our being in such a way that it begins to accord with that initial vision.