Your life is the path
Richard Heeps - ‘Cats’, from an old postcard.
As a Buddhist, I’m practising the 3-fold path of ethics, meditation and wisdom. It’s one of many models of the path, but a crucial one.
What teaching is this model pointing to?
Our ethical practice is the foundation for our meditation practice. And our meditation practice is the foundation for insight or wisdom.
Or, put another way, the arising of insight depends upon samadhi, a calm and concentrated mind. And to have a calm and concentrated mind, we have to live a ‘good’ life.
Like all models, there’s always a tendency to take them literally, so I started asking myself:
What would the 3-fold path look like if I included everything that is part of my practice or conducive to practice?
You see below how I changed the usual image, a pyramid divided into 3 distinct sections, into something more fluid.
There’s a place where the ethics of everyday life merges into meditation and another where meditation merges into insight.
I was especially interested in this intermingling space.
The base is ethical action. It’s how I try to set up my life in helpful ways. How I take care of the basic functions of being a human being, connected to others and living on planet Earth.
These day-to-day activities merge with the next section, meditation. In that merging place, I’ve put the following; writing, gardening, creativity and doing nothing.
At the top of the pyramid is wisdom, ‘a turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness.
Again, I was curious about what’s in the space where meditation merges with wisdom. I have; ‘paying attention’, awareness and ‘existential curiosity’.
What would you put in those spaces?
(I wanted to share this now before the image became too crowded, but I plan to add in much more!)
Turn your own life into the path -
Here’s how my thinking went:
If the 3-fold path is a complete path then surely what we think of as ‘ethics’ must include all of our activities? All our actions are ‘perfumed’ in some way. Every little choice we make has some consequence.
Then, if the base of the pyramid holds so much more than I originally assumed, maybe the part of the path called samadhi, or meditation, also contains much more than I think.
Try it with your own life:
Make a little pyramid which shows how the three sections merge into one another, rather than being divided by distinct lines.
Then start adding in everything in your life that is a part of your practice or conducive to practice.
Take time to ponder on what goes where especially in those merging places.
