This factor right here, right speech.
Says that you not only have to avoid saying things that are
not true, you actually have to avoid saying mean things about people.
Avoid ideal gossip.
And I don't know about you, but if I were to try to
completely eliminate gossip from my life,
that would take some pretty serious reform.
Maybe if you offered me nirvana in exchange for
it, I could do it, but I'm not honestly sure.
Then when we get to the meditative part of the
path, there's more heavy lifting to be done, more hard work.
And one reason the work is hard
is because, remember, to get to liberation, we're
supposed to abandon craving, abandon clinging, we're
supposed to lose our aversion to unpleasant things.
And that's obviously not going to be easy.
Meditation isn't the only thing that goes
into cultivating that kind of discipline, but
it's a big part of it and it's going to take a lot of work.
There's another reason that meditation is going to involve
work if you want to get all the way to Nirvana.
And that is that remember, this isn't just liberation, it's enlightenment.
It's seeing the essence of reality clearly as the Buddha taught it.
And part of doing that is back up here in the first factor of the path, right view.
That's when you try to gain
an intellectual understanding of Buddhist doctrine.
But it's in the meditative part of the path where
you try to gain an experiential understanding of Buddhist doctrine.
So, for example, with the idea of impermanence you would meditate and,
and thereby gain just an intuitive
apprehension of the impermanence of things.
The impermanence of your feelings, of your thoughts,
and of everything that comes into your mind and
this apprehension would in turn reinforce the intellectual understanding
of Buddhist doctrine and strengthen your commitment to it.
Now you might ask, if it takes so much work.
To attain liberation, how many people have actually done it?
Well, this question came up in a conversation I recently had
on a website I run called
bloggingheads.tv, where we have video dialogues.
I was talking to a very highly esteemed Buddhist scholar and monk named Biku
Bodi just to give you some idea of what a serious scholar he is.
This is a sizable chunk of the Buddhist Canon.
And the connected discourses of the Budha.
It's more than 2000 pages of translation and commentary.
And this is the achievement of Biku Bodi the person I was talking to.
And so I was talking to him, and
I thought, well he's obviously a serious Buddhist.
He says he meditates a lot.
He's sitting there in a monastery.
Maybe he's attained enlightenment.
Maybe I'll ask him.
Maybe this is kind of a personal question, but have you attained liberation?
>> [LAUGH] No, not by a long shot.
>> Not by a long shot.
>> Yeah.
[LAUGH] So are there people alive today that you think have attained liberation?