The Noble Eightfold Path & Business

1. Right View — sammā-diṭṭhi

Your view (diṭṭhi) is your basic outlook, and it's the starting point of everything you do. Wrong view sends you down a wrong road; right view (sammā-diṭṭhi) sends you down a road of steadily increasing wellbeing. Transcendent: correct understanding of the Four Noble Truths and the path to liberation. Everyday: a correct understanding of the world and of life — including knowing right from wrong, good from bad, what to do and what not — and understanding, in accord with reality, whatever you're actually involved in, whether family or work. The more right understanding you have, he says, the better you manage yourself.

2. Right Intention — sammā-saṅkappa

Transcendent: the resolve to let go of craving, of ill-will and vengeance, and of any wish to harm or exploit. Everyday: thinking well — correctly, constructively, with initiative and a bent for improvement. Whatever the business, your thinking must never feed selfishness, vengeance, or the inflaming of appetite — in yourself or anyone else. Cross that line and it isn't "creative thinking" anymore; it's just deviant thinking. And to think rightly, you need right view first.

3. Right Speech — sammā-vācā

Here the higher and everyday meanings are the same: speech that isn't false, isn't divisive (setting people against each other), isn't coarse, isn't idle and empty. Plus — and this is the manager's part — train yourself both to speak well and to be silent well. Speaking well, doing good PR, genuinely persuading — speech that reaches someone and lodges in them — all of that is right speech. But to have it, you first have to be thinking good things inside.

4. Right Action — sammā-kammanta

(This is conduct, not occupation.) Transcendent: a standing intention to abstain, in any circumstance, from killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct. Everyday: doing your work with skill in ways that are right and proper — never destroying life or property, never wronging anyone sexually — and cultivating good manners, being no one's eyesore. And to manage this factor, you need the ones before it in place first.

5. Right Livelihood — sammā-ājīva

Higher and everyday meanings coincide: earning a living purely, according to your station, without breaking precept, dhamma, law, or custom. And he is emphatic that a layperson must avoid these five trades:

1. trading in weapons;
2. trading in human beings;
3. trading in animals for slaughter;
4. trading in poison;
5. trading in intoxicants.

These five, he notes, can make excellent money — enough that some who deal in them grow rich enough to sway a government — and should still be refused, because human happiness isn't proportional to wealth. Mostly, the more of this work you do, the more strained you become; it doesn't pay for what it costs. (And someone who can hold to right livelihood already has the foundation of the previous factor — a bent for work that doesn't exploit anyone.)

6. Right Effort — sammā-vāyāma

Transcendent: the classic fourfold effort — prevent unwholesome states not yet arisen, abandon those that have, cultivate wholesome states not yet present, and grow those that are. Everyday: the habit of improving yourself a little every day, wasting no time, making no excuses, finishing what you start and never quitting halfway — a person with a working "fire" for doing good. But to sustain effort like that, your occupation has to be a right livelihood first; otherwise, he says memorably, the competitor turns into an enemy, the partner into an adversary, "even a soulmate becomes a pair of bones."

7. Right Mindfulness — sammā-sati

Transcendent: repeatedly contemplating body, feeling, mind, and mental objects as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and beyond your control — dissolving both attraction and aversion. Everyday: knowing how to gather the mind and keep it with you — specifically, collecting it at the center of the body — so it doesn't wander or lapse, staying alert and un-heedless, wary of the dangers worth being wary of, so you can guard against them before they arrive. Miss this, he warns, and however knowledgeable, clever, and diligent you are, the work can still come to ruin. A manager's real job is to manage his own mind into complete, steady mindfulness — which itself requires the habit of right effort first.

8. Right Concentration — sammā-samādhi

Transcendent: settling the gathered mind into stillness (jhāna) at the center of the body, so it becomes firm and unwavering, an inner brightness arises, and defilements are burned away by degrees. Everyday: while working, the mind is fixed on that work alone — not wavering, not drifting — thinking only of doing it as well as it can be done. And for the mind to hold that focus, mindfulness has to be trained well first.

Managers of any nationality or religion, he concludes, who practice these eight correctly and completely, will reach the highest success in management. The Eightfold Path is a formula for a life of happiness and accomplishment that has "existed alongside the world" for ages; the Buddha discovered it and revealed it. Whoever practices it, at whatever level, succeeds at that level.

The screw-thread

Then comes the image worth keeping. Notice, he says, that in the Path, Right View is the starting factor, and Right Concentration is the accelerator — because a settled, luminous mind produces a higher grade of Right View, which begins the whole cycle again at a new level. So the Eightfold Path isn't a checklist you complete once; it's a thread on a screw. Each full turn through the eight tightens the bolt one thread deeper. Turn after turn, round after round, and everyday wisdom (lokiya-paññā) is drawn up, thread by thread, toward transcendent wisdom (lokuttara-paññā).