The Noble Eightfold Path covers every aspect of life – intellectual, ethical, social, and psychological – and thus contains everything we need to develop ethically and spiritually, in the process benefiting ourselves and others.
The steps of the path are:
- Right View : clearly understanding the fundamental laws of life and the nature of things as they really are.
- Right Intention : inclining the mind towards unselfishness, benevolence, and compassion.
- Right Speech : avoiding false speech, malicious speech, harsh speech, and idle chatter; speaking truth, promoting harmony, speaking gently, communicating what is meaningful and beneficial.
- Right Action : avoiding bodily actions that cause harm and suffering to others, especially killing and violence, theft, and sexually abusive or exploitive conduct.
- Right Livelihood : earning one’s living through an honest, upright, socially responsible means of livelihood.
- Right Effort : the effort to eliminate unwholesome mental qualities and to develop and perfect wholesome qualities.
- Right Mindfulness : developing clear and precise awareness of one’s own bodily and mental processes.
- Right Concentration : training the mind to become firm, steady, calm, and collected, untroubled by distracting and agitating thoughts.