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:

  1. Right View : clearly understanding the fundamental laws of life and the nature of things as they really are.
  2. Right Intention : inclining the mind towards unselfishness, benevolence, and compassion.
  3. Right Speech : avoiding false speech, malicious speech, harsh speech, and idle chatter; speaking truth, promoting harmony, speaking gently, communicating what is meaningful and beneficial.
  4. Right Action : avoiding bodily actions that cause harm and suffering to others, especially killing and violence, theft, and sexually abusive or exploitive conduct.
  5. Right Livelihood : earning one’s living through an honest, upright, socially responsible means of livelihood.
  6. Right Effort : the effort to eliminate unwholesome mental qualities and to develop and perfect wholesome qualities.
  7. Right Mindfulness : developing clear and precise awareness of one’s own bodily and mental processes.
  8. Right Concentration : training the mind to become firm, steady, calm, and collected, untroubled by distracting and agitating thoughts.