Notes
… toward a practice guide for cultivation of the Path, in the form of a collapsable digital-garden essay
Our practice must be organic, spontaneous - not attached to forms like schedules and sadhana. Familiarity with the Noble Eightfold Path helps me to practice wherever I go and whatever is happening. I have been attached at times, to a particular form of practice - a schedule or sadhana - and have been gradually realising the Path can or must be walked everywhere we go.
By essaying on the research and application of the Path, I am developing a resource for myself and anyone else interested. The process helps me to refine my understanding of some edge where I am unsure how to walk the Path - an edge like, I’m about to walk off into the jungle. It might end up becoming a repository of inspiring reading and some Reflect(s) or some suttas or commentaries, all of which can be tracked around the site by following links or using the navigation tree.
It’s a long and arduous road through samsara, with few fellow travellers and a rather vague … amorphous and often bewildering map, but a map nonetheless. It does seem to get more clear as I find patterns among the suttas and their application - but an edge can show up anytime and suddenly you’re in the weeds again.
Being a map, it must be carried while walking, and the best way to carry the Path is by memorisation and integration through action - the walking. The more we integrate the Path, the more embodied our awareness of it becomes until we are the Path, our every action as aligned as we can manage. Hopefully developing this guide supports that integration at least conceptually, but of course a tool is only an object until it is applied in-hand to the job - a hammer could be many things until it hits the nail on the head.