Buddhism and modern psychology.

Lecture 2. The Buddhist Prescription

Part 1, the Eightfold Path.

In the previous lecture, we talked about the first two noble truths,

the Buddha's diagnosis of the human predicament.

Now we're going to talk about the third and fourth

noble truths, which contain the Buddhist prescription, the cure for what ails us. And also,

they point to meditation, which will then talk about in some depth. Now, I guess you could call

the first two noble truths the bad news and good news respectively. The bad news is that

human life is full of duca of suffering, of unsatisfactoriness. And the good news and the second

noble truth is that we have at least isolated the cause. The cause is craving, clinging to

things that are not going to last forever. Well in that sense I guess you could say that the third and fourth noble truths are,

respectively, more good news and then some bad news.

The third noble truth tells us what the cure is.

It is the abandonment of craving and of clinging.

The fourth noble truth spells out the path you have to follow if you're going to attain full liberation.

And it turns out that it is an eightfold path. There are eight things you have to master if you want to be liberated.

So it starts with right view, which is to say getting a proper understanding of the Buddhist teaching.

And then there are a lot of other right things. I'm not going to get into all of them.

But at the end, we then see right mindfulness and right concentration,

which point us to meditation.

Now, some people might be surprised that there's so much stuff on the path that isn't about meditation.

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