A Review of The Eightfold Path
Part V: Right Livelihood
Dharma Talk -- Eric Kolvig -- August 20, 1998 -- Albuquerque, New Mexico

After nineteen or twenty months of going through the Noble Eightfold Path, we're doing our final tour through it, spending one evening on each aspect of the Eightfold Path. The Buddha said about these teachings, "If you want to be free, do these eight things." Tonight we'll be talking about the third, and last, of the aspects of the Path that have to do with ethics, or nonharming conduct; these aspects being speech -- how we talk in the world; action -- how we act in the world; and finally, tonight, livelihood -- how we make our living in the world.

I don't think that most of us would say that going to work is a spiritual practice, but the Buddha was very clear about it. He said that if you really want to seek liberation for yourself, if you want to free your heart from suffering and the causes of suffering, then you need to pay attention to how you work. Many spiritual traditions, I think, don't consider this to be an aspect of the practice, but it very much has been a consideration in Buddhism for over 2,500 years now.

One question is, do you consider going off to do whatever work you do, or staying home to do whatever work you do, and if you don't work for pay, whatever volunteer work you do, as important as what we just did: sitting here and doing formal meditation practice? At least from the point of view of the teachings, it is as important. I think probably, in this room, we all have many different circumstances of working -- people who go to 9-to-5 jobs, people who are free-lancers, people who work at home and people who work out in the workplace, people who are between jobs, people who are retired, and perhaps some people with inherited wealth who don't need to work. But there are some basic guidelines -- the Buddha's guidelines on livelihood -- that are actually very simple and obvious. He said to refrain from working in ways that cause harm to yourself or to others -- just that simple. The list that he gave applied to a culture, or society, in a very different part of the world, 2,500 years ago, but it still applies, I think. He said to refrain from traffic in lethal weapons; to refrain from traffic in slaves -- that may seem pretty outdated to us, to be concerned about slavery, but for those people who are following the development of slavery, actually there's more and more slavery in the world today, including in this country -- people being brought here and essentially being kept under conditions of servitude to work in this country; to refrain from traffic in poisons; and to refrain from doing work that defrauds or cheats people.

I think probably we could add a few contemporary things to that list. For many of us, we would feel that traffic in tobacco, which we know to be lethal, would be something we would want to refrain from doing, and traffic in drugs that are harmful to people, not medicinal drugs but drugs like cocaine and heroin. And I think we could probably disagree about a number of things. Many of us would feel that some forms of work are perfectly ethical, and for others of us it may not seem so ethical. For example, building and running nuclear power plants -- it's very possible there would be a disagreement among us about how ethical it might be to be involved in that kind of work. Or, an issue that's very big in New Mexico right now, grazing cattle in riparian areas, which may be destructive to the environment and to endangered species.

So there are things that we could disagree about, and what I think is really wonderful about this path -- about this particular practice -- is that it's really up to our own hearts. There's no authority out there saying, "You can't do this." Essentially, we make our own decisions -- we are all responsible for our own liberation. There's no concept of a centralized authority in Buddhism -- it's quite an anarchistic spiritual tradition. We just decide for ourselves -- consulting our own hearts about how we speak in the world, how we act in the world, and in this case, how we make our work in the world. Just to ask the basic question, "Does my work benefit human beings, or does it cause harm to human beings?" And probably, my guess is that for most of us, it would be a mixed response, if we really thought about it. It's very possible that aspects of our work are really helpful to living beings, and perhaps some aspect of our work isn't. There's a wonderful book that Parallax Press came out with a few years ago, called Mindfulness and Meaningful Work, an anthology by mostly Buddhist writers, writing about this aspect of the path -- about livelihood. One of the writers said that since the Industrial Revolution, this writer's feeling was that about five to ten percent of jobs in the contemporary world were what we might call Right Livelihood.

So it's not an easy undertaking to really examine our work. I think it's very important -- again, a subject that I've talked about so many times, but it seems important to keep coming back to it -- that there are no moral judgments in this spiritual tradition. There's basically just making the choice -- the Buddha said you can choose anything you want, just be clear about what your choice is. You can choose to do things that will lead to happiness, or you can choose to do things that lead to suffering -- there's no judgment, there's no concept of right or wrong, or good and bad, in this tradition -- there's only what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering. It's as clean as a mathematical equation.

One of my colleagues, Christopher Reed -- who has just gone through a transgender experience and become Catriona Reed -- wrote in that book that it's impossible to follow the precepts -- the basic guidelines of nonharming conduct -- perfectly. It's impossible. I think I mentioned, when I talked about nonharming action a few weeks ago, that I was dusting and I wasn't very conscious, and I killed a spider. Or, it's so hard to avoid exaggeration, for example, in terms of speech. We can't get it perfect. It's very important for us to be very spacious and very kind to ourselves as we do this kind of examination.

It's also important to realize that many people in our society just have no choice about their work. They do the work that they have to do in order to survive. Many of us do have choices -- those of us who have had the privilege of education, and have learned skills in our lives, it's possible for us to move from one kind of work to another. But I think it's important to realize that many people really don't have choices.

But some of us can make the choice. I had a wonderful ongoing discussion with someone involved in our practice here in New Mexico, who came to me over a year ago and said, "I work for one of the national laboratories, and I'm concerned about the ethics of my work. I'm concerned about what my work actually leads to. I don't feel good about that, but I don't know what to do." And after some weeks of really thinking about it, this person decided to leave that job, eventually -- it took many months to do -- and to find other work, and is now working for an academic institution, having taken a considerable cut in pay, but actually feeling really good about the career change. So it's very interesting to watch this practitioner really examining the nature of their work, and making a choice about it.

So essentially, as we look at our livelihood, there are a couple of things we could do. For many of us, we have the resources to make a change in work, for example, like this person. Or, there are others ways of looking at it, of just saying, "OK, if work is my path, how can I transform my relationship to the current work that I have?" It's really quite wonderful. I think that one of the things that really keeps us from liberating ourselves is our very deeply ingrained habit patterns -- patterns of conditioning. I spent years working in alienating jobs when I was younger, of going to work and basically carrying a kind of mind state of negativity with me, that made it impossible for me to see that I could transform my relationship to the work that I actually had.

I think when we were talking about Right Livelihood last year, I mentioned this wonderful example of living in Massachusetts, several years ago now, and being on the Massachusetts Turnpike. I don't think there are any toll booths in New Mexico, so it may be hard to relate to this story, but I was late for a meeting, and I was quite stressed. I got off the turnpike and drove up to the toll booth feeling quite stressed, and the woman in the toll booth took my money and gave me the most extraordinary smile -- it was just amazing. It was like having the Dalai Lama take your money at the toll booth. It was an extraordinary experience. It was the highest quality contact that I had that day, or that week, with someone who was obviously a bodhisattva -- someone who basically took their work and, because they transformed it, there was a very deep, human connection, even though it only lasted for seconds.

I've often felt that working in a toll booth is about the worst conceivable work that I could ever imagine -- being cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and breathing all of those toxic fumes all the time, and dealing with impatient and unpleasant people all day long, and all that noise. And here was someone who chose to transform that job. For me, it's been a wonderful model. So it's possible that our work doesn't have to be the way that we normally conceive it. We might be able to conceive it in an entirely different way.

There's a wonderful line of Thomas Merton's -- the great Trappist Catholic monk -- when he had this great opening at Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka just exactly a week before he died. His mind woke at this place. He writes about it in his journal, either later that day or the next day, and he says, "... I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things" -- a kind of radical shift of understanding, of seeing things. That can happen in our work, as well. I'd like to read a couple of examples of people who have a different perspective on work. This comes from the book How Can I Help? by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman, that came out eleven or twelve years ago:

And then, another example of a radically different perspective on work:

So it's possible to have a transformed vision of what's possible in our work life.

Just to take some of the other aspects of the Eightfold Path and apply them to this concept of Right Livelihood -- for example, the first aspect, which is Right Understanding, or wisdom. Just to ask the question, "What do we believe -- what are the values that drive our work? What are the principles by which we work?" For most people in this culture, I would guess that the principles, the values, the beliefs that drive our working are wealth and status. This is what we get from most of the sources in our culture, from the media. What kind of clothes you wear, what kind of car you drive, what kind of house you have -- those things are important. And that's the norm in our culture.

So the question is, is our worth determined by how much money we make and what status our work has -- whether we're professionals or whether we're doing blue-collar work? Or, is our worth determined by questions like, how much do we love? And, how much wisdom have we developed in our lives? How connected have we been in our lives? Or, maybe, even, is our worth absolute, and isn't determined by any criteria? That's my sense of it. It seems important to be able to understand, what do we actually believe? What drives our working? Some values that could drive our work are our compassion, and generosity, and seeking harmony instead of discord. I have certainly been in many workplaces which have been really toxic with disharmony, with all kinds of politics and struggles over power, for example.

The second aspect of the Eightfold Path is Right Intention -- what is our intention? I find it very useful -- for myself, in determining what work I do -- to ask the question, "What is my path? And does this work really serve my spiritual path?" There's a stage of insight, in the progression of insight in this practice of insight meditation, called "the knowledge of what is path and not path." And that applies to the formal kind of practice, of really understanding what really contributes to our liberation and what doesn't, but I think it can apply to all aspects of our lives. And I've found, over time, that I can really ask this question in terms of making any kinds of decisions in my life, to really ask the question, and take it to a deep, intuitive level, "Is this really my path?" and to get a clear answer to that.

Sometimes the answer is not convenient. A few years ago, when I was first invited to move down here to New Mexico to be the resident teacher in Santa Fe, I was living in California, and had a cushy job at a philanthropic foundation, and did about half-time there and half-time teaching. It was actually a very hard decision, whether or not to come here. I thought it was likely that my life partner wouldn't be able to move from California and adapt to New Mexico, and that turned out to be the case, actually. I promised him that I wouldn't go to New Mexico without him, and I wouldn't stay in New Mexico if he had to leave.

So we were working on this decision about whether to come here, and I went on a self-retreat on top of a mountain in Oregon, at a very remote cabin. A few days into this retreat, when I got quite deep into meditation practice, it came to me absolutely clearly that my path was to come to New Mexico. There was no way that I couldn't do it -- that if I made another choice, it wouldn't work. So I had to say to my partner, "I'm sorry I made that promise. I have to go, whether you come with me or not, whether you stay with me there or not." Hard choices -- choosing between the two most important things in my life, actually. But although the choice was difficult and painful, there was never any doubt about it, because of that clear intuitive message, "This is what you need to do."

I've found in my own work life, over the years, that it's been quite wonderful to be able, more and more, to listen in. I started out my professional life as a professor of English literature and writing at a college. I realized, when I got very interested in Buddhism and the Dharma, and knew that I had to do a lot of meditation practice, that I couldn't sustain that career. So I dropped out of that work and became a consultant writer and editor -- it was the kind of work that I could drop and pick up again, and go on these very long meditation retreats. I worked for a while as a grant writer at a university, and then at a college, and I realized that I didn't like institutions. I just made this resolution -- it was very clear to me: "I'm going to use these skills in some way that is socially more useful, and that isn't at a big institution." And somehow or other, a job raising money for a peace foundation came up -- a small foundation that was funding grass-roots peace and social justice groups.

And then, at some point, I felt that I would really like to edit dharma books -- books about the practice -- because I loved being steeped in it. And not actually going out and looking for it, but then my own teachers called me and said, "Would you help me with a book?" And it has been very much like that in my life. I decided a few years ago that I wanted to get more into philanthropic work, and I'm now having the opportunity, maybe, to be on the board of directors of a philanthropic foundation. It's been quite wonderful, for me, just being clear about the intention and not actually doing very much about it -- just holding the intention and the circumstances have come together -- and I find myself, now, doing the work that I love most.

For most of us, we spend more time in work than in any other aspect of our lives, except for sleeping -- more time than we spend with our families, more time than we spend with our friends, more time than we spend with the activities that are important to us, more time than we spend with our formal spiritual practice -- we spend a lot of time working. We pour a lot of our vital energy -- our lives -- into it, and so it's really important what we choose.

The aspects of the Eightfold Path -- of Right Speech and Right Action -- apply to really asking whether we're seeking division or harmony, whether we hold grudges, whether we get into factions in our work life. If you are an employer, or if you supervise people in your work, can you consider your employees' well-being at least as important as the well-being of the organization or the institution that they're working for? If you're an employee, is it possible to have a right relation to people who have power over you -- to really work out the power relationships? Someone writing in Mindfulness and Meaningful Work, that book I mentioned, said that the victim mentality keeps most people unhappy in their work. Is it possible to get past the victim mentality in our work, to be clear in our relationships to people who have power over us, as well as in our relationships to people over whom we have power?

Right Mindfulness, another aspect of the path -- is it possible to be present and aware of what's happening, as it's happening, and notice what our relationship to it is? Is it possible to be aware of the qualities of mind and heart that come up in our work? Can we catch fear when it comes, and anger when it comes, and pride, and jealousy, and envy? Can we catch generosity, and lovingkindness, and compassion, when they come? Is it possible to cultivate the wholesome, as the Buddha says, and let go of the unwholesome? If you're able to do that in your work, you're right in the middle of your spiritual practice.

I've been noticing the ways in which some unwholesome mind states get institutionalized. I finally wrote to Publishers Clearinghouse and said, "If you don't get me off your mailing list" -- I wrote to them for the third time -- "I will take legal action." And they finally stopped sending me stuff. Because it felt to me that this is institutionalized greed, and I didn't need it. I didn't need to have all that paper wasted, coming into my mailbox.

The work and the livelihood of our political culture seems to have become so divisive and hostile in recent years that these qualities of consciousness get deepened, get conditioned, get habituated in our political culture. Is it possible to have a different kind of politics? Truthfulness is quite a subject, this week, in our political culture. I have a dear friend, a college classmate, who has been a lawyer all his life. A few years ago he was feeling that certain qualities of consciousness, because of the nature of the work that he was doing -- he had worked as a public defender -- the kind of competitiveness and aggression, and often the twisting of truth that was required of him in his work, he felt wasn't functioning for his spiritual life. It was a very hard decision, at fifty years old, for him to make the decision to drop out of being a lawyer, to go back to school, and he's now working as a therapist. Very courageous.

I think in all of our work we find ethical dilemmas. If we're told to do something that doesn't feel ethically OK to us, is it possible to say, "That doesn't feel OK to me -- I prefer not to do it"? We have to make these choices. I've found, over the years, that if I stand my ground in a respectful and open and friendly way, but in a very clear way, that often when I say, "I'm sorry, but I can't do that because it doesn't feel right to me," the refusal is respected.

I've been reading a lot, in recent months, about how we Americans are becoming more productive in our work life, and I just read an article saying why we're more productive -- it's because we're working more hours, that we're all working harder, that we're spending more and more of our lives in our work. Often, people are working more than one job. It feels to me -- and this is a burning question for myself, in my own work life, in my own livelihood as a spiritual teacher -- it's an important question to ask, how do we hold our work in balance with all the rest of our life, all that we value in our life? We've got this life, and how are we actually going to use it? If we pour all of our energies into one kind of activity in our life, how much is left for the rest of it -- for our personal relationships, for our families, for our children, for our parents, for our friends, for whatever leisure activities we would like to have in our lives, for our spiritual practice? It seems like a very important question -- trying to find a balance. I'm not so good at it myself, but I'm working at it. This quotation is from Thomas Merton:

Overactivity is a form of violence that actually does harm our beings, and we live in the most hyperactive society in the history of the world. So I think most of us are challenged by that. How do we find balance in our activities?

If I'm too busy, then there might be no time for the children, for a partner or spouse, there's no time to wash out the plastic bags and reuse them, there's no time for recycling, there's no time for composting instead of throwing out that good material, there's no time for stopping the toxic waste dump that's about to be put in the next town, there's no time for many activities that might feel really important to us in our lives. I think that's true for us all in this society, but I think men, particularly, are conditioned to identify ourselves with our work, that that's our identity. In this society, when we meet someone we say, "What do you do?" And they're not asking what's your method of brushing your teeth -- it's really, "What's your work -- what you do?" So it's really important to ask, "How much do I need? How much activity do I need to do to stay balanced? How much income do I need in order to live a balanced life? Can I live with less, and work less?" Thoreau says, "How much of my life will I give to possess this thing?" It's very interesting -- you look at a car that you're about to buy, and you divide that by what you make per hour, and you can figure out how many hours of your life you will actually spend paying for that car. It can be amazing to think of that.

It feels to me that we Americans, more and more, don't have a life, because of the kind of compulsion of activity and work that we have. And I'm raising this question, not in a self-righteous way, because I'm really caught in this dilemma in my own life, but it feels like this is actually a very important part of my spiritual practice, to find that balance.

It's an enormous subject -- just touching on it this evening -- but if we just remember that our livelihood is important, and that it really is part of our spiritual life, then we can change the work we do, in terms of the amount of work we do or the kind of work we do, but we can also transform ourselves within the work we're doing.

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Q: It's ironic -- this is my first time here, we moved here about two years ago, but I never got hooked up with this particular group -- just yesterday I decided that my livelihood is definitely not dharmic, but it takes a long time to work with that issue. We have a family, a mortgage, several cars, kids going to school, kung fu lessons. It's an important question, because it affects who we are and our relationships with other people. I know Jack Kornfield talks about it in his tape series on the Eightfold Path. It's easy to get sucked into a career, in America, and just write it off as just, "Well, this is what supports my family." But I promise to change.

Eric: If the intention is there, you'll find a way, especially if you have education and skills and the means. I think it's a lot harder for many people to change their work. I'm just reminded of something I learned last year -- normally we think, because we're such individualists in this society, "Well, I really need to change my work," and we take it on as a personal undertaking. But I heard, last year, about an extraordinary cooperative effort that a number of engineers made, who were involved in weapons production. All of them felt ethically compromised by what they were doing, but they also had families, and basically needed to provide for themselves and for their families. What they chose to do is, they quietly got together and they committed to support each other, so that, one by one, they dropped out, and the others supported each one, until that person found another job. And after that person found another job, they continued to support the next one, until they had all left that work and found other forms of work. It's just a beautiful expression of sangha -- of community -- of people saying, "OK, we need to make a change -- it's hard for any one of us to make a change, but we can do it together." I think it's a wonderful idea, that we can actually find collective solutions to some of these things. Thank you.

Q: I've spent most of my professional life working in what would be regarded as Right Livelihood, and for me, the transformational part of what you were talking about is the most important. I've never not had conditions of power and authority in the work environment, and all of the nasty things that go on in the larger world -- all of that happens, even in fields that appear to be Right Livelihood, so we all have to deal with the transforming of it, wouldn't you say?

Eric: Yes, very much. And it's really wonderful that I'm finding over time, as I really focus on the practice and really try to live the practice in my life -- I mentioned that I worked for a foundation in California, which was actually doing wonderful work, it's a philanthropic organization. But I moved into a smaller organization of five staff people, and I moved into an absolutely toxic environment. There were never staff meetings; nobody ever talked to anyone; people really disliked each other; there was a lot of vicious gossip. And I decided that my task would be, first, to make a personal connection -- a connection of friendship -- to each of my co-workers. And after I made that connection, and felt on terms of friendship with each person in the work environment, to start to try to change the work environment -- getting people talking to each other, and taking little groups of people out to lunch. And then, finally, having somebody else come into the organization who shared my vision, so that we became a caucus of two. And we couldn't make enormous changes -- we couldn't eliminate the executive director, for example -- but we really changed the culture of the work environment, just by having a very clear intention to do that. It was really wonderful to see that. And then we both quit and it got toxic again [laughter], but still, for that time, it felt compassionate. So I agree with you absolutely -- to transform the environment that way can be really a wonderful contribution. Thank you.

Q: You were talking about intention, and when you got clear on your intention to come to New Mexico, that it was the thing that you had to do. My guess is that with that intention setting, you're in the flow of life, and then it's not hard, anymore.

Eric: Right. Well, it can be hard in the sense that sometimes, when you have to make a choice, you have to make a big sacrifice. That can be hard, but there is some way, and you're describing it very well -- the Buddha said that intention is karma -- it's out of intention that all results flow. And it's very clear to me that when you make a pure intention, a very deep, pure intention, like the intention, "I will come to full liberation," or "I will support all beings to liberate themselves," if you make a very deep intention that's very pure, there's a way in which -- this sounds very New Age, but it really works -- the universe lines up behind it. You can feel it -- you can feel the power. What it's like for me -- it's like the heart is a compass needle for the path, and when I get off the path, I can just feel that things are out of balance. So there's a way of trusting. Usually when I make major decisions in my life, now, I don't have to weigh the pros and cons and go through what is often the agony of decision making -- very often it will come on the intuitive level, and then it's clear -- it doesn't wobble. So you're right, you move into the flow of things. Thank you.

Q: I have trouble looking at what the right path should be. I didn't have a picture of that, but I was with guys who, even with the smallest tasks that I do, have the right intention, and just that -- "I'll do good in this moment, with this task, or this writing, this typing, whatever" -- however small it was. Forget about the bigger picture at the moment, and that really helps me. I'd like to know about the bigger intent, but until I get there, this is really useful to me.

Eric: That's a wonderful thing to do, to have the intention: "I am doing this task, and it will have these results. It will be a good result -- my intention is a good one."

Q: I find it hard enough, in itself, to do that -- there's a constant effort involved in that.

Eric: Yes. But something the Buddha recommended that we do, that most of us Westerners hate doing, is to reflect on our good deeds. We'd much rather think of the things we've done wrong, than to think of the things we've done that are useful. But if you have that intention, and you're typing a letter or something -- a small task as part of your work life -- it's useful to take just a moment to step back and say, "That was a good thing to do, and I'm really glad I did it" -- to celebrate your good deeds. And I often do that. Often on Thursday evenings, I'm very tired at the end of these sessions, and I have to drive to Tesuque, which is 65 miles from here. Tonight I'll be very tired, as I just got off a plane. But I often think, "Well, that was a good thing to do -- to come to Albuquerque," to really give myself credit for doing something wholesome. As simple as that, but it brings energy, actually. Thank you.

Q: I'm really interested in this idea of overactivity being violent, because I'm in a helping profession, and I've started to think, more and more, about whether my life is my work, or what other things I want to give energy to. As you were talking, I was thinking about, is there a way to be harmful in my work? Because at first glance, it's very giving -- I work with a lot of children and families, and I give a lot. But a child did something in my office the other day, that came up for me just a minute ago, in terms of, if you can't take care of yourself and be balanced and fully present, what a great disappointment that can be for somebody who needs you to be fully present. Because she was working in a sand tray, and she made this beautiful world, and she had a tree that bore fruit, and if you ate this fruit, all your wishes would be granted, and you'd never even have to tell anybody what they were -- it would just happen. And I thought, "This is somebody who really needs me to be so focused that she doesn't even have to tell me what she needs." But if I'm not taking care of myself, that's absolutely impossible.

Eric: Right. It's a beautiful insight to see that. There's a quality of our presence, and the quality of our minds and hearts, and when we get overstressed we get toxic, and the unwholesome qualities of consciousness come to the fore -- we get angry, we get irritable, we get fearful, we get contracted. If it's possible to limit the amount of activity, very often the quality of the activity is better. Thank you.

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