Page 109 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

‘You can't work in the kitchen without getting a bit of soot on

you' (cooking in India is apt to be a rather messy affair, with
charcoal and so on). In the same way, you cannot live and work

in a corrupt, basically unethical society without to some extent
being besmirched by it. So, even in the interests of one's own
individual moral and spiritual life, one has to make some effort

to transform the society in the midst of which one lives. It is all
very well to talk about the lotus blooming in the midst of the

mire, but it is very difficult to be a lotus when the mire is
particularly nasty and particularly all-pervasive.

Now at this point a question arises. We have seen that our
collective existence has three principal aspects, the social, the

political and the economic, but Perfect Livelihood represents
only one of these, i.e. the economic. So why is this? Assuming
that the fifth stage of the Noble Eightfold Path does deal with

our collective existence, why does it deal only with the economic
aspect? Why are the political and social aspects not included in

the Path? Perfect Livelihood is all right, but why not Perfect
Citizenship, or Perfect Administration? If the Path is also
concerned with our whole collective existence, why only Perfect

Livelihood? The explanation is partly to be found in the
conditions obtaining in India in the Buddha's day. On the social

side life was comparatively simple, comparatively unorganized,
luckily, and apart from the caste system there was not much in
the social system which needed revision or correction. So far as

the political aspect is concerned, it may be recollected that the
Buddha taught and propagated the Dharma mainly in areas

where monarchy was the only existing form of government,

109