Page 66 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

Creation. If we reflect, we shall see that a great part of our
culture depends, directly or indirectly, on speech. Through

speech the mother and the teacher educate the child. Through
books, which are, as it were, frozen, crystallized speech, we get
information, we get knowledge; we may even get

Enlightenment. If books were abolished, if all the literature in
the world was burned, — if it all went up in flames in one great

conflagration, what would we know? We would know hardly
anything: just a few facts of immediate sense observation and
nothing more.

All our culture, our knowledge, even our spiritual insight, is to a

great extent derived, directly or indirectly, from the word: from
speech; from utterance. It is therefore natural, even inevitable,
that in the moral and spiritual life we should give as much

consideration to speech as we do to thought and action.

There are three great phases in the historical development of
Buddhism: Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana, and in the
Vajrayana, the Adamantine Path or Way, body, speech and mind

are associated respectively with three psychic centres, as we
may call them — without attaching too much importance to the

word psychic. The body is associated with the head centre,
speech with the throat centre, and the mind with the heart
centre. This is why when we salute the Buddha image, or our

teacher, we very often do this by joining our hands and with
them touching our head, throat and chest in succession, to

signify that we salute with body, speech, and mind, i.e. with our
whole being: completely, fully; without holding anything back.

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