The eight Buddhist practices in the Noble Eightfold Path are:
- Right View: the futility of striving after worldly fullfilment. Our actions have consequences, death is not the end, and our actions and beliefs have consequences after death. Later on, right view came to explicitly include karmaand rebirth, and the importance of the Four Noble Truths, when “insight” became central to Buddhist soteriology, especially in Theravada Buddhism.
- Right Resolve (samyaka-saṃkalpa/sammā-saṅkappa) can also be known as “right thought”, “right aspiration”, or “right motivation”. One resolves to leave home, renounce the worldly life and follow the Buddhist path. The practitioner resolves to strive toward non-violence (ahimsa) and avoid violent and hateful conduct.
- Right Speech: no lying, no abusive speech, no divisive speech, no idle chatter.
- Right Conduct or Action: no killing or injuring, no taking what is not given, no sexual misconduct.
- Right Livelihood: no trading in weapons, living beings, meat, liquor, or poisons.
- Right Effort: preventing the arising of unwholesome states, and generating wholesome states, the bojjhaṅgā (Seven Factors of Awakening). This includes indriya-samvara, “guarding the sense-doors”, restraint of the sense faculties. Mindfulness, Investigation of the nature of reality, Energy, Joy or rapture, Relaxation or tranquility, Concentration, Equanimity To accept reality as-it-is without craving or aversion.
- Right Mindfulness (sati; Satipatthana; Sampajañña): a quality that guards or watches over the mind; the stronger it becomes, the weaker unwholesome states of mind become, weakening their power “to take over and dominate thought, word and deed.” In the vipassana movement, sati is interpreted as “bare attention”: never be absent minded, being conscious of what one is doing; this encourages the awareness of the impermanence of body, feeling and mind
- Right samadhi (passaddhi; ekaggata; sampasadana): practicing four stages of dhyāna(“meditation”), which includes samadhi proper in the second stage, and reinforces the development of the bojjhaṅgā, culminating into upekkhā (equanimity) and mindfulness. In the Theravada tradition and the vipassana movement, this is interpreted as ekaggata, concentration or one-pointedness of the mind, and supplemented with vipassana meditation, which aims at insight.