Wise Livelihood

In the Buddha’s day, the role each person played in the marketplace -- their occupation and where they put their money -- was easy to gauge. Today our local employer and our local market both draw from and perhaps cater to complex and often hidden international market, and we provide each other with an amazing array of services unheard of 2500 years ago.

But we each have a moral compass within us, that when ignored causes a feeling of being off-kilter. This moral compass guides us quite admirably when we slow down and pay attention to it. It lets us know when we are causing pain by the way we make our living and by how we invest and spend our money, for example.

A fellow Toastmaster named Olga gave a speech last week that moved me, especially when she said that she had previously pursued a career that made her feel ‘I lost my North’. Fortunately she heeded her inner moral compass, and changed careers. She is now working in the public sector for the good of the community. She is not a Buddhist as far as I know, but that moral compass lives in her without ever having learned about Wise Livelihood. And it lives in each of us.

So the Buddha was not the source of all wisdom. That universal wisdom is accessible to each of us if we quiet down and pay attention. And that’s what the Buddha advised, and that’s what we continue to practice through meditation. But the Buddha also provided a wonderful and comprehensive structure for us to look at what otherwise might feel like a morass of moral complexity: The Eightfold Path. Wise Livelihood is one of those eight, and the final one we will explore.

Remember our Cooking Pot Analogy. 
Wise Livelihood, like Wise Speech and Wise Action arises naturally like steam out of the pot full of Wise Mindfulness, stirred by the spoon of Wise Concentration (practices such as meditation). The cooking pot itself is Wise View, wherein we see the dharma, the true nature of things such as the nature of impermanence and our inherent interconnection with all life (no separate self) and how we cause suffering. But the steam only arises if the flame under the pot is constant, sparked by the match of Wise Intention (to be present in this moment, anchored in physical sensation and to be compassionate with ourselves and all beings). The flame won’t be constant and the pot won’t stand without the logs burning under it being well laid and balanced, and that is Wise Effort -- neither striving doggedly nor lazing and procrastinating.

When we find that our actions, words or livelihood do not seem very wise at all, we can look at our intention, our effort, our view, our degree of mindfulness, our meditation practice, to see why the wise 'steam' isn't rising. It's a very useful tool.

So here we are at Wise Livelihood. Since our sangha is mostly retired, or wisely employed, we will focus more on this investment/spending aspect of Wise Livelihood. (The Buddha’s list of unskillful career moves is at the end of this post.) Wise Livelihood is the overall impact of our engagement in the marketplace, not just what we do for a living. Why? Because money has the power to create jobs in one area or take them away in another, so the way we invest or spend affects the ways in which others make their living. We are not only concerned with our individual happiness, but with the happiness of all beings. This doesn’t mean we proselytize or tell others how to live or make their living, but it does mean that we try not to create unwise jobs through our marketplace demands.

Do you know your impact on the marketplace? Where your money is invested? Who is producing the goods you are buying? Under what conditions?

Bargain hunting is a valued activity by most of us who have had challenges in making ends meet. It is considered a high virtue, and sometimes a sport. But if we make purchases based solely on price, we may negatively impact people to whom, if we met in person, we would practice kindness. We rarely know for certain the answers to all the wise questions we might ask, but so often we don’t even try to find out if this garment we wear so intimately next to our skin was made by someone who suffered from unhealthy working conditions or whose pay was so minimal that they couldn’t feed themselves and their families. When we think through the choice, that bargain doesn’t seem like such a bargain anymore, does it?

We’re not going to throw out what we have, but we might set an intention to make more informed choices the next time we are shopping.

Of course, it’s not just our clothing but the food we eat, the vehicles we drive, the energy we purchase to heat our homes, as well as a myriad of other choices we make when we pull out our wallet and interact in the massive and intricate web of the marketplace. How are our choices affecting the planet and its inhabitants?

To live out our paired intentions of awareness and kindness we need to look at the policies and behavior of not just the makers of the products but the sellers of the products. When we shop at a store that pays such low wages that it’s employees are eligible for government food stamps, we are giving tacit approval of those policies. Is this wise?

If we buy produce that has been sprayed, we may be concerned for our own health, but have we given any thought to the workers in the fields who have their hands and faces exposed to this toxicity for so many hours per week? And what about the wild creatures and the earth itself, the water that runs off from a polluted field and pollutes the water, that 1% of the earth’s water that is fresh? Lots to consider. Buying organic becomes a way to send metta to all beings, not just a way to stay healthy in our own bodies.

If we invest in companies, or in funds that invest in companies, do we simply look at the numbers? Or can we look a little closer and see what we are giving tacit approval to by our investment. Clearly, a mutual fund that invests in companies that potentially cause harm is not a fund a Wise Livelihood investor wants to fund. To invest wisely, we look at the impact of putting funds and therefore power into the hands of people who are not aligned with our intentions. Through the practice of mindfulness we are becoming increasingly mindful that all beings are deserving of respect, kindness and compassion; that all beings are interconnected, all part of the same web of processes. Our consciousness rests in the sensations of this body at this time, but it is not in isolation. It is in interaction always, in every decision, every movement, every purchase and every investment.

Perhaps you have felt badly about buying or investing in something. These bad feelings are clues that your decision is out of alignment with your deepest intentions and understanding of the nature of things. When this happens, when we notice it, it is an opportunity to slow down, notice, look more closely at what is really going on here. But so often we don’t bother. We just feel bad. We just create suffering for ourselves as we continue to create suffering for others.

All of this may run counter to all we have ever learned about being smart in the marketplace. But in the process of buying and selling, sometimes it’s our ease and happiness that gets sold.

As you might expect, we had a lively discussion in class about Wise Livelihood, especially around the difficulty of obtaining accurate information to make informed choices. As an example, one of the students in class had recently been to El Salvador where she said she was allowed into an area called a free zone, where manufacturers, employing Salvadorans, created goods that they labeled ‘Made in the USA’.

This is not an entirely new scheme. In the 1950’s ‘Made in the USA’ could mean the product was made in a town in Japan with the name of Usa! So it is indeed very challenging to do the right thing when our labels contain insufficient and, as in this case, erroneous information.

Yet we do what we can to live in a way that doesn’t cause our inner moral compass to lose its north. That’s going to be different for each of us. But in this process of coming to understand how we fall into the morass of misery, it’s quite useful to acknowledge that sometimes it’s how we blind ourselves to our powerful impact on the world in all kinds of ways, big and small.

Powerful? Yes! Remember the power of the choice by many people around the world to divest from South African stocks, and the role that played in ending Apartheid? We are powerful! Make these choices count, and let us ‘find our North.’

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End Note (excerpted from Access to Insight’s extensive text and commentary on Buddhist teachings. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/waytoend.html#ch4)

“The Buddha mentions five specific kinds of livelihood which bring harm to others and are therefore to be avoided: dealing in weapons, in living beings (including raising animals for slaughter as well as slave trade and prostitution), in meat production and butchery, in poisons, and in intoxicants (AN 5:177). He further names several dishonest means of gaining wealth which fall under wrong livelihood: practicing deceit, treachery, soothsaying, trickery, and usury (MN 117). Obviously any occupation that requires violation of right speech and right action is a wrong form of livelihood, but other occupations, such as selling weapons or intoxicants, may not violate those factors and yet be wrong because of their consequences for others.”

Eightfold Path: Right Livelihood

For many of us, how we make our living is tightly woven into who we are. One of the first things people ask us when they meet us is “What do you do?” because how we choose to make a living offers people clues into many other aspects of our identity, including our values, skills and interests.

In inner exploration we discover that what we do is not who we are, yet the Buddha acknowledged the importance of our work life. It is the action we do all day for most of the days of our adult lives, so our work needs to be Right Action if we are to free ourselves and others from suffering. This is called Right Livelihood.

On the surface Right Livelihood seems pretty straightforward. The Buddhist sutras offer guidance on the kind of jobs that cause suffering, and if we adhere to them we should be set in this department. Check this one off our list! But as we explore this aspect of the Eightfold Path, we find that it is just as tricky and deep as Right Speech or Right Action because it has multiple aspects.

The first and most obvious aspects is to choose a job that is in keeping with our deepest values so that we are not fighting inner battles every time we go to work. I worked for a decade in advertising. The better I got at my job the more insidious it seemed. I realized that I was learning how to trade on people’s fears. In essence every ad ever written says,’ Without this wonderful product you will be less.’ Less attractive, less happy, less safe, less productive, less appreciated. Just less. A real dukkha making job!

I refused to write advertising copy for products or companies I didn’t believe in. I remember saying no way to a liposuction client. I had my limits! But even if every word I wrote was true, it didn’t feel like Right Livelihood to me. By the end of the decade I wrote an eight page harangue about how advertising was the root of all evil. I may have gotten a little carried away, but clearly it was not the profession for me.

I remember at one point saying to a co-worker, ‘I feel totally separate from myself.’ That would have been a nice clue to have heeded, instead of just laughing it off as a strange sensation. What my inner wisdom was trying to tell me was that I was being untrue to my own core set of values, as well as struggling to be the role I thought I should play.

I didn’t quit. In many ways I liked my job. It was often fun and creative, I enjoyed my coworkers, I was helping to support my family and secure our future. But finally my body spoke up. Illness as messenger. I came down with CFIDS (chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome). I write about this more in my book Tapping the Wisdom Within, so I won’t go into it here, except to say that I hope others in a similar position won’t wait for an illness to force them to quit a job that makes them feel ‘separate’ from themselves.

So how do we determine if the work we do is harmful to ourselves or others? Fortunately we are not totally on our own to figure this out. We have the Five Precepts to guide us. As you may recall from our discussion of Right Action, they are:
- Refrain from killing or harming other beings.
- Take only what is freely given, refrain from stealing, exploiting or deceiving.
- Refrain from misusing of our sexuality.
- Speak truthfully and kindly
- Maintain clarity of mind by avoiding intoxicants.

And we have the Buddhist sutras that add a few specifics: It is not Right Livelihood to deal in arms, slaves, meat, alcohol, drugs or poisons, or in making prophecies or telling fortunes.

If you do none of the above, hooray! But we need to delve a little further. If we work for a company, we need to make sure that it adheres to the precepts as well. If we work for a large corporation, this is challenging, as corporations are legally required to make as much profit as possible for their shareholders. Between what is legal and what is ethical from the point of view of the Buddhist precepts, there is a lot of wiggle room. So we need to do some research about our own company, because our job is intrinsically entwined. Now if our company is not, in our view, living up to ethical standards, we have the choice of leaving or of staying and trying to change the ethical culture. But if we want to end the suffering of ourselves and others, we don’t get to say “Just doing my job, it doesn’t have anything to do with me.” Right View, that vaster vantage point in which we sense our connection to all that is, precludes pretending that we are somehow separate in all this and therefore not culpable.

So, say you’ve chosen a profession that is Right Livelihood, your company is highly ethical – yay! Now there is the way in which we do our job to consider. Bringing all the aspects of the Eightfold Path and the Five Precepts to bear on our interactions with co-workers, clients, patients, customers, suppliers, etc. means bringing loving kindness into every interaction. As always we start that loving kindness with ourselves, so we are not beating ourselves up all day every day. Then we send metta to each person we meet, each email we send, each voice we hear on the phone.

When we act as a conduit for infinite radiant metta (loving kindness) we transform our own experience and the experience of those around us. This is powerful stuff. In fact, power as usually perceived in the workplace – who gets to boss whom, who gets the fanciest title, the corner office, the most money and best perks – that kind of power pales in comparison to the empowerment of infinite metta. Think about it: The supposed result of all that power and perks is happiness. But being a conduit of metta brings immediate, expansive and true happiness. The other is just fool’s gold. Some perk!

All right, you’ve chosen a profession that is Right Livelihood, your company is highly ethical, and you bring loving kindness into your interactions at work. So now you can check Right Livelihood off your to do list, right?

Well, not so fast! Because Right Livelihood isn’t only about how we make our living but how we, by our behavior in the marketplace, set other people up to make their livings! If we don’t make our living by killing animals but we benefit by others doing so, i.e. we eat meat, poultry or fish, then that is not Right Livelihood. We are contributing to the harm, both to the beings who are killed and to the person we are encouraging to do the killing – i.e. letting other people do our dirty work for us.

If we raise crops using chemicals that poison the environment, that is clearly not Right Livelihood. But if we knowingly purchase those crops we are also culpable, because we are helping to create a market where it is not commercially viable for a farmer to cease using those chemicals.

If we employ people at wages that leave them and their families hungry and at risk, then obviously that isn’t Right Livelihood. But if we purchase the products produced by manufacturers who treat their workers poorly, then we are also culpable.

And then once we make a purchase, we are responsible for it. If we dispose of it in a manner that harms the earth, that is not Right Livelihood either.

As an investor, Right Livelihood asks us to investigate thoroughly what exactly we are using our money to support when we buy stock.

So Right Livelihood takes into account not just how we earn a paycheck but how we interact in the marketplace. It takes into account every person whose life is touched by our interaction, and the very earth as well.

Now this is a lot of responsibility! By this time in my dharma talk my students were ready to join a monastery in order to avoid all these complicated pitfalls! Stop and notice if you are feeling in your body any sense of burden or exhaustion. Perhaps you feel Right Livelihood is impossible, given that as consumers we are not often given enough information to make wise choices, and the thought of having to do the level of research required to do so.

So what do we do? We do the best we can. That’s going to be different for each of us at different times in our lives. But keep in mind that Right Livelihood is a guidepost on the Eightfold Path that lights our way to liberation, the ending of our own suffering. When we are suffering, we can look to it and see if any of our actions are causing this suffering. We might experience this suffering as being at odds with our true selves, having developed a schism between what we believe and what we do. At that point it becomes less painful to change our actions than to continue to suffer the schism. We just want to be done with the ongoing inner battle, and come into a sense of integrity, wholeness.

When we access Right View and see our deep interconnectedness, then we really get how we harm ourselves when we harm workers on the other side of the world by supporting the industry that oppresses them -- when all we thought we were doing was getting a great deal on a cute shirt!

Living in that place where our actions and our values are not aligned is uncomfortable. I know this from experience. The process is ongoing. It starts with noticing not just our actions but the excuses we make for our actions, and in the process of observing with great compassion, we may begin to observe a shift. This shift into a more connected sense of non-harming, where we take responsibility for our actions in a more joyous way and let go of the punishing, sacrificing mentality we had thought would be necessary, is a lovely gateway to liberation. But it doesn’t happen overnight. If we beat ourselves up about it we slow the process and squelch the possibility of truly coming into alignment.

Once we come into some sense of alignment, it’s important to continue to be mindful, noticing our thoughts and actions. We may become unskillful in a different way, developing a sense of purity around this, vowing that from this day forth we will live in perfect Right Livelihood, and make it our mission that others do the same. All we can expect from such action is misery in our ambition, our striving and our failures; as well as misery for those around us who will tire mighty quickly of any proselytizing we do in our new conversion.

As the Buddha did, we find the Middle Way. This is not the half-hearted way, mind you, and certainly not the half-assed way! This is the way full of mindfulness and compassion for ourselves and others. When we allow this awareness to unfold gently and with Right Effort, we create joy and ease, and, to the best of our abilities, Right Livelihood.

An Introduction to the Noble Eightfold Path

Now we begin on the Fourth Noble Truth. To review the first three:The First Noble Truth is that there is suffering, the Second that it is our tendency to grasp and cling that causes this suffering, and the Third is that the end of suffering is possible. (For more in depth discussion, refer to prior posts in the archive at right.)

The Fourth Noble Truth is that The Noble Eightfold Path is the means to end suffering by developing Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration.

On our first encounter with the idea of there being ‘right’ views, speech, etc., we may bristle. We don’t want to be forced into a particular way of speaking or thinking. We want to speak authentically and think for ourselves.

For me the single most powerful sentence the Buddha spoke, the one that drew me to Buddhist study in the first place, was “Be a lamp unto yourself.” (Before I ever undertook to study Buddhism, I had that quote on the back of my book, Tapping the Wisdom Within, A Guide to Joyous Living.) For me, this list of do’s and don’ts just didn’t jive with that statement.

Since becoming a Buddhist practitioner it has been easy to just ignore the subject. There are so many rich veins of Buddhism to explore that even over the course of many years The Eightfold Path rarely came up in any dharma talks in weekly classes or retreats I attended.

But then when the upper retreat hall and residences were built at Spirit Rock, they installed a beautiful hand-painted prayer wheel in the pedestrian entry gate. It is adorned with illustrations of the Eightfold Path. As you walk through, you take a handle -- perhaps the one named ‘Right Effort’ -- and spin the wheel. Then that focus of Right Effort (or whichever handle you took) stays with you as an intention.

In my comings and goings, I always enjoy spinning the prayer wheel. I remember one day I was walking through, and I had a bit of an aha moment about the Eightfold Path. I recognized that I had resistance to being told what to do, but that in fact, these were not dictates that I must subscribe to or rules of behavior I have to live by, lest I fail to be a good Buddhist. Instead I could see them as useful guideposts, so that when I am suffering I can see them in the fog of my misery shining a helpful light to help me see the cause of my suffering.

For example, say I am feeling oddly discomforted and don’t know why. I can mentally review the Eightfold Path to see if there is anything there to guide me. Say that on this occasion when I come upon Right Speech, and then I remember that the night before I had been talking about someone, telling a story that wasn’t mine to tell, and now I have this residual sense of ickiness, as if I truly have wandered into a sticky and stinky bog in my mind. But now I can see that by not adhering to Right Speech, I had wandered off the Eightfold Path.

That guidepost sheds the light of awareness on my behavior and brings me back on the path. Each time I find my way back, I have learned something valuable. And though I will probably wander off the path many times in many ways, these guideposts help me return more quickly, so that my suffering is shortened as I develop the habit of looking to the guideposts for cues to my current discomfort.

If a path sounds constricting, like a ‘straight and narrow’ path, the truth is that this path is incredibly spacious. For by staying on the path, we free ourselves to be fully present in every moment in an unencumbered way. And that is deep authentic connection indeed.

Over the coming weeks we will explore the aspects of the Eightfold Path. Each is a facet of the same jewel of wisdom, and they are so deeply inter-related that insight in one aspect brings understanding in another. Together they have the capacity to enrich our lives, sweeten our relationships and deepen our practice.

Yes, the Buddha told us to be lamps unto ourselves. But he also offered these guideposts to shed light on our path in order that we may brighten and strengthen our own inner light.