Eightfold path of Buddha and correlations to Sysyphus

557 Words3 Pages
The Buddha advises the monks about the suffering as part of his enlightening noble truths and he often indicates at establishment of the craving as being agreeable and pleasurable, either after discussing the matters; origin of suffering, cessation of suffering, and the way of practice leading to the cessation of suffering. The latter matter, the way of practice leading to cessation of suffering is the famous Eightfold path consisting of:1)Right Understanding 2)Right though 3)Right Speech 4)Right Action 5)Right Livelihood 6)Right Effort 7)Right Mindfulness 8)Right Concentration. Right Concentration is the category surrounding the story of Sisyphus and is well-known as one of the most spiritual and hard to apply aspects of Buddhism. We can correlate the myth of Sisyphus to Dhayanan Buddhism, generally called trance, in which both consist of passionate desires, restlessness, ill-will, and sensuous lust helping the person carry on to the everlasting path of the suffering and try to overcome all of them while maintaining the feeling of joy and happiness, which would disappear at the final stage of Dhayanan in order to reach pure equanimity and awareness helping the mind get trained and developed. There is also a different belief surrounding the subject ignorance, between the myth of Sisyphus and the fourth noble truth of Buddhism. Ignorance in Buddhism is the first major interception of mind which leads to suffering and is everything except being positive knowledge, while ignorance in the myth of Sisyphus is a state where Sisyphus lacks the needed wisdom, although being regarded as “the wisest and most prudent of mortals…”(Page 1-Albert Camus) and it leads him to discovering and creating new aspects of life although being condemned to hopeless labor. The rock in Sisyphus could be correlated to the starvation prolonged by the Buddhists in order to reach Nirvana by
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