Right Livelihood - Excerpts from Hermetica.info

Samma Ajiva, Right Livelihood or Occupation also has its proscriptive and proactive sides. First, it abandons ways of living which bring harm and suffering to ourselves and other sentient beings, and then it adopts ways of living which will further our personal evolution and our higher purposes. There are also two sides to Right Livelihood along a different axis: at it's most literal level it refers to our occupation, the means by which we acquire the wherewithal, usually money, to meet our physical needs; and at it's most comprehensive level it refers to our Work in the highest sense, how we develop character and dignity, how we fulfill our human potential by meeting our broader range of needs, how we live a noble life and make the world a better place. To the Hermetic alchemists of the west, the Great Work was the transformation of humankind. To Eliphas Levi: "the Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future." Nietzsche, of course, took this another step forward in claiming "Man is something to be surpassed." In Buddhist terms, this Work is the cultivation of wholesomeness and skillful living. In Theravada Buddhism particularly, studying and learning go nowhere when they find no way into practice and our everyday lives. In general this also pervades the rest of Buddhism. The Dhammapada, a Mahayana text says: "Much though he recites the sacred texts, but acts not accordingly, that heedless man is like a cowherd who only counts the cows of others: he does not partake of the blessings of the holy life." (D19). The talk must be walked.

The most familiar of the teachings on the subject of Right Livelihood runs thus: "These are the five types of business that a lay follower should not engage in" (AN 5.177):
1) Satthavanijja, trafficking in weapons or lethal arms;
2) Sattavanijja, trafficking in people, slaves, prostitutes and children;
3) Mamsavanijja, trafficking in flesh, butchery, and animals for slaughter;
4) Majjavanijja, trafficking in intoxicants (drinks and drugs); and
5) Visavinijja, trafficking in poisons or toxic products.

These five are all straightforward enough to require little elaboration. Today we know things about the human condition and its future that were likely not foreseeable twenty-five centuries ago. Civilization has brought new problems and occupations into our lives and even simple common sense could expand the list quite a bit. We might now, for instance, add advertising to the list, at least to the extent that it creates artificial wants and dissatisfactions that it then turns into artificial needs in order to sell products to the newly insecure. And we can also can include those occupations that overexploit the environment, extinguish species, pollute the commons and lay whole ecosystems to waste.

    While the Buddhist monks and nuns live pretty simple lives, they too will find themselves needing to gather food, clothing, money and other wherewithal. In the Majimha Nikaya, Sutta 117, and in the Vsm I:61-65, five more forms of wrong livelihood by deceit (kuhanadi micchajiva) are identified:
1) Kuhana, deceit, scheming, trickery, fraud, especially by pretending to work wonders;
2) Lapana, flattery, talking to please donors with a view to acquiring gain, honor and renown;
3) Nemittikata, innuendo, hinting, semblances, inviting others to make offerings by giving all kinds of hints (as at supernatural rewards);
4) Nippesikata, belittling, disparaging, backbiting, harassing in order to induce offerings; and
5) Labhena labhau nijiginsabata, offering enticements of getting goods with goods, gain from invested money.
    Monks are also enjoined from using the base arts of reading signs and omens (tiracchana vikka micchajiva virati).
    There are legitimate half-measures to Right Livelihood, for people on the path to liberation but not yet ready for the renunciate's life. A great deal of the progress that we are making towards enlightenment and the elimination of suffering might still be made by the householder with property and a family to care for. In the Vyagghapajja Sutta (AN 8.54), economic stability and well-being come to the householder by way of:

1) Utthana sampada, the production of wealth by skilled and earnest endeavor;
2) Arakkha sampada, the protection, wise investment and savings of these earnings; and
3) Samajivikata, living within one's means, or balanced livelihood. This of course is a big one in a culture with so little restraint as ours.

In the Anana Sutta (AN 4.62) the householder or layman might help himself to four kinds of happiness (sukha) or satisfactoriness without straying from the path:
1) Atthi-sukha, the happiness of ownership, economic security, sufficient means, wealth righteously gained by work and zeal;
2) Bhoga-sukha, the happiness of enjoyment, from wise and economical expenditure of lawful wealth, especially in funding meritorious deeds;
3) Anana-sukha, the happiness of debtlessness, of solvency, of not owing others, freedom from usury and the threat of repossession; and
4) Anavajja-sukkha, the happiness of blamelessness and harmlessness in body, speech and mind.

There may be a misconception about Buddhism suggesting that we are to shun beauty and other finer things of life, renouncing all but simplicity and plainness. There is a point of view from which the main purpose of gathering wealth is gaining control over what you have to see and hear, particularly out of the windows of your own home, together with gaining control of what others see of you. Much wealth is spent on this pair. It is certainly true of Dhamma-Vinaya that we are encouraged to see past and through all of the "trappings" of glamor and culture. But when we do see past this it is often the case that what we see is more beauty, and of a deeper, more authentic kind. There is a lot of beauty that we overlook or dismiss just because we overlay a film of plainness on it, beauty that we only glimpse rarely in those special moments when the ordinariness seems to rub off. There is beauty that we will take for granted only because we have "been here and done that", or because we have now learned a once-wonderful thing's name or category. Sometimes we will simply but perversely refuse to adopt the point of view needed to see it. And there is beauty that is available only to giant squids because only they have the giant squid eyeballs that are needed to see it. The world also has music both above and below the range of our hearing. Because so many of us are out to find only the most glamorous beauty, the most pleasing surfaces, most of us miss the more interesting big picture. A simple life of just adequate prosperity frees us to renew our way of seeing, to find the things we overlook. And importantly, entering into this richer world does not require selling ourselves into slavery.

It is central to Buddhist philosophy that the future is the consequence or the kamma of the past and the present. There is a continuity in the journeying forward (samsara) that goes beyond genetics and the physics of cause and effect. The people waking up in the years to come with our memories, and with what we have passed down of our evolved sentience, will have us to either thank or curse for their conditions. Cultures with philosophical traditions of either rebirth or reincarnation have a head start towards this understanding, a more familiar sense of connectedness to future generations. If the world is worse the next time around it is so because of our human greed, ill-will and shortsightedness (lobha, dosa, and moha). Others have managed to develop an ethic towards our legacy in other ways. The Native Americans developed an ethical tenet to act with regard, remembrance and respect for the seventh generation down the line from ours. The cultures that practiced ancestor worship had a subtler message hidden between the lines of their ritual scripts: if you wanted to be honored or revered in this way, you would make an effort to become worthy ancestors yourselves.

The Buddha voiced his concern for future generations in a number of places. In some his first concern was with the propagation of inferior dhammas, ideas or doctrines, and in others with the quality of life that we are leaving to the unborn. We have a responsibility to the natural world as stewards for the simple reason that there is nobody else that is able to take responsibility for the damage we are doing. It is our job because it is our mess and at best we can only avoid the consequences temporarily. The exhaustion of natural resources, the extinction of species, pollution, even the loss of natural beauty are increasingly pressing the more perceptive among us to develop consensual environmental and social ethics that can stand independently of divisive religious and cultural factions.

To a much greater extent than in Buddha's day, the human being is a parasite on this world, and yet the majority of human beings alive still will not or cannot admit that overpopulation and overconsumption are serious problems. I once tried to get the board of directors of a statewide environmental group to publicly acknowledge human overpopulation as an environmental problem. They refused to touch the issue for political reasons. I left the group in disgust. We have cooked up our terminology to support our denial, so that now something that is either "green" or "environmentally friendly" is only ten percent less damaging than the business-as-usual thing it seeks to replace. We don't look at real costs, life-cycle costs or net values. We don't look at embedded materials, energy or nutrients, the real costs of manufacturing products. Most of the people in government seem incapable of seeing anything beyond the next budget or election year. And the single most abused term in the English language today is the word "sustainable." To the U.S. Forest Service, a "sustainable harvest" doesn't mean a level that can be continued in perpetuity, it means "a non-diminishing flow of commodity outputs." Then there is "sustainable petrochemistry" that ignores the end of oil to concentrate on the steep costs of the next congressional election and the costly purchase of new congressmen. The U.S. "national debt" is another example of deceitful language. It doesn't include any of those "unfunded liabilities" like the commitments to Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits or pensions, the sum of which dwarfs what is officially called the debt. This may be taken as a very general reflection of the human capacity for denial in matters of livelihood: most of us are spoiled children, borrowing with no thought of paying back the debt. One supposes that there are architects who will set their foundations on wishful thinking, but they build nothing for future generations.

Waking up in such a world as our species is making, really waking up, is problematic to somebody with a conscience, who cannot simply "go with the flow." And it's particularly problematic to a Buddhist who cannot submit to anger and outrage any more than they can submit to ignorance and denial. This will discourage many from waking up at all. Of all of the things that I invited to drive me to drink, the powerless outrage at my species' unspeakably dangerous and ignorant behavior topped the list. I seized on Sebastien Chamfort's words, "Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty years can never have loved mankind." And I am still much more embarrassed than proud to be a human. The best I could do was to calm down eventually, sober and wake up, and continue to live the simplest, most harmless, smallest-footprint life that I could manage to live. And write furiously, and publish the work for free. It was easy to adopt Dave Foreman's prescription, used by Earth First: "… do something. Pay your rent for the privilege of living on this beautiful, blue-green, living Earth." And this story helped a little, too:

There are tradeoffs to the benefits of simple living. I get experiences instead of stuff. I'm spared a lot of pressure, stress and fatigue. But I can't get a credit card since I haven't owed anybody any money in forty years. There are no waiting lines for potential lovers or mates wanting to share in my wealth. The nice things I own will fit in just a few boxes, except for a decent library, compiled just in time for books to become obsolete and the eyesight to start failing. What I have had, that some people work all of their lives to get and never do, is forty hours a week to spend in any way that I wish. These aren't regular hours either, but cubic hours, with length, breadth and depth. This is the kind of time that labors of love require. It also doesn't hurt to live without having to run the human race.

Some researchers have correlated income with happiness and graphed the results. Not surprisingly, the curve rose steeply at the lower income levels, below subsistence, so that somebody making twice the income was vastly more happy. As the higher incomes were reached the curve leveled off, so that the billionaire was only slightly happier than the millionaire. There was a point where the curve could be bifurcated, called an inflection point, that represented the maximum bang for the buck and the real beginning of diminishing returns when it came to acquiring wealth for the sake of happiness. That point was almost precisely at the United States poverty line, the point where our real needs can be met and discretionary expenditure of life's time and energy becomes practical. Discretion, then, has a cash value that is largely ignored in an affluent society. Part of the problem here is the standardized forty-hour work week, when the wages earned exceed the cost of true necessities: people resign themselves to spending their whole paycheck and more instead of saving for early retirement or working less than full-time. Such a shift requires discipline, which requires motivation, which requires reassessing the value of our time. Reassessment like this often comes with the untimely death of a close friend or loved one. We rethink what is important and reevaluate our values. The Buddha had his disciples ponder their own mortality as well as that of others to get the sense of urgency needed to forcibly remove distractions and dead weight from their lives. To lose what you did not need is not a real loss.

Right Livelihood means leading by example. There is certainly less danger of hypocrisy when it comes to environmental concerns, and that often counts for something. But making the impressive impressions is not the main point of the effort, and that is fortunate: simple living isn't really all that attractive to others unless we have something else to show that such a lifestyle clearly enables. It cannot be counted upon to glorify much of anything, and so it appears mainly to those who can notice the subtle and the understated. In other words, it's mostly great for preaching to the choir.

Once the disciple Ananda spoke to the Buddha, saying, “It seems to me that half of a holy life is association with good and noble friends.” The Buddha replied, “Not so, Ananda. The whole of a holy life is association with good and noble friends, with noble practices and with noble ways of living.” And "admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life" (SN 45.2).

Our means of livelihood concerns the social environment as well as the natural. It is, after all, the human culture that now carries the bulk of the human project forward through time, with all of its problems and all its solutions. It's this environment that future generations will live within. It is an economy with its own kind of currencies, such as trust, reputation, charity, good will, knowledge and wisdom. We all make our living in this way as well.

The Buddha tells us that advantageous friendships (kalyana-mittata, and metta) are crucial to our awakening. Although he would propose that we eventually try to attain to an unconditional fraternal love, compassion and supportiveness (metta, karuna and mudita), we must begin with the conditions that are imposed by our own necessity, the conditionality of advantageousness in friendship, the need for selection and discretion. In recovery, this might sometimes mean upgrading our circle of friends to something more like a Sangha than our old circle of ex-drinking buddies. "Should a seeker not find a companion who is better or equal, let him resolutely pursue a solitary course; there is no fellowship with the fool" (Dhammapada 61). This one was particularly challenging for me in a rural environment with a less than vast pool of potential relationships. But I did wind up going to the occasional AA meeting just to meet people to whom I couldn't lie. There were also a number of internet forums, once the internet really came into being.

Surrounding ourselves with people of like inclination, such as a Sangha or intentional community, was a large part of the Buddha's approach. We are, however, still living for ourselves. The group life, and particularly the group mind or conscience, is still only a fiction. Social livelihood isn't a question of immersion, submission or conformity, or at least it isn't when it's healthy. Our own health and welfare will be served or else we do not belong. The good doctor will attend to his own health first. "Let one not neglect one's own welfare for the sake of another, however great. Clearly understanding one's own welfare, let one be intent upon the good" (Dhammapada 166). The value is in symbiosis and synergy, or mutual benefit. The feeling of belonging is only a feeling that we have: it isn't a master to be served. If being honest about the problems of the group itself is needed, then consider that the group itself has no feelings and lay the problems out. Let's say that a recovery group is bogged down and going nowhere in a swamp of collective helplessness. Some flesh-and-blood individual really needs to point that out if it is ever going to change. And if such a group cannot get that message, this is good information about the need to find another group.

    Refuge or sanctuary will have two functions. The first is protective, it can provide a safe place for confession, apology, the acknowledgement of our error and the reestablishment trust. A recovery process is a deliberate vulnerability. Out in the world there is cultural pressure to feel insecure, unloveable and ashamed. The young trees need staking and fencing. New relationships with others need to be nurtured, and sometimes new kinds of relationships need to be invented. But shelter or protection is only an interim need, and protection from the truth of the longer-term goals, of competence, self-reliance, or self-efficacy, doesn't even serve in the short term. The common problems are not all common troubles. We just want the troubles out of the way right away so we can get to work on problems, and in an environment where we can regard the problems as puzzles.
    If I had to sum up an ethic of Right Livelihood that would apply to our impacts on both natural and social environments, I think it would be:
    Leave the world a better place than the one you emerged from. Failing that, at least don't make things worse.