Untangling with the Eightfold Path

Moving from a life of suffering to a life of true pleasure and freedom on the Eightfold Path

By Kōshin Paley Ellison

By the time students come to me, they’ve often tried many different things to make themselves happy, and none of them have worked. They’ve come to the hard-won, dispiriting realization that the things that seem so pleasurable are not, really. What they thought would satisfy them doesn’t last. They don’t feel like society has given them any real answers. Sometimes they’re at their absolute wit’s end. What they’re after is nothing short of a truly happy life, one free from the hold of junk pleasure that satisfies our urge for instant gratification but does not provide true nourishment. They’re tired of living all tangled up, and yet they have no idea how to get out of it alone.

This is the same plight that a certain guy you may have heard of found himself struggling with a long time ago in India. He led a privileged life and yet was confronted by some grim realities: that everything changes and we get old and sick and die. He was a prince, so all the luxuries of an actual palace stopped being of interest to him. Once those truths sunk in, the distractions he was used to were no longer of interest to him. Shaken by the realization, he set out to transform his life.

As important a figure as the Buddha was and is, I think about him as just another person continuously practicing. What he did was take an honest account of our situation as human beings—all of our vulnerabilities and the way we cause ourselves needless suffering—then, as the texts tell it, he vowed to never again build himself a house of sorrow. It’s the poetic way of saying that he looked around and thought, “Damn! I’ve got to see through all my B.S.”

Wanting to get your s___ together is a powerful and important place to be. It’s the beginning of deep inquiry. Inquiry is central to transforming our awareness. Many spiritual traditions have lineages, much like family trees. Inquiry is so fundamental to the view of practice in my own Soto Zen lineage that an ancestor in my lineage, Hongzhi Zhengjue, used a Chinese phrase meaning “inquiry” to sum up the whole of Buddhist practice. From that place of readiness to inquire deeply, we can start to answer the simplest and most complex question that we face as human beings: What is my life about, and how do I live my values in it?

What’s interesting is that for many of us, the shape of the answer is the same, just as the biggest, heaviest threads in our tangles are the same. What we want is a life infused with meaning, marked by genuine connection, and aligned with what matters most. A life like that is full of true pleasure. True pleasure is the other side of junk pleasure; it can’t be produced through any of the means we’re used to. This type of life builds gradually, but with a more solid foundation—it can’t be swept away by circumstance or anyone else, because the only thing it depends on is you. It takes a big effort to cultivate, but is 100 percent possible. And it’s totally free.

When you figure out how to keep growing true pleasure, it pervades your life inside and out. That’s a good thing not only for you, but for others, too. An untangled person isn’t spending a lot of time struggling to move and walk without pain. With freedom of movement and true pleasure comes a feeling of richness, maybe for the first time. Richness enables generosity. In a time of ecological crisis, rising inequality, violence, and trauma, surely the world needs our generosity. It needs people who feel rich enough to give, which has nothing to do with your bank account.

Stepping on the Eightfold Path

Fortunately, the Buddha not only figured out how to see through his s___; he also taught others how to do it. That’s the original definition of a Buddha—someone who both wakes themselves up and is able to teach others how to wake themselves up too. The method he laid out for cultivating a life of true pleasure is called the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path is a place of practice, a container for our aspirations and longings for freedom that can carry us to our true home.

The eight parts of the path are a time-tested map for transformation that people have been following for almost three thousand years. Making the Eightfold Path our place of practice catalyzes inner change that radiates into our external lives, from everyday interactions to our most intimate relationships. The true pleasure it creates is one that calms us, grounds us, and sustains us, making the bad times more easily borne and the good times even better.

I’ve spent the last thirty-five years of my life practicing the Eightfold Path. When you make a home in it, it makes a home in you. It turned me from someone who was traumatized and untrusting into someone I never thought I’d be: joyful, open, and able to reflect that energy back into the world.

Picture the right aspects of the path like eight spokes on a wheel leading into the central hub. That central hub is where we find true pleasure, which is the joy of the path. Anywhere on the wheel is walkable, including all the roads, the outer rim, and the central hub. There is no arrival point or finish line, although you can spend more and more time within the hub of true pleasure.

The Eightfold Path won’t help you strike it rich, lose weight, or win friends and influence people. What these practices will do is help you untangle, and when you do that, you’ll be free to stretch your wings. Heck, you’ll be free to howl at the moon. This is the freedom that would appear if you forgave who you are and expressed your true nature—if you let your freak flag fly.

Don’t Hold Back

I believe that everyone intuits there is a way to live that is easeful, connected, authentic, and free. Most of us have had moments, or even seasons of life, when we felt like that. Some people have the idea that it’s a kind of heaven, and that it can’t exist in this world. The design perspective, so to speak, of Buddhism is different. Freedom exists here, where we are, moment by moment, and this can be invited and cultivated. Living a life of true pleasure is living with a sense of expansion, of exploration and curiosity, of having wild access to the full range of human experience from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to the heights of Everest. Learning how to live like this requires what is required of all adventurers: courage. It’s the courage to say what you value and stick to it. It’s the courage to stop f___ing around, because life is short.

Fifteen years ago, my husband, Chodo, and I had the honor of care partnering with a woman named Rose as she was dying. I think about her when I think about courage.

“Promise me you won’t hold back,” she said to us, on her deathbed. Her energy had been low and quiet for days, but she became exuberant for a minute while she spoke. “I held back for twenty years,” she said. “Then I didn’t anymore, and I have no regrets. Promise me you won’t hold back.”

This is the kind of courage we need to walk the eight roads and create a life of true pleasure. Ready? Don’t worry—you never will be. Let’s begin anyway.

FromUntangledby Kōshin Paley Ellison © 2024, Balance, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. Reprinted with permission of the author.