The Buddha's Central Teaching

The Buddhist Pali canon is several times as long as the Old and New Testaments combined, yet not even a fraction of this literature directly deals with the steps of the Buddha's Eightfold Path. Instead there is much discussion of insights attained on that path, and the philosophical doctrines derived from those insights--so much, in fact, that the reader of Buddhist scriptures might tend to forget that the actual practice of the Eightfold Path was the Buddha's central teaching. It is, he assures us, the same path that he himself traveled to reach the end of suffering. Had it not been practiced and mastered, by him and many others, there would have been no one to make the dazzling insights of later Buddhist philosophy.

One of the reasons so little is said about the Eightfold Path is the highly intellectual bent of many Buddhist thinkers, who might have found matters like right occupation rather mundane. Another explanation may be the fact that until very recent times, practical spiritual instruction in India has always been oral, direct from teacher to student, so that in any case we should not expect to find written instructions in the Eightfold Path. Whatever the explanation, the Path remains far more important than philosophy. It is, in the Buddha's own estimation, his foremost gift to mankind.

---Eknath Easwaran, in his translation of The Dhammapada---