Bruce Lee's Take on the 8 fold Path

1. Right View: “You must see clearly what is wrong.”

   1. You ought to be transparent with yourself about how you’re showing up in the world and how the world is showing up inside you. Honesty with one’s self about both the acceptable and unacceptable parts of our inner and outer realities makes it easier to tend to our harmful shortcomings that continue working in the background in spite of our ignoring them. 

2. Right Purpose: “Decide to be cured.”

   1. Face the ailments of the soul, our self-created and prolonged suffering that extends past healing from an actual wound. Facing them symmetrically, the alternative and resolutory choices that accompany them and “decide consciously that you don’t wish to exist in this way anymore” (160). A feat reserved for the realization of our will’s radical freedom to choose its own fate outside constructed pathways for ourselves. A will with a purpose is a strong force. We get a lot of say on the perspective we adopt and our being in the world. 

3. Right Speech: “Speak so as to aim at being cured.”

   1. Carrying with us the long-term intent of being cured. With the correct perspective, and the correct aims in the first two steps, we ought to carry forward our natural and compassionate state in the way we speak to ourselves and others. Speak with honesty, about who you are or how you relate to the world. Talk about “the problem and the solution” with openness and “optimism”. Shannon continues “Live in the possibility of your new way of being with the words that you speak.” (160)

4. Right Action: “You must act.”

   1. Act on your solution despite the inertial force of self-destructive habits. Your rehabilitation might take weeks, months or years to settle in depending on the size of your task. Find the right tool for the right task and get out of your own way. 

5. Right Livelihood: “Your livelihood must not conflict with your therapy.”

   1. “Keep the path as clear as possible”, and remove what doesn’t serve you in your life “bad habits, toxic environments, negative relationships.” Shannon adds that your livelihood extends to “your life, your aliveness, your environment” (161).

6. Right Effort: “The therapy must go forward at the staying speed.”

   1. Don’t rush and burn yourself out, be patient, don’t sacrifice your values and authenticity, remain steadfast, incrementally growing in your “therapy.” Stay centered on living for living’s sake and passing through without getting too bogged down in the end of our journey. Move “at a pace that you can sustain” (162). 

7. Right Awareness: “You must feel it and think about it incessantly.”

   1. Keep your cure in mind and be aiming for it always.” If you stray, reorient yourself back on course, be stubborn and persistent in your therapy. 

8. Right Meditation: “Learn how to contemplate with the deep mind.”

   1. Shannon describes the deep mind as listening beyond itself, it feels, expands, and integrates “with the body and the soul.” The deep mind observes rather than dissects, alters, or compares the uniquely refreshed moment of observation. Very importantly in observing our inner life, that we experience the passage of “thought to feeling to being.” By aligning our thoughts with our actions through conviction of will the “internal and the external can unite.” Lee takes a position similar to Herder, that the mind is an extension of our life force that Lee takes to be “infinite, boundless, creative” (162).

These are from Shannon Lee's book Be Water my Friend, FlatIron Books (2020)