Right View: The Paradox

There is an irony in teaching Right View: we are offering you our view of Right View. We are, in effect, teaching perspectives while encouraging you to become less attached to perspectives. Can you see the conundrum?

Our views are often deep-seated and invisible to us. We don’t necessarily choose them, and we can’t simply decide to let them go. They arise from our history, culture, relationships, experiences, conditioning, and current circumstances. The practice is not to have no views, but to become aware of them and, as they become clear, hold them more loosely, develop a capacity to hold more views, and to see the view refine or develop ethically/ less harm.

Why Views Matter

Our view on views from our book. Reflective Meditation: Cultivating Kindness and Curiosity in the Buddha’s Company.

“We often address Views (ditthi) first because how we view experience underlies everything else. For example, if our dominant view is that life is mean and people are out to get us, we will likely speak to them in a defensive way, harness our energy and intentions to protect ourselves, take protective actions, impact our choice of livelihood. On the other hand if our basic view is that life is a wonderland a different path will follow. One which may be ignorant of dukkha and maybe lacking in compassion.”

Our views matter because they shape the path that follows. Our views are dependent on many conditions and factors. Right View (sammā-diṭṭhi) is sometimes translated as “seeing things as they really are.” But we cannot fully understand this in abstraction. This is why Reflective Meditation places such emphasis on meditative experience and life experience. We discover our views not only by thinking about them, but by noticing how they operate in us.

From Right View to Right Views

We’ve often talked about having problems with the word right. The word right almost inevitably evokes its opposite: wrong. Even when we don’t intend it that way, “right” can divide the world into two categories—right and wrong, correct and incorrect, this side and that side. And I think that can make something as complex and alive as our views seem much simpler than they actually are. There are other translations of the Pali word samma that I find much more useful: skillful or appropriate.

“Right View.” View is referred to in the singular. When we looked into this, it appears that the Pali word for view, ditthi, is, in fact, singular. And in the traditional teachings, Right View refers primarily to a basic understanding of the Buddha’s teaching, often expressed through what are named the Four Noble Truths. We have renamed these the Four Ennoblings.

In Reflective Meditation, we have broadened this idea. Rather than thinking only about one foundational “Right View,” we talk about appropriate views in the plural. Because we have so many views. We have views about ourselves. We have views about other people. We have views about what is happening, what should be happening, what has happened, and what might happen. We have views about relationships, work, aging, illness, politics, money, meditation, our bodies, our families, metaphysics, and what other people think of us…

And we have views that we don’t even recognize as views. They can feel like facts. It’s easy to have a thought about something and immediately experience it as simply the way things are. Then we don’t experience ourselves as having a view. We experience ourselves as seeing reality. And this is one of the things Reflective Meditation gives us an opportunity to notice.

We allow our minds to move. We don’t have to intentionally go looking for our views. We don’t have to sit down and say, “Today I’m going to discover my views about aging,” or “Today I’m going to uncover my beliefs about relationships.” Instead, we let the mind go where it goes. A thought arises. Then another. A memory appears. We find ourselves worrying about something. We imagine a conversation. We become irritated with someone. We remember something that happened yesterday. We start planning something that will happen next week. And then, sometimes, we can look back and notice: “Oh. There was a view in there.”

Perhaps underneath an irritation was the view, “People should understand this without me having to speak up about it.” Perhaps underneath anxiety was the view, “I need to know what is going to happen before I can be okay.” Perhaps underneath a decision was the view, “If I don’t do this perfectly, I will have failed.”

These views can be so familiar that we don’t recognize them as views at all. This is one reason that speaking about our meditation can be so valuable. When we tell a teacher or a friend what happened in meditation, someone else may hear something that we didn’t notice. We might see that what seemed like a fact was actually a view. Not necessarily an incorrect view. But a view. And once we recognize something as a view, it becomes available for investigation.

This brings us back to the Eightfold Path. If we broaden samma ditthi—appropriate view—to include the views that underlie our lives, we can begin to see how view is connected to all the other parts of the path. Our views influence our intentions. Our views influence how we speak. They influence our actions. They influence how we understand our work and what we consider appropriate livelihood. They influence how we practice awareness and what we pay attention to. They influence our effort and even our experience of samadhi.

In other words, our views are not just ideas floating around in our heads. They are woven into how we live. And this is where we think the plural becomes important. How could there possibly be one “right view” for every circumstance? There are countless situations in life, and each situation contains countless conditions. And within each situation, we can hold multiple views.

Take something as ordinary as a difficult conversation. You might have the view that you need to speak up. You might have the view that you need to listen. You might have the view that this is not the right time. You might have the view that you’ve already said enough. You might have the view that the other person is being unreasonable. You might have the view that you are being unreasonable. You might have the view that this conversation is an opportunity. And you might have all of these views at different moments.

So rather than asking, “What is the right view?” perhaps a more useful question is: Which view is more skillful under these conditions? And that brings us directly to conditionality. What is skillful in one set of circumstances may not be skillful in another. Sometimes persistence is appropriate. Sometimes letting go is appropriate. Sometimes speaking is appropriate. Sometimes silence is more appropriate. Sometimes we need to take care of ourselves. Sometimes we need to move beyond our immediate self-interest.

The practice is not to discover a permanent answer that will tell us what to do forever. The practice is to become increasingly able to discern. This doesn’t mean that all views are equally useful. We don’t think they are. Some views lead toward greater freedom, compassion, clarity, and responsiveness. Other views lead toward fear, rigidity, isolation, or suffering.

We become more aware of the conditions in which they arise. And perhaps that is the movement from Right View to views becoming more skillful: not moving from wrong to right, but moving from certainty toward curiosity, from rigidity toward responsiveness, and from assuming that we know- toward being willing to see what is actually here.