Right livelihood is more meaningful if we understand that it is not limited to social and moral conventions but includes the customs and patterns of our individual lives: making good use of the hours between rising and retiring, working well, maintaining good health. Such a way of life requires rational behavior. Care must be taken to get the right amounts of sleep and exercise and to eat wisely. Though our age, sex, constitution, environment, and occupation must all be taken into consideration, an optimum way of life exists for each of us. If we pursue this life steadily over the years, it will exert good influences on our economic and physical well-being, our progress in academic studies and religious practice, and even our ultimate success or failure in life. People who neglect to live in the way best suited to them bring ruin on their own heads. The Buddhist precepts set forth detailed prescriptions for the way monks are expected to live. It should be a major concern of everyone to correct bad habits and live in the regular and careful pattern that is best for him or her.
Basic Buddhist Concepts

Primitive Buddhist scriptures describe four kinds of right effort – the sixth step of the Eightfold Path – designed to cultivate good and suppress evil. These are the effort to prevent evil from arising, the effort to abandon evil when it has arisen, the effort to produce good, and the effort to increase good when it has been produced. Right effort alone promotes realization of one’s goals.

In the initial stages of producing good or preventing evil, tremendous deliberate effort is essential. But as the effort becomes habitual it grows easier. In other words, willingness to make the effort to prevent evil from arising and to produce good is the crux. In religious faith, ethics, morality, politics, economics, health, or any other area of life, people who continue making right efforts are certain to advance step by step toward success and attainment of their goals.
Basic Buddhist Concepts

Right action is refraining from killing, stealing, and immoral sexual activity. In positive terms, it means the compassionate protection of all living beings, giving to the poor, and correct sexual behavior. Both right speech and right action are consequences of right thought.
Basic Buddhist Concepts

The … 5 precepts for lay Buddhists: not to take life, not to steal, not to indulge in improper sexual activity, not to lie, and not to drink intoxicants. Stated positively, these precepts exhort us to love and protect living creatures (including both human and nonhuman beings), to be generous and munificent, to lead lives of sexual morality, to tell the truth always, and to lead sober lives free of dissipation.
Basic Buddhist Concepts

Whereas Hinayana Buddhism concentrates on negative commands to suppress and eliminate evil, Mahayana moves in the direction of ideal spirituality by setting forth the precepts called the three pure, all-embracing commandments: to suppress evil, to stimulate the creation of good, and to work for the benefit of all sentient beings.
Basic Buddhist Concepts

The precepts are both spiritual and physical training, a routine designed to build the foundation for the concentration of Buddhist meditation (dhyana; in Chinese, ch’an, in Japanese, zen). The body and mind must be conditioned in order to achieve the concentration of meditation. The physical regimen aims to assure general health and freedom from the pains and discomfort of illness and to ensure that daily requirements of food, exercise, and rest are met.
Basic Buddhist Concepts

Like a great physician of the mind, Shakyamuni taught the four truths that life is suffering, that ignorance is the cause of suffering, that suffering can be eliminated, and that the Eightfold Path is the way to eliminate suffering. A medical doctor must accurately diagnose the cause of a patient’s illness and must know the nature of the illness when it is recognized. Shakyamuni taught that we must accurately understand the nature of human suffering. This is the significance of the first of the four truths.
Basic Buddhist Concepts

If the existence of the ordinary mortal is one of suffering, the state of the enlightened sage, whose delusions have been eliminated, is the complete tranquility of nirvana. In his first sermon, the Buddha described nirvana as “the utter passionless cessation of, the giving up of, the forsaking of, the release from, the absence of longing for this craving.” Craving represents all the obstructions, including ignorance, that hinder the realization of the ideal state. Nirvana is the state in which all obstructions have been eliminated and one can function in accord with the ideal.
Basic Buddhist Concepts

Nirvana is not a concept to be pondered and understood intellectually but the actual realization of the ideal state in each thought and deed, accomplished with perfect freedom from all obstructions and impediments, without mental or physical effort, and in the natural, spontaneous activity of perfection. This is the ultimate goal of Buddhism.Basic Buddhist Concepts

The term nirvana means “blowing out.” Just as a wind can blow out a lamp, so self-discipline and religious practice can extinguish the flame of the obstructions that cause our suffering. The Samyutta-nikaya contains a passage that explains nirvana more explicitly. An itinerant ascetic asks the Buddha’s disciple Shariputra what the nature of nirvana is. Shariputra replies that nirvana is the condition in which all greed, anger, and ignorance have been extinguished. In short, it is a state free of the three poisons. Far from being an inert, inactive condition attained only after physical and mental annihilation, nirvana is the condition in which all human potential is realized in the ideal state of enlightenment.