Venerable Sir, would you please explain the step known as Right Effort (sammā-vāyāma) in the Noble Eightfold Path?

‘Right Effort’ (sammā-vāyāma) means taking effort or exercise that is righteous, aimed at cultivating wholesome actions. Revered-laity take exercise every day. Some folks run. Some walk, or stretch their arms and legs. Is this righteous exercise? Is it a kind of exercise that develops wholesome actions? In trying to make a sickly body healthy, a dying body beautiful, you become persistently distressed due to birth, decay, sickness, and death; and because of it, develop unwholesome-roots greed, hatred and delusion.

Buddha has set forth a daily form of exercise even for us ordained monks. That exercise is: Early morning, go to the village on house-to-house alms round. Could be one, two or three kilometres long. Having finished the alms round, return to the kuṭī. Subsist on just the alms food received, just one meal a day. When eating the alms food, eat mindfully, reviewing and reflecting (paccavekkhana). In your free time, mount the sand walkway and practise walking meditation, firmly focusing your mind on the step. Look how meaningful a form of exercise it is. Imbued with moral worth. Lets wholesome actions grow. Not just the body but the mind, too, develops well along the essence of the Dhamma. The craving for corporeal form (rūpa) lessens. Also, a sickly body becomes healthy to a certain extent. [Whereas] the revered-laity do exercise for an hour or two, have all three meals, and go to sleep. If you too incorporate in your life, as right for lay life, the method of exercise the Buddha has spelled out, not only does your body get in shape, but also your wholesome qualities develop.

Apart from the said type of exercise, Buddha proclaims the noble exercise called Right Effort coming under the Noble Eightfold Path, which makes for comforts in both this life and the next. For the phenomenon called Right Effort to develop in you properly, all of the first five constituent steps of the Noble Eightfold Path must develop in you, starting with Right View. Right Effort consists of four things:

• [One] keeps performing still more strongly the wholesome actions currently being performed.

• Starts doing new wholesome deeds not previously done.

• Abstains from those unwholesome actions previously performed.

• Refrains from committing any new unwholesome deeds not previously committed.
  
  

The above four things make up the phenomenon called Right Effort. By incorporating the said phenomena in your life, your wholesome qualities become stronger. Simply as a result, wholesome karma-formations accrued in past saŋsāra that haven’t yet taken effect come pouring into your life. Because of this, your Dhamma practice goes from strength to strength. Longevity, good appearance, comforts, and strength improves. [But] when looking at present society, by incorporating Right Effort in their lives without first perfecting the essence of Right View, the way some revered-folks turn the [said] merit into a blazing inferno is all too apparent.

Venerable Sir, how can Right Effort be turned into supermundane Right Effort (lokuttara sammā-vayama)?

Revered-you, contemplate with the faculty of wisdom; however much you live cultivating wholesome actions and abstaining from unwholesome actions, what do you get as a result? A wholesome-saṅkhāra; and because of it, rebirth in a fortunate destination. Is that wholesome-saṅkhāra, that rebirth in a fortunate plane, permanent or impermanent? Impermanent.

Having been born in dispensations of past buddhas, how much we will have cultivated wholesome actions, or stayed away from unwholesome actions. Buddha proclaims that you and I, having ordained into this worthy monkhood in the round of rebirths past, cultivated wholesome actions for hundreds of thousands of years. But all such saṅkhāras became impermanent. The view of penetrative insight (vipassanā) you acquire by beholding the impermanence of wholesome-saṅkhāras produced through Right Effort begets supermundane Right Effort in you. Then you won’t get attached to ephemeral saṅkhāras. Having strengthened Right Effort in life, seeing the impermanence of those wholesome-saṅkhāras, you will strengthen the perception of impermanence of the five clinging aggregates.