What comes before mindfulness? Right effort

What is the meaning of Right Effort in Buddhism? (LotusBuddhas)

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What Comes Before Mindfulness? Right Effort and the Buddhist Path to Enlightenment

Effective Effort: How to Inner Garden

Western Theravada Buddhist monk Ajahn Sona (the abbot of Birken Forest Buddhist Monastery, British Columbia) published a paperback late in 2023. It has 5 out of 5 stars with 8 ratings, asking: What comes before the practice of mindfulness?

It's not a trick question, even though mindfulness is always in season, always of benefit [if done correctly and not practiced incorrectly while thinking it's mindfulness, which is where people get in trouble.]

Ajahn Sona answers just as one might think the Buddha would. Right Effort comes before mindfulness.

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  Noble (Aryan) = "Enlightening"

  [Only this isn't exactly true. The Noble or Ennobling (Enlightening) Eightfold Path, in spite of its name, is not a step-by-step guide to practice. One does not one day wake up, develop Right View, and then carry on through the remaining seven factors. It's nothing like that. Every factor supports every other factor. They co-arise, to a greater or lesser degree, simultaneously. They interdepend. They mutually support. So just as one is practicing fourfold Right Effort -- one is carrying on mindfully and boosting all of the other factors right at that moment.

1. the effort to prevent the arising of unwholesome states (eliminating harmful and unwholesome mental states that have already arisen);
2. the effort to generate wholesome states (like the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, guarding the sense doors, restraining the sense faculties);
3. the effort to maintain wholesome mental states that have already arisen;
4. the effort to keep these states free of delusion, to develop, increase, cultivate, and perfect them.]

Back cover of book

Right Effort is a sadly neglected factor of the Noble Eightfold Path. There are endless retreats about "mindfulness," but the sixth factor of the path, Right Effort, is woefully underappreciated and not talked about enough in Buddhist circles.

It's one of the most inspiring and beautiful of the path factors, full of so many clear instructions about how to navigate in the inner world and in the outer world.

Ajahn Sona teaching at Birken Forest

This Dharma book is an attempt to bring Right Effort out of the shadows of its glamorous sister, beautiful Right Mindfulness, by going back to the basic sutras of the Pali language canon and examining the language of the Buddha around this essential training.

[Remember, if one were practicing Right Effort correctly, one would be practicing mindfulness. and the practice of Right Mindfulness is essential to the Buddha's practice as a whole.]

• BOOK: What Comes Before Mindfulness? Right Effort and the Buddhist Path to Enlightenment
• Who is Ajahn Sona? Books, biography, latest update
• Ajahn Sona (Birken); Amber Larson and Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly