A Noble Warrior’s Path Thanissaro Bhikkhu

A Noble Warrior’s Path
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu 

"The Buddha was a member of the noble warrior caste—in fact, it’s said that of the past seven Buddhas, only one was not a member of the warrior caste—and a warrior sensibility permeates his teachings. You see this with the imagery he uses, comparing a meditator to a skilled archer, to a soldier facing an approaching army, even to elephants and horses trained in battle. And this sensibility is not just in the imagery. It’s in the content as well. The noble eightfold path bears a lot of similarities to the education of a soldier. You learn the right view on how to fight. 

You learn the right motivation: the resolve to come out victorious, and to do whatever is needed to achieve that end. 

You have a code of honor on what constitutes right speech, right action, and right livelihood. Right mindfulness keeps in mind what you’ve learned—keeps in mind how to analyze things so that you know which tactics to apply when you find yourself face-to-face with the enemy.

Mindfulness helps you keep your wits about you, and right concentration keeps you steady and strong in the face of whatever comes up. You don’t lose your head.

The most important similarity, of course, is that the Buddha’s teachings are strategic, just like a soldier’s or a warrior’s......

And as we’re practicing here, we have to think strategically, too. There’s a passage where Ven. Ananda talks about three things that the practice is aimed at abandoning—actually, we’ll be giving up our need for these things as a result of the practice—but we need to use them in the meantime. And they parallel the things that you have to provide for soldiers. There’s food, there’s desire, and there’s confidence.

As for food, as Napoleon said, an army has to march on its stomach. But our food here is right concentration, using it to gain a sense of well-being to sustain us along the way.

What do you get the sense of well-being from? From the five aggregates. We know that eventually we’re going to have to give them up, but first we need to get some use out of them. After all, they do have their uses—they offer their pleasures for all that they’re stressful—so why throw them away? Even though our aim is the deathless, you have to realize that you can’t use the deathless as a path. You can’t use it for anything at all. It’s outside of conditioned experience, so it’s not a means to anything. That means you have to use the means, the conditioned things, you’ve got."

A Noble Warrior’s Path
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/Meditations8/Section0040.html