>>40945703
I haven't been posting as much but this came up and this is the only relevant thread I can find.

All our translations in English of the Noble Eightfold Path come from a 19th Century man called Rhys Davids. He is like the de facto scholar and everyone who came after him just runs with his definitions and translations.

I am trying to investigate this and I encourage you to too.

It seems right now to me that what we have is not the "Noble" Eightfold Path but "Davids" Eightfold Path!

For example the easiest way to see this is right samadhi. The whole Noble Eightfold Path climaxes in the 8th path, right samadhi. This has a very particular Sanskrit and esoteric meaning. But he translates it as right concentration. Samadhi clearly isn't just concentration! So if you read right concentration, and didn't know it was samadhi, you'd have wrong view and would be practicing basically an egregore construct of Davids.

The path ends in right samadhi which is like right bliss, it climaxes as "relief from suffering in samadhi" and it doesn't have the same Nobility when you say right concentration, that's no climax.

This got me thinking maybe right mindfulness is Davids egregore, since the Sanskrit word here could mean right recollection, or disciplined focused knowledge, shonen in Japanese. Mindfulness is an English word Originating in Christian theology in the 16th Century -- thanks "Davids."

So I'm wondering if we even know what the Noble Eightfold Path is, since all our translations come from Davids.

Right samadhi is clearly not right concentration and this leads me to believe other translations might be wrong. Mindfulness is a complete MESS today, with psychiatrists saying open up your senses to the material world and enjoy what the Demiurge has created for himself. It could be Davids egregore leading to Christian New Age "Mindfulness Meditation," which psychologists preach but which is also not a thing.