The Eightfold Noble Path

T1606 is careful to mark exactly what "this later time" means: the seven awakening factors just examined constitute the path of seeing itself, and the eightfold path takes as its own object the identical reality of the four truths, but now as encountered afterward, on the path of cultivation — the same insight, revisited and consolidated rather than freshly discovered. T1606 also explains each of the functional labels in turn. Correct view is called the factor of discernment because it is simply the direct, discerning realization of the truths already achieved. Correct thought is the factor of instructing others because it is the very deliberation by which what has been realized gets put into words others can follow. Correct speech, action, and livelihood together inspire others' trust for a very concrete reason: by observing that one's manner of speaking, one's conduct, and one's means of livelihood are all genuinely clean, others come to trust that one's view, moral discipline, and way of life really are pure — each of the three, respectively, giving outward evidence of one of these three purities. And the final three — correct effort, recollection, and concentration — divide the remaining work of purification three ways: effort permanently cuts off the root afflictions themselves; recollection guards against the secondary afflictions of torpor and restlessness ever gaining a foothold; and concentration is what brings forth the supernormal powers and other superior qualities whose absence would otherwise remain an obstacle even after the afflictions themselves are gone.

By simply referring back to the awakening factors' own fourfold cultivation sequence — distancing, freedom from desire, cessation, and relinquishment, each applied in turn to each of the four truths — the treatise signals that the eightfold path is not a separate cultivation technique layered on top of the seven awakening factors, but their direct continuation into the subsequent path of cultivation. The fruit named here simply restates, as a single unified outcome, every function already assigned to the eight factors individually: view discerns, thought instructs, speech/action/livelihood inspire trust, and effort/recollection/concentration between them purify every remaining obstacle — the afflictions themselves, the secondary afflictions that would otherwise still trouble the mind, and whatever still stands between the practitioner and the path's own most excellent qualities. With this, the treatise's presentation of all thirty-seven factors of awakening — the four foundations of mindfulness, the four correct exertions, the four bases of supernormal power, the five faculties, the five powers, the seven factors of awakening, and now the eightfold path — is complete.