Limb 1 - Right Understanding or Perfect Vision

The first two limbs are usually grouped together as the parts of the Eightfold Path that are concerned with Prajna, which means wisdom, or here is better interpreted as understanding, intellectual understanding and emotional understanding or empathy.

For a Buddhist, our beliefs colour or affect the way that we see and interpret and therefore act in the world. Beliefs are important therefore. Further to this, for a Buddhist, a belief is a kind of action, in that it has an effect. For example, just feeling hatred or ill will towards a certain person or community will affect you. It will affect your body chemistry, how you respond when you hear that person or community named. Just being in a certain state of mind has an affect on you, whether you have acted upon it or not.

It is important, therefore, for Buddhists to "know their minds", to be really clear about their beliefs, to examine their views and opinions. This goes for all of the main Buddhist ideas too.

In an important Sutta called the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha is asked by a group of sincere but confused seekers what they should believe, which teaching or teacher they should follow. The Buddha answered:

"Do not be satisfied with hearsay,
or with tradition,
or with legendary lore,
or with what has come down in scriptures,
or with conjecture,
or with logical inference,
or with weighing evidence,
or with liking for a view after pondering over it,
or with someone else's ability,
or with the thought "the monk is our teacher".
When you know in yourselves: "these things are wholesome, blameless, commended by the wise, and being adopted and put into effect they lead to welfare and happiness,"
then you should practice and abide in them."

Put simply you have to test things out for yourself, and go by your own experience!

Perhaps the key belief of Buddhism is Impermanence, all things change, and Buddhism is a tradition, philosophy or perhaps religion if you wish, that is all about realising this, and using it, to make positive changes in our lives which we call growth or transformation. Because, if all things change, including ourselves, then there are two things possible, either we can get worse, or we can get better. This is symbolised in the second wheel of the Bhavachakra. We can consciously try to use the fact that all is change as a wonderful opportunity to change for the better, to grow, or else we can ignore and waste our great opportunity.

Often this desire to change grows out of a general dissatisfaction with ourselves and with the world around us. This can be seen as the starting point of Buddhism, a sense of dissatisfaction with things, with ourselves, with the world around us and the general state of things. It is a yearning sense that there is more to life than that which is apparent to us, and a desire or will to want to look. This experience of dissatisfaction is called Dukkha.

But this is not a negative thing. We need a sense of wonder and the courage to go and find out, to question and to dream! To be open to different things. So the eightfold or eight limbed path starts with this sense of wonder. Perhaps a bad experience, or some ...an "ah ha" moment of understanding and realisation may have prompted it, perhaps not, but the point is that there needs to be a motivation which is this sense of wonder and curiosity. This is what is meant by Perfect Vision.