What is Right Livelihood?

When looking at right livelihood within Buddhism, traditionally there are five prohibited livelihoods. However there is also a great deal of interesting additional material about inappropriate livelihoods for monastics, as well as a couple of wrong livelihoods for laypeople that the Buddha was reluctant to discuss. We’ll go over it all!

It’s worth pointing out that the material about wrong livelihood for monastics may be product of a later interpolation. Anālayo suggests this in his Early Buddhist Meditation Studies, p. 169. If so then the issues I mentioned in the video might be product of dallying by later monastics with these practices, and its censure by those closer to the textual tradition, rather than any skepticism per se on the part of the Buddha himself.