The Path translates the diagnosis of the Four Noble Truths into a program of life, integrating morality (sila), meditation (samadhi), and insight (prajna) into a single course of practice. It is affirmed across the Buddhist traditions as the practical heart of the way, though schools weight and interpret its factors variously. Its comprehensiveness (reforming conduct, speech, livelihood, and mind alike), expresses the Buddhist conviction that liberation is achieved through disciplined transformation of the whole person rather than through belief or ritual alone. Right livelihood is given concrete content in the Anguttara Nikaya (5.177), which names five trades incompatible with the precept: dealing in weapons, in living beings (including livestock for slaughter), in meat, in intoxicants, and in poison.
Applying this list to a modern economy remains a live question among lay Buddhists: whether service in a nation's armed forces, work in the alcohol or gambling industries, or investment in companies engaged in such trades violates right livelihood is debated rather than settled, with more traditionalist teachers reading the list strictly and others treating intention and proportion as the deciding factor, consistent with the Path's general emphasis on the mental state behind an action over the bare category of the act.