What is the "Middle Way" in Buddhism?
Draft: Ivan Ermakov
The Middle Way (majjhimā paṭipadā) is the name the Buddha gave in his first discourse to the Noble Eightfold Path (the set of practices and views leading to final liberation, Nibbana). The name “middle way” was chosen because the practices the Buddha proposed lay between two extremes popular in his time:
- indulgence in sensual pleasures (kāmasukhallikānuyoga);
- extreme asceticism and self-torment (attakilamathānuyoga).
The first extreme the Buddha calls low, coarse and ignoble, the second painful and ignoble; neither leads to the goal (SN 56.11). The Middle Way itself leads to the cessation of suffering and to nibbana, and it constitutes the fourth noble truth (“there is a path of release from suffering”).
In MN 36 this approach is unfolded through Gotama’s account of his own search for awakening. The future buddha pushed his body to the limit: he starved, practised intense and life-threatening breathing exercises, up to the state where “the skin of his belly clung to his spine”. It brought him no awakening at all, only exhaustion. Then he remembered a special and pleasant state of concentration he had experienced in his youth (the first jhana), and asked himself whether that pleasure was to be feared. The answer was no - it has nothing to do with sensual desires or unwholesome states.
The Middle Way consists of the following eight aspects - factors (see SN 56.11 and MN 139):
- right view;
- right intention;
- right speech;
- right action;
- right livelihood;
- right effort;
- right mindfulness;
- right concentration.
This is where its other name comes from - the Noble Eightfold Path.
The word “middle” has another sense as well - with regard to views. There are the views “everything exists” and “nothing exists” (SN 12.15), eternalism (the “self” is eternal) and annihilationism (the “self” is destroyed completely at death) (DN 1). The view that corresponds to the Middle Way also lies midway between these extremes and rests on the principle of dependent origination: suffering takes shape when its conditions are present and ceases when they cease.
Where to read: MN 36, MN 139, SN 56.11.