Siddhârtha’s Gift – The Middle Way

Essentially, the path through meditation requires balance.

Take the act of meditating for example – for sure, we need to apply effort – but if we use too much effort we create tension and anxiety and stillness cannot happen. Alternatively, if we use too little effort our attention drifts and we end up daydreaming – and again, the potential for stillness is lost.

So you see, everything we do in meditation requires that we find the middle path between extremes – the middle way.

And that apples to life as well. When we apply too much effort, we become tense, self conscious and rigid, which ultimately sabotages what we’re trying to achieve. And if we apply too little effort, things fall apart and we fail.

This notion of the middle way was a central pillar of the Buddha’s teachings. So maybe we should take a look at how it evolved.

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Before the Buddha became a wandering ascetic, he was Prince Siddhârtha Gotama, born 2500 years ago to a warrior king who ruled over the land of the Sâkyans on the Nepalese frontier.

When Siddhârtha was born, a sage told the king that either of two things would happen with his son – he would either become a great and powerful ruler, or a wandering beggar-ascetic in the tradition of spiritual seekers of the day. Of course, the king wanted his son to become his eventual successor, so he decided to try and tweak fate by grooming Siddhârtha as a king- to enclose him in luxury while educating him to rule.

This cocoon of luxury was so complete that Siddhârtha spent many years totally oblivious to very basic truths of life. Surrounded as he was by youth, beauty and luxury, he had no idea there was old age, or sickness or suffering or death in the world – which made it all the more shocking when, as a young man, on a few of his rare forays outside one of the palace compounds, the prince began to glimpse the suffering which had always been hidden from him.

A number of separate events changed him profoundly and sowed the seeds for his eventual life direction.

On the first occasion, as the he was driving with his charioteer Channa to the royal gardens, he saw a man weakened with age, lying on the ground where he had fallen and crying out for help.

The second occasion was when he caught sight of a man who was diseased and dying, so thin he was skin and bones.

And the third occasion was when he saw a group of weeping men carrying a corpse to cremation.

Siddhârtha was shocked. He had never known that there was suffering like this, and he’d never contemplated death. And when his charioteer told him that even he and his beautiful wife and child, and all his youthful friends would, without exception, eventually become subject to ageing, disease, and death, he was stricken with grief. He found it almost impossible to assimilate this new reality into the kind of life he was living. Suddenly all the luxury and pleasure of his life was revealed as only temporary – to be lost when sickness and death eventually came.

As one used to perfection and facile fulfilment, this realisation of the profound unsatisfactoriness of life nagged at Siddhârtha. It didn’t make sense to him, that most beings should be born to such ignoble suffering, with death as their only reward. And because he had never experienced suffering or sickness, he felt as if he had been tricked into a grand deception by his father’s desires for him.

He became obsessed with the questions that had been created in his head. No matter how he tried, he could no longer ignore the fundamental ‘wrongness’ he saw in the world around him. He saw death and imperfection everywhere. And the more he thought about it, the more this haunted him, until finally he realised he had no way of knowing how to address those questions, because his experience was so limited by his luxurious life.

He became very unhappy. Luxury no longer satisfied him, nor did the prospect of becoming a king – and no-one could distract him from the despair he felt, which became stronger every day.

Then one day he happened to come upon one of the many wandering holy-men who were common at that time. These were men who had left home and family to devote themselves to the spiritual life. In India, these wandering holy men were revered and supported with donations wherever they went. Though the man was emaciated and dressed in rags Siddhârtha was impressed by his grace and good humored demeanor. He was different to other people – oddly unconcerned with the obvious physical hardship he lived with.

Siddhârtha asked his servants why this man seemed so happy when he lived in apparent poverty. It was explained to him that many men in India and the surrounding countries of the region did this with their life – became travelling beggars to devote themselves to spiritual truth through renunciation and meditation – and they all seemed impervious to suffering.

As he watched the holy-man, Siddhârtha saw his life direction. He knew by now that the tug of all the questions and doubts that nagged at him had made him utterly unsuitable to be king. He had experienced all the luxury and power and gratification that the material world could offer him, yet it only confused and suffocated him. He realised that the answers he needed  lay in finding the solution, not only to suffering as it appeared in life, but to his own suffering as well.

So he gave away his robes and left his young wife and son, and the palaces where his whole life had been spent, and became a wandering sadhu.

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At first Siddhârtha sought guidance in the most obvious place – from sages famous for their knowledge. Under their guidance he brought all his intelligence and willpower to bear on the new challenge of meditation, and it was not long before he had surpassed his teachers – yet still the answers he was looking for eluded him. Though many would have been satisfied with the progress he had made, the original questions that had caused him to renounce his life as a prince remained unanswered, so he could not rest.

Now, at that time there was, and still is, a belief in India that it is only through rigorous self-denial and physical mortification that spiritual purification and enlightenment can be achieved. Siddhârtha decided that if this was what he must do to find the answers to his questions, then he would take it as far as he could. He thanked his teachers and left, wandering until he found a suitable place beside a river where, with a few fellow ascetics, he began his efforts anew – determined this time to find what lay beyond life itself.

For the next six years he and his companions struggled to transcend their physicality in the hope of liberation. During this time they lived on nothing but roots and leaves, all the time reducing the amount of food they needed to stay alive. They wore cast off rags and slept on the bare ground, no matter how cold it became at night, or how badly bitten they were by insects.

Of all of them, Siddhârtha was most extreme as he tried to succeed in this mission for which he had given up so much. He meditated for days on end, and when that wasn’t enough, he meditated for longer. In his desperation to find an ultimate truth that would satisfy his questions, he pushed the limits of mind and body right to the point of death.

It was only then, in the moments before his last breath, that he suddenly realized how futile his extreme efforts had been. He was no closer to his goal. All he’d done was nearly kill himself. He saw then that his will had been too strong and too full of ambition and desire. It had pushed him to ignore and abuse his only true friends in this endeavor – his own mind and body.

By now Siddhârtha had experienced the two opposite extremes in his life. He had experienced extreme wealth, luxury, pleasure and comfort, and he had experienced absolute poverty, starvation, suffering and deprivation. And  he knew now that true liberation did not come from either of them – neither from indulgence of the senses, as he had experienced when he was a prince, or from the extreme abstinence and denial of an ascetic.

He realized that the true path to his goal, or any goal for that matter, lay between the two extremes, in what he termed ‘The Middle Way’. He is reputed to have said, “The middle path, avoiding the extremes, gives vision and knowledge and leads to calm, realization, enlightenment, and Nibbâna.”

In the middle way Siddhârtha saw how important it was for his body to be nourished and well kept. To this end, he took meditation in a new direction. Rather than using it to try to escape mind and body, he abandoned extreme measures and began to take care of himself, and make himself healthy so he could investigate how mind and body interact with one another to create the reality we live in.

His companions did not understand. Where previously they followed Siddhârtha’s example, now they turned against him, accusing him of weakening in the ascetic cause. They thought that by forgoing extreme self denial, Siddhârtha was giving up the goal of enlightenment to resume his old princely habits of luxurious living.

In disgust they left him.

But Siddhârtha was not swayed by their disdain. With firm determination, now alone and unguided by any teacher or companion, Siddhârtha set out on his new, and unique path.

After taking the time he needed to nurse his body back to health, he seated himself beneath a banyan tree and began. But this time as he meditated, he did not seek to escape his physicality. Rather he turned his attention around and did the opposite. He looked into the mental and physical stuff of his being to see how it worked, patiently examining the mechanic of his conditioned mind and body, looking for answers to the questions about life and the true nature of suffering.

As his absorption deepened he gained what at the time was a revolutionary insight into the nature of habits, reactions and conditioning. Siddhârtha saw how the mind is caught in a strange revolving cycle of stimuli and reactions, that leads to suffering.

Put simply, the cycle of suffering goes something like this:

1. Whatever we do creates reactions and sensations in our body.
2. We like some of these reactions and sensations and we dislike others.
3. This causes us to seek out the reactions and sensations we like and avoid those we don’t like.
4. This seeking and avoiding of things creates mental and physical habits.
5.  The more these habits act out, trying to cling to our desires and avoid what we fear, the stronger they become.
6. As the habits become stronger, so too the desires and fears that drive them become more intense.
7. Meanwhile, life keeps changing without regard for what we desire or fear.
8. This constant changing inevitably pushes against the habits we have built around our desires and fears.
9. This creates suffering.
10.  And because we suffer, our addiction to our desires and our aversion to our fears becomes even more intense.
11. So we try even harder to cling to what we desire and avoid what we fear, in a futile attempt to defeat change.
12. And the harder we try, the stronger our habits and reactions become.
13. And so we find ourselves stuck in a cycle of suffering, constantly bouncing between ever-strengthening desires and fears, as the universal force of change keeps pushing against them.
14. And so it goes. We’re stuck in the wheel of ‘dukkha’ (A Pali word meaning: ‘unsatisfactoriness leading to frustration and suffering’).

As he meditated, Siddhârtha realized that the compelling habits and reactions being generated by his own mind, and in his own body, were creating the wheel of suffering that he and all of humanity were caught upon.

He also noticed that as he changed his view of the habits and saw them for what they are – simply sensations in the body accompanied by thoughts in the mind, the habits slowly lost the definitions his conditioning had created for them. They no longer created pleasure or pain. They became characterless – just what they are – thought energy and sensations.

As his habits lost their defining characteristics, he no longer felt the need to pursue or avoid the objects that had caused them. Result being, his needs became less – not through denial or abstinence, but through understanding and wisdom.

Siddhârtha’s other revelation was revolutionary for the time, and even today it remains controversial with those who are not Buddhist. He saw very clearly that, aside from the tangled habits that form the layers of conditioned mind, there is no essential ‘Self’ or ‘soul’ to anything, whether it be a human being, an animal, a tree, or anything else in this universe. He saw that all things are just composites of other things – that a human is a composite of organs and skeleton, which are composites of cells, which are composites of molecules, atoms, particles, and so on. And within all these collections of different things, the only permanent thing common to all, is an awareness that’s not specific to any of them. And in this awareness, everything in the universe is unified.

In short, he saw that the separateness of being we commonly perceive is an illusion created by our habits.

As such, Siddhârtha realized that no one thing in this unity of existence is worth clinging to, or valuing, or fearing, or desiring – because all things, except bare awareness itself, are insubstantial, temporary, and essentially illusory. And if we cling to any part of this vast web of being, we will suffer.

As his mind experienced this new view of itself, it began to change. It lost interest in the conditioned attachments it had been formed from, and his conditioned sense of self began to deconstruct itself.

As his sense of self deconstructed, his absorption grew deeper. He now had no need to try to transcend his mind – his own mind had transcended itself.

He is reputed to have exclaimed, “Wonder of wonders! This very enlightenment is the nature of all beings and yet they are unhappy for lack of it!”

Buddhist texts speak of the many different stages he went through on the night of his enlightenment, but nobody can really know just how deep his experience of ultimate reality actually was. All we know is that the product of his enlightenment was profound insight into the nature and psychology of mind, physicality, and conditioned reality.

When Siddhârtha told his followers what he had found, they were astonished by the stunning dichotomy of simplicity and the profound depth of what he had discovered. They gave Siddhârtha the title, ‘Buddha’, meaning ‘enlightened one’.

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The wonder of Siddhârtha’s enlightenment was that it was so clean of religious connotation. Unlike most sages, gurus and prophets of the time, he did not refer to gods, or mystical or apocalyptic visions. In this Siddhârtha did something incredible – he stepped outside the ubiquitous religious beliefs and conditioning he’d been born into and, looking back from a totally detached position, he stripped away all the mythology and superstition that had built up over thousands of years, and laid bare simple truths about life.

He said, “What we are today comes from our thoughts of past, and our present thoughts build our life of the future. All experiences and mental states are preceded by mind. They have mind as their master. They are produced by mind.”

In the intensely fatalistic mysticism of the time this was unique. The idea of self-responsibility had never been considered, because few had ever made the connection between suffering and their own actions. Added to which, with the vast pantheon of gods that most of humanity believed in at that time, people had become used to feeling powerless – blaming the gods for their suffering, or praising them for their good fortune. As a result, humanity lurched from one disaster to the next, never learning from personal experience because, whatever the problem was, it was usually ascribed to gods, or fate, or evil spirits.

It is this clarity that distinguishes the Buddha from other religious teachers. He never claimed mystical powers, or to be a God or any incarnation of God, nor did he try to make himself a prophet.

In fact, he was initially reluctant to keep quiet about what he now knew, because he had no faith in people’s ability to understand it. He is reputed to have said, ‘… if I were to teach the Dhamma and others would not understand me, that would be tiresome for me, troublesome for me.’ It was only the encouragement of the rapidly expanding group of fellow meditators who convinced him his knowledge should be spread.

So he set out to teach what he knew. He laid out a way to realize the true nature of our life experience through meditation. As such all of his teachings, both moral and theoretical, are specifically and entirely to do with the development of meditation and mindfulness.

Central to these teachings is ‘the middle way’ – the idea of balance – that the most effective path towards anything, be it meditation, or life itself, is the path that runs between the extremes. And the only way we can travel this middle path is to be mindful of the habits and addictions that pull us away from it.

Modern psychology has appropriated a lot of what the Buddha taught, so his revelations are not seen as being particularly significant these days. It’s really only when we have practiced meditation for a while that we begin to experience the truths of what he said. The more we meditate, the more we realize how profound was the gift that this extraordinary man gave us.

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