the middle way

Gautam Buddha urged us to follow a middle path, not to be extreme.

This teaching had come from his own experience. As a young man he had lived a very hedonistic life. As a prince, he ate the most sumptuous food available in the kingdom. And all the prettiest girls were sent to him to satisfy his carnal desires. Life was one long party for young Siddhartha Gautama. But when he left that life and became a monk, he became an aesthetic, eating very little, having almost no material possessions; he had renounced it all. And at one stage, he tried living off one grain of rice a day.

But after a while he realised the folly of it. He realised that his body was growing weak, and he could not concentrate, he could not meditate. So, having experienced great luxury and great denial, he came to the middle path. And this formed the basis of his teaching, that we should follow the middle way, not living in extremes.

But I have something else to say on this. My feeling is that Gautama could only appreciate the middle way after having experienced for himself the extremes; extreme wealth and extreme poverty. And my feeling, as an explorer, is that we should explore whatever space we possibly can in all its extremities. Afterwards, for sure, we will return to the centre, to the middle way, and through relaxing into that middle path, we will find our true centre. But we need to know it for ourself, and we can only feel ourself to be in the middle having known for ourself the extremes.

So I feel it is good to spend some period of one’s life chasing after riches and wealth and all this materialistic nonsense. Only having lived it for ourself will we know from our own personal experience that it does not bring us happiness. And similarly, if we try denying some of our normal thirst and hungers in life, if we try being celibate, denying our sexuality, we will see that this too leads to an inner tension, a frustration, the mind going slowly crazy craving these things and not allowing itself to indulge. Once we have known such extremes for ourself, then we can come naturally to a middle way.