Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, titled and#8220;What is the Middle Way?and#8221; is extracted from the talk and#8220;Twenty Years on the Middle Wayand#8221; by Sangharakshita. The Middle Way can be explored through three levels of application: ethics, psychology and metaphysics. Sagharakshita explores the extreme views associated with each as he points the way towards the Middle Way.
Talk given in 1987
[Music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you, and happy listening. So what is the middle way? This is the further question that arises. And remember that in the course of my 20 years in India, I gave quite a number of lectures on this particular topic. Usually, I spoke of the principle of the middle way as having three aspects or three levels of application. There was what I called the middle way in ethics, the middle way in psychology, and the middle way in metaphysics. The middle way in ethics is, of course, well known. It consists in the fact that one should avoid the extreme of self-mortification, on the one hand, and self-indulgence on the other. What if you like the extremes of asceticism and hedonism? The middle way in psychology is not quite so well known. Here also, there are two extreme views. According to one of these extreme views, man has, man possesses, an unchanging soul, and that this soul unchanged the vibes bodily death. That is one of the extreme views in psychology. According to the other view, the opposite view, man possesses, no soul, unchanging or otherwise, and there is therefore nothing of him that survives bodily death. These two extreme views were very well represented in the time of the Buddha by different thinkers. So here, the middle way is the view that there is not an unchanging, but a changing soul, and that this changing soul continues to exist after death in the same way that it existed during life. And of course, after death it may again become connected with a physical body, whether gross or subtle, and this is what is popularly known as rebus or reincarnation. So much than for the middle way in psychology, as I explained it in India, all those years ago. The middle way in metaphysics is somewhat more abstract. One may think, as some of the thinkers in the Buddhist data, one may think of ultimate reality in terms of existence, in terms of a being, or one may think of it in terms of non-existence, non-being. The middle way consists in thinking of it in terms of becoming. That to say, consists in thinking of it in terms of shunya-tara, of weightiness. Now in India, this threefold explanation of mind of the middle way was very popular with my various audiences, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. And here in England, as in the West generally, it forms part of our standard F.W.B.O. teaching. But this evening I'm not going to enlarge on these three aspects of the middle way. I'm going to take them so to speak as red. I'm going to speak instead of the middle way and of our being on the middle way in more directly practical terms, terms which are moreover of particular relevance to us here in the West. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] [music]
