The Middle Way and other essays

Summary

This is an audiobook of Bodhi Leaves No.99 by M. O’C. Walshe, "The Middle Way and other essays" found in the Pariyatti Edition of Collected Bodhi Leaves Vol. IV.

Excerpt:

"It is always a good idea to seek the middle way, or the golden mean, between extremes whether in politics, in one’s personal view and behaviour, or in fact in any walk of life. The difficulty arises when we attempt to discover what, in practice, is the middle way. It is not, as some appear to suppose, the mid-point between truth and falsehood, or between right and wrong! In fact the middle way itself is true, and is right: the difficulty lies merely in finding it. Here are some examples: it is the mean between (as the Buddha said) self-indulgence and self-mortification, or (the same thing as applied to other persons and animals) between pampering and cruelty.

"The middle way, even at a fairly modest, mundane level, is not very popular in the world today. Probably it never was. But in these restless times it is perhaps especially needed, and at the same time especially hard to achieve. It is fatally easy to indulge in nostalgia, to conjure up a false and idealised picture of earlier times which in fact, whatever period of history we may envisage, all had their grave disadvantages of one kind or another. All the same, until recent times it may be said that, in general, life usually had a kind of placidity that has now been lost, and which is hard to recapture, except in the atmosphere of some temple, church, meditation centre or the like. This, however, may simply mean that in earlier times the tendency towards sloth and indolence was, on the whole, greater than that towards worry and flurry."