Category Archives: Great Thinkers

Middle Way Thinkers 7: M.K. Gandhi

Ethics, Great Thinkers,

M.K. Gandhi was a Middle Way thinker in very striking practical respects. I count him as such not because of his obviously metaphysical beliefs about God, Truth, and the ultimate unity of religions, nor because of his commitment to Pacifism, but because of his courage and innovation when it came to dealing practically with conflict and providing us with tools for non-violent political change. Gandhi’s key insight was that the whole concept of any enemy is a projection of narrowed, dogmatic representations of the world. Our desires may conflict with others’ desires, but that conflict needs to be resolved by integration, not by a victory that eliminates the ‘enemy’. The conflict we may have with ‘enemies’ reflects a conflict within ourselves and within that person, which is not resolved by ‘winning’ the conflict.

Instead, in a case of conflict like that between exploited Indians and the ruling British of imperial India, the resolution of the conflict comes from making opponents recognise the conditions they are ignoring in their unnecessarily narrowed view of the world. They can be led into this by being led to see the humanity of those they are oppressing, and the similarity, rather than just the difference, between their concerns and those of the group or individuals they have previously seen so rigidly. If they cannot be positively persuaded, they need to be shocked into an act of imagination.

The recent death of Richard Attenborough prompted me to re-view the great biopic of Gandhi that he directed, and I highly recommend that film to get an impression of the man (selective though it inevitably is). The following scene from the film depicts the disciplined practice of non-violent protest that Gandhi inspired and organised, though Gandhi himself does not appear in this clip (he had just been imprisoned). The march on the salt works was inspired by the injustice of a British state monopoly on the making of salt, so in effect the salt works symbolised British imperial rule.

At one time I used to think of this scene as masochistic, but now I no longer think of it in this way. There seems to be no sign that the protesters lacked confidence or had any sort of craving to be hurt. Masochism reflects a conflict and repression within, but I see no sign of that in these men (though of course it is a reconstruction, and who knows what motivated the original men). Rather their willingness to incur injury to themselves for their cause could be seen as the result of their commitment to integration: not so much a self-sacrifice as a recognition that voluntary physical injury to oneself is in the end less important than the integration they were trying to bring about.Gandhi1

This, at least, is how I now read the practical insights that Gandhi reached, in which I see a powerful example of the Middle Way in action. In practice, in his political campaigning at its best, Gandhi seems to have neither stuck dogmatically to an interpretation of his beliefs that would cause immediate conflict, nor gone to the self-sacrificial opposite extreme of giving up the cause that he identified with and understood the justice of. It is in his private life, revealed particularly in his Autobiography ‘My experiments with truth’, that I find a much more dogmatic Gandhi: one whose absolute beliefs led him to repress his own passions and to have an inconsistent response to his sexuality.

Gandhi called his technique Satyagraha,  ‘truth grasp’. At times he seems to stubbornly assert that he has a grasp of truth of a metaphysical kind, but at other times I can read Gandhi’s relationship with ‘truth’ as something he found profoundly meaningful and interpreted with humility, a truth on the edge. Though he was an imperfect human being like the rest of us, he is also a thinker who forged his understanding of the Middle Way in the heat of action.

Middle Way Thinkers 6: Jesus

Great Thinkers, Myth, Religion, The Arts,

Was Jesus a Middle Way Thinker? Largely not. His beliefs seem to have included many absolutes, and he has also been interpreted since in terms of those absolutes. Yet in this series I also want to encourage incremental thinking. I want to suggest that there are some important ways in which Jesus moved forward from the dogmas of his time, which amount to some specific instances of Middle Way thought. I’d suggest that it is due to these new ways that he addressed the conditions of his time that he gets much of his power. Particularly for those of us from a Christian background (which includes me), I think it’s important to re-examine Jesus in a critical way: one that tries to separate out the dogmas of Christian tradition from those elements that might helpfully speak to our experience.

However, this is a loaded subject, so I’d better start with some clarifications. On the one hand, I’m not interested in supporting any of the dogmas of the Christian tradition about Jesus: either that he was the Son of God, affirmed as some type of supernatural status, or that everything he uttered was ‘true’ and the Word of God. But nor, on the other hand, am I interested in historical revisionism, which seems to be the opposite trap for those interested in re-examining Jesus. I don’t want to make any claims about what Jesus “really” was, or believed, or meant to say. I’m content to work with the Jesus accepted by Christian tradition, and depicted in the four canonical gospels, because that is what ‘Jesus’ effectively means to most people today. I’m looking for insights or symbolic inspiration, rather than historical revelation, in this traditional depiction of Jesus, without getting swallowed up by the various scholarly quagmires of Biblical Studies. The third extreme I’d also want to avoid here, is the mere rejection of Jesus as a source of insights or inspiration. For me, and I suspect many others in the West, Jesus is a powerful archetypal figure, both because of his role in Western art and culture and because of his influence through the Christian churches (very much associated, for me, with childhood experience as a minister’s son).

Let me also briefly note some of the aspects of Jesus that I think are pretty unhelpful. There’s the virgin birth, the idealised childhood, and the sense of divine destiny as the son of God. There are the miracles: at least where these are presented not as acts of compassion but (as particularly in the gospel of John) as signs of divine status. There’s the self-sacrificial aspect: he appears to have basically offered himself up as a sacrifice, aware that he was walking into a trap that would result in his death in Jerusalem, but still doing it. In his trial before Pilate he also seems guilty of false modesty, not offering even a moderate defence to draw people’s attention to his innocence. It seems possible that he believed God would save him from the cross (accounting for ‘My God! Why have you forsaken me?’), because of his profound belief in cosmic justice and an imminent doomsday. Finally, if we follow the role of Jesus in Christian tradition, there’s the interpretation of Jesus’s death as an atonement for human original sin, and the belief in his resurrection as a further sign of divinity and a proof of eternal life for the saved: all these are damaging dogmas by which the moral complexity of our experience is overlaid with crude diagnoses and crude magical solutions.

But, if we can manage to leave all that stuff aside, let’s try to focus on some of the ways that Jesus can be inspiring and insightful – corresponding also to ways that he moves towards the Middle Way. I’d suggest that these fall into two categories: one of these is helpful elements in Jesus’s moral teaching, and the other is helpful archetypal interpretation of the meaning of Jesus as the Son of God.

Much of Jesus’s moral teaching involves a struggle with the Pharisees, who were a sect of Jewish legalists, and the Sadducees, who were conservatives associated with the priestly elite at the Jerusalem temple. Jesus is excoriating about rigid observance of tradition or adherence to the letter of the law, instead urging awareness of motive and the spirit behind the law. For example, when his disciples plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath (against the laws that forbid harvesting on the sabbath, which would be work) and were criticised by the Pharisees, Jesus said “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). He also emphasised motive in urging people not to be showy about giving alms, “Your good deed must be secret” (Matthew 6:4). From today’s perspective, to merely emphasise motive in ethics is not enough, because our motives vary so much along with our unintegrated desires. However, this emphasis was a major step forward in a context where people were thinking of ethics only as an extension of law, in the form of rigid social rules. On the other hand, Jesus seems to be trying to strike a Middle Way in relation to the Jewish Law, because he does not reject it either: “Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to complete” (Matthew 5:17).

Jesus is also well-known for his teaching of ‘turning the other cheek’ – the apparent pacifism of “Do not resist those who wrong you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). The key insight here is the necessity of avoiding fruitless conflict. Rather than offering one rigid position in response to another, we need to find ways of reducing (an not acting on) the narrow egoistic identification we may have with ‘winning’ when someone challenges us. However, I also think that the Pacifist interpretation of this verse develops another kind of dogma. If we read it as forbidding violence in all circumstances whatsoever, then we rule out the possibility of violence addressing conditions in some circumstances where it might be the best response.

Jesus also offers what might be regarded as a brief equivalent to the Kalama Sutta in Buddhism, offering the suggestion that we need to consult experience when confronted with a conflict between different dogmatic claims. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you dressed as sheep while underneath they are savage wolves. You will recognise them by their fruit. Can grapes be plucked from briars, or figs from thistles? A good tree always yields sound fruit, and a poor tree bad fruit” (Matthew 7:15-17).  Here he seems to be suggesting that verbal claims are not enough, and one of the ways we can judge the justification of conflicting claims is by their integration, evident in people’s behaviour. Again, we could take this to another extreme, by rejecting a person’s view whenever there is a shade of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy does not necessarily make people’s claims untrue, but it is a useful warning sign.

Much more could be said about Jesus’ moral teaching, but I must keep this post brief. More broadly, too, I think Jesus’ symbolic role should also be mentioned. His traditional position in Christianity as ‘Son of God’, both wholly human and wholly divine (according to the Nicene Creed) does not have to be merely rejected as a dogmatic belief, because its meaning can be separated from such beliefs. That meaning is one I encounter very frequently in Renaissance art, where I encounter Jesus as what sometimes seem to be an attempt to represent the Middle Way in human experience. The symbolic richness of Jesus’s status as both divine and human is one way of confronting the profound ambiguity of the relationship between perfect ideals and imperfect experience, the ‘truth on the edge’, or necessity of maintaining a robust conception of truth without claiming to possess it. Jesus is full of contradictions: he is both vulnerable and powerful, wise and foolish, alive and dead, but these contradictions are only damaging as objects of incoherent belief. As symbols, on the other hand, their ambiguity can help us to recognise both the conflicts in our own experience and the ways we can work with those conflicts.

Orozco_Christ_cuts_his_CrossWestern art often depicts Jesus in three particular forms: as an infant, in his crucifixion, and in his resurrection. All of these, I think, can be appreciated as offering evocations of that symbolic richness. As an infant he represents the incarnation, that strange ambiguous middle way between divine and human. On the cross he represents the unbearable and unjust suffering of the human condition when understood in relation to divine perfection. When resurrected, he shows the perseverance of hope: that the good can still come through human experience even when we least expect it, when we have come to terms with the conditions of human life. The picture here is an intriguing one by the Mexican artist Orozco. There are many ways of reading it, either as a symbol of resurrection, or as an anti-theistic statement in which mere humanity triumphs.

I have passed through a number of stages in my response to Jesus. As a child and teenager, I mainly had a negative reaction to the idealised figure I was presented with, who was being foisted on me, but didn’t at all seem to represent the qualities I would have chosen to idealise or to worship. At times, however, I also tried out that idealisation, though I had great difficulty making it my own. I then started to see Jesus primarily as a swindle: an attempt to magically jump across the difficulties of human life. Now, however, I’m quite clear about rejecting a lot of the religious claptrap that surrounds beliefs around Jesus, but at the same time I think I am beginning to develop  a relationship with him both as a man and as an icon. As a moral teacher, he can be inspiring, but does not seem to me as hugely significant as he is often cut out to be, and a lot of contextualisation is needed to see how he was moving towards the Middle Way. As an archetypal symbol, though, he means a lot more, and that meaning develops a little almost every time I step into an art gallery.

Postscript (2018)

This article was written in 2014, and since then I have written a whole book, The Christian Middle Way, that is now being published. In that book I give a much more detailed interpretation of Jesus with rather more reference to the gospels. Although this article gives an idea of the direction I was heading in a couple of years before I wrote the book, the view of Jesus that I arrived at subsequently is in many respects more positive than this one.

Robert M. Ellis

Middle Way Thinkers 5: John Stuart Mill

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, , ,

“It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves…unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement….In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you were looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”

This is how John Stuart Mill, writing in his autobiography, tells us about the great crisis in his life: what we might now call a nervous breakdown. Mill is one of philosophical history’s great infant prodigies. Urged by his pushy utilitarian father, he was also intended as a living demonstration of the power of a rationally ordered way of life in pursuit of utilitarian objectives. Famously, John Stuart Mill started to learn Ancient Greek at the age of three. By the time of his breakdown at twenty, he had already been through a high pressure education and become a utilitarian campaigner. We can guess, however, that in this pressurised environment a great many other feelings were repressed. As repressed feelings tend to do, they made themselves unexpectedly, distressingly and disruptively manifest.

What makes Mill such an inspiring figure is the way that he dealt with this inner conflict. He neither tried to repress the inconvenient feelings further, nor did he entirely give way to them. Instead he learnt from them and modified his view of the world. He seems, in fact, to have integrated the conflicting desires, meanings and beliefs that lay behind this inner turmoil, by working through them in his philosophy. What had started off as a narrow, puritanical utilitarianism was broadened and modified in an attempt to recognise the importance of emotional and aesthetic experience. Mill became especially known for his essay On Liberty, the key founding text of liberalism and a hugely creative advance in the political thought of the time. In addition, with the collaboration of his wife Harriet, his essay On the subjection of women also became a key early text in the attempt to persuade the repressive male-dominated nineteenth-century world that women should also share men’s liberty as equal partners.

As with any other thinker one might identify as making an important contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way, Mill found a balance in some ways more than others. For example, Mill’s interpretation of Utilitarianism moves beyond the narrowness of his early mentor Jeremy Bentham, it still has the limitations of Utilitarianism in general.  Bentham wanted to reduce moral decision-making to a ‘hedonic calculus’, in which the pleasures and pains likely to result from different possible actions would be quantified and weighed up in a notionally mathematical fashion. In the scales of this calculus, Bentham argued that every pleasure weighed equally, and should be measured only by its intensity, duration and other quantitative features: in his famous phrase “Pushpin is as good as poetry” (pushpin being a fairly mindless game played in pubs at the time). After his breakdown and recovery, Mill began to argue that some pleasures were better than others. However, he did not really have a convincing account of why poetry was better than pushpin that went beyond the weight of social consensus. That poetry might have benefits in terms of the meanings it offers us is too intangible an idea to fit easily into a utilitarian framework.john mill

It is in  On Liberty that I find Mill at his best and closest to the Middle Way. The utilitarianism is nominally there, but fades into the background beside Mill’s passionate argument for the freedom of expression and action. If you allow people to express unorthodox views and behave in unconventional ways, Mill argues, society as a whole will benefit, because these people will be able to develop and test out new and better ways of thinking and acting. Adults should thus be allowed to act as they wish provided they did not harm others in the process. Mill challenged those who thought they knew the truth as to whether they thought themselves (and the socially accepted view) infallible: if not, he argued, the possibility of error needed to be tested out in a free discussion in which better justified views would become evident. Mill here gives a very practical expression to the Middle Way in the recognition of basic uncertainty, and draws out its implication of tolerance that allows people to reach their own autonomous, but justified, conclusions.

Mill goes on “Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it be suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but…the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason and personal experience.”

Mill here puts his finger on some of the key features of metaphysical dogma. By repressing alternative views, it not only prevents debate and experiment that might help us address conditions more effectively, it also represses emotions and creates conflicting psychological states that inhibit creativity and well-being. Personal experience may give rise to new ideas and beliefs, but these potential innovations must be crushed at source in order to ensure social conformity with the dominant beliefs. Unhappy individuals and rigid, fragile societies are the result. So much of nineteenth century literature is about this: the struggles of individuals to find sustenance and fulfil their vision in a stiflingly conventional society. But before the nineteenth century society was no less dogmatic and conformist. It was due to people like John Stuart Mill that awareness of the possibility of an alternative began to spread in a way it had not existed before.

Perhaps many people in the twenty-first century take this as old hat. We take tolerance of harmless individual differences for granted, at least in theory. Mill’s liberalism in its turn has now become the basis of a kind of social orthodoxy, which sometimes just goes through the motions of supporting creative individual freedom, but sometimes also genuinely does support that freedom to great positive effect. The Middle Way has now become much more a question for individuals, because dogmas can be carried around with us inside as well as laid on us from outside. But the fact remains, that without that basic degree of liberalism, our ability to find a Middle Way is severely curtailed by social pressure and control. That, perhaps, is why modernity is a much better context to practice the Middle Way than the traditional and hierarchical societies of the Buddhist East, even though these societies transmitted the Buddha’s idea of the Middle Way for many centuries.

 

Link to index of other posts in the Middle Way Thinkers series

Middle Way Thinkers 4: Jung

Great Thinkers, Psychology, ,

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the great Swiss psychoanalyst, had a long and rich life and left a huge body of writings behind him. I think he offers a huge contribution to our thinking on the Middle Way. Though his approach has been dismissed by some who regard themselves as hard scientists or analytic philosophers, I would argue that these criticisms are often based on prejudicial misunderstandings of his work and its significance. More than anything, I think his contribution is philosophical, in the sense of offering us new and helpful ways of understanding and assessing our beliefs and the ways we interpret our experience. He also offers a personal narrative of his incredibly rich and inspiring inner life. Questions remain about his effectiveness as a therapist – a point that I don’t feel in any position to assess – but even if he ‘cured’ nobody, his interactions with patients provided a strong basis of experience that supports the philosophical and cultural value of his work.

Jung was the son of a Protestant pastor, and qualified in medicine before specialising in psychiatry. He encountered and was influenced by Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, but rejected some of Freud’s dogmatic assumptions, such as his materialism and his reduction of desire to sexuality. In this respect you could compare Jung’s position to that of other philosophical disciples who have learnt much from but greatly surpassed their masters (such as Plato and Aristotle), primarily by identifying dogmatic assumptions that were holding back their masters and freeing themselves of those assumptions.Carl_Gustav_Jung

Jung saw himself as a man of science, and constantly  strove to meet the standards of objectivity that he felt were necessary to meet what he saw as the exacting standards of science. This is what led him to be so cautious during his lifetime in publishing accounts of his inner experience. This commitment seems to me double-edged: it led him towards a genuine objectivity of approach, but also led him to attempt what was probably impossible, to convince those committed to a naturalistic approach to science that phenomena as remote from publically-verifiable, reproducible proof as the unconscious or the archetypes should be taken seriously in scientific terms. In my view it is science that needs to try to live up to Jung’s high standards of objectivity, not the other way round. Jung was not afraid of the use of ‘private’ experience, or of material from cultural or religious traditions, and thus did not unnecessarily narrow the field of investigation, or impose likely conclusions that are the result of limitations in the methodology, in the way that those who insist on ‘hard’ scientific evidence have to do. His hypotheses about these areas of experience provide us with a valuable basis of understanding that is well supported by Jung’s experience, and by the provisionality that went with his scientific approach.

Jung’s biggest contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way has to be the concept of integration – which Jung more commonly referred to as individuation. Recognising that our experience comprises a variety of energies, symbols and beliefs that may be in conflict, with some repressing others and the repressed elements often unconscious, Jung saw the goal of human life as overcoming these conflicts and bringing these energies together. This insight has huge implications far beyond the medical model of psychotherapy – for example as the basis of moral objectivity – though this is a point that Jung himself only seems to recognise implicitly rather than advertise explicitly.

I prefer the term ‘integration’ to ‘individuation’, because this makes it clear that integration is not only the process of psychological development in an individual, but can also be applied at a social level. Again, I would say that Jung also recognised this point implicitly, but did not discuss it explicitly because of the extent to which exploring these philosophical implications might potentially threaten the scientific credentials he wanted to maintain. I see integration as the Middle Way inside out: rather than just avoiding dogmatic beliefs on either side, integration brings together experiential beliefs and energies that at first were unnecessarily opposed. Each supports the other, because it is only by avoiding metaphysical beliefs (that cannot be integrated) that we can make integration possible.

Jung’s other huge contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way lies in his development of the concept of archetypes. There has been much confusion about what Jung meant to assert about the status of archetypes, much of which has arisen from his use of the term ‘collective unconscious’ where he placed the archetypes. Some people have mistaken the collective unconscious for some kind of Platonic realm of absolutes, but Jung makes it clear that he is only referring to the universality that comes from genetic similarity between human beings, that gives us all similar psychic functions. These psychic functions need to be expressed by symbols, but the form of those symbols will differ between cultures. Thus, for example, the Shadow archetype is the one we encounter in symbols like Satan, Darth Vader, Sauron and Voldemort – an embodiment of evil found in all cultures because it reflects the psychic function of rejecting what we do not identify with. Any creature with aversions will have a Shadow of some kind, however it is expressed.

Archetypes are very important in understanding the Middle Way, because they allow us to distinguish between meaningful symbols that are found universally (because of their psychic function) and metaphysical ‘truths’. So, in the case of God, for example, the God archetype came first, and is meaningful to us because it represents a psychic function, regardless of whether or not we ‘believe’ in God. Belief or disbelief in God seems to me completely irrelevant to the meaning of the archetype. I think this is what Jung probably meant when he said that he did not believe in God, but that he ‘knew’ God, probably in the sense that he directly encountered God in experience.

After the Buddha, perhaps, I can’t think of any thinker whom I think is quite so rich and rewarding as a source of insights into the Middle Way as Jung. I am not really well-read in later Jungians that others recommend, such as James Hillman, so I must reserve judgement on their value. But whether you read more recent Jungians as well or not, I’d highly recommend going directly to the source. His autobiographical book ‘Memories, dreams, reflections’ is a very good place to start, because it gives you a big picture of Jung the man, and of his rich inner life, as well as of his scientific development.

 

Link to index of posts in the ‘Middle Way Thinkers’ series

Middle Way Thinkers 2: Sangharakshita

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Religion, ,

Sangharakshita is the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Community, previously known as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order or FWBO. Now well into his eighties, he still lives quietly at the new rural Triratna centre called Adhisthana in Herefordshire, in the west of England. As a former member of the Triratna Order, I was once officially one of Sangharakshita’s disciples (though I was always rather uncomfortable with this implication of Order membership). Both before and after leaving the Order, I have been critical both of aspects of Sangharakshita’s teachings and of his status in a personality cult in Triratna. When you have been part of a religious group that you need to distance yourself from, the stakes are high, and there is always a danger of polarisation – people only perceiving a rejection when one attempts a balanced approach. But Sangharakshita is also an important and often inspiring thinker and practitioner in relation to the Middle Way, and I would like to give full recognition to that. I would also like to encourage others to engage positively with his writings whilst maintaining a critical perspective, despite the fact that Triratna does not sufficiently encourage such a critical perspective. sangharakshita

Balanced appraisals of Sangharakshita’s thought are rare. Though you might get some of his disciples to admit to minor criticisms, their public utterances about him are usually characterised by gushy gratitude and uncritical intellectual idealisation. On the other hand, he is largely ignored both by the academic world and by other kinds of Buddhists, many of whom could learn from his ideas, but who are often put off by the cultishness that surrounds him. His writings are voluminous, unsystematic and varied in style (because many are compiled from oral transcriptions, and these are very different from the books he has composed directly), and probably the best overview available is by his disciple Subhuti, Sangharakshita: A new voice in the Buddhist Tradition (Windhorse). One day I hope to write a critical study of Sangharakshita’s ideas of a type that does not yet exist: one that tries to sort the wheat from the chaff.  In a blog post, for the moment, I will only be able to say a little about some of the most important of his ideas as they relate to the Middle Way.

First, it must be said that Sangharakshita is probably the Buddhist teacher who has taken the most notice of the Middle Way. It is clear that he has a sense of its importance, and he does often apply it in his judgements about ethical and other matters. For example, he writes:  At every stage of the spiritual life we are faced by the necessity of making a choice between either of two opposites, on the one hand, and the mean which reconciles the opposition by transcending it, on the other (A Survey of Buddhism, p.160). That’s probably the reason why, in practice, the Middle Way is often used as a basis of judgement in Triratna: even when the theory surrounding it is so inadequate, people still have a sense of the Middle Way as they encounter it directly in experience and spiritual practice.

However, I say that his theory of the Middle Way is inadequate, as his approach (in common with that of many other Buddhists, it must be said) is to regard the Middle Way as  description of a metaphysical truth rather as a method by which to make judgements in our experience. He sees the Middle Way as having metaphysical, ethical and psychological modes, but his account of the ethics and the psychology is deduced from the metaphysics he assumes. As a result he ends up caricaturing the extremes to be avoided in a way that is quite inadequate to our experience of the complexity of our beliefs and the way they relate to psychological states. He writes: “The belief that behind the bitter-sweet of human life yawn only the all-devouring jaws of a gigantic Nothingness will inevitably reduce man to his body and his body to his sensations; pleasure will be set up as the whole object of human endeavour, self-indulgence lauded to the skies, abstinence contemned, and the voluptuary honoured as the best and wisest of mankind.” If, on the other hand, one believes in an Absolute Being such as God, “the object of the spiritual life will be held to consist in effecting a complete dissociation between spirit and matter, the real and the unreal, God and the world, the temporal and the eternal; whence follows self-mortification in its extremest and most repulsive forms” (Survey pp.162-3).

If the Middle Way is to be of any use to us, it cannot merely consist in such a caricature of the materialist, the Marxist, the Christian etc, with the automatic assumption that, because of traditional statements about the Middle Way found in traditional Buddhist texts, these people must either be totally self-indulgent or self-mortifying. Experience suggests rather that the relationships between metaphysical beliefs and psychological states are far more complex than this. There are self-mortifying Marxists and self-indulgent Christians, for example. The Middle Way potentially offers far more insights than this caricature of it suggests, but it will only yield them with an approach that avoids metaphysical assumptions about the Middle Way itself, and takes experience rather than obscure dogma as the basis of judgement about how beliefs relate to psychological states.

It is this metaphysical reading (of a principle that needs to start with avoidance of metaphysics) that I assume leads Sangharakshita to his view that the most basic principal of Buddhism is conditioned co-production (or dependent origination) – a claim about how things are rather than a method of investigation. So despite his emphasis on the Middle Way in some respects, Sangharakshita’s approach merely promotes confusion about it in other respects, because the Middle Way as an experiential method gets constantly confused with a ‘truth’ that conflicts with that method. This confusion can only have a negative practical effect when people try to put the Middle Way into operation.

However, there are many other useful ideas and attitudes that I owe to Sangharakshita. One is his universalism – not in the shallow sense that all views are equally good, but in his conviction that all kinds of traditions can be mined for insights that support and inspire the practice of the Middle Way. For example, he is a lover of Renaissance art and of William Blake, as well as attempting to find common insights in all the schools of Buddhism and even in some aspects of other religions.

Sangharakshita has also made considerable use of Jung’s thought and related it to the insights of Buddhism. He makes use of the concept of integration and a psychological explanation of what is involved in spiritual development. He also makes excellent and stimulating use of Jungian archetypes in his discussion of the deeper significance of Buddhist scripture and symbol and its significance. As a result, Triratna Buddhists tend to make widespread use of archetypal interpretations of religious forms.

Sangharakshita also points out the dogmatic nature of group thinking, and recognises a Middle Way between groupishness and individualism. This is what has led me into the conclusion that the function of metaphysical belief is the maintenance of group loyalty. Sangharakshita instead extols what he calls ‘the true individual’. In effect this seems to mean a person who follows the Middle Way in developing an autonomous judgement, neither prematurely accepting nor rejecting the group and the beliefs that give it identity.

Sangharakshita is also undoubtedly inspiring as a practitioner, who has tried to combine an intellectual articulation of Buddhist insights together with huge commitment to its practice. Though it is often rather difficult to separate genuine experience from hagiography in the accounts leading disciples give of his practical acuity, it is obvious that he has engaged deeply and seriously with both meditative and ethical practice. His ethical writings and guidance have given a particular emphasis to the practice of friendship that seems to have been particularly helpful in the development of Triratna, and marked it out from other Buddhist groups.

This commitment to the unity of theory and practice just by itself is both inspiring and rare, particularly when one considers that the theory Sangharakshita has developed is what he has thought out for himself rather than merely adopted uncritically from tradition. I only wish that Sangharakshita’s disciples would emulate their teacher more in this respect, by treating Sangharakshita’s own thinking with the critical attention that a full respect for it merits, rather than treating his words and writings as a new basis of uncritical authority. To follow Sangharakshita, surely, one should try to do what he did, which was to critically appraise the traditions that he found in his context, and, where necessary, start afresh to develop new approaches that better capture the insights one finds in past work. To turn Sangharakshita into a guru, as even he at times has suggested is not appropriate, seems to me like a betrayal of the best that can be found in his legacy.

Related pages

The Buddha and the Middle Way

The Buddha and the Middle Way Audio

The Middle Way in Buddhism Books