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'The Trouble with Buddhism' Chapter 1 (The Four Noble Principles) part a

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The Middle Way

Expositions of Buddhism often start with the Four Noble Truths as the most basic teaching of Buddhism. That is one reason why I feel a need to address them from the beginning. Yet I cannot take the Four Noble Truths as they are normally presented and build on those, for even here, at the very starting point of Buddhism, there are confusions to clear up. These confusions suggest to me that the Buddhist betrayal of its own insights is no recent phenomenon, but started very early on in its history or was perhaps even there in confusions from the beginning. My main purpose, however, is not to try to trace the history of this betrayal, but simply to ask whether core Buddhist teachings are coherent and consistent, whether they make sense, and whether they are helpful in assisting people in the modern world to improve their lives.

Before examining the Four Noble Truths, I will need to establish an approach with which to examine them. The standard of judgement I will be applying is one which Buddhists often appeal to but which they apply incompletely: that of practical spiritual usefulness, of making people’s lives better. This does not mean any attempt to reduce Buddhism to science, utilitarianism, postmodernism or any other modern Western doctrine, but to take the account of usefulness pointed to by central Buddhist teachings themselves.

The Buddhist teaching which is centrally concerned with usefulness is the Middle Way. We can assert this primarily through its role in the story of the life of the Buddha[1], a story that is of great symbolic value. It matters little how far it is historically true, much more how well it represents a core Buddhist insight.

Traditionally, the Buddha is said to have been a prince with an over-protective father, who sheltered him in the isolation of a palace from any kind of suffering and tried to distract him from any religious goal by surrounding him with pleasures. He was roused from the obsession with pleasure that this sequestered existence symbolises through encounters with an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a religious mendicant. Perhaps a modern equivalent to this might be a modern adolescent, lost in a highly protected technological world of instant gratification, suddenly finding himself in a developing country and confronted for the first time with the pains of common human experience as it has existed down the ages. As a result the purpose of his life changes.

The Buddha-to-be then dramatically renounces his protected and hedonistic lifestyle for the highly risky alternative of religious beggary. He leaves the palace and goes forth into the forest to seek enlightenment. At first he does this under the instruction of two different spiritual teachers, and then in company with a group of companions often known as the Five Ascetics. The Five Ascetics are trying to gain enlightenment through imposing pain and hardship upon themselves, in the belief that this can earn merit which they can subsequently cash out as enlightenment. The Buddha-to-be eventually realises, however, that this ascetic approach, too, is not conducive to enlightenment, but merely weakens his body. He abandons it, to the disgust of his companions.

The story so far has a symmetry. The Buddha-to-be has tried a life of pleasure and a life of pain, but neither approach has led to the enlightenment he sought. So he tries what subsequently became known as the Middle Way, and by this method, according to the traditional story, achieved enlightenment. The question of enlightenment is something we will unavoidably have to return to later in this book, but for me the story starts to become much less interesting at this point. What the Buddha finally achieved is of much less interest than the method he used to make progress towards it, because the method he used can be applied by anyone, anywhere, at any time, whereas there is nobody around who is verifiably enlightened. The story so far simply symbolises that method in a compelling narrative, but after this it starts making claims about the Buddha and about a state of nirvana which is both remote to us and in conception very much conditioned by Indian culture.

In my experience, Buddhists often go little further than saying that the Buddha followed the Middle Way between asceticism and self-indulgence.  They might also discuss the Middle Way of beliefs which accompanies this: the Middle Way between eternalism (often defined as belief in an eternal self) and nihilism or annihilationism (often defined as the belief that the soul is cut off at death), which is extensively discussed in the Pali canon. They identify eternalism with asceticism and self-indulgence with nihilism, and point to Buddhist teaching as lying between these extremes. But they rarely go on to explain much more than this about the Middle Way, an incredibly rich teaching scandalously neglected by the religion that gave birth to it.   

Yet the Middle Way, uniquely among central Buddhist teachings, is about how to generally go about judging the right way forward, rather than about some claimed state of affairs or about a more specific prescription for action. It is thus the only central Buddhist teaching which is completely universal, and which can be passed without reservation directly from the Buddha’s ancient Indian context to a modern Western context. We do not have to worry about whether it is true and relevant today, because what it offers us is a general approach for working out what beliefs we should accept and what actions we should take in any context. We simply have to try it out in our own context, in a similar experimental fashion to the way in which the Buddha was said to have tried it out. In itself, it does not tell us to believe or to do anything, but if we make use of it, it will quite shortly make clear what we should believe and do in our context.

It does this basically by addressing conditions, not in a scientific way by creating positive theories about what will happen, but the other way round, by pointing out what approaches to conditions are likely to be mistaken and unhelpful. In a world that is constantly changing and always more complex than we take it to be or can readily grasp, it is overall certainties about the world or about how to act in it that are likely to be mistaken.

If we consider the religious, moral, and scientific certainties of the past – for example that sacrifices to the gods kept the world in order, that slavery is acceptable because master and slave classes are part of the world’s design, or that the earth is at the centre of the universe – it seems clear that what may seem obvious at one time or place is not at another, and the less closely these theories could be checked through specific experiences, the more vulnerable they were to eventually being superseded. Let’s take the idea that sacrifices to the gods maintained order.  We can now see that this is mistaken because we can now see other, more concrete, ways, that we can experience more closely, which explain how the order of society can be maintained: for example, education, democracy, international institutions, and the police. Similarly, slavery is no longer acceptable because we can see that those who used to be slaves are in fact human beings with the same kinds of capabilities as those who used to be their masters, so that the justifications for giving them inferior status were mistaken. Both sacrifices and slavery were justified by metaphysical beliefs, i.e. beliefs that cannot even potentially be checked through experience of any kind.

It is dogmatic metaphysical claims of this kind that are unhelpful, because they lead us to make claims which stop us looking more carefully at people and events and becoming more closely aware of what they are actually like. In finding the Middle Way, the Buddha navigated between two types of metaphysical claim that were dominant in his time. One was the idea that there was an order in the universe that would ensure that every pain inflicted would be compensated in the future by pleasure hereafter, which we would continue to experience in an eternal existence (eternalism). The other was that we do not know of, or at least can safely ignore, any such order, and will cease to exist after death anyway, so we should just fall in with the values of those around us and get pleasure where we can (nihilism). It is by navigating between these extremes that he managed to engage with the conditions in his own life that were holding back his spiritual progression. The Middle Way helped him engage with the conditions created by the craving, hatred and ignorance of his own mind, which he could only address by combining disciplined strength of resolve with care for himself.

It was through following this Middle Way in his context that the Buddha managed to not only get closer to discovering the truth about himself and the world, but also find the values that would subsequently motivate him. To make this procedure universal, one should navigate between the metaphysical dogmas of one’s own time and place, and thus attempt to engage with one’s own conditions more closely, rather than assuming that one’s navigation will be in any other respects similar to the Buddha’s. 

Before saying much more about this, however, we will first need to backtrack to say more about what are more generally considered to be the basic principles of Buddhism. I shall consider these in the light of the Middle Way as the most universal method, and try to assess whether these principles are indeed consistent with the Middle Way or not.