As a young woman, I found the peacefulness of Buddhist teachings deeply attractive. But I felt myself stumble psychologically when they were called the “middle way.” I believed life was a bold and daring adventure, whereas the middle way sounded conservative and unbearably dull. But decades of practice and study since then have helped me appreciate what a fascinating, joyful, and liberating path the middle way is.
The term “middle way” refers to two main types of Buddhist teachings. The first is that taught by the Buddha himself: It’s the balanced way of living between the extremes of self-indulgence on one hand and self-denying asceticism on the other. In Buddhist philosophy, the term also refers to Madhyamaka—literally “Middle Way” in Sanskrit—a major Mahayana school that teaches this principle as a profound insight into the emptiness of all phenomena.
“The middle way looks different for each of us. To find our own middle way, we must recognize our extremes.”
In modern language, we might describe the middle ground as the most generative space to practice. We’re not getting caught up in our attachment to sensory pleasures or objects, nor are we making our lives difficult by denying ourselves what is good in life.
It’s helpful to reflect on where we get pulled to extremes and how we can use our creativity and ingenuity to live with balance and ease. Can you identify different ways this could be a meaningful contemplation for you?
How did the Buddha Come to Teach the Middle Way?
Before he became the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama was an Indian prince, living in the kind of luxury typical for royalty of his time: a beautiful palace, a princess for a wife, a harem, sumptuous feasts, and an exquisite horse and chariot.
Though luxurious, it was a sheltered life. When the prince left the palace for the first time at age twenty-nine, he was shocked to see what are known as the “four sights.” He observed an old man, a man stricken with illness, a corpse, and a serene spiritual practitioner.
He realized the inevitability of the first three sights: If we don’t die when we’re young, then we all experience old age, sickness, and death. The prince also perceived that pursuing a spiritual life, as represented by the fourth sight, would be a wise response to the first three. In a profound act of renunciation, Siddhartha left his life, family, status, wealth, and responsibilities. He renounced the extreme of worldly self-indulgence, which he saw would not end suffering.
For the next six years, he applied himself diligently to spiritual practice. He studied with accomplished teachers and mastered their methods but found no end to suffering and continued his quest. He practiced extreme self-mortification with five other ascetics. He tried subsisting on a single grain of rice per day, and then nothing at all. He held his breath until he fell unconscious. He wore rags scavenged from graveyards and garbage, and he meditated all night in cemeteries, facing his fear of wild animals.
After years of effort, Siddhartha Gautama realized that this form of practice wasn’t working—it didn’t end suffering. He renounced extreme asceticism and accepted a refreshing bowl of rice milk offered by a young woman, Sujata. With this healthy nourishment, Gautama opened to the goodness of life on this earth and let go of harsh self-denial.
He subsequently meditated all night under the Bodhi Tree in Bodhgaya, persevering through various intense distractions: fears and worries, temptations like worldliness, escape through transcendence, fame, sensuality, power, and so on. Finally, liberating himself from the shackles of suffering, he spent seven weeks in meditation, contemplating what he’d realized.
The First Turning of the Wheel of Dharma
The freshly awakened Buddha went to Deer Park in Sarnath to find the five renunciates he’d previously meditated with and share his first teaching. This is referred to as the Buddha setting in motion the wheel of dharma, which means both the Buddhist teachings and natural truth.
He encouraged his former companions to practice the middle way between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. He shared his insights with them: the four noble truths and the eightfold path whose practice leads a person to become “noble,” or enlightened, and free from suffering. These teachings are referred to as the Buddha’s “first turning” of the wheel of dharma.
In the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Buddha spoke of the middle way. “There is an addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people, unworthy, and unprofitable,” he said, “and there is an addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable. Avoiding both these extremes, the Perfect One has realized the middle path; it gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment, and to nibbana. What is the Tathagata middle path? It is the noble eightfold path and nothing else.”
One reason we practice meditation is to develop an ongoing continuum of awareness. This allows us to observe mental arisings, such as sensations, feelings, states of mind, and thoughts. The discernment we develop through this process empowers us to see our tendencies to run toward, hang onto, or turn away from an arising or object, also known as grasping, clinging, and aversion. Unchecked, these can become hindrances to our awareness and other wholesome states essential to our liberation from suffering.
With awareness, we undertake to train ourselves to let go of all these hindrances, including the extremes of self-indulgence and self-denigration, and dwell in ever greater equanimity. This helps us live the middle way fully.
The Middle Way and the Second Turning of the Wheel
The second meaning of the term middle way appears in the Madhyamaka philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism. Founded by the Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna in the second to third century, Madhyamaka is a key teaching of the Mahayana tradition, which is associated with the second turning of the dharma wheel.
Madhyamaka emerged from teachings on shunyata, the emptiness of any solid or inherent existence, including fixed philosophical positions. It shows the limits of views—such as assuming that things either exist or don’t exist—pointing instead to the middle way that avoids all dualistic extremes.
Based on the bodhisattva path—dedicating one’s energy to the welfare of all beings—Madhyamaka’s foundational texts are the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) sutras. These sutras explore the middle way as a path between the extremes of eternalism and nihilism.
Nagarjuna’s best-known work is the Mulamadhyamakakarika, “Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way.” In it, he explains Madhyamaka philosophy through his famous tetralemma method, in which he analyzes four possible positions about phenomena:
All phenomena exist.
All phenomena do not exist.
All phenomena both exist and do
not exist.
All phenomena neither exist nor
do not exist.
Through rigorous logic, Nagarjuna deconstructs each of these four positions and shows why they’re plagued by internal contradictions and cannot be correct. When we contemplate this reasoning, our ego struggles with the absence of “right” answers and the security of fixed positions. Nagarjuna confounds our conceptual thought, demonstrating how phenomena are simply not what we habitually conceive them to be. Rejecting each possibility, he points to a spaciousness between existence and nonexistence, a middle way between any fixed or solid position.
As the Heart Sutra famously teaches us, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” All that we perceive is in constant flux, dissolving as soon as it has arisen and arising once it’s dissolved. What, then, is this world we perceive?
Nagarjuna’s philosophy pries open the insecure rigidity of our minds to reveal a profound relativism: Everything can only be said to exist in relationship to everything else. This is best illustrated by the Buddha’s teachings on dependent origination. Nagarjuna taught that dependent origination demonstrates how phenomena depend on all other phenomena for conditions that allow them to exist.
Your Unique Middle Way
In daily life, we may catch ourselves pulled between extremes: attachment and aversion, taking over a space and abdicating it, indulging ourselves and denying ourselves. We may find ourselves believing that things exist as something permanent we can hang on to or doubting everything in the depression of nihilism.
The middle way looks different for each of us. To find our own middle way, we must recognize our extremes. Our lifestyle may be indulgent. Or we may use self-denial as penance, or become obsessive about exercise, or even meditation. We might swing between highs and lows, fun times out with friends and despair when home alone, worry and blitheness, or eating more than we need and then undertaking cleanses.
It’s helpful to know your personal patterns of going from one kind of extreme to another, precisely to help you find the middle way between them. Can you identify where you tend toward extremes in your life? Can you undertake to train yourself to find ways to dwell in the more harmonious, fruitful, peaceful space between them? What might that look like? Take a few moments to visualize it, breathe with that visualization, and reflect on how it feels in your body.
The harmony between all opposites naturally lies in the middle: the center between ecstasy and misery, recklessness and fear, growth and decay, birth and death, impermanence and eternity. The middle way guides us toward balance, both in how we live and in how we perceive existence itself. It supports profound well-being.
