Good morning. Stormy weather. And welcome back to Sojan Roshi from Tassajara. He's making sort of a cameo appearance before his return in about two days. This morning I'd like to explore with you The Middle Way, which is one of the watchwords of basic Buddhism, and it comes up for me because I was speaking with someone earlier this week and we were looking at the path between how to find the path in our life. What did the Middle Way mean? So I thought, actually my voice is really rough, so I wanted to sing you a song about what the Middle Way isn't, but I'll recite you the lyrics first.

[01:12]

This is a wonderful rhythm and blues song by Charles Calhoun. It was a hit for Big Joe Turner in 1954. It's called pitch me smack dab in the middle, fling me smack dab in the middle, let me rock and roll the status on my soul. And then the verse, so this is not the Buddha's teaching. I want ten Cadillacs and a diamond mill, ten suits of clothes all dressed to kill, a ten room house and some barbecue, And 50 chicks, not over 22. OK. That's not what the Buddha was talking about. Although. It's like a good medium. Right.

[02:13]

Right. There you go. For Ken, yes. Although, it's actually a fairly good description of what the Buddha left behind. It's a description of what his life was when he was Prince Siddhartha and he found that that kind of life did not bring him happiness. I must say in terms of this Rhythm and Blues song there's a tone of irony throughout and wit which suggests that the The subtext is, this is not a realistic expectation. I don't know if the subtext is, and I don't think it would make me happy, you know, if it was a realistic expectation, maybe it would make you happy, I don't know. But anyway, this idea of the middle way, or the golden mean, that's another expression that you find

[03:24]

in the West. It's very clear from the Buddhist time, you can find it in Aristotle, who talked about it as the desirable middle between the extremes of excess and deficiency. And he says, in the Aristotelian view, if courage is a virtue, if you take courage to the excess, it would manifest as recklessness And if you lack courage, if there was a deficiency, it would manifest as cowardice. The Greeks took this a bit farther and they actually ended up creating a number that represented the golden mean or the golden ratio. It's an endless series. It's designated by Phi, P-H-I, and it's generally 1.618, and then it goes on 0.339887499 infinitum.

[04:40]

And you find what they discovered is that this is a ratio that appears in nature. It appears in our bodies. They used it as an architectural principle. some sense of balance. In the Jewish tradition, Maimonides said, if a man finds that his nature tends or is disposed to one of these extremes, he should turn back and improve so as to walk in the way of good people, which is the right way. The right way is extremes in its class, not being nearer to one than the other. And in the Sufi Islamic tradition, the 11th century Al-Ghazali wrote, what is wanted is a balance between extravagance and miserliness through moderation

[05:50]

Suzuki Roshi had another way of expressing it, which I found in a lecture of his from June of 1970. He said, middle way means between two extremes. To be quite independent and dependent is middle way. To be myself is my middle way. So that I can just be myself, you know, I must support someone. And at the same time, I must be supported by various people. That's why I can be independent. I love that way of framing it. To be yourself, and in order to be yourself, you have to support others. And also, in order to be myself, I have to allow myself to recognize how I am supported by others.

[07:08]

I think this is, you know, in our Suzuki Roshi family way, this very, very deep relationality is So in Buddhism there are many ways to think about the middle way. There's a Theravada way, which I'll lay out for you. There's in Mahayana, stemming from Nagarjuna's teaching on the middle way, on Majamaka, it's He was teaching the middle way between essential being and nihilism, the non-existence of anything.

[08:12]

But this teaching entered the Buddhist tradition in the Buddha's first sermon, which is the first turning of the wheel. Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, and it's the first teaching that he gave after enlightenment. He sat under the tree, under the Bodhi tree by the river, and then he remained silent for 49 days. And the legend is that the gods really urged him to teach what he had discovered. And he was reluctant at first, but he decided to try. So he walked from Bodh Gaya to the village of Sarnath. And as he entered the village, he saw five of his old friends, five people who

[09:28]

for the previous six years he had been practicing with very closely they had taken on all of they had gone to study with all of the great teachers that they could find in north india at the time and at the end of those studies the buddha felt this wasn't it and he went off and they remained behind as masters of those various traditions. And when they saw him, they were like really skinny. They were practicing these austerities and various forms of self-mortification. And you know, he looked pretty good. for the last 49 days he'd been taking modest meals and, you know, kind of filled out a little.

[10:33]

And they were suspicious. Their first take on seeing him from a distance was that he had given up the path. They had renounced worldly life and they thought that he had been indulging in sense pleasures. But when he got a little closer, they saw that he was shining. And they wanted to know, you know, what's up? What's happening? And he gave his first teaching. So his first teaching was, the first thing he taught was what he called the middle way.

[11:36]

These extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. In other words, one who has become a monk. What are those two? There's the addiction to indulgence of sense pleasures, which is low, coarse, unworthy and unprofitable. And there's the addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy and unprofitable. So, avoiding these extremes, the Tathāgata has realized the middle path, It gives vision, it gives knowledge, it leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment and to nirvana. And what is the middle path realized by the Tathāgata? It is the Noble Eightfold Path and nothing else.

[12:47]

Namely, right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. So, in this first sutta, first he lays out what is the middle way, then he lays out the Eightfold Path, then he lays out the Four Noble Truths, the fourth of which is the Eightfold Path, so it has a kind of circular structure. But this is radical, the idea of not having to put oneself through these austerities, through these extreme actions. In the conversation that I was having with

[13:52]

what came clear to both of us was that we actually still have this idea inside our heads that it's almost as if we believe the model of sort of an alchemical model or the model of the purification of a metal by putting it in a crucible really, really getting it hot until it becomes liquid and all of the impurities boil away. And I think that somewhere in many of us, we have this feeling that, oh, I have to do something really, really hard. And somewhere in our minds we have the sense that, somebody once asked me, is suffering redemptive?

[15:07]

And I think on an instinctual level I said, I don't think so. And I'm certain of that. Suffering itself is not a virtue. How one meets one's suffering, how one works with one's own suffering, the suffering that one encounters, that can be redemptive. It also can be overwhelming and lead us into despair. How we carry difficulty is precisely the work of our practice. So, suffering is not redemptive and of course we live in a cultural context where we practice this kind of marginal spiritual tradition and the mainstream religion in this country is buying things.

[16:23]

It's filling this hole that we perceive at the center of our being with youth and beauty, we know that doesn't work for long, but also with food, cars, sex, alcohol, anything that, any of a myriad of things that were being sold constantly. And I think that many of us are actually in this room because we have either the direct knowledge or the intuition that hasn't really worked out too well. as individuals. It certainly hasn't worked out for us as a society where the wealth of the world is pouring into our borders, into our lives in ways that are certainly not the golden mean.

[17:53]

that are disproportional to our population, just the sheer human balance. So we have these things to contend with, that inner sense of drivenness, and I've seen this over and over again, and I am not I'm not completely free of it myself and the wish to indulge and then sometimes really the quandary of what is indulgence and what is maintenance, what is balance this is a hard thing to determine so One of the, something I found while I was looking, comes from the Thai forest teacher Ajahn Chah.

[19:19]

Wonderful teacher, Ajahn Chah. He's about as close, in that tradition, as close to the wisdom that I get from Suzuki Roshi as anyone. Really open. not doctrinaire, but fully grounded in the teachings in a way that he seemed to be able to embody and pass on to his students. So he says, the Buddha declared that these are the two ways of intoxication. They are not the ways of a meditator or the ways of peace. Those two ways are indulgence in pleasure indulgence in pain, or to put it simply, the way of slackness and the way of tenseness. So that's a really, that's a model that points us in

[20:25]

When I think about this in terms of my musical understanding, you could say that being in tune is the middle way. If you're playing a string instrument, I have to tune my guitar not too loose and not too tight. But there's a tricky reality, which is, it's not exact. So, there's no, you can't really, you can't tune a guitar so that it'll be in tune in every key. You can't tune a piano, you can't tune any instrument when they first invented instruments, at least in Greece, they tuned them according to what was known as the Pythagorean system, which was actually a mathematical designation of the correct note.

[21:57]

And that would only work in one key. So you could But then if you're going to play something in the key of E, you have a whole different set of ratios. I may not be articulating this correctly, but this is my understanding. And so, they developed various sets of what they called temperance, which is really, as you tune an instrument, a set of compromises. It's a set of averages so that things sound pretty close to a tune. Now, you can't do this on a piano, you can't change your tuning on a piano as you play.

[23:01]

I don't think, can you? But on a guitar, what I've noticed, first of all, I've noticed that every guitar, I have to do something a little different with my fingers. And every key that I play in every guitar, I am unconsciously, or, well, really unconsciously, bending the strings a little bit to get them, to get the chord in tune. If you play enough, you hear it. If you just put your fingers down, first of all, if you tune just the strings, when you put your fingers down on a fret or on a place on the fingerboard, you're already out of tune. So you have to be constantly adjusting, constantly looking for that middle way.

[24:04]

Which means that the middle way is not, the way itself is not a fixed path. It may have a goal. The goal in terms of a musical instrument is what generally sounds harmonious to people. It's not, and that is actually to some degree defined by our ears and our culture and the ear training that we've had, conscious or unconscious. The goal of liberation, I think in our tradition, is not some fixed point. The goal of liberation which is the hopefully the place that the middle path reaches is one of being awake in the moment being capable of enlightened activity and being able to meet

[25:33]

each being and each thing appropriately. I think that's something close to how I would define awakening. It's not some categorical state of mind. It's not like the Pythagorean tuning of guitar or of an instrument which, you know, in theory works out well. So how we do this on the path is by is by utilizing all the aspects of the Eightfold Path, all those particular practices and qualities, in the ratios and blend that seem appropriate. But really, and we're constantly readjusting, Roshi used to talk about, your zazen is like the actions of an automatic pilot on a ship or a plane, which really functions as a device that averages.

[26:54]

So you go off a little one way, and then you counter-correct by going off a little in the other direction. And so you're constantly going back and forth. You cannot stay on the middle. But there's constant adjustment and readjustment. Adjustment of your body and adjustment of your mind. And of course the the model that we have for this is our Zazen itself. It's modeled by our posture, which is also the middle way. Now, some people would come in here and think, oh, this posture is extreme. But the more you do it, it's not extreme. It looks like it's a form.

[27:57]

But actually, it's a natural way to sit. And the more that I've done it in my life, the more, at least until my body gives out, which it will, the more at ease it feels to sit upright. And there's constantly this minute motion of readjusting. there's this flexibility, as if one were a tree, or a blade of grass, or, I watched a program about the construction of the new One World Trade Center, you know, a skyscraper, which is always moving. It's never, if you were like this, you know, an emotion would come or a wind would come and it would just blow you over. Instead we move with our body and with our thoughts in very small ways and are constantly readjusting.

[29:12]

And so we're also not falling into slackness or into tenseness. So there's a dynamic There's a dynamic tension, just as there would be with a guitar string. It has to be in just the right degree of tension. Not too tight, where it'll snap, and not too loose, where it makes no useful sound at all. So we can find this, we can observe ourselves in Zazen. and find our model of existence in our sasana self, in our posture, in our breath, which is, again, either lazy and slack or prescribed in some way, you know, it's got to be deep,

[30:21]

in our minds are flexible and soft and receptive. So this is what we are practicing over and over again. Each time we come here, each time we sit down. And the function of that is to cultivate the middle way. We do it here. We do it together. This is what Suzuki Roshi is saying. We are supporting people who are sitting around us and we are being supported by the people who are sitting around us. And that way we can be ourselves. And then, in the long run, can we learn to take just that flexible, dynamic intunement into the world, into our working relationships, into our families, into our society.

[31:42]

What does that look like? So I think I close with another, this is from another lecture by Suzuki Roshi, a few days later than the one that I quoted. I actually think, I think you were at those lectures in Tassajara, because in one of them he goes into this whole riff about milk. I think they're online, you can find them. But he wasn't talking about sojourns here, in what I'm about to read you. He says, because we have selfish way of life, we will have difficulties which we should accept.

[32:50]

When you accept these difficulties, it is middle way. You don't reject it, you accept it. But you don't stick to it, you know. You just enjoy it. Enjoy your human life as long as you live. That is the middle way. So, thank you. We have some, we have a little time for questions or comments. So, please. Katie? I was struck when you were talking about more Western forms of talking about the Middle Way that I was kind of raised on the idea of moderation. But for me, it was something that was very cognitive and something that was something you could observe and evaluate and attempt to calculate and control.

[33:58]

Sort of a striving for just Right. Can you give an example? Oh, like, if you're a student, how much you speak in class. Do you, you know, just effervesce and speak too much, or are you completely silent? But you can speak just enough. And it's something that you're observing about yourself, not something coming from inside. It's just a more cognitive, evaluative kind of mode. And I'm not entirely sure what my question is, but my impression of, my experience of the Middle Way has been much more, has been completely different. And I'm just wondering if you see that difference within Buddhism or between the two traditions. I don't know.

[34:59]

Honestly, I feel like you grew up in a different world than I did. Right, a hundred miles away. I don't think that was what you described doesn't resonate with me as the culture that I grew up in. So it really was. It may have been a different culture, but I don't think there certainly are models of composure containment expression, and they are built into the Zen tradition, they're built into the Buddhist tradition. But I do think that the fundamental essence of respect may appear different in different cultural settings. And the cross-cultural navigation is not always so easy. But anyway, I'm not sure.

[36:05]

Walter? Following up on what Katie said a little bit, for me, is the question, who is doing this balancing? Who is doing it? You have to do it. You? You have to. This is where I think This is where you practice the first step of the eightfold path, which is right view. Right view of what? Right view is not one view. Sometimes that view is looking very closely at things that are small, or things that are internal, And sometimes that view is very wide, that's looking at the whole room, or the whole society that you're in, and so you're constantly, that's the thing, you're constantly, that's where the readjustment comes.

[37:17]

So there is no one single point from which this comes, I don't think. The right view is also related to right intention. when I, the best I can do to reflect on myself is to remember, is to try to see what's my intention? Like right now, what's my intention? Is my intention to score a point? Or is my intention to be in connection with you? Which would include sharing something that I think and admitting something that I don't know. So, but the intention, I think the wholesome intention is to connect, not to divide. Right view might have something to do with the notion of no self. Yes, it does. That's, I mean, in classical terms, that's what it means.

[38:23]

So, It's included in that, but what no-self means doesn't mean that one can't get rid of oneself so easily. It means not self-centered. I think we're moving down the line here. I think in response to Walter's quote there, Buddhist views, we have no self, but on the other hand, sometimes you're engaged in something, sometimes you back off, and so on. And I think the who that's doing it also needs to have a middle way. In other words, at one point it may be appropriate for that whatever it is to kind of hang back

[39:23]

And at another point, it might be more appropriate to be more egotistical, in the sense of, OK, I'm going to go here and do this. And you're very conscious about what I am going to do, because this is the appropriate thing now. But then in another sense, you may say, oh, I'm getting a little bit too much there. I need to ease off. So there could also be this constant adjustment with that. Yes. And whenever you're in that constant adjustment, That is karmic activity. Not my karma, but just karma. Action is generating karma. And one of the wonderful things about this practice is in an essential way it's non-karmic activity. So it gives us some taste or touch of that. Do you want to respond to any of those? Q. My response to that is, the self is not a self.

[40:31]

Not a self is a self. So if you say, who's the self that's doing this, you'll never find out. Presence of self is not a self. The other thing is... Thank you for your talk. I just want to add one thing. Middle way, basically, fundamentally, is the middle way between birth and death. The middle way between birth and death. You mentioned it sort of in previous streams of eternalism and nihilism. middle way between journalism and realism, and between birth and death.

[41:40]

It's the middle way. So where do you find that middle way between birth and death, where there's no birth, no death? And nirvana is where there's no birth and death. That's the middle way. And that also folds back to what you were just saying a moment ago about self and no-self. Those are quite announced. Right. And we are always some place in the middle of that. Which is no place. Right. Which can't be quite identical. One more, and then Conan. Well, so I was just going to say that Adoption and Nose Up is really about emptiness. Right? Right view is actually about the view of emptiness, about the impermanence of self. Right?

[42:42]

And that this ego that can harmoniously say, discern, that something needs to be done, is actually not And we know, just to clarify, the question of whether there was a self or not was one of the questions that the Buddha would not respond to. People were constantly coming to him in the early sutras trying to pin him down on this question. It's a burning question. It's still a burning question for us. he wouldn't respond to that. And yet, all of the discourse of the Buddhist tradition is about the deconstruction, not the deconstruction of the self, but the deconstruction of the idea of the self, of our faith in a fixed self.

[43:55]

So that's why there can be something like the Middle Way, because we're actually flexible. We can move. And that is what our training is.

[44:07]

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