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craving

ill will

sloth and torpor (spiritual laziness)

restlessness

doubt

The Buddha personally confronted each of these challenges; he had firsthand experience of how these challenges confuse the spiritual seeker. Like the Buddha, at one time or another, you can expect to confront all of these on the spiritual path. As we learn more about the Eight-Fold Path, we will also be examining some of the ways these challenges will present themselves.

Buddha himself recognized that each of us will be facing different situations; we each have our own karma to work with. The all-knowing Buddha, who understood that each of us has to walk our own spiritual path to enlightenment, said, “Each one has to practice and strive for himself, the Perfect Ones have only pointed the way.”

MAINTAINING THE BALANCE BETWEEN

COMPASSION AND WISDOM

The Eight-Fold Path is also known as the Middle Path or Middle Way. To understand the significance of this, let’s once again remember the historical Buddha. During his lifetime, spiritual seekers and yogis typically chose a path of extreme asceticism, including self-mortification. This was in marked contrast to those who tried to find happiness solely through the worldly search for sensual or material pleasure.

The Buddha knew firsthand both ways of life. Like many of us, the man we know as Buddha initially experienced life as a series of extremes: extreme attitudes toward money, pleasure, and entitlement; extreme emotional needs and desires; and extreme physical and spiritual conditions. Despite his luxurious surroundings, the Buddha was dissatisfied, bored, and somewhat depressed living in his palace. H. G. Wells once wrote of the Buddha that his “was the unhappiness of a fine mind that needs employment.” Perhaps we can identify with that ourselves.

When the Buddha first left his palace and donned a mendicant’s tattered yellow robe, he became an ascetic wandering holy man, determined to reach enlightenment as quickly as possible for the benefit of the world. For six years, he led a life of the most rigorous austerity. While he was meditating day and night, it is said that for several weeks he ate only a single grain of rice every day, becoming starved and emaciated. Yet despite all his efforts, he felt that the goal of enlightenment was eluding him.

What the Buddha finally realized after reaching the verge of death from starvation is that the man or woman who is seeking truth first has to move away from the extremes of either self-indulgent passion or self-inflicted mortification in order to find the path that is moderation’s Middle Way. The Buddha saw that a perfectly realized spiritual life is not a carnival ride of exhilarating ups and terror-inspiring lows.

The Buddha’s lesson for all of us is that happiness and/or nirvana cannot be found in a life mainly devoted to caring for sensual gratification (more money, sex, vacations, status, pride, or any other materialistic variation on the theme of more). But surprisingly enough, the Buddha also taught us that a life devoted to self-denial, self-deprecation, or self-blame and guilt is equally foolish and misdirected. Attachment is still attachment, even if that attachment takes the inverted form of self-denial and self-loathing.

The Middle Way is the way of balance, sanity, inner strength, purity and restraint, steadfastness, and moderation. The Middle Way points the seeker in the direction of an impeccable and integrated life. To remain whole, as well as to become whole, requires a complete inward arc, or full circle, rather than just a linear achievement-oriented race to grace. With these eight-step Middle Way instructions, Buddhism shows us that in life, each of us is capable of developing qualities of the heart in equal measure with qualities of the head: compassion with wisdom; love with truth. We need to awaken the mind as well as open the heart to let reality in, to let others in, to realize for ourselves the