Buddhist Philosophy: The Middle Way
The Prince Who Starved Himself to Enlightenment — and Why It Didn't Work
Before he became the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama spent years as an extreme ascetic — and the moment he gave it up is arguably more instructive than anything he later taught.
The Idea
Most people encounter the Middle Way as a pleasant-sounding platitude about moderation — avoid excess, don't be too hard on yourself, find balance. That framing sells it short almost completely. The Middle Way is not a lifestyle tip. It is a precise philosophical claim about the nature of suffering and what actually dissolves it. Siddhartha arrived at it through a specific failure. After leaving a life of palace luxury, he joined a group of ascetics and pushed self-mortification to its limit — near starvation, breath retention, exposure to extremes. His reasoning was coherent: if sensory pleasure causes attachment, and attachment causes suffering, then destroying the body's capacity for pleasure should produce liberation. It didn't. What he noticed, sitting exhausted by a river, was that punishing the body was itself a form of craving — craving for a different self, craving for purity, craving for an end to craving. The two extremes — indulgence and mortification — share the same root: the assumption that the right relationship with experience is one of grasping or rejection. The Middle Way refuses both. It is not a compromise between two poles; it is a third position that sees through the poles entirely. In practice, this looks like meeting experience clearly — neither clinging to what is pleasant nor fleeing from what is painful — which turns out to be far harder, and far more radical, than either extreme.
In the World
In 1967, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr., who called him 'an apostle of peace and nonviolence.' What drew King's attention was not Nhat Hanh's theology but his practice — what Nhat Hanh called 'engaged Buddhism,' a direct application of the Middle Way to political suffering. During the Vietnam War, Nhat Hanh refused both the comfort of spiritual retreat and the bitterness of political rage. He organised young monks and nuns to rebuild bombed villages, not aligned with North or South, simply present to the suffering in front of them. When he was exiled from Vietnam in 1966 — too peaceful for the communists, too critical of the war for the South Vietnamese government — he didn't retreat into either resentment or resignation. He founded Plum Village in France, a practice community, and kept teaching for another five decades. The point is not that he was serene or untouched. In his writing, he describes grief, longing, anger. The Middle Way, as he embodied it, was not the absence of strong feeling but the refusal to be governed by the impulse to either suppress or amplify it. He sat with what was there. That sitting — clear, unhurried, neither grasping nor pushing away — is precisely what the Middle Way describes.
Why It Matters
Here is where this stops being philosophy and starts being uncomfortably personal: most of us oscillate between the two extremes the Buddha identified, just in more contemporary forms. We binge, then restrict. We numb out, then flood with guilt and resolve to do better. We avoid a difficult conversation until we explode into it. We overwork until we collapse. The pattern is recognisable: intensity, then retreat, then intensity again. The Middle Way is not a call to do everything in moderation — that reading makes it useless. It is a call to notice the moment of grasping or aversion before it tips into action. Not to suppress the impulse, not to indulge it, but to see it clearly enough that you are no longer simply carried by it. That is a genuine skill, not a disposition you either have or don't. And it changes the texture of daily life in ways that are hard to predict in advance — small pauses before reactions, a slightly looser grip on outcomes, a growing suspicion that the thing you are most desperate to fix about yourself may not need fixing so much as understanding.
A Question to Ponder
Which of your current habits — including the ones you're proud of — are secretly another form of grasping or aversion in disguise?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable