The Buddha was Pointing to Something Bigger than Buddhism

What is the value of engaging with the stories, ideas and practices of great figures from the past — particularly the founders of great traditions such as Buddhism, Christianity or Islam? In long study and reflection on these, I have not lost my sense of their value (if anything, it has increased), but I have come to reject many of the reasons that people implicitly have for valuing them. I don’t think it’s because they will tell us ready-made ‘truths’, because we always have to interpret what they say in relation to our own starting point. Nor do I think that studying their part in founding a tradition is an end in itself — even though any religious tradition will quickly try to immerse you in its all-encompassing ways of thinking, so it’s easy to lose any sense of needing a justification beyond it. Nor is it particularly about history, because although these figures contribute to our historical understanding, historical interest alone doesn’t account for their power and value.

These questions seem particularly important for Siddhartha Gautama, otherwise known as the Buddha, who lived in the northern Indian subcontinent about 2500 years ago. For Westerners, the Buddha is still very marginal to our culture (although you can buy his image in a garden centre). So why is the Buddha even relevant? In his case, I want to suggest three major reasons why we might be interested in the Buddha: ones that do not involve assuming that he tells us ‘truths’, do not assume a Buddhist culture, and do not involve appealing to history. Instead, they connect with the experience and needs of any individual, Buddhist or not.

Firstly, we might find helpful ideas: that is, potential beliefs about how to live our lives that we can consider and weigh up, as we might with any other thinker. In their value to us, these depend just on what the Buddha is recorded as saying, or indeed, what we can helpfully interpret him to be saying. It doesn’t depend on what he ‘really’ said, which we have no way of knowing. Whoever a past thinker is, we still have to interpret what they say, which will be ambiguous and given in a context we may not have understood. These difficulties are multiplied with someone who lived so long ago, in a very different cultural context from the modern West, and with a long and dubious chain of transmission through selection, oral memorisation, and textual copying. So I think our first question when considering what the Buddha is said to have said is not ‘Is this real?’ but rather, ‘Is this relevant and helpful to me and to us?’

Secondly, we can find helpful practical instructions about techniques and practices. There are sections of the Pali Canon, where the (probably) earliest accounts of the Buddha’s words and actions are found, that, for instance, offer detailed guidance on mindfulness practice. You could read them as a ‘how to’ guide, though obviously most people learn the skills of meditation more directly from a teacher.

Thirdly, we might be inspired by what the Buddha has come to symbolize: any kind of practice to improve our lives or the world is tough, and we need all the inspiration we can get to regularly prompt us to keep going. Again, this doesn’t depend at all on who the Buddha ‘really’ was, just on the set of associations we have built up with his image in stories, art and discussion. This is what I would call an archetypal function, and depends on the relationship between you and the Buddha as a symbol, not on the nature of the symbol itself, or on the formalities of Buddhist iconography. Other symbols — your grandmother, the oak tree on the hill, Harry Potter — could also have inspirational functions for you, and there is no particular reason why it must be the Buddha. What is practically important is that you stay inspired when you need to be.

So what is the Buddha’s most helpful idea? Unlike most Buddhists (who will probably talk in terms of enlightenment, conditionality, or the Four Noble Truths) I think this is the Middle Way. This is a concept that the Buddha emphasised explicitly in several places, but is also implicit in lots of others, and is a basic requirement for applying the practices he taught. It appears most centrally in the early life story of the Buddha, in which the young prince goes forth from the Palace to the Forest, and then also recognises the limitations of the Forest and discovers the Middle Way. ‘Palace’ and ‘Forest’ here can stand for any two contexts where different social groups have opposing views of how to live our lives. These groups have adopted assumptions that fit their own context, but will not fit every other context: they are not adequate for the bigger picture. Any individual, like the Buddha, may react to one group by rebounding into another, then come to realize that the new group still only has a partial view of things. The third or Middle view, then, needs to be assembled by critically integrating what we have learnt in different opposing contexts and judging them in practice. It does not arrive for us ready made as a set of ‘truths’.

The reason I think that the Middle Way is the most important teaching of the Buddha is entirely practical: that is, that it is about how we make judgements at every moment. It is not about a remote goal, nor does it involve claims about the universe, but it focuses on how we respond to each situation, both intellectually and emotionally. It might involve a distraction arising in meditation, a moral dilemma about covid rules, or working out what to believe about climate change. That practicality is also the basis of the Middle Way’s universality: it doesn’t depend on being a Buddhist, or even expressing things in Buddhist ways. There are lots of possible ways of articulating the value of navigating between opposing absolutes in any given situation.

The Buddhist tradition obviously tends to articulate the Middle Way in ways that are specific to the Buddha’s context: so it tends to talk about finding the Middle Way between eternalism (belief in the continuing self) versus nihilism (denial of that belief), or about belief in existence versus belief in non-existence. But these are just examples of the Middle Way applied to the issues of concern to people in his context. To be clear about its practical relevance now, we have to take a wider view of it. So I understand the Middle Way as a navigation between opposed absolutizations, as they occur in our experience, at every moment of judgement. That means that the Middle Way might be understood as, for instance, navigating your way between assumptions of freewill (total responsibility) and determinism (zero responsibility) in a particular situation where your responsibility is complex. Or it might mean navigating between two opposed political arguments, one of which assumes that justice in distributing wealth is the only important thing, and the other of which claims that freedom is the only important thing.

If you start to interpret the Buddha’s chief insight in this universal and practical way, you also then start to realize that it is found in all sorts of other places. The Buddha most probably gave it the clearest expression available, but because human beings are constantly having to engage in this navigation of judgement, it’s obvious that people have found and articulated the Middle Way in all sorts of ways — many of them partial, but nevertheless informative and inspiring. To give just one example, the Red Book of early psychologist Carl Jung includes a number of explicit references to the Middle Way that seem to be entirely independent of any Buddhist influence: this is the subject of my recent book Red Book, Middle Way. Whatever sources we investigate as telling about the Middle Way, though, it’s important to do so critically, and to continue to ask about the practical value of what is being said, rather than assume that a particular source tells the whole story.

I suspect that most Westerners first encountering Buddhism have got interested for reasons that were initially just about the potential practical value of the ideas it offers, about practical techniques such as mindfulness, and about the Buddha as a figure of inspiration. However, I’m also often dismayed at how quickly those initial motives may then get forgotten if people adopt Buddhism as a tradition that tells the whole story, ceasing to weigh it up critically. They may then assume that Buddhist teachings offer ‘truths’ regardless of interpretative issues, adopt the tradition on authority as an end in itself, and get enmeshed in historical controversies about what the Buddha ‘really said’. Because of the common predominance of such attitudes, I do not call myself a Buddhist, and I have no allegiance to the authority of Buddhist tradition. I am a practitioner of the Middle Way, but one who in many respects finds the Buddha and his message inspiring and insightful.

Fuller details and references for the approach in this article can be found in my book The Buddha’s Middle Way: Experiential Judgement in his Life and Teaching (Equinox, 2019).