Finding the Middle Ground

Recently, while enjoying a rare moment of meditation, I thought about my daily life, with all the ups and downs, pleasure and pain. When you meditate for a bit and let your mind settle, you can see how it gets so easily pulled along this way or that. When I see a hot girl, or get hungry my mind pulls one way toward craving, while when I am having a difficult day at work (or on-call) my mind pulls another way toward anger and frustration. By the end of the day, no wonder I am tired. My mind just goes a mile a minute one way or another. So mercurial.

I want to look at beautiful people, I want to eat good food, I want to hear good music, do mentally stimulating things I like, and so on. I don’t want to be around people that annoy me, I don’t want to be hungry, I don’t want to have to do work I don’t want to do and so on. I want one extreme, but not the other. Me, me, me.

But it occurred to me that life is this kind of pendulum that’s constantly swinging back and forth between one extreme or another. One minute, I see or taste something I really like and I feel great, while in another I have to suffer instead, but they’re not separate, discrete events. One always leads into the other. Good food costs money, and after my stomach becomes satisfied comes the bill. No matter how attractive my spouse is, it’s never enough, and inevitably she’ll grow old, feeble and fade, and she can’t be hot all the time anyway. I can stay up all night playing my favorite video games, but in the morning when I am sleep-deprived and miserable, I start to regret the lack of sleep.

So I realized that I was stuck between this constant, shifting pattern of pleasure and pain for the rest of my days without rest. When I think about it, it’s all so tiring and terrible. I’d love to just be somewhere where I didn’t have to be bombarded by both, and just live a quiet, bland life, but where can I go?

Then I somehow remembered the famous treatise written by Chinese Buddhist master Shan-tao about the Two Rivers and the White Path. In the parable, the hapless person finds himself on the shore facing two rivers: a river of water and a river of fire. Crossing these rivers is a small white path leading to the other shore. On the other end is Amitabha Buddha, and on this end is the historical Shakyamuni Buddha pointing the way toward the other shore (a metaphor for Enlightenment).

The two extremes in my life between pleasure and pain reminded me of the two rivers. The river of water might represent the pleasures of life, and my efforts to immerse in then, until I would metaphorically drown. The river of fire was my anger and resentment and all the things I hated in life. My exhaustion at being pulled by these two extremes compels me to somehow let go of both and follow the white path in the middle, knowing that the Buddha is at the other end beckoning people to cross over and away from the two extremes. Life happens, and this small revelation won’t change that, but if I set my sights further out, settle the mind, etc, I can hopefully keep from getting burned by life so easily.

Man, when the Buddha stated famously in the Fire Sermon (Adittapariyaya Sutta, SN 35.28):

“Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.

He was not joking.