Middle Way · Pāli: majjhimā paṭipadā

The phrase comes from the Buddha’s first discourse. In the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11) he names “these two extremes that are not to be indulged in by one who has gone forth”: the life “devoted to sensual pleasure with reference to sensual objects: base, vulgar, common, ignoble, unprofitable”, and the one “devoted to self-affliction: painful, ignoble, unprofitable”. Avoiding both, “the middle way realized by the Tathagata” leads “to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to Unbinding”. He then identifies it exactly: “Precisely this Noble Eightfold Path”. So the Middle Way is not vague moderation. It is the Noble Eightfold Path under another name, and it is demanding.

A second sense appears in the Kaccayanagotta Sutta (SN 12.15), where the extremes are views rather than habits: “‘Everything exists’: That is one extreme. ‘Everything doesn’t exist’: That is a second extreme. Avoiding these two extremes, the Tathagata teaches the Dhamma via the middle”. What stands in that middle is dependent origination.

Both senses are canonical, and it is the second that later philosophy built on. Nāgārjuna’s “philosophy of the ‘middle way’ (madhyamaka)” is, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “based around the central notion of ‘emptiness’ (śūnyatā)”, and with the spread of Buddhism “to Tibet, China, Japan and other Asian countries the writings of Nāgārjuna became an indispensable point of reference”. The Mādhyamikas “are very clear that their position avoids both of the extreme views, the view that believes in the existence of svabhāva as well as its nihilistic opposite”, arguing that cause and effect “are not independent but mutually dependent”. The Pali discourses keep the Middle Way as a path and as a view; the schools that inherited Nāgārjuna carry it into emptiness.