6.3 — Six Years of Failure, and the Middle Way

He spent six years getting it wrong, and the fact that the tradition kept the six years is one of the most valuable things about it.

Most founding stories compress the failure. This one takes it slowly, names the teachers, describes the methods, and reports exactly why each one did not work.

The two teachers

Alara Kalama taught meditative absorption up to a state the texts call the sphere of nothingness — a condition of extremely refined attention in which the object of awareness is the absence of anything.

He reached it quickly, and the account says Alara offered to make him co-leader of the community.

And he left. His reason is stated: this state does not lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to awakening. It leads only to that state. You come out of it and you are the same person.

Uddaka Ramaputta taught a further state, the sphere of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, subtler still.

He reached that too, was offered leadership of the whole community, and left for exactly the same reason.

What this establishes

He was extremely good at meditation before he started, and it was not enough.

That is a claim worth taking seriously, because it cuts against the most common modern assumption about all of this. Deep meditative states are real, they are attainable, and — on his own account — they do not by themselves change anything. You enter a profound condition, you leave it, and your habits, your reactions and your suffering are exactly where you left them.

The general form: a technique that produces a good state while you are doing it, and no change once you stop, is a holiday. It may be a valuable holiday. It is not a transformation, and the distinction is the one people most often fail to make about meditation, exercise, therapy, retreats and holidays alike.

The austerities

Then he goes to the other extreme, and the texts are unusually graphic about it.

He describes it himself. He held his breath until there were violent headaches and a sound like a bellows in his ears. He reduced his food to a few grains or a handful of soup a day.

His own description of the result: his limbs became like jointed reeds, his spine stood out like a corded rope, his ribs like the rafters of a ruined shed. When he touched his belly he felt his spine. When he tried to stand, he fell. His hair fell out.

Five other ascetics joined him, because his practice was the most extreme any of them had seen.

He nearly died.

And then the assessment

He asks himself the question, and it is the same question he asked about the meditation: is this producing anything?

And the answer is no. He states it plainly: by this racking practice I have not attained any distinction in knowledge or vision beyond ordinary human states. The pain has produced pain and nothing else.

The memory

And then the moment, and it is the best passage in the whole account.

He remembers something from childhood. He was a boy, sitting under a rose-apple tree while his father was working, and he had entered — with no effort and no intention — a state of quiet, pleasant, alert absorption. Nothing mystical. A child sitting in the shade of a tree, completely settled.

And he asks: could that be the way?

Then the thought that turns the whole thing: why am I afraid of that pleasure? It is not a pleasure of the senses, it does not come from craving, and it does no harm. There is nothing to be afraid of in it.

And he concludes that this state cannot be reached with a body reduced to nothing, and that he will have to eat.

Sujata, and the five who left

He takes solid food. A village woman named Sujata gives him rice cooked with milk.

The five ascetics leave in disgust. They had followed him because of the severity of his practice. The moment he eats, they conclude he has given up and gone back to comfort, and they walk away.

He is now alone, having failed at both available methods, abandoned by the only people who took him seriously.

Keep that image, because the awakening happens about a week later. The state immediately before the breakthrough is total failure and complete isolation, and the texts do not dress it up.

The Middle Way

The doctrine that comes out of the six years is stated in his very first sermon, before the Four Noble Truths, as the frame for everything else:

Two extremes are not to be followed. The pursuit of sensual pleasure, which is low, common, and does not lead anywhere. And the pursuit of self-mortification, which is painful, ignoble, and equally does not lead anywhere.

Avoiding both, there is a middle way.

What the Middle Way is not

It is not moderation as a personality trait, and it is not "everything in balance." That reading makes it a platitude.

It is a specific empirical finding, arrived at by testing both extremes to their limits.

And that is the part worth having. He did not reason his way to the middle. He went to both ends and reported back. He achieved the deepest meditative states available in his world, and the most extreme austerities, and found that neither did what was claimed.

The Middle Way is a result, not an attitude.

Why both extremes fail, in his account

They fail for the same reason, which is the elegant part.

Sensual pursuit fails because it treats the body's wanting as the thing to satisfy, and it cannot be satisfied — the mechanism regenerates. 6.5 covers this as the second Noble Truth.

Austerity fails because it treats the body as the enemy, which is the same error with the sign flipped. In both cases the whole attention is on the body and on managing sensation, and in both cases the person is still organised entirely around what they are feeling.

The middle way is not a compromise between them. It is the removal of the axis they are both on. Feed the body enough that it is not an obstacle, and then work on the actual problem, which is in the mind.

And the practical version of this is one of the most useful things in Part 6. Both the person who is indulging and the person who is punishing themselves are spending all their attention on the same thing. The dieter and the binger think about food identically. The workaholic and the burnout are the same relationship to work. The way out is not the opposite behaviour; it is a different question.

The Gita agrees

Worth noting, because the two traditions rarely line up this exactly.

The Gita's chapter six says: yoga is not for one who eats too much nor for one who does not eat at all, nor for one who sleeps too much or too little (5.6). Moderate in food, moderate in sleep, moderate in effort.

Two independent traditions, in the same region, within a few centuries, both looking at an ascetic culture and both concluding it does not work.

What to carry from this page

A technique that produces a good state and no change afterwards is a holiday. Useful and not the thing.

Punishing yourself is the same error as indulging yourself, with the sign reversed. Both put all the attention on the same axis. The way out is a different question, not the opposite behaviour.

Go to the end of a method before concluding it works or does not. He did both, completely, which is why the finding has weight.

And the state immediately before the breakthrough was total failure, alone, abandoned by everybody who had believed in him. That is not an inspirational flourish. It is in the text, and it is worth having on the days it applies.

Next: 6.4 — one night under a tree, and what actually happened on it.