Join us for The Middle Way with Colin Warwick
The Buddha began his life as Siddhattha Gotama (in Pali), a prince living in luxury, isolated from life’s adversities such as illness, aging, and death. Legend has it that the shock of learning about these caused him to become a monk in order to solve the problem of life’s unsatisfactoriness (dukkha). He went from one extreme, his pleasure palace, to another, asceticism. Neither worked. After six years of monasticism, he decided to sit under a Bodi tree in Bodh Gaya and not move until he figured out his own solution. He emerged with a profound insight that he called the Middle Way: neither luxury nor ascetic. He identified the cause of unsatisfactoriness to be craving (taṇhā) and proposed an eight-fold path to end both. This service will explore these ideas.