Middle Way Ethics
Tonight at Satsang we'll continue the conversation from last week about ethics and wise action. To understand the relationship between action and emptiness, we have to find a middle way between fundamentalism and relativism. The desire for certainty in an uncertain world makes simplistic physical interpretations of the ethical precepts attractive, and this is the form fundamentalists always preach. But this approach always fails—life is too complex, and everything arrives as spectra, never dyads. The postmodern approach that emptiness seems closest to understands spectra, uncertainty, and interdependence, but can get lost in relativism. As if our faculties of discernment can't let go of a harmful body of meaning without thinking that means that all bodies of meaning are harmful. This becomes a middle way problem, a variation of the "middle way between existence and nonexistence" that is the central pillar of the Madhyamāka—the Middle Way school. The parallels to current political and social problems are clear, and suggest that bodhisattva wisdom—the wisdom of the middle way—may be a productive way to think about moral issues in a less-polarized way.
