Religious Study: The Middle Path

Recently, I visited to Wheaton Warrenville Sough High School in order to educationally observe. The following is my brief experience from one of the classrooms.

In a religious class, students learned and discussed the concepts, ideas and terms of the five major world religions. On the day that I observed, students were very interestingly learning about the terms of The Ka’aba, Ramadan, Hajj, Kosher Laws, Jehovah / Yahweh, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Diwali, Ahimsa, The Middle Way, Book of Revelation and Gospels. I saw many critical questions, which students made on the board and their discussions were really high and standardize.

I was asked by the teacher to introduce by myself with the class and also to contribute something in the class about the religions. I said that I was a Buddhist monk about one year. Then, teacher asked me to make an explanation about the “Middle Path” of the Buddhism. “Middle Path” is one of the prime concepts, which the Buddha taught. Probably it was theme of Buddhism.

The key meaning of middle path was ‘to avoid the extremism’ in any part of our lives and conditions; even to love, hate, like or dislike on anything, any person, any opinion, any fact, and so on, because no man or nothing is perfect. No body or nothing is perfect to be extremely loved or hated or liked or disliked. Besides, nothing is permanent; everything was changing; is changing; and will be changing. As soon as we extremely love or hate or like or dislike on something or somebody, it makes us to not to see the truth. We could be seeing, thinking and pointing unfairly because of that extremism, which we are having. Reversely, as soon as we avoid that extremism, we are able to see things, cases, problems, persons clearly. Therefore, it makes us to see the truth and it also always makes the appropriate way. Moreover, the ‘middle path’ also reminds us to not to be extremely sad because of very poor conditions in our lives and at the same time, to not to be extremely happy because of very good conditions in our lives. Nothing will be everlasting. In time, it will be changed or erased. Hence, that middle-path approach also makes us to be appropriate living in our daily lives.

It was my contribution about the Buddha’s middle path in that religious class.
Picture: http://adreampuppet.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/buddha-3.JPG