The Middle Way: Four Remedies to Cure the Pain of Dukkha

Ajahn Amaro retells the Buddha’s path to awakening to explain why the first teaching he gave was the middle way. He covers the Bodhisatta’s leaving home, the teachers he outgrew, the failure of severe asceticism, and the memory of an innocent pleasure from childhood that led him to a different approach. He follows with the first sermon to the five ascetics, explains sammā as “in tune” and not just “right”, and sets out the four noble truths in the medical form of symptom, cause, prognosis and treatment.

He goes through the three kinds of craving, the stories of Kondañña, Rahula and Channa, and closes with the difference between a worldly and a supramundane eightfold path, and how to treat “I” as a convention of speech.