Introducing the Middle Way Society, an interview with Robert M. Ellis

October 9, 2013 By Justin Whitaker

JW: Let’s begin with an overview of the Middle Way Society. What is it? Who is it?

RME: It’s a new society (a charity) devoted to the understanding and practice of the Middle Way. It was launched in August 2013 by the agreement of the participants in a Middle Way Study Retreat which I led in Malvern. The participants in this retreat had come together initially through the Secular Buddhist movement. However, we wanted to create something rather different from Secular Buddhism, with a clearer philosophical foundation to help us get beyond the religious-secular divide and a greater openness to people from other traditional backgrounds. Seeing the Middle Way as a principle of universal applicability rather than just an aspect of Buddhism, we want to start treating it as such by separating it from the authority of the Buddhist tradition. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t draw on the resources and symbols of the Buddhist tradition, as we could any other.

For a number of years I have been trying to promote Middle Way Philosophy by myself and feeling that I’ve made very limited headway in communicating it. The main problem is the interconnected elements that people need to understand simultaneously and in relation to each other, so it’s very easy for people to dismiss it by just applying their own model and not recognising the ways in which they also need to question other assumptions that they’re making to understand the model I’m using. It has been a great relief to start feeling that I have got across those interconnected elements to some other people who also see its value and are willing to work with me on promoting it. The key other people involved in setting up the Society are Julian Adkins and Barry Daniel.

JW: You’ve had a fascinating path in life. In addition to sending readers to a longer bio, would you like to give a short summary of how you got here?

RME: I came from a Christian (liberal Baptist) background but declared myself an atheist at the age of nine. I first got involved in Buddhism, as well as studying Sanskrit, Pali, Hinduism, Buddhism etc as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1980?s, but then I ducked out of Buddhism for a few years before returning to the FWBO (now Triratna) in the mid-90?s. My practical experience of Buddhism shaped my understanding of Western philosophy as I began to engage with it seriously at around the same time, and I particularly became interested in the problem of relativism and how relativism was counter-dependent on absolutism. So I did a Ph.D. in the Philosophy department at Lancaster, avoiding all the scholarly Buddhist Studies stuff and just focusing on how the Middle Way could be brought to bear on the central problem of what objectivity is. Since getting my Ph.D. in 2001 I have felt that it contained some important ideas that I needed to spread, develop and apply. At first I tried doing this in the Triratna Buddhist Order, where I was ordained as Upeksacitta between 2004 and 2008, until I realised that the primary commitment in that Order on balance is to the tradition, not the Middle Way. Since then I have been looking for new ways to move forward with Middle Way Philosophy and share it with others.

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