Try to pick up a beach ball. There's nothing to grip. Your hands slide, it squirts away, and the harder you close on it the faster it goes. Not because it's heavy or slippery in any exotic sense — because there is no handle anywhere on it, and grip requires a handle.
Now consider a sentence engineered the same way, on purpose.
That's what Bodri says the Middle Way is. Not a doctrine about the metaphysical status of the world, not a claim that the truth is halfway between two extremes — a description, selected out of the available descriptions, because a mind cannot get hold of it.
Since we cannot define the cultivation path as itself being an ontologically real thing, we should describe the path in a special manner that will lead you to liberation despite this negative connotation, and the best mode of description is to describe the conventional realm as neither existent nor non-existent, as neither real nor unreal, as neither is nor is-not.1
Note the vocabulary. Mode of description. Best. This is a passage about the selection of a formulation, made on grounds of what the formulation does to the reader.
The justification comes in the next sentence and it has two halves:
This type of description is best because it states things as they truly are while eliminating all possible objects of clinging.2
Half one: it states things as they truly are. That's a correspondence claim. The formula is best because it is accurate.
Half two: it eliminates all possible objects of clinging. That's a functional claim. The formula is best because of its effect on the person holding it.
Those are different criteria and there is no guarantee they select the same formula. A statement could be accurate and grippable. A statement could be un-grippable and false. Bodri asserts that the Middle Way happens to be top-ranked on both, and the assertion is doing a lot of quiet work — it makes the pragmatic argument look like a metaphysical one, and vice versa, so that a doubt about either half is answered by the other.
The reason to separate them is that the second half is the one the book actually operates on. Everywhere the Middle Way appears, what is being demonstrated is its prophylactic value: it stops you doing something. The correspondence claim is stated once and never argued.
There's an obvious competing formula, and Bodri's handling of it is the sharpest thing on this topic:
As an expedient method, the meaning of the path to teach you emptiness and non-grasping is usually taught as "all is unreal," or neti-neti "not this, not this." However, the actual path is "it's neither real nor unreal, neither existent nor non-existent." This is the Middle Path, which actualizes prajna wisdom.3
So all is unreal — the negation everyone reaches for, the one that sounds most radical — is demoted to an expedient. A training wheel.
And the reason is exactly the grip problem. "All is unreal" is a position. It has a handle on it. You can hold it, defend it, identify with it, and build a personality out of it — and people demonstrably do, which is the nihilist misreading every emptiness tradition spends its energy correcting.
Neither real nor unreal offers no such purchase. It doesn't give you a side. There is nothing to be a partisan of.
This is a striking thing to say about neti neti, incidentally, given that Bodri quotes the Bṛhadāraṇyaka's version approvingly a few pages earlier and puts Maimonides beside it as the Western equivalent.4 The negative method is good, and it is a stage, and stopping there leaves you holding a negation.
The practical form is at p 502, and it names the two failures symmetrically:
That's why the true process of cultivation is the Middle Way: neither to grasp the false nor establish the real. If you shine on your thoughts with prajna wisdom without dropping into them, then you'll be practicing the Middle Way and can regain your original enlightenment.5
Two errors, and the second is the one nobody warns you about.
Grasping the false is the ordinary case: taking thoughts and objects as substantial. Everyone knows this is the mistake.
Establishing the real is what the sophisticated practitioner does instead. Having correctly declined to grasp the false, they turn around and try to install the true — to locate the ground, occupy the awareness, take up residence in the absolute. And that, on this account, is the same operation with a better object.
The instruction between them is unusually concrete: shine on your thoughts without dropping into them. Illumination without immersion. Which is the same two-sided constraint stated as an activity — not withdrawing from thought, not entering it.
Then Bodri does something that is worth watching closely, because he sets up a supporting quotation and immediately warns you against the obvious reading of it.
He quotes the Doctrine of the Mean: "Before joy and anger and sadness and happiness come forth is called the mean."6
That's a beautiful line and it sounds like a destination — the quiet prior to emotion, the still point, the place to go.
And then:
But if you try to hold onto this mean, you're trying to incorrectly establish the Real. Rather you must let the mind give birth without clinging, for past, present and future mind cannot be grasped.6
He has just quoted a positive formulation and disarmed it in the following sentence. The mean is not somewhere to be. Treat it as somewhere to be and you have committed error number two.
He completes the Confucian pair to make the point: "If they all reach the proper measure after they come forth, this is called harmony" — so the tradition itself has a second term for what happens after the emotions arrive, and the ideal is not staying before them.6
The whole handling is a small demonstration of the page's thesis. Even a quotation whose content is correct becomes a handle the moment it names a place, so the naming gets neutralised on delivery.
The tightest statement is one Bodri borrows from his own teacher, sixty pages later, when he asks the question directly — what exactly is the Middle Way?
The perfection of [prajna] transcendent wisdom, the bodhisattvas' path of omniscience, because of its wisdom, does not dwell on this shore, the shore of birth and death, and because of its compassion, does not dwell on the other shore, the shore of nirvana. Nor, in its supreme non-abiding, does it dwell in between these two shores.7
Three refusals, and the third is the one that makes it a real position rather than a familiar one.
Not samsara. Not nirvana. And not the middle either.
That last clause is what separates the Middle Way from every "balance" or "moderation" reading it gets translated into. A midpoint is a location. If you can stand on it, it's a third shore, and the whole apparatus has just been reproduced one step over.
Nan Huai-Chin's version supplies the two reasons for the first two refusals, and they aren't symmetrical: wisdom keeps you off the near shore, compassion keeps you off the far one. You don't stay in birth and death because you see through it; you don't retire into nirvana because other people are still here. And the third refusal has no reason attached, because there is nothing to say about it except that it also is not a place.
Bodri had already gone one further at p 42, via the same teacher: "One should also drop the middle way and relinquish even this attachment."8
A difficult afternoon. Something has gone badly wrong at work and you can feel the mind reaching for a frame.
Frame one arrives first: this matters, this is serious, I have to fix it. That's grasping the false — taking the situation as solid and getting inside it.
You've read enough to catch that, so frame two arrives: none of this is real, it's all passing, in a hundred years nobody will know. And there is genuine relief in it, for about ninety seconds.
Then notice what frame two actually is. It's a position you have taken up, with a view attached and a small satisfaction in having taken it. You have established the real — installed yourself somewhere above the situation — and the somewhere is a handle like any other. The tell is the satisfaction.
The instruction here offers you neither. Not this is solid, not this is nothing. You keep working the problem, at full effort, with the phone calls and the apology and the fix — and you decline to settle the question of how real it is, because settling it either way gives the mind something to hold.
What that feels like, honestly, is unfinished. There's a low discomfort in not having a frame, and the discomfort is why people take one.
Six months of this and something changes that isn't equanimity. You get better at working without a settled account of what you're working on. That's the whole yield, and it is much less impressive than either of the two frames you gave up.
Step back from the content and look at what Bodri is doing methodologically, because he is doing something unusual and mostly not admitting it.
He is choosing a metaphysical formulation on pragmatic grounds. The Middle Way is the best mode of description — best for a purpose, measured by an effect on the reader, ranked above a competitor formula (all is unreal) which is explicitly demoted to an expedient for people who aren't ready.
That is a genuinely defensible position in a soteriological framework. If the point of the doctrine is liberation rather than accuracy, then formulations should be ranked by what they do, and a true statement that reliably produces clinging is worse than a slightly evasive one that doesn't.
Three consequences follow, and Bodri takes none of them up.
It makes the doctrine's content hostage to its audience. If all is unreal is an expedient for one reader and neither real nor unreal is the actual path for another, then what the tradition teaches is indexed to who's listening — which is a claim the book makes explicitly elsewhere about teaching schemes being audience-relative, and never connects to this.
It gives no independent purchase on the correspondence claim. It states things as they truly are is asserted once and defended nowhere. Every argument actually offered in its favour is an argument about clinging.
And it creates a problem with the ladder above it. If the criterion is un-grippability, then the criterion applied to itself yields Nan's third refusal — not even the middle — and applied again yields drop the middle way — and there is no principled place for the recursion to stop, because any stopping point is by definition a handle. The regress is not a flaw someone else could point out; it is what the selection criterion generates when run on its own output.
The honest summary: the Middle Way as Bodri presents it is less a description of reality than a description-shaped device for preventing a specific cognitive move. That is not a criticism — it may be the most useful thing a formula of this kind could be. It is, however, a different sort of claim from the one the sentence appears to make, and the two are welded together in a single line that never gets taken apart.
Strongest support: the position is stated with the third refusal intact. Almost every popular rendering of the Middle Way collapses into moderation or balance. Nan's formulation explicitly rules out the midpoint, and Bodri's own p 42 quotation drops the middle way itself.78 A framework that closes its own most attractive exit is being used rather than displayed.
Second: the demotion of all is unreal to an expedient is a real commitment with costs. It puts the most rhetorically powerful version of the doctrine on the second tier, and it is stated flatly.3
Tension, unaddressed: two justifications welded into one sentence. Correspondence and prophylaxis are independent criteria, and only the second is ever argued.2
Tension, structural: the regress has no stated floor. Not this shore, not the other, not between, and also drop the middle way. Each refusal is generated by the same criterion, and nothing in the text says where or why it stops.78
Open question. If a formulation can be ranked by its effect on the reader, can two readers require contradictory formulations at the same time — and does the tradition then hold both, or hold neither? Not addressed in the range read (pp 42, 481, 485, 502, 506, 562–563).
The page this most obviously belongs beside is Vocabulary Chosen by What It Prevents, and the relationship is one of scale rather than kind. That page establishes the habit at the level of individual terms — a word selected because of the error it forecloses. This one shows the same criterion operating on an entire metaphysical formula, and being stated openly as a ranking principle. The habit is not a stylistic tic; it is a method the author will apply to his largest claims. Which also means that when this book states a doctrine, the right first question is not is this true but what was this built to stop.
Against Knowing Emptiness Is Not Emptiness, the two pages are the same instruction in two registers. That one removes every place to stand experientially — no state, no knowing, no host. This one removes every place to stand propositionally — no position, no negation, no midpoint. The parallel is exact enough to suggest the two are one claim, and Bodri never says so.
And against The Error Is Misuse, Not Content: if the defect is a relation rather than a content, then a doctrine's job is not to supply the correct content but to be un-relatable-to. That is precisely why a description can be ranked by its grip resistance, and it is the deepest justification available for the Middle Way's selection — which Bodri has to hand, one chapter earlier, and does not use.
Both/and is presented as the escape from the tyranny of either/or. Most thinking runs on dichotomy — strong or sensitive, ambitious or at peace — with one pole good and the other suppressed. The capacity to hold both simultaneously is treated as a developmental achievement.9
Line that up against neither real nor unreal and the two look like allies. They are not, and the difference is the useful part.
Both/and affirms twice. Neither/nor denies twice. Both/and says you can be strong and sensitive, and the payoff is that you stop amputating half of yourself — it enlarges what you're permitted to hold. Neither/nor says the world is not real and not unreal, and the payoff is that there is nothing left to hold at all.
The insight the pairing produces is a diagnostic about which tool a given problem wants. Both/and is the right move when the dichotomy is false and both poles are genuinely available. Strong and sensitive are both real properties; the error was the exclusive-or. Neither/nor is the right move when both poles are artefacts of the framing itself — when real and unreal are not two options one of which obtains, but a pair generated by a question that shouldn't have been asked. Applying the wrong one is costly in both directions: both/and applied to a false pair produces someone who affirms two artefacts instead of one, and neither/nor applied to a genuine dichotomy produces evasion dressed as subtlety, which is the standard complaint against this whole style of thought and is sometimes correct.
Ashoka built his public programme on dharma, a word chosen precisely because its enormous semantic range let him address a religiously fractured empire without picking a side. The formulation was selected for what it prevented — a sectarian reading — rather than for what it asserted.10
The structural correspondence is at the level of selection criterion: in both cases a formulation is chosen because of the reading it forecloses, and in both the pragmatic ground is more decisive than the descriptive one.
But the history supplies something the doctrine can't supply about itself, which is the failure mode of a formula chosen for its effects. Ashoka's dharma was built to be religiously neutral and the word's heavy Buddhist resonance came along anyway. The ambiguity did not stay ambiguous; readers resolved it in the direction the vocabulary already leaned, and the emperor's neutrality has been argued about for two thousand years.
That predicts something specific for the Middle Way, and the prediction is confirmed by its actual reception history. Neither existent nor non-existent was built to have no handle. It has been read, continuously and by serious people, as moderation, as balance, as a golden mean, as a mystical both/and, and as a polite nihilism — every one of those a handle, grown on a surface designed not to have one. A formulation cannot control its own reception, and un-grippability is a property of the sentence, not of the reader. Which suggests the prophylactic strategy is weaker than Bodri's ranking assumes, and that traditions relying on it will need exactly what they in fact have: a teacher standing beside the sentence, removing the handles as they grow.
Sharpest implication. The formula is not telling you what reality is. It is a device for stopping a particular move — and once you see that, the natural question about any doctrine flips from is it true to what was it built to prevent, which is a much better question and works on doctrines you don't believe.
Generative questions.
If descriptions can be ranked by grip resistance, is there a most-un-grippable formulation, or does the ranking generate an infinite series? Nan gives three refusals; Bodri's teacher elsewhere drops the middle way itself; nothing marks a floor.
And: what is the cost of a doctrine no one can hold? Traditions survive by being transmissible, and transmissible usually means grippable. Is the Middle Way's long history of being misread the price of its design, or evidence that the design failed?