Ellis/The Buddha's Middle Way, 3. The Buddha's Metaphors

This section interprets some key analogies of the Buddha in terms of embodied meaning theory, showing their relationship to different aspects of the universal Middle Way, and in the process illustrating the analysis of the Middle Way into the five principles of scepticism, provisionality, incrementality, agnosticism and integration. Metaphor is omnipresent rather than allegorically reducible to ‘literal’ teachings, and the effect of the Buddha’s metaphors needs to be recognised in embodied terms rather than allegorically. The Middle Way itself is a metaphor combining basic schemas of source-path-goal and equilibrium. The Buddha’s raft metaphor evokes a universal experience of provisionality, and the lute-strings a basic expression of provisionality in the embodied experience of moderated tension. The man pierced by an arrow evokes the distracted irrelevance of absolutisation, and the ‘second arrow’ metaphor the accentuation of suffering by absolutisation. The gradual shelving of the ocean evokes the organic experience of incrementality, in contrast to the abstraction required for discontinuity. The blind people and the elephant evoke the universal power of confirmation bias through the metaphor of sensual limitation, whilst the snake simile evokes the dangers of absolute interpretations of the teachings. The saturation of a piece of wood with the more flexible medium of water evokes the way in which integration can guard against the fire of absolutisation.