The Middle Way: Buddha's Revolutionary Teaching : หน้า 197/263

tered to liberate themselves from suffering, but because the strongest spiritual trend of the time was the practice of self-mortification, many went astray or perished in their quest. Having tormented themselves they had the feeling that their sensual lust was diminished and they thought that if they tormented themselves to the utmost, they would attain true happiness. No-one knows who originated this school of thought — all you can say is that Mara had fooled a whole continent and a whole generation of people into inflicting pain on themselves. Even Prince Siddhattha was among those to be taken in by this school of thought — but luckily he realized the futility of it sooner than the others. The Group of Five hadn’t agreed with him however and had opted to continue with their self-mortification, so at that time they had had to go their separate ways. There had been no anger between them, but they were subscribing to different schools of thought at that point. Thus the Lord Buddha taught that neither of the extremes of sensual indulgence or self-mortification were profitable. This teaching was revolutionary, because it went beyond what any previous philosopher or religious leader had ever taught. Thus for the Buddha to deny the truth of these two schools of thought, was to overturn all that had gone before. The Buddha didn’t just deny what had gone before — he offered a correct alternative. Normally this part of the Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta is just translated: “Avoiding both of these extremes, the Middle Way realized by the Tathagata — producing vision, producing knowledge — leads to calm, to supreme knowledge, to good knowledge, to extinction.” This is a literal translation, but it doesn’t give us much clue