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sight of a few biting ants? In self-disgust, he set aside the bottle and continued to meditate unprotected. The bright clear sphere of Dhamma which he had first perceived before his midday meal was still the same size as the yolk of an egg and firmly established at the centre of his body. As he meditated, the clarity of the sphere of Dhamma increased until it was as lucid as a flawless sphere of crystal. The brightness grew more intense until it outshone the midday sun. He contemplated on this object of meditation for hour after hour, from early in the evening until well after midnight. He found that his meditation could not progress any further than the sphere of Dhamma because he didn’t really know how to work with this newfound object of meditation. In all his past experience of learning meditation, there had been no master who had described a technique such as this. Then, coming from the silence at the centre of the sphere of Dhamma, there arose the gentle sound of the ancient words, *majjhima-paṭipadā*: a technical term from Pali meaning ‘Middle Way’. He thought to himself: "Ah!...The ‘Middle Way’! From my Scriptural study, we define this as ‘a way of life which steers between the two extremes of asceticism and sensual indulgence’." But now this sound came directly from the centre of his body. The centre of the sphere of Dhamma was becoming inordinately bright as if it were source of all the brightness in his body — bright, intense, cool and soothing. The illumination blazed so that the brightness was multiplied enormously, and deep in the brightness of the sphere of Dhamma he knew