After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age by Stephen Batchelor (PDF)

Description

Some twenty-five centuries after the Buddha started teaching, his message continues to inspire people across the globe, including those living in predominantly secular societies. What does it mean to adapt religious practices to secular contexts? Stephen Batchelor, an internationally known author and teacher, is committed to a secularized version of the Buddha’s teachings. The time has come, he feels, to articulate a coherent ethical, contemplative, and philosophical vision of Buddhism for our age. After Buddhism, the culmination of four decades of study and practice in the Tibetan, Zen, and Theravada traditions, is his attempt to set the record straight about who the Buddha was and what he was trying to teach. Combining critical readings of the earliest canonical texts with narrative accounts of five members of the Buddha’s inner circle, Batchelor depicts the Buddha as a pragmatic ethicist rather than a dogmatic metaphysician. He envisions Buddhism as a constantly evolving culture of awakening whose long survival is due to its capacity to reinvent itself and interact creatively with each society it encounters. This original and provocative book presents a new framework for understanding the remarkable spread of Buddhism in today’s globalized world. It also reminds us of what was so startling about the Buddha’s vision of human flourishing.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐If you are reading reviews of this book to determine whether it’s worth your time, my answer is yes: I think most readers with an interest in the dharma, except perhaps those unshakably committed to traditional Buddhist dogmas on karma and reincarnation, will find much value here. This is an intelligent, serious, and engaging work whose ideas the author likely pondered and refined over a period of years, a learned but vibrant formulation of a secular dharma that hones in on tasks we can undertake to live compassionately and authentically. At the same time, this secular dharma dispenses with metaphysical and ontological claims that have scant bearing on liberating ourselves from the prison of reactivity. Someone who is drowning has little use for a lesson on the chemistry of water. What is needed is a teaching on how to breathe in and out of the water, and how to move and thrive in a dynamic seascape of ever-shifting currents, not a discourse on covalent and hydrogen bonds or molecular orbital theory.The book is organized into eleven chapters that alternate in shiplap fashion, an expository chapter on the dharma followed by a chapter on an individual associated with the Buddha. The latter are helpful in providing a historical context of the Buddha’s life and times. In all, five characters are profiled: Mahanama, a cousin of Buddha and a governor of Sakiya; Pasenadi, king of Kosala; Sunakkhatta, a Judas Iscariot figure; Jivaka, a physician; and Ananda, the Buddha’s attendant.Batchelor’s approach to the surviving Buddhist corpus borrows from Biblical textual criticism, attempting to suss out from the massive Pali canon parts that may be attributed to early Buddhist tradition and even the historical Buddha himself, hereafter referred to as Gotama. Batchelor declares in the first chapter: “My starting point in dealing with dogmatic statements is to bracket off anything attributed to Gotama that could just as well have been said by another wanderer, Jain monk, or brahmin priest of the same period.” That is, utterances inconsistent with Indic beliefs prevalent during that period are more likely to be authentic, to not have been emended by a later hand. Batchelor continues, “The bracketing off of such beliefs does not, in my opinion, result in a fragmentary and emasculated dharma. Instead, the result is what appears to be an entirely adequate ethical, contemplative, and philosophical framework for leading a flourishing life in this (italics) world.”Gotama, as described by Batchelor, stresses the undertaking of existential tasks rather than cerebral, speculative, and abstract elaborations on metaphysics or even universal ethics. More on the latter shortly. Leaning on Pali philologist K.R. Norman’s observations on the semantic oddity involving the use of “ariya-saccam” or “noble truth” in Gotama’s first alleged discourse, Batchelor recasts the four noble truths as the four tasks instead. In other words, he asks us to lift our gaze from the metaphysics of the Truths of the existence, origin, and cessation of suffering, and instead reframe them as four tasks we can undertake to negotiate both an unpredictable world that is often traumatizing as well as our reactivity to it. As an experienced craftsman deploys an array of skills in his trade, so does a wise person skillfully practice the four tasks to flourish in this world. In Batchelor’s reformulation of the four noble truths, they become the following tasks: 1) Embrace [the totality of] life; 2) Let go of what[ever reactivity that] arises; 3) See its ceasing; 4) Act!The foundation for performing the four tasks is the two-fold ground of causality and nirvana. Causality: this is so because that is so. Knowing that this leads to that enables us to follow the path toward liberation. Likewise, when you see that letting go of reactivity opens a space for a peace that is unmolested by burning impulses, when you have tasted this nirvana in which flames of impulse are extinguished, if only temporarily, it is possible to enter the stream and begin swimming toward liberation. To enter this stream, one must have courage to see past the shaky grounds on which we often rest our identity, whether they are nationality, ethnicity, gender, career, educational background, or favorite sports team. The grounds of causality and nirvana are more elusive yet offer a much surer footing for a sane and fulfilling life.What kind of a person was the historical Gotama who emerges from the suttas and vinayas? Stripped of the supernatural and dogmatic elements that Batchelor deems later accretions influenced by Indic traditions, the Gotama we see is foremost a pragmatist. Attentive to the specifics of a situation, he abandons claims to ultimate truths or universal ethics. He says, “Of that which the wise in the world agree upon as not existing, I too say that it does not exist. And of that which the wise in the world agree upon as existing, I too say that it exists.” It seems that Gotama did not toss and turn at night agonizing over metaphysical questions! Gotama’s ethics, as well, are guided by core values but eschew absolutism. For the monastic community, Gotama allowed for the revocation of minor rules after his passing, and left it up to the mendicants themselves to fashion out what that means. Of philosophy, ethics, and jurisprudence that seek to hammer out universally applicable principles, Gotama would probably say that they lazily elide over the all-important contextual details that guide us toward the most wise and loving course of action for a given situation. Nor is Gotama a detached ascetic. He regularly interacts with the outside world, and springs to action where there is a need. In this book we see him negotiating delicate political terrains. We also see him as a healer. Upon discovering a dysentery-stricken mendicant who lay in his own excrement, neglected by his fellow mendicants, Gotama cleans off the fecal waste and bathes him, after which he scolds the sick man’s cohorts: “If you do not tend to each other, then who is there who will tend to you? Whoever would tend to me, he should tend to the sick.” Gotama, as we glimpse him in these anecdotes, is compassionate, practical, and engaged.In the closing chapter, A Culture of Awakening, Batchelor champions a dharma that speaks urgently to the needs of our times. The project Gotama envisioned was like rebuilding upon the ruins of a newly discovered ancient city. Here, informed by the freedom of nirvana, individuals come together to build a culture in which humans can truly flourish. Realizing this core vision does not, Batchelor argues, require an unquestioning belief in doctrines such as karma and reincarnation. He asks, in a secular western civilization without long traditions in which reincarnation was taken as a given, in which scientific narratives have overtaken religious ones, does belief in reincarnation help us accomplish the four tasks? Batchelor concludes the book with his Ten Theses of Secular Dharma, most of whose credos have been reflected in this review, but which also espouses sanghas, or spiritual communities, without hierarchies.While I cannot judge the quality of Batchelor’s Pali scholarship, the book seemed to be densely woven with learned and carefully nuanced arguments. I found the author an able and sensitive reader, and many times in the book I was surprised by how much information he was able to extract from seemingly insignificant Pali fragments. Batchelor’s conjectures and conclusions regarding the texts are necessarily speculative, but I believe they are informed and intelligent. His textual approach to arrive at the historical Gotama is a welcome one, and in my opinion, badly needed in Buddhist studies. I also believe that his vision of a secular dharma is sensible and healthy. Buddhism has survived across centuries and continents because it was able to adapt to the needs of its practitioners, though its core teachings remained intact. Batchelor is wise to ask what kind of dharma follows after Buddhism in a western culture in which the idea of mindfulness has spread like wildfire, but one that is unlikely to embrace the idea of reincarnation in literal rather than metaphorical terms. Additionally, I found the portraits of Gotama and assorted characters in this book vivid and compelling. Here we see these historical people fleshed out, with their ideologies, allegiances, temperaments, and limitations. We gasp in horror as Gotama is helpless to stop the genocidal onslaught of his kinsmen by a vengeful king. We witness a monk of senior position, disappointed in Gotama’s lack of supernatural abilities, turn traitorous and furiously denounce his former teacher. In the chapter on Ananda, we sympathize with Gotama’s attendant as he is humiliated and marginalized in the power struggle that ensues Gotama’s death.I do disagree with Batchelor on a few counts, most notably on the meaning of Gotama’s awakening. I’ll discuss only the latter here. Was Gotama’s awakening the complete and eternal eradication of the impulses of greed, hatred, and delusion? Clearly not, as the Pali canon describes his multiple encounters with Mara, the personified metaphor of these forces, even after his enlightenment. Batchelor appears resigned to the impossibility of a lasting nirvana: “The problem with the three fires of greed, hatred, and confusion does not lie in their being hot but in the havoc they cause when they get out of control. … The parable of the snake might suggest that these fires are not to be extinguished but regulated. Since emotions appear to be rooted deep in our limbic system as the legacy of biological evolution, regulation might be all that is possible and feasible.” For Batchelor, then, nirvanic freedom is not something to work toward, but available in each moment we choose to disentangle ourselves from reactivity. If progress is made, it is by habituation.My own experiences have led me to a different take. While I agree with Batchelor that we are inescapably subject to features of our mammalian physiology, I do not believe that nirvana is something merely glimpsed through practice, a momentary peace that flits like a butterfly in and out of our lives. Traumas we’ve experienced dissociate us physically from our bodies and temporally, and consequently 1) we lack full awareness of the felt sense of living in our bodies, and 2) our thoughts constantly stray from the present, either wandering toward fantasies or fears regarding the future, or dwelling upon glories, regrets, or injuries of the past. Whatever evolutionary instincts we are born with for the sake of self-preservation, trauma adds to the fuel of Mara’s fire. In my opinion, Gotama’s instruction on mindfulness of the breath is a prescription for the undoing, the healing, of the forces of trauma, to bring us back into our bodies in this moment. I believe that creating and sustaining this internal milieu opened up the space for the healing of the traumas of Gotama’s past until there was no more to be undone. I say this based on my ongoing experience with the healing of traumas. A practice of meditation on and off the cushion has been the foundation allowing me to slowly process the traumas of my past, and little by little, I find that I am becoming less reactive. My days tend to be more present, I feel more connected to my body, and compassion flows more naturally. Even in emotionally volatile moments, it is becoming easier to slip back into the sublimity of the present moment. In short the fires of greed, anger, and confusion now burn less avidly in my interior landscape than they did a year ago, and much less so than they did, say, three years ago. Given my personal trajectory, I can only extrapolate that there must be an eventual end to the flames of trauma, at which point the limbic system may still stir and rattle, but with considerably attenuated intensity. This is my understanding of, and partial experience with, nirvana.Finally, for those who might be interested, recordings of many of Batchelor’s talks are freely available on the dharma seed website. I have listened to a few over the past several days, and they address many of the themes from this book. I wish you well on your path.

⭐Buddha means awake. Buddha was not the name of an individual. It was Sanskrit referring to the state of a being fully awake.Buddha is not difficult and confusing. Buddha is spontaneously loving open intelligence, your night and day demonstration of always on sublime mind, speech, body, qualities and activities of great social benefit. In other words, regulation and rational optimism are not the goal. These are dead and dry, not alive and juicy.Western ideology breeds more of the same, nose to the grindstone. Please. Buddha subsumes all opposites such as regulation and non-regulation in open intelligence spontaneously pervaded by indestructible dignity and sublime activities for the benefit of all.There are Buddhas in numerous cultures of beings. I know those who live today and have read specific written autobiographies and biographies of over 250 who have lived in the past 1000 years. Mr. Batchelor may have missed examination of these Dzogchen masters lives. There is no means of examining Buddhist lives without proof through scholarly comparative analysis of enlightenment methods from all cultures. Mr. Batchelor’s approach is entirely anecdotal. Dzogchen has the only documented proof of contemporary Buddhas who came about through Tibetan culture’s systematic and comprehensive map for accomplishing Buddhahood in one lifetime.In Tibetan culture, at 15,000 ft elevation and higher, meditation pervades culture as the only means to survive in these extremes. This is the sole cause behind the effect of its countless Buddhas. Now we all live in the age of global pandemics. Applying the teachings of Dzogchen, anyone, regardless of background or behavior, has ready access to Buddhahood.I respect Mr. Batchelor’s contribution to Buddhist and global thought. However, it completely misses the point through use of totalizing concepts and competitive sensibilities that are the antithesis of Buddhahood. Maybe the 7-10,000 year old cultures of the East have something to offer.Buddhism rests in its profound meaning: the mind of great bliss seeing unconstructed union while engaging in the spontaneous beneficial qualities and activities of mind, speech, body, qualities and activities. All the Buddhas of Buddhism agree on this point.Batchelor’s insistence on trading miserable unhappiness for regular unhappiness misses the point of Buddhism. His views are those of the psychiatry of Freud and Lacan.The author simply has no reliable teachers or friends who have opened to Buddhism. There are four spaces of openness for students of Buddhist teachings: most excellent, superior, middle and least. These refer to the initial ability to understand the wealth presented across the spectrum of possibilities. This is not a fundamentalist approach, it is one for the countless culture-rich beings in today’s world.There are three kinds of beings—ordinary, practitioners, sublime beings. Regulation is the life of ordinary beings. Practitioners practice with a qualified teacher who is authorized by their teacher to teach Dzogchen. This is the fact of it. No one, regardless of proclamation, is qualified to teach Dzogchen, not Batchelor, not Sam Harris, not Loch Kelly, and so forth. Receiving Dzogchen teachings does not qualify one to teach. Full stop. Sublime beings have accomplished Buddha and their already Buddha teacher confirms that they have. You can find Dzogchen lineage successors of rigpawiki.com. See Dudjom Rimpoche, who lists over 125 and Wangdor Rinpoche (successor of Dudjom Rinpoche) authorized 7 students throughout the past 25 years. Though global citizens may receive Dzogchen teachings through fresh styling, they are still Dzogchen teachings and confirmed to be so by a Buddha.Just as the book states, regulation of positive and negative content will end in regulation, regulation + regulation = regulation; this approach is for those who have least openness to the overall teachings and their promises.It is important for the author to deeply understand where he is on the Buddhist path and decide what he wants to do about it. And each being has everything needed to determine where they are in terms of openness to the 84,000 teachings of Buddhism, which simply accommodate many kinds of beings with varying capabilities and give instruction to each one.

⭐His serious examination has had an outsized influence on my sense of Buddhist concepts from my many years of study and practice . It has enabled me to make Buddhism still more personal to me, and for my use within my own perspective.

⭐Worth re-reading and sticking with. I’m getting much more out of the book reading it the second time. It’s important to note how the book is arranged. The odd numbered chapters are what I was really looking for and that’s a clear guide to secular Buddhism. The even numbered chapters, which at first lost me a bit, and I wondered where the book was going, look at individuals that Buddha taught who did not become ‘monks’ eg they stayed ‘householders’ with all the responsibilities and headaches that goes with everyday life. These chapters look at how they applied Buddha’s teachings whilst ‘in the world’. This is where the book is focussing, those practitioners that didn’t become monks and leave everyday life.This is an aspect of Buddhas teaching that Batchelor emphasises and that is that this path is grounded completely ‘in the world’. It is not an escape into the meta physical, or bliss, or some calm true self, hidden behind all this conditioned arising. There is just conditioned arising and our reactivity to the arsing and ceasing of conditions. And in seeing this, and through cultivating awareness and concentration we can choose how we react, and that is freedom.Which is my understanding of secular Buddhism in a nutshell.A personal note and reflection: This book is an interesting difference to modern mindfulness, which I have been practicing for the last few years. Modern mindfulness sometimes seems to suggest an unconditioned state that is attainable, that is unaffected by everyday concerns, to be the unaffected observer. Many mindfulness meditations bring this in, a mountain unaffected by the weather, a blue sky unaffected by the clouds, a deep calm ocean unaffected by the surface waves or the meditator sat calmly on the bank, watching the thought stream realising that is really your true self, or the ‘true home’ of spacious consciousness. Therefore, S Batchelors understanding of Buddhas teaching, that all things are subject to conditioned arising and ceasing and there is nothing separate from conditioned arising, seems to conflict with many modern mindfulness practices and also a lot of Buddhism practiced today. This difference could be dismissed really as a minor change in emphasis or it could be a major difference if the ‘mindful observer’ is elevated to the status of an unconditioned eternal soul, which I believe it often is.In my own experience I have found my attempt to find and reside in that calm blissful unaffected place really unhelpful to everyday life. Yes I found amazing nirvana transcendent bliss whilst meditating, but then was plunged into the stress of everyday life, just with an increased discontent and craving to escape.S Batchelors book brings spiritual striving back down to earth. Back into ‘this world’ “a contemplative relation with experience, where attending to what is happening tansforms it’s passing into the fertile nirvanic space from which an unprecedented response to the worlds dukkha can emerge” rather than an attempted escape or transcendence from contingency and life, or as Batchelor poetically puts describes it “the tragic dimension of life… it’s bittersweet taste, it’s annoyingly fugitive charm, it’s fascinating and terrifying sublimity…the beauty and the joy .. in the whirling disintegration of the world”Great stuff! Give it a read. (Review edited Sep18 see comment for original)

⭐It’s a very insightful book. The reconstructions of what might have happened historically from the various texts Batchelor pieces together are intriguing and convincing. I’m not convinced about the way he translates some buddhist terms, but I’m not an expert on the languages he translates from. I think what I have gained is a better understanding of the historical context of the establishment of Buddhism. Hoping to find liberation myself from the fears and anxieties associated with living, and moved by the apparent tranquility of mind of Buddhist practitioners, I’ve been on a reading and meditating quest over the past months. I come away from reading this book perhaps more firmly sceptical of the Buddhist claims (I was to begin with anyway though) of enlightenment and of a consistent and coherent teaching. I thing those old semi-ascetics had hold of something true. I’m not convinced, as Batchelor seems to be, that the teachings were very life affirming. Avoiding craving and attachment seem like great ideas to a degree but I couldn’t see from this book how life’s simple pleasures were being encouraged to be enjoyed by the Buddha or any of his followers since then. But it’s great, as Batchelor shows, how in sickness and old age the Buddha himself said something along the lines of only finding comfort when in deep meditation. At other times no doubt he was in pain and it seems he admits he suffered. This shows the practical use of meditation, and also shows the hyperbolic nature of some Buddhist claims, such as that of the end of suffering. Perhaps it’s only true in meditative states, which is not to be scoffed at. So to summarize, the book has been valuable as I try to sort through my thoughts on Buddhism and how, if at all, it can be applied to my life.

⭐Stephen Batchelor should be congratulated for the work and study necessary to produce this essential book. As a humble adherent to the Buddhist path this book has offered light in the darkness by using dialogue and context to enrich and ground the subject matter. In demonstrating Gotama’s use of dialogue to guide others to appreciate reality, and placing it within the context of his time, society and social mores, he creates a solid base for our understanding. It has taken him many years to arrive at this point and it is worth every second of his efforts. Far from bring an academic tome, this book is a treat to read as it relates aspects of the teaching to the dialogues with those who realised a truth in the process. Gotama may not have said every word attributed to him but, by creating the necessary conditions for them to be uttered by others, played the critical part. I would heartily encourage anyone interested in Buddhism to read this book, it will make a difference.

⭐There is too much guessed at history in this book. Nobody really knows who thought what 2500 years ago. Batchelor could have made this book much more readable without going into such great detail about the old stories. There are gems of thoughts in here, but in general it is a heavy book. I had a bad feeling when, at the start of the book, he mentions Tillich (totally incomprehensible and contorted) and Cupitt (who never seems to come to a conclusion, but drones on and on).Batchelor’s previous books in general were clear and concise. This isn’t.

⭐Take home from this book is that its probably easier to get yourself a good psychotherapist to sort out your ‘reactivity’ issues than go to all the bother of practising Buddhism…. And anyway, every fule kno that you have to bite back on your immediate negative emotional reactions if you want to get on with the idjits in this world – or just count to 10 or take 3 deep breaths – job done.

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