Stephen Batchelor Quotes

Buddhism, it seemed, was a rational religion, whose truth-claims could withstand the test of reason.

Gotama did for the self was Copernicus did for the earth: he put it in its rightful place, despite its continuing to appear just as it did before. Gotama mo more rejected the existence of the self than Copernicus rejected the existence of the earth. Instead, rather than regarding it as a fixed, non-contingent point around which everything else turned, he recognized that each self was a fluid, contingent process just like everything else.

To embrace the contingency of one's life is to embrace one's fate as an ephemeral but sentient being. As Nietzsche claimed, one can come to love that fate. But to do so one must first embrace it, though one instinctively recoils at such a prospect.

Mindfulness can have a sobering effect on the restless, jittery psyche. The stiller and more focused it becomes, the more I am able to peer into the sources of my febrile reactivity, to catch the first stirring of hatred before it overwhelms me with loathing and spite, to observe with ironic detachment the conceited babbling of the ego, to notice at its inception the self-demeaning story that could tip me into depression. And

The astronaut in his technical and complex machine, effortlessly orbiting the earth, alone and weightless in the emptiness of space, is the perfect symbol of man today. Despite our domination of the forces of nature and our highly developed technology, we have come to feel ourselves as empty, alienated, anxious, and lonely, without any real inner purpose or meaning to our existence.

A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.

The collapsing of an empire. This changing word moves inexorably on. Thoughts bubble and the stiller the mind the more palpable the dazzling torrent of life becomes.

The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks. (65)

The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one's ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to 'the Truth' but to enable one's life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one's death. (154)

Nowadays, the tendency to be preoccupied with having, at the expense of losing touch with the dimension of being, is becoming ever more pronounced. In times such as ours, when secular and material values dominate social and cultural life to an extreme degree, the intensity of the urge to have creates an ever widening gulf from the awareness of who and what we are.

The origin of the conflict, frustration, and anxiety we experience does not lie in the nature of the world itself but in our distorted conceptions of the world.

The root of all inauthentic manifestations of being-with-others is the attitude of self-concern. It is in this state of mind that, either consciously or unconsciously, we reduce the central aim of all value and meaning to the accomplishment of the welfare of ourselves alone. This attitude can operate very deviously even in the person who outwardly appears to be thoroughly altruistic. Despite all magnanimous commitments and generous deeds, it silently measures the ultimate worth of these things in terms of the personal satisfaction that results from them. It is the root of inauthentic being-with because it is primarily responsible in preventing our essential being-with-others from full and genuine expression.

You only set out to prove what you have already decided to believe.

The tensions between Gotama and the Buddha and between the dharma and Buddhism may have started during Gotama's lifetime. The discourses themselves provide ample examples of how Gotama was transformed from a human being into a quasi-deity, and the dharma was transformed from a practical ethics into a metaphysical doctrine. The texts that make up the early canon cannot, therefore, be regarded as sharing an equivalent antiquity, but need to be understood as products of the doctrinal and literary evolution of a tradition that took place over at least three centuries.

How extraordinary it is to be here at all. Awareness of death can jolt us awake to the sensuality of existence. Breath is no longer a routine inhalation of air but a quivering intake of life. The eye is quickened to the play of light and shade and color, the ear to the intricate medley of sound. This is where the meditation leads. Stay with it; rest with it. Notice how distraction is a flight from this, an escape from awe to worry and plans.

The true value of any dogma or belief lies in its ability to point beyond itself to a deeper reality which can not be readily articulated in a simple formula or expression.

It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.

In pride we consciously elevate our own standing and concerns and look down upon others as essentially inferior.

It is only when the question ceases to be identified with the subject-verb-predicate structure of grammar, and is recognized within its original ground, within existence itself, that we can start looking for an answer. But such an answer will not be restricted to the confinements of language; it too must be revealed within an existential structure.

Our old religious and moral traditions," writes Cupitt in The Great Questions of Life (2005), "have faded away, and nothing can resuscitate them. That is why a tiny handful of us are not liberal, but radical, theologians. We say that the new culture is so different from anything that existed in the past that religion has to be completely reinvented. Unfortunately, the new style of religious thinking that we are trying to introduce is so queer and so new that most people have great difficulty in recognizing it as religion at all.

A secular approach to Buddhism is thus concerned with how the dharma can enable humans and other living beings to flourish in this biosphere, not in a hypothetical afterlife. Rather than emphasizing personal enlightenment and liberation, it is grounded in a deeply felt concern and compassion for the suffering of all those with whom we share this earth.

I reject karma and rebirth not only because I find them unintelligible, but because I believe they obscure and distort what the Buddha was trying to say. Rather than offering the balm of consolation, the Buddha encouraged us to peer deep and unflinchingly into the heart of the bewildering and painful experience that life can so often be.

Did I live? The human world is like a vast musical instrument on which we play our individual part while simultaneously listening to the compositions of others in an effort to contribute to the whole. We don't chose whether to engage, only how to; we either harmonize or create dissonance. Our words, our deeds, our very presence create and leave impressions in the minds of others just as a writer makes impressions with their words. Who you are is an unfolding narrative. You came from nothing and will return there eventually. Instead of taking ourselves so seriously all the time, we can discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before. -- Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157)

P. 62 ... meditation ... exposes a contradiction between the sort of person we wish to be and the kind of person we are. Restlessness and lethargy are ways of evading the discomfort of this contradiction.

To cultivate these diverse elements of our existence means to nurture them as we would a garden. Just as a garden needs to be protected, tended, and cared for, so do ethical integrity, focused awareness, and understanding. No matter how deep our insight into the empty and contingent nature of things, that alone will do little to cultivate these qualities. Each of these areas in life becomes a challenge, an injunction to act. There is no room for complacency, for they all bear a tag that declares: "Cultivate Me.

He has no interest in pursuing an abstract argument to demonstrate a purely theoretical truth. His practical reason is ethical. Its first principle could be stated thus: Do no evil, Take up what is good, Purify the mind - This is the teaching of buddhas.11 In seeing conditioned arising as a "ground," Gotama implies that insight into conditionality provides "grounds" on which to act.

one who loves himself should not harm others.

By emphasizing doubt rather than belief, perplexity rather than certainty, and questions rather than answers, Zen practice granted me the freedom to imagine.

To preserve the integrity of the tradition, we have to distinguish between what is central to that integrity and what is peripheral. We have to discern between what elements are vital for the survival of dharma practice and what are alien cultural artefacts that might obstruct that survival.

I am empty only in the sense that there is nothing fixed or intrinsically real at the core of my identity as a person.
Recognition of such emptiness therefore liberates one to change and transform oneself. And this, it seems, is precisely what the Jungian theory of individuation describes, yet in a language that is affirmative rather than negative.

Our religion, with its beliefs, rituals, and dogmas becomes another segment among all the other segments that constitute our linear and fragmented existence. It offers us another set of possible acquisitions, even more tempting than all the others: a meaning to life, immortality, enlightenment, the kingdom of heaven.

We perceive the world in a particular way and confidently expect it to conform to its appearance. But we fail to recognize that certain aspects of the 'reality' that appear to us are nothing but figments of our own imagination. In this confusion a conflict ensues between the world as it is and the world as we believe it to be. And the more we insist on our infallibility, the more frustrated we become as the actual world again and again stubbornly refuses to live up to our expectations.

The practice of mindfulness aims for a still and lucid engagement with the open field of contingent events in which one's life is embedded. All events are ontologically equivalent: mind is not more "real" than matter, nor matter more "real" than mind.

For others, however, the significance of anxiety in disclosing a fundamental insight into human existence is grasped. At this point their consciences will never allow them to return to a contented absorption in particular entities. Any such attempt to do so will be felt deep down as a betrayal of their truer instincts. Those things which previously were experienced with full satisfaction will now seem shallow, hollow, and somehow meaningless. We come to understand with greater and greater clarity that absorption int the world of things provides no refuge, and one ceases to center one's hope in them. At this critical juncture of human existence two basic alternatives remain: either to dismiss existence in general and man's existence in particular as essentially futile and absurd, or to place one's hope in the actualization of a greater purpose or meaning that is not immediately evident within the realm of empirical data.

Learning and education have frequently degenerated into the systematic accumulation of facts and information.

Erotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles- the trappings of religion- confuse as much as they help.

Ignorance is not merely a deficiency of knowledge but, in addition, it positively apprehends reality in a distinctive way. And being a distorted mode of conception, it creates a view of the world that is in opposition to, and in conflict with, the actual way the world is.

Every attitude we assume, ever word we utter, and every act we undertake establishes us in relation to others.

While 'Buddhism' suggests another belief system, 'dharma practice' suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.

Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing within the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such works achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth.

While originating in acts of imagination, orthodoxies paradoxically seek to control the imagination as a means of maintaining their authority. The authenticity of a person's understanding is measured according to its conformity with the dogmas of the school. While such controls may provide a necessary safeguard against charlatanism and self-deception, they also can be used to suppress authentic attempts at creative innovation that might threaten the status quo. The imagination is anarchic and potentially subversive. The more hierarchic and authoritarian a religious institution, the more it will require that the creations of the imagination conform to its doctrines and aesthetic norms. Yet

I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive. The standard subjects of history, geography, mathematics, and English seemed perversely designed to ignore the questions that really mattered. As soon as I had some inkling of what 'philosophy' meant, I was puzzled as to why we were not taught it. And my skepticism about religion only grew as I failed to see what the vicars and priests I encountered gained from their faith. They struck me either as insincere, pious, and aloof or just bumblingly good-natured. (p. 10)

This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.

A lack of being remains unaffected by a plenitude of having.

Being-in-the-world means that I am inextricably knit into the fabric of this fluid, indivisible, and contingent reality I share with others. There is no room for a disembodied mind or soul, however subtle, to float free from this condition, to contemplate it from a hypothetical Archimedean point outside. Without such a mind or soul, it is hard to conceive of anything that will go on into another life once this one comes to an end. My actions, like the words of dead philosophers, may continue to reverberate and bear fruits long after my death, but I will not be around to witness them.

In varying degrees, the authority of the dharma was replaced by the authority of the guru, who came, in some traditions, to assume the role of the Buddha himself.

Dharma practice is founded on resolve. This is not an emotional conversion, a devastating realization of the error of our ways, a desperate urge to be good, but an ongoing, heartfelt reflection on priorities, values, and purpose. We need to keep taking stock of our life in an unsentimental, uncompromising way.

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)

For a while I hoped that Buddhism Without Beliefs might stimulate more public debate and inquiry among Buddhists about these issues, but this did not happen. Instead, it revealed a fault line in the nascent Western Buddhist community between traditionalists, for whom such doctrines are non-negotiable truths, and liberals, like myself, who tend to see them more as contingent products of historical circumstance.

The inner aim of thought is never fully realized until it ripens into vocal utterances through which others can have access- albeit indirect- to our personal experience. In fact,an inner experience only achieves true completeness when it has been spoken. No matter how profound an insight one may gain, as long as it stays inarticulately concealed within an introspective silence, it remains one-dimensional and incomplete.

Such altruism, generated in the seclusion of one's own thoughts, becomes a subtle means of evading concrete inter-personal responsibility and of justifying to oneself a life of peaceful uninvolved isolation from others. We proclaim to ourselves our love and compassion for such abstract entities as 'humanity' or 'all sentient beings' in order to avoid having to love any one person.

We are participatory beings who inhabit a participatory reality, seeking relationships that enhance our sense of what it means to be alive. In terms of dharma practice, a true friend is more than just someone with whom we share common values and who accepts us for what we are. Such a friend is someone with whom we share common values and who accepts us for what we are. Such a friend is someone whom we can trust to refine our understanding of what it means to live, who can guide us when we're lost and help us find the way along a path, who can assuage our anguish through the reassurance of his or her presence.

The actions that accompany the four truths describe the trajectory of dharma practice: understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path. These are not four separate activities but four phases within the process of awakening itself. Understanding matures into letting go; letting go culminates in realization; realization impels cultivation. This trajectory is no linear sequence of "stages" through which we "progress." We do not leave behind an earlier stage in order to advance to the next rung of some hierarchy. All four activities are part of a single continuum of action. Dharma practice cannot be reduced to any one of them; it is configured from them all. As soon as understanding is isolated from letting go, it degrades into mere intellectuality. As soon as letting go is isolated from understanding, it declines into spiritual posturing. The fabric of dharma practice is woven from the threads of these interrelated activities, each of which is defined through its relation to the others.

Loneliness is not only positively characterized by a certain degree of isolation, but is negatively characterized by a deficiency of participation.

We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by our outward show of 'civilized' manners and 'cultured' social behavior into believing that self-concern, desirous attachment, aversion, and indifference are steadily losing their hold over us.

Awakening is the purpose that enfolds all purposes.

Anxiety, alienation, loneliness, emptiness, and meaninglessness are the fruits of living as an isolated subject admist a multitude of lifeless objects. Although our scope of involvement may extend to numerous and diverse fields of interest and concern, as long as the notion of having predominates, our being remains empty and superficial.

When there is great doubt," says a Zen aphorism that Kusan Sunim kept repeating, "then there is great awakening." This is the key. The depth of any understanding is intimately correlated with the depth of one's confusion. Great awakening resonates at the same "pitch" as great doubt. So rather than negate such doubt by replacing it with belief, which is the standard religious procedure, Zen encourages you to cultivate that doubt until it "coagulates" into a vivid mass of perplexity.

So the Buddha is presenting awakening not as a single mystical experience that may come upon us at some meditation, some private moment of transcendence, but rather as a new engagement with life. He is offering us a relationship to the world that is more sensitized to suffering and the causes of suffering, and he gives rise to the possibility of another kind of culture, another kind of civilization.

As a way of life, a middle path is an ongoing task of responsiveness and risk, grounded on a groundless ground. Its twists and turns are as turbulent and unpredictable as life itself.

Buddhism has become for me a philosophy of action and responsibility. It provides a framework of values, ideas, and practices that nurture my ability to create a path in life, to define myself as a person, to act, to take risks, to image things differently, to make art. The more I prize Gotama's teachings free from the matrix of Indian religious thought in which they are entrenched and the more I come to understand how his own life unfolded in the context of his times, the more I discern a template for living that I can apply at this time in this increasingly secular and globalized world.

Awakening is no longer seen as something to attain in the distant future, for it is not a thing but a process - and this process is the path itself. But neither does this render us in any way perfect or infallible. We are quite capable of subverting this process to the interests of our far-from-extinct desires, ambitions, hatreds, jealousies, and fears. We have not been elevated to the lofty heights of awakening; awakening has been knocked off its pedestal into the turmoil and ambiguity of everyday life. There is nothing particularly religious or spiritual about this path. It encompasses everything we do. It is an authentic way of being in the world. It begins with how we understand the kind of reality we inhabit and the kind of beings we are that inhabit such a reality. Such a vision underpins the values that inform our ideas, the choices we make, the words we utter, the deeds we perform, the work we do. It provides the ethical ground for mindful and focused awareness, which in turn further deepens our understanding of the kind of reality we inhabit and the kind of beings we are that inhabit such a reality. And so on.

[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)

Man's mastery over nature, then, is a mastery which has less and less control over itself ... A world where techniques are paramount is a world given over to desire and fear; because every technique is there to serve some desire or fear.2 - Gabriel Marcel

We could decide simply to remain absorbed in the mysterious, unformed, free-play of reality. This would be the choice of the mystic who seeks to extinguish himself in God or Nirvana - analogous perhaps to the tendency among artists to obliterate themselves with alcohol or opiates. But if we value our participation in a shared reality in which it makes sense to make sense, then such self-abnegation would deny a central element of our humanity: the need to speak and act, to share our experience with others.

Ironically, the more we crave to possess and dominate the world and others, the deeper and more unbearable becomes the chasm of our own emptiness.

The Buddha described his teaching as "going against the stream." The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected - precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command.

As for the law of moral causation ('karma'): this is human justice dressed up as cosmic justice and then imputed to the impersonal workings of the natural world.

We took a bus to the nearby monastery of one of the last great Tang dynasty Chan masters, Yun-men. Yun-men was known for his pithy "one word" Zen. When asked "What is the highest teaching of the Buddha?" he replied: "An appropriate statement." On another occasion, he answered: "Cake." I admired his directness.

After all, people desire immortality and do not wish to embrace the inescapable reality of death; they long for happiness and shy away from the contemplation of pain; they want to preserve their sense of self, not desconstruction it into fleeting and impersonal components. It is counterintuitive to accept that deathlessness is experienced each moment we are released from the deathlike grip of greed and hatred; that happiness in this world is only possible for those who realized that this world is incapable of providing happiness; that one becomes a fully individuated person only by relinquishing beliefs in an essential self.

Each time something contingent and impermanent is raised to the status of something necessary and permanent, a devil is created. Whether it be an ego, a nation-state, or a religious belief, the result is the same. The distortion severs such things from their embeddedness in the complexities, fluidities, and ambiguities of the world and make them appear as simple, fixed, and unambiguous entities with the power to condemn or save us.

To put it bluntly, the central question Buddhists have faced from the beginning is this: Is awakening close by or far away? Is it readily accessible and available only through supreme effort? If its proximity and ease of access are emphasized, there is the danger of trivializing it, of not according it the value and significance it deserves. Yet if its distance and difficulty of access are emphasized, there is the danger of placing it out of reach, of turning it into an icon of perfection to be worshipped from afar. Doesn't the question itself deceive us? Aren't we tricked by its either/or logic into assuming that only one option can be true? Couldn't the ambiguous logic of both/and be more appropriate here? Awakening is indeed close by - and supreme effort is required to realize it. Awakening is indeed far away - and readily accessible.