Wake Up to Your Life in Columbus Ohio
Discovering the here and now in Columbus, Ohio
Interview with Stephen Batchelor
From the Monday 1 June 2009 edition of Insight Aotearoa Newsletter:
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7. Stephen Batchelor – a journey through Buddhism
In March 2009, three members of London's insight meditation community were fortunate to have an interview with Stephen Batchelor at Sharpham House in Devon. In the following excerpts from that interview, Stephen talks about his journey through buddhism, starting with his first encounter with insight (vipassana) meditation while attending a ten-day Goenka retreat. At that time he had ordained and was practising as a Tibetan Buddhist monk.
Stephen Batchelor: That [Goenka retreat] completely blew me away – because in a sense that was the first conflict I had with buddhism, because I was being given two quite different messages. The Tibetans were saying “look, you have to study all this stuff, you have to accumulate all this merit, you have do all these devotional practices, and then you can start to meditate. Whereas with Goenka you sit down and watch your breath, from day zero. And what was stunning to me about the 10 day course with Goenka was that it actually worked; that it actually effected discernible and effective changes in my consciousness, in myself and in my reality, that I’d never gotten close to in my Tibetan practice.
London Insight: Even though you’d been doing meditation for quite a long time?
SB: “Well not that long – perhaps a year and a half. I’d just become a monk, so obviously I was committed, but when you say meditation, in a Tibetan setting, we did lots of reflective meditations, where you quiet your mind, and you think about the path to enlightenment. Reflections are very well described, but the idea that you just pay attention to what’s going on in your body – without any clutter, without any aids, without importing anything apart from simple instructions – was extraordinarily powerful. It was the first time I understood what ideas like impermanence meant. It was actually witnessing it moment to moment. … So this was my first conflict … It was immensely attractive, and I think instinctively I felt that this was where it was at, but at the same time I was committed to my teachers and my training and I wasn’t prepared to jettison all that on the basis of a ten-day retreat. After that, however, it didn’t quite fit somehow, it never quite took hold.
LI: What were the touch points, where you saw things in a different way? For example, rebirth.
SB: That actually goes back to my time in Switzerland as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. I was told that if I did these “philosophical” studies then I would find certainty about areas I still had many doubts about. An emphasis on a more rational way of looking at things, prior to going into more formal kinds of practice that we would call meditation. But I found that it didn’t work, and when I came to the arguments for rebirth, and there are these proofs, they simply didn’t work.
This was my intellectual break with orthodox Buddhism, recognising that the metaphysics was somehow discontinuous with the actual praxis.
LI: Is this going right back to your days in the Tibetan monastery?
SB: The agnostic idea was my solution in a way, a somewhat casuistic solution to that problem. My solution, where I could still remain within the Buddhist fold, was not to deny rebirth, but to say that I didn’t know. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s false, whereas Wrong View means that you deny rebirth. I wasn’t going to deny rebirth. That’s agnosticism, you see, and that’s where my whole agnostic approach began, and then continued by mulling it over for several years, while I was in Zen training, initially here in Sharpham.
Stephen on his recent move to calling himself an atheist rather than an agnostic
SB: Now I say that there is no rebirth – that whole way of thinking must be jettisoned. Agnosticism is basically a cop-out – a convenient cop-out for sure. Of course no one can say “I know for sure”, but I can see very, very few grounds for believing in rebirth and karma. And in the Pali Canon you can find passages where the Buddha seems to be quite open to that. It’s not an issue with the Buddha whether the mind and body are the same or different. But for the Tibetans it’s absolutely central that mind and body are completely separate substances. It’s effectively mind-body dualism; otherwise, how do you explain continuity of anything after death, unless there’s a non-material entity called mind that continues and is able to store karmic impressions?
I liked Zen because, even though they believe all those things too, they’re rather peripheral. Zen is much more concerned with immediate experience. It’s very confrontational, creating doubt and uncertainty, and seeing them as the fuel which drives the whole practice.
LI: You used the phrase at one of our recent retreats that you didn’t believe in the Karmic Law. Were you thinking of this more in the sense of the karmic energy that you were speaking of just now, rather than the fact that actions have consequences?
SB: Our actions obviously have an effect in this life, and also after our lives, but not to me; I’m not going to be around. Buddhism has enormous difficulty with that; you say that if you commit a bad action now, you will suffer in a future life. And then you subject that to the whole Buddhist understanding of who “you” is and they’ve got an enormous problem, because they’re not going to say that there is a permanent self. That’s anathema. So what is the status of this person here? Buddhism gets itself into an enormous problem here, since there are profound contradictions between the doctrine of not-self and the belief in moral consequences after death, on you.
Stephen on today's Buddhist scene
SB: I find Buddhism today is extremely bewildering, because it’s taken off in a way that none of us could have foreseen back in the ’70s. If you’d told me in 1973 when I was in Dharamsala that the Dalai Lama would be a world superstar I'd have told you to get real!
In those days, anyone could read every English language dharma book there was....now, I can’t even keep up with those that come out every month. The degree of expansion has grown to the point where it’s impossible for one to keep it all in one’s mind any more – it’s excessive. There’s so much going on.
There’s an enormous positive regard for Buddhism. Words like mindfulness are now filtering into mainstream discourse – the National Health Service is funding research and so on. While I've certainly got no problem with mindfulness being used as a therapeutic tool, the danger of the mindfulness thing is that it will become so abstracted from the matrix of Buddhism and could lead to things like mindfulness becoming what yoga has become. If you go to a yoga class in Fulham, chances are you won’t come across it the way Patanjali understood it – that is as a whole way of life.
The Buddhist groups that are growing the most come across to me like big, old-time religious movements, which offer to people spurious certainties, and I see that as what is very probably going to become the dominant voice. And given that I feel that a great deal will be lost if that is the case, I like to keep alive a kind of counter voice, a critical voice, that points back to what I would humbly regard as what the Buddha was trying to do, namely a radical reorientation of one’s life, without adopting religious or metaphysical beliefs. But whether that will thrive, it’s impossible to know. I just don’t know.
On his plans for the next few years
SB: I have just finished a book provisionally titled Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, which is currently being edited. Hopefully this will be published next March in New York.
Basically I’m a writer – even an artist. I need to make things. If I'm not making something, I get itchy and buddhism is the raw material of my art, to put it bluntly. My books are how I work out my ideas, not just for spiritual purposes, but for my need to construct, to construe, to make. So I don’t have a plan beyond what I’m doing now, I just have a faith that when I get to the end of a project, at that point will I be able to know what comes next. So I trust now that there’s a creative process, so that when a certain point is reached on Project X, that is the point when you can meaningfully consider what will be Project Y.
In November 2010, Stephen Batchelor will be coming to New Zealand with his wife Martine, who his also a buddhist teacher. They will be offering two retreats, one in the North Island through Wellington InsightMeditation Community and one in the South Island through Southern Insight. To find out more, contact Ramsey Margolis ramsey@insightaotearoa.org | 021 211 3531.
>> +==0==+ >>
In March 2009, three members of London's insight meditation community were fortunate to have an interview with Stephen Batchelor at Sharpham House in Devon. In the following excerpts from that interview, Stephen talks about his journey through buddhism, starting with his first encounter with insight (vipassana) meditation while attending a ten-day Goenka retreat. At that time he had ordained and was practising as a Tibetan Buddhist monk.
Stephen Batchelor: That [Goenka retreat] completely blew me away – because in a sense that was the first conflict I had with buddhism, because I was being given two quite different messages. The Tibetans were saying “look, you have to study all this stuff, you have to accumulate all this merit, you have do all these devotional practices, and then you can start to meditate. Whereas with Goenka you sit down and watch your breath, from day zero. And what was stunning to me about the 10 day course with Goenka was that it actually worked; that it actually effected discernible and effective changes in my consciousness, in myself and in my reality, that I’d never gotten close to in my Tibetan practice.
London Insight: Even though you’d been doing meditation for quite a long time?
SB: “Well not that long – perhaps a year and a half. I’d just become a monk, so obviously I was committed, but when you say meditation, in a Tibetan setting, we did lots of reflective meditations, where you quiet your mind, and you think about the path to enlightenment. Reflections are very well described, but the idea that you just pay attention to what’s going on in your body – without any clutter, without any aids, without importing anything apart from simple instructions – was extraordinarily powerful. It was the first time I understood what ideas like impermanence meant. It was actually witnessing it moment to moment. … So this was my first conflict … It was immensely attractive, and I think instinctively I felt that this was where it was at, but at the same time I was committed to my teachers and my training and I wasn’t prepared to jettison all that on the basis of a ten-day retreat. After that, however, it didn’t quite fit somehow, it never quite took hold.
LI: What were the touch points, where you saw things in a different way? For example, rebirth.
SB: That actually goes back to my time in Switzerland as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. I was told that if I did these “philosophical” studies then I would find certainty about areas I still had many doubts about. An emphasis on a more rational way of looking at things, prior to going into more formal kinds of practice that we would call meditation. But I found that it didn’t work, and when I came to the arguments for rebirth, and there are these proofs, they simply didn’t work.
This was my intellectual break with orthodox Buddhism, recognising that the metaphysics was somehow discontinuous with the actual praxis.
LI: Is this going right back to your days in the Tibetan monastery?
SB: The agnostic idea was my solution in a way, a somewhat casuistic solution to that problem. My solution, where I could still remain within the Buddhist fold, was not to deny rebirth, but to say that I didn’t know. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s false, whereas Wrong View means that you deny rebirth. I wasn’t going to deny rebirth. That’s agnosticism, you see, and that’s where my whole agnostic approach began, and then continued by mulling it over for several years, while I was in Zen training, initially here in Sharpham.
Stephen on his recent move to calling himself an atheist rather than an agnostic
SB: Now I say that there is no rebirth – that whole way of thinking must be jettisoned. Agnosticism is basically a cop-out – a convenient cop-out for sure. Of course no one can say “I know for sure”, but I can see very, very few grounds for believing in rebirth and karma. And in the Pali Canon you can find passages where the Buddha seems to be quite open to that. It’s not an issue with the Buddha whether the mind and body are the same or different. But for the Tibetans it’s absolutely central that mind and body are completely separate substances. It’s effectively mind-body dualism; otherwise, how do you explain continuity of anything after death, unless there’s a non-material entity called mind that continues and is able to store karmic impressions?
I liked Zen because, even though they believe all those things too, they’re rather peripheral. Zen is much more concerned with immediate experience. It’s very confrontational, creating doubt and uncertainty, and seeing them as the fuel which drives the whole practice.
LI: You used the phrase at one of our recent retreats that you didn’t believe in the Karmic Law. Were you thinking of this more in the sense of the karmic energy that you were speaking of just now, rather than the fact that actions have consequences?
SB: Our actions obviously have an effect in this life, and also after our lives, but not to me; I’m not going to be around. Buddhism has enormous difficulty with that; you say that if you commit a bad action now, you will suffer in a future life. And then you subject that to the whole Buddhist understanding of who “you” is and they’ve got an enormous problem, because they’re not going to say that there is a permanent self. That’s anathema. So what is the status of this person here? Buddhism gets itself into an enormous problem here, since there are profound contradictions between the doctrine of not-self and the belief in moral consequences after death, on you.
Stephen on today's Buddhist scene
SB: I find Buddhism today is extremely bewildering, because it’s taken off in a way that none of us could have foreseen back in the ’70s. If you’d told me in 1973 when I was in Dharamsala that the Dalai Lama would be a world superstar I'd have told you to get real!
In those days, anyone could read every English language dharma book there was....now, I can’t even keep up with those that come out every month. The degree of expansion has grown to the point where it’s impossible for one to keep it all in one’s mind any more – it’s excessive. There’s so much going on.
There’s an enormous positive regard for Buddhism. Words like mindfulness are now filtering into mainstream discourse – the National Health Service is funding research and so on. While I've certainly got no problem with mindfulness being used as a therapeutic tool, the danger of the mindfulness thing is that it will become so abstracted from the matrix of Buddhism and could lead to things like mindfulness becoming what yoga has become. If you go to a yoga class in Fulham, chances are you won’t come across it the way Patanjali understood it – that is as a whole way of life.
The Buddhist groups that are growing the most come across to me like big, old-time religious movements, which offer to people spurious certainties, and I see that as what is very probably going to become the dominant voice. And given that I feel that a great deal will be lost if that is the case, I like to keep alive a kind of counter voice, a critical voice, that points back to what I would humbly regard as what the Buddha was trying to do, namely a radical reorientation of one’s life, without adopting religious or metaphysical beliefs. But whether that will thrive, it’s impossible to know. I just don’t know.
On his plans for the next few years
SB: I have just finished a book provisionally titled Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, which is currently being edited. Hopefully this will be published next March in New York.
Basically I’m a writer – even an artist. I need to make things. If I'm not making something, I get itchy and buddhism is the raw material of my art, to put it bluntly. My books are how I work out my ideas, not just for spiritual purposes, but for my need to construct, to construe, to make. So I don’t have a plan beyond what I’m doing now, I just have a faith that when I get to the end of a project, at that point will I be able to know what comes next. So I trust now that there’s a creative process, so that when a certain point is reached on Project X, that is the point when you can meaningfully consider what will be Project Y.
In November 2010, Stephen Batchelor will be coming to New Zealand with his wife Martine, who his also a buddhist teacher. They will be offering two retreats, one in the North Island through Wellington InsightMeditation Community and one in the South Island through Southern Insight. To find out more, contact Ramsey Margolis ramsey@insightaotearoa.org | 021 211 3531.
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