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A Secular Buddhist – Stephen Batchelor

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A SECULAR BUDDHIST

Stephen Batchelor

Itinerant Preacher

I am a secular Buddhist. It has taken me years to fully “come out,” and I still feel a

nagging tug of insecurity, a faint aura of betrayal in declaring myself in these terms.

As a secular Buddhist my practice is concerned with responding as sincerely and

urgently as possible to the suffering of life in this world, in this century (our

saeculum) where we find ourselves now and future generations will find themselves

later. Rather than attaining nirvana, I see the aim of Buddhist practice to be the

moment-to-moment flourishing of human life within the ethical framework of the

eightfold path here on earth. Given what is known about the biological evolution of

human beings, the emergence of self-awareness and language, the sublime complexity

of the brain, and the embeddedness of such creatures in the fragile biosphere that

envelops this planet, I cannot understand how after physical death there can be

continuity of any personal consciousness or self, propelled by the unrelenting force of

acts (karma) committed in this or previous lives. For many – perhaps most – of my

co-religionists, this admission might lead them to ask: “Why, then, if you don’t

believe such things, do you still call yourself a ‘Buddhist’?”

I was neither born a Buddhist nor raised in a Buddhist culture. I grew up in a

broadly humanist environment, did not attend Church, and was exempted from

“scripture” classes, as they were then called, at grammar school in Watford. At the

age of eighteen I left England and travelled to India, where I settled in the Tibetan

community around the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. I became a Buddhist monk at the

age of twenty-one and for ten years underwent a formal monastic education in

Buddhist doctrine, philosophy and meditation. Even in the wake of the 1960’s this

was considered a highly unconventional career path. Buddhism, when it was

mentioned at all in those days, was dismissed by mainstream Western media as a

marginal though benign spiritual preoccupation of ex- (or not so ex-) hippies and the

occasional avant-garde psychiatrist. I would have dismissed as a fantasist anyone

who told me that in forty years time Buddhist meditation would be available on the

NHS, and a U.S. congressman (Tim Ryan, Dem.) would publish a book called A

Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve

Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit.

Buddhism has its origins in 5

th

century BCE India and eventually spread

throughout the whole of Asia, but it was not until the middle of the19

th

century that

Westerners had any inkling at all of what it taught and stood for. The abrupt

discovery that Gotama Buddha was an historical figure every bit as real as Jesus

Christ, whose influence had spread just as far and wide, came as a shock to the

imperial conceits of Victorian England. While a tiny handful of Europeans converted

to Buddhism from the late 19

th

century onwards, it was only in the late 1960’s that the

dharma started to “go viral” in the West. In contrast to Christianity, which slowly and

painfully struggled to come to terms with the consequences of the Renaissance, the

European enlightenment, natural science, democracy and secularization, Buddhism

was catapulted into modernity from deeply conservative, agrarian societies in Asia,

A Secular Buddhist – Stephen Batchelor

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which had been either geographically remote or cut off from the rest of the world

through political isolation. After a lifetime of work in Buddhist studies, the scholar

and translator Edward Conze drew the conclusion that “Buddhism has not had an

original idea in a thousand years.” When Buddhist communities collided with

modernity in the course of the twentieth century, they were unprepared for the new

kinds of questions and challenges their religion would face in a rapidly changing

global and secular world.

I suspect that a considerable part of the Western enthusiasm for things

Buddhist may still be a Romantic projection of our yearnings for truth and holiness

onto those distant places and peoples about which we know the least. I am sometimes

alarmed at the uncritical willingness of Westerners to accept at face value whatever is

uttered by a Tibetan lama or Burmese sayadaw, while they would be generally

sceptical were something comparable said by a Christian bishop or Cambridge don. I

do believe that Buddhist philosophy, ethics and meditation have something to offer in

helping us come to terms with many of the personal and social dilemmas of our

world. But there are real challenges in translating Buddhist practices, values and

ideas into comprehensive forms of life that are more than just a set of skills acquired

in courses on mindfulness-based stress-reduction, and that can flourish just as well

outside meditation retreat centres as within them. Buddhism might require some

radical surgery if it is to get to grips with modernity and find a voice that can speak to

the conditions of this saeculum.

So what sort of Buddhism does a self-declared “secular Buddhist” like myself

advocate? For me, secular Buddhism is not just another modernist reconfiguration of

a traditional form of Asian Buddhism. It is neither a reformed Theravada Buddhism

(like the Vipassana movement), a reformed Tibetan tradition (like Shambhala

Buddhism), a reformed Nichiren school (like the Soka Gakkai), a reformed Zen

lineage (like the Order of Interbeing), nor a reformed hybrid of some or all of the

above (like the Triratna Order – formerly the FWBO). It is more radical than that: it

seeks to return to the roots of the Buddhist tradition and rethink Buddhism from the

ground up.

In exploring such roots, the secular Buddhist finds herself excavating two

fields that have been opened up in the past century by modern translators and

scholars. The first of these fields consists of the earliest discourses attributed to

Siddhattha Gotama, which are primarily found in the Pali canon of the Theravada

school. We are exceptionally fortunate as English speakers not only to have a

complete translation of the Pali canon, but one which is continually being improved –

something that speakers of other European languages can still only dream of. The

second of these fields is that of our increasingly detailed (though still disputed and

incomplete) understanding of the historical, social, political, religious and

philosophical conditions that prevailed during the Buddha’s lifetime in 5

th

century

BCE India. Thanks to scholars like Richard Gombrich, we are beginning to see more

clearly the kind of world in which the Buddha taught. Together, these two fields

provide a fertile soil for the project of rethinking, perhaps reimagining the dharma

from the ground up.

Yet this very wealth of material also raises serious difficulties in

interpretation. The Pali canon is a complex tapestry of linguistic and rhetorical styles,

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shot through with conflicting ideas, doctrines and images, all assembled and

elaborated over about four centuries. The canon does not speak with a single voice.

How then to distinguish between what is likely to have been the word of the Buddha

as opposed to a well-intended “clarification” added by a later commentator? We are

not yet – and may never be – at a point where such questions can be answered with

certainty. Be that as it may, as a Buddhist practitioner, I look to the Buddha’s

discourses not just for scholarly knowledge, but in order to help me come to terms

with what the Chinese call the “great matter of birth and death.” It is in this sense that

my secular Buddhism still has a religious quality to it, because it is the conscious

expression of my “ultimate concern” – as the theologian Paul Tillich once defined

“faith.” As one who feels an urgency about such concerns, I am bound, therefore, to

risk choices of interpretation now that may or may not turn out to be viable later.

My starting point is to bracket off anything attributed to the Buddha in the

canon that could just as well have been said by a brahmin priest or Jain monk of the

same period. So when the Buddha says that a certain action will produce a good or

bad result in a future heaven or hell, or when he speaks of bringing to an end the

repetitive cycle of rebirth and death in order to attain nirvana, I take such utterances to

be determined by the common metaphysical outlook of that time rather than reflecting

an intrinsic component of the dharma. I thus give central importance to those

teachings in the Buddha’s dharma that cannot be derived from the worldview of 5

th

century BCE India.

Tentatively, I would suggest that this “bracketing” of metaphysical views,

leaves us with four distinctive key ideas that do not appear to have direct precedents

in Indian tradition. I call them the four “P”s:

1. The principle of conditionality

2. The process of four noble tasks (truths)

3. The practice of mindful awareness

4. The power of self-reliance

Some time ago I realized that what I found most difficult to accept in Buddhism were

those beliefs that it shared with its sister Indian religions Hinduism and Jainism. Yet

when you bracket off those beliefs, you are left not with a fragmentary and

emasculated teaching, but with an entirely adequate ethical, philosophical and

practical framework for living your life in this world. Thus what is truly original in

the Buddha’s teaching, I discovered, was his secular outlook.

And when you bracket off the quasi-divine attributes that the figure of the

Buddha is believed to possess – a fleshy head-protuberance, golden skin etc. – and

focus on the episodes in the canon that recount his often fraught dealings with his

contemporaries, then the humanity of Siddhattha Gotama begins to emerge with more

clarity too. All this supports what the British scholar Trevor Ling surmised nearly

fifty years ago: that what we now know as “Buddhism” started life as an embryonic

civilisation or culture that then mutated into another organized Indian religion.

Secular Buddhism, which seeks to articulate a way of practicing the dharma in this

world and time, thus finds vindication through its critical return to canonical sources,

and its attempts to recover a vision of Gotamas’s own saeculum.

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Above all, secular Buddhism is something to do, not something to believe in.

This pragmatism is evident in many of the classic parables: the poisoned arrow [M.

63], the city [S. 12:65], the raft [M. 22] – as well as in the Buddha’s presentation of

his four “noble truths” as a range of tasks to be performed rather than a set of

propositions to be affirmed. Instead of trying to justify the belief that “life is

suffering” (the first noble truth), one seeks to embrace and deal wisely with suffering

when it occurs. Instead of trying to convince oneself that “craving is the origin of

suffering” (the second noble truth), one seeks to let go of and not get tangled up in

craving whenever it rises up in one’s body or mind. From this perspective it is

irrelevant whether the statements “life is suffering” or “craving is the origin of

suffering” are either true or false. Why? Because these four so-called “truths” are not

propositions that one accepts as a believer or rejects as a non-believer. They are

suggestions to do something that might make a difference in the world in which you

coexist with others now.

“Enlightenment,” therefore – though I prefer the term “awakening” – is not a

mystical insight into the true nature of mind or reality (that always weirdly accords

with the established views of one’s brand of Buddhism), but rather the opening up of

a way of being-in-this-world that is no longer determined by one’s greed, hatred, fear

and selfishness. Thus awakening is not a state but a process: an ethical way of life

and commitment that enables human flourishing. As such it is no longer the exclusive

preserve of enlightened teachers or accomplished yogis. Likewise, nirvana – i.e. the

stopping of craving – is not the goal of the path but its very source. For human

flourishing first stirs in that clear, bright, empty space where neurotic self-centredness

realizes that it has no ground to stand on at all. One is then freed to pour forth like

sunlight.

Such a view of the dharma fits well with Don Cupitt’s vision of a “solar

ethics.” In Room 33 of the British Museum you will find a small clay, 2

nd

century CE

Gandharan bas-relief, which represents the Buddha as a stylised image of the sun

placed on a seat beneath the bodhi tree. In the Pali canon, Gotama describes himself

as belonging to the “solar lineage” (adiccagotta), while others call him by the epithet

“solar friend” (adiccamitta). A true friend (kalyanamitta), he remarks, is one who

casts light on the path ahead just as the rising sun illuminates the earth [S. 45:49]. Yet

as Buddhism grew into an organized Indian religion, it seemed to lose sight of its

solar origins and turned lunar. Nirvana is often compared to the moon: cool,

impassive, remote, and also – as they didn’t know then but we know now – a pale

reflection of an extraordinary source of heat and light. Perhaps we have reached a

time when we need to recover and practice again a solar dharma, one concerned with

shedding its light (wisdom) and heat (compassion) onto and into this world, which, as

far as we know, might be the only one that ever has been or ever will be.

Stephen Batchelor

April 2012