What is Buddhism? It’s a simple question, but an unanswerable one, at least on a frozen, bite-size, media-ready level. It’s a question not unlike the koan that Stephen Batchelor pondered back in the early 80s, as he sat before a white wall in a Korean Zen monastery, day in and day out: “What is this?”
At the time, Batchelor was still a practicing saffron-robed and crimson-scarfed Buddhist monk. He had departed from England in the early 70s with Siddhartha, Alan Watts, and Soft Machine in his head and a mop of long hair on top. The young man went east and ended up in Dharamsala, the northern-Indian home of the Dalai Lama in exile. Batchelor was thus one of the first among the waves of young Westerners who embarked on a quest for a higher consciousness and went native in the process.
“I suspect that in the initial honeymoon phase, I probably uncritically absorbed everything and figured it was just the way things were,” said Batchelor, a seemingly mild-mannered but fiercely concentrated 62-year-old, via Skype from his home in France. “The paradox is that the emphasis of my training was very explicitly on not taking anything for granted, by subjecting these doctrines and ideas and teachings to a kind of critical rigor. And what you find out in the end is that most of these things that Tibetans or Buddhists claim to be true don’t stand up particularly well. In A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell said that the Jesuits employed highly sophisticated reason to convince themselves of what they already believed. I think it’s the same with the Buddhists.”
As Batchelor’s standing within the hierarchy of orthodox Tibetan Buddhism rose, his doubt about two of its central tenets—karma and reincarnation—deepened.
“We don’t need to keep holding on to those ideas of the ancient world,” Batchelor told me. “They don’t serve us anymore. They confuse. And then they lead to all kinds of silly fantasies about ‘If I do this in this life then when I’m reborn in the next life I’ll become a deity.’ This is just missing the point.”
Batchelor’s first giant step away from Buddhism-as-organized-religion brought him to the Korean Zen monastery, Songgwangsa, where his teacher, Kusan Sunim, instructed him to meditate on the aforementioned koan. During his years in Korea, he became increasingly close to a Zen nun, another spiritual pilgrim from the West, who had taken the name Songil and was also in a state of doubt. In 1985, they renounced their vows, married, and moved back to Europe, where they were confronted with a different kind of question, one they hadn’t had to consider for many years: How were they going to make a living? Stephen and Martine Batchelor both found an answer in writing and teaching.
Batchelor’s break with Buddhist orthodoxy led to his first book, The Faith to Doubt, published in 1990. Since then, in a series of wonderfully lucid volumes that strike a welcome balance between personal memoir, philosophical and historical inquiry, and practical instruction—including two best-sellers, Buddhism Without Beliefs and Living with the Devil—Batchelor has written his way to a radical rethinking of Buddhism itself. He considers his newest book, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, recently published by Yale University Press, to be a kind of crowning achievement.
“I don’t like the term ‘magnum opus,’ because it’s very grand, but effectively I think that’s what the book is aspiring to be, a sort of culmination of about 40 years’ work. I do feel that in some ways it coheres as a whole perhaps more than anything else I’ve ever written.”
Batchelor’s luminous writings and teachings, taken altogether, do not amount to Buddhism for Dummies. Nor do they reduce Buddhist practice to the level of a pseudo-science, a corporate-friendly self-awareness technique, or an antidote to your iPhone fixation. Batchelor removes Buddhism from the realm of dogmas and spiritual hierarchies and gives it to us as a living practice, a response to the here and now.
“I feel it’s important that I stand up for a Buddhism that does not tow a party line,” he says. “I think it’s important for people in the world who are looking for a Buddhist practice or something to do with Buddhism, that they are not just left with the options available through orthodoxies. A great deal of the correspondence I get from my readers is basically saying, ‘Thank you for doing this. Without this work I would have abandoned this whole thing a long time ago.’ I give people an opportunity to have a practice which is rooted in Buddhist values and ideas and ethics, and for them to be able to feel that they can belong to that tradition without having to buy in to the sorts of beliefs that they simply cannot accept.”
After Buddhism alternates chapters on the life and times of the Buddha and certain of his followers, enemies, and successors, with careful descriptions and elucidations of different aspects of Buddhist practice, grounded in years of painstaking research and a close reading of the Pali Canon (the earliest known Buddhist scriptures). Batchelor identifies and isolates what he recognizes as the original, founding, non-conformist spirit of what came to be known as Buddhism, and in so doing he puts the Buddha on a level playing field with the rest of us. He is as fallibly human as we are, and we in turn have access to the sublime, right here and right now, just as he did. Batchelor strips away layer after layer of centuries-old dogma and mystification and burns off the fog of spiritual perfection. Siddhartha Gautama and his band of followers, he explains, “gave birth to something called ‘Buddhism,’ yet that was very unlikely to have been their actual wish. I don’t think that’s what they intended at all: another religion, a belief system, a hierarchy of priests. Yet that’s clearly what happened. . . . Perhaps it’s only in the kind of world we’ve arrived at now that we can recover what it was that the Buddha was trying to do at the outset, and put to one side the whole religious project.”
Despite the fact that he is a regular on the Buddhist “circuit,” giving talks at meditation centers, alternative bookstores, and in sanghas throughout the world, Batchelor is regarded with suspicion by many in the Buddhist community. There are those who see him as a secularizer whose scholarship is more selective than thorough and whose thinking is so shot through with Western influences (he is an admirer of Michel de Montaigne, Martin Heidegger, and the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty) that finally he doesn’t seem like much of a Buddhist at all.
“I think about this a lot. Some people say, ‘Look, everything you say goes against what Buddhists take to be necessary for their faith, so why not just drop this idea of being a Buddhist and go your own way?’ But you see, that is a very naïve remark. It somehow suggests that you can step outside of tradition. But you can’t.”
