After Buddhism: Embrace Life, Let Go of What Arises, See its Ceasing, Act!

After Buddhism: Embrace Life, Let Go of What Arises, See its Ceasing, Act! November 30, 2015

imgresWhen I mentioned to a friend that I was reading Stephen Batchelor’s new book, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, he asked, “Is it as acerbic as his last book?”

Ouch!

Now, I’ve been reading Batchelor for a long time. Way back in 1983, Batchelor’s Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism, was a powerful and important book for me. Living with the Devil (2005) is still a personal favorite. And perhaps because of my own acerbic proclivity, I haven’t found any of his works to be primarily such. I don’t necessarily resonate with all the atheist and secular threads, but always find his work to be coming from a like-minded practitioner who earnestly follows his line of inquiry wherever it might lead.

Sometimes it leads to a critical examination of dharma training and beliefs, especially those in the Tibetan Gelug tradition where he was ordained and practiced for nearly a decade. Batchelor’s background has led him, in a series of books, to examine Buddhist orthodoxy and to find much of it wanting.

If you’re going to criticize, you risk being thought of as being acerbic from time to time. I’ve been there and have been accused of that.

In any case, I told my friend, “No, I don’t find it acerbic … but then you know me.”

To be clear, I found After Buddhism to be a smart and delightful read and am grateful to Batchelor for the decade-long process that resulted in this book.

For starters, Batchelor’s narrative voice is evocatively sincere and probing. Like many intent on offering a new expression of the buddhadharma, Batchelor returns to the source – for him, the collection of works now referred to as the Pali Canon, previously thought of as the “original teachings” of the Buddha, but now, thanks to the work of modern scholars, we know that this collection contains texts with a wide-range of themes and perspectives (repetitive, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory) that developed during the centuries following the Buddha’s death. Sorting out what might be Gautama Buddha’s voice from all of what was added is an impossible task. Still, Batchelor offers some careful speculation.

In addition, Batchelor adroitly pulls off a risky thematic structure with the odd-numbered chapters rearticulating the dharma for the modern practitioner (“After Buddhism,” “A Fourfold Task,” “Letting Go of Truth,” “Experience,” “The Everyday Sublime,” and “A Culture of Awakening”) and the even-numbered chapters offering a detailed synthesis of a handful of marginal characters whose stories are spread through the Pali Canon (“Mahanama: The Convert,” “Pasenadi: The King,” “Sunakkhatta: The Traitor,” “Jivaka: The Doctor,” and “Ananda: The Attendant”). Batchelor skillfully connects his rearticulation of the dharma in the odd chapters to the ancient (freshly emphasized) tradition in the even chapters. This entangling vine organization creates two foci in intimate conversation.

As a person who has spent some time working through the Pali Canon (I studied it for a couple years with Katagiri Roshi), I’m awed by the sections of the book that offer a detailed examination of the marginal figures cited above, fleshing out the contexts in which the Buddha taught so much more fully than I had understood in my own cursory study. Especially powerful is how Batchelor shows how the Buddha was a person, immersed in time and place with joys and tragedies like any of us. Batchelor notes, for example, that the Buddha said, “Now I mainly dwell by dwelling in emptiness.”

“Mainly” – what the heck? Even the Buddha only “mainly” dwells in emptiness. And there are plenty of examples with the old guy getting reactive (like when his former attendant Sunakkhatta quits, or Devadata turns against him) that more than support the “mainly.”

For me, the most striking aspect of this part of the book lay in how it shows the last months of the Buddha’s life. We learn that the Buddha died at a time that his community was in chaos and his dharma career was limping along. Some of his key allies had either died or turned away, his native people (the Sakiyans) had been nearly annihilated, his most senior, trusted disciples had died, and others (especially the conservative meanie Mahakassapa who Batchelor calls a “prig”) vied to lead the order.

Although these sections were always engaging for me, I sometimes wondered if the less dharma geekee would find them as compelling.

Batchelor summarizes some of the essential dharma points of the book (expressly developed the odd-numbered chapters) like this:

“An understanding of conditionality as the context for a fourfold task: to comprehend suffering, to let go of the arising of reactivity, to behold the ceasing of reactivity, and to cultivate an eightfold path that is grounded in the perspective of mindful awareness and leads one to become self-reliant in the practice of the dharma.”

“Task” is used consciously rather than “truth.” Batchelor, refreshingly, directs dharma practice away from abstract truths to doing, so what are generally called the Four Truths (here the four tasks) are expressed like this: “Embrace life, Let go of what arises, See its ceasing, Act!”

This perspective is certainly right up the Zen alley of practicing enlightenment where it isn’t so much about what you believe but what you do. And there’s not much to argue about – rebirth, karma, enlightenment, religion, secular, yadda, yadda, yadda. The message is clear – get off your dharma soap box and get to work.

“The purpose of the Buddha’s teaching,” says Batchelor, “is not to resolve doubts about the nature of ‘reality’ by providing answers to such conundrums but to offer a practice that will remove the ‘arrow’ of reactivity, thereby restoring practitioners’ health and enabling them to flourish here on earth.”

I especially appreciate Batchelor’s argument against the two truths doctrine (the absolute and relative truths) that quickly became pervasive across schools, but was never mentioned in the Pali Canon (see Chapter 5, “Letting Go of Truth”). For more on my view of the pernicious two truths doctrine, see this previous post – “The No of No No.” Batchelor calls the adoption of the two truths, “…a fatal fork in the road for the Buddhist tradition.”  This fatal fork, among other things, is a “… dualism [that] led to a recurrent emphasis on the innate purity of mind as opposed to the defiled, unclean nature of the body.”

Rather than an absolute truth that is divorced from this very body and mind, Batchelor presents the Buddha’s awakening and practice as being right here: “’It is just in this fathom-high mortal frame endowed with perception and mind,’ says Gotama, ‘that I make known the world.’”

And in Batchelor’s words,

“Emptiness thus seems to be a perspective, a sensibility, a way of being in this poignant, contingent world. The ‘great person’ would be one who has cultivated such a sensibility until it has become entirely natural. Rather than being the negation of ‘self,’ emptiness discloses the dignity of a person who has realized what it means to be fully human.”

Another strong section begins with an introduction of embodied meditation and moves into the vital role of questioning and doubt. Batchelor frames the role of meditation like this:

“Meditation is an integral part of a caring/care-full relationship to oneself and the world. As such, it forms a crucial dimension of each aspect of the fourfold task. It is involved in the cultivation of the eightfold path, which requires fully embracing the conditions of one’s life, letting go of habitual reactivity, and beholding the ceasing of that reactivity. Such a meditative sensibility allows one to flourish by leading a life of ethical commitment, contemplative attention, philosophical reflection, and aesthetic appreciation.”

About Great Doubt, Batchelor writes,  “The kind of doubt spoken of in Sŏn [Zen] … should be thought of as a psychosomatic condition of astonishment and bafflement rather than as a discursive mental process.”

A couple limitations of the book are worth a brief mention. First, Batchelor diminishes the role of kensho (i.e., breakthrough or turnaround) and misses the chance to fully unpack the significance of that experience in light of ongoing practice. Second, his emphasis on the secular vs. religious has the (reactive?) ring of lumping all the good stuff in one pile (e.g., doubt and inquiry) and calling it “secular” and all the not-so-good stuff (dogmatism, belief in rebirth, and rigid orthodoxy) into another pile and calling it “religious.” I don’t find this distinction to have much utility. I consider myself religious, for example, but agree with all of his “Ten Theses for a Secular Dharma.”

Nevertheless, in After Buddhism, Batchelor makes another strong contribution to the ongoing exploration of the buddhadharma for modern, global practitioners like us. I strongly recommend it.

Here’s an interview with Batchelor that gives some of the back story to the book – click.
Comments welcome, especially if you’ve read the book.

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