Stephen Batchelor Talks Buddhism
in a “Secular Age”
Vanity Fair DECEMBER 29,
2015 KENT JONES
Once an ordained monk, the author’s latest work focuses on bringing
Buddhist teachings into the 21st century.
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 thatStephen
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.”