Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

by Stephen Batchelor

separate self is entitled to a life removed from the contingencies and uncertainties of existence.

In any event, dharma practice is concerned not with proving or disproving theories of self but with understanding and easing the grip of self-centeredness that constricts body, feelings, and emotions into a tight nugget of anguish. Imagine you are at a crowded exhibition of Ming porcelain.

It is as though this self—which is a mere configuration of past and present contingencies—has been fired in the kiln of anxiety to emerge as something fixed. Fixed but also brittle. The more precious it becomes to me, the more I must guard it against attack. The circumstances in which I feel at ease become ever narrower and more circumscribed. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IS AT once the most obvious and central fact of my life and the most elusive. If I search for myself in meditation, I find it is

EMPTINESS IS AS devoid of intrinsic being as a pot, a banana, or a daffodil. And if there were no pots, bananas, or daffodils, there would be no emptiness either. Emptiness does not deny that such things exist; it merely describes how they are devoid of an intrinsic, separate being. Emptiness is not apart from the world of everyday experience; it only makes sense in the context of making pots, eating bananas, and growing daffodils. A life centered in awareness of emptiness is simply an appropriate way of being in this changing, shocking, painful, joyous, frustrating, awesome, stubborn, and ambiguous reality. Emptiness is the central path that leads not beyond this reality but right into its heart. It is the track on which the centered person moves.

And we too are impressions left by something that used to be here. We have been created, molded, formed by a bewildering matrix of contingencies that have preceded us. From the patterning of the DNA derived from our parents to the firing of the hundred billion neurons in our brains to the cultural and historical conditioning of the twentieth century to the education and upbringing given us to all the experiences we have ever had and choices we have ever made: these have conspired to configure the unique trajectory that culminates in this present moment. What is here now is the unrepeatable impression left by all of this, which we call “me.”

So what are we but the story we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads?

I am more like an unfolding narrative. As we become aware of all this, we can begin to assume greater responsibility for the course of our lives. Instead of clinging to habitual behavior and routines as a means to secure this sense of self, we realize the freedom to create who we are. Instead of being bewitched by impressions, we start to create them. Instead of taking ourselves so seriously, we discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before.

A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.

THE GREATEST THREAT to compassion is the temptation to succumb to fantasies of moral superiority.

It recognizes that mysteries are not solved as though they were problems and then forgotten. The deeper we penetrate a mystery, the more mysterious it becomes.

This perplexed questioning is the central path itself.

REALITY IS INTRINSICALLY free because it is changing, uncertain, contingent, and empty. It is a dynamic play of relationships.

Awakening is the recovery of that awesome freedom into which we were born but for which we have substituted the pseudo-independence of a separate self.

Awakening is both a linear process of freedom that is cultivated over time and an ever present possibility of freedom.

Face to face with the world, we struggle to find concepts, images, ideas through which to express the awesome inexpressibility of reality in authentic speech and acts.

The denial of “self” challenges only the notion of a static self independent of body and mind—not the ordinary sense of ourself as a person distinct from everyone else.

We cannot choose whether to engage with the world, only how to. Our life is a story being continuously related to others through every detail of our being: facial expressions, body language, clothes, inflections of speech—whether we like it or not.

In theory, freedom may be held in high regard; in practice it is experienced as a dizzying loss of meaning and direction.