Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

by Stephen Batchelor

How can we know which parts of the Brahmanical tradition the Buddha accepted and which he rejected? It is very important that we understand the Buddha’s teachings in the context of his times. And there is plenty of material in the canon where the Buddha seems to accept elements of traditional Indian belief. Yet I must confess that what I find least appealing and helpful in Buddhism are precisely those elements it shares with Hinduism—rebirth, karma as a scheme of moral bookkeeping, the goal of freeing oneself from the cycle of birth and death, the idea that there is a transcendent consciousness or absolute that underpins phenomenal experience. Not only do these ideas not speak to me, they often seem to obscure what was truly original and distinctive in what the Buddha taught: the principle of conditioned arising, the four noble truths, mindful awareness of phenomenal experience, and the emphasis on self-reliance.