Some will say, “Batchelor is just cherry-picking the bits he likes.” He just selects the passages that agree with his secular worldview and ignores everything else. That’s a very common criticism, and I think it’s a good criticism. That’s why, at the beginning of the book I try to lay out a hermeneutic strategy. It’s clear that if my sole criterion for valuing a text is because I like it, because it doesn’t conflict with my view of the world, that would be a very poor way of constructing a theological thesis, as it were. So I try to identify what are the distinctive elements in the Buddha’s
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