Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

by Stephen Batchelor

The Buddha’s genius lies precisely in his imaginatioṇ I don’t believe that when he experienced awakening, suddenly the four noble truths appeared—1, 2, 3, 4—in words of fire in the sky or anything like that. Rather, his awakening did not become real until he had to stammer it out to his first disciples, the five ascetics, in the Deer Park in Sarnath. The model of awakening in Mahayana Buddhism is that of a process which is perhaps never completed. The process of articulating the dharma goes on and on according to the needs of the different historical situations that it encounters.

We could read the whole history of Buddhism, from the moment of the Buddha’s awakening until now, as a process of seeking to imagine a way to respond both wisely and compassionately to the situation at hand.

Historically, Buddhism has always had to find ways of responding effectively to the danger of becoming too acculturated, of becoming too absorbed into the assumptions of the host culture. Certainly such a danger exists here in the West: Buddhism might, for example, tend to become a kind of souped-up psychotherapy. But there’s the equal danger of Buddhism holding on too fiercely to its Asian identity and remaining a marginal interest. Somehow we have to find a middle way between these two poles, and this challenge is not going to be worked out by academics or Buddhist scholars; it’s a challenge that each of us is asked to meet in our own practice from day to day.

Buddhism is not some ethereal thing that is being magically transferred from Asia to the West. Titles of books like The Awakening of the West might suggest that Buddhism is a thing that has this almost mystical capacity. But what is it that is transmitted? The only thing that is transmitted is the understanding and the way of life of those people who practice it, people like you and me. No one else is going to do it for us. The responsibility is ultimately our owṇ

We need to acknowledge that we live in a time of transition, a time in which the dharma might be in crisis in Asia and yet has not really found its feet here. It’s an exciting time to be in: one in which something is being created, and we are the participants in that creatioṇ

This fluidity has enabled Buddhism throughout its history to cross cultural frontiers and adapt itself creatively to situations quite different from those in the lands of its origin on the Indian subcontinent. (The most striking example being that of its movement nearly two thousand years ago to China.)

This creative process requires Buddhism to imagine itself as something different. It entails adopting compatible elements from the new host culture while at the same time critiquing elements of that culture that are at odds with its own Buddhist values.

Meditation on emptiness is not a mere intellectual exercise but a contemplative discipline rooted in an ethical commitment to nonviolence. It is not just a description in unsentimental language of the way reality unfolds; it offers a therapeutic approach to the dilemma of human anguish.

The emptiness of self, for instance, is not the denial of individual uniqueness but the denial of any permanent, partless, and transcendent basis for individuality.

The anguish and uncertainty of human existence are only exacerbated by the preconceptual, spasm-like grip in which such assumptions of transcendence hold us. While seeming to offer security in the midst of an unpredictable and transient world, paradoxically this grip generates an anxious alienation from the processes of life itself. The aim of Buddhist meditations on change, uncertainty, and emptiness are to help one understand and accept these dimensions of existence and thus gently lead to releasing the grip.

By paying mindful attention to the sensory immediacy of experience, we realize how we are created, molded, formed by a bewildering matrix of contingencies that continually arise and vanish. On reflection, we see how we are formed from the patterning of the DNA derived from our parents, the firing of a hundred billion neurons in our brains, the cultural and historical conditioning of our times, the education and upbringing given us, all the experiences we have ever had and choices...

What is here now is the unique but shifting impression left by all of th...

Moreover, this gradual dissolution of a transcendental basis for self nurtures an empathetic relationship with others. The grip of self not only leads to alienation but numbs one to the anguish of others. Heartfelt appreciation of our own contingency enables us to recognize our interrelatedness with other equally contingent forms of life. We find th...

Addressing people who were similarly confused as to what path in life to follow, the Buddha once suggested to the Kālāma people: “Do not be satisfied with hearsay or with tradition or with legendary lore or with what has come down in scriptures or with conjecture or with logical inference or with weighing evidence or with liking for a view after pondering over it or with someone else’s ability or with the thought: ‘the monk is our guru.’ When you know in yourselves: ‘these things are wholesome, blameless, commended by the wise, and being adopted and put into effect they lead to welfare and happiness,’ then you should practice and abide in them.”1

Although delivered to an audience in north India more than two and a half thousand years ago, the Buddha’s skeptical and pragmatic advice has a curiously contemporary ring.

he advises them to find out for themselves what actual benefits the practice of such a teaching can bring.

Those who adopt Buddhist ideas, values, and practices today in the West are not necessarily interested in joining another religious institutioṇ They find the Buddha’s “test it and see” approach to be perfectly compatible with a healthy skepticism.

Buddhism may also be enabled to recover its own critical and pragmatic perspective, which, historically, has often been overshadowed by its having assumed the identity of a religious creed.

Self-conscious life has somehow come to flourish in the biosphere enveloping this planet. That is all I know about it with certainty. Human beings like us may never have evolved before and may never evolve again in this or any other universe. As far as anyone knows, we are alone in an inconceivably vast cosmos that has no interest at all in our fate.

All that will survive from my brief spell here as a rational animal will be the traces I leave behind in this world and the impact I have through my words and deeds on the lives of others.

God, the devil, heaven, hell, rebirth, karma are human inventions that we have projected beyond ourselves and invested with a separate reality of their owṇ The view of reality disclosed through the natural sciences evokes for me feelings of awe incomparably greater than anything religious or mystical writings of any tradition can inspire.

By abandoning religious cosmologies and metaphysics, one is able to see more clearly the transformative role spiritual practices can play in this life.

Long before embracing agnosticism, my doubts around karma and rebirth were resolved when it dawned on me that even were they not true, it would not affect my commitment to a Buddhist practice. To live according to Buddhism’s ethical precepts, to apply its instructions on meditation, and to engage with its philosophical ideas seemed sufficiently self-validating and worthwhile in themselves. None of these activities needed to be justified or motivated by arcane theories of multiple lives and karmic causatioṇ

In its unique configuration of these values Buddhism introduced an entirely new perspective on life and the world. It suggested the possibility of a culture of awakening. And, crucially, it provided a systematic body of practices whereby that perspective and culture could be embodied and realized.

I see the aim of Buddhist practice to be the moment-to-moment flourishing of human life within the ethical framework of the eightfold path here on earth.

I am sometimes alarmed at the uncritical willingness of Westerners to accept at face value whatever is uttered by a Tibetan lama or Burmese sayadaw, while they would be generally skeptical were something comparable said by a Christian bishop

Agreed and really not in line with Kalama sutta

I do believe that Buddhist philosophy, ethics, and meditation have something to offer in helping us come to terms with many of the personal and social dilemmas of our world. But there are real challenges in translating Buddhist practices, values, and ideas into comprehensive forms of life that are more than just a set of skills acquired in courses on mindfulness-based stress reduction and that can flourish just as well outside meditation retreat centers as within them.

So what sort of Buddhism does a self-declared “secular Buddhist” like myself advocate? For me, secular Buddhism is not just another modernist reconfiguration of a traditional form of Asian Buddhism. It is more radical than that: it seeks to return to the roots of the Buddhist tradition and rethink Buddhism from the ground up.

The first of these fields consists of the earliest discourses attributed to Gotama, which are primarily found in the Pali Canon of the Theravāda school. We are exceptionally fortunate as English speakers to have not only a complete translation of the Pali Canon, but one that is continually being improved—something that speakers of other European languages can still only dream of. The second of these fields is that of our increasingly detailed (though still disputed and incomplete) understanding of the historical, social, political, religious, and philosophical conditions that prevailed during the Buddha’s lifetime in fifth century BCE India. Thanks to the work of many scholars, we are beginning to see more clearly the kind of world in which the Buddha taught. Together, these two fields provide a fertile soil for the project of rethinking, perhaps reimagining, the dharma from the ground up.

Be that as it may, as a Buddhist practitioner, I look to the Buddha’s discourses not just for scholarly knowledge but in order to help me come to terms with what the Chinese call the “great matter of birth and death.”

My starting point is to bracket off anything attributed to the Buddha in the canon that could just as well have been said by a brahmin priest or Jain monk of the same period. So when the Buddha says that a certain action will produce a good or bad result in a future heaven or hell, or when he speaks of bringing to an end the repetitive cycle of rebirth and death in order to attain nirvana, I take such utterances to be determined by the common metaphysical outlook of that time rather than reflecting an intrinsic component of the dharma. I thus give central importance to those teachings in the Buddha’s dharma that cannot be derived from the worldview of fifth century BCE India.

Tentatively, I would suggest that this “bracketing” of metaphysical views leaves us with four distinctive key ideas that do not appear to have direct precedents in Indian traditioṇ I call them the four P’s: 1. The principle of conditionality 2. The practice of four noble tasks (truths) 3. The perspective of mindful awareness 4. The power of self-reliance

Some time ago I realized that what I found most difficult to accept in Buddhism were those beliefs that it shared with its sister Indian religions Hinduism and Jainism. Yet when you bracket off those beliefs, you are left not with a fragmentary and emasculated teaching, but with an entirely adequate ethical, philosophical, and practical framework for living your life in this ...

what we now know as “Buddhism” started life as an embryonic civilization or culture that then mutated into another organized Indian religioṇ

Secular Buddhism, which seeks to articulate a way of practicing the dharma in this world and time, thus finds vindication through its critical return to canonical sources and its attempts to recover a vision of Gotama’s own saeculum. Above all, secular Buddhism is something to do, not something to believe iṇ This pragmatism is evident in many of the classic parables: the poisoned arrow, the city, the raft—as well as in the Buddha’s presentation of the four noble truths as a range of tasks to be performed rather than a set of propositions to be affirmed. Instead of trying to justify the belief that “life is suffering” (the first noble truth), one seeks to embrace and deal wisely with suffering when it occurs. Instead of trying to convince oneself that “craving is the origin of suffering” (the second noble truth), one seeks to let go of and not get tangled up in craving whenever it rises up in one’s body or mind. From this perspective it is irrelevant whether the statements “life is suffering” or “craving is the origin of suffering” are either true or false. Why? Because these four so-called truths are not propositions that one accepts as a believer or rejects as a nonbeliever. They are suggestions to do something that might make a difference in the world in which you coexist with others now. Therefore “enlightenment”—though I prefer the term “awakening”—is not a mystical insight into the true nature of mind or reality (that always weirdly accords with the established views ...

Dalai Lama entitled Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World. “What we need today,” he argues, “is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.”

“Mindfulness,” writes its foremost proponent, the American emeritus professor of medicine Jon Kabat-Zinn, “is a way of being in wise and purposeful relationship with one’s experience, both inwardly and outwardly. It is cultivated by systematically exercising one’s capacity for paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally, and by learning to inhabit and make use of the clarity, discernment, ethical understanding, and awareness that arise.”

What Kabat-Zinn presents here as mindfulness is more than just a short-term therapeutic intervention to treat a transient health problem. It is a practice that demands not only considerable mental discipline but also a revaluation of the purpose of one’s life and the ethical values needed to realize that purpose.

By using such terms as “wise,” “non-judgmental,” “ethical understanding,” and “awareness,” Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness endorses certain values. Such a set of values may be pointing to the kind of secular ethics envisioned by the Dalai Lama, but, at the same time, it has a distinctly Buddhistic ring.

Mindfulness is not a marginal practice among Buddhists. Mindfulness is the seventh element of the noble eightfold path, the doctrine the Buddha declared to constitute the very heart of his teaching.

The Buddha even declared mindfulness to be the “sole path” to nirvana itself.

I cannot think of a single meditative discipline from any other world religion that could be utilized outside a religious setting in the way mindfulness is being used today. This leads one to wonder whether, in its essence, what we call “Buddhism” is best described as a religion at all.

one could also argue that the discovery of the effectiveness of mindfulness in reducing suffering allows Buddhism to recover its secular soul that has long been obscured by the encrustation of religious beliefs.

I attempt in my writings to imagine what the dharma would be like were it divested of the cosmology and metaphysical beliefs of ancient India. I maintain that such a rethinking of Buddhism reveals a foundation on which to build a secular dharma that is based on the earliest texts and provides an entirely adequate framework for human flourishing.

empowers the individual by returning him or her to the core principles, values, and practices taught by the historical Gotama before they mutated into an Indian religioṇ In this light, secular Buddhism may be far closer in spirit and style to the Hellenistic philosophies of Skepticism, Epicureanism, or Stoicism than to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

A secular Buddhist celebrates the adoption of mindfulness in nonreligious settings, while recognizing that for its potential to be fully realized a meditative practice alone is insufficient. Just as Jon Kabat-Zinn and others have secularized Buddhist mindfulness, the challenge now is to secularize Buddhist ethics and philosophy in such a way that they can address the current conditions of our world by articulating a way a life in which humans and other beings can flourish together on this earth.

The self is itself a cloud of minute events and as such is part of the world.

Although this uote is by an Anglican priest describing annata, I think it does a very good job of describing it

think that there is a tendency within the Buddhist world, particularly in the West, to see study as merely an inessential adjunct to “practice.” This reflects how much of the Western Buddhist community is still carrying the legacy of the 1960s, which was an anti-intellectual, romantic movement that denigrated study and theory in favor of direct experience. It is understandable why that was the case at the time, but I think it is dangerous to unthinkingly perpetuate that view.

Buddhist tradition, however, has a strong rational and critical thread running through it. When you read the Pali texts, you don’t have the impression that the Buddha is a paradox-loving romantic. He is a very skilled dialecticiaṇ He argues and reasons with rigor and clarity and has enormous skill in using metaphor.

If the Buddhist community is going to be able to communicate its ideas and values with the wider public, it needs to have a coherent and rational discourse. I think if we abandon that, we do so at our own peril.