Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

by Stephen Batchelor

To learn how to think clearly, to express oneself articulately: these are practices of the dharma in themselves.

Moreover, study enables us to enter into a closer relationship with the traditioṇ It provides us with a much clearer sense of where its ideas are coming from and how they are expressed. And modern scholarship, with its emphasis on historical criticism, helps us understand how the teachings attributed to the Buddha are often only intelligible as a critical response to the issues, ideas, and philosophical views of his time.

Nonetheless, I think it is important for any serious practitioner to memorize the key Buddhist lists, such as the four truths, the eightfold path, the five aggregates, the twelve links of dependent origination, the four foundations of mindfulness, and so oṇ This is useful both as a memory aid for reading the texts and as providing themes for ongoing reflection and contemplatioṇ

Study informs my meditation practice by providing it with a clearer framework of meaning and purpose.

There is intelligence that arises from hearing (sutamaya paññā), intelligence that arises from thinking (cintāmaya paññā), and intelligence that arises from cultivation or training (bhāvanāmaya paññā). In other words, you start by hearing the teachings, thereby acquiring informatioṇ But information alone is inadequate. You then have to think about it. You need to reflect upon what you have heard in a way that allows you to internalize it, so that it becomes part of a coherent and consistent view of oneself and the world. But this rational, conceptual exercise is still not enough. Whatever insights and understanding you have gained through such reflection need to be translated into actual felt experience. That is done through bhāvanā, cultivating yourself through meditative training so that what began as an idea is brought into being as a lived experience.

I would suggest that one start straightaway with the suttas themselves, rather than later commentarial works. My first exposure to the Pali suttas was Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli’s The Life of the Buddha. I read this while I was a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and it opened up the world of the Pali Canon for me. It is a marvelous anthology of key canonical texts. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s In the Buddha’s Words is also an anthology

At some point you are probably just going to have to follow your own nose. You need to find those texts that speak to your own condition rather than feel obliged to read those suttas that tradition has privileged.

At the beginning it is useful to find a teacher who can help you find your way through this morass of texts. Once you get a toehold into the body of material, you can more easily pursue your study yourself, by looking up related passages where the Buddha or one of his monks expands and elaborates on the theme that engages you.

Even though he is not my personal teacher I feel I have done exactly this with Josh Korda

In other words, dharma practice is an ongoing conversation, even an argument, with traditioṇ You meditate, you do retreats, then you go back to the texts and reflect further on their meaning. That helps inform, clarify, and integrate your experiences so that when you return to the cushion, you bring that knowledge of the tradition with you in a subliminal way.

Gombrich and others seek to locate the Buddha’s suttas in the context of fifth century BCE India, where they were taught. I feel this is crucial for our understanding of the dharma.

The Buddha did not teach in a vacuum or from some transcendental perspective, but in the context of a culture, in response to particular beliefs held at the time, in dialogue with people from a specific kind of society. Modern scholarship is now able to tell us a great deal about the kind of world in which the Buddha worked.

Can study lead to discursive thinking and papañca [mental proliferation]? You mean meditation can’t? Scholar and meditator alike have to be alert to their own tendencies to an unnecessary proliferation of thoughts.

For myself, I have found that the more human the Buddha becomes, the more his teachings connect to experience in the real world.

The Buddha’s life is in itself a teaching of the dharma. It shows us how the Buddha addressed the specific situations of his sociopolitical world. It demonstrates how he was not indifferent to the plight of that world. He was constantly involved with people—not just his monks but powerful rulers, wealthy merchants, religious opponents, simple farmers, his ambitious relatives. He had to do whatever was necessary to ensure the survival of his teachings and community. The suttas show us how the Buddha taught not just by words but by his actions.

In our culture, in addition to Christianity we have the religion of psychology. What do you think of the impact of Western psychology on Buddhism in America? If you look at how Buddhism has entered into different cultures in the past, it has tended to do so by finding points of common interest within the new host culture. In the case of China, for example, Buddhism attracted Taoists, who had an interest in meditatioṇ In the secular West, it is hardly surprising that Buddhism attracts those interested in psychology. The Buddhist analysis of the causes of suffering, for example, immediately strikes us as psychologically astute.

In contrast, it would be alarming if Buddhism in the West were to be overdetermined by psychological discourse and Buddhism evolved into a kind of spiritual psychotherapy. That would be far too reductive. The practice of the dharma embraces the totality of the eightfold path. It is an integral way of life that balances philosophical insight, ethical commitment, right livelihood, spiritual discipline, and the forming of community. To overemphasize its psychological dimension risks losing sight of its complex reality as a culture that addresses every aspect of human need.

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.

I don’t believe the Buddha had a detailed metaphysical theory that he sought to impose on the world irrespective of whom he was addressing. He was a situationalist. His teachings were given to specific people in specific situations at specific times in their lives. He considered himself a physician, and his dharma a medicine. He prescribed different treatments to different people in different situations. That is the great message of the Buddha’s teaching. It is not dogmatic or doctrinaire but therapeutic and pragmatic.

Perhaps the Buddha did believe in some of these things. I don’t find that problematic—like all people he was a product of his time, and the teachings he gave were embedded to some degree in the context of his Indian culture. But I don’t think those beliefs are what is really universal and liberating about the Buddha’s dharma.

The theme for your analysis of the teachings might be that the Buddha was not a metaphysician but more of a physician, a healer, that his method was pragmatic, ethical, and philosophical. He was helping us see what to do rather than what to believe.

the Buddha says, “I do not dispute with the world; the world disputes with me. What the wise in the world would agree upon as existing, I too say that exists. What the wise in the world agree upon as nonexisting, I too say that does not exist.”

By approaching the dharma as a task-based ethics, we don’t have to deal with that anymore. It’s no longer relevant to get into a battle with beliefs, because beliefs, one way or another, are not terribly significant, and we kind of miss the point. We get sidetracked, much as the Buddha said in the parable of the arrow, where the person just endlessly discusses what kind of arrow it was, what kind of bow it was, what kind of person shot it.3 Other texts too seem to be clear that the approach of the dharma is entirely pragmatic and therapeutic and ethical. That’s what it’s all about. And somehow that idea got lost, as Buddhism mutated into a metaphysical religious system dominated by people who claimed to know “the truth.”

No Buddhist tradition gives equal weight to every word in the canoṇ It’s impossible. Every tradition is based on a relatively small percentage of the overall canonical material, upon which it bases and it builds its own particular orthodoxy.

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 teaching that you can’t derive from other sources. I also lay out that the suttas probably have the most authority, then the Vinaya, and then commentaries. Sometimes I have to deal with material that I might prefer to say, “Oh, this must be something that was added later.” That’s the easy way out of a problem, but if that doesn’t agree with the criteria that I’ve established, then I have to keep it iṇ

It’s about keeping a very open mind concerning yourself, not with what is right or wrong, true or false, but with what is the most skillful, compassionate way to respond to this condition I find myself in here and now. It’s not having a sort of a game plan that is already encoded in your belief system that you somehow just apply.

I think what Buddhist practice does is dismantle, or erode, that whole reactive strategy. One of the ways it does it is by encouraging us, as much as we can, to live in a state of questioning and inquiry.

find it dispiriting that some teachers still claim that “you can’t be a Buddhist unless you believe in reincarnatioṇ” If we can get round that kind of thinking altogether, and bring people together into a framework of value, meaning, purpose, and practice, it starts generating other possibilities of human culture.

My photographs, taken over many years, reflect various stages in this journey. They also mirror my engagement with the process of Buddhist meditatioṇ For both paths have served to deepen my understanding of the fleeting, poignant, and utterly contingent nature of things.

The self, like a work of art, is transcendent. It is not reducible to its parts, nor does it exist independently of them. Yet such transcendence is not in any way permanent or unconditioned. If the painting is destroyed or the person dies, they are gone forever.

As in Gestalt psychology, Madhyamaka philosophers understand how the whole is not equivalent either to all or some of its parts.