Secular Buddhism Quotes

“The great difference is that this version relies on the work of W. W. Rockhill. Rockhill was an American diplomat who lived in China in the nineteenth century, a linguistic genius—he must have been the first American to know Tibetan; he also produced a Chinese-English dictionary. And in 1884 he published a life of the Buddha according to the Tibetan canoṇ It draws from material of equivalent antiquity to that of the Pali Canon, from a source called the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. He went through it in the 1870s and pulled out of it a story that is almost identical to the story that I reconstructed from the Pali materials. Somewhat embarrassingly, I hadn’t actually read Rockhill until quite recently. I didn’t think the Tibetan material would be relevant. But I was wrong. The Tibetan Vinaya, from the Mūlasarvāstivāda school, gives us the same story, with the same characters, and the same relationships. The two versions don’t agree in every detail, but they’re remarkably similar.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“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. I do not believe that I existed in any meaningful sense before my birth or will exist again after my death either here on earth or in a heaven, a hell, or any other realm.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Within the last hundred years the teachings of the Buddha have confirmed the views of theosophists, fascists, environmentalists, and quantum physicists alike.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Both photography and meditation require an ability to focus steadily on what is happening in order to see more clearly. To see in this way involves shifting to a frame of mind in which the habitual view of a familiar and self-evident world is replaced by a keen sense of the unprecedented and unrepeatable configuration of each moment. Whether you are paying mindful attention to the breath as you sit in meditation or whether you are composing an image in a viewfinder, you find yourself hovering before a fleeting, tantalizing reality.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“But how does one square this with the idea of rebirth, of something distinct from that which dies but which is somehow reborn and so passes from life to life? To answer this question, more or less every Buddhist school has come up with a different explanation—a fact that in itself suggests that their answers are based on speculatioṇ Most schools claim that what is reborn is some kind of consciousness. Some say that this is simply the sixth sense (manovijñāṇa); others speak of a special existence-generating mind (bhavangacitta); still others propose the presence of an underlying foundation consciousness (ālayavijñāṇa); while the tantric traditions talk of a combination of extremely subtle energy and mind. But as soon as one hypothesizes the presence of some kind of subtle stuff, no matter how sophisticated the technical term one invents to denote it, one has already reintroduced the notion of some kind of esoteric self-substance.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Institutionalized Buddhism throughout Asia not only has a doctrinal commitment to rebirth but also has an economic and political one. In contrast to most Tibetan lamas, for whom the belief in the doctrine of rebirth is essential to the continuing authority of their institutions in exile, other Asian Buddhists in the West have felt freer to adapt their teachings to suit the needs of a secular and skeptical audience whose interest in the dharma is as a way of finding meaning here and now rather than after death. One will search in vain for any discussion of rebirth in the numerous writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, for example. Although he comes from a country (Vietnam) in which the belief is deeply rooted, he now seems to be moving toward a view that equates karma with some form of genetic inheritance and transmissioṇ”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“So what I’ve done is taken the four noble truths and torqued them into another shape. This reconfiguration enables us to revise the standard understanding of causality that underpins them. So instead of seeing craving as the cause of suffering, and the noble eightfold path as what leads to the end of suffering, I’ve turned that on its head. The experience of dukkha is actually what gives rise to reactivity. And the experience of nirvana is what allows the possibility of another way of life in this world. Now”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“the whole discourse around enlightenment becomes about being cognitively correct or incorrect.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“If Buddhists choose to model their lives on the liberated arahant—or the idealized Mahayana bodhisattva, for that matter—rather than follow the example of Gotama, then I wonder how Buddhism will find a compelling voice to address the pressing issues of our world today.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“In the Sangīti Sutta, Sāriputta mentions three kinds of intelligence (paññā).1 It is also a model I learned in the Tibetan traditioṇ 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.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Then I spent the next four years translating it into English. That was a very valuable experience. It enabled me to internalize somebody else’s refined understanding of the dharma and to work very closely with”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Even though we are the most privileged and richest human beings there have been so far, in terms of the stability and length of our lives and the cultural resources available to us, we’re not as happy as we should be. I’d like to see politics more oriented toward the question of happiness; certainly I’d like to see religion more concerned with making integral, happy people and raising the quality of personal life in our culture.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“That Buddhism may indeed have arrived at such a watershed is further suggested by a recent book by the 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.” Without for a moment rejecting his own Buddhist faith, he acknowledges how “the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I believe the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics that is beyond religioṇ”2 Without”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Thus awakening is not a state but a process: an ethical way of life and commitment that enables human flourishing.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“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.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Rather than attaining nirvana, 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. Given what is known about the biological evolution of human beings, the emergence of self-awareness and language, the sublime complexity of the brain, and the embeddedness of such creatures in the fragile biosphere that envelops this planet, I cannot understand how after physical death there can be continuity of any personal consciousness or self, propelled by the unrelenting force of acts (karma) committed in this or previous lives. For many—perhaps most—of my coreligionists, this admission might lead them to ask, “Why, then, if you don’t believe such things, do you still call yourself a ‘Buddhist’?”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“these practices began to yield unorthodox results. Meditation on impermanence, suffering, and no-self, for example, did not—as the Buddha insisted it would—lead me to disenchantment, dispassion, and a resolve not to be born again but to an ever-deepening awareness of life’s infinitely poignant beauty.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“All believers, by definition, must be agnostics. The moment you declare that you believe in God or the law of karma, you are acknowledging that you do not know whether they exist or not. For if you did know, you would have no need to believe. Only fools, fanatics, and omniscient beings would claim to know such things.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“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 we have ever made.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“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.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“I like to think of dharma practice today as venturing into a world of imagination, one in which each individual seeks to articulate a vision in terms of the particular needs of his or her own situatioṇ Buddhism would then become less and less the preserve of an institution, and more and more an experience that is owned by ordinary people in ordinary communities.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Emptiness indicates how everything that comes about does so through an unrepeatable matrix of contingencies, conditions, and causes as well as through conceptual, linguistic, and cultural frameworks.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“this gives us an important clue to understanding the notions of emptiness and “no mind.” They do not mean that there is literally no mind; they’re saying that if you try to understand the nature of anything in the deepest sense, you will not be able to arrive at any fixed view that defines it as this or that. The Dalai Lama uses a quaint expression in colloquial Tibetan—dzugu dzug-sa mindoo—which means “There’s nothing you can put your finger oṇ” Again,”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Emptiness” is a singularly unappetizing term. I don’t think it was ever meant to be attractive. The Tibetan Buddhist scholar Herbert V. Guenther once translated it as “the open dimension of being,” which sounds a lot more appealing than “emptiness.” “Transparency” was a term I played with for a while, which also makes emptiness sound more palatable. Yet we have to remember that even two thousand years ago Nāgārjuna was having to defend himself against the nihilistic implications of emptiness.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“This deep not-knowing, in this case the Second Patriarch’s inability to find his anguished mind, takes the notion of agnosticism down to another depth. One might call it a contemplative depth. Such deep agnostic metaphors are likewise found in such terms as wu hsin (no mind), and wu nien (no thought), as well as in the more popular “don’t know mind” of the Korean Zen master Seung Sahṇ”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“an agnostic Buddhist would not be a believer with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena and in this sense would not be religious. I’ve recently started saying to myself “I’m not a religious person” and finding that to be strangely liberating. You don’t have to self-identify as a religious person in order to practice the dharma.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“And the Buddha was not interested in them. But if we look at Buddhism historically, we’ll see that it has continuously tended to lose this agnostic dimension through becoming institutionalized as a religion, with all of the usual dogmatic belief systems that religions tend to have. So, ironically, if you were to go to many Asian countries today, you would find that the monks and priests who control the institutional bodies of Buddhism would have quite clear views on whether the world is eternal or not, what happens to the Buddha after death, the status of the mind in relation to the body, and so oṇ This”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“Why was Buddhism unable to survive the Muslim invasion of India during the twelfth century, whereas Hinduism, which suffered equal persecution, was? One major factor was that Buddhism relied for its continuity and identity upon isolated monastic groups. To destroy Buddhism it was only necessary for the Muslim armies to destroy the monasteries. With the monasteries gone, the lay community swiftly disintegrated because of the lack of a cohesive center. Hinduism, on the other hand, was far more integrated into the fabric of Indian society—and therefore much more difficult to destroy.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“A Buddhist community—a sangha—is not something one is merely born into or chooses to join but something one is challenged to create. A sangha provides a matrix of communal support for people to realize their commitment to a common vision or concerṇ Yet it is always in danger of deteriorating into an institution intent on preserving the power of a minority of professionals.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

“To take photographs,” wrote Henri Cartier-Bresson, “is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. . . . It is putting one’s head, one’s eyes and one’s heart on the same axis. . . . It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s originality. It is a way of life.” These words of the renowned French photographer define photography as an ongoing meditative relationship to the world. For Cartier-Bresson, photography is not merely a profession but a liberating engagement with life itself, the camera not just a machine for recording images but “an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”1 To be moved to take photographs, like being inspired to practice meditation, is to embark on a path. In both cases you follow an intuitive hunch rather than a carefully considered decisioṇ Something about “photography” or “meditation” draws you irresistibly. While you may initially justify your interest in these pursuits with clear and compelling reasons, the further you proceed along their respective paths, the less you need to explain yourself. The very act of taking a photograph or sitting in meditation is sufficient justification in itself. The notion of an end result to be attained at some point in the future is replaced by an understanding of how”
― Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World