If you watch television documentaries or visit airport bookshops, you’ll have noticed that the “view-from-nowhere” brigade is still hard at work debating their opposing truth-claims. The “view-from-nowhere” reduces religions, spiritualities, philosophies, and sciences down to their propositions–their truth-claims–and argues the toss over whose story is the “right” one, that is, has the most defensible truth-claims. In doing so, they’re missing the point: all these schools of thought are human artifacts designed to serve human needs and interests, just as the Buddha’s discourses patently did. The real issues in the debate should be: whose and what needs and interests are being served, and how effectively? So let’s follow the Buddha’s advice and not get sidetracked into metaphysical claims and arguments. 

Going by what we now know about the history and variety of religions and spiritualities–all those social practices–they’ve served a variety of practical purposes. These purposes include bolstering group cohesion; providing community-building moral codes and rituals; staging ceremonies for seasonal and personal transitions and life events; holding communal memory; and serving as a platform for aesthetic practices, a language for existential solace and reflection, and working hypotheses to satisfy humanity’s relentless curiosity.

Religions are thus no different from other human innovations, like plows and buildings. Even religious ritual fits the mold. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted, humans are “ceremonial animals,” and this trait seems to constitute an evolutionary factor. Rituals help us to cohere in our communities. 

The ability of religious social practices to serve their purposes does not depend on their myths being literally “true,” or even being believed. In the light of this usefulness, secularists might respect religion, even practice it in some sense, even though these days there are also non-religious ways of meeting these needs. 

So what is Buddhist mindfulness-based meditation for, and what modus operandi does it propose to serve its purpose? Meditation keeps us focused on the fine grain of our experience, not least our bodily experience, and in this way leads us to “fully know” and embrace what it means to be a vulnerable, mortal but aware being. What it means to be-in-the-world in this guise, in this way. To come to terms with our actual condition, instead of fleeing into fantasies of another set of preconditions than the ones we actually confront. That is, to ground ourselves in our real lives without “craving.” This is the first of the Buddha’s four great tasks. 

We can find the modus operandi for meditation readily enough in the Satipatthana sutta, among many other places in the Pali canon. Essentially it’s about opening up the totality of our experience as it unfolds–in all its freshness and complexity–to awareness (sati); and over time coming to understand it (sati-sampajanna). It’s not about being drilled to generate already-prefigured experiences while rejecting those that don’t fit the template–which is the inherited agenda of formulaic meditation techniques. 

Among other things, then, secular Buddhism aims to reinstate meditation to its earliest role as a major vehicle for tackling the four great tasks. To do so it promotes non-formulaic, non-technical insight meditation, in which one invites the senses and the mind to disclose their entire contents in all their layered complexity, so we come to see the whole picture, and gradually discern the patterns in our experience, in our individual way of being-in-the-world. We need an approach to meditation appropriate to our actual way of life, not one appropriate to the way of life of institutionalized male renunciants. 

To meditate effectively, all we need to put forward is our effort in following our immediate experience, and our honesty in acknowledging it. It makes no sense in this meditative environment to congratulate ourselves on being a “good” meditator who can follow the instructions, or to despair and declare ourselves “unable to meditate” because we don’t experience what the textbooks prescribe. So many people quickly get a sense of lostness, inadequacy, and failure when introduced to formulaic meditation that’s touted as “the one true way.” 

The only real failure to note here is the failure to live like institutionalized celibates! And we’re certainly not “good meditators” by dint of often finding ourselves in blissful states, nor bad ones for sometimes seeing into the abyss when we’re meditating. All lives contain tragic elements, and we have to receive them in our sits as we would any other experience. 

We’re all responsible for nurturing our own meditation practice, and the major issue we face is whether our approach is fit for purpose. The only true indications of meditative effectiveness are often subtle, off-the-cushion ones. Am I gradually strengthening positive qualities, such as friendliness (including to myself), empathy, generosity, clarity, self-reflectiveness, and equanimity? And am I seeing more clearly–and overcoming–my reactivity, immaturity, and narcissism? 

*** 

Already in the Buddha’s own lifetime, some of his followers fetishized his teaching, his dharma, seeing it as a supreme value in itself, as the Holy Grail (we might say in our culture), instead of just as a means to an end. He tackled this problem in a teaching in which he compared the dharma to a raft that someone might throw together, out of any materials that just happened to be lying around, in order to get across a body of water. Having arrived safely to the other shore, what should the traveler do with the raft–leave it on the shore, or carry it overland on her/his head as something of great value? The ever-pragmatic Buddha strongly recommended leaving the raft on the shore. It has already served its purpose, and that’s its only value. 

Stephen Batchelor suggests that secular Buddhists take this teaching to heart. We should throw together a raft out of what we have to hand in our own time and culture. The question then is not whether this is “really Buddhism”; the only sensible question would be: Does it float?

⧫

Adapted from Revamp: Writings on Secular Buddhism by Winton Higgins, The Tuwhiri Project, April 2021

The post Ask Whether It Works, Not Whether It’s True  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This review is a response to Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition, a book around which Tricycle previously hosted a four-part event series. Watch discussions from the series here on YouTube.

Anyone picking up Secularizing Buddhism should first turn to the editor’s concluding chapter, where Richard K. Payne unfurls his intention to “interrogate” something called “the secularizing discourse” (singular). At a normal interrogation, the interrogatee is present in the room. But not in this case. Thus the interrogation segues into the prosecutor’s opening address, with the defendant on trial in absentia and unrepresented. An inevitable collapse of evidentiary and forensic standards follows.

The main charge has it that the secularizing discourse (let’s call it SD) constitutes the delayed rebirth of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. It carries all the defilements of its former incarnation—textual fundamentalism, anticlericalism, individualism, disrespect for religious authority, abhorrence of ritual, complicity with colonialism, and what the German sociologist Max Weber called “the rationalization and disenchantment of the world.” But SD also embodies distinctly late-modern inclinations such as Orientalist disdain, hostility toward tradition, insistence that the Buddha was human, (invisible) whiteness, racism, empiricism, dogmatism, neoliberal manipulation, conservatism, and the neocolonial project.

However, SD is an abstraction, a sort of street gang, and the public will want to see actual villains occupying the dock. So which villains are we actually talking about? Two stand out in this collection. The first is “the mindfulness movement” (singular) whose practitioners the scholar and dharma teacher Ron Purser identifies as “Secular Buddhists” in his contribution. They are “the new scientifically authorized mindfulness priests” who use the confessional mode to mold their subjects into “ideal neoliberal selves.”

The second culprit is Stephen Batchelor, the contemporary teacher known for his agnostic approach to Buddhism, who makes fleeting appearances throughout the collection, rather like the specter haunting Europe in the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto. He disturbs the sleep of good Buddhists by night. And that’s about all we learn about him until we come to contributor Philippe Turenne’s “friendly invitation” to have a conversation with him.

Turenne, a Canadian scholar based in Kathmandu, says he wants to quiz Batchelor about his attempt to impose a new orthodoxy on the Buddhist world, one that is empiricist (Batchelor’s “love of empiricism” rates two mentions) and informed by his dislike of Buddhism, skepticism about the tradition, disrespect for the Abhidhamma, dry scholarship, naturalistic/psychological conception of liberation, rationalism, positivism, scientism, and other “modern ideologies.” Turenne adduces no evidence for these attributions. That’s understandable—there’s none to be had.

Turenne has lost sight of the division in Western philosophy’s development from the late 19th century, with a post-metaphysical branch (including phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism) diverging from an analytical branch (including positivism and empiricism) that has meanwhile converged with the natural sciences. Generations of thinkers, now including Batchelor, have leveraged the dharma’s affinity with phenomenology in particular, as both prioritize direct experience. Turenne has simply stalked Batchelor along the wrong branch, and mistaken a concern with experience for empiricism. On that basis every vipassana or insight meditator would also be an empiricist, not to mention the Buddha himself.

Turenne’s clumsy juggling of concepts typifies much of the argumentation in this collection. Key terms like religion, tradition, secularism/secularity, and even Buddhism are tossed around as if their meanings were self-evident and uncontested, each one sealed off from further inquiry with an initial capital letter. For example, almost all the contributors except Sarah Shaw assume that Secularity is the antithesis of Religion, yet many writers on secularity (including secular Buddhists) see it in terms of its actual etymology, as a reference to specific times and places, with no necessary connection to religion. In his magisterial text in this area, A Secular Age (2007), the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor presents secularity as the achievement of Western religious culture over the last seven centuries.

To take another example, contributors who adhere to the collection’s editorial line fulminate against secular Buddhists’ disrespect for the Buddhist Tradition. But as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out in his important work After Virtue (1981), a living tradition is one in which each generation goes back to the beginning, to the founder’s original questions, in an intergenerational conversation, a process of renewal. By contrast, “the Tradition” most contributors to this volume defend is what MacIntyre calls a “sedimented,” “dying,” or already “dead” one, in which the current generation simply rehearses whatever it’s been inducted into, with scant sense of how present practice came about and why. From this point of view, Batchelor and others are carrying on the Buddha’s living tradition and are thus the true traditionalists.

Suggesting guilt by association is an important ploy in the prosecution’s case in this book. It explains the awkward and unfamiliar title “Secularizing Buddhism,” which along with “the Secularizing Discourse” casts a wide net indeed. Potentially it squeezes self-describing secular-Buddhist dharma and meditation teachers into the same dock as the worst commercializers, corporatizers, and militarizers of mindfulness meditation, whom Ron Purser catalogs in his own book, McMindfulness (2019). It’s as if the former collude in the devilment of the latter. But sometimes the ploy needs some expert backup.

Lawyers who run cases through courts, though, attest to the high risk of calling expert witnesses. Under gentle cross-examination from the other side, experts often stray from the narrative they’re supposed to support—or actually disrupt it, as they steer the discussion toward their own professional insights. The valuable chapters in this collection are of this ilk, and make it worth getting, in spite of the editorial agenda.

Sarah Shaw’s suggestion that secular Buddhism has become religious lacks backing. But she does take us into the important shifts in the Theravada from the late 19th century. They fed into Buddhist modernism, and eventually into the various strands of the current Western Vipassana movement. Kate Crosby’s chapter complements Shaw’s, with a detailed examination of how imperial pressures and national exigencies shaped Theravada developments in Burma, including secular ones, leading up to heresy trials in late 20th-century Myanmar. (Yes, Buddhist heresy trials, ending in prison sentences!) Kathleen Gregory (for whom “secular Buddhism” means mindfulness meditation) teases out some interesting themes in the area, starting with the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn.

The valuable chapters in this collection make it worth getting, in spite of the editorial agenda.

A drastic change in the conditions of belief characterizes the present secular age, Charles Taylor argues: we can no longer naively cleave to any doctrine as absolutely true and beyond challenge. We now have to take responsibility for our choice of belief. Theravada teacher Bhikkhu Bodhi does just that in his confessional chapter, in which he straightforwardly commits to all the truth claims of orthodox Theravada as the opposite pole to secular Buddhism. (At the same time, he points to the cylinder that fails to fire across the Buddhist spectrum: civic engagement around humanity’s two main crises today—global warming and social injustice.)

The reader can contrast Bhikkhu Bodhi’s embrace of the supernatural with Roger Jackson’s amusing survey of how Buddhists of various persuasions—literalist, neotraditionalist, modernist, and secularist—handle the hot potato of rebirth doctrine. Once again we have to choose: to believe in rebirth literally, more or less literally, figuratively, or not at all.

The best contributions in this collection come from the tacit disruptors of its editorial line, David McMahan and Gil Fronsdal. The former leads us through a subtle and complex account of the travails of modern subjectivity, now further impacted by mindfulness practices. For both the maestros and those who sit at their feet, the experience of mindfulness can lead either to a false sense of individualistic autonomy (the neoliberal delusion) or, through an experience of not-self, to a dharmic illumination of interdependence and interbeing. Depending on context, then, secular mindfulness has a liberatory potential.

Fronsdal’s chapter is another limpid confession of faith, in the Theravada tradition like Bhikkhu Bodhi’s, but on radically different premises. Although he is a vipassana teacher in the Mahasi lineage, Fronsdal identifies as a “naturalistic” Buddhist—an increasingly popular identity in the West. Natural Buddhism involves expounding the dharma and teaching meditation exclusively on the basis of natural—as opposed to supernatural—doctrine and guidelines. In doing so, Fronsdal writes, he’s merely following the example of the Buddha, for whom dharma practice marginalized supernatural concerns. He acknowledges a close affinity with secular Buddhism but feels that the label itself is an oxymoron because, for him, Buddhism is a religion.

Still, the problem of the editorial intention driving Secularizing Buddhism remains: to defend that old-time religion from the barbarians at the gate. I read it at the same time as I was reading Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001), where I came across this passage:

Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history.

And the thought arose in me: Hmm.

The post An Unconvincing Case Against Secular Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Many people who come to the Buddhist group with which I am involved, and I am sure this applies to other groups too, say when they start meditation that they want something “secular”; they do not want “the trappings,” or “Buddhism as a religion.” Some retain this feeling, whether they prefer not to chant or offer devotions, or whether they are closely involved with another spiritual tradition, such as Christianity. But many do go on to appreciate chanting, devotion, making offerings, and the sense of refuge in the triple gem of the Buddha, dharma, and sangha, as forms of practice in themselves. They notice they arouse mindfulness, direct the mind to the meditation, and encourage a willingness to let go of problems and hindrances. They “go” for refuge, or in some cases “understand” the refuge: the Pali verb gacchāmi allows both meanings.

At some point there is a need to trust and, perhaps, take a leap in the dark. The refuges are to help us with that. We may articulate these refuges in terms that could also be regarded as secular: the Buddha as the fully awakened state of mind, the highest potential for a human being, whose seeds are present in ourselves; the dharma as the teaching of the graduated path that leads to this awakening; and the sangha, variously understood as being those who have attained this awakening or the orders of monks and nuns, or the community at large, of those who are following the same path. These, to many Buddhists, are what really ensure our balance and health in following a Buddhist practice. They offer three, interdependent reference points: the Buddha, a graduated teaching that can be re-created and reformulated, and a community to safeguard the development of the other two. As refuges, these three elements restore one another, and support each other.

But many are drawn to Buddhism precisely because of the devotional, the sense of the mysterious, and the numinous, which is there for those who wish it. Should such people wait to have their tastes sanctioned by scientific study on chanting or devotional practices in the name of what has become something of a secular imperative? Their love is intuitive and arises to them from a different kind of knowing. For this is where there is a real problem area in issues concerning this subject. Secularism has a real excellence: it suggests ways toward a common consensus that give effective and respectful grounds for interaction, as a kind of orthopraxy, between very different groups. Is it in danger, however, of becoming our new orthodoxy?

Awe and humility are strange things, but they need to be there and cannot be measured. For the possibility that we can find awakening, with the help of the three refuges, is awe-inspiring, and oddly humbling too. It is important to measure, for all sorts of purposes: to compare, graph, tabulate, assess, and quantify. But the “divine abidings” (brahma-viharas) in Buddhism are defined by the fact they are immeasurable (appamāṇa); they cannot be experienced or understood in full without an openness to the infinite and to the large, whether in time, in past and future buddhas and bodhisattvas, or in space, in infinite universes. It is this that is to many so mysterious and inviting about the Buddhist path—the sense of something much greater than oneself, or one’s society, or even a group of societies. The infinite manifoldness of things around is, in the end, a transcendent teaching. 

The desire for transcendence is, it seems to me, a human impulse, unacknowledged sometimes within secularist discourse. One Christian friend said she found mindfulness teaching very helpful. For her, she said, mindfulness of the infinite is really what heals, and gives her life meaning. A sense of transcendence for her was not an added extra to activities in daily life: it is something that can inform all she does.

A sense of awe, and of the infinite, is part of the healing of the Buddhist path too. The full extent of mindfulness encompasses this, and allows that possibility in daily life, and all dealings. The Buddha once taught an old man, Piṅgiya, who said his path was one of devotion. The Buddha sanctioned his chosen route. The Buddha might not have taught that path to everyone, but if it worked, he encouraged it; where another meditator is excessively dependent, he tells him to look to himself. Secularism has proven itself an effective way of breaking down old barriers and of allowing communications between groups that may not have been easy before. It has also prompted many people to follow Buddhism and explore it more. But do we need to be careful where we finally assign real understanding of what contributes to our health of mind? While secularism is not considered a religion, sometimes it feels a bit that way. At the time of the Buddha, we are told, only high priests had the means of sustaining the sacred texts and teachings. Other people had to rely on them for their perpetuation, for the performance of rituals, and for spiritual authority. Like others, I often talk of “they,” as in “they have found that…” or “they have proved that…” We do not need to reject the impulse to investigate external validation for Buddhist methods and techniques. Scientific, well-grounded research is encouraging, often framing Buddhist technique in modern technical terms and situating it in often highly specialized disciplines. But I have noticed we are increasingly regarding those that conduct research as “they,” our arbiters of all things to do with the mind, as if they must be the only ones who can really understand the path to happiness and recovery (however that is articulated). In my experience scientists, mindfulness researchers, psychologists, and psychotherapists are not high priests, and would not want to be!

[Social reformer and radical thinker George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906) coined the term “secularism” in 1851. His] original formulation of secularism accommodates the free practice of religion, without intervention. At some point, however, Western society somehow conflated science, reason, enlightened thinking, and truth. Something called “religion” seems to challenge this and is thus identified as a threat. For something to be real these days it needs to have a good scientific backing. But the very word “secular,” in its Latin meaning, suggests changing times and new generations; secularism is by definition one mode, for our time. It is not the only, or indeed a transcendent one. 

Over the last few decades, secular academic findings, often fused with a rationalistic, scientific worldview, seem to be gaining ground in domains that we used to see as nothing to do with secularism at all. [Buddhist scholar] Peter Skilling has recently noted how universalism was deeply embedded in early Buddhist inscription and text: it is framed as the wish for ourselves and others to find happiness and freedom, and it informs the Buddhist approach to a sensibly balanced transmission in many languages, together with the promotion of tolerance, shared cultures, and new technologies.

Acting within this universalist approach is what Buddhist groups are undertaking now, and academic disciplines working with Buddhist techniques and doctrines are doing so too. If we are to stand our ground in Buddhism, with the three refuges, we need to remember that Buddhism has always done this kind of thing, and that in this process there is, in the end, no “they.” Faith is not the same as belief; having faith does not involve opposing the practices and beliefs of others, or insisting on one’s own rightness, either. It is possible to be deeply religious and passionate yet respectful. The Buddhist path is apt, inviting (ehipassiko), and leads onward (opanayiko); there is also a community to help us find it. The teaching is to be known directly by the wise (paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhī). As Buddhaghosa, [the fifth century Theravada scholar-monk] indicates, it is an ornament on one’s own, not on another’s, head. By being mindful of these protections and the larger perspective they offer, Buddhism can, where it is needed, continue to encourage secularism and secularization but still genuinely allow “all dharmas to flourish.”

♦

From Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition edited by Richard K. Payne © 2021 by Richard K. Payne. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

For more on this new anthology, join ‘Secularizing Buddhism,’ a week-long conversation series with Shambhala Publications from August 2 – 5. 

The post Has Secularism Become a Religion? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The following discussion of the Buddhist parable of the raft is excerpted from our online course, Secular Dharma. In the course, Stephen and Martine Batchelor lay out a new vision for understanding and practicing dharma in the contemporary world. Through these traditional parables, Stephen and Martine investigate the core elements of Buddhist thought and introduce practices geared toward the way we live today.

The Parable of the Raft

Imagine, friends, a man in the course of a journey who arrives at a great expanse of water, whose near bank is dangerous and whose far bank offers safety. But there is no ferryboat or bridge to take him across the water. So he thinks: ‘What if I collected grass, twigs, branches and leaves and bound them together as a raft? Supported by the raft and by paddling with my hands and feet, I should then be able to reach the far bank.’ 

“He does this and succeeds in getting across.

“On arriving at the far bank, it might occur to him: ‘This raft has been very helpful indeed. What if I were to hoist it on my head or shoulders, then proceed on my journey?’ Now, what do you think? By carrying it with him, would that man be doing what should be done with a raft?’

“’No, sir,’ replied his audience.

“’So what should he do with the raft? Having arrived at the far bank, he might think: ‘Yes, this raft has been very useful, but now I should just haul it onto dry land or leave it floating in the water, and then continue on my journey.’ In this way the man would be doing what should be done with that raft.

“The dharma too is like a raft. It serves the purpose of crossing over, not the purpose of grasping.

“When you understand that the dharma is like a raft, and that you should let go even of positive things (dhamma), then how much more so should you let go of negative things (adhamma).” [MN 22]

♦

This parable very clearly expresses an experience that many people in the time of Siddhartha Gautama would have had. Gautama lived at a point of great transition and change in Indian society. People were leaving their familiar rural environments that generations of their ancestors would have known and setting out on a journey into the unknown. Most of them would have been heading for new urban centers that were springing up throughout the India of the Buddha’s time. So this image of a person arriving at a riverbank would have spoken to the experience of many of Gautama’s followers, be they monks, nuns, laypeople, or any other persons who would have been repeatedly encountering serious obstacle in their lives.

Today, we can likewise understand this parable as referring to how life is constantly throwing new, unprecedented situations in our way. We keep finding ourselves in situations where the old solutions don’t seem to work anymore. It may be in terms of our philosophy of life or religious beliefs, or it may simply be that what has worked reasonably well so far in our lives, no longer seems to be effective. We hit obstacles, hindrances, and blockages—language that we find throughout the Buddhist tradition. And the way to deal with these situations is to employ the imagination and transform the resources that are already close to hand.

The person in the parable has to think, How can I get across this body of water? No one is there to tell him what to do. He has to figure this out for himself. He has to be imaginative and resourceful.

In this case, he looks around and finds whatever is within his reach that can float on water and be tied together. That is all he needs to build his raft.

Related: Freeing Yourself from Suffering By Putting the Four Noble Truths First

Likewise, rather than simply following time-honored teachings, philosophies, and beliefs, we need to be more resourceful and more imaginative in how this practice of dharma is able to respond effectively to the needs we face in the kind of world we live in today. It calls for the imagination. A secular dharma approach is one that values the power of each practitioner’s own imagination and resourcefulness.

What the parable also is telling us is that the dharma is understood as a means not as an end. The practice of the dharma is very effective in resolving certain issues that might be obstructing us. But once it’s done its work, we can let go of it. If we become attached to the dharma, Buddhism, or any other form of religious practice—if we hold on to it as intrinsically valuable—it can turn into an obstacle, a burden that you keep carrying on your back even though you no longer have any need for it.

Here, Gautama presents us with the challenge of letting go of the very things that have been so helpful to us in the past and opening up a future in which we have the courage, the faith, and the capacity to move forward on our own resources and under our own steam.

The post When to Let Go of the Dharma, Too appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The first Buddhist meditation I practiced entailed visualizing a seated figure of Shakyamuni Buddha on a bejeweled throne in the space before me. To his right was Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, to his left Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, while in front of his throne stood the wrathful figure of Vajrapani, the bodhisattva of power. After creating this image, I was instructed to recite the mantras of these figures while imagining beams of light and nectar emanating from their hearts and entering mine.

For the Tibetan lamas who taught me this practice, these visualized figures were not understood as mere symbols or archetypes. Despite being “empty of inherent existence,” they were regarded as possessing both an agency that was independent of mine as well as the power to intervene in human affairs by granting blessings and answering prayers. In other words, they functioned as gods, which happens to be the very term (hla) by which they are known in Tibetan. In Tibetan Buddhist philosophy to be “empty of inherent existence” is the ultimate nature of all things. Gods, therefore, are no different from humans in terms of how they operate as agents in the conventional or relative world.

Related: Why I Quit Guru Yoga 

As hard as I tried over the years, I found it very difficult to “speak” with these Buddhas and bodhisattvas as though they were quasi-persons with agency. I could not dispel a gnawing suspicion of bad faith when, in the course of reciting a tantric sadhana like the one described above, I heard myself requesting insights or blessings from them. To interpret these figures as symbols or archetypes only made matters worse. For the idea of conducting a meaningful conversation with a symbol struck me as even more absurd. In the end, while still a Tibetan Buddhist monk, I abandoned these practices altogether. And it was around this time that I first came across the work of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72).

Feuerbach was a student of Hegel who came to reject his teacher’s emphasis on the primacy of Spirit in the unfolding of history and advocated instead a liberal, materialist, and atheist view of the world. He is perhaps best known for serving as a bridge between the ideas of Hegel and those of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Trained as a theologian, he launched a critique against religion in general and Christianity in particular.

Feuerbach’s basic idea is simple. “Religion,” he wrote in the preface to his most famous book, The Essence of Christianity (1841), “is the dream of the human mind. But even while dreaming we are not in heaven or in the realm of Nothingness. We are right here on earth.” Feuerbach argued that the function of religion was to project the essential human qualities of reason, love, and will onto the nonhuman and transcendent figure of God, who then becomes an object of worship. As a result of this transference: “In proportion as God becomes more ideally human, the greater becomes the apparent difference between God and man. To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must become nothing.” Since God is merely “the projected essence of man,” if people are to recover their true humanity, Feuerbach maintains that they need to reclaim their essential nature from the God onto whom they have projected it. In the words of Karl Marx: “[Feuerbach’s] work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis . . . Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human.”

Related: The Myth of the Historical Buddha 

While an echo of Buddhism may be detected in his phrase “in the realm of Nothingness,” the primary target of Feuerbach’s critique was Christianity. The visualization practice that I described above, however, fits Feuerbach’s thesis to the letter. As the dharma evolved into another Indian religion, Gotama [the historical Buddha’s name] lost his humanity and turned into the godlike figure of Shakyamuni Buddha. At the same time, the human qualities of reason, love, and will were projected, respectively, onto the godlike bodhisattvas Manjusri, Avalokiteshvara, and Vajrapani. The practitioner thus finds herself supplicating these “gods” to grant her in the form of blessings the very qualities she gave away to them in the first place. In both theism and Buddhism, as the tradition crystallizes into orthodoxies and hierarchical institutions, a similar gap opens up between the ordinary person and her essential humanity. By the time of Shantideva, Buddhism had come to function as a polytheistic religion. The Bodhicaryavatara [the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, a central Mahayana Buddhist text written by Shantideva around 700 CE] includes confession of sins, threats of hellish punishment, and supplicatory prayers such as this one:

To the Guardian Avalokiteshvara
Who infallibly acts with compassion,
I utter a mournful cry:
“Please protect this evil doer!”

By reflecting on how one is always “in the presence of Buddhas and bodhisattvas endowed with unobstructed vision,” one is encouraged to “develop a sense of shame, respect and fear.” Shantideva’s world is a far cry from that of Gotama’s. These kinds of practices are unimaginable in the discourses of the Pali Canon. Gotama’s ironic atheism and emphasis on self-reliance have given way to the kind of devotion and dependency that Feuerbach regards as the essence of religious behavior. This process waxes and wanes over time. Feuerbach approvingly quotes Augustine as saying, “God is nearer, more closely related to us, and therefore more easily known by us than sensible corporeal things.” Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther likewise understood the experience of God to be a profoundly intimate one. In Buddhism this emphasis is even more explicit since the aim of the practice is for each person to become fully awakened. Yet the history of both traditions is marked by critical moments when the gap between the ordinary person and her religious ideal becomes so vast that it can no longer be sustained. There then follows a collapse of the old order, which allows the possibility of something new being born. A good example of this in Buddhism occurs with the emergence of Chan (Zen) in China, where we find teachers such as Mazu Daoyi (709–88) repeatedly insisting that the Buddha is nothing other than one’s own mind.

Related: Tibetan Buddhist Meditation 

No matter how radical the reform of a religious tradition, over time the new and vibrant school tends to coalesce into yet another orthodoxy and hierarchic institution. As power becomes concentrated into the hands of an elite body of priests, the gap between the unenlightened and the enlightened starts opening up again, thus repeating the old pattern of disempowerment and alienation. Whenever a religion becomes an instrument of state power, thereby further enhancing the authority of its priests, it becomes even more difficult to challenge its dogmas, particularly if they become enshrined in law.

An established religion exercises its power most keenly by controlling the interpretation of its canonical texts. In religious studies departments of universities today a similar role is assumed by experts who decree what the languages and doctrines of a particular religion “really” mean. Those with a vested interest in preserving the correct interpretation of texts cannot tolerate the idea that “ordinary” people might enter into a living dialogue with the authors of those texts. They will actively discourage them by emphasizing the difficulty of such writings and the need for arduous study to acquire the linguistic and interpretive tools required to understand them correctly. There is some legitimacy to this concern, but it can be used illegitimately to justify a blanket condemnation of any attempt to question orthodox beliefs.

A Feuerbachian approach to Buddhism would entail a recovery of the historical Gotama as a human conversation partner as well as an uncompromisingly secular reading of his teaching. Discarding all elements of supernaturalism and magical thinking, one returns to the mystery and tragedy of the everyday sublime. Instead of nirvana being located in a transcendent realm beyond the human condition, it would be restored to its rightful place at the heart of what it means each moment to be fully human. Rather than devoutly repeating what has been said many times before, you risk expressing your understanding in your own stammering voice.

From Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World by Stephen Batchelor. Reprinted with permission from Yale University Press.  

♦

Continue studying with Stephen and Martine Batchelor in Secular Dharma, a six-week online course exploring their vision for understanding and practicing dharma in the contemporary world.

[This story was first published in 2017] 

The post Dropping the Bodhisattva Gods appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A few years ago, in the middle of a weeklong meditation retreat, I joined the queue to speak to the group’s most senior teacher. I’d spoken to him before, of course, many times, both during one-on-one practice discussions and in more informal settings, like the potluck lunches the group organized every now and then. But this time I had some questions I wanted to ask, and they weren’t about meditation. They were about him.

I was thinking about taking refuge, the ceremony in which you make a more formal commitment to the practice. I wanted to find out more about what I was getting into, so I did a bit of research online into Buddhist communities in the United States generally, and into the one I was sitting with in particular.

What I found was, well, concerning. Besides the lurid allegations about various Buddhist teachers in the U.S., there was a bit of specific gossip about the group I was in, and about its head teacher. I didn’t know whether the things people were saying were true, and even if they were, they didn’t seem serious enough in themselves to make me want to leave the group. But I did have some questions.

Which isn’t the same, actually, as wanting some answers. In fact, what answers I might get wasn’t so important to me. What was important to me was that the teacher be open to questioning—even (or especially) when the questioning was about his own behavior. And I genuinely expected that he would be. The group as a whole put a lot of emphasis on maintaining an open, questioning mind-set, and the teacher had a reputation as someone who didn’t put too much stock in formality.

I realized my mistake within minutes of entering the room. When I tried to explain why I was worried by referring to a scandal at another Buddhist group, he told me that most of the gossip that was reported about teachers was just false. When I told him I was thinking about taking refuge, he told me not to, since I was clearly doing it for the wrong reasons. He also told me I had no right to be asking these questions. For much of the conversation he was shaking with rage.

That, to say the least, was not what I’d been expecting from a senior Buddhist teacher, especially one whom I had previously known as a genial and open-minded man. Suddenly I felt very alone, in that retreat center hours from home, in a group that hung upon the teacher’s every word.

Later, I went to a friend I trusted, an older man who’d sat with the group for years but had already let slip that he had some doubts about the head teacher. When I told him what had happened, he told me the teacher had clearly “fucked up”—and not for the first time either, but that people who clashed with him tended just to leave the group. As we turned back toward the retreat center, he said to me, with a mixture of regret and resignation, “This is a great community. But you have to realize that it’s not a democracy.”

“Not a democracy” would probably be a fair description of many Buddhist groups in the West. The teacher is often a revered figure. I’ve noticed that this is especially the case in Zen and Tibetan groups, bastions of guru yoga, in which the teacher is seen as a path to enlightenment. But I’ve also seen teachers in vipassana circles being accorded an uncritical kind of veneration.

Related: Why I Quit Guru Yoga

Part of the reason for this, I think, is the idea of dharma transmission, a sort of apostolic succession in which intimate knowledge of the dharma is said to be passed down from generation to generation, ultimately going back to the Buddha himself. As I’ve seen time and time again in various groups, teachers who have transmission hold not only spiritual but also institutional authority: they’re often deferred to when it comes to making decisions for the group. Indeed, they are held in such high regard that the usual checks and balances—financial auditing, a board of directors, and so on—are often felt to be unnecessary.

The result of this is that many sanghas suffer from an alarming democracy deficit. Formal consultation with ordinary members of the group is rare. Leaders are almost never elected. Decision making by democratic processes such as voting is virtually unheard of.

That should surprise us, for Western Buddhists tend to see themselves as cooperative, progressive folk. Many of us would probably uphold egalitarianism and democracy as key values. Yet most of our groups are organized in a way that we’d never tolerate in our governments or even, increasingly, in our workplaces.

Why is this? There are many possible explanations, but my hunch is that a big part of the reason we give teachers so much power is that we think that’s what Buddhism is. At least, a lot of us have come to assume that firm guidance by a wise teacher with an ancient lineage is part and parcel of the Buddhist tradition.

That impression is not entirely wrong: the enlightened master certainly is a fixture of many Buddhist traditions, as any encounter with koans will tell you. But it’s not the whole of Buddhist tradition. Buddhist tradition is vast and varied, and there are many different strands within it. One of these strands—albeit one we don’t hear much about—has a great deal to convey about democratic theory and practice. Moreover, this is no marginal, newfangled part of the tradition, but one that goes right back to some of the most ancient texts in the canon.

For some practitioners, democratic values may be enough in themselves for them to start taking steps to make their sanghas more democratic. To them, the fact that democracy has a place in Buddhist tradition will be neither here nor there. But I suspect that there will be more than a few Western Buddhists who still worry that moving away from what they see as time-honored forms of practice in a hierarchical environment will mean that they are no longer practicing Buddhism. That is simply not the case.

As for the rule, that when decisions are made, one should put into effect the opinion of the majority . . . ancient scriptures say . . . among three people to follow what two of them think. . . . This has become a good practice . . . from the past into our present.

These words were taken from a document held in a Japanese temple. The document is dated to 1355, and it comes from Gakuen-ji in Izumo Province, one of the oldest and largest monasteries in the country. What were these monks up to? Was their apparent enthusiasm for making decisions by majority voting just an exception, an eccentric departure from what other Buddhist temples were doing at the time?

Apparently not. As the German historian Markus Rüttermann has shown, several Japanese monasteries were making decisions by majority vote during the same period. The monks of Jingo-ji in Kyoto, for example, also made decisions facing the community by majority vote, according to a temple document dated to 1185. So the monks of Gakuen-ji were not a breakaway sect. They were representative of a common way of doing things among Japanese monastics from the 12th to 14th centuries.

Some will see this phenomenon as interesting enough in itself: a whole tradition of Buddhist monasticism where majority decision making was the norm! But skeptics about Buddhist democracy will want to ask more questions. For instance: was this Japanese tradition itself an anomaly, an aberration from the mainstream of Buddhist monastic practice?

Let’s look back at the words I have just quoted from Gakuen-ji. They don’t merely say that majority decision making is a “good practice.” They also say that it has been around for a long while, “from the past into our present.” And they claim that the practice is sanctioned by “ancient scriptures.”

Which ancient scriptures are these? It’s a good bet that the reference is to the vinaya—the set of scriptures relating to monastic practices, parts of which contain discussions of majority voting. Particularly interesting is the Fivefold Rules of Discipline, which tradition asserts was brought from Sri Lanka to China in the 5th century by the celebrated Chinese pilgrim Faxian (Fa-hsien), who translated it from Sanskrit.

The Rules of Discipline text outlines seven different techniques for resolving disagreements, among which is “finding out of the will of the majority.” It then describes several different areas of disagreement for which voting may be appropriate, at least under certain conditions. It also describes the use of voting sticks, which can be handed out and then counted.

As the German scholar Egon Flaig writes in his book on majority decision making (Die Mehrheitsentscheidung, 2013), similar discussions are found in the Pali vinaya, especially the Mahaparinibbana Suttanta, the Mahavagga, and the Culla- vagga, texts that became part of the canon by the 4th or 3rd century BCE. Flaig points out that they are the earliest texts we know outside Europe dealing with decision-making procedures.

In these texts, majority voting emerges as perhaps the central way in which decisions should be made within the monastic community. Voting is held by secret ballot (using voting sticks) or by show of hands, or by whispering one’s preference into another monk’s ear. It’s also laid down that a course of action is illegitimate if the assembly leader knows that the majority doesn’t agree with the decision being taken. At the same time, if there’s a dispute about how monastic rules are to be applied, the decision can be taken by a committee elected for the purpose as well as by a majority vote in the monastic assembly. When it comes to ordination, or for decisions of very personal nature, unanimity is recommended. The monastic assembly has a leader, furthermore, and he can strike down decisions if they threaten the unity of the sangha. And older monks can ask younger monks to relinquish their opposition if they think an important law is at stake.

All the same, the evidence for democracy within Buddhist monasteries is quite strong. Japanese monastic records show that majority voting (Japanese, tabun) was certainly practiced in Japan from the 12th to 14th centuries; and the vinaya texts suggest that this was not a new development but one in accordance with a tradition that stretches back to the beginnings of Buddhism.

Related: Is the Dharma Democratic?

Might this tradition go back even further than that? Egon Flaig thinks so. He suggests that democratic practices in early Buddhism grew out of the context of the republican city-states of ancient India, which flourished in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. They were often governed by a council of nobles (sabha) made up of male aristocrats, ruling either on its own or with the help of an assembly (samiti).

Were these city-states democracies? Much of the answer hangs on who got to attend their assemblies, which have been compared to the popular assemblies of ancient Greece. Unfortunately, the halls in which the ancient Indian assemblies were held could probably hold only around 500 people, far less than the 6,000 or so that could meet in the open-air assembly (ekklesia) of classical Athens. Rather than being a genuinely popular assembly, then, the samiti may have simply featured a slightly less restricted elite than the sabha. It’s true that some Greek sources, like the 1st-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus, used the Greek word demokratia with reference to the Indian city-states. But by this point Greek authors had started to use the same word for any nonmonarchical or republican state. So Flaig is probably right to stop short of calling the Indian city-states democracies; he uses instead the term “para-democracies.”

More important, as Flaig himself admits, the Buddhist monasteries were more democratic than the Indian city-states in one crucial respect. Where the city-states had a council of nobles and a slightly less elite assembly, the Buddhist monasteries did away with the council of nobles, and made do with just an assembly. Moreover, it looks like their assemblies included all monks, not just an elite subset.

It may well be, then, that though the earliest Buddhists received some democratic ideas from the republican city-states of ancient India, they decided to go further along the democratic road themselves. In other words, the idea of doing things democratically in ancient India may have been not just something in the air. It may have been a distinctive part of Buddhism as a movement, right from the start.

That this may have been the case is hinted at in a Pali canonical text, Digha Nikaya 16, which relates how the chancellor of the king of Magadha comes to the Buddha to ask whether he should attack the confederation of the Vajii, a league of republican city-states.

The Buddha doesn’t respond directly, but notes that alongside a number of other positive practices the Vajii have frequent and well-attended assemblies, and he suggests that as long as they do, the king of Magadha will never conquer them. The idea that democracy is good partly because it helps you vanquish your enemies may not seem like a very Buddhist one. But in a fiercely competitive world like that of the ancient Indian city-states, there could have been no higher recommendation for the practices of popular rule.

There is, then, good evidence that democracy was something that Buddhists have long thought about and practiced. Indeed, Buddhists have been thinking about and practicing democracy as long as there have been Buddhists at all. It may even be the case that one of the things that made the earliest Buddhists distinctive was that they took democratic decision making further than anybody else.

For those of us who place importance on acting in accordance with tradition, there is no reason to reject democracy in our sanghas. Democratic practices such as making decisions by majority vote have at least as solid a place in Buddhist history as authoritarian practices such as dharma transmission.

Indeed, you could argue that Buddhist authoritarian practices were simply a reflection of the authoritarian institutions that have been the norm in many countries for much of human history. The democratic practices, by contrast, might plausibly be considered an intrinsic part of Buddhism as an intellectual and spiritual movement—a part that has been eclipsed or pushed to the side for too long.

Where does this leave us as practitioners? Well, it means that we now have a choice, even if we want to insist on cleaving to Buddhist tradition. Do we emphasize the more authoritarian parts of the tradition, or the more democratic ones?

If we emphasize the more democratic aspects of the tradition, we should probably not worry too much about what democracy looks like precisely in our individual communities. Electing leaders would be one way of doing it, as would taking votes on all key issues facing the community, following the lead of monasteries like Gakuen-ji.

But there are also any number of ways in which more democracy can be injected into a group. Service positions could be filled by pulling names out of a hat, for instance. In the group I currently sit with, the task of leading an evening session rotates through regular attendees on a weekly basis. In a group I used to sit with in San Francisco, a silver owl or a plastic bug (any object will do) was passed around, giving the person holding it the momentary right to uninterrupted speech.

I myself wouldn’t be surprised to find out that such practices are more common than we think; probably many small groups have set themselves up in a democratic way as a matter of course. We shouldn’t make the mistake of seeing this as the kind of thing that you do only if you aren’t a real Buddhist group that doesn’t know about sacred traditions like dharma transmission.

Conversely, those Buddhist institutions—and there are plenty of good ones—that do continue to uphold practices like dharma transmission should be aware that they represent thereby one part of the tradition—not Buddhist Tradition, period. They should also be aware that they can easily move away from such practices without being less Buddhist as a result.

And where does this leave me, half a decade on from the shock of my one-on-one encounter with that senior teacher? For a while, of course, I was put off the whole practice. After some thought, though, and some conversations with friends, I decided to take refuge after all, though with another teacher. And I don’t regret it.

Since leaving that community, I have sat with vipassana groups, Hindu-related meditation groups, and the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers). For a few years I was a fully signed-up member of a Zen group, but eventually the focus on the teacher was, once more, too much for me (even though that particular teacher seemed pretty down to earth).

Today I sit with a small group that professes no lineage or transmitted teacher. We meet on a basis of equality, as people who are interested in meditating together and talking about it afterward.

Is it a Buddhist group? I don’t necessarily see it like that, and we don’t signal that message to the outside world. More than anything else, it’s a group in which meditation is practiced, and most of that meditation proceeds in a Buddhist manner (rather than, say, a Christian or Hindu one).

At the same time, though, there’s nothing un-Buddhist about it. And it’s especially not the case that it’s un-Buddhist because we do things in an egalitarian way. There’s no reason to think that we’re not following Buddhism simply because we don’t have a teacher whom we look up to spiritually and in terms of decision making.

Actually, if I think about it at all, I feel that the earliest Buddhists, who clearly cared about democratic modes of organization, would approve of the way we do things. I feel as though we’re carrying on their tradition of spiritual equality, and that gives me a lot of contentment.

The post Democratic from the Start appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Anyone who has read even the most introductory Buddhist books will have come across the phrase “the four noble truths,” referring to the tenets that form the bedrock of the Buddhist worldview. These four truths are generally understood as the historical Buddha’s realization that (1) life inevitably contains suffering; (2) this suffering is caused by craving and clinging to impermanent things; (3) suffering can be ended by cutting the roots of craving; and (4) this can be achieved by following a path outlined by the Buddha. But is the translation of “noble truths”—a phrase that is thoroughly embedded in Western Buddhist discourse—correct? And what would it mean for our practice if it weren’t?

In the following conversation, three of the five core teachers of Bodhi College, an online educational center focusing on a secular understanding of the dharma, explain why they say these truths are due for a fresh translation and reassessment. 

Stephen Batchelor (SB): I have a problem with using the word “truth” at all for what’s usually translated as “the four noble truths.” We’d be much better off if we abandoned that language. As soon as we bring up this notion of truth, we’ve framed everything within the idea that there is some reality we have to understand: truths are things that you understand or you don’t understand. But I don’t think that’s what the Buddha is trying to do here. He’s actually asking us to embrace suffering; he’s asking us to let go of craving; he’s asking us to see the stopping of craving; and he’s asking us to cultivate a way of life, which is the way it’s explained in his first sermon, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (“The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dharma”). And you can say all of that without any reference to the word “truth” at all.

“Noble truth” is very possibly a kind of Buddhist rhetoric. All religions claim to teach noble truths; in a sense, it’s a given in this kind of discourse. What would happen if we stopped using that language? I think it would free us up to give primacy to the practices.

Christina Feldman (CF): Well, actually, I would agree.

SB: I thought you’d agree.

CF: [Laughs.] I am uneasy with the whole phrase “four noble truths.” First, these are interactive understandings, not separate, fragmented pieces where we can choose one or the other. Second, as soon as we use the word “truth,” we get into an absolute way of thinking instead of living these truths as a dynamic process that is happening moment to moment. They are something that we’re actually invited to see and to understand for ourselves.

These “truths” are not observances; they’re not something historical, like “twenty-six hundred years ago the Buddha invented the four noble truths.” What the Buddha was describing was the process of getting into optional difficulties and pain and distress that could come to an end. So these are liberating investigations, which are only valuable if you can take them into your own experience and see if they are true for you. This kind of framework is a primary way of learning to be honest with ourselves and with what’s going on in our lives. Instead of being mystified and bewildered and saying, “How did I end up here in this awful anguish?” we can actually come to understand exactly how we ended up there, and that understanding is, of course, the key to not reentering those cycles of distress.

Akincano M. Weber (AW): We also have good reasons to believe from the very old traditions that the four noble truths have always been understood in different ways. It’s very interesting to look at how the early commentators actually related to the term. In the commentary to the Digha Nikaya (“The Collection of Long Discourses”) and Anguttara Nikaya (“The Collection of Numerical Discourses”), two of the collections of texts from the Pali canon, for instance, the term is glossed as “these truths are the truths of the noble ones.” So our oldest canonical references to these teachings make it clear that “noble truth” is probably a misnomer, and yet it became the term with which most people are familiar.

The doubt about the exact doctrinal content of the term ariyasatya in Sanskrit or ariyasaccani in Pali has been there for a hundred years, from the Russian 19th-century Indologist Fyodor Stcherbatsky up to the present-day British philologist K. R. Norman, who has looked at this topic very carefully. The conclusion is fairly clear: anyone who knows the languages will know that the term can be broken down in a number of ways, and “noble truth” is likely the least useful way to do it. Probably the best and closest translation is something like “engaging with these truths, practices, or themes is an ennobling pursuit.”

“As soon as we use the word ‘truth,’ we get into an absolute way of thinking instead of living these truths as a dynamic process that is happening moment to moment.”

SB: K. R. Norman also argues that in the earliest version of the presentation, the term ariyasaccani wasn’t there; it was stitched in at a later point. I see the addition of the term as a reflection of how the dharma, over a period of time—although we don’t know exactly what that period is—mutated, how what started out as a way of life or a practical philosophy became more and more aligned with a form of an Indian religion. I think what might have happened is that as the dharma began to evolve into Buddhism, quite understandably it then had to deal with the “competition”: the Brahmins and the Jains and the Ajivikas and the other schools of ancient India, each of whom claimed that what they taught was the truth and that their truth was truer than the other guy’s truth. And so the Buddhists, I think, got drawn into the game of making truth claims in order to have the status of being a respectable religion alongside the others, so it would have more credibility in the eyes of the people, the kings, and the various ascetics who were around at that time.

CF: It’s important to remember that we’re not endeavoring to reframe this very central teaching in order to be clever or to somehow imagine that the Buddha didn’t actually teach these things. What we’re endeavoring to do is to bring this liberating teaching into something that is an ongoing question, that question being, what is it that is ennobling?

Now, it’s curious: in English, we would hardly ever use the word “ennobling”; it doesn’t have any meaning for most people. I think that the Buddha was really asking: What is it that brings dignity to your life? What is it that allows you to live without regret? What is a way of living that is imbued with respect and blamelessness? What is a way of living where you’re no longer hostage to the world of conditions? What is a way of living where your mind is actually a friend rather than something that torments you?

It’s important to remember that the Buddha, as much as he was a contemplative, was also a social activist. He was not just concerned with personal development and freedom. He was also concerned with the kind of world that people lived in and created together, either through ignorance and confusion or through respect and integrity. So my own sense is that the teaching of these ennobling understandings is not just about personal well-being. They continually ask this question of us, which is of grave immediacy: What is it that ennobles our lives, which we can then communicate to the world around us through the ways we engage with that world?

SB: That points to how the Buddha’s vision was centrally ethical. I’m not referencing the moral precepts here and so on; by ethical I mean leading a way of life in which you try to become the kind of person you aspire to be and try to create a world that you aspire to live in.

My problem is that the word “truth” gets in the way of that. In the Sutta Nipata, one of the oldest collections we find in Pali, there’s a line where the Buddha actually says that he does not claim truth. He says that “This is true” is what fools say to one another. So he’s very skeptical of truth claims in these earliest texts, because they lead inevitably to quarrels, which is another one of the things the early scriptures are constantly warning us against: getting drawn into disputes.

CF: The Buddha is constantly identifying this world of division and conflict and how it comes into being, which is why many of the discourses are framed as a conversation between two people who are quarreling or between the Buddha and someone who is trying to quarrel with him. Much of the time those quarrels are created through identification with view. “I am right. And if I am right, you are wrong.”There’s a very fine line between what we call a truth and a view: the latter is used to create a sense of position and a self that in turn becomes the foundation for more suffering.

SB: Again, as long as you’re using the word “truth,” you’re going to be just a whisker away from having a dogmatic view. If we take, for example, the second noble truth as it is usually translated—that “craving is the origin of suffering”—to me that is a metaphysical statement. You’re making a very generalized claim about the nature of reality, and so immediately people get drawn into the discussion: Well, is that really true? What about this? What about that? And down you go into the rabbit hole of theology. Whereas if you frame it as a task, the challenge is: how do I let go of craving? Then you are setting up a whole different doorway to the thoughts and the discussions that follow. Your discussion inevitably will be pragmatic. It won’t be, “Is this true? Is this false? Is this right? Is this wrong?” but, “How do you get it done?”

It’s like the very famous example of the person who is wounded by a poisoned arrow and his friends want to take it out, but he won’t let them until he knows the name of the man who shot it and so on. And the Buddha says that he doesn’t teach all of these metaphysical views, that all he’s interested in is “how do you get the arrow out?” How do you let go of craving? That’s all that matters. The rest is speculation.

AW: But there’s a slight tension in there. If you look at the framing of the second truth in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, it states literally that craving is the origin of suffering. But if you look at other teachings, the problem doesn’t seem to be craving primarily, but ignorance. Buddhist traditions have played that against each other for many centuries, whether the major problem is a lack of understanding, so that all it takes is to open your eyes and wake up from the sleep of not knowing; or whether the solution is to gradually wean yourself from bad habits and come to create wholesome activity on the basis of an attitude to the world that is guided by the four forms of empathy.

Anyway, if I am pressed to state something about the teaching on the four “truths,” I’ve been greatly inspired by the English monk Nanavira Thera, who says in a letter to one of his supporters in the mid-’60s that he understands the four truths by way of an Alice in Wonderland analogy. Alice doesn’t have a bottle that describes its contents. She finds a bottle that tells her what she should do with the contents—“Drink me”—and then things happen: she shrinks and grows and so on. In the Buddhist application of the analogy, the label on the first truth says, “Understand me.” On the second of the truths, the label says, “Give me up.” On the third bottle, it says, “Realize me,” and on the fourth bottle it says, “Develop me.” So if we boil down the teaching of these four truths, they are four different calls to action.

And the first one is not to believe me; it’s to understand me.

SB: That’s the point, I think. See, with the whole issue of craving, it’s so easy to get into questions of where it comes from or what it produces, all of which can be very insightful, but none of which can really address the primary experience of what it’s like as a sentient creature to crave, to grasp, to fear, to hate. What is that actually doing to me psychosomatically, and how do I work with that? It’s all very well to say, “Give me up; let go.” How the hell do you do that?

In other words, if we start thinking more in terms of tasks than truths, that makes it all eminently practical. In a sense, at that point, the broader truth claims become irrelevant. Does it really matter whether craving causes suffering or not? Well, that’s interesting, but the real practice, the real challenge, is to enter into a relationship with my craving in which I transform that experience from one that traps me and binds me and keeps me stuck into one that makes me free.

♦

Continue studying with Stephen Batchelor, Christina Feldman, John Peacock, and Akincano Weber in The Four Noble Truths, a six-part online course available through Tricycle Online Courses.

The post Understand, Realize, Give Up, Develop appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As secular mindfulness continues to expand into many layers of our society, from psychotherapy offices and schools to corporations and the military, I welcome its spread. Regardless of the context in which it is learned, mindfulness reduces suffering when practiced diligently and ethically. Moreover, applying mindfulness to daily life situations is a fundamental dharma teaching. So I experience mudita [sympathetic joy] when I see that mindfulness has become available to many more people.

But do secular programs teach the same mindfulness that the Buddha offered? Programs vary widely, of course. Some have a firm foundation in the Buddha’s teachings while others make no reference to Buddhism in order to strip it of its spiritual context. Exploring this question naturally leads to another: what is the mindfulness of the Buddha?

The Buddha taught that mental suffering arises out of ignorance. By “ignorance” he meant the mind’s misunderstanding of the nature of reality, both mental and physical. For example, a practitioner may have profound insights into the four noble truths (which outline the path to freedom); the three characteristics of existence (impermanence, the existence of suffering, and the absence of a permanent self); or the seven factors of awakening (qualities such as investigation, energy, and equanimity which support realization).  Through vipassana practice we have insights about the implications of the constancy of change, the true nature of reality and self, and the empty radiant nature of mind when it is not clouded by desire and aversion.

But to what end are we cultivating these critical realizations through insight? In order to be able to choose non-suffering rather than suffering—to be able to think, speak, and act in such a manner that does not cause suffering for ourselves or others. Ultimately these realizations bring about a “change in lineage” so complete that the very roots of desire, aversion, and delusion are removed, which is one definition of nibbana.

One of the main tools the Buddha taught for developing insight is the ability to be fully aware in the moment. Other meditative tools he taught include directing attention, achieving deep concentration states, and cultivating the four divine abidings of lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

He also taught non-meditative practices he considered essential, such as sila [ethical behavior], dana [generosity], and nekkhamma [renunciation]. Each of these tools plays a critical role in developing insight and allowing you to stay on the noble eightfold path to full understanding, as described in the four noble truths.

Mindfulness practice [sati] as a skillful means enables us to go beneath the surface level of our moment-to-moment life experiences, which are clouded with emotions and habitual thinking, and allows us to see the truth of what is happening. In daily life, it helps us see clearly what needs to be done, what we are capable of doing, and how that relates to the larger truths. Obviously, it isn’t easy being mindful in such a manner, but we can develop mindfulness through the practice of formal meditation practice and by practicing “walking around” mindfulness.

What most distinguishes the Buddha’s from secular mindfulness is that he does not teach it as a standalone skill. Rather, it is a part of the eightfold path that leads to the realization of the four noble truths and the end of mental suffering. The Pali phrase for the Buddha’s mindfulness is samma sati, which translates as “wise mindfulness.” Samma sati is one of three parts in the samadhi [concentration] section of the eightfold path, along with wise concentration and wise effort. It is employed in the development of both of these factors, and both of these factors enhance mindfulness. Likewise in the panna [wisdom] section, wise understanding and wise intention need mindfulness and are needed for the practice to flourish in daily life. Wise understanding fuels the aspiration for liberating the mind from the grasping and clinging that cause mental suffering.

Mindfulness supports the moment-to-moment intention to not cause harm, to be kind, and to renounce those thoughts and actions that lead to heedlessness. Without wise intention and wise understanding, mindfulness is aimless, and therefore not the Buddha’s.

Finally, in the third section of the eightfold path, the Buddha instructs us on applying mindfulness to our work and personal lives through wise speech, wise action, and wise livelihood. These teachings also reflect a particular kind of mindfulness, one that is wise, nonharming, and forward leading. This is the mindfulness taught by the Buddha.

As a standalone practice it may well lack the ethical and aspirational qualities of samma sati. Although the commentaries say that mindfulness is always a wholesome factor of mind, this refers to the samma sati of the eightfold Path. As the esteemed scholar and translator Analayo Bhikkhu points out in his book on the Satipatthana Sutta, there are times when the Buddha refers to “wrong” mindfulness. In other words, we can learn to be mindful, but to what end? For instance, when we are more mindful, we are more likely to see how to gain advantage and opportunity in regard to others. But is this the mindfulness of the Buddha? I certainly don’t think so.

Regardless of the circumstances under which it is taught and by whom, mindfulness is wholesome when it comes from an ethical base and helps people to be more present, have less stress, and experience fewer negative thoughts. But in my view, it is not samma sati without grounding in the Buddha’s teachings on the nature of mind and skillful means, and the aspiration to choose nonsuffering rather than suffering.

The Buddha’s mindfulness has one purpose—the end of suffering. It encompasses all of life in order to purify the mind and bring wisdom, love, and equanimity to the center of our lives. When these qualities and goals are clearly present, we are in the presence of the Buddha’s great gift of mindfulness. Each of us is fortunate that these teachings are so widely available in our lifetimes and that we have the interest and the time to allow them to liberate our minds and awaken our hearts.

♦

This story was originally published in 2016.

The post The Mindfulness of the Buddha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Probably the most prominent proponent of “Secular Buddhism,” writer, artist, and lay scholar Stephen Batchelor has been a contributor to Tricycle since its third issue (Spring 1992). His latest book, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (2015), represents the culmination of four decades of Buddhist study and practice in the Tibetan, Son (Korean Zen), and early Pali Buddhist traditions. “While many Asians are Buddhists who find themselves being secularized,” Batchelor writes, “I am a secular European in the process of finding out what it means to be Buddhist.”

Batchelor’s earlier works, perhaps most notably the bestselling and controversial Buddhism Without Beliefs(Riverhead/Tricycle, 1997), did much to lay the groundwork for the secular Buddhist movement that would later emerge. Today, Batchelor is cofounder of the newly established Bodhi Institute in the UK, which offers “early Buddhist teachings for a secular age.” In April, Batchelor sat down with Tricycle editor and publisher James Shaheen in New York City to discuss his new book.

Why “After Buddhism”? As an impermanent and contingent phenomenon, Buddhism will inevitably be transformed through its interactions with modernity. Exactly what shape it will assume is impossible to know. All we can say with confidence is that what will come after Buddhism will remain tied to it as well. But will it still be Buddhism as we understand it now? I don’t know.

Since a key part of my argument is a call to return to the earliest sources of Gotama’s teaching, I could just as well have called this book “Before Buddhism.” Several readers of the manuscript have in fact suggested this.

The book’s title also acknowledges my debt to a number of similar works: After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre, After God, by Don Cupitt, and After Christianity, by Gianni Vattimo. “After” does not imply that these authors have abandoned virtue, God, or Christianity any more than I have abandoned Buddhism. Rather, “after” signals a radical revisioning of what these terms mean today.

After Buddhism continues an inquiry that I’ve been pursuing for many years. I try to divest the Buddhist teachings of the layers of doctrinal and cultural accretion that have built up over the last two and a half thousand years. Our culture is at such a distance from that of ancient India that we may no longer be in a position simply to adapt a particular orthodoxy by giving it a new spin for our times. The challenge may be more fundamental than that. We might need to strip Buddhism back to its bare skeletal form and begin again.

How possible is it to do that when we are, as you say, so distanced from it in time? I realize that this is a difficult, even presumptuous undertaking. A very easy criticism of this book will sound something like this: “Well, this is just what Batchelor likes about Buddhism, and so he finds these pieces and then claims them to be original.” That would be a perfectly valid objection if I were simply highlighting my preferences. But I do actually have a hermeneutic strategy.

Which is? When you read a text in the Pali canon or other comparable sources, if something said there by the Buddha could just as well have been said by a Jain or Brahmin priest, then you put that aside as simply part of the broadly accepted worldview of that period. It’s not something unique to the Buddha’s dharma. By pursuing this process of subtraction, you can start to separate out the generic cosmology and metaphysics of the time. What remains left over can then be considered as what made the Buddha’s teaching so distinctive. And that would be my starting point.

What do you identify as distinctive? I identify four primary themes: the principle of conditionality; the practice of the fourfold tasks; the perspective of mindful awareness; and the power of self-reliance. I call them the four P’s. The book teases out of these four themes what hopefully is a comprehensive account both of the dharma and of the Buddha’s life.

The language you use for fundamental Buddhist terms and concepts is often a radical departure from convention. The four noble truths become “the four tasks”; nirvana becomes “a nonreactive ethical space”; dukkha, typically translated as “suffering,” simply becomes “life.” And tanha—craving—becomes “reactivity.” In many cases, your translations are more interpretive than literal. As the cliché goes: translation is always interpretation. The meaning of words, as Wittgenstein pointed out, has to do with how they are used more than how the dictionary defines them. I may choose a term that might not be literally so close to the original but could actually shed more light on how that term operates within the framework of the discourses.

Related: Understand, Realize, Give Up, Develop  

In the case of the four noble truths—what you call the four tasks—the departure is especially jarring. Can you explain? If you open any book that purports to explain Buddhism, within two or three pages you’re onto the four noble truths. So to start questioning them is clearly controversial— even audacious. But on the basis of philological analysis, earlier translators—F. L. Woodward, for example, then people like Kenneth R. Norman—have spotted troubling incongruities in the way the expression “noble truth” is used. For instance, the Buddha’s first discourse literally says, “The second noble truth is to be abandoned.” Now that doesn’t make any sense. You don’t abandon the second noble truth; you abandon craving. It’s equally problematic to say, “The fourth noble truth is to be cultivated.” How do you cultivate a noble truth? Would that make it more true? Or more noble? Or both? It seems that at a later date the expression “noble truth” was rather clumsily introduced into the text. Now, that comes as a bit of a revelation, frankly, and a rather disturbing one. Norman concludes his analysis by saying: “The earliest form of [the Buddha’s first] discourse did not include the words ‘noble truth.’” That’s equivalent to saying: “In the original teaching the doctrine that people associate most fundamentally with Buddhism simply wasn’t there.”

Another example is the use of the word “truth” itself. I’m not suggesting the Buddha didn’t use the word. He did. But apart from in the expression “four noble truths,” the word “truth” in most cases refers to the virtue of speaking truthfully, being honest, having integrity in one’s life. We find this usage in the Ashokan edicts as well as in the Theravada doctrine of the perfections, one of which is sacca-parami: the perfection of truth. Here the word “truth” doesn’t refer to truth as a synonym for “reality,” it refers to truth as a virtue of speech. This supports my hypothesis that Buddhism did not start out as a truth-based metaphysics. In other words, to be awakened does not mean to understand the truth or nature of reality, which then frees you from ignorance, leaving you awakened. It may be more accurate to think of truth as truthfulness, or living a truthful life. It means to live in a certain way rather than to gain access to a privileged knowledge. So “four tasks,” as opposed to “four truths,” seem to me more appropriate. Truth is an act to be performed, not a fact to be known.

And the notion of ultimate and conventional truth? The famous doctrine of the two truths—conventional truth and ultimate truth—is not mentioned a single time in the early discourses. Yet it has become central to all forms of Buddhism that we know today. The first mention of the two truths appears to be in a text in the Abhidhamma called the Kathavatthu. Yet in one of the earliest canonical texts, the Atthakavagga, the Buddha is actually dismissive of those who claim to know the truth: “I do not say ‘this is true,’ which is what fools say to each other. They make out their own way to be true, therefore they regard their opponent as a fool.”

Yet the Buddha does get polemical when he debunks competing schools. Wouldn’t you consider, say, the truth of impermanence to be, well, a truth statement? It’s very tempting to say the Buddha rejects all other views and that his view is the correct one. You could, on the basis of the Brahmajala Sutta, in which the Buddha argues against prevailing views of the time, arrive at that conclusion, but that would be contradicted, particularly in texts like the Atthakavagga.

I don’t see why a dogmatic opinion, just because it is claimed to be Buddhist, has any particular advantage over any other such opinion. Consider the 14 questions in the Majjhima Nikaya that the Buddha refuses to answer: Is the world eternal or not? Is the soul identical with the body or not? Does the Tathagata [epithet for the Buddha] exist after death? And so on. These are all dogmatic propositions. And it’s not that there are only 14 such propositions; the ones he lists are simply examples of a particular style of thinking that one needs to avoid if one wants to practice the dharma. Otherwise, one could easily slip into the trap of thinking that the aim of the dharma is to arrive at a correct set of opinions about the nature of reality. Buddhism certainly has invested a lot of energy in doing that, but I think it actually runs against the spirit of his refusal to even get drawn into a discussion about such things. In another verse in the Atthakavagga, the Buddha says, “Wrongminded people voice opinions and truth-minded people voice opinions too.” But when an opinion is uttered, he concludes, “The sage is not drawn in.” Now that’s found in a text the antiquity of which is accepted by Buddhist and modern scholars alike. But it flies in the face of a great deal of what has come to be accepted Buddhist orthodoxy.

Related: Dropping the Bodhisattva Gods 

Do you see belief playing any role in Buddhist practice? Well, I think you first need to differentiate between what we might call Belief with a big B and belief with a little b. “Big B” beliefs assent to certain metaphysical dogmas, like “Craving is the origin of suffering.” This is not something you can conclusively either prove or disprove; it may be supported by certain experiences but it is ultimately a matter of faith. You’re staking a metaphysical claim for yourself. Belief with a small b, on the other hand, is more like a working hypothesis. In that sense, it’s a more scientific approach: “Maybe we could look at the world this way. Let’s see if it would be useful to consider it from this angle.” The question is not “Is this true?” so much as “Does this enable the lives of oneself and others to flourish more fully?”

We can think of this in terms of the American Pragmatic tradition, which also rejects the traditional notion of truth as “correspondence.” From William James on, pragmatists have understood truth not in terms of statements that correspond to the nature of reality but in terms of whether or not they lead to greater benefit in the quality of life. For example, “conditioned things are impermanent.” That’s a working hypothesis. Does it actually improve and enhance the quality of my life to train myself to see things that way as opposed to looking for something permanent? Does it loosen me up? Does it free me from restrictive attachments and fears that block the creative flourishing of life? Does it enable me to become a more ethical, compassionate, and wise person?

You write that at some point Buddhist schools seemed to have veered away from the original teachings. Can you say something about that? I personally believe that is the case. Like any living tradition, Buddhism has to survive in a particular milieu. And Buddhism had to survive in the milieu of competing religious truth claims coming from the Brahmins, Jains, and others, and it adjusted itself accordingly. It may have seemed at the time to be an entirely natural and necessary development. And it could well have been that figures or ideas in the early community were already inclining that way anyway.

Yet you identify in the early Chan tradition a very different impulse. What the Chan (Zen/Son) tradition did was to reject the complex metaphysics that had built up over the centuries in Buddhist thought. It returned to the primacy of responding to the core questions of life itself. So when you read Linji [Japanese, Rinzai, d. 867], for example, you find him saying things that are far more provocative and outrageous than anything in my mildmannered prose. In the course of writing this book, I became aware of the great extent to which I am indebted to the Chan approach—and particularly the Son form that I learned in Korea. It’s far more about a provocation to question deeply what this life is about and to notice the ways in which we keep ourselves stuck in certain views and opinions. Orthodox Buddhism is treated very harshly in some of these texts.

Yet when we read these statements today, because they’re Chan records, we treat them with an awed reverence, which we wouldn’t accord similar statements not endorsed by centuries of tradition. But you have to note their incredibly radical nature. You’ll find this also in the writings of the mahasiddhas, the founders of the Vajrayana tradition. Tilopa, for example, uses exactly the same sort of shock tactics as the Chan masters.

Buddhist tradition has undergone many periods of ossification. It then reaches a point where the tension is just too great to sustain any longer and it snaps. These moments go on to produce figures such as Linji and Tilopa. I suspect we may be at a comparable phase in the emergence of Buddhism for our time, where some sort of rupture seems to be in the offing.

Early in the book you mention that you are running the risk of arrogance . . . That’s right. I fully understand this risk. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night feeling very anxious about what I’m doing.

You mention that earlier schools were “wearing glasses” when they interpreted the teachings. You acknowledge that you’re wearing glasses, too. You describe yourself as a “white European male from Scotland, living in a village near Bordeaux, a middle-class intellectual writer and teacher, liberal and green in politics, a secular Buddhist who spends a lot of time narrating, editing, and worrying about the story in my head.” [Laughs.]

To what extent, say, has Protestant culture likewise shaped your understanding of the canon? I fully admit that my reading of Buddhism is informed by the Protestant tradition. We often forget that the word Protestant comes from the word protest. Martin Luther, for example, got to a point where he could no longer tolerate the institutions and the dogmas of the Catholic Church. He saw it full of corruption—you know, the selling of indulgences and all these things—the commercialization, the commodification, the excessive power of the priest as an intercessionary between you and God. Nagarjuna, Linji, Tilopa—these are all Luthertype figures. They belong to a lineage of protest against rigidification, institutionalization, and dogma. Something I perhaps don’t develop enough in After Buddhism is the idea that every claim to truth is also a claim to power. If I claim that my teacher has access to ultimate truth in a direct, nonconceptual way, then that is not just a neutral description of that person’s knowledge. It’s also what gives that person authority over others. As Francis Bacon is reputed to have said, “Knowledge is power.” In other words, a critique of certain orthodox ideas is implicitly a critique of certain structures of power. I admit that that’s what I’m doing. It’s what Luther did and Linji did. In both cases, they are saying: “Look, we need to recover the ordinary person’s unmediated relationship with the core questions and values of their life.”

You do focus on ordinary, sometimes marginal, figures from the canon in your book. Yes. By focusing on nonordained “laypeople” in the early discourses, I’m trying to shift the emphasis away from the detached, celibate arahant, who has become the ideal of perfection that every good Buddhist should emulate. There is evidence in these early texts to show that it wasn’t just the monks who were getting enlightened. It wasn’t just the monks who were doing the teaching. It wasn’t just the monks who were doing the practice.

Why is the historicity of the Buddha’s story important to you? Why does there need to be a factual basis to your reading, and why do you emphasize it? I would find it very difficult to relate to this tradition if I believed that the story of Gotama was just a devout fiction concocted long after the Buddha’s death. Of course, you could argue that if the dharma is a practice to transform and improve the quality of your life and lead you to awakening, then what does it matter if the Buddha really existed or not? 

Yet as a practitioner, I find that these texts, for me, serve as a partner in an ongoing conversation. I don’t consider them coldly and objectively but rather value them in terms of how they speak to my condition today. I find that the voice I listen to has more authority if it comes from a figure who walked on this earth rather than simply being a voice that’s put in the mouth of someone who could just as well be a character in a novel. 

You write that you require of the Buddha that he be more than a mere cypher—he’s a person who must navigate his world much like anyone else. Yet you also require that he be more than merely human. What do you mean? If you reduce the Buddha to a person who’s basically not much different from you or me, then he ceases to function as a figure who embodies our aspirations. The power of the Buddha’s teaching is that he has overcome a great deal of what causes us, as fallible humans, to feel limited, constrained, unfulfilled, and stuck. The whole metaphor of freedom— liberation—implies that the voice we hear in these texts is one that’s coming from a place that is no longer locked into the inertia of habit. On the other hand, if you make the Buddha too perfect, you lose his humanity. I think this is what has happened in most Buddhist traditions. The Buddha has become impossibly perfect and remote. He no longer functions as a model on which one might realistically base one’s own aspirations in life. 

I think it’s fair to say you’re a central figure—if not the central figure—in the Secular Buddhism movement. Can you define Secular Buddhism? Well, I think it’s a Buddhism that is primarily concerned with two things: the personal and collective suffering of this world or this age (saeculum), and the means to respond fully to such suffering. That doesn’t mean that it is only concerned with our selfish interests here and now. That would be a misreading. Because, frankly, the only thing about which we have certainty is that life—human and all other forms—has emerged on this little planet. This might be the only shot beings will ever have, and considering climate change and other challenges, we’re becoming increasingly aware of the fragile and tentative nature of such life. Secular Buddhists maintain that this should be the sole focus of our wisdom and compassion. They are agnostic about supernatural truth claims. The challenge is to find ways to respond to the suffering of this world, both now and in terms of how we leave it for those who follow us after our death. That, to me, is an entirely adequate frame for a complete commitment to a way of life founded on the dharma and dedicated to all living beings. In a nutshell, this is how I would see the ethos of Secular Buddhism. 

This book seems to be a culmination of 40 years of writing about the dharma. Do you see your writing as a practice? I see my writing as a running commentary to my ongoing inquiry into what the dharma is about. And not only what it’s about in an abstract sense, but what it’s about for people living in today’s world. In that sense I find writing to be a practice, and the books are the product of that practice. It’s only in retrospect, having completed this book, that I can see how it joins together threads that I’ve been following for a long time. With the completion of each book, I have come to trust that it will lead me to whatever project follows next. But I have no grand plan that aspires to some final outcome. What I have found to be different with After Buddhism is that when I finally got to the end I realized that I couldn’t encompass it all in my mind. It was as though I’d written something that exceeded my capacity to grasp what it was about. That feeling still persists; it is a very strange sensation.

♦

Join Stephen and Martine Batchelor in Secular Dharma, a six-week online course which lays out a new vision for understanding and practicing dharma in the contemporary world.

The post After Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Something called “Buddhism” has certainly been growing in the Western world during the last few decades. Surveys on both sides of the Atlantic—the Pew Survey in the US and the recent census for England and Wales in the UK—indicate a rate of growth second only to Islam. Yet, I must admit, I felt a little uneasy about this picture of robust health. Mixing effortlessly into our culture, will Buddhism, a two-and-a-half-millennia-old system of philosophy and contemplative practice, be capable of challenging that culture? Will the resultant mixture be conducive to awakening? It was with such thoughts that I accepted the invitation from my friend Lama Surya Das to attend an informal gathering of dharma teachers held in New York City on November 18, 2013. The venue was the New York Insight Center, where we were warmly welcomed by resident teacher Gina Sharpe. The format was no format—a sharing of experiences, observations, and concerns. About 15 people drawn from such traditions as Theravada, Zen, and Vajrayana were present. Among them were well-known American teachers Jack Kornfield, Nancy Mujo Baker, Roshi Enkyo, Shinzen Young, and Tulku Sherdor.

It was a good day. Many topics came up, ranging from the impact of new technologies on spiritual life to the question of whether new forms of pedagogy would be required. Most of the discussion, however, circled around the seemingly competing demands of innovative adaptation versus preservation—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. At times the group seemed to divide into two parties corresponding to the weight given to each side of this semi-subterranean debate.

Related: Taking Vows (and Buddhism) Seriously 

I was left wondering if I had caught a glimpse of the face of a new Buddhism slouching westward to be born. However, I wasn’t sure whether my Tibetan teachers would recognize it, or even whether it was the dharma at all. Hearing how some believe that Buddhism has no ethics, that science will likely be able to engineer enlightenment neurologically, and that the stages of the path toward (as well as the actual signs of) buddhahood were outdated myths, convinced me that things have changed—and not necessarily in a positive way—since I found the dharma back in the 60s. It also made me suspect that, if we so crave Buddhism with a Western face, we might end up with a Buddhism that is merely a mirror image of ourselves and our present culture, a hybrid of superannuated Protestantism and narcissism marketed by Spirituality Inc. for upscale liberals.

One might say the principal spiritual feature of Buddhism’s history up until now has been the transmission of a body of doctrines, contemplative methods, and organizational forms. While the exact constituents of this transmission vary somewhat from tradition to tradition, in Tibetan or Vajrayana Buddhism the key mechanism for transmission is the relationship between teacher and student, between the holder and the recipient of knowledge. It is through this nexus that initiations, transmissions, and oral instructions—the three principal forms of Vajrayana teachings, which we may define as a collection of methods designed to bring about a transformation of the psyche—are passed from one generation to the next. Such an emphasis on transmission from the master might lead one to conclude that a rigid conservatism or traditionalism must necessarily follow. But since the knowledge of the tradition—its repertoire of spiritual methods—is transmitted in a living form from person to person, the idea of a static, unchanging body of knowledge is mistaken.

One can see this illustrated in the lives of the early Kagyu and Sakya masters in medieval Tibet. As a link in the chain of transmission, each successive master had to re-create the teachings in the context of his or her own contemplative experience and personal and social circumstances. The first Tibetan in the nascent Kagyu tradition, Marpa, was a family man, gentleman farmer, and translator that had to assimilate the teachings of his masters Naropa and Maitripa. Their knowledge was drawn from a combination of the highly refined monastic university system of Buddhist India and the wildly unconventional customs of tantric yogins, two milieus worlds away from his own. There also persisted a striking difference between the lifestyles of the autocratic Marpa and his principal disciple Milarepa, a penitent sorcerer turned ascetic. Yet Milarepa, like Marpa, was able to utilize his master’s teachings to attain the pinnacle of spiritual achievement.

A similar pattern of fluid and responsive transmission is equally evident in the early Sakya tradition. The transmission from the lineage’s spiritual antecedents of Indian tantric yogins like Virupa through its first three masters in Tibet, lay practitioners all, reached its settled form with Sakya Pandita, who successfully blended the scholarly and the contemplative, the monastic and the tantric.

Related: The Myth of Progress

It’s instructive to reach back to these examples of earlier cross-cultural transmissions to guide us now in our not-so-dissimilar situation. Indeed, it cannot be mere coincidence that Sakya Pandita, in order to preserve the liberating force of the teachings, devoted much of his energies to disentangling 13th-century Buddhism from ungrounded and maladroit Tibetan adaptations. Educated by both his uncle Drakpa Gyaltsen and some of the last generation of Indian Buddhist masters, Sakya Pandita was able to subject contemporary Tibetan forms of Buddhism to a critical scrutiny that could discern those spurious adaptations that accorded neither with major textual and contemplative transmissions from India nor with reason. One can safely assume that a Buddhism stripped of ethics, one reduced to mere mindfulness, recast as materialism or one in which enlightenment becomes a fleeting psychological state, would not have passed Sakya Pandita’s test of acceptable innovation. Neither should they ours.

So, to return to the seemingly irreconcilable claims of adaptation and continuity that echoed through that gathering in Manhattan, maybe we do not need to choose one over the other in the development of Buddhism in the West. As we have seen, adaptation and continuity were both evident in the transmission of Buddhism from India to Tibet. The element of continuity endowed the new Tibetan schools with the resources and strengths accumulated by Indian Buddhism over one and a half millennia; yet, at the same time, the element of innovation endowed the traditions with flexibility to respond to their new cultural settings and, in effect, be reworked by masters who were both grounded in the central concerns of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and subtle enough in their perceptions of Tibetan realities to present the traditions felicitously. Our first task, then, as practitioners who wish buddhadharma to prosper in the West, is to receive and master the inheritance of dharma. We have not yet done so, but we have made a start.

Thus, if the question is adaptation or continuity, the answer is both, just as it was in India and Tibet, so it has to be here, whether in Los Angeles or London, New York, or Paris.

[This story was first published in 2013]

The post Buddhism with a Western Face appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.