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by Stephen
Batchelor
In Buddhism in America, Brian D. Hotchkiss, ed.,
Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1998
What I want to talk about today is an idea called
deep agnosticism and this is the outcome of many years of reflection. I
certainly don’t see it as some kind of position, certainly not a final or
dogmatic position, but, in a purely personal sense, a step along the way
to trying to understand what my own relationship is with the teachings of
the Buddha as a European / Westerner I discover as I grow older a
reconnection with the roots of my own culture. Maybe many of us of my
generation were drawn to Buddhism as a kind of act of defiance, a kind of
rebelliousness against what we viscerally disliked—often for rather naive,
adolescent, and idealistic reasons—in our own culture and we saw Buddhism,
or at least I saw Buddhism, as a kind of vindication of that dissent.
But as the years have gone by I’ve found that this
denial of one’s roots, this denial of one’s cultural upbringing, is not
actually possible to sustain. If one seeks to sustain it, one often ends
up as a kind of mock Tibetan or pseudo-Japanese. Although I have tried to
do that on occasion, dressing up in all of the appropriate regalia, more
than that I feel it to be still seeking to find an identity outside that
of my own culture. It’s, as Freud might say impossible to repress these
things. They simply come out in other ways.
What I found in myself though, when I say returning
to my cultural roots, is not some rediscovery of Christianity. In fact, I
was brought up outside an explicitly Christian culture. I never went to
church. I was excused by my family from attendance at religious assemblies
at school and so on. What I reconnect with, therefore, is not what we
would call the religious traditions of the West, but rather the
humanistic, secular, agnostic culture, which I feel a very very deep
sympathy with. And I feel that this attempt to create dialogues between
Buddhism and the West often seems to assume the essentially religious
nature of such a dialogue. So we have Christian-Buddhist dialogs and so
on. So in recovering my roots, I’m also recovering, as it were, a
nonreligious identity which finds itself at odds with much of how Buddhism
is implicitly or explicitly presented as a religion.
Now, of all the terms I’ve just listed— “humanist,”
“secularist,” “agnostic,” and so on—the term agnostic seems to me the vein
with the greatest possibility to mine something out. Most of you are
probably unaware that the term is only very recently coined. It didn’t
exist before about 1888 and it was coined by a man called Thomas Huxley,
T. H. Huxley the biologist, who was a very staunch defender of Darwin in
the latter part of the nineteenth century and a very radical critic of the
church and religion. Also, we note that Huxley coined this term somewhat
as a joke, tongue-in-cheek.
He belonged to a philosophical circle in London and
found that he was unable to identify as all the other members of the
circle were able, with an ism, with an identity—as a Christian, as a
materialist, as a whatever, a thingamabob. So he thought about this and
said, Well, what generic term would best describe where I stand? And he
came up with the term agnostic, “in order that,” he rather jokingly says
in his essay on the subject, “I could have a tail like all the other
foxes.” So we don’t want to take this term agnosticism too seriously.
There’s already an irony at the beginnings of its usage.
Of course, we can trace historically way before
Huxley something that we might now call an agnostic position. It would go
back, in fact, to the Greek Protagoras, I think is how it’s normally
traced, and it would go through people like David Hume and so on. But
Huxley is the person who coined the term.
Now, once he’d somewhat jokingly come up with this
idea, he recognized, Ah, this seems to actually have some mileage. And he
started to define it, to really look into what it meant for him. Agnosis
is constructed from the Greek—"not knowing,” “not know,” a gnosis—which
Huxley contrasted to gnosis, not in the sense of the early Gnostics, but
gnosis in the sense of those traditions that claimed that they have some
kind of privileged knowledge and then declaim that as their religion or
their philosophical position.
Now, interestingly Huxley describes agnosticism as
being as demanding as any religious, philosophical, or moral creed. In
other words, it requires the same degree of commitment, the same degree of
integrity to take that kind of stance. But he distinguishes it from a
creed and describes it as a method. The kind of method he had in mind in
many ways underpins the kind of attitude that would underpin what he saw
as the scientific approach. He saw it in two ways: On the one hand, this
method requires taking one’s reason as far as it will go; and on the other
hand, it requires not accepting something as true unless it can somehow be
demonstrated. In other words, it’s a commitment to reason but also a
refusal to accept anything as true unless it is somehow demonstrable in
one’s own experience, either empirically (I think that’s probably what he
had in mind), or perhaps experientially.
Here we have very clear parallels with many
elements of the Buddhist tradition. When I was training as a Tibetan
Buddhist monk, my practice was actually very much about the cultivation of
rational inquiry. One of the great sort of unacknowledged riches in the
Buddhist tradition is that tradition of rational investigation, the
tradition of logic, of epistemology, which, for many Buddhists,
immediately evokes, “Uuaah!” But I think the often rather romantic,
anti-intellectual perception of Buddhism is one that then conceals from us
the richness of its own rational traditions and the power of ideas and
reason. And of course, whether or not that commitment to reason is found
in all Buddhist traditions, nonetheless the second criterion of Huxley—not
to accept something as true unless it’s demonstrable—is certainly the case
in all Buddhist traditions and often that is what is appealing to people
about the Buddhist path, that it presents a process of practice that
claims to result in demonstrable changes in one’s own life, in one’s
understanding, something that one can actually witness and experience for
oneself. It’s demonstrable.
Huxley even described agnosticism as the agnostic
faith, in other words, giving the kind of seriousness and commitment that
you would normally reserve for religion. It’s also striking that, within
fifteen years of Huxley coining the term agnosticism, it was already being
applied to Buddhism. Now, we have to put that into an historical
perspective. The first Englishman, effectively the first European, to
become a Buddhist monk, a bhikkhu, was a man called Allan Bennett. He was
actually a close colleague of a somewhat notorious figure called Aleister
Crowley who described Bennett as “the kindest man I have ever known.”
Bennett left for Burma, where he became a bhikkhu in 1901, and then he
took the name Ananda Metleya. Bennett was the first European to take the
robe in the whole of Buddhist history. Remember that that’s 2,450 years,
at that point, to actually engage with a non-European or let’s say
non-Middle East-based tradition. That is a very very important break with
this conviction of Europe to embody the supreme philosophical, rational,
and cultural tradition of the world; and this was still in a time when
colonialism was at its peak. So it’s a very radical break. In one of the
very first Buddhist magazines ever issued in English, Bennett spoke of
Buddhism in 1905 as “exactly coincidental in its fundamental ideas with
the modern agnostic philosophy of the West”.
Now, why would this young man have adopted this
term? I suspect that one of the key sources he would have drawn on would
be the Culomolunkya Sutta in the Pali canon. It’s number 63 in the
Majjhimanikaya. The Buddha is speaking:
Suppose, Malyunkyaputta, a man were wounded by an arrow thickly smeared
with poison, and his friends and companions brought a surgeon to treat
him. The man would say,” I will not let the surgeon pull out the arrow
until I know the name and the clan of the man who wounded me, whether the
bow that wounded me was a longbow or a crossbow, whether the arrow that
wounded me was hoof-tipped or curved or barbed.” And all this would still
not be known to that man and meanwhile he would die. So too,
Malyunkyaputta, if anyone should say, “I will not lead the noble life
under the Buddha until the Buddha declares to me whether the world is
eternal or not eternal, finite or infinite, whether the soul is the same
as or different from the body, whether or not an awakened one continues or
ceases to exist after death.” That would still remain undeclared by the
Buddha and meanwhile that person would die.
What’s striking about this passage is it brings
together two key features of the Pali tradition. On the one hand, the
primarily pragmatic nature of the Buddhist practice, of the Buddhist path:
It’s about doing something to resolve a dilemma that’s with you here and
now. That’s the primary concern, praxis. Secondly it illustrates a very
distinct agnostic bent. In other words, I think a fairly reasonable
interpretation of that passage would be that what the Buddha was concerned
with was not the kinds of questions that would generally fall under the
heading of religious belief: Where did the universe come from? Where is it
going? What happens to the Buddha after death? Are the mind and the body
the same or different?
As Buddhist tradition has developed, it’s
interesting to note that the extent to which it becomes a religious
institution is that degree to which answers to these questions tend to be
supplied. One will find in many of the later Buddhist traditions, and even
the later versions of the earlier traditions, quite clear views on many of
these unanswered questions. It seems to me that as we look at Buddhism
historically we find that it continuously loses its agnostic dimension by
becoming institutionalized as a religion, with all the usual dogmatic
systems of belief that religions have.
This is actually not an idea of my own. This comes
from a very good study by a man called Trevor Ling, who talks of Buddhism
as actually degrading into a religion from a civilization. I would argue
rather than Buddhism initially being a civilization, it was a culture that
embraced all elements of human life, which I think is already very
implicit in the structure of the eightfold path. But as the vitality of
that tradition declines, or when it becomes coopted, often by secular
powers, political powers, it tends to become institutionalized as what we
would describe as a religion. So if you go to any Asian country today you
will certainly find religion. If you go to a temple in Bangkok or in Lhasa
or in Kyoto, you will find something that is quite definitely religious.
There’s devotion, there are priests, belief systems, dogmas, etc.
This, of course, has led to Buddhism, as it comes
into the West being automatically regarded as a religion. The very term
Buddhism which, remember, is a Western concoction—there’s not really any
exact Asian term that corresponds to the English term Buddhism, that I
know of—the -ism word automatically puts it into a camp of a belief system
of some kind: a position, a stance, a view. It suggests that it’s a creed
to be lined up alongside other creeds. It’s another set of beliefs about
the nature of reality that we cannot really know by other means than
through faith. What that identification of Buddhism as a religion does is
to distort and to obscure the encounter of the Dharma with secular
culture.
The word secular I’ve noticed, in many Buddhist
writings is often used quite spontaneously as a negative term. “In this
materialist, secular world,” for example. It’s difficult to find secular
being used in a positive sense. But what does secular mean? The word
literally goes back to the root, meaning “of this world.” Secular has to
do with a concern for the matters of this world. That would apply to
someone who is simply concerned with maximizing greed and pleasure, true.
But surely it would also apply to someone who, let’s say is committed to
social justice in just as much the same way.
As a Tibetan monk. I was taught for many many years
that if I practiced for the sake of this world, I would not actually be
practicing the Dharma. If you crave this world, this life, you are not a
Dharma person. You’re not really doing the right thing. Now, there is a
sense in which one can see that as a perfectly legitimate point of view,
but it does tend to postpone any kind of action or any kind of practice
that would be concerned primarily with the state of the world we find
ourselves in.
Another problem is that the word agnostic also has
lost its potency. People often confuse agnostic with atheist. An “agnostic
atheist,” you often hear in the same breath. When people say they’re
agnostic—even if they know that it means that they do not claim to know
certain things—very often today that goes hand in hand with an attitude of
actually not caring about certain things. It’s a kind of careless: ”I
don’t care. I don’t really want to know. I don’t know what to think about
those sort of things.” It’s a dismissive denial in some way.
So modern agnosticism has kind of degraded into a
skepticism, a cynicism that we find so much in the world today. It’s
certainly lost the kind of confidence, what Huxley called the “faith,”
that underpinned it initially. At the same time, we find that the agnostic
dimension in Buddhism has also been somewhat lost, that that cutting edge
you find in the Pali discourses, you find in Madhyamika philosophy, you
find in the Zen koans, those things too have lapsed into kinds of
philosophies or forms of meditation, but that radical, cutting edge is
gone.
Now, it seems to me that an agnostic Buddhist would
not regard the Dharma as a source from which we can derive answers to the
questions of where the universe is going, where the universe came from,
the nature of the universe, the difference between the mind and the body
and so on. In this sense, an agnostic Buddhist would not be a believer
with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal
phenomena and in this sense would not be religious.
I found recently that saying to myself, “I’m not a
religious person,” has a curiously liberating effect. It’s liberating in
my own case, perhaps, because at least it’s truthful. I think I spent a
lot of time pretending to be religious and I really don’t believe that one
has to be religious or a religious person to practice the Dharma. One of
the features about religion is that it has very much to do with providing
metaphors of consolation. Religions offer a consolation in the face of
birth and death by offering the promise of survival after physical death,
offering some sense of reward if one behaves in a certain way; and one
finds this in Christianity as much as in Buddhism. They offer a kind of
psychological security that’s achieved by making an act of faith.
Now, I wouldn’t want to be so narrow-minded as to
exclude the consolatory dimension of Buddhism. It certainly in a social
and a cultural sense in Asia and also in the West, provides that, and
that’s a perfectly good thing. But I’m personally not interested in that.
To me, the Buddhist teachings are not consolatory—they’re confrontative.
They’re not about telling us stories that appease our anguish, but they’re
about telling us truths. It’s about truth telling. It’s not about painting
a more attractive picture of life somewhere else. And they start, of
course, with the primary recognition: Life is painful; there is suffering;
there is duhkha. That’s where the business begins, not with the promise of
some salvation and an afterlife.
But I think we need to take this one step further.
This kind of agnosticism is not based on disinterest. It’s not based on
saying, “I just don’t really care about the great matter of birth and
death.” It’s recognizing that, I do not know in a very passionate way in a
passionate sense, where, perhaps we find our deepest integrity as human
beings. So it’s not just something that one would periodically reflect
upon, but really something that one brings to heart, that I do not really
know where I did come from. I do not really know where I am going. I do
not really know what will happen after death. The only honest stance I can
take toward the doctrine of rebirth is to say (just do not know, and to
rest in this do not know or, as Seung Sahn calls it, this “don’t-know
mind.” It’s a very different order of don’t know from the more superficial
skepticism or cynicism of much modern agnosticism.
It’s this process of stripping away consolatory
illusions by holding true to this kind of not knowing that leads to what I
would call deep agnosticism. For me, Buddhism is the practice of deep
agnosticism. Let’s now look at what we mean here by “deep.” To me this is
getting right to the heart of what Dharma practice might be about. Let me
illustrate this with the very first koan of the Blue Cliff Record (and
this is from the Cleary translation):
Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, “What is the
highest meaning of the holy truths?” Bodhidharma said, “Empty. No
holiness.” The emperor said, “Who’s facing me?” Bodhidharma replied,”
don’t know.”
I don’t think it’s accidental that that’s the first
case in what is one of the major collections of koans in China and, as you
can see, it much confirms the kind of don’t know. But this kind of don’t
know brings the notion of agnosticism down to another depth, what we might
call a contemplative or a meditative depth. Deep agnostic metaphors are
also found in such terms in Ch’an Zen as wu shin, no mind; wu nien, no
thought. Again, it’s easy to think that no mind, no thought is about sort
of blanking out but, as any Zen teacher will tell you, that’s nonsense.
It’s far more challenging than that. lt’s about literally getting down to
our primary state as beings who do not know.
It’s also interesting that we can take this not
knowing as a link, a bridge between the Zen tradition and the Indo-Tibetan
Mahayana tradition of the Madhyamika philosophy. I don’t know is likewise
suggestive of no self and emptiness. So if we apply this notion of don’t
know to Bodhidharma’s case, by honestly inquiring into his self-identity,
Bodhidharma could perhaps find nothing he could ultimately take hold of
and say “Yes, that’s me. There it is. I’ve got it. I’ve realized it.”
Instead, he discovers the ultimate unfindability of himself, and by
implication the ultimate unfindability of everything and everyone else as
well.
This gives us a clue. It’s not that there’s
literally don’t-know mind. If you try to understand the nature of anything
in the deepest sense, you will not be able to arrive at any fixed view
that defines it as this or that, as some kind of essence, as some kind of
substance, as some kind of thing. In his public lectures, the Dalai Lama
uses a quaint expression in colloquial Tibetan, which literally means
“there is no finger-pointing place” or, as we would say in English, there
is nothing you can put your finger on. This doesn’t imply that the thing
in question doesn’t exist at all, it simply exposes the fallacy of a
deeply felt, almost instinctive assumption that our self or our mind or
anything else must be secured in some kind of permanent,
quasi-metaphysical base. So if we follow the analysis of Madhyamika
philosophy into inquiring into the nature of self, the nature of mind, or
anything, we find that ultimately there’s nothing we can point to and say:
That is what the thing really is. There is no “nugget” of essential
identity or self-identity to which a person or a flower anyone, or
anything, is reducible.
And yet, this is not a denial of the uniqueness of
a person, or the uniqueness of a flower or the uniqueness of anything. The
uniqueness of things is totally compatible with the idea of their
emptiness, of their lacking some kind of self-nature. What this insight
into the unfindability of something in an ultimate sense reveals is that
things are what they are, people are who they are. I am who I am. Not
because there’s something in me, a kind of blueprint or code, an essence
of any kind, but that things are what they are in their unique way because
of the unrepeatable matrix of contingencies, conditions, causes,
conceptual, linguistic frameworks. My uniqueness is because of the unique
trajectory of my choices of my life in contradistinction to the unique
trajectory of yours.
This is just another way of saying how emptiness
and interdependence are the same. Things are empty because they are
complex, because they are what they are out of a set of myriad
relationships. And this is the central philosophic truth of Buddhism-not
just a philosophical truth, but something that through meditation practice
can be demonstrated. One can realize that.
Whether we follow the Tibetan analytical approach
or the approach of asking a Zen koan such as, What is this? this kind of
meditative inquiry leads to a mind that becomes more still and clear. In
other words, this kind of investigation is a meditative or a contemplative
investigation. This deep agnosticism is not just a stance, but it is an
attitude that can be cultivated through practice, through stilling and
focusing the mind on the question and it is another commonality between
Tibetan and Zen analysis. It’s sometimes assumed that as the mind becomes
more still and clear then the nature of reality becomes somehow more
self-evident, more obvious, more clear cut, but that doesn’t seem to be
the case. In fact, because it seems the more our experience of life
becomes vivid and clear it also becomes more mysterious and perplexing. We
must have had this experience just by doing a simple kind of awareness
practice, just sitting still, watching the breath and listening to sounds
or watching the play of light on a wall in front of you. As the mind
becomes still, it might be a bit boring initially but one passes through
that boredom into an encounter with the world in an increasingly
unfamiliar way. Let’s face it, we define our fixed sense of self by
constructing a world that appears to reflect and to confirm that static
center of our own identity. If we express this in more emotional language,
we end up constructing psychologically a reality in which we can be bored,
and that, I think, is a very tragic thing. We live in this utterly
extraordinary world that has taken billions of years to evolve, enormously
complex, profoundly beautiful, and yet we find ourselves sifting around
not knowing what to do. We find ourselves feeling bored, tired, waiting
for something exciting to happen, like the next episode of our favorite
soap opera. We fail to encounter the utterly astonishing nature of our
experience and as soon as we witness our life as astonishing, we
immediately find ourselves back with a world that poses a question—the
world is a question. It is something that we are unable to contain within
the categories and confines of a world that would be designed for the
security of my ego.
So as one’s perplexity and questioning become
stabilized in the stillness of meditation, one comes to inhabit a world
that is mysterious, and in a very real sense, magical, in the lived sense,
not in some sort of ideological sense.
But this is not where the practice ends. Emptiness
is not the end of the process. That’s not what it’s about finally. That is
just a halfway point, because what we discover in this open, but
nonetheless ambiguous, space of not knowing, of perplexity of mystery of
emptiness, of astonishment, is we also discover the origins of imagination
and creativity, two subjects which we rarely hear anything much about in
traditional Buddhism. I don’t even know if there is a word for imagination
in traditional Buddhist terms.
This leads us into another area. For me, one of the
great doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism is the notion of the three kayas, the
notion of the buddha bodies, the Dharmakaya, Sambhogakoya, and Nirmanakaya.
That points to that idea that the Buddha is not just someone who’s had an
incredible mystical experience, whose mind has become liberated from
craving, who’s totally there in the emptiness of reality. But the Buddha
is also this being who spontaneously and compassionately manifests and is
embodied in the world. (Nirmanakaya would be the technical word.)
If we go back to the traditional story of the
Buddha’s awakening, we have this strange period of about six weeks after
the awakening under the bodhi tree where the Buddha just sort of hangs out
around the tree and effectively hesitates. In the Pali texts it says that
he didn’t want to get involved in the vexation of teaching, in the
vexation of the world. And it takes a god—in this case, Brahma Sahampati—to
say basically, “Come on, Sunshine, there’s something to do out there.”
That prompted him then to get up and leave.
If we think about this process, it is quite
comparable to the process of artistic creation. When we’re faced with the
task of articulating a deep, intuitive vision, whether it be in words or
in clay or in paint, we might find ourselves in a very comparable state of
intense trepidation. This is something one finds (at least I’ve found very
much in my Zen training): When one really gets into the core of asking a
question like, What is this? one gets to a point of stillness; but at the
same time, one hits up against a tremendous resistance to pursue the
inquiry further .There’s something very threatening about asking questions
at that level of depth. Usually we become very prone to fantasy,
daydreams, drowsiness, and so on, and this perhaps is somewhat similar to
the experience a writer may have, when you’re trying to really communicate
something that’s important to you and all you have in front of you is a
blank sheet of paper or an empty computer screen. You so easily become
caught up in compulsions to tidy your desk, to clean up your books,
reorder them, do something you would never do like Hoover the room, dust
the room, whatever. Although that’s, in a sense, somewhat comical, it
points to how there is this reluctance to encounter an unknown and a
reluctance to encounter and to engage in expression, in creatively
generating something that has never quite been said or thought or imaged
in that way before. This is what creation is about—bringing into being
something that did not exist before. So creativity is that dimension of
ourselves that takes the risk of stating what has not yet been stated.
Of course, religious institutions are not terribly
keen on that. Religious institutions are very much about controlling the
imagination. The imagination is threatening. The imagination is a very
deep way of owning your own experience and articulating it in a way that
is true to that experience. So when we sit in meditation, we also sit on
the threshold of the imagination and I personally feel that the Buddha’s
genius lay in his imagination. I don’t swallow the kind of stereotyped
picture of the awakening or the enlightenment—that he was sitting beneath
this tree and then, all of a sudden, ko-pow! and the four noble truths
sort of appeared in letters of fire in the sky one, two, three, four.
Okay got it. I don’t honestly think we can put that into words. It seems
to me that the awakening did not actually become real until the Buddha had
to stammer it out to his former companions in Sarnath.
In other words, awakening is not a state.
Enlightenment is not a state. It’s not some kind of inward mystical event
in which everything suddenly becomes articulated for you. But rather it is
the first step in a process for which perhaps there is not an end. Now,
religious institutions like to think that they have got the end product.
If you listen to the polemic—you know, “the ultimate teaching of the
Buddha,” “the final teaching of the Buddha,” “the original teaching of the
Buddha,” ‘the quickest teaching of the Buddha,” etc—this is all about
laying claim to some kind of truth, which appears in definition to be
static. The task, then, of the tradition becomes that of preservation
rather than that of creation.
I think one of the great things that Western
consciousness can bring to the Buddhist tradition is historical awareness,
the recognition of historical contingency. The different Buddhist
traditions, different Buddhist expressions, are all contingent upon the
cultural, social, economic, political circumstances that prevailed at the
time that they were first stated. So from an historical perspective, the
wheel of the Dharma didn’t just turn once, twice, or three times depending
on your tradition, but it’s actually turning through time. It’s like a
wheel that’s moving along with the unfolding of history. It’s a process.
It’s something that’s continuously challenged by every new situation it
encounters.
We are in a situation that’s very different to that
of Asia, to any of the former situations in Asia, and we talk very much of
the creation of a Western Buddhism. Very dangerous idea. How much of that
is yet another attempt to freeze Buddhism into another religious,
dogmatic, institutional form?
[A man said that “there has been a tendency for
some traditions to look at other traditions in Buddhism and say, ‘No,
that’s not the real thing.”’ He went on to say “that what we are doing is
not really Buddhism anymore. It’s something else.” He asked Mr. Batchelor
if his intent was to suggest that what has been called “Buddhism,” be it
in India, Tibet, China, Japan, and other places, is now “something else
[we’re calling] ‘agnosticism.”’]
Stephen Batchelor: It’s clearly differentiable from
agnosticism. That’s why I would preface it with “deep.” And certainly it’s
got nothing to do with critiquing any particular tradition of practice. I
guess it has to do with what we might call samma dittthi [Pali or yangdag
pa’i tawa [Tibetan} usually horribly translated as ‘right view.””
Authentic vision,” perhaps. It’s the basic sort of weltanschaung, or basic
sort of paradigm within which we understand, interpret, and make sense of
the practice. It’s really that paradigm that shifts with different
cultures.
There are two dangers: One is that, if we’re too
loose in our adherence to the integrity of the Buddhist tradition, then
all these practices and philosophies and psychologies could easily just
get absorbed into other fields. So a bit of it could be drawn into
psychotherapy; a bit could be drawn into contemplative Christianity; a bit
might help postmodern philosophy etc. But the actual integrity of the
tradition is then dissolved, which clearly I wouldn’t want to do.
On the other hand, if we’re too rigidly adherent to
the Asian cultural forms, then the chances are that Buddhism will remain a
kind of marginal cultural artifact of interest to eccentric people like
us, but not really have much impact on the world in which we live. So it’s
about somehow finding a middle way between the two.
[The next question took the ideas discussed farther
positing that institutionalizing Buddhism gets static and that it’s a
constant tendency to want to freeze things. “I would say that aside from
the cultural tendencies, it’s a parallel, individualistic tendency to
freeze because [change is] so scary. It has to do with clinging. It has to
do with grasping.”]
Stephen Batchelor: Since Buddhism has as two of its
primary axioms “Everything changes” and “Nothing is self—nothing is
substantially frozen and real—it strikes me as paradoxical that the very
tradition that states that rarely applies those perceptions to itself. The
idea that the Karma Kagyu tradition changes or the Galukpa or the Soto Zen
traditions change is not really up for grabs, in a sort of metaphysical
way.
I think Buddhism has to be subjected to the very
critique that Buddhism applies to everything else, that’s it’s not some
thing. We like to think there’s some sort of thing, some sort of essential
Buddhism, that doesn’t change.
Let’s say we lined up in this room and put a
Tibetan Nyingma yogi here, a Japanese Pure Land priest here, and a Sri
Lankan bhikkhu here, and we ask them, What do you teach? I think we’d get
three very different answers. One of the great richnesses of Buddhism is
it’s fantastic diversity and yet what’s interesting is that each of those
traditions would actually be very reluctant to celebrate diversity.
Instead, diversity is seen as a kind of pyramidical structure. We’re at
the top and the other guys are okay they’re good, but they don’t quite
make the grade. To me, that betrays a certain commitment to essentialism,
a certain attachment to some sort of frozen image of who I am, of what the
tradition is. That is something we need to really question, I think,
because the whole identity of Buddhism is bound up in that issue.
[Pointing out that he perceived Mr. Batchelor to be
“dichotomizing” by using such phrases as “at odds,” a man remarked that an
important component of Buddhism for him “is the idea of oneness, of the
unity of everything.” He also mentioned that he would like to see develop
what one could call “Buddhist humanism,” which would “force us to take a
look at the humanistic aspects of Buddhism a little more closely.”]
Stephen Batchelor: I actually have some difficulty
with this term oneness. I’m not aware of any term, at least in Tibetan,
that corresponds to this and I don’t see that term valued and celebrated
as it often is in contemporary writings on Buddhism. The very notion of
interrelatedness and emptiness presupposes difference. You cannot have
relationship without difference. If everything were one, there could be no
relationship. So I think we need to be careful to be able to preserve a
valuing and a celebration of difference, and philosophically a necessity
of difference, without slipping into a kind of frozen dualism.
Buddhism is very critical of dualism, but dualism
is actually a denial of relationship. Dualism basically could be described
as, my relation to you or the world might be I’m one thing, that is
another thing, and ne’er the twain shall meet. We are separated from each
other. We are separated from the environment by an unbridgeable gulf.
There is total opposition.
Buddhism is not saying that we need to dissolve all
sense of difference and opposition and enter into a kind of mystical,
oceanic oneness in which all sense of differentiation is gone. That, as
far as I’m aware, is not the traditional Buddhist view. It’s far more
about replacing dualism with a kind of relational awareness. That rather
than me being utterly opposite and at odds with you, I stand always in a
relationship with you, even if that be a relationship of opposition or a
relationship of love. But that difference is what makes it possible.
Although I did mention at the beginning of my talk
my reconnection with the humanist tradition, I’m not sure that Buddhism is
humanist, in fact. I think a more comparable term would be something like
“sentient-beingist.’ ‘The Buddha always speaks of sattva—all sentient
beings. I think the Buddhist concern for the world is far more than a
concern for human life. It’s a concern for all that lives and breathes and
has consciousness and awareness, and perhaps beyond that, too. So although
the Buddhist tradition is a human tradition, created by human beings, it’s
a valuing of human potential— there’s absolutely no question of that—I’m
slightly nervous about identifying it with humanism.
[Another participant, further addressing issues of
carrying on Buddhist traditions in the West, noted that everything he has
read about Buddhism “was somehow transmitted down through somebody who was
‘within’ the traditional orthodox Buddhist religion. Everything I’ve
gotten, I’ve gotten out of that.” While he didn’t consider himself to be
part of any particular group or sect, “I do have a great deal of thanks
for those people who carry on those traditions.”]
Stephen Batchelor: The danger of seeking to move
toward some kind of Western or agnostic or humanistic Buddhism, or
whatever--is that that might feed into a kind of devaluing of Asian
cultures, which I think would be not the way to go. There’s also a danger,
of course, of identifying Buddhism with the Asian cultural force, but, on
the other hand, we could say that Buddhism has the great virtue of
spreading diverse cultural forms through the world. For many of us, what
we know of Tibetan culture, for example, or Japanese culture, comes
through our interest in Buddhism. That actually brings us into other
people’s realities. It brings us into other ways of aesthetic
appreciation. It introduces us to other ways of thinking about the world,
other forms of society and that’s immensely enriching.
I don’t actually like the idea of Western Buddhism.
I think it’s a horrible notion as well as a very outdated notion. It
presupposes West/East—again, a standard dualism and one that reflects, in
fact, a kind of imperial, colonial bias. Of course, it’s a purely
arbitrary distinction. Where do you draw the line? It may be useful as a
sort of generic generalization, but it potentially preserves a cultural
arrogance. Is there actually such a thing as an essential Buddhism that is
separate from these cultures? I don’t think there is.
The Dharma finds its form not because there’s some
essential dharma that then dresses up in Tibetan robes or Japanese robes.
What the Dharma is, in that historical instant, is that particular
manifestation, and it needs to be respected as such. I think it’s falling
into precisely the trap that Buddhism warns against if we think there’s
some kind of “essential dharma” hidden in there somewhere. Take off these
Tibetan robes and we’ll find it. That’s nonsense. It’s like the peeling of
the onion: You peel away the culture, there’s actually nothing there. Or
like the analysis of the self: I think I’m in here somewhere. I peel away
all the bits, there’s nothing there. So Buddhism is configured out of
cultural structures and that’s a much more complex and difficult way to
look at it than the often-repeated one about Buddhism inside culture,
outside. I don’t think it’s as simple as that.
Since I’ve sort of ceased practicing within the
Tibetan tradition, I’ve actually become much more engaged with Tibetan
politics, writing guidebooks to Tibet, and so on, which has led me to an
appreciation of Tibetan culture I probably didn’t have when I was actually
in the tradition.
[Participant: Using the example of pieces of paper
and computer screens being blank, you talked about our reluctance to
encounter things that we don’t know; to avoid them, Hoover them. What can
you say further about that in terms of getting past that? I do much better
with computer screens and pieces of paper. Can you just say more about
that and whatever thoughts you have about how to practice with that
reluctance or avoidance.]
Stephen Batchelor: For me, a lot of this has to do
with coming back again and again to the question, Why the hell am I
sitting here? What am I doing this for? It’s so easy when you adopt any
kind of practice that initially it can be inspirational, it can be
invigorating, it can be challenging, it can be provocative. But, like
anything human beings learn to do, it can so easily become mechanical and
routine. I think that’s actually in the bigger picture one of the ways in
which we deal with the real challenge of sitting, is to routineize
sitting, is to routineize practice, make it into a routine practice. And
this often leads to an experience of I don’t feel my meditation’s really
going anywhere anymore, or I don’t seem to be able to do anything about
these wandering fantasies and thoughts that I have. And if it’s likewise
about avoidance, if you notice you’re getting caught up in strategies of
evasion, it seems that in a weird way we come to the practice with a very
authentic question. And yet so easily that question becomes, as it were,
compromised or somehow shifted from a living question into a set of
theoretical inquiries about what emptiness means.
So to deal with avoidance, to deal with compulsive
distraction, to deal with routineization—to ask oneself why am I sitting
here? In the Tibetan tradition, a practice that I’ve always found
extremely helpful is the meditation on death. To sit there and to reflect
on the fact that the only thing that’s certain in life is that I’m going
to die. Everything else is uncertain, and that one certain thing that’s
going to happen could happen at any time. It’s totally uncertain as to
when it will occur and that paradox of certainty and uncertainty serves to
focus the mind extremely well. If we could really touch a felt sense of
the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its time, that, I think, can
reawaken an authenticity of the question of what our practice is really
about.
Again, that practice too, that reflection too, can
become routineized. You can’t get out of the routineizing loop, but it
seems to me a way of perhaps, you know, you’re halfway through a sitting,
perhaps, and you notice this kind of repetitive, habitual sort of thing
that’s set in, just stop—stop looking at the breath, asking a koan, and
just stop. Be aware of the fact that you’re sitting there and ask yourself
why. In other words, question. Keep the question at the heart of the thing
and then I think it’ll work.
[Opening what Mr. Batchelor called a subject for a
whole other lecture, a man asked how the concept of reincarnation fits
within the idea of deep agnosticism.]
Stephen Batchelor: That’s one thing I have a very
agnostic view about. I don’t personally believe that you have to hold any
belief in reincarnation to practice Buddhism. To me, reincarnation is a
very good example of a metaphor of consolation. Traditionally,
reincarnation is actually what you’re trying to escape from. It’s very
ironic that Westerners actually think that reincarnation is something to
look forward to, because it’s actually what the Buddha was trying to get
you out of. But, even if you see it in a very traditional Buddhist way,
nonetheless it is containing death within the confines of what the human
brain can imagine. It’s much more comforting to know that, when I die, I
might even go to Hell, but at least I’ll know where I’m going. But to me,
that denies death of its dignity. It denies death of its mystery. It
denies death as the profound unknown of our lives, to which we are
inexorably headed.
[“I feel that the presentation that you gave was a
magnificent presentation of the prajna side of Buddhism, the wisdom side
of Buddhism,” a participant said. What concerned this man, however, was
that he didn’t feel that cam passion, “the Mahayana balance, which is so
crucial to my love of Buddhism,” had been addressed here. He further
related compassion to the creative aspects of meditation, which Mr.
Batchelor had discussed.]
Agreeing this was a good point. Mr. Batchelor
elaborated.
The reference I did make to compassion was when I
said that the awakening only really happened when the Buddha stammered out
his understanding to others. That, of course, is the act of compassion. So
creation—bringing something into existence that has not existed before—is
bringing something into the world. One does not do that just for one’s own
egoistic satisfaction. As soon as I say something, or you say something,
or you write something, or I write something, or paint something, it
becomes public; it becomes instantiated in the shared world that we
inhabit together.
The agnostic dimension, I think, and the secular
dimension also, brings the attention back primarily to practice as a
response to the situation we live in now, with others, not to some future
life. That is very much about compassion. Had I gone on to develop my
ideas about community the kind of community that we would perhaps envisage
from this perspective, that would necessarily bring in forming the kinds
of relationships that would support a practice. So, in the realization, if
I were to tease out the implications of this kind of perspective, it would
come more and more to reflecting on the actual concrete forms that
Buddhism might take in terms of community, of teacher-student relations,
of sangha relations--in terms of responding not just to the questions of
how does Buddhism survive, but the questions of how do we address the
issue of suffering in our world.
To go back to your question, my own vision would be
that I would look to a kind of Buddhism that would be small scale, that
would be community centered; one that would be socially engaged. And I
can't really conceive of what an authentic Buddhism for me would be
without those dimensions.
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