Book Reviews: Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs and Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

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I love Stephen Batchelor’s writings on Buddhism, and his tastes in it are very much like my own, although we each came to them via very different roads. Batchelor immersed himself completely into Buddhism, becoming an ordained monk in the Tibetan tradition and later training at a Korean Zen monastery, spending a total of about ten years in robes (i.e., as a monk).
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I will talk about these two major works of his out of their chronological order, because I read his later book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (2010), first, and then I read his famous earlier one, Buddhism without Beliefs (1997), last.
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Confession of a Buddhist Atheist really grabbed me and I could not put it down. I love intellectual biographies, and this book takes us on a guided tour through Batchelor’s intellectual journeys within Buddhism and his personal evolution. He is a few years younger than me, but we have a lot in common as far as our early reading experiences: The Doors of Perception, Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, and Kerouac’s books.
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Batchelor, as a young man, left his native Britain and went to Dharamsala, India in the early 1970s. This is the Dalai Lama’s residence-in-exile and the center of free Tibetan (Vajrayana) practice. Batchelor is good with languages and did some important translations of Tibetan scriptures. He also got the chance to try something quite different while there by attending a vipassana meditation retreat taught by an Indian meditation teacher, and this experience gave him a lifelong curiosity about other schools of Buddhism such as Theravada and early Buddhism, and their meditation practices. He had a restless, inquisitive spirit even then.
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Later he went with a Tibetan teacher to Switzerland, to help establish a Vajrayana center there. In Europe he also studied some Existentialism and took Jungian analysis on the side, continually curious. He tells of some of the deep sectarian religious disputes in the Tibetan Buddhist community (which is no surprise, since all religious sects and secular ideologies tend to split asunder and then splinter off again and again into warring sects).
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Ever searching, he traveled to Korea to train at a Zen monastery there for a few years. Zen, as a sect in the Mahayana tradition, is a bit different from Tibetan Vajrayana and Theravada/ Hinayana. He loves Zen’s aesthetic dimensions – as I do. At this monastery he met a French woman who had been a nun and translator there for a while, and eventually they both disrobed (i.e., formally left the monkhood) and later got married. They have ever since been active lay Buddhist teachers and writers in England and France.
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Batchelor’s evolution toward Buddhist atheism was rooted in his ability to think critically and independently. He saw the many contradictions in Buddhist doctrines, but the primary driver was his inability to believe in outrageous supernatural claims, especially in rebirth (sometimes also called “reincarnation”). Try as he might, he could not believe in human or animal rebirths after death. Yet he admits that “the entire edifice of traditional Buddhist thought stands or falls on the belief in rebirth.” (p.37) And, I must agree it does. This left him as a heretic outside the Buddhist fold, and I’ve always felt that way, too.
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I never really believed in survival after death, be it resurrection to Heaven/Hell or rebirth here in the real world – except for one independently imagined moment as a small child, before ever hearing of reincarnation, resurrection or rebirth. My knowledge of human death at that time was represented by an old photo, in my grandmother’s room, of my maternal grandfather, and this grandfather had died a year before I was born. I never met him, but I saw him in the photo as representing a unique individual personhood who was now gone.
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At this same time, I was a young farm boy who saw the death of animals all the time, and I thought of my grandfather’s death within this knowledge of frequent animal death. I remember one evening as my father was milking the cows; a kitten that I loved and played with every day was coming down with the symptoms of distemper, a disease that killed over half of our cats at that time. My father saw me squatting down to look face to face with my beloved kitten as it sneezed weakly and hung its head. He told me that I must understand that the kitten would most probably die soon (as it did and as I knew it would) and that I should be ready for this.
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I looked at my kitten friend, so soon to die, and I thought a kind of wordless childhood equivalent of: “What is death? What will happen to this kitten that has a unique personality of its own? I know that its body will rot into nothing, but does its personhood just disappear into nothing? Or does this person/soul jump from one life to another? Can this kitten, living now but so soon to go, be my dead grandfather’s person that has somehow jumped into this kitten’s body/life to die once again, and will it soon jump into another body/life of some kind after this kitten dies? Is this my grandfather facing me now?”
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I – a child – had independently invented for myself the notion of the reincarnation of a person/self/soul after death. I know of no outside influence on this and can explain it no other way. It is hard to let go of a self, such as my beloved kitten, into a death with no future. This early memory is a very strong one. I understand how fundamentally rooted such ideas of the survival of death are to human religions through the ages. Even Plato fell for it.
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Later, I learned a vague notion of resurrection to Heaven or Hell after death, as pushed by my family’s Christian religion, but I never really bought it completely. The stories of New Testament characters coming back to life after being dead for a while never seemed sensible at all, given my knowledge of death and decay here in the real world.
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But I was temporarily scared by hell-fire and brimstone tent-show evangelists, artists at scaring folks. One time, as a kid, my father and I attended a tent-meeting in the old gravel parking lot of the Methodist Church, and the evangelist roared on about once personally meeting the Devil face to face. He was a great stage-man, a born actor. As we left the tent-meeting to walk home, the wind was gusty and the night shadows from blowing branches were terrifying. I said to my father, “I’m scared,” and in his unvarying honesty he said, “Me too.” Monsters I could imagine, but Heaven or rebirth, no.
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I discovered Buddhism when I was 17, the same year I realized that I had been an atheist (or a “non-theist”) for some time and no longer had any interest in Christianity, theism, or supernaturalism of any kind. I was drawn to two aspects of Buddhism: 1. the story of the Buddha’s incomparable integrity and his arduous lone independent quest for truth; and 2. the rambling esthetic quality of the Beat Zen of Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, with mountains, forests, and lonely wilderness haunts.
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This was the same time that I discovered Western rationalist philosophy via Ayn Rand, and she gave me the solid beginnings of a classical Western education. I somehow digested them all together without too much indigestion.
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The Buddhist rebirth myths and grand supernatural Mahayana mysticism were never interesting to me, and I still don’t have the slightest clue what the Vajrayana Tibetans are talking about. Zen (aka Chinese mountain “Ch’an”), mixed with a bit of Taoism and absent any supernatural elements, has been my constant spiritual center for 45 years.
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The “selfish” Hinayana (aka Theravada) schools also appealed to me, as they still preserve the ancient Pali Canon, the oldest Buddhist texts and those closest to the time of Siddhartha Gautama, the Sakyamuni Buddha, and I still like this tradition mostly for its possible insights into the actual historical Buddha – the man, the teacher and the therapist. Batchelor has gravitated back to the spirit of early Buddhism, as I have to some extent. The Pali Canon reveals what looks very much like an authentic personality portrait of this great Gautama sage.
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Batchelor can articulate, in just a phrase or two, decades of my own experiences as a bumbling practitioner. It is such a comfort to read someone of like mind.
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Batchelor’s earlier masterpiece, Buddhism without Beliefs, is distilled and sharp. Without insisting on belief in any dogma or mysticism, he introduces us to Buddhist basics: meditation and Buddha’s own primary aim, teaching us how to deal with Dukkha (aka the anguish, disappointments and sufferings that are integral parts of life as we are born, are so often disappointed, age, get sick, and eventually die). The Buddha – in his early Pali Canon discourses – frequently insisted that the heart of his whole message was recognizing Dukkha and the means of its cessation through his Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Noble Path, and that the surrounding religious edifices were mere chaff compared to this central healing advice. The immediate point is release from the grip of Dukkha, and this can be learned and practiced.
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The First Noble Truth is in understanding Dukkha/anguish and embracing it as an integral part of life, and the Second Truth is seeing Dukkha’s origins and causes (i.e., clinging to irrational, unrealistic desires, cravings and obsessions) and then letting go of them. Batchelor writes that the challenge of Truths One and Two “is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us.” This reminds me of modern cognitive psychology.
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Buddhist metaphysics, cosmologies and theologies are just irrelevant distractions, of no importance. As the Buddha advised in the Pali Canon: imagine a man wounded on a battlefield with a poisonous arrow embedded in him; a surgeon wants to immediately remove the arrow and clean out the poison to save his life; but the wounded man says: “Stop! Before you remove the arrow, I want to know who the man was who shot it. What clan does he belong to? What kind of bow did he use to shoot it? Who fletched the arrow?” Etc.
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The Buddha said that before such useless questions could ever be answered, the man would die of the poison. The all-important immediate task is to remove the arrow and have the surgeon treat the poisoned wound. All the other questions are completely unimportant and absurd. The treatment for Dukkha is all-important right now, and the rest is useless. This gets down to the basics. Buddha said that metaphysical questions “Do not tend toward edification”, and he ignored them when asked.
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Batchelor also emphasizes the Pali Canon’s Kalama Sutta, where the Buddha tells the Kalama people not to believe something simply because it is legend, tradition, scriptural, or coming from an authority. Rather you should determine to “see and know for yourselves” that some actions or qualities are skillful, blameless, and lead to welfare and happiness, while other actions or qualities lead to the opposites. (Many traditionalists – often themselves wannabe authorities – claim that this sutta is misused to give people a doctrinal carte blanche and thus they criticize anyone emphasizing it. Yet it appeals to heretics such as Batchelor and me, who are not impressed by dogma.)
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Batchelor has several simple meditation exercises sprinkled throughout the book, and they are very well selected. One of these is, after earlier learning to concentrate on one’s breathing (the Buddha’s favored focus of meditation) and on releasing physical and mental tensions, to contemplate this thought: “Since death is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?” (p.29) We are all impermanent and we will all certainly die, so what do we do with our time here and now? I think of this when I observe many traditional Buddhists focusing almost mechanically on a better rebirth somewhere down the road rather than on the spiritual enrichment of this precious life we have right now.
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I wish that I had read these books when I was 17. Yet Batchelor was only 14 or 15 at that time and he had not yet discovered all this. He cuts through so much of the massive superfluous stuff in traditional Buddhist culture and belief, yet in his compassion he doesn’t put the traditions down. His writing is quite often very poetic, and his refinement of all of his life’s experiences and scholarship into readable texts makes it all so rich and beautiful.
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-Zenwind.
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