SECULAR BUDDHISM ALSO BY STEPHEN BATCHELOR Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism (1983) The Tibet Guide: Central and Western Tibet (1988) The Faith to Doubt: Glimpses of Buddhist Uncertainty (1990) The Awakening of the West: Encounters between Buddhism and Western Culture (1994) Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening (1997) Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime (2000) Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil (2004) Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (2010) After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (2015) SECULAR BUDDHISM IMAGINING THE DHARMA IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD Stephen Batchelor Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Batchelor. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Designed by Mary Valencia. Set in Scala type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948566 ISBN 978-0-300-22323-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Helen Tworkov It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating change. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new. —NICCOLÓ MACHIAVELLI, The Prince CONTENTS Preface INTRODUCTION In Search of a Voice 1 LOOKING FOR ÑĀNAVIRA Existence, Enlightenment, and Suicide “A Much0 Younger Man, but No Less Ch0arming” 2 BUDDHISM 2.0 A Secular Buddhism 3 THINKING OUT LOUD Rebirth: A Case for Buddhist Agnosticism Creating Sangha The Agnostic Buddhist The Other Enlightenment Project What’s Wrong with Conversion? Limits of Agnosticism A Secular Buddhist A Mindful Nation? 4 CONVERSATIONS The Eclectic Cleric Study and Practice After Buddhism 5 ART AND IMAGINATION A Convenient Fiction A Democracy of the Imagination Seeing the Light A Cosmos of Found Objects An Aesthetics of Emptiness Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index PREFACE As the practice of mindfulness finds its way into mainstream Western culture, more and more people today find themselves engaging in a form of Buddhist meditation. Such men and women may have little or no interest in Buddhism as a religion; their adoption of meditation occurs entirely within secular contexts such as healthcare, education, or the workplace. The very fact that a core practice of an ancient world religion can be shown through clinical trials to be effective irrespective of whether one is a Buddhist raises fundamental questions about the nature of Buddhism itself. Is this tradition best characterized as a religion? Or did it start out as a practical philosophy and mutate into a religion? Might we still be able to recover from the teachings of the Buddha a vision of human flourishing that is secular rather than religious in orientation yet without compromising the integrity of the dharma? Such questions have given rise to a phenomenon that is now being called “secular Buddhism.” This book traces how my own understanding and practice of the dharma has evolved in an increasingly secular direction over the past twenty-five years. The writings collected here date to the early 1990s, when I started writing for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. I regard the work that began in this period as what eventually resulted in my coming to advocate a fully fledged secular practice of Buddhism. A key moment in this process was the publication of Buddhism without Beliefs, which was commissioned by Tricycle, in 1997. The introductory essay (“In Search of a Voice”) and the concluding essay (“An Aesthetics of Emptiness”) were written for this volume. One other piece (“A Much Younger Man, but No Less Charming”) is published here for the first time. The other essays and interviews have appeared in a broad range of journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers (for publishing details, see Acknowledgments). I have left these pieces in the form in which they originally appeared, deleting passages only if they repeat what has already been said elsewhere in the collection. Occasionally I have rewritten a sentence if I judge it to be factually incorrect, misleading, ambiguous, or poorly crafted. Otherwise, the reader will notice how through the course of these writings I struggle to settle on the meaning of such terms as “spiritual,” “religious,” “secular,” “agnostic,” “skeptical,” “non-self,” and “emptiness.”