Stephen Batchelor'S Buddhist Atheism

[Xangsamhua]

Stephen Batchelor interviewed in Australia 11 June 2011

This is a long, but very interesting transcript of Stephen Batchelor's interview with Rachael Kohn on ABC Radio.

Stephen talks about his own journey, the influence on him of Jungian psychology, German phenomenology and Christian theologians such as the existentialist Paul Tillich and the form-critic Rudolph Bultmann in helping him arrive at his own Buddhist existentialism. He discusses the Buddha as an historical figure, philosopher, teacher and skeptic (of metaphysics). In the latter part of the interview he considers the development and evolution of Budhism as it moved East and now to the West and touches on the place of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan tradition in the latter shift. He then presents his understandings of the Sangha and the role and relationships of the lay community and the ordained.

An example:

Rachael Kohn: How different is the Buddha who you discovered from the one that is widely celebrated in the tradition? What are the main differences?

Stephen Batchelor: The main difference is that the Buddha that I've discovered is very human, he is someone you could imagine meeting, whereas the Buddha who is worshipped in most forms of Buddhism is almost impossibly perfect, a kind of a god-man hybrid who has very little sense of belonging to a historic, social, political, religious world that can be in any sense regarded as historical.

Rachael Kohn: Did you have to reconstruct that historical world in which he was a part? Because I understand those who transmitted the stories weren't very interested in describing all of that.

Stephen Batchelor: That's the problem. The people who compiled the Canon had no interest in these particular details, they were concerned with preserving the Dharma, the teaching. But modern scholars, historians, have over the last 50 or so years given us a much, much clearer picture of the circumstances under which the Buddha taught. In other words, we know now through archaeological studies, sociological studies...what was the state of the society at the Buddha's time, where were these places that he actually lived and taught? And by piecing that together, the two sides of the equation come into focus.

On the one hand we have this clearer picture of the place, the time, the kind of society that was operative, we know what kinds of texts pre-existed the Buddha, particularly the Upanishads, and all of that allows you to see for the first time how the Buddha is not speaking out of a kind of timeless enlightenment in a sort of vacuum, as it were, but rather his teachings are responses to the conditions of his own world, of his own people, of his own students and his own followers.

I feel this is a crucially important step in coming to a clearer picture not only of the Buddha as a man but also to see how his teachings are embedded in his time.

Rachael Kohn: Given your own suspicion of metaphysical thought and your interest in humanism, how much does Guatama Buddha reflect those interests that you have?

Stephen Batchelor: It is very clear I think, and I don't think I'm saying anything particularly radical here, the Buddha was profoundly suspicious of metaphysics. He refused to answer what we would nowadays consider the big questions; do we exist after death, are mind and the body the same or different, does the world have a beginning, does it have an end, is it finite, is infinite? The sort of questions we still ask today and the sort of questions also to which we find that science perhaps does not give answers and we look therefore to religion to give us answers to these big questions.

It seems to me very clear that the Buddha did not actually wish to continue thinking in an overtly religious way, he wanted to put aside metaphysics, put aside those kinds of speculations and address the primary issue of human suffering, both within himself and also within the world, within the lives of others and find a therapeutic and a pragmatic approach to addressing the question of suffering and craving and greed and hatred, the things that drive this cycle of discontent, of frustration, of anxiety that I think was as much the primary concern of people in the Buddha's time as it is in our time.

Rachael Kohn: Well then how controversial was he, particularly in a society which was so suffused with supernaturalisms and deities and gods and goddesses?

Stephen Batchelor: He was certainly disliked, and in many of the discourses you find him engaged in some quite powerful debates and arguments with people who certainly didn't agree with him. But you also have to remember that the 5th century BC in India was a period of enormous change, it was a period of great social upheaval. The whole political structure of North India was transforming from groups of agrarian villages and clans into the first monarchies.

You also find it's a time when the Buddha was not alone in being a controversial religious figure, there were many teachers who were opposed to the Brahmanic orthodoxies of India. So he was part of a movement that emerged at that time that has in fact given us two world religions; Jainism (Mahavira was a contemporary of the Buddha), and the Buddha himself. So he was living in a time of great ferment. So I don't think he was that unusual amongst many of his peers in questioning many of the assumptions of the time.

More at http://www.abc.net.a...011/3237807.htm