by Tom
Stephen Batchelor is a well-known teacher, author and contributing editor for Tricycle who is focussed on making Buddhism relevant to the modern world. He initially studied Tibetan Buddhism, became a monk and translated some important works into English but then went to Korea to investigate Zen. Returning to West, he has written a series of books aimed at emphasising the practical, ethical core of Buddhism. These works include Buddhism Without Beliefs and Confession of a Buddhist Atheist.
I am now reading his book Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times. It seeks to establish parallels between the two epochal figures in the title, but at the moment I am struck by his views of the Buddha and the history of Buddhism. His basic argument, as far as I understand it, is that as Buddhism became institutionalised its emphasis changed from practical ethics to personal salvation.
This movement started almost immediately upon the Buddha’s death with a Council convened to codify his oral teachings, emphasising personal salvation. ‘With faith in Gotama [the Buddha] and his teaching you no longer have to be concerned about what is virtuous or just. This has already been revealed to you by an infallible, omniscient authority. The Buddha has effectively become God’. (157) There is no ethics of choice and uncertainty, just a path to follow.
This contrasts with what Batchelor sees as the Buddha’s ‘original’ approach, which eschewed metaphysics and either/or thinking by concentrating on practice not theory. It resolved ‘to avoid the binary of “is” and “is not” by dwelling in a non-reactive emptiness … [empowering practitioners] to engage with the world more directly, truthfully, and compassionately.’ (278)
Batchelor argues that as Buddhism became institutionalised, there was a shift from the ‘Four Tasks’ to the Four [Noble] Truths: from ‘ought’ to ‘is’. The Four Noble Truths, he maintains, are ‘proposition of facts’, i.e. suffering, cause, cessation, method, while the Four Tasks present a method of engaging with the uncertainty of life: ‘embracing life, letting reactivity be, seeing reactivity stop, and cultivating a middle way’ (105).
Whatever the quality of Batchelor’s scholarship, I am attracted by his emphasis on the groundedness of Zen in the ethical practicalities of everyday life. The Buddha is said to have warned followers to ‘rely not on the teacher/person, but on the teaching. Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words. Rely not on theory, but on experience.’[1]
Batchelor’s approach seems in harmony with that of Joko Beck, the founder of Ordinary Mind Zen: educating our minds through the disciplined practice of zazen to deal with the messiness of ‘life as it is’ through compassion and wisdom free from personal ego.
Zen is about an active life, an involved life. When we know our minds well and the emotions that our thinking creates, we tend to see better what our lives are about and what needs to be done, which is generally just the next task under our nose.
[1] https://www.boundlessmindzen.org/teachings/kalama-sutra