Quotes from Stephen Batchelor

one who loves himself should not harm others.

Rather than seek God—the goal of the brahmins—Gotama suggested that you turn your attention to what is most far from God: the anguish and pain of life on this earth. In a contingent world, change and suffering are inevitable. Just look at what happens here: creatures are constantly being born, falling ill, growing old, and dying. These are the unavoidable facts of our existence. As contingent beings, we do not survive. And

THE ACTIONS THAT accompany the four truths describe the trajectory of dharma practice: understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path. These are not four separate activities but four phases within the process of awakening itself. Understanding matures into letting go; letting go culminates in realization; realization impels cultivation.

Were mind and matter me, I would come and go like them. If I were something else, They would say nothing about me. —N?G?RJUNA, M?lamadhyamaka-k

Reflective meditation is a way of translating thoughts into the language of feeling. It explores the relation between the way we think about and perceive things and the way we feel about them. We find that even the strongest, seemingly self-evident intuitions about ourselves are based on equally deep-seated assumptions. Gradually learning to see our life in another way through reflective meditation leads to feeling different about it as well.

By meditating on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life.

Man's mastery over nature, then, is a mastery which has less and less control over itself. . . . A world where techniques are paramount is a world given over to desire and fear; because every technique is there to serve some desire or fear.2 —Gabriel Marcel

Solitude is good for great minds but bad for small ones. It troubles brains that it does not illuminate." Yet Hugo was unable to go as far as his older English contemporary William Wordsworth, for whom solitude was a "bliss" that filled the heart with joy. Largely avoiding its extremes of hell and bliss, here I will explore the middle ground of solitude, which I consider a site of autonomy, wonder, contemplation, imagination, inspiration, and care.

Grounded in awareness of transiency, ambiguity, and contingency, such a person values lightness of touch, flexibility and adaptability, a sense of humor and adventure, appreciation of other viewpoints, a celebration of difference.

the whole discourse around enlightenment becomes about being cognitively correct or incorrect.

these practices began to yield unorthodox results. Meditation on impermanence, suffering, and no-self, for example, did not—as the Buddha insisted it would—lead me to disenchantment, dispassion, and a resolve not to be born again but to an ever-deepening awareness of life's infinitely poignant beauty.

Dharma practice is founded on resolve. This is not an emotional conversion, a devastating realization of the error of our ways, a desperate urge to be good, but an ongoing, heartfelt reflection on priorities, values, and purpose. We need to keep taking stock of our life in an unsentimental, uncompromising way.

The emptiness of self, for instance, is not the denial of individual uniqueness but the denial of any permanent, partless, and transcendent basis for individuality. The anguish and uncertainty of human existence are only exacerbated by the preconceptual, spasm-like grip in which such assumptions of transcendence hold us.

The extent to which dharma practice has been institutionalized as a religion can be gauged by the number of consolatory elements that have crept in: for example, assurances of a better afterlife if you perform virtuous deeds or recite mantras or chant the name of a Buddha.

one can either believe in rebirth or not believe in it. But there is a third alternative: that of agnosticism—to acknowledge in all honesty that one does not know. One does not have either to assert it or to deny it; one neither has to adopt the literal versions presented by tradition nor fall into the other extreme of believing that death is a final annihilatio? This, I feel, could provide a good Buddhist middle way for approaching the issue today.

Much of what animated me in those days I now recognize as the romantic yearnings of an idealistic, alienated, and aimless young man. I endowed these strange, exotic people, about whom I knew little, with all the virtues that my own culture seemed to lack.

Nanamoli Thera (Osbert Moore). The Life of the Buddha. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publishing Society, 1992 (1st edition 1972). Shantideva. The Bodhicaryavatara. (1) Translated from Sanskrit by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton. Oxford/New York:

All believers, by definition, must be agnostics. The moment you declare that you believe in God or the law of karma, you are acknowledging that you do not know whether they exist or not. For if you did know, you would have no need to believe. Only fools, fanatics, and omniscient beings would claim to know such things.

How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America by Rick Fields (Boston: Shambhala, 1981), and my The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western

The apparently unthreatening act of settling the mind on the breath and observing what is occurring in the body and mind exposes a contradiction between the sort of person we wish to be and the kind of person we are.

Feuerbach argued that the function of religion was to project the essential human qualities of reason, love, and will onto the nonhuman and transcendent figure of God, who then becomes an object of worship.

of the monastic institutions on which it depended. Since celibate monks tended to

The Four are presented in that order because that is the order in which they occur as tasks to be performed: fully knowing suffering leads to the letting go of craving, which leads to experiencing its cessation, which leads to the cultivation of the path.

I greatly enjoyed these studies. Geshe Rabten communicated the ideas clearly and succinctly, then had us divide into pairs to pick apart in debate the details of what he had just taught. This was an excellent intellectual discipline. It made me aware of how much of my thinking was muddled. Without subjecting one's ideas to such scrutiny, it is easy and reassuring to cherish opinions that, in the end, are found to rest on the sloppiest of unexamined assumptions. This