Quotes from Stephen Batchelor

SOMEONE MIGHT SAY: "I resolve to awaken, to practice a way of life conducive to that end, and to cultivate friendships that nurture it," but he may feel exactly the opposite much of the time.

We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by our outward show of 'civilized' manners and 'cultured' social behavior into believing that self-concern, desirous attachment, aversion, and indifference are steadily losing their hold over us.

A Buddhist community—a sangha—is not something one is merely born into or chooses to join but something one is challenged to create. A sangha provides a matrix of communal support for people to realize their commitment to a common vision or concer? Yet it is always in danger of deteriorating into an institution intent on preserving the power of a minority of professionals.

He has no interest in pursuing an abstract argument to demonstrate a purely theoretical truth. His practical reason is ethical. Its first principle could be stated thus: Do no evil, Take up what is good, Purify the mind— This is the teaching of buddhas.11 In seeing conditioned arising as a "ground," Gotama implies that insight into conditionality provides "grounds" on which to act.

As ??ntideva puts it in the Bodhicary?vat?ra: When both myself and others Are similar in that we wish to be happy, What is so special about me? Why do I strive for my happiness alone? And when both myself and others Are similar in that we do not wish to suffer, What is so special about me? Why do I protect myself and not others?

The point is not to abandon all institutions and dogmas but to find a way to live with them more ironically, to appreciate them for what they are—the play of the human mind in its endless quest for connection and meaning—rather than timeless entities that have to be ruthlessly defended or forcibly imposed.

For a while I hoped that Buddhism Without Beliefs might stimulate more public debate and inquiry among Buddhists about these issues, but this did not happen. Instead, it revealed a fault line in the nascent Western Buddhist community between traditionalists, for whom such doctrines are non-negotiable truths, and liberals, like myself, who tend to see them more as contingent products of historical circumstance.

The world is here to surprise us. My most lasting insights have occurred off the [meditation] cushion, not on it.

A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.

When my self is no longer the all-consuming preoccupation it once was, when I see it as one narrative thread among myriad others, when I understand it to be as contingent and transient as anything else, then the barrier that separates "me" from "not me" begins to crumble. The conviction of being a closed cell of self is not only delusive but anesthetic. It numbs me to the suffering of the world.

The experience of nirvana marks a turning point in an individual's life, not a final and immutable goal. After the experience one knows that one is free not to act on the impulses that naturally arise in reaction to a given situation.

Deathless" (amata) is another word for abundant life. If we think of M?ra as death (the words amata and m?ra are both rooted in the Vedic m = death), then to no longer be constrained by his armies is to be freed to live fully. Gotama does not think of the deathless as immortality—as the term is understood in Brahmanism—but as the positive absence of reactivity.

When we stop fleeing birth and death, the grip of anguish is loosened and existence reveals itself as a question.

Europe learned that Buddhism was "a Babylon of doctrines so intricate that no one can understand it properly, or describe it.

Places to which I am instinctively attracted are places where I imagine suffering to be absent. "There," I think, "if only I could get there, then I would suffer no more." The groundless ground of contingency, however, holds out no such hope. For this is the ground where you are born and die, get sick and grow old, are disappointed and frustrated. To

an agnostic Buddhist would not be a believer with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena and in this sense would not be religious. I've recently started saying to myself "I'm not a religious person" and finding that to be strangely liberating. You don't have to self-identify as a religious person in order to practice the dharma.

Above all, secular Buddhism is something to do, not something to believe i? This pragmatism is evident in many of the classic parables: the poisoned arrow, the city, the raft—as well as in the Buddha's presentation of the four noble truths as a range of tasks to be performed rather than a set of propositions to be affirmed.

Even though we are the most privileged and richest human beings there have been so far, in terms of the stability and length of our lives and the cultural resources available to us, we're not as happy as we should be. I'd like to see politics more oriented toward the question of happiness; certainly I'd like to see religion more concerned with making integral, happy people and raising the quality of personal life in our culture.

This deep not-knowing, in this case the Second Patriarch's inability to find his anguished mind, takes the notion of agnosticism down to another depth. One might call it a contemplative depth. Such deep agnostic metaphors are likewise found in such terms as wu hsin (no mind), and wu nien (no thought), as well as in the more popular "don't know mind" of the Korean Zen master Seung Sah?

An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma as a source of answers to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc.

Emptiness indicates how everything that comes about does so through an unrepeatable matrix of contingencies, conditions, and causes as well as through conceptual, linguistic, and cultural frameworks.

Then I spent the next four years translating it into English. That was a very valuable experience. It enabled me to internalize somebody else's refined understanding of the dharma and to work very closely with

There is nothing one can have that one cannot fear to lose. Instead of living life in order to have more abundantly, live life in order to be more abundantly.

Life is a groundless ground: no sooner does it appear, than it disappears, only to renew itself, then immediately break up and vanish again. It pours forth endlessly, like the river of Heraclitus into which one cannot step twice. If you try to grasp it, it slips away between your fingers.