At the end of "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist", Stephen Batchelor speaks briefly of the collage art he creates from found materials. This book is something of a collage, pieced together with three major themes, the whole forming a work that is complete and beautiful, with a wholly admirable integrity.
The first theme is expressed as a memoir. Batchelor tells us, with just enough detail to bring the story to vivid life without distracting us from its narrative course, how he journeyed from a childhood in provincial England, raised without religious indoctrination by a single mother, through a classic '60s-style road trip, with plenty of drugs, little money and no clear end in mind, Eastward through Afghanistan and Pakistan to Daramsala, where the young Dalai Lama had recently settled with his community of exiled Tibetans, and where Batchelor first encountered the Buddhist thinking that would inform his life. He learned Tibetan, ordained as a monk in the Dalai Lama's Gelug tradition, and discovered the first of a series of teachers who would, through the next 30 years, conspire, albeit unknowingly, to form the person who has emerged as Stephen Batchelor, a very different person than any of them sought to form, but a person whose goodness and honesty would compel their admiration, being themselves good and honest people.
In addition to Geshe Rabten, with whom Batchelor studied in India and later in Switzerland, those teachers included S.N. Goenta, from whom he learned the technique of mindfulness meditation (the fundamental practice of the Theravadin school of Buddhism), and Kusan Sunim, the Korean Zen master under whom Stephen practiced for seven years as a monk when his emerging doubts about the dogmatism of the Tibetan schools no longer allowed him, in good conscience, to stay with Geshe Rabten. Kusan Sunim, like Geshe Rabten, and like the Dalai Lama himself, with whom Batchelor was privileged to have close contact several times through those years, turned out to be attached to the rituals and texts of his particular tradition with an intensity that did not allow him to understand or accept the validity of the Dharma as Batchelor was increasingly coming to experience it.
That first part of Batchelor's life ends with his decision to disrobe. He married Martine, a French woman whom he had met and come to love as the nun Songil at the monastery in Songgwangsa, and the two have been creating, ever since, a new way of being Buddhist teachers, without the protective authority of either a traditional sangha or an academic institution, but working from their continually deepening understanding of Buddhism, informed by meditative practice and far-ranging scholarship.
The continuity of the memoir theme pretty much ends with Stephen and Martine's move back to the West. We learn some details of their life, the friends they've made, the work they do, and the influences they've felt, but the thrust of the book turns to the second and third themes: first Stephen's cogent articulation of what he has come to understand as the fundamental message of Buddhism and the urgent relevance of that message to our lives; and, second, his long and perceptive attempt to recreate the biography of Siddhattha Gotama, the wealthy and privileged son of a Sakiyan nobleman who Awakened as the Buddha. Each theme--memoir, Dharma teaching, and historical biography--is present from the beginning and throughout, but, as in a collage, as the book proceeds, each theme, in turn, assumes a dominance that completes it as a theme and gives the whole book structure and thrust.
In "
Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening", Stephen Batchelor explained the Buddha's Dharma so simply, so persuasively, in such an approachable idiom, that it evoked my recognition that I was, in fact, a Buddhist, and no longer simply someone "interested in Buddhism" or "studying Buddhism". Now, in this book, the explanation is very much deeper, very much more tied to the phenomena we experience in the course of our noisy and surprising lives, but still clear, still free of jargon, even more persuasive. As the first book invited me to adopt it, this book invites me to reject the label "Buddhist", even as I realize that there is nothing to do, as each new surprise arrives and death comes every minute closer, but follow the Dharma that the Buddha elaborated with lively detail and remarkable subtlety in the teachings we find in the Pali Canon.
In elaborating the theme within which his understanding of the Dharma is clarified, Batchelor explains his method for creating that understanding, which involves examining the canonical texts for elements which were part of Siddhattha Gotama's cultural environment, and those other elements, standing out from the rest of the texts, that could have been inserted later to justify the various orthodoxies that formed after the Buddha's death. Then, without necessarily rejecting those elements, we set them aside; what is left must be considered new and original, even radical. That is the Buddhadharma.
Batchelor's method leads directly to the third major theme of the book, the author's story of the Buddha's life as an individual human being. Without understanding that, one cannot separate the extraordinary experience that the Buddha awakened to after deep examination from the experience that all other human beings of his time saw as ordinary, needing no examination. Recreating the Buddha's life is no simple task; much of what's been handed down is clearly myth, and the community of monks who remembered the Buddha's teachings with such deliberate effort, in such remarkable detail, and with such probable fidelity, were simply not interested either in the parts of the story that presented fairly the views of those with whom the Buddha held debate, or in any narration of events that we today would identify as "historical". So Batchelor is left to tease a plausible story from brief segments found here and there in the texts, from what we know about the men and women with whom the Buddha associated and whose way of life he shared, and from uncommonly well-informed guessing. The figure that Batchelor sculpts of the man Siddhattha Gotama looks real to me; that figure could very well be the man who delivered the teachings that have come to inform my life. It is certainly truer to that man than the fat happy Buddhas in Chinatown gift shops or the austere Hellenic statues in museum galleries. Beyond that, who can know?
And that brings us to the essential message of "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist": the impossibility of knowing, and the freedom we gain from that impossibility--the freedom to trust our experience and follow that to an understanding of the Dharma that works on our lives, the freedom to create those lives, the freedom to cultivate a path that allows me to awake tomorrow morning (barring the inevitable surprises) a better person than the person who woke this morning.
This is an important book. Batchelor's writing style is the very model of "right speech", articulating the most subtle and difficult notions with wit and clarity. For those who think they know Buddhism, the book will illuminate that knowledge. For those who are coming fresh to the study of the Buddha and his teachings, this is a wonderful introduction, requiring no pre-requisite study, demanding nothing of the reader but diligent attention.
