Stephen Batchelor

[Edward theurj Berge]

In my quest to go postmetaphysical a few of my several concerns follow: 1) How to interpret states and stages of consciousness; 2) How to practice secular meditation free from metaphysical baggage; and 3) How to share the former in a contemporary, western community with a focus on some form of liberation, or at least alleviation, of human suffering. Stephen Batchelor has been invaluable in this quest. (See our prior discussion of him here.) One of his essays is instructive along these lines, "The agnostic Buddhist: a secular vision of dharma practice." Here are a few select excerpts:

 

It is important to distinguish between those questions that are addressed by the core teachings of the Buddha, and those which are not really of central concern. I was listening on the radio not long ago in England to a discussion about religious belief. All of the participants were engaged in a heated discussion about the possibility of miracles. It is generally assumed that being a religious person entails believing certain things about the nature of oneself and reality in general that are beyond the reach of reason and empirical verification. What happened before birth, what will happen after death, the nature of the soul and its relation to the body: these are first and foremost religious questions. And the Buddha was not interested in them. But if we look at Buddhism historically, we'll see that it has continuously tended to lose this agnostic dimension through becoming institutionalised as a religion, with all of the usual dogmatic belief systems that religions tend to have. So, ironically, if you were to go to many Asian countries today, you would find that the monks and priests who control the institutional bodies of Buddhism would have quite clear views on whether the world is eternal or not, what happens to the Buddha after death, the status of the mind in relation to the body, and so on.

 

So, what would an agnostic Buddhist be like today? How would we even start to think about such a stance? Firstly, I would suggest that an agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma or the teachings of the Buddha as a source which would provide answers to questions of where we are going, where we are coming from, what is the nature of the universe, and so on. In this sense, 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 be a religious [or spiritual] person in order to practice the Dharma.

 

Secondly, an agnostic Buddhist would not look to the Dharma for metaphors of consolation. This is another great trait of religions: they provide consolation in the face of birth and death; they offer images of a better afterlife; they offer the kind of security that can be achieved through an act of faith. I'm not interested in that. The Buddha's teachings are confrontative; they're about truth-telling, not about painting some pretty picture of life elsewhere. They're saying: "Look, existence is painful." This is what is distinctive about the Buddhist attitude: it starts not from the promise of salvation, but from valuing that sense of existential anguish we tend either to ignore, deny or avoid through distractions.

 

"Emptiness" is a singularly unappetising term. I don't think it was ever meant to be attractive. Herbert Guenther once translated it as "the open dimension of being," which sounds a lot more appealing than "emptiness." "Transparency" was a term I played with for a while, which also makes emptiness sound more palatable. Yet we have to remember that even two thousand years ago Nagarjuna was having to defend himself against the nihilistic implications of emptiness. Many of the chapters in his philosophical works start with someone objecting: "This emptiness is a terrible idea. It undermines all grounds for morality. It undermines everything the Buddha was speaking about." Clearly the word did not have a positive ring back then either. I suspect that it might have been used quite consciously as an unappealing term, which cuts through the whole fantasy of consolation that one might expect a religion to provide. Perhaps we need to recover this cutting-edge of emptiness, its unappealing aspect.

 

I like to think of the Buddha's awakening under the Bodhi tree not as some kind of transcendental absorption, but as a moment of total shock. Neils Bohr once said about quantum mechanics: "If you're not shocked by quantum theory, then you don't understand it." I think we could say the same about emptiness: If you're not shocked by emptiness, then you haven't understood it.

 

Now, whether we follow the Indo-Tibetan analytical approach or the Zen approach of asking a koan like "What is this?," such meditative inquiry leads to a mind that becomes more still and clear. But paradoxically this does not mean that things then become more clear-cut, that you reach some final understanding of who you are or of what makes the universe tick. Because, at the same time as such things become more vivid and clear, they also become more baffling. One encounters, as it were, the sheer mystery of things. A deep agnosticism would be one founded on this kind of unknowing: the acknowledgement that, in terms of what life really is, I really do not know. And in that unknowing there is already a quality of questioning, of perplexity. And as that perplexity becomes stabilised through meditation, one enters increasingly into a world that is mysterious, magical in a sense, and not containable by narrow ideas and concepts.

 

But this is not where the practice ends. This is only half the project. What we also discover in this open space, in this mysterious experience of non-self, are the wellsprings of creativity and imagination.... The process of articulating the Dharma goes on and on according to the needs of the different historical situations that it encounters. We could read the whole history of Buddhism, from the moment of the Buddha's awakening until now, as a process of seeking to imagine a way to respond both wisely and compassionately to the situation at hand.

 

All of us have experiences of what it means to imagine and create something. It struck me very forcibly one day…that preparing myself to put into words what had not yet been put into words was to enter a very similar frame of mind to that of sitting on a cushion in a zendo, asking: "What is this?" The creative process seemed very comparable to the meditative process. Awakening is only complete -- in the same way that a work of art is only complete -- when it finds an expression, a form, that translates that experience in a way that makes it accessible to others. That again is the balance between wisdom and compassion. The creative process of expressing the Dharma is not just a question of duplicating in words something etched somewhere in the privacy of my soul. The living process of understanding is formed through the encounter with another person, with the world. You've probably all had the experience of someone coming to you in a state of distress and blurting out their problems, and you suddenly find yourself saying things that you were quite unaware you knew. The process of awakening is one of valuing and connecting with that capacity to respond in authentic ways to the suffering of others. The imagination is the bridge between contemplative experience and the anguish of the world. By valuing imagination, we value the capacity of each person, each community, to imagine and create themselves anew.

 

In the contemporary world Buddhism encounters a culture that places a positive value on the power of each individual's creativity and imagination. It's interesting that in most Buddhist traditions these things are not strongly encouraged, or, if they are, it's usually only within highly formalised settings. I like to think of Dharma practice today as venturing into a world of imagination, one in which each individual, each community, seeks to express and to articulate their vision in terms of the particular needs of their own situation. Buddhism would then become less and less the preserve of an institution, and more and more an experience that is owned by ordinary people in ordinary communities.

 

Of course, there are dangers here. But these are hardly new. Historically, Buddhism has always had to find ways of responding effectively to the danger of becoming too acculturated, of becoming too absorbed into the assumptions of the host culture. Certainly such a danger exists here in the West: Buddhism might, for example, tend to become a kind of souped-up psychotherapy. But there's the equal danger of Buddhism holding on too fiercely to its Asian identity and remaining a marginal interest amongst a few eccentrics. Somehow we have to find a middle way between these two poles, and this is a challenge which is not going to be worked out by academics or Buddhist scholars; it's a challenge that each of us is asked to meet in our own practice from day to day.

[Lol]

You're welcome, Edward : ) I've always had a lot of time for Stephen Batchelor. Quite a number of years ago now when he was still living locally he gave a fascinating talk + slide show at a clinic where I was working, the subject matter being the ancient topography of the land around Lhasa, where the hills around were historically seen to be powerful demonesses. Afterwards we went to the pub and discussed his then views on Buddhism, Tibetan and other. I think he was quite gentle with me, but there again I always did find him genial and urbane, and as the above letter shows he still is.

theurj said:

Thanks for this lol. This is one reason I prefer Batchelor in my quest of postmeta "religion."

[Edward theurj Berge]

Given the recent discussion in the Magellan blog post I thought I'd revive this thread with Elias Capriles' book Sutrayana from the perspective of Dzogchen, available at Scribd. He said:

"The Dzogchen teachings resort to concepts and terms which are extraneous to Prasangika thought, and which are featured in the canonical texts of the Third Promulgation (dharmachakra) and in the philosophical schools based on them, such as the Yogachara School, the Madhyamaka-Swatantrika- Yogachara subschools of Madhyamika thought, and the subschools that make up the inner, subtle Madhyamaka (which are the Zhentongpa and Mahamadhyamaka subschools)" (9).

"The contemplation of Ch'an or Zen....and the corresponding realization were not the condition of total plenitude and perfection called Dzogchen" (11).

[Balder]

Yes, well, there is always that game of sectarian soteriological one-up-manship... 

 

Capriles, especially, seems rather zealous...

[Edward theurj Berge]

Also see Sonam Thakchoe's  The Two Truths Debate referenced earlier in the thread, as well as his paper "How many truths?" that pre-dates the book. Also Garfield's book Empty Words is available at Scribd.

[Edward theurj Berge]

There is always that game of sectarian soteriological one-up-manship...

And kela has blogged on this quit a bit in the forum, especially the one on inclusivism. Capriles is just passing on the prejudices inherent in his favorite tradition.

[Edward theurj Berge]

The following are some excerpts from Empty Words and are points I've made before above and in previous threads. We can see the Yogacara influence in Dzogchen Caprilles admitted above and which is a major sticking point in the shentong/rangtong debate. Similar analysis is found in The Two Truths Debate.

"The fact that all phenomenon are ultimately empty entails very different consequences....for the Madhyamika, it entails that nothing, including emptiness, lacks inherent existence and that all phenomenon are on the same ontological footing. For the Yogacarins, on the other hand, it entails that all objects of consciousness are completely nonexistent and merely imaginary, while the mind itself and the absence of duality are truly existent.... As a consequence, whereas for Nagarjuana the two truths are in the end identical, characterizing the same reality from different perspectives...for Vasubandhu ultimate reality and conventional reality are not in any sense identical.... For Nagarjuna we can express genuine truths through language and can understand reality conceptually. For Vasubandhu neither is possible. Madhyamaka hence provides a non-mystical, immanent characterization of the nature of reality...and of the nature of our knowledge...about one reality. Yogacara epistemology and metaphysics, on the other hand, require for genuine knowledge, for access to truth, a mystical intuition of a transcendent realm.... It hence implicates a strong ontological version of an appearance/reality distinction" (182-3).

[Edward theurj Berge]

From "How many truths?"

"Tsong khapa's own claim [is] that that two truths constitute 'a single ontological identity' with 'different conceptual identities'" (124).

"Go rampa argues...that conventional truth must be eliminated in the ascent to ultimate truth.... The two truths are binary opposites....conventional truth...is the ignorance of ordinary beings....ultimate truth is the sole truth and the phenomenal world is utter illusion" (130-1).

He then shows which people side with which view, and it pretty much comes down to the rangtong (Gelug) versus the shentong (the other Tibetan sects including Dzogchen).

[Edward theurj Berge]

From Morton, “Hegel on Buddhism”:

“To the undecuated ear the shentong view almost sounds like a version of idealism, or perhaps even solipsism, especially as it is full of phrases such as 'the clear light nature of mind,' which could easily be heard as a form of theism.... [But] shentong does not accept the Cittamatra view that consciousness is truly existent. [It] hold[s] the Madhyamaka view that it is non-arising and without self-nature” (23-4).

And yet:

“Realty is empty, but not of the qualities of a Buddha, transcendent intelligence, wisdom and compassion: luminosity. Remember that the subject-object dualism has long been surpassed. So what we are dealing with here is a self-luminous reality, beyond conceptualization” (25).

[Edward theurj Berge]

From Caprilles (cited above):

“Concerning the confusion of the Ati view according to which the true nature of mind is Awake Awareness, with the lower Yogachara view according to which there is a thoroughly established Buddha-nature, it must be stressed that the Dzogchen teaching, rather than viewing the nature of mind as thoroughly established, assert it to be an awareness free of elaborations” (200).

[Edward theurj Berge]

Morton and Caprilles assert that shentong adheres to the Madhyamaka view of phenomenon as empty of inherent existence. Yet they both seem, per Garfield and Thakchoe, to adhere to an ultimate realm beyond conceptual elaboration. That is, "a strong ontological version of an appearance/reality distinction." Or in my terms, a dualistic nondualism.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Now how does this square with OOO's notion of the withdrawn real in relation to local manifestations? There doesn't seem to be a ontological appearance/realty distinction, for one thing, as both are structural constructions, elaborations, as it were. In OOO there is not only no transcendental essence but no transcendental substance.

[Edward theurj Berge]

For example, Bryant from "On the reality and construction of hyperobjects with reference to c...":

"While classes are hyperobjects, individuals, or entities in their own right, this does not entail that classes don’t have to be produced. Classes are the result of antipraxis, or the material trace of millions of technologies, media, signs, signifiers, natural environmental conditions, infrastructure, and countless
human practices that, in their material trace, take on a life of their own, structuring the possibilities and activities of persons embedded within the class" (88).

Even hyperobjects like emptiness are produced through elaboration; the latter term doesn't have to be interpreted narrowly as "conceptual" but more broadly as objective in the OOO sense. No elaboration, i.e. no parts to establish the hyperobject, no hyperobject. While the latter cannot be reduced to the former (transcendent in one sense), it also cannot exist without "them" (not transcendent in another sense).