Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

I was very disappointed with this book because it is primarily a treatise on the life of the Buddha, almost in mind-numbing detail, rather than a detailed treatment of why the author has gotten to the particular stage that he has in his spiritual development. The title of the book is "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" but very little is devoted to that topic. Most of the book discusses facts surrounding the buddha's life, much of which I found to be superfluous and quite frankly boring. But there were occasional glimpses where the author's insights on why he has come to the perspective that he has came through very powerfully. I rated this book three stars because the biography of the buddha was very meticulous and complete but it was not at all what I expected given the book's title. I have read several of this author's other works and he has much to offer. I wish that he had stuck to the book's topic.

Batchelor provides a clear and cogent case for committed Buddhist practice based on principles that a modern American can apprehend and embrace, stripped of magical descriptions and miraculous claims.

The title is much sexier than the content. It's interesting without really making any conclusions about the in-depth explanation of Buddhism in the modern world. An interesting biography, but not a particularly captivating read for someone looking for an in-depth analysis of Buddhism and how to practice it in a secular way. In fact, it doesn't really talk much about being a Buddhist Atheist at all. Like an entree, it's a great taster, but doesn't quite fill you up.

I actually finished this book a week ago, and at the time was unsure how I was going to rate it. Batchelor's conclusions re: Buddhism are very different from my own. I enjoy the magic, the mystic, expressions present in some lineages of Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, and with connecting with Buddha as an eternal force, not only a human being. So I was faintly dissatisfied with where the author's own journey and research led him, and almost docked a star because of it.

In the end, though, I didn't, because the book is so well-written and well-researched, and I have found myself thinking about it and discussing it frequently with people I know. I read and review a lot of books, many of them Buddhist, and few of them stay with me for this long. So that to me is a sign of a five-star book, whether I personally agree and relate to all the author's points or not.

My favorite parts of the book were his stories regarding his own experiences as a young Tibetan Buddhist monk, and then studying in Korea with a Zen teacher, while grappling with existential questions and increasingly exploring Western philosophy as well. What a profound seeker! As I said, my own personal experiences have led me to a more mystic orientation, and I kept feeling like the author's intellect was getting in his way. But that is not for me to say. In the end, I admired his integrity and dedication to seeking truth. It is rare that someone is willing to throw away everything they have known, all that has made them comfortable, over and over again as their searching brings them to new conclusions. And that is what Mr. Batchelor did - first by becoming a Tibetan Buddhist monk, then by leaving his Lama teacher to study with a Zen monk, and then by leaving his monastic vows behind entirely, marrying, and continuing to practice as a layperson.

As a married person with a family myself, I also appreciated his analysis of the social forces that made celibacy a necessary choice for serious seekers in ages past, and his conclusions that in today's world, a lay life may actually be the ideal way to practice what the Buddha really taught. And his analysis of the latter - what the Buddha taught - is fascinating. He is focused on Buddha as a real person with real struggles, and within the social and cultural context of his time. Whether or not this is the 'true Buddha', I have no idea. The suttas are like the Bible in that way, as far as I am concerned - anyone can find something to support their view.

What can't be disputed though, is the thoroughness and intensity of Batchelor's research and presentation. I think all Buddhists should read this book to put their own beliefs to the test. And I think anyone interested in Buddhism, but wary of 'religion', should read it as their number one guide.

So five stars it is!

This book is well written and thoughtful. But I felt the author had spent a lifetime studying how to be happy at the expense of those who give money to these monks. Then he discovered he didn't really believe what he was saying, studying and being taught. In other words. like all religions, Buddhism, while lacking a god per se, does teach reincarnation, karma and other dogmas. Is there proof of these? No. Like all mythologies, there is no proof because it was created by people to give them a sense of meaning.

Buddhism teaches altruism --- being unselfish and putting others first. And yet, they accept all the help they can get from others so they can pursue what, to me, is a somewhat selfish indulgence.

The first part of the book held my interest but the second half was rather a bore. To someone unfamiliar with Buddhism it would be enlightening, however.

-- Susanna K. Hutcheson

Several things stood out to me while reading the book, which is part memoir, part history lesson on the Buddha, and part religious argument. First, the idea that we have a hard time understanding each other due to our frame of reference, which is based on our experience, biases, and perceptions. When combined, this creates our own prism of understanding that we use to interpret what others say, creating a wealth of misperceptions and misunderstandings. This likely even happened to the Buddha, his students warping what he wanted to teach to match the world view of society during his time. Second, the idea that atheism is not anit-theism. I'm an atheist, but I won't demand that others renounce their god(s), and all I ask in return is that I be left in unbelieving peace.

Another point on atheism. I saw a review that said Buddhism is an atheist religion, so the title is a misnomer, which is exactly what I though, before reading the book. While this is true, there is no God, Buddhists do believe in reincarnation, making the Self the divine. The author does not believe this, he believes the Buddha taught that the repetitive existence we live was in this lifetime. That the goal is to master the self in the here and now, improving oneself and society at large in the present, not in future lifetimes. This not believing in the Self, makes the author a Buddhist Atheist.

Other than that, Stephen clearly has a sharp mind. Reading his arguments and research on religion and Buddhism was a treat.

And just so I can remember: Suffering is ever present, embrace it. Let go of craving. Experience the cessation of craving. Act on the path. Conditioned arising leads to the creation of self, and allows one to respond to the world with neither infatuation or mortification, but the middle way.

Stephen and Martine are such an idyllic couple. They reaped all the benefits and then cashed in the residuals. As Buddhist monk and nun cavorting across the terrestrial sphere in search of all flavors of enlightenment and a place to squat, the happy couple have found the Holy Grail of Western infatuation with Eastern traditions. Dilettantes ?, god no, or is it God know or...oh Buddhism, yea, his journey is not singular or unparalleled but it has served them well and the teachings sans belief rant is a truly western adaptation we can all not-know and love.

Stephen Batchelor's new book is much more than a memoir, and certainly a world removed from that of confessional tales with similar titles. In fact, it's more like two books: the story of Batchelor's early life as a Buddhist monk, starting when he barely out of his teens, and a de-romanticized life of Siddhatta Gotama, man and monk, not god or supernatural being.

And as interesting as Batchelor's progression of awakening to the realization that he is not meant to be a monk might be, it's his careful telling of Gotama's post-enlightenment wandering life, a man in a land just like ours, filled with politics, patronage, and compromise, that gives the book its true strength. Both tie together in Batchelor's theme and thesis: that Buddhism, stripped of its accretions of gods and rituals over the intervening centuries, is a powerful way of awakening to life's reality here and now.

Having landed in India in the early 1970s, a young British hippie wandering in search of a spiritual home -- even if he didn't recognize it as such at the time -- he fell under the sway of Tibetan Buddhist exiles in India, donning robes and shaving his head. Following his teacher, he moved to Switzerland, helping establishing a monastery there, but his doubts about the melange of gods and demons that the Tibetans revere and fear in the end pushed him to the more Spartan Korean Zen tradition. He took up residence in a temple there, innocently meeting his future wife, a French Zen nun. After the master dies, he disrobed -- a "Buddhist Failure", as he calls himself.

Later, as a layman, he was inspired by the writings of a British Buddhist monk from the early 1960s, who like Batchelor can't reconcile the supernatural beliefs of local (in this case Sri Lankan) Buddhists with his secular views. (That monk, though, preferred to kill himself than do the dishonor of disrobing, proving that secular doesn't equal sane.) Batchelor was soon intrigued by the Pali Canon, the first written record of the sayings of Gotama, and through fortuitous circumstances, starts traveling in northern India, Gotama's stomping grounds in the four-plus decades following his awakening. In the book, Batchelor tries to reconstruct life in those times, as Gotama gains followers and draws on patronage of local kings. It's a powerful narrative, all the more so for being so different from the standard hagiographies.

Batchelor has obviously been pondering Buddhist thought and beliefs for decades and the way he conveys his understanding is remarkably clear. "The heart of Gotama's awakening lay in his unequivocal embrace of contingency," he writes. "He recognized how both he and the world in which he lived were fluid, contingent events that sprang from other fluid, contingent events, but that need not have happened. Had he made other choices, things would have turned out differently." That sums it up neatly, and is just a small sample of Batchelor's explication of what he sees as Buddhism's core teachings. In the end, Batchelor jettisons everything in Buddhism save these core points -- leaving no room for rebirth, karma, gods, demons, prayer -- just this moment to awaken to.

He does this in a direct and simple writing style that is personal and deeply felt. I'd never gotten through earlier books of his -- they seemed too cerebral -- but Confession has the stamp of his personal voice. When I saw him, in early March 2010 reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., he had a dry and self-deprecating wit that was engaging; it comes through here vividly. And more than all these thoughts, there's this: I have already re-read passages in the book, a high compliment.

One of the attractions that Buddhism has offered to Westerners is the opportunity to pursue a nontheistic spiritual life outside the contours of traditional Judaism or Christianity. Thus, the title of Stephen Batchelor's recent book, "Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist" (2010) is provocative and surprising on the surface in that Batchelor is "confessing" his "atheism" as if it were inconsistent with "Buddhism". But Batchelor understands the teachings of various traditional Buddhist schools well. In addition to rejecting Western theism, Batchelor also seriously questions Buddhist teachings such as rebirth and Karma in favor of an outlook which is secular and scientific. Thus, his book deserves the title of the "confession" of a Western Buddhist seeker.

Batchelor's (b. 1954) best-known earlier work on Buddhism was his controversial 1997 study "Buddhism without Beliefs" Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening in which he articulated his secular understanding of Buddhism. His recent "Confessions" is an intruiging collage of autobiography, philosophy, and history. Raised in England without a formal religion by a single mother, Batchelor did not attend college. Instead, he left home as a hippy and traveled through Asia where he became an early Western student of the Dalai Lama in his Indian exile. In the first part of his book, Batchelor recounts how he learned Tibetan and became a monk in the Tibetan tradition even while entertaining serious doubts about the specifics of Tibetan teaching. During this time, Batchelor also read Western existential philosophy and was greatly influenced by Heidegger's "Being in Time" with its emphasis on "being-in-the world" and experientialism rather than rationality as the basis for understanding the human condition. As a young Tibetan monk, Batchelor also had his first exposure to earlier non-Tibetan Buddhist tradition when he attended a meditation retreat under the Burmese lay teacher S.N. Goenka.

Batchelor left his Tibetan teacher and became a Zen monk in Korea together with a group of other Westerners. His doubts about Zen teachings paralleled his doubts about Tibetan Buddhism. After ten years as a monk, Batchelor disrobed and returned to lay life. He married a former colleague, a nun named Songil (Martine); and he and Martine moved to England as Buddhist laypeople to participate in a newly founded Buddhist meditation center known as the Gaia House, founded by the Sharpham Trust. Steven and Martin Batchelor eventually left the Gaia House. They live in rural France, and both continue to teach and write.

The second part of the book continues Batchelor's autobiography combined with his more detailed reflections on Buddhism and on early Buddhist history. Both Tibetan and Zen Buddhism are part of what is generally referred to as Mahayana Buddhism which emphasizes the figure of the Bodhisattva -- an individual who delays his or her own full enlightenment to work towards the enlightenment of everyone -- and a philosophical, ahistorical understanding of the Buddha. Batchelor became interested in the earlier Theravada Buddhism, which is found in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and elsewhere and in its texts which are known as the Pali canon. The Pali Canon is lengthy and diffuse, but is texts and Suttas show Gotama Buddha as a person and as a wanderer rather than as an abstraction. I have been fortunate to be part of a long-standing study group under the guidance of a capable teacher where I have had the opportunity to read and think about the Pali Suttas for the past 15 years.

Batchelor argues that Buddhism needs to be understood in its historical context as teased out of the Pali Suttas. In his book, he tries to show how Buddha was part of his times, how he may have studied, and how his teachings were the product of long reflection and engagement, rather than only of introspective meditation, that involved the rejection of much of the Hindu/Brahmanic teachings in which the Buddha was raised. While seeking the historical Buddha, Batchelor freely admits to "cherry-picking" the tradition by focusing on the teachings he can understand and accept. Batchelor's Buddha thus is a rationalist and something of a skeptic whose teachings focus on four distinctive elements: 1. the conditionality and changeable character of everything, 2. the process of the Four noble truths. 3, mindful awareness and 4. the power of self-reliance. (p. 237) The teachings are pragmatic, for Batchelor, and based upon ever-present change and groundlessness as opposed to dualism, transcendence, Nirvana, or fixity. These teachings, for Batchelor, rather than traditional Asian Buddhist teachings are those that speak to the "peculiar maladies of a late-twentieth century post-Christian secular existentialist like myself." (p.66)

Whether Batchelor offers a convincing portrayal of Buddhism or a highly sophisticated form of modern secularism is a subject for debate and disagreement which cannot be resolved in a short review. In addition to the many unusually detailed reviews of this book here on the store, there is an excellent review of Batchelor's book in the Fall 2010 issue of the Buddhist review, "Tricycle" called "Secular Buddhism?" by David Loy. But on all accounts, Batchelor's book is engagingly and thoughtfully written and challenging. It is full of digressions and discussions of people worth knowing in their own right, including Batchelor's own Buddhist teachers, Geshe Dhargyey, Geshe Babten, and Kusan Sunim, and Goenka. Other figures discussed in the book include the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the English theologian Don Cuppit, the Italian writer on Buddhism Julius Evola, and two early English Buddhist monks, Nanamoli and especially Nanavira who particularly influenced Batchelor. There is also a fascinating aside on one Leonard Cranke, a distant relation of Batchelor who designed a famous sculpture of a fisherman in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that I have visited and admired.

Batchelor has written a thoughtful, challenging book on his own spiritual journey, on Buddhism in the West, and on Buddhism and its possible relationship to Western secularism.

Robin Friedman

This is an exhilarating book. Its strengths include the following:

(1) An engaging personal story about the author's youth, his experiences as a Buddhist monk in various places, and his decision to rejoin the secular world and to reject part of the Buddhist doctrine he was taught.
(2) A critical examination, akin to the Jesus seminar and other efforts to uncover the "historical Jesus", that attempts to provide a plausible story about the historical Buddha and what he actually taught.
(3) An interpretation of Buddhist teachings that is likely to be attractive to those of a secular, atheistic, agnostic, or philosophical bent. Buddhism is interpreted as a way and set of techniques for living better in this world, rather than for anything that might imply for what happens after death.

What is exhilarating about the book is that the author is so highly engaged in critically examining his own past life and Buddhist teachings. He does not shy away from self-criticism or controversy. The author's engagement sustains the interest of the reader. The critical examination encourages the reader to actively think about the issues that the author raises.

Of course, the author's interpretations of Buddhism may be wrong. He freely admits that he stresses the aspects of Buddhist history and teachings that are most relevant to someone like himself, from a Western background that highly values science and skepticism.

The author provides on his own website an interesting critique of his approach to Buddhism, by Bhikkhu Punnadhammo. You can also find online an interesting 1997 debate between Batchelor and noted Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman (father of Uma!) about how central the doctrine of reincarnation is to Buddhism. These alternative views of Buddhism to Batchelor's can easily be found online by a little googling.

At eighteen, this drop-out joined the Dalai Lama. In Dharamsala in the early 1970s, he entered "an intact pocket of modern Tibet," where it "was as though a group of Italian hippies had wandered off into the Apennines and discovered in a remote valley a fully functioning papal court of the fourteenth century." (27) But, this Shangri-La failed to enchant this British-raised skeptic.

Despite a decade in the monastery, Stephen Batchelor declared himself a deep agnostic and a literal atheist. "No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of giving more importance to a hypothetical, post-mortem existence than to this very life here and now." (40) He left the Zen retreat. He married a nun with whom he had fallen in love, after they "disrobed" to promote what emerged into a secular, non-theistic Dharma. He claims the same "grounded" attitude animated the historical Buddha. A dozen years after his admission of doubt as Dharma, Batchelor expands his 1997 "Buddhism Without Beliefs" (see my review) into a "collage" that combines spiritual autobiography, travel to the Indian heartlands where the Buddha taught, and an examination of early Pali texts.

Batchelor -- recalling Rudolf Bultmann's textual reclamation of the "historical Jesus" in the later 19th century -- seeks to strip the Indian-born preacher of those who in his name have elevated a simple exponent of human self-realization into the massive, gilded image of a deity. Batchelor rejects the Buddha as a guide towards liberation by karma and rebirth. His enlightenment, Batchelor explains, "did not encourage withdrawal to a timeless, mystical now, but an unflinching encounter with the contingent world as it unravels moment to moment." (129)

By scraping off the accretions of Brahmin thought, Batchelor shakes the Buddha free of glitter and incense. This scholar substitutes a radical humanist. He presents an existentialist founder of a civilization. The Buddha did not invent a religion. He did not direct us towards an afterlife. He did not further the Indian quest for an Oversoul. "Not-God" more accurately, Batchelor implies after a close study of the ancient Pali scriptures, comes closest to the original contexts that we can find. Siddhartha Gotama "was not a theist but nor was he an anti-theist. 'God' is simply not part of his vocabulary." (179)

While Gotama accepted the Brahmin outlook of gods and deities as marginal figures, he did not place them at the center of his cosmology. Instead, Batchelor argues, the Buddha's "original approach was therapeutic and pragmatic rather than speculative and metaphysical." (100) Batchelor defends himself against "cherry-picking" texts, for he counters "it has ever been thus." (181) If Buddhism remains a living tradition, it must retain this flexibility.

This narrative displays similar fluidity. Batchelor tells of his inability to accept karma and rebirth, as opposed to scientific explanations for our mental constructs. He "never had the God habit," so he entered the Indian monastery easily, adapting quickly to his surroundings. Ordained at twenty-one, he seemed to float into another realm, spiritually and culturally. Yet he soon migrated from India to a Tibetan foundation in Switzerland, and then left for Korea. Tibetan Buddhism, suffocated him by its certainties; "while the uncertainty celebrated in Korean Zen brought me vividly, if anxiously, to life." (65)

His innate agnosticism forced him to confront how to live as a Buddhist without confidence of salvation in this or another life. "It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty." (66) He rejects any liberation based on delayed entry of his mind into an immaterial entity. He interprets the Buddha's Four Noble Truths as 1) the embrace of suffering as fully known, 2) of letting go of craving for substantial truth or material support, 3) of experiencing the cessation of longing, and 4) appropriately acting to cultivate transformation by the Buddha's Eightfold Path. These terms remain a bit wordy, but they convey by Batchelor's translations the essential first sermon of the Buddha. Batchelor discards "all passages that assume the multi-life worldview of ancient India." This root text supplements the author's eloquent, sparely told chapter "Embrace Suffering."

Batchelor stresses the difficulty of honest inquiry. "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." (156) He reduces in pithy fashion the Four Noble Truths first expounded by the Buddha into: "Embrace, Let go, Stop:, Act!" (161) "This template," he notes, "can be applied to every situation in life." It nourishes empathy and feeds imagination. Mindfulness, he accepts, makes one respond to daily specifics, rather than divine transcendence. "It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief." (130)

As this citation demonstrates, Batchelor sets out his theology without "theos." Fresh perspectives emerge. Celibacy may have preserved a professional cadre handing down Dharma, but monastic institutions -- as shown by the collapse of Buddhism before Muslims in India or Communists in Tibet -- cannot rally troops against armies. "A reflective and educated laity" separate from "devout but often illiterate" laypeople or a theological community of contemplatives appears, as he and his wife have pioneered, a relevant model for seekers. (92)

Speaking of models, Copernican revolutions resemble the Buddha's reorientation of the self. Batchelor retrieves the Buddha from a life-negating, karmically deferred, repetitively reborn immaterial interpretation. "Gotama no more rejected the existence of the self than Copernicus rejected the existence of the earth. Instead, rather than regarding it as a fixed, non-contingent point around which everything else turned, he recognized that each self was a fluid, contingent process just like everything else." (133) Batchelor insists upon "relinquishing beliefs in an essential self." (135) He regards the Buddha as a "dissenter, a radical, an iconoclast."

He separates the Buddha's discourses from "the dead matter inherited from the Indian ascetic tradition." Batchelor "rejects world-renouncing norms." (147) He faces hard truths. "To steady one's gaze on the finitude, contingency, and anguish of one's existence is not easy. It requires mindfulness and concentration." (156) In this fortitude, one gains the knowledge that suffering permeates existence, and that we lack control over most of what will befall us. Instead of fatalism, Batchelor aims to fully engage the mind with this human predicament, "be it the song of a lark or the scream of a child, the bubbling of a playful idea of a twinge in the lower back." (157) He offers no platitudes. "You notice things come, you notice things go." This sensibility begins, with meditation, to widen to permeate one's whole outlook, to sober and direct one's self.

He rouses his rationalist readers. "The strongest argument against gods, spirits, and tantric divination is found in the existence of the electricity grid, brain surgery, and the Declaration of Human Rights." (200) Batchelor finds the appeal of Buddhism not within its explanations of reality, but in its methodology, its practical confrontation with the nature of suffering. This study's level may be too slightly too advanced for beginners. First, Michael Carrithers' "The Buddha" and Damian Keown's "Buddhism" entries in the Oxford University Press' "Very Short Introduction" series, and then Batchelor's "Buddhism Without Beliefs," (see my reviews of all three) will serve as compatible prerequisites for secular seekers.

Within familiar tales, Batchelor bolsters his skepticism. Near the Buddha's death, he told his disciple Ananda: "you should live as islands to yourselves, being your own refuge, with the Dhamma as an island, with the Dhamma as your refuge, with no other refuge." (219) Not even the Buddha or the Sangha (the community) can help; ultimately, free of God or gods, salvation or rebirth, liberation or an afterlife, Batchelor asserts that an honest Buddhist must realize: "You are on your own."

With such an exclusion of the supernatural, can wonder survive? Compassion, Batchelor avers, comes out of a suffering faced and embraced. Neither morbid nor despairing, it calms one's depths. Certitudes recede, and confidence emerges. "I will never see what Gotama saw," he tells us from his pilgrimage to the Buddha's homeland, "but I can listen to the descendents of the same cicadas he would have heard when night fell in Kusinara all those years ago." (223)

This rambling yet incisive study displays Batchelor's manner of writing: a "jackdaw" assemblage of "ideas, phrases, images, and vignettes." (227) He compares this construction to the Buddha's parable of a raft one makes to get across a river, only then to leave it behind for another crosser as one goes on one's way. The raft does not stay on the walker's back, nor is it enshrined as a relic. The Buddha's method of Dharma practice, Batchelor reasons, resembles making a collage. Meditational styles, philosophical nuggets, ethical values, insights all get bound together as a function, a tool, a vehicle. The raft helps us navigate life's river. "That is all that matters. It need not correspond to anyone else's idea of what 'Buddhism' is or should be." (229)

"If 'secular religion' were not considered a contradiction in terms, I would happily endorse such a concept." He concludes: "And if in the end there does turn out to be a heaven or nirvana somewhere else, I can see no better way to prepare for it." (240) In this slightly playful, gently ironic manner, Batchelor closes a rewarding, challenging journey down his life's path.

I read one of Stephen Batchelor's books before, and I was not disappointed. In this book he does three things:
a) He describes his personal journey through orthodox Buddhism
b) Outlines the reasons that led him to leave the monastic life and eventually reject many orthodox views/practices of Buddhism (some of which are only typical of Tibetan schools), such as; rebirth, karma, nirvana, mind-body dualism, visualization techniques, faith in the experience of meditators, recitation of mantras, tantric rituals
c) He weaves into his narrative a historical and cultural history of Buddha's life, paying special attention to the relationship he had with socio-economic-political powers of his day and age.
I did not find Batchelor to be a "hard core atheist," but somebody who is temperamentally inclined to a soft version of atheism. He is not so much "anti-this" or "anti-that", but rather favors the therapeutic and pragamatic bent of Dharma, and an eclectic approach (p. 229 and 237), as opposed to the Dharma's speculative/dogmatic/metaphysical trajectories. Batchelor also found much value in the Thereavda tradition (the Vipassana method taught by Goenka, and the entire Pali canon, which is not entirely reproduced in the Tibetan canon, or Kanjur)
Because of my personal interest in Julius Evola, I really enjoyed his chapter 11 devoted to the Italian thinker's impact on two British secret service operatives who eventually became Buddhist monks with the names of Nanamoli and Nanavira. Also, I liked the way he discussed the Dorje Shugden controversy (villain or saint?) and the Tibetan aversion to Zen's "sudden enligthenment" in favor of perfection of morality, studying the suttas, cultivating meritorious deeds and devotional practices.
I will definetely planning to read his earlier "Buddhism without Beliefs."

this book is an incredible read and necessary for anyone interested in buddhism or who practices buddha's teachings. a lot of people raised catholic or christian who get sarcastic towards there faith tend to eventually find eastern thought and idealize it as the new answer they just didn't see before. people think they're making a huge change philosophically, but really they're replacing one dogma with another, and avoiding the core questions which all religions fail to answer. batchelor's story of his failed romance with buddhism is brilliant and painful and very very human, which i really found so captivating. his research of the historical buddha is second to none, and puts his life and his teachings into correct perspective. i've read many books on buddhism and this is by far the best and most intriguing. i'd strongly recommend this to anyone interested in buddhism and not afraid to question.

I can't add too much more than the other reviewers, so if you're looking for a nice summary as a way of deciding whether or not to read the book, the other reviewers do a nice job of that. Though I am not a Buddhist, I felt an immediate connection with Batchelor's label for his outlook on life: radical agnosticism, a term that nicely encapsulates my own. It refers not only to the god question but to humans' ability to know anything with absolute certainty. Batchelor comes across as being very sincere in his desire to understand the world, the Truth if you will, though humble at the same time in realizing that true objectivity, and therefore the right to unwavering convictions, is likely impossible. I appreciated Batchelor's willingness to constantly question things, to look at the world, even his current beliefs, from a skeptical point of view. His skepticism is born not of a desire to simply criticize some point of view but of an awareness of his own limitations and biases and to get beyond them. It's refreshing to read someone who is sincere in his quest for certainty but honest in his acknowledgment that he has yet to find it. Even if you are more sure of your way of looking at the world than Batchelor, you might still appreciate the honesty and even be challenged to at least revisit your certainty. Highly recommended.

The book is about Stephen Batchelor's pretty much Life journey as a Buddhist follower. His journey starts as a 20 year old joining the Dalai Lama school and within an year he ordains as a Monk. He realizes that his journey as a Monk has hardly been enlightenling and after 10 years he comes out of Robe. Then he goes to a Zen Monk in Korea and learns Buddhism from him.

Meanwhile he has had a chance to have a look at the Pali Canon considered by many to be one of the oldest of Buddha's words. He realizes that what the Dalai Lama school and the Zen school teach are radically different from what is written in the Pali Canon.

He says that the core of the Buddha's message is the following 4:
a. This - that Conditionality - with the arising of this leads to arising of that- dependent origination.
b. Impermanence, No -Soul - Anatta
c. The 4 Noble Truths.
c. Self - Reliance (He quotes several suttas from the Pali canon where in the Buddha himself says believe nobody, no guru, no person, -----Just believe in yourself. Let the Dhamma be the refuge.)

ps: Batchelor mentions about a Theravada Buddhist Monk Nanavira Thera who had attained Sotapanna (stream enterer) and committed suicide. It would be worth it to read his works.

Update, May 2011: I was unaware of the context of this book when I first reviewed it, but I can see that it is an attempt to recast Buddhism in the vein the the New Atheism, and the reductionist thinking of the current 'cult' of scientism. The atheism (and, it should be pointed out, residual polytheism) of Buddhism is a deeper insight than the current brand of 'new atheist' muddle. One symptom of this is the attempt to write the issue of rebirth out of Buddhism, but that is a mistake. Every stage of Buddhism had this doctrine, and if it makes contemporary thinkers uncomfortable it is because their science is limited, not Buddhism. Buddhism was always an atheist religion, but it does not follow that it conforms to the dogmas of current bad science and its reductionist mania. It remains a challenge to that contraction of thought, well called by Max Weber, the Iron Cage.
I withdraw my support from this book, indicated by the first review: it is an interesting perspective, but let's hope it is not Batchelor's fate to be one of the destroyers of Buddhism in our age.

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I should let this book do the good it can do with the audience to which it is addressed, save only to offer a caveat that you can overdo it and secularize Buddhism too excessively. Buddhism is already a better secularism than what we are now offered by confused scientists. I enjoyed reading this, however, and appreciate the author's quandaries in trying to see through the pre-scientific views of much Buddhist thought. The problem is that Buddhism in essence has a deeper take on 'science' than much science, and confronts that which an age of modern scientism has lost. Thus the 'new' Buddhism without any consideration of the admittedly impossible question of reincarnation is a venture into the unknown, and no longer really Buddhism. There is no Buddhism without an understanding of of the cycle of rebirths. But skepticism can be helpful, perhaps, in leading to something more than mere faith and belief.
There is a lot of interesting history here, especially as to the incidents in the life of Gautama from the Pali Canon.
The question of Tibet is hopelessly difficult, and I can only sympathize with the author's curious disillusion, but all the puzzles of Tibet remain to be understood, some day, by someone who really understands reincarnation, and the strange ghostocracy of Tibetan Buddhism. Meanwhile, searching for the simplicity of primordial Buddhism is a vital task, which forgives this book its limits. A starting point here doesn't have to be perfect.
The New Atheists should consider this book, and the complexities of Buddhism, as an atheist religion, but with a perspective far beyond the dumbed down scientism of the current pseudo-secularists who have turned bad science into a religion.
The nature of the 'atheism' in ancient Buddhism is something lost to us. Buddhism was a reform movement in parallel to the crystallizing deviations of Hinduism, and its lack of theism resembles the most ancient traditions in Jainism and pre-Hindu Shaivism, where the 'gods' were considred entirely beyond human knowledge, and their action too likely to turn men into spiritual cattle. The need to pass beyond this by a direct path to liberation is an essential teaching that entered the very late Buddhism of the Axial Age.
That's a warning to the current fad of new atheists who have renounced the occult dimenisons present in Buddhism. The New Atheists are too likely to join the Old Christians as spiritual blind spiritual cattle of the 'gods'. Be wary of a too watered down Buddhism. It will lose its flame.
But a fine book, as is.
Buddhism is being lost to us. I might be of interest to also very cautiously pursue the primordial history of Shaivism and Jainism from which Buddhism springs in Danielou's book on the history of Indian religion. The Kali Yuga (and you don't have to believe in such a thing to get the point here) began long before the Axial Age, and we should note that Hinduism a form of religious decline, Buddhism being a reform movement. The moral is that Buddhism could now be in decline, asking us for a New Age to do what the Axial Age did, at a point of decline.

This book is going to be very surprising to many readers because it more or less tells the true story of millions of young people of the Baby Boom who got tired of western narrow morality and hierarchical alienating if not frustrating and castrating society in the West up to 1968 when the Hippie movement, Bob Dylan and a few others broke the mould and left these young people without a model. So they moved out. You have to understand most of these movers were from the middle class, and even at times the upper middle class. The poor did not even have the idea, certainly not the opportunity, of moving out. The chains were too heavy.

The most surprising fact concerning these emigrants out of the west is that they looked for both exotic cultures and practices and at the same time the most esoteric beliefs they could think of, in fact not think at all, they could let themselves be captured by. Being from that generation but from the working class, under the lower middle class, I could not move out that easily; So I went to Africa on a cooperation program, then I went to the USA on a personal working program, and then to the USA again on an exchange university program. My freewheeling experiences remained in Europe, including some working summer camps in East Germany, after ten or twelve summers spent on farms, working day after day, especially Sundays. It is only more recently that I moved to the vast Orient, Sri Lanka, to Buddhism and a three months placement in a Buddhist temple.

My experience makes me understand Stephen Batchelor's enterprise at that time and also makes me understand that some time along the way his quest will have to make him scream "Fake! Sham!" but I fully understand that he will and does retain the essential learning he accumulated during his time in the Tibetan, or Korean Buddhist institutions, and that heritage is the Dhammapada, though he has a slightly wider approach than just the Dhammapada or even the Abhidhamma. But we must understand that Stephen Batchelor rewrites or even rewires history. His whole escape at the beginning was nothing but a full submissive adherence to what he found there, even if today when he writes he seems to be taking some distance with some of the most foolish Tibetan assertions.

". . . in the Kangyur and Tengyur (the Tibetan Buddhist canon). There you would learn that the earth was a triangular continent in a vast ocean dominated by the mighty Mount Sumeru, around which the sun, the moon and planets revolved. Driven by the force of good and bad deeds committed over beginningless former lifetimes, beings were repeatedly reborn as gods, titans, humans, animals, ghosts or denizens of hell until they had the good fortune to encounter and put into practice the Buddha's teaching, which would enable them to escape the cycle of rebirth forever. Moreover, as followers of the Mahayana (Great Vehicle), Tibetan Buddhists vowed to keep taking birth out of compassion for all sentient beings until every last of them was freed." (p. 6)

And he knows he believed in all that at once and without any pangs of questioning. As he says "It was prompted by my craving for belief." (p. 7) Hence to escape that eternity of dramatic if not tragic or purely inhuman rebirths he accepted the idea that life is nothing but suffering, a cyclical repetition of suffering from which you can only escape via "nirvana" that is to say perfection in thoughts, speech, acts and all other elements of one's life that brings enlightenment, or awakening, and makes you step out of this hellish life of all humans. What's even worse, a good enlightened and awakened Buddhist who could escape into nirvana and become a Buddha has the duty to serve his fellow human victims and refuse to take nirvana and vow to stay in the rebirth cycle to serve again as a Boddhisattva till the very last human being is finally saved from this "suffering." Even the worst ideologies advocated in the Middle Ages by the Christian churches, or by some Christian sects up to today, or by Islam in its most fundamentalist versions have not put forward such a bleak picture since for a good Christian who has suffered a lot, like Job, death will be a reward and a liberation in the Christian dimension, or for a good Muslim who has fought for the triumph of his faith will be transported into paradise after his death with the compensatory gift of a few virgins.

In that line of total mental alienation the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a masterpiece that anyone who does not want to become a bigot of any faith has to read and ponder upon. It is a real salvation when you finally understand that all that is nothing but a mental construction meant to deal with a hostile world and totally out of touch today in a world that is not exactly dominated by the survival of the species, at least in numbers, since the real agenda should be to reduce the numbers.

But let's enter one more minute into Stephen Batchelor's nightmare.

"Every morning I could become the glorious and mighty bull-headed Yamantaka: `with a dark azure body, nine faces, thirty-four arms, and sixteen legs, of which the right are drawn in and the left extended. My tongue curls upward, my fangs are bared, my face is wrinkled with anger, my orange hair bristled upward. . . I devour human blood, fat, marrow, and lymph. My head is crowned with five frightful dried skulls and I am adorned with a garland of fifty moist human heads. I wear a black snake as a brahmin's thread. I am naked, my belly is huge and my penis erect. My eyebrows, eyelashes, beard, and body hair blaze like the fire at the end of time.'" (p. 23)

This is one of the essential source of cannibalism, vampirism and were-wolfism that have roots deep in the oldest religious devised by Homo Sapiens when confronted to the ice age, receding waters, advancing ice, and then the thawing period with mounting waters, receding ice, and all kinds of dramatic transformations in both cases. These Homo Sapiens colonies all over the world devised blood lust and religions based on that lust. Tibetan Buddhism has not been able to let go of this pre-Neolithic heritage. His conclusion though is brutal:

"I was being indoctrinated. Despite a veneer of open, critical inquiry Geshe Rabten [his master at the time] did not seriously expect his students to adopt a view of Buddhism that differed in any significant respect from that of Geluk [a Tibetan branch of sect of Buddhism] orthodoxy. I realized that to continue my training under his guidance entailed an obligation to toe the party line. This felt like a straightjacket." (p. 45)

If I have insisted on this side of the book, and I could quote it a lot more, it is because Stephen Batchelor's project is to desacralize and de-divinize Buddhism, to purge this deeply human and vastly creative philosophy and humanism that Buddhism is of all the feudal (if not frankly slave-age), medieval apparatus of subjugation and submission and subservience imposed on the faithful with two classes in the traditional (today exiled) Tibetan society: on top the professional monastic people who produce nothing and live on what they get from society, from the other class (in one word that is called parasitic exploitation in my dictionary) and the second class of those who work, produce what the monastic population needs to live in comfort (at the height of Buddhism in Tibet before the Chinese take-over 25% of the male population were in the monasteries living on what the rest of the population produced, especially male children to make this monastic nursery perennial), and eventually, not necessarily, what they, the populace, need to survive.

Stephen Batchelor states the existence or development of a third class in the world with the spreading of Tibetan Buddhism to the middle or upper middle class in the West. These refuse to follow the superstitious bigotry that thrives under the blanket of the smiling Dalai Lama. His smile charms but his real thought and action harm, to plagiarize an English motto from English Buddhist monks when the Dalai Lama visited this country. And Stephen Batchelor only considers the Mahayana Tibetan sphere. He should have studied the Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) or Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka and South East Asia and he would have learned how Buddhist communities in Laos, with the help of UNESCO is building a real economy with their know-how and their knowledge in order to become sustainable as a community without having to rely on the people around them to feed them. That will not change their relation with the population but that will provide the monasteries with means to develop, create, produce some added value and even promote tourism with meditation camps and training sessions in Buddhist arts and music, not to mention the services they will be able to provide their surrounding population.

When this is understood we can wonder what remains behind, what Stephen Batchelor retains from Buddhism in his present life, and I will say a lot and I can only be skimpy on that lot.

There remains a long and serious attempt at reconstructing the real life of the real Buddha and the book is quite clear about his origin, not the son of a king but of what would be a provincial governor within a wider kingdom, with many wars around and inside and many plots and counterplots from one family against another at the top of this aristocratic slave and feudal agrarian society. You will have to read the book yourself because it is enlightening, awakening too. You may not reach nirvana but you will definitely start understanding how as soon as the Buddha was dead from some kind of slow poisoning a recent convert (a convert who was understanding there was going to be a free position in the hierarchy of this new religion that had important supporters and providers, or who was even preparing that free position behind the wings), a certain Kassapa, plainly took over the order and made it into a lasting religion though it will be rejected from India later on and pushed into Tibet to the North and abandoned to its own in Sri Lanka and South East Asia from which it moved to China to become the Zen tradition, to Korea and to the islands Taiwan and Japan.

Personally I am connected to the Theravada tradition that has no problem with living without gods, since they reject the concept and they have purified Buddhism from all the feudal discourse and practices and insist on the fact the monastic population is there to serve society with education, healthcare, benevolence, refuge, knowledge and so many other services, including of course meditation practiced to relieve the mind and the body of real suffering and to help people to find happiness and eventually liberation in "nibbana" (Pali word for Sanskrit nirvana)

Stephen Batchelor does not question the anthropological dimension of this Kassapa. From an old religion, Hinduism, with even older religions behind like the Bon religion in Tibet, emerges a new religion, the preaching of the Buddha, essentially carried by one man. When this man dies a self-appointed successor turns that potential project into a stabilized institution, Buddhism. In the same way from the old religion Judaism with older religions behind, emerges a new religion, the preaching of Jesus and his direct half brothers and some friends. The four brothers will die: one, Jesus crucified by the Romans at the demand from the priests of the Jewish temple; the second, James, stoned to death by decision of the High Priest of the Jewish Temple; and the two other brothers, Theudas ("Jude") and Cleophas (Simon or Simon "son of" Cleophas - not Joseph) martyred. And then a self-appointed apostle of the gentiles, Paul, ex-Saul, invents Christianity out of a fully rewritten story. And later on from the Dead Sea Scrolls tradition and Abraham's son from his slave servant, Ishmael, will arise another religion with the intervention of the self-appointed prophet Mohamed. What did these Indian and Middle-Eastern societies (and Roman Empire) find in these religions being born from older traditions? Why in these two cases three men took over the drama or the tragedy of death to transform what was essentially a personal, even if collective, venture, into a global (at least at the time) institution? Stephen Batchelor does not answer this question though it is always present behind.

Then the main Buddhist principles he retains are simple.

First of all think by yourself (p. 33 and 39). Zen Buddhism cultivates doubt (p. 65 and 71). And this is based on one of the oldest discourses of the Buddha, the famous Kalamas discourse.

"The Buddha: . . . Do not go by oral traditions, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of scriptures, by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reflection on reasons, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of the speaker, or because you think `The ascetic is our teacher.' But when you know for yourselves, `These things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practiced, lead to harm and suffering,' then you should abandon them. . . These things are wholesome, these things are blameless; these things are praised by the wise; these things if undertaken and practiced, lead to welfare and happiness, then you should engage in them."

It is obvious from this very old discourse that the Buddha did not privilege "suffering," in Pali "dukkha," and that this "dukkha" is set in parallel with "happiness," in Pali "sukha," the two words being built on antagonist roots "du-" and "su-" with the suffix "-kha." "du-" applies to something that has a negative dimension including that could cause injury or pain. "su-" is absolutely parallel and applies to something that has a positive dimension including that could bring joy and happiness, if not bliss. Unluckily in standard Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism only "dukkha," translated since Rhys Davids, the founder of the Pali Text Society in London at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, as "suffering" recuperating the narrow Tibetan vision, the identical Hindu vision in India and the good old Christian tradition of the valley of tears drowning in a sea of lachrymal fluids, if not blood.

This false and misleading translation sticks to Buddhism because the Dalai lama himself and the global Tibetan Budhhist organization are imposing it in the media. My practice of Theravada Buddhism is in perfect agreement with the Kalamas discourse: both "dukkha" and "sukha" have to be taken into account. Life is an alternating succession of positive and negative elements.

Then, and Stephen Batchelor is not clear enough on this subject, man has six senses and not five, the mind being the sixth sense. In Theravada Buddhism and in the Budhha's teaching it is quite clear that the world is a reality outside ourselves that cannot be denied at all. Then this world is only captured by us via our six senses. The five material sensorial organs are simple to understand: hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch (plus all kinds of internal sensors in the body). But the mind is difficult to understand. The mind is attached to the neo-cortex that builds it as a virtual construct from the circumstantial, existential, experiential and situational surrounding context as received as nervous impulse from all the senses. This mind, like the neo-cortex is first of all flexible, adaptable, and can be remapped according to new circumstantial, existential, experiential and situational surrounding contextual elements. This is in perfect agreement with the first precept from the Buddha: you must become aware of the exact context in which you are and at the same time the exact state in which you are.

As long as the mentalists of this world go on making the mind something immaterial, they will run into the dichotomy body-mind, or body-soul, or body-psyche, or whatever other pair of concepts seen as antagonist. The conception of the mind emerging here is essential.

It is the surrounding conditions and the real state in which I am in these surrounding conditions that produce via the work of my six senses a behavior, an action, a thought, or whatever initiative, be it willful, instinctive, unconscious or anything else, my mind and my body will take. Stephen Batchelor is finally, along with others, understanding that the Buddha never negated the "self." In fact Stephen Batchelor does not insist enough on the three basic concepts of Buddhism. First, "anicca" and the observation that everything is changing, that nothing is permanent. This concept is often translated "impermanence." If nothing is permanent, then second everything is going through successive cycles or birth-life-death-rebirth. The point is that it is simple to understand that for a plant that grows from a seed and produces more seeds before dying. It is the same for man. Every single experience will have a beginning, a development and an end and there is not reason to suffer, because, to take one common example in the field of Buddhism, the birth of a love affair is pure bliss, except to bliss-haters, and the love affair itself is pure bliss, even if with some difficult moments, except of course for bliss-bashers, and the end of a love affair, no matter how, has to be a simple event because nothing is eternal. So this love affair will end in a divorce, in a separation if we are speaking of a married couple of any kind. It can also just change from a very passionate physical affair to a very passionate mental and spiritual affair. In fact it can also be the reverse. Or it can also be the fact that the two people decide conjointly that they have to follow their own tracks that lead them to two different trails, but the love affair has been bliss and the separation is leading to more bliss.

Then "dukkha" is nothing but the couple "dukkha-sukha," this cycle of necessary change in life and the acceptance of this change. A pain always covers a joy and a joy always carries a pain. Some can even enjoy a blissful moment so much that it becomes painful to them, and vice versa, some can enjoy a pain so much that they find it exquisite.

If we accept this "dukkha-sukha" emerging from "anicca" in the surrounding physically real and mentally virtual conditions the result is the emergence of the fact that nothing in reality, in real life is the same thing in two successive moments. That is "anatta" in fact badly translated as "non-self" or "not-self" or "unself." Another word is needed, though I am for keeping the Pali concept and developing a lexicon. But we could think of "existential transient essence." We must understand our mind can develop the concept of dog, but it is a concept not a permanent essence because there are dozens of different species, and each individual dog is different from all others even from all others in his own species, and every single dog is the locale of a cycle of birth-life-with-reproduction-death-rebirth-in-the-puppies, and at each moment that particular dog is different from what it was a minute ago and what it will be in a minute.

Then "awakening" is nothing mysterious, no trouble at all to understand.

When we accept what I have, along with Stephen Batchelor, explained awakening is pure bliss because it is first realistic about what is around me and what I am at one moment and what I could be at another moment, and the same about everyone else around me, Then it is the determination by my fully awake, or aware, concentrated and willful, equanimous and empathetic mind of a course of action, or thinking, that will make me what I will have to be for the time this situation will last. This can be bliss or danger and pain. The end is never programmed in some computer and you are free to build your happiness or your unhappiness, even if some may say that you are free to choose to accept the happiness or the unhappiness the world imposes onto or proposes to you. Bliss is the result of serendipity, though at times pain can be the result of the very same accidental discovery called serendipity. I was always so fascinated by this guest house, hotel and restaurant in Sigiriya, Sri Lanka, whose name was Serendipity, in the middle of the fields and the jungle with wild elephants roaming around at night.

The main requirement here is that we get rid of our addictive, compulsive, neurotic, obsessive attachments that are often nothing but good or bad habits that cannot produce happiness because happiness is necessarily a construct, something we each one of us at each moment of our lives construct with our own hands and our own minds.

That leads us to Stephen Batchelor's conclusion:

"I think of myself as a secular Buddhist who is concerned entirely with the demands of this age (saeculum) no matter how inadequate and insignificant my responses to these demands might be. And if in the end there does turn out to be a heaven or nirvana somewhere else, I can see no better way to prepare for it." (p. 240)

His bet "à la Blaise Pascal" is in a way a relapse into believing. The very principles he has been defending of the awareness of the real complex context of each moment of life should prevent him from this casuistic remark. He has to be a realist and say, and that's what I personally say, if that eventually did pop up, I will consider it then. That will only be one more river to cross. And the Buddha explained that when we build a raft to cross a river we do not take the raft along for the next river and we leave it behind for the next person who will want to cross the river. If there is another river ahead we will build another raft then, or we might have to swim across it. "I know each day will bring its task." (Helen Hunt Jackson, 1830, Amherst, 1885, San Francisco)

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

People seem to love or hate Stephen Batchelor. I am a "Batchelorette," (my dharma friends' affectionate name for his fans), and this is probably my favorite of his books. His description of Buddha's life is more fully realized than any I've read before. Speculative? You bet. But -all- descriptions of Buddha's life are, and Batchelor gives persuasive reasons for his take on every point he makes. His writing is scholarly but yet very readable, and my copy of this book is marked up, page-flagged, and dog-eared from use.

In a clear, concise, compelling manner Stephen Batchelor addresses several questions/ponderings I've had surrounding the Buddhist religion and religion in general. Thank you for your candid, forthright sharing—one of the best books I've read on Buddhism and faith.

I had the pleasure of hearing Stephen Batchelor at a reading of Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist a couple of months ago in Los Angeles where I picked up the book.

First, just as a work of history (ancient and modern) it is delightful. Batchelor is basically into mining the Pali Sutras, in part as a socio-political text, and has found amazing stuff. Here is how he describes the dialog between the Buddha and Sivaka from the Connected Discourses [p. 142], as very possibly first commented upon by Nanavira Thera (nee Harold Musson)in Clearing the Path [then published as Notes on Dhamma] in 1963 in Columbo, Sri Lanka:

". . . in which the Buddha said of the doctrine of karma, that people who hold such a view "go beyond what is known by themselves and what is reckoned to be true by the world" and are therefore `in the wrong.' He pointed out how the experience of pleasure of pain may simply be the result of ill health, inclement weather, carelessness or assault. Even on such occasions when it is the result of former actions, that should be something you should be able to understand for yourself or with the help of others. The Buddha thus categorically rejected one of the central dogmas of orthodox Buddhism and, in its place, presented an entirely empirical view of the sources of human experience."

[In his talk, Batchelor commented on the historic roots of this Dialogue, how it appears in a setting that inured to the benefit of no one in power at the time the Canon was first transcribed, utilizing a technique often employed by Biblical scholars as indicia of historic authenticity.]

But the book is not an exercise in dry scholasticism, relating with full flavor how Musson was first introduced to Buddhism in 1945, as he was hospitalized in Italy while interrogating Fascists, and read the just published work of one Julius Evola, who just skipped town for Vienna after the fall of Mussolini, where he was kept:

". . . translating Masonic texts for Himmler's Ahnenerbe, a Nazi think tank devoted to establishing the historical supremacy of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe suspected that Siddhartha Gotama might have been of good Aryan stock and in 1938 sent an expedition to Tibet under the leadership of SS Hauptsurmfuhrer Ernst Schafer to find further evidence of this. The Germans spent two months in Lhasa in early 1939, measuring Tibetan's skulls and facial features and collecting Buddhist texts. They did not meet the newly discovered four-year-old Dalai Lama, who was still in his village near the Chinese border, preparing to leave for his enthronement in Lhasa. "[p.138.]

(To think I took Raiders of the Lost Ark as fiction!)

But what left the crowd in awe at the end, was Batchelor's retelling/retranslation of Turning the Wheel of Dharma, the Buddha's first discourse at Deer Park, as incorporated into Chapter 12 of the text:

"Turning the Wheel of Dharma, the discourse Gotama delivered at Deer Park in which he outlined his understanding of the Four Noble Truths, boils down to this:

Embrace,
Let go,
Stop:
Act!"

Fortunately, the store has included the full text of that translation, along with the author's comments and explanations, as set forth in Appendix II of the text, pp. 253 - 254, which includes the author's most controversial statement:

"I have removed from the test all passages that assume the multi-life worldview of ancient India."

Why? Because it was so deeply imbedded in the culture he would the Buddha would have gotten nowhere railing against it. For more useful to employ it at poetry. So instead, while the phrases are repeated in the Canon, each "rebirth" can be read as "arising," as in this absolute world we now address in terms of deep physics, self and the relative world continuously arise in the moment. Thereby allowing us to fundamentally shift our positions at any time with - as stressed by Batchelor - the aid of those around us.

This view illuminates the last four sentences of Batchelor's comments on his translation of Turning the Wheel of Dhamma:

"Toward the end of the text, the Buddha concludes by saying: `The freedom of my mind is unshakeable. This is the last birth. There will be no more repetitive existence.' In my translation, I have removed the phrase `This is the last birth.'"

Indeed. In ancient India, rebirth as a persuasive cultural construct could not be easily ignored, but could be played off of. But then as well as today, to truly give up repetitive thought and action - repetitive existence - is to break the cycle itself. Arising in the moment, ever new.

Very well-written, honest account of a man's search for meaning and the best way to live. I totally empathize with Stephen's thoughts on Buddhism -- I can't imagine how difficult it must have been to live as a monk with so much doubt about many of the core beliefs. It reveals a lot about his character -- how he desperately wanted to believe but in the end, he had to be true to himself. What struck me about this book was the honesty -- how he acknowledges that although he's come to this sort of customized "middle path" -- he understands he may be interpreting the Buddha's discourses to suit his western mindset. But that can be said about all religions, as well as each follower within a religion. I agree that all religion, if it is to be helpful, has to be reinterpreted to fit the current reality. The eight-fold path holds up, on its own, as a way to ease suffering for ourselves and others. Beautifully written account of an ongoing heartfelt journey and search for truth and meaning -- this book meant a lot to me. Thank you!

The text takes many, too many, swings at Buddism again and again. Buddhism becomes the prey of a very subtle game of innuendo and good fun mud-slinging. We get pulled far and wide grasping for anything to embarrass or belittle conventional Buddhism. The reaching goes far into citations of uncertain verifiability such as:

"I am living hemmed in by monks and nuns," thought Siddhattha Gotama to himself one day in the Ghosita Monastery near Kosambi, "by kings and ministers, by sectarian teachers and their followers, and I live in discomfort and not at ease.

And this use is not just to bring up a questionable historical antecedote (Kosambi was disfunctional, Eastern Bamboo Grove was not), but to continue hammering away at apparent displeasure and disdain for what most of the world knows and practices as Buddhism.

Clearly every religion come under the same flogging in this book.

"The ensuing controversy showed that Buddhists could be as fervent and irrational in their views about karma and rebirth as Christians and Muslims could be in their convictions about the existence of God. "

But repeatedly it is Buddhism which unfairly receives a high brow tromping. In short you are mainly provided with the wrong instead of the right. You have no inklings of the beauty of a path that most folks deeply into Buddhism know. We even hear about the allegation that the Buddha had inappropriate relations with a woman (of which he was later cleared) just to put some extra doubt into Buddhism and the Buddha. Suicide in connection with Buddhism or Buddhists is mentioned in this book 13 times using the guilt by association card. The text makes noticable use of the spelling of words like Dhamma (vs Dharma), Gotama (vs Gautama), and Siddhattha (vs Siddhartha ). These spelling choices shout out more disdain for any established norms in Buddhism. It's like thumbing your nose at Buddhism verbally, repeatedly. You get the feeling of paddling upstream and against the current just for the sake of it. Subtle tones of Captain Ahab abound in these shadows.

Sentence after wandering sentence mentioning folks like Harold Musson and Bertie Moore provide meaningless hyperbole and diversion from meaningful discussion related to the title of the book:

"As language users, we can no more cease trying to generate coherent theories and beliefs than a stomach can cease to digest food. As social animals we invariably organize ourselves into groups and communities. Without a rigorous, self-critical discourse, one risks lapsing into pious platitudes and unexamined generalizations."

The above few sentences are simply a mental lap around the track. They and the associated content in the book have no real meaning and value to the topic at hand. Most of the book is filled with these neural jungle gyms:

""Religion today," says Don Cupitt, "has to become beliefless. There is nothing out there to believe in or to hope for. Religion therefore has to become an immediate
and deeply felt way of relating yourself to life in general and your own life in particular." "

Who is Don Cupitt? Why should I care who he is or what he says? And why should I 'believe' anything he says? The book wants to reshape everyones beliefs to it's own views. Not just out of aspiration, but almost out of demand that you join the future anti-Buddhist Buddhism movement. The book should have been titled Buddhist Protestantism as it is much more against something than for something.

The challenge is, for most readers, that the author knows far more academically than most people about this subject. Readers will not realize that the views they are receiving are not only poo-pooing 'conventional' Buddhism (if such a thing exists) but they are also promoting something that is barely able to be called, or resembling, any form of Buddhism at all. Many times books written from an atheist viewpoint carry a tone of overt antagonism. This book is no exception and the target is the Buddha and Buddhism.

A key component of Buddhism is compassion and bodhicitta, along with a general teaching of the dharma. In most of the authors writings and talks, you get none of this. The content is of trouncing the old and bringing in some 'more real form' of new Buddhism for the future. But the product is not any Buddhism at all. It does not seem very compassionate, nor honest, nor Buddhistic at all, if you understand what Buddhism is.

If you are a Buddhist or admire anything about Buddism than don't read this book, you don't need the continual attempts to upset you via senseless aggravation.

If you are interested in Buddhism then there are many fine teachers out there of good character to listen to.

Check videos you can find with Richard Gere or solid and helpful books like A Complete Guide To The Buddhist Path.

The Four Immeasurables

May all sentient beings have happiness and its causes,
May all sentient beings be free of suffering and its causes,
May all sentient beings never be separated from bliss without suffering,
May all sentient beings be in equanimity, free of bias, attachment and anger.

This self-styled "confession" by Stephen Batchelor succeeds brilliantly in three distinct literary genres. First and foremost, it's an articulate and passionate exposition of Buddhism from this gifted, world-renowned scholar and teacher. Second, it's a poignant memoir of a lifetime's journey along the dhamma path, dating all the way back to some of the author's earliest childhood memories. And third, it's a vivid travelogue, as Batchelor recounts, in the last half of the book, a series of visits he recently made to various historic sites where the Buddha is known to have taught, re-imagines how these places would have appeared to the Buddha twenty-five hundred years ago, reports on their current appearance (sadly, in most cases, partially or completely in ruins), and re-creates in his own words the essence of what the Buddha is reputed to have spoken about at these sites.

The heart of the book, and coming almost exactly at its midpoint, is a chapter entitled "Embrace Suffering", in which Batchelor discusses the heart of the Buddha's teaching, the Four Noble Truths. It would be impossible (and presumptuous) for me to attempt to summarize or paraphrase any part of this crucial chapter, which demands to be read attentively from its first sentence to its last, but here are three brief excerpts, a mere sampler of the riches it contains:

"Each truth is the condition that gives rise to the next: fully knowing suffering leads to letting go of craving; letting go of craving leads to experiencing its cessation; and those moments of cessation open up the free and purposive space of the eightfold path itself."

"To know, deep in your bones, how everything you experience is fleeting, poignant, and unreliable undermines the rationale for trying to grasp hold of, possess, and control it. To fully know suffering begins to affect how you relate to the world, how you respond to others, how you manage your own life."

"To experience the cessation of craving, even momentarily, is to gain a glimpse of what the Buddha called 'nirvana'. In this sense, nirvana is not the goal of the eightfold path, but its starting point."

Since I opened this review with a reference to the first word in the book's title, "confession", let me close it by referring to the last word in its title, "atheist". Batchelor devotes an entire, albeit short, chapter to his notion of the Buddha as "an ironic atheist", meaning that he simply wasn't interested in questions regarding the existence or non-existence of an other-worldly God, because he was so completely absorbed by the question of what to do in the face of the suffering present in this world. Batchelor then takes to task the militant brand of atheism currently in vogue with some notable contemporary authors, claiming that "their position is premised on a denial of God every bit as fervent as the believer's affirmation of Him." These aggressive atheists, in his view, should more correctly be called "anti-theists", while the Buddha's - and presumably Batchelor's - atheism is more attuned to the correct meaning of the word, "non-theism". For me, this was a welcome clarification, one that is much needed in these polarized political times we find ourselves living in.

Batchelor concludes this, his most autobiographical book, by defining himself as "a secular Buddhist", someone for whom ....

"Buddhism has become ... a philosophy of action and responsibility. It provides a framework of values, ideas, and practices that nurture my ability to create a path in life, to define myself as a person, to act, to take risks, to imagine things differently, to make art."

With this book, he has, indeed, made art.

I'll preface this by saying I highly admire the author's previous work Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening.

Parts of the book are engrossing - his reconstruction of the actual person of Gotama versus the myth of the king's son who was sheltered from life until he escaped and saw people suffering is well worth reading. But by the end of the book, the whole thing seems as aimless as the middle-aged author regards much of his life.

Batchelor's story is one of a man who abandons what he sees as sophistic inauthenticity (Boomer boy in suburban England), only to find what he sees as dogmatism (hippie in India acting as Tibetan monk), to arrive at the dogmatic sophistry of the New Atheists (European Caucasions who think religion is beneath them). It is part autobiography, part travelogue, part Western philosophy, part love story, part reading of the Pali canon, part revisionist history, and part revisionist history of someone else's revisionist history.

The ideas are not only jumbled, but he seems to miss his best opportunities for expanding stories. One example: Batchelor talks about a version of the Pali canon written by a man who was not only not a Buddhist, but worked for a Nazi think tank exploring the idea that the Buddha was of "good Aryan stock." While the Nazis were measuring Tibetan skulls to see if they fit the mold, they were also deciding that the Pali Canon preserved the true Aryan spirit: Aristocratic, anti-spiritual, anti-evolutionist, and (my favorite) "manly." Not only does Batchelor tell you nothing more about that, but he sorta leaves you thinking ... What? This is the Pali Canon you're placing all your prayer beads in as the one and true Buddha? And you call the Tibetan lamas uncritical thinkers?

Much of the book is just hard to read, and unlike the earlier book of his I admire, I don't think it was because it required reflection. "Rather than dismiss the self as a fiction, Gotama presented it as a project to be realized," he insufferably writes in his chapter on embracing suffering. "By 'self' he referred not to the transcendent Self of the brahmins, which, by definition, cannot be anything that what it eternally Is, but the functional, mortal self that breathes and acts in the world."

And it goes on like that. His long descriptions of the suffering in life made me scream out, dude, just read Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament; it's much briefer but more poetic and makes the same point that life is vain and meaningless, doo-dah, doo-dah. Nothing new under the sun there.

What Batchelor says we are left of the Buddha's teaching, after stripping out the evil Hindu and other religious influences, are something like the 4 Ps of self-actualization that you would find on a Tony Robbins CD: 1) The principle of "this-conditionality, conditioned arising"; 2) The process of the Four Noble Truths; 3) The practice of mindful awareness; 4) The power of self-reliance.

If I understand correctly - and I'm not at all sure that I do - atheist Gotama wants you to practice self-development (even though you have no reason to). Atheist Gotama is revealed to be a 2,500-year-old Dr. Phil.

This book should have been at least two books, if not three. One, a memoir, another, a re-examination of the Buddha's life and his doctrines. As a reader, I never quite understood why I was being presented with the author's life and the Buddha's life in the same book. If there was supposed to be some parallel, it didn't come across well.

The strange and jarring jump from one chapter to the next between parts that felt like they should have been in two different books is unfortunate, and left me wishing Batchelor had written a stand-alone book with only the material about the Buddha. The examination of the Buddha's life in its historical and sociopolitical contexts is well researched, compelling, and enjoyable to read; I would have loved to have had more of it. I also found the critical examination of the Buddha's teaching and whether it advocated any metaphysical views thought-provoking.

That said, I was not convinced by the author's theses. Batchelor takes pains to remind the reader multiple times that he cherry picks what parts of the Pali Canon support his argument and focuses on them, while setting aside the parts he finds disagreeable. This is admirable for its honesty--because it's exactly what he does--but doesn't do much by way of convincing the reader that his interpretation of the Buddha's teaching should be given more weight than anyone else's. Which undermines the entire point of writing such a book, because most people reading it aren't reading it simply to find out what Stephen Batchelor's intellectual predilections are.

I liked the portrait of the Buddha that Batchelor painted, and think it is a Buddha many modern readers will find relatable, but I wasn't convinced this was the 'real Buddha,' any more than Thomas Jefferson's Jesus was necessarily the 'real Jesus.' There are many passages in the Pali Canon that quite clearly and directly contradict the portrait of the Buddha that Batchelor paints. So the book amounts to a bit of slight of hand--if you go along with what the author wants you to see, it's because it's what you want to see as well, not because it's what actually is there.

As a Buddhist, my primary interest is in what is true. As a Zen practitioner, I've learned that most of the time when I believe or think I know something, I really don't. As for rebirth, it's not something that has bothered me too much because I have no way of really knowing if it's true or not, and it wouldn't change how I lived my life anyway. It is pretty clear to me that the Buddha taught rebirth, and I think it's lazy and condescending to just wave this off as a 'cultural thing.' The Buddha, as Batchelor points out in this book, ignored and went against many cultural givens of his time, so he wouldn't have just taught rebirth because it was a common belief.

So the main thrust of this book, an argument that the Buddha was a skeptic and a materialist, falls flat and does not convince, especially as the Buddha directly refuted materialism as a philosophical position (something that Batchelor, of course, fails to mention). The historical portrait of the Buddha is nice but clearly comes across as incomplete. And the memoir part of the book gives insight into the motives of the narrator, but it's also very dry. Batchelor ignores what could have been a compelling narrative turn by failing to give the reader the story of how his romance with Martine developed. This is but one of many examples of moments when Batchelor could have gone into more personal and emotional detail, but neglects 'personal growth' or 'human interest' moments in favor of intellectual points. The dry tone leaves the reader following the life story of a narrator with no charisma or interest at all other than as a thinker, but as a thinker, he's problematic because he ignores a lot of evidence that the educated Buddhist reader knows challenges his arguments.

In the end, I think this book is worth reading and considering, but advise taking it with a few grains of salt. It would have been much better had it been two books--one fuller and more strongly argued account of the Buddha's life and teaching, with more excellent historical research, and one memoir, with more focus and attention given to other aspects of the narrator's life besides his ideas, especially the story of his relationship with his wife, which I suspect is interesting.

"Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.

There are no wormholes in this intricate and fluid field through which one can wriggle out, either to reach union with God or move on to another existence after death. This is a field in which one is challenged to act: it is your actions alone that define you. There is no point in praying for divine guidance or assistance. That, as Gotama told Vasettha, would be like someone who wishes to cross the Aciravati River by calling out to the far bank: "Come here, other bank, come here!" No amount of "calling, begging, requesting or wheedling" will have any effect at all."

I was first introduced to Mr. Batchelor through his book "Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening," which radically changed my perception of the religion. Mr. Batchelor continues to forge new ground with his newest release "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist."

The book is an exquisitely woven tapestry, threaded via a seamless combination of personal narrative, historical tracing, and dissection of canon. Mr. Batchelor doesn't simply deconstruct the milieu of Buddhist dogma (karma, reincarnation, et. al.), he presents how they are the antithesis of what Gotama intended, and how they are unnecessary (and often hindrances) in the application of his message.

Based on the title, in combination with the jacket blurb from Christopher Hitchens, one may be inclined to foresee the book as a complete disemembering of the Buddhist religion. However, this book is more of a "decluttering", sweeping away thousands of years of dust that have accumulated on The Buddha's declaration.

Whether you are a practicing Buddhist, a staunch atheist, a purveyor of Eastern thought, or simply looking for an innovative perspective, "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" will not disappoint. Thrilling in its revelation, breathtaking in its artistry, and erudite in its reasoning, this book is destined to become a classic.

Highly recommended, and thoroughly encouraged. An 11 out of 10.

In this beautifully written and engaging book, Stephen Batchelor recounts his journey out of the drug-induced heightened awareness of the 1960's counterculture and into the meditation-induced heightened awareness of Buddhism without beliefs.

He claims his journey has led him into a state of being the Buddha called awakening or enlightenment, one that among other things rejects selfishness (except for provision of the basic necessities--food, shelter, and clothing) in favor of selflessness in a social/communal environment of compassion and fellowship.

While reading, I was anxious for him to provide a summary answer to the question: What has Buddhism without beliefs empowered him to do? He provided the answer on page 181: "Buddhism has become for me a philosophy of action and responsibility. It provides a framework of values, ideas, and practices that nurture my ability to create a path in life, to define myself as a person, to act, to take risks, to imagine things differently, and to make art."

I was particularly interested in his view of religious beliefs. Clearly, he is not a rabid atheist/anti-religious fascist. He simply believes that religious beliefs are irrelevant to, and can be a corrupting influence on, the process of enlightenment/awakening. Moreover, he believes the process is not only serving him well in life but will prove to have served him well in preparation for an afterlife if there turns out to be one. In short, he believes he has chosen a win-win path as stated in the last line of Chapter 18: "And if in the end there does turn out to be a heaven or nirvana somewhere else, I can see no better way to prepare for it." (This review is also published on frankzahn(dot)com.)

I grew up in a Buddhist household and have since lost connection with the supernatural aspects of the religion, but I missed the outlook and serenity of Buddhism. Reading this book helped reconcile the two outlooks in my life as well as clarify a bunch of misconceptions I had over the history behind Gotama. It's worth checking out.

Through a blend of archival research in the Pali cannon and his own experiences as a monk in the Tibetan and zen traditions, Batchelor posits a reformulation of Buddhism as a historically active institution. He deftly dispenses with magical thinking and the supposed law of karma to distill a philosophy that is more concerned with actions in this life instead of preparing for rebirth.

I'm giving two stars because of the effort the author put in to writing. The first couple of chapters I thought were potentially leading to something profound so I kept on reading. By half way thru I stopped reading. His extensive travelog going all over the Far East, on no money no less, his betrayal of his teachers, getting married,etc. All this plus my own experience with Buddhism taught me that it is a large social club consisting of progressive minded cheaters and liars.

It is always refreshing to find a religious teacher who approaches his subject without the reassurance of notions of survival after death or the salvaic intervention of a benign deity. Mr Batchelor provides a Buddhism commensurate with the needs of our times, the developments of modern science and philosophy, and the very complex world we live in. He has done us a great service and deserves his reputation as a modern teacher writing to his times.

Stephen is a master of cutting through the superficial to find the underlying essence of spiritual teachings. One of those essential themes is the importance of developing presence and the openness of the still mind, that comes through the cultivation of mindfulness. This is the fertile earth at the core of all the Buddha's teachings and is the ground from which right action and compassionate wisdom emerge. I also recommend 'The Path of Mindfulness Meditation' available through the store.

We have had nearly a hundred years of Buddhism in the West and the West is getting worse. What has Buddhism contributed to contemporary western societies? It has added a touch of gravitas and exoticism to the self-help, wisdom-while-u-wait industry. It has created a cluster of hierarchical groups wearing black or maroon skirts - each claiming orthodoxy and direct ancestral links to the Buddha himself. It has conferred a dignified aura to hard-line vegans, neo-puritans and the occasional recovering hedonist. It has granted a few celebs the chance to express platitudes for the spiritual emancipation of their fans and of paparazzi. It has managed to both sanitize the world of psychotherapy (via mindfulness-based cognitive-behavioural therapy) and re-mystify it (via trans-personal psychology). And with Mandela fading fast from the limelight, it has also given the media two new moral superstars to applaud and patronize: the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh.

Nowadays Buddhism advertises itself as the science of happiness, providing a set of contemplative techniques and a toolbox of ethical behaviours. In doing so it has joined forces with the multi-billion-dollar positive-thinking industry and contributed, perhaps unwittingly, to the conception of bio-morality, the insidious ideology according to which one's illnesses, depression and distress are all due to one's negative thoughts and attitudes: always handy in justifying redundancies after an economic crisis spearheaded by the Jolly Bankers Ltd, and responding perhaps to that good old Calvinist penchant, widespread among North-Americans and North-Europeans, for self-examination to the point of self-loathing. In short, Buddhism has become the opium of the middle-classes. Could it have been otherwise? Can any perspective which is truly other ever hope to infiltrate our world without being coaxed into Judaeo-Christian values?
Contemporary mainstream Buddhism appears to have wholeheartedly inherited the misguided universalism of the Victorian era, at the time a response aimed at normalizing the bewildering array of worldviews brought about by imperial expansion, i.e. the belief that the experience of Truth (a reified and transcendental truth with a capital T) is the same everywhere, above and beyond cultural, ethnic and social circumstances. The universalism and perennialism we find in popular Buddhist authors proffers the possibility of an internalized view from nowhere above the contradictory claims of religions and philosophies in a kind of purified realm of experience, a stance all the more problematic because it blatantly evades cultural diversities and ignores its own imperial connotations. It is an integral part of the enduring western tendency to assimilate and neuter Buddhist teachings by discarding their existential edge, a tendency rooted in the desire to divert the radical nature of the practice towards comforting homilies. During the Victorian era the Buddha was portrayed as a harmless and serene Victorian gentleman. Could a contemporary portrait be that of a Facebook-Guru dishing out virtual platitudes while you sip your double macchiato at Starbucks?
Batchelor's book gives one hope that Buddhism might be reclaimed from Disneyland where it has been confined in the last few decades. It continues the author's life-long entreaty for a secular appreciation of the Buddha's teachings, adding a refreshingly dissonant note to contemporary Buddhism. It re-describes Buddhist meditative practice in terms that strongly resonates with phenomenology and existential thought. Buddhist meditation - as I understand it - is not "spirituality" but instead phenomenological and existential enquiry, being aware of the wider organismic field, actively and creatively adapting to the fluid nature of the world. It deals with - and helps one appreciate more fully - the everyday. Spirituality is in any case a problematic notion, often fostering spiritual bypass, i.e. the circumvention of the intricacies and the complexities of the human condition.

This book is timely and important in reclaiming the existential character of the Buddha's teachings. It is also true, however, that in stressing rationality and science as trustworthy alternatives to religious dogma, the author risks abandoning religion in favour of positivism, leaving one church only in order to join another. Our post-secular world assumes that Darwin has explained our origins, Einstein has mapped the beginnings of the cosmos and very little room is now left for blind faith. But evolutionism and scientism are new forms of religion.
So you would be forgiven for thinking, at first, that this book simply adds a Buddhist slant to the prodigious output of the anti-God industry of recent years. The book-cover, after all, sports an endorsement by no less than Christopher Hitchens, latter-day prophet not only of atheism, but also of triumphalist scientism and of neo-liberalism. In his endorsement, Hitchens writes something interesting: "The human thirst for the transcendent, the numinous - even the ecstatic - is too universal and too important to be entrusted to the cultish and the archaic". Transcendence here becomes an option - I am tempted to say a consumer's option - within the immanent frame. Latter-day atheism, it would seem, still has high regard for transcendence: the worship of empirical data and the elevation of science is still foundational and expresses a deep nostalgia after the demise of God. This is quite different from, for instance, Merleau-Ponty's vision of phenomenology as "contemporary atheism", understood as the impossibility for the subject to make any claim of objectivity. No longer prelude to a general ontology - as in the case of orthodox empiricism, which is the field-work of axiomatic science - but more modestly shedding light on our existence in relation to the physical, social, and historical dimension of our experience. In the name of "atheism" much nonsense has been written by Richard Dawkins, whose ignorance of theology is frightening and whose lack of social-theoretical grounding makes for a greatly impoverished perspective. Under the "atheism" banner we also had crackpot crusades such as Sam Harris's, author of The End of Faith, a writer who advocated the use of torture against religious fanatics and even dreamed up an ideal torture pill who would induce transitory paralysis aimed at extracting useful information in the so-called war on terror.

Batchelor sees himself as an atheist and is happy to be perceived as one. This is both good news and bad news. It is good news because Confession of a Buddhist Atheist is written by one who knows his theology and his Buddhism inside out. It is bad news because Batchelor seems to have taken on the role attributed to him by the over-simplified debates taking place in our Manichean times. This is inevitable: no matter how subtle our line of reasoning might be, we end up being defined by our actions and pronouncements.

The title proudly bears that very word, "atheist", an adjective used here as a noun, puzzlingly next to that other equally ambivalent adjective, "Buddhist". To top it all, we also have "confession", implicit homage perhaps to the revered tradition of washing dirty laundry in public, championed by Augustine and Rousseau long before the advent of reality TV, and ridiculed by Nietzsche as a self-important stab at feigning greatness. Thankfully, we get few confessions here. The autobiographical sketches plaited into the book along with fragments of the Buddha's life and more doctrinal considerations, speak of the author's progression from "pastoral hippy" to Buddhist monk, scholar and layman. We read accounts of Batchelor's life-long engagement with Buddhism; the writing is graceful and precise, registering the beauty and poignancy of life in a style that is the most tangible expression of the author's dedication to meditative practice and the embodiment of Buddhist principle. A constant theme running through the book is the refusal to accept the consolations of religious belief. But then autobiography too is consolation, a kind of mourning even, for a self that continues to evade us, while exerting temporary control over the way in which one is being perceived. So in this sense, this book is a confession. With fluid reflections becoming solidified on the printed page, the author's subtle agnosticism becomes however moulded into a coarser shape: thus the agnostic becomes atheist. There are hints at times that Batchelor the artist longs to come out more and express in more ambivalent ways the ambivalence of life, but Batchelor the rationalist won't let him. The author's love of Zen expresses the quirky and finely tuned aesthetic appreciation of imperfect phenomena in a tradition which at its core sacralises the everyday in ways not too dissimilar from affirmative art. Now that would be a more convincing "secularist" claim, one that does not solidify into the metaphysical statements of hard science.
Batchelor the logician has, however, retrieved a niche in contemporary Buddhism, his persona invested with the task of fulfilling the unspoken demands of hundreds of practitioners shy of the tougher and more conflicting aspects of Buddhist practice, i.e. surrender to the teacher, the great faith and the determination necessary for throwing oneself fully into what D'gen Zenji called "the great ocean of Buddhism". Batchelor himself of course would have not arrived at his own insights without a life-long commitment to the discipline of first Tibetan Buddhism and later Korean Zen, something he readily acknowledges. I am all too painfully aware of how surrender, faith and determination become without fail pathological traps that hinder rather than liberate one. I am all too aware of how institutional Buddhism is political, hierarchical and sectarian. On the other hand, the "non-denominational" Buddhism which Batchelor helped established in the West reveals itself to be at close scrutiny yet another set of little parishes and churches with their own enclaves, their own revered teachers, and their own brand of unquestioned, blandly secular beliefs, in a sort of neutered, de-caffeinated approach to Buddhist practice that largely leaves the self smugly unscathed.

In describing his current perspective, Batchelor seems to have almost entirely discarded the term "agnostic", which was prevalent in his other books, for the seemingly more incisive and polemical "atheist". Agnostic is mentioned three times as synonymous with atheist. The two terms, however, are worlds apart. To be an atheist in our current discourse means to oppose the notion of a creator, to distance oneself from the ancient legacy of monotheism, or indeed of monolatry (the idolatrous belief in one exclusive and exclusivist deity) and to advocate a more rational, scientific outlook and explanation of reality. The atheist no longer believes in a bearded omnipotent world-designer perched on a heavenly cloud; instead, he believes in that cosmic premature ejaculation known as the Big Bang. Religion here gives way to scientism, and both systems are unable to accept the profound ambivalence of our condition, hurrying instead to the superstore of ready-made answers.
Doing away with God means doing away with foundational thought, and accepting that groundless ground which is at the heart of the Buddha's teachings but also at the heart of existential phenomenology. It also means doing away with the numerous shadows of God, the most obvious being, in secular societies, the belief in science and evolutionary biology as new metaphysical systems. This is maybe a wrong assumption on my part, but I seriously doubt whether anyone in the anti-God contingent has the faintest idea of what is meant by atheism as non-foundational mode of thought.
Agnostic too has become as harmless in current discourse as atheist, conveying a vague, lukewarm absence of commitment, paired with a yawning nod at Pascal's wager. I would like to suggest that its implications are deeper: to my mind, agnostic means both not-knowing as well as non-Gnostic. An agnostic is one who does not know. Not-knowing is the very essence of Zen Buddhist practice as I understand it (and very close to how Batchelor teaches it) the awakening of that profound perplexity that helps me re-consider my relation to the world, the self, and others. Perplexity (not doubt, as I had previously believed, and as Batchelor personally helped me clarify) reawakens a sense of wonder and a keen awareness of the fleeting nature of life. This is a deep perplexity, a deep naïveté even: learning to look at the world afresh time and time again (a position common to both Shunryu Suzuki beginner's mind and to Merleau-Ponty's perpetual beginner). A stance deepening as one's meditative practice matures: all this is not akin to doubt, as emphasized in some Zen teachings, for doubt is problematic. Cartesian in essence, requiring a detachment of the doubting subject from the life-world, what Batchelor calls the "contingent nature of life". The author writes of "deep agnosticism", a stance which is beyond a lukewarm and conventional not-knowing:

"To say "I don't know" is not an admission of weakness or ignorance, but an act of truthfulness: an honest acceptance of the limits of the human condition when faced with "the great matter of life and death". This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives the bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty".

Equally problematic is the crystallization of great doubt into a realization - canonical in most Zen schools - because this would bring back the notion of mystical knowing, of revelation being bestowed upon a worthy individual. In emphasizing the growing sense of perplexity that is brought about by one's practice, and in resisting the temptation to define awakening through religious language, Batchelor neatly escapes the trap into which most contemporary Buddhist teachers and writers all too-happily tumble: the reification of the process of awakening, paired with the assumption that one has visited a numinous dwelling and has come back with the truth.
Perhaps the title is controversial after all, since it has provoked the anger of Buddhists of all orientations. Even positive reviewers have managed to sound politely derogatory, indirectly pointing out that the author has admitted that he has had no earth-shattering breakthroughs or insights. The implication is that he does not possess enough clout for daring to criticize orthodox Buddhist doctrine. Much like the beatification of saints to be, resting on visions and ectoplasmic visitations, the cohesion of many Buddhist groups heavily depends on the assumption that their teacher is just back from Nirvana, has bought the t-shirt and a brand-new sat nav with the voice of Gautama giving instructions on how to get there by the quickest route.

Non-Gnostic, the second meaning I attribute to "agnostic", means doing away with the Gnostic sensibility, common to influential brands of both religious and secular thought throughout the centuries, a worldview common to Manicheism, Zoroastrianism, Heideggerian existentialism, Tibetan Buddhism, new age cults, and groups found at the margins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is a sensibility permeated by metaphysical anxiety and psychological alienation and by a resultant need for salvation and redemption. The Gnostic sees the individual abandoned in a world emptied of the divine, and the cosmos as a battlefield where each individual replicates the universal drama, the conflict between external repressive forces and an "interiority" that must be protected and defended. However diversely this might be conveyed, the Gnostic perspective fathoms a way out from the wheel of rebirth, the alienation of a materialistic world, the vale of tears etc. Only in a vertical or totalizing mode of transcendence can he envision salvation. To be "thrown" into this imperfect world means, for the Gnostic, to be exiled. The core teachings of the Buddha, as re-assembled in Batchelor's book, encourage us instead to enter the stream, to engage with the world more fully by opening ourselves up to its suffering, by understanding the conditioned nature of existence, and by abandoning our exaggerated fondness for our sense of place and identity:

"This Dhamma I have reached is deep, hard to see, difficult to awaken to, quiet and excellent, not confined by thought, subtle, sensed by the wise. But people love their place: they delight and revel in their place. It is hard for people who love, delight and revel in their place to see this ground: this conditionality, conditioned arising".
An agnostic stance implies the refusal to bargain one's willingness to appreciate the flawed and unpredictable world of phenomena for any notion of a more perfect dimension: Brahman, Platonic idea, reified Nirvana, Being behind becoming, Kantian noumenon, Husserlian essence, Heideggerian Dasein.
In May 1979, a 25-year old Stephen Batchelor, recently ordained monk in the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, went to a lecture by Lévinas on Husserl and phenomenology. Meeting the philosopher disappointed him, although he ends up acknowledging an indirect influence in two passages of the book: Lévinas's doubts about Buddhism's denial of the finality of death made Batchelor's question the docrine of rebirth. Towards the end of the book, we also find an apposite correlation between Lévinas's ethical stance and Shantideva's moral and affective articulation of the Buddhist notion of ''nyat', a.k.a. "emptiness".
I sympathized with Batchelor: studying the philosophy of Lévinas changed me, yet I had noticed fatigue settling in, the sheer tiredness of the ethical obbligation to the other, central in Lévinas's ethics and so easily prone to mutate into dutiful and unhealthy self-abnegation. Questioned during the lecture as to how phenomenologists achieve epoché or phenomenological reduction, Lévinas had no answer. It was an excellent question; Batchelor believes, as I do, that the answer is meditation. "After the lecture - Batchelor writes,
"I joined a group of students for dinner with M. Levinas. He seemed wary of Buddhism- and being confronted by a shaven-headed man with wire-rimmed glasses in a long red skirt probably did little to mitigate that wariness. He appeared to have made up his mind about Eastern religions in general and showed no interest in exploring the subject further. I found his attitude dismissive and haughty. In his manner too he struck me as guarded. He rarely smiled. He spent most of the evening discoursing to the cluster of awestruck undergraduates around him who hung on his every word. Since much of the discussion (in French) concerned technical issues in phenomenology, I had difficulty following. Then at one point, after praising a point in Heidegger's philosophy, he suddenly stood up and declared: Mais je détestais Heidegger. C'était un nazi! (Lévinas, like Husserl, was Jewish)".
Reading Heidegger's Time and Being had an impact on Batchelor, who on this occasion perhaps did not submit the text to as rigorous a scrutiny as he had done with Buddhist texts. Not only did Heidegger truly believe that nazism would shield Europe from the materialism of the Soviets and the superficiality of America; not only did he never retract his position. Being-in-the-world, an Heideggerian notion of great promise, attempting to rewrite the conventional idea of individuality - remained unfulfilled. Under the guise of "phenomenology" Heidegger traded on the one hand good old-fashioned German idealism - with subjectivity making a grand entry as mysticism, and on the other a disguised form of theology, with capitalized concepts playing the part of God. Batchelor's self-confessed penchant for the writings of theologians (Tillich, Cupitt) and closet theologians (Heidegger) makes one wonder how truly "secular" his secularism is, and how closely related to religion secularism in general really is. Batchelor comes clean about this; quoting Don Cupitt, he supports the idea of a "beliefless religion". This reminded me of Kant's assertion that he lived in an age of enlightenment but not an enlightened age, echoed by Charles Taylor's claim that we live in a secular age, but not necessarily an age of secularism. We still have a long way to go...

There is something distinctive in the Buddha's teachings, something that is at variance, according to Batchelor, with the Indian worldview of its time, and more importantly, with the pious platitudes of the Buddhist orthodoxies of our time. It is a compelling perspective, envisioning Gautama Buddha as a man of his time who, having absorbed the ideologies and biases of his era, having become proficient in the yogic practices of his day, ends up creating an entirely new path and a new perspective. This reminds me of Harold Bloom's (and Richard Rorty's) notion of the strong poet, of one who slowly but surely creates a new language and opens up new vistas.
Using the vast patchwork source known as the "Pali canon", and readily acknowledging that his own reading of it is as selective and as biased as any other existing Buddhist commentary, Batchelor identifies four core elements that cannot be derived from the Indian culture of [the Buddha's] time: 1 The principle of "this-conditionality, conditioned arising". 2. The process of the Four Noble Truths. 3. The practice of mindful awareness. 4. The power of self-reliance. (237). For Batchelor "these four axioms provide a sufficient ground for the kind of ethically committed, practically realized, and intellectually coherent way of life Gotama anticipated"(ibid). It remains to be seen whether these principles would provide, as well as a new kind of culture (something that in his previous Buddhism without Beliefs Batchelor has neatly described as "culture of awakening"), also a new kind of civitas. The societal corollaries of Buddhist practice are not explored. After all, like Plato, sages of old are not renowned for translating their free-thinking into the vision of a just society. The insistence of Batchelor's Buddha on loosening the attachment to identity has great resonance. It is this very attachement that prevents us from recognizing the conditioned nature of existence. Why?

"Because people are blinded to the fundamental contingency of their existence by attachment to their place. One's place is that to which one is most strongly bound. It is the foundation on which the entire edifice of one's identity is built. It is formed through identification with a physical location and social position, by one's religious and political beliefs, through that instinctive conviction of being a solitary ego. One's place is where one stands, and whence one takes a stand against everything that seems to challenge what is "mine". This stance is your posture vis-á-vis the world: it encompasses everything that lies on this side of the line that separates "you" from `me'".
This is also the stance on which the nation-state (an extension of the ego, according to Buber) is built. The social and political implications of abandoning one's place, of loosening the tight grip on one's identity are enormous, especially considering the growing intolerance throughout the world towards migrants and "non-citizens" along with the disturbing rise of unsightly forms of patriottism, and the fact that the very raison d'être of empire is exporting identity.
Crucial to Batchelor's interpretation of the Buddha's teachings is the relinquishing of one's place ('laya) and arriving at a ground (tth'na) which is not solid but instead "the contingent, transient, ambiguous, unpredictable, fascinating and terrifying ground called `life'" (p 128). The Buddha called this experience "entering the stream", an expression reminiscent of Heraclitus, who similarly emphasized the river-like nature of experience. Gautama Buddha's example shows not only that it is possible to abandon our tight grasp on identity without losing our minds, but that one can in fact gain a greater sense of freedom and sanity. Equally crucial is that this awakening is a shift of perspective rather than "the gaining of privileged knowledge into some higher truth". The Buddha

"[S]poke only of waking up to a contingent ground - "this-conditionality, conditioned arising" - that until than had been obscured by his attachment to a fixed position. While such an awakening is bound to lead to a reconsideration of what one "knows", the awakening itself is not primarily a cognitive act. It is an existential readjustment, a seismic shift in the core of oneself and one's relation to others and the world".

For Batchelor, Gautama Buddha was a human being who experienced this radical shift of perspective rather than the God-like figure he became in subsequent Buddhist iconography: omniscient, without a remaining trace of greed, anger and ignorance, and endowed with infinite wisdom and compassion. Instead, we have a Buddha who faces craving and the other "armies of Mara" (the Devil) even after his awakening. He is no longer being manipulated by Mara, Batchelor tells us, but nevertheless those tempting thoughts, feeling and emotions still linger because the Buddha is still human. This is very encouraging to any practitioner. I don't know whether it avoids the Anglo-Saxon error Nietzsche once attributed to George Eliot, which consists in getting rid of the transcendental whilst recycling the ethical postulates of religion. Another task of a secular Buddhism might well be a beneficial and humorous critique of the more sanctimonious, life-denying, politically-correct attitudes to Buddhist practice, given that a straight-laced, ecologically sound, über-sensible position towards ethics is but a remnant of the other-worldly domain. Flawed and deeply human the Buddha might be, but he is never entirely let go of. If he is not a God, he is still a moral super-hero. But the Buddha was after all the greatest swindler who ever lived, a spinner of tales, the prime mover of the absurdist Circus known as Buddhism. Perhaps a truly secular Buddhism would at regular intervals throw away the baby Buddha and his insufferable holy bath water: as a sign of love, of course, of too great and too tough a love to allow itself to be swamped by soppy devotion and smug rationalism.
Batchelor fittingly reminds us of the famous parable of the raft. The Dharma is a raft, the Buddha said, assembled with bits of wood and branches, useful to cross the river and reach the other shore. It would be pointless to make a shrine of it once you crossed the water. Across the centuries the raft has been elevated to divine status and in its name powerful institutions have been created, led and organized by the St. Pauls and the Richelieus of the Buddhist world. One of them was Kassapa, credited in Zen folklore to have smiled when the Buddha silently held a flower one day in lieu of a sermon. It turns out Mr Kassapa was a shrewd politician, a quality often found in institutional Buddhism. This is not by any means a bad thing: someone has to preserve and recycle tradition; and someone else has to knock it down and start afresh.

not at all profound.contains many misunderstandings about what
Buddhism is. By his own admission, he accepted pretty much nothing of what his Buddhist teachers taught him. His arguments were ridiculous like when he throws out Indian philosophy used by Buddha as though any religion or philosophy just springs out of no where. like throwing the Old Testament out of Christianity. what shallow thinking. This fellow is no intellectual heavy weight.. He rejects rebirth, Karma and shunyata. In other words, he has invented his own shallow
New age religion and he can have it. I agree with this critique of this nonsensical book:

http://buddhism.about.com/od/beginnerbuddhistbooks/a/batchelor-confession.htm

Batchelor provides a clear and cogent case for committed Buddhist practice based on principles that a modern American can apprehend and embrace, stripped of magical descriptions and miraculous claims.

well i think mr batchelor missed the point of the middle way. and that is not eternalism ( a soul) or extinction ( radical materialism)
in the buddhas day he was confronted with these different ideologies one of existence of a soul and the other hand materialism Atheistsm and he chose the middle way between the two with out introducing identification with one or the other .he didn't need to its that middle way that is holistic and does not cling or get attached and all with out making into a problem . why does mr batchler have to " be" something ? why does he cling to labels and identities?
I suspect mr batchler has written his book to cash in on a trendy philosophical movement that Atheistsm has become as of late.
And so he has built a image of him self as an Atheist and that introduces the division of I'm a Atheist and that inherently creates the conflict against people who believe in god . so the dualistic conflict is in inherent in the idea . And so this fragmentation brings more chaos and conflict between us and them or they believe we don't I'm this your that. So he has reduced the buddhas teachings to a having a pre packaged dualistic identity.
the synopsis of his book is basically i can be an Atheist and a buddhist but to me thats absurd its like putting legs on a snake. why tack on a persona or identity based on some ideological concept? and than say i am identified with an idea or i am the idea. see my point is that it.is fragmentation and identifying with some thought.
so it seems mr batchler has some idea he refuses to let go of and that is " i m this " or i am that and so ill just bring it into buddhism and say see now i have found security and all he has really created was dualism.
unfortunately he has written a book about this and has done nothing but divide people even more.

Warning! This book is very difficult to read on the kindle. It is riddled with hyperlinks that jump to the appendix - often several per page that are multiple line sentences. Doing this accidentally by touching to page-turn results in one losing one's place in the narrative with no easy route back. The only way to get back is trial-and-error with the goto function. After doing this four times, I gave up exasperated. Disappointed.

After poor school results Batchelor got some money together and travelled around Europe. He hit the hippie trail and at 21 trained as a monk in Tibetan Buddhism. After seven years he spent another three years in a Korean Zen monastery. He decided this was not the life for him and became a freelance writer and speaker on Buddhism.

He takes an iconoclastic approach to Buddhism. When Buddhists accuse him of cherry picking Buddhist sources to suit his needs, he says this is what Buddhists have always done. This may be so, but Batchelor is just one person and he doesn't represent any school of Buddhism. He does not accept the doctrines of reincarnation and karma. Batchelor thinks he has a more authentic understanding of the Buddha's teachings than that of many other Buddhists. Like some Christians, some Buddhists spend a lot of time trying to figure out what their religion really means.

A fair amount of this book concerns the alleged life of Gotama Buddha from the Pali Canon. Batchelor finds six inconsistent images of the Buddha in the Pali Canon. This does not lead him to ask the obvious question : which is the true Gotama Buddha? In fact, some real scholars know there was no historical Gotama Buddha. He is an archetypal figure created to express the teachings, as is the case with the mythical Jesus Christ. This was the custom in olden days when creating a religion.

Is not this type of blather, mainly propagated by science-worshipping, atheistic, material-rationalist, elitist, intellectuals? Have they not commandeered and co-opted, certain elements of Buddhism to serve primarily as a "moral framework" and as a "guide to daily living" for the general purpose of adding something meaningful to and consoling to their sterile, empty, hollow, vapid, and nihilistic worldviews?

Having said that, I actually see nothing wrong with this kind of phenomenon per se. But to consider nirvana/enlightenment, karma and rebirth, as nothing more than "useless baggage from the past" based on superstitious belief and the ignorance of 'infallible and almighty Western-Science,' makes it hard to call these people "Buddhist" in any sense of the word. I feel I know them reasonably well, as I used to travel in their circles and to be completely honest with myself- I'll admit I was one myself, of the worst sort. One of the self-styled iconoclastic and progressive thinkers, who are all quite eerily similar to one another in thought, deed, education, schools attended, book collections, social class, etc.. They can frequently be observed entering Unitarian Universalist churches, humanist groups/meetings of various sorts, and Ethical Society meetings, often gloating, drooling, and reveling in their intellectual superiority over the masses and in their atheistic superiority over the religious and faithful amongst us.

I myself came to Buddhism from this background- an atheism and science background (I'm an engineer for what it's worth), and like many others, for many years I could not accept the karma/rebirth model of existence. However, rather than my universally proposing that Buddhism be reworked and re-tooled for the `modern rational age,' I simply adopted certain Buddhist beliefs that I could accept at the time, and worked these into my life. Batchelor is somewhat my doppelganger- he has moved in a polar opposite direction from me, yet in some strange way I feel he is quite similar to me. If I understand correctly, he rushed out whilst barely out of his teens, to become ordained as a Tibetan monk, lived in India, studied Zen in Korea, etc. In contrast- It took me 20 years of studying Buddhism before even deciding to become a lay Buddhist, unaffiliated with any Buddhist school, order or movement. Batchelor appears to have been a hastily ordained Tibetan monk, soon after a disrobed Tibetan monk, tried Zen on for size, decided that didn't fit, and was eventually drawn to the scientific/atheistic worldview model, over many years of thought and consideration.

As for me, I came from an atheistic science worldview model to begin with. It's where I started from. After many years of study, questioning, and searching, I gradually accepted Buddhism and all its foundational thought, including rebirth, enlightenment/nirvana and karmic law. This was a gradual process for me, and this also appears the same in Batchelor's case; albeit us moving in polar opposite directions. "Opposite journeys" towards truth and liberation as it were.

I sincerely hope I am wrong in stating this, but it seems to me as if there is a good deal of Western, intellectual elitism at work here. By all means, adopt Buddhist teachings into your scientific/atheist worldview, but please, don't make the claim "My Buddhism is better than your Buddhism. "My Buddhism is based on rationality and science, whilst yours is based on ancient superstition and an outmoded worldview." "My Buddhism is pure in nature and entirely based on cold rationality and reason, unsullied by superstition, whilst your Buddhism has 'folk beliefs' mixed in and is therefore diluted, corrupted, and inferior." "My Buddha is Bigger than your Buddha!!!" Is this not that what this group of misguided people, is actually saying here? Does not all this boil down to: "The Buddha was a victim of living in a culture/society that brain-washed him into believing in a karma/rebirth model he could not shake off?" "The Buddha's mind was not intelligent, advanced, or enlightened enough to shake off the concepts/trappings of karma and rebirth?" Whilst conveniently ignoring the fact that the Buddha discarded many other such "sacred cow" beliefs without hesitation. Anatma(no soul) being one key example. The Buddha also discarded the caste system when it comes to Buddhism, no easy feat for that culture and time period.

Does Batchelor, with all his surety and confidence, ever stop to think for one micro-second, that maybe it is *he* who is the product of his environment, social conditioning, schooling, Western academia, British culture and its legacy of racism and colonialism, Western thought, and the paradigmatic group-think, common amongst Western intellectuals? Or is he a special being who is somehow entirely immune from paradigmatic thinking and all environmental conditioning? Did the thought ever arise even once in his mind, that perhaps it is *he* who needs to change his solidly embedded, Western, rationalist worldview? Or is he so intent on shaving off the corners of Buddhism so it then fits into his nice and tidy, little Round-Hole of Atheism and Science? Am I wrong in stating that many believe that Buddhism is a buffet or smorgasbord of ideas, wisdom and teachings, where you pick and choose the concepts that you happen to you like, agree with, give you warm fuzzy feelings or are compatible with your pre-existing worldviews?

I find it somewhat interesting that Batchelor hails from Britain, which at one time not so long ago, colonized and ruled vast parts of the globe.. Mr. Batchelor, is this simply a case of us white, European, western-educated, rationalists and men of science, needing to teach these backwards Asians how "real Buddhism" actually works and how it needs to be implemented? After all, many of them even hail from Tibetan backwater villages and such, grew up in impoverished conditions, lack proper schooling, academic degrees, knowledge of rationalist philosophy, quantum physics, and beyond that, they are superstitious, believe in spirits, ghosts, fortune tellers, pray, bow to statues, and other non-scientific nonsense. It's our job to educate them about pure/genuine/original/rational Buddhism, and save them from their backward ways of practicing Buddhism, isn't it? Is there more truth in my comments than you would care to admit, my good Mr. Batchelor? Is your current quest, some type of modern, Buddhist based "White Man's Burden?" Those Asians who have been studying, practicing, refining, and perfecting Buddhism over the last 2,500 years, could not have possibly got things right without us modern, science-based, Westerners to improve upon it for them. Is that what you are saying Mr. Batchelor?

Batchelor also states something to the effect of- "I find rebirth hard to believe in and accept." Well great, so your solution is to change Buddhism so that several fundamental building-blocks of it, are abesnt and no longer bothersome to our western-trained, modern, rationalist minds? I find many things hard to believe as well- I find it hard to believe I am sitting here at my work-desk and traveling at approx. 800mph.(Earth's rotation) Or that my body is 99.9999999 empty space(spacial structure of the Atom) and that the solid feeling earth that I stand on, is also such empty space. However, all these things happen to be true.

I'll share an experience of mine- One nice, warm, summer evening, about ten years ago, I was strolling down one of the back-streets of Chinatown in NYC, away from the crowds and traffic, and I was passing by a storefront. Behind the front glass window of the small shop, sat a statue of the Buddha. An elderly Asian woman seemed to appear out of nowhere. She was approx 60 years of age, pencil thin to the point of emaciation, and very haggard and impoverished looking. She quickly stood facing the window, clasped her hands together as if in prayer, and quickly bowed three times to the Buddha's image, before quickly disappearing once again, into the urban jungle of NYC's Chinatown.

This occurred during the time I fancied myself somewhat of an Atheist-Scientist-Rationalist-Buddhist and for about ten minutes I thought to myself- How far superior is my understanding to her understanding. Did she study the sciences and have an engineering degree? Did she have huge book collection of western philosophers, eastern philosophers, advanced physics, and did she understand where Buddhism intersects and stands within that great pantheon? Did she understand particle theory? Dark matter? String theory? Plato? Descartes? Sartre? All the great thinkers and philosophers of the ages? All the intricacies of interdependent origination? How dare she degrade and insult Siddhartha Gautama's teachings by merely bowing to his image as if he were a common God of some sort, to be prayed to, revered and worshipped. How dare this vile, tired, haggard, and skinny, old Asian woman, corrupt MY Buddhism with her primitive folk beliefs and her irrational superstition? At that very moment, I was Stephen Batchelor, I became Stephen Batchelor, or even worse!

After ten minutes of such thought, I became literally nauseated, sick to my stomach, and ill because of myself and my big, fat, ego and proud sense of self. And I had somewhat of an epiphany, regarding my own shallowness, egotism, ignorance, and lack of compassion- With all my stone-cold reason, hard science, rational facts, and intellectual B.S., who was it for me to question, cast doubt upon, consider more ignorant or less informed, any person's beliefs or practice? Maybe that old, skinny, woman, knows more about Buddhism than I do. Perhaps her practice and application of it is superior or more pure than mine. Perhaps she has developed more positive karma in her life than I have or ever will. Perhaps she could teach me many things about life and Buddhism. Perhaps she is a kinder person than I. Perhaps she is more compassionate than I. Perhaps she has helped others more than I. Perhaps she is further down `the path' than I am. At this point, I decided that I am not one to judge others in their beliefs and practices. I can only say what is right for me, and my path, and my beliefs. I am not here to denigrate anyone else's path or write books claiming "mine is superior" for such and such reason...

"Cherry picking" Buddhism for certain agreeable concepts, whilst rejecting the main foundational concepts, and still calling it `Buddhism' can be quite insulting to the Sangha and Buddhist community. Call it for what it is- Make up a new term for it- "Atheistic-Buddhism" perhaps, or "Scientific-Buddhism.". I could accept those terms being used to describe it. Referring to it as simply `Buddhism' and presenting it as having anything to do with traditional or historic Buddhism, is quite foolish and erroneous..

I wanted to like this book. I really did. Some of Batchelor's earlier works have been useful.

The author describes the events of his life and his numerous years involved in Buddhist monastic communities, which he has left.

Much of the book takes the form of a spiritual autobiography, wherein his extensive study seems to have made little to no dent in a determined materialistic view of the world. Of his own spiritual practice and experience, he mentions virtually nothing, except that it didn't 'work' for him. Because of this, he seems to discard the merits of such practice altogether.

The book does contain some interesting work he has done in reassembling the political context that provided the backdrop for the life of the historical Buddha. This is interesting, if his research can be trusted.

As for the rest, Batchelor firmly strips the Buddha of his awakening, turning him instead into a smart guy who came up with a system of monastic practice. The author repeatedly makes the mistake of projecting onto the Buddha his own limitations and bias. Although he acknowledges that he does this, it does not seem to have deterred him or given him a serious pause. In passing, he also projects his own limitations onto modern spiritual teachers, including the Dalai Lama.

Batchelor seems to completely discard the possibility that spiritual realization actually occurs, when in fact, it seems to be an actual byproduct of being a human being. I cannot state with certainty whether this is a metaphysical result or an artifact of brain plasticity, but it does happen.

However, since the book seems to have sold well, probably amongst the New Atheist crowd, I am also suspicious that Batchelor is simply cashing in. The book simply serves no one except himself.

Trying to shoehorn western atheist prejudice into a major religion that believes in gods and rebirth.... is just childish. Nothing more needs to be said. If you like fiction, this is the book for you

I found this book to be thought provoking and interesting. I'm new to Buddhism and having been on a ritual free nine day retreat with an ex monk then to a three day retreat with a monk filled with chanting and ritual, I began to question what exactly Buddhism meant to me. I didn't want it to become a religion and that's how it was presented on the second retreat. So reading 'Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist', was like a breath of fresh air. It made me look at what I believed in. I don't want to be a follower, I want to find my own way with Buddhism. Even if one doesn't agree with everything that is presented in the book, it doesn't matter, if it gets you thinking and contemplating and that's what matters. I also liked Stephen Batchelor's honesty and reading about his journey. I highly recommend the book.