Book Review: "After Buddhism" by Stephen Batchelor

I was fully prepared to not like this book, After Buddhism, by Stephen Batchelor. I had read an interview with Batchelor in Tricycle, in which he made some statements that seemed to me to be somewhat self aggrandizing and egotistical. In particular, his definition of nirvana as "a nonreactive ethical space" seemed to me to completely miss the point. This definition is at variance with the hard core/pragmatic dharma movement that I'm a sort of lurking member of, and I couldn't see 2500 years of Buddhist monks devoting their lives to preserving a teaching about a "a nonreactive ethical space". During the pilgrimage I shared with Batchelor in 2010, he claimed to be like a Protestant theologian from the 19th century revising the story of Jesus by asking what of the material in the Gospels could possibly be the original words of Jesus.  Now, just from the title alone, he seemed to be setting himself up to be like Martin Luther, with this book being his Ninety Five Theses, starting a revolution that would transform the world.

But after reading it, I have to say I liked the book much more than I thought I would. In particular, Batchelor's definition of nirvana comes directly from the Madhyamaka philosophy in which he trained as a young man when he was a Tibetan monk, and is therefore no surprise. The Madhyamaka teaches that any moment of nongreed, nonhatred, and nondelusion is a moment of experiencing nirvana and that nirvana is nothing more and nothing less, which I suppose one could characterize as "a nonreactive ethical space". Others have different views, as I talk about in this post. And as for catalyzing a revolution like the Reformation, the last chapter does go into developing a "culture of awakening" in which Batchelor argues for taking the dharma into the world and for breaking out of a culture of reactivity, where the same actions keep occurring out of reactivity, rather than approaching problems from new directions through the Eightfold Path. This is hardly the stuff of a revolutionary manifesto for society at large however, though it is quite revolutionary for the people who practice it. His writing has had a profound impact on Western dharma practice, catalyzing the development of secular Buddhism, but one has the feeling that he would like to see it spread more widely.

As with some of his other writings, Batchelor structures the book around the Buddha's - or as secular Buddhists have taken to calling him, Gotama's - life. He focuses on five important men in the Buddha's story:

• Mahanahma, the Buddha's uncle and Ananda's father, who was a lay supporter and who took over the role of the headman, or mayor, of Kapilavastu after the Buddha's father died,
• Pasenadi, the king of Kosala who was a lay supporter of the Buddha but was dethroned by his son Vidudabha in a coup,
• Sunakkhatta, the monk who disrobed and denounced the Buddha at the assembly in Vaishali in the Buddha's last year of life, 
• Jivaka, the doctor who was also a lay supporter of the Buddha but about which the suttas have very little to say,
• Ananda, a monk and the Buddha's attendant whose attempt to continue the Buddha's open and inviting approach to the dharma after the Buddha's death was sidelined by Mahakassapa at the First Council.

Most of the material will be familiar from other of Batchelor's writings but, in particular, he does provide some new thinking about certain events depicted in Pali Canon, primarily from the Suttas and the Vinaya.

For example, the motivation behind Sunakkhata's traitorous betrayal of the Buddha was never clear, an event recorded in the Mahaparanibbana Sutta, the semihistorical text that describes the Buddha's last year, when he was 80 years old and the movement he had devoted his life to founding was in the process of falling apart. Recall, Sunakkhata denounced the Buddha, saying: "The wanderer Gotama doesn't have any superhuman states, any special knowledge or vision worthy of the noble ones. What he teaches is just hammered out by reasoning and following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him. And all it leads to is the end of dukkha (which Batchelor translates as 'reactivity')".

According to Batchelor, Sunakkhata was an idealist who was looking for mystical experiences and metaphysical truths. When he didn't get them he complained. For example failing to hear heavenly music, he became upset and complained to his father who then asked the Buddha about it. He also admires a couple of ascetics who behave strangely, one who is a "dog-duty" ascetic, i.e. wears no clothing, goes on all fours, and eats his food with his mouth only, and an ascetic with an extreme practice who vows not to leave Vashali. Batchelor attributes Sunakkhatta's denunciation to a likely incident that may have occurred outside Vaishali, at the border of Sakiya a few days before Sunakkhatta appeared before the assembly. King Vidudabha of Kosala was in the process of launching a genocidal attack on Sakiya, the Buddha's home territory, and the Buddha tried to dissuade him but failed. Batchelor believes that Sunnakkhata became disgusted because the Buddha couldn't perform a miracle and stop the attack.

The section on Jivaka is perhaps the least satisfying. Jivaka was a doctor in King Bimbasara's court, and was rumored to be an illegitimate son of the king. Jivaka is on the list of adherents, basically lay supporters, who were said to have achieved full enlightenment. But Jivaka is only mentioned briefly four times in the Canon, and so Batchelor doesn't have a whole lot of material to go on here, unlike with the other men. Picking a woman who was important to the Buddha's story, either his stepmother, Mahapajapati who was also Mahanama's wife and who founded the order of nuns, or Ambapali, the high class prostitute who was one of the Buddha's followers in Vaishali, would have given the book a bit more gender balance. 

The Jivaka section seems primarily there to talk about Devadattta's attempt to supplant the Buddha as the head of the order. Devadatta stood up in the assembly one day when the Buddha was seventy two and proposed that the Buddha put him in charge of the community so the Buddha could retire. The Buddha then proceeded to denounce Devadatta as a "lick-spittle", the kind of language that today's Theravadan community would never expect from an arhat much less a buddha, and says he has no intention of putting him in charge nor of appointing anyone to take charge after he dies. A group of monks then left the community together with Devadatta and broke off into a more strict vegetarian community, at Gaya Head. The Canon portrays Devadatta as having launched a few attempts to kill the Buddha, but these are probably later additions. When asked about the language he used,  the Buddha says the words were spoken in compassion for others, and that he had to act in a way that was swift, timely, and appropriate to the situation.

Batchelor is at his best when talking about practice, and he intersperses the chapters about the lives of the four men with chapters on his view of practice. In one, he talks about the passage in the Canon that focuses on the Unborn. He cites the interpretation of a little known Pali scholar, J.B. Horner, who translates the passage somewhat differently. Instead of escaping from what is born, Horner's translation talks of a escape for what is born, in other words, that the escape is not necessary a metaphysical state as the cannonical Therevadan teaching, and especially the Abhidhamma, would have it. That escape, in Batchelor's translation of Samyutta Nikaya 35:13, is the emancipation from grasping or craving.

In the chapter on meditation, however, Batchelor talks about meditation as beginning and ending in the everyday sublime. Though he says little about what lies between these two, he states up front that he has no interest in achieving states of concentration that remove awareness from the physical world. Batchelor has always been suspicious of altered states of consciousness in meditation, and, as far as I can determine from talking with him and from his writings, seems never to have experienced any in his own practice.  For those of us who have experienced far deeper ASCs, this view seems to be dismissing a mode of experience that can provide powerful support for the validity of the Buddha's teachings. He seems to be ignoring or denigrating the value of ASC experiences in breaking down the pitiless logic of the material world which holds most of humankind in its thrall of selfishness. Such experiences leave the teachings deeply ingrained in the body and mind in a way that purely logical argumentation can't, engaging a part of the mind that is separate and distinct from the part that engages in logic and reason.

All and all, then, a good read and a welcome development in Batchelor's dharma.

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Stories

Lately I've been thinking about stories, as a followup to my previous post on math. It seems people need to construct a story around something before they're ready to say they understand it. Take for example this.

Sometimes during particularly intensive retreats, I will get to the point where I don't have a lot of self-referential thinking. My sense of agency, that is that I am an agent and that the language in my thinking is coming from me, disappears. This is what some Buddhists call "not-self" or more technically, emptiness of self. But still there will be thoughts and sometimes they relate to my future plans or what I should do next or what would be best for me. This sense of a loss of agency is also accompanied by tremendous mental and physical energy.

Usually we ascribe some agency to thinking, in particular that we are the agent or that there is a self behind our thoughts, but in this case I don't have any. So my mind instead ascribes these thoughts to other people, mostly friends who aren't physically present (but who might be in the vicinity), animals, or sometimes to mythical beings (mostly devas and daemons). Instead of just seeing these thoughts as arising out of emptiness and passing away into emptiness, i.e. that the thoughts are agency-less, I ascribe the agency of these thoughts to others, not myself. I talk about this a bit in the book, in the penultimate chapter where I'm on a jhana retreat and end up in the psychiatric ward of the local hospital for 4 days.

Now, from the standpoint of someone experiencing reality in a conventional way, this kind of thing looks classically like schizophrenia. I'm "hearing voices", and if I had admitted this to the doctor during the 2011 retreat, I'd probably have been put away into a psychiatric hospital for a lot longer than 4 days. But there are two fundamental differences between the typical schizophrenic experience and what I experience.

The first difference is that for a typical schizophrenic, the voices are screaming abuse or howling at the person what a piece of sh*t they are, etc. In other words, the voices are abusive. And they don't stop, they continue to hector, cajole, and criticize so that the person sometimes can't sleep. In my case, the voices are giving practical advice, but often advice that is not in my best interest, or are telling stories. Sometimes, they are setting up mental tests or games that I play with visualized characters. And the stories, in particular, are elaborate Buddhist themed mythologies, often with a science-fiction subtext, in which I'm typically the star or at least play a leading role. Though I typically sleep less during an intensive retreat and sometimes also afterwards, the voices aren't the reason I can't sleep, it's just that I am so wired with energy that I don't really need to sleep.

The second difference is that about a month after the retreat, I start experiencing an agency behind my thinking again and the sense of the thoughts as "voices" disappears and instead becomes just my thinking. For most schizophrenics, the voices never disappear unless they take powerful medication for suppressing psychosis. That medication works in my case as well, and I took some after the 2011 retreat, but after the voices have disappeared, I don't need it anymore. And even beforehand, the voices are typically not harassing or scolding, they are just providing advice, but usually not very good advice unfortunately. Kind of like a stockbroker advising you to sell everything at the 5 year low for the market.

So, to pop up a level, this is a kind of story I've constructed to help me understand why my mind tends to construct these elaborate fictions when I have a particularly deep retreat. I think my task now is to see through these stories, and  to really experience thoughts as simply arising out of emptiness and disappearing into emptiness. From the standpoint of my conventional everyday experience of reality, I have a hard time seeing how I could take any action, in particular action towards my physical benefit, with this viewpoint, but others who have experienced emptiness say that it's really possible.  Action just seems to happen, they say, like thoughts simply arising out of emptiness.

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