A Secular Buddhism | Lecture by Buddhism scholar and teacher Stephen Batchelor

[Music] the Buddha was an ordinary man who taught an extraordinary way to deal in a fresh effective wise and empathic way with the problems we all deal with every day Stephan Bachelor Buddhist scholar and teacher explains the remarkable success of Buddhism worldwide by by seeing its ability to reinvent itself time and again in each new situation and because our Western culture is not very well at ease with the religious aspects of Buddhism he dedicates himself to developing a secular boothy Buddhism one that keeps the treasures that is the ethical aspects and the practical wisdom and that lets go lets go of the metaphysics and the dogmatism he will tell you all about this himself in a minute we are very happy that he is here with us today Stephan Bachelor buddhism scholar teacher he leads retreats worldwide he was a founding member of Bodhi college and he has published extensively books and articles about secular Buddhism he was invited by Hubbard reflects enter hot bounce a scent of mindfulness and again we're very proud that you're here today he will give a lecture and after that he will talk to two scholars of hot-bod University let there be light and that is firstly honest professor of psychiatry and director of the hot body a center for mindfulness and secondly crystal human tau professor of systematic theology and of course there will also be time for your own questions my name is Lizbeth alsa I'm a program manager at HotBot reflects and I will also be moderating the two discussions tonight um you're most welcome I'm very happy that you're here with us tonight and I would like to give the floor to Steve it's wonderful to see so many people here welcome and thank you very much Liz Bette and all of those are rad board reflux who have made this possible I'm going to talk to you as a secular Buddhist and as a secular Buddhist I'm a mindful not only of my breath but also of the fact that this is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation 500 years ago Martin Luther nailed his theses to a door in Wittenberg and began the process of the Reformation of the Christian Church and I also would argue again Christoph we can talk about this he also did a key move in the process that we now call secularization very difficult to imagine a secular culture without the Protestant Reformation that also I think sheds a light on my own background I was not raised formerly in a Christian tradition although of course being raised in Britain I was inevitably part of a Christian culture a Christian history but I do see in my own perspective on Buddhism very much a Protestant perspective I see secular Buddhism as maybe the beginnings or at least an indicator of what might become a Buddhist Reformation I feel in many ways that's the Dharma which is what the Buddhists call Buddhism i mater I might just use this word Dharma rather than Buddhism and the Buddhists that the Dharma I think has a great deal to say to us today and obviously we know it through the widespread use of mindfulness and so on but I feel that in many ways traditional Buddhism is still very much ensconced within a way of speaking a way of thinking that doesn't always communicate itself fairly very clearly or well to us and this is not something that I'm just observing this is something that Buddhists themselves have become aware of in the course of the last hundred or more years and I'd like to start this reflection on secular Buddhism by looking at the broader history of the secularization of Buddhism in other words how Buddhist teachers and scholars and monks and nuns from different cultures in Asia have found themselves having to confront modernity a modernity that in many cases was brought into Asia through the forces of colonialism and perhaps one of the most significant moments in the secularization of Buddhism occurred in Burma towards the latter part of the nineteenth century Burma became part of the British Raj in about 1850 in other words part of British India and the Burmese being a proud nation of people with a strong history and cultural tradition found themselves in the position of being the oppressed and as one way to stand up to the colonial powers they sought to reconnect with the deeper values of their own traditions this was often the case in these anti-colonial movements they that it served as a moment for renewal within those countries themselves one of the ways in which this took place in Burma was to rethink what their Buddhist tradition meant to them and since many of the reformers know not so much the reformers but the anti-colonialist agitators what since many of them had been educated in the West they had a clear understanding of how the Western mind thought they took this perspective to consider what they might have within their own tradition that could both restore their sense of cultural and national pride and also have sufficient rigor to be able to stand out to the threats particularly of the Christian churches who were seeking to convert Buddhists to Christianity and it's at this moment that they decided that they needed to take meditation out of the monasteries and introduce it into the life of ordinary men and women in the in families in the workplace and so on and thus was invented the Vipassana movement a number of monks number of laypeople found in Vipassana or meditation practice a way of looking at the world that was both rationally coherent did not require any grand metaphysical beliefs and perhaps most importantly was something you could do through your own practice through your own efforts that would make a qualitative difference to how you lived as a person in the world this movement grew and grew in Burma by the time of independence in 1948 the first Finance Minister of Burma was a man called uber King and he introduced in his ministry the practice of Vipassana which nowadays we perhaps would simply call mindfulness but it's from this movement from people I grew back in mohassess I adore and others that Westerners started studying Buddhist meditation in Burma and then brought it back to the West to America into Europe and began offering retreats the Pastner retreats one of which was attended by someone called John kabat-zinn who then realized the therapeutic implications of this practice and kick-started the movement that we now know as the practice of mindfulness so we can see here that we already have a process of secularization going on I'll give a couple more examples before I move into my own ideas the Soka Gakkai probably one of the largest Buddhist groups in the world today likewise started out as a lay movement affiliated to a priesthood of the litter in Shu Shu school in Japan soccer gaku in Japanese means value-creating Society it was an educational movement founded on Buddhist ideas but rooted in nature and Buddhism and that too over the decades after it was founded in the 20s became after the Second World War particularly the largest Buddhist movement in Japan it too now has spread across the world it has something like 20 million adherents and it is largely a secular movement there are no priests anymore they've all been taken out of the picture or let's say the priests tried to to excommunicate this lay organization that was becoming too powerful so the lay organization dropped the priests and went solo as it were so again another example of the secularization of the Dharma in the 20th century here in Japan another very potent example is what happened in India also as emerging out of the colonial situation in the movement up towards independence in 1900 in Burma in 1948 and one man in particular who was called Bhimrao Ambedkar who came from the untouchable caste in other words outside the Hindu caste system he had been spotted by the British as a very brilliant man young man educated at Oxford or Cambridge became a barrister and became the first justice minister of the independent India he in fact helped frame the Indian Constitution the fact though was that he could not accept the doctrines of Hinduism that treated him effectively as someone who didn't fit into their scheme of things and he felt after much reflection that the best way to serve his community there now called the Dalit community was to break free of Hinduism altogether and he did this by converting to Buddhism together with half a million of his followers he tragically died a few months later but his movement continues today it now embraces millions and millions of former untouchables in India it is a major political social force in that country and it is once again based upon a secularized version of Buddhism and Bekah wrote a book called the Buddha and his dharma in which he takes the Four Noble Truths for example not as a religious doctrine but as a doctrine of social justice again there are no monks involved in here there's no priesthood it is a totally lay movement that is engaged with social and political issues take a figure like the Dalai Lama obviously a monk very committed Buddhists arguably the best-known Buddhist in the world yet nine twenty ten he publishes a book called beyond religion which is the inaud title for someone who is the leader of a religion and what the Dalai Lama advocates in this book is what he calls a secular ethic and he is inspired coincidentally by the Indian Constitution that was established by ambekar for the Dalai Lama he feels the world is too small a place for ethics to be driven by the ethics of any particular religion or school and he takes his inspiration from the Indian Constitution in that it offers a secular space a secular space for him is a space of tolerance in other words in a multi religious society like India you need a secular state in order that all can be treated equally under the law so here again another indicator of a secularist approach coming in this case from a traditional Tibetan Buddhist so when I talk of secular Buddhism I'm not speaking of it as an invention of people in the West in the last 20 or 30 years I see it as part of a deep historical movement that was already underway in Asia before people started thinking about it more explicitly in those terms here in the West just to give a little bit of relevant sense of my own approach during my 20s I was trained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in the galoop a tradition that emphasizes very much the importance of critical inquiry debate textual analysis and arriving at an understanding not just through faith alone but through the use of reason and rationality and although I left the Tibetan Buddhist tradition many many years ago now I feel that my work since has nonetheless been deeply influenced by this intellectual training I received as a young man and my work as a teacher as a writer in many ways has emerged out of this critical approach that I learnt from my Tibetan teachers so what do I understand therefore as secular Buddhism I would start by saying that secular Buddhism offers a radical rethinking of the Buddhist teaching from the ground up and in that sense I see it as a reformation I see it as going back to the earliest source materials that we have in other words the Buddhist equivalent of the Gospels and trying to get as clear and understanding as is possible of what it was that the Buddha was saying in his time that spoke to the condition of people then that was not drawn from his Hindu or his ginormous environment that was already in place at his time what was it that was original about the Buddhist teaching again I've written about this at some length in my books and I'm not going to go into any detail here but basically I feel that when you look into these early texts you find that the Buddha is not at all interested in setting up an alternative metaphysical account of the nature of reality he may borrow certain ideas that were current in his time such as reincarnation and and utilized them provided that they served his purposes but basically he was not an oncologist he was not interested in knowing what is the nature of of truth or being or reality he was concerned first and foremost with coming to terms with human suffering with dukkha that is the starting point of his whole approach and his approach to dealing with dukkha is to learn strategies whereby we can understand it whereby we can in a way almost embrace it in a way in which we begin to understand more clearly what it is that gives rise to it and how we might adopt a way of life that embraces all of our humanity not just our spiritual core but how we see the world how we make choices how we speak how we act how we work all of this constitutes the Eightfold Path that the Buddha presented and his teaching therefore is to my mind primarily and centrally and ethics it's about human flourishing it's about how we can live in this world in a way that enables ourselves as individuals and our communities to optimize the potentials that we have in this very short life if I'm to sum this up I would suggest that a secular Buddhism moves from a truth based metaphysics in other words a view of the world that makes truth claims and then bases its teaching and its practices and its theories on these non-negotiable truth claims and instead of a truth based metaphysic moving to a task based ethics now the way in which I have approached these questions is by making a study a critical study of the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths which you are probably familiar with if you've ever opened a book on Buddhism you will find right there on page two or three the Four Noble Truths but the Four Noble Truths arguably are just another metaphysics the life is suffering that the origin of suffering is craving that the ending of suffering is the ending of craving and the way to the ending of suffering is through the Noble Eightfold Path now these are all framed as propositions you can believe those propositions or not but basically if you're a Buddhist you're somebody for whom those propositions are true in other words those statements life is suffering origin of suffering is grave they correspond to a state of affairs in reality they are true then they're not really negotiable to me that doesn't sit at all comfortably with the Buddha's repeated a vowel of metaphysics his refusal to answer questions about the origins of the world the end of the world where the mind and body are the same or different what happens to him after death or not all such questions are simply questions that he remains silent about not because he knew the answer but he didn't think people would understand them and not because he didn't know the answer but because that simply was not what concerned him these questions were for him irrelevant he says there have as much relevance as a person who's been shot by an arrow who's bleeding to death but won't let a doctor remove the arrow until he knows the name of the person who shot it whether that person had fair hair or dark hair whether the arrow had the feathers of a crow or he makes his absurd and he says meanwhile of course the person would die so in other words this parable points very clearly to how the buddha is not interested in where you know how things came to be the way they are he's concerned with how do we address the question of our dukkha the tragic dimension of our life our birth sickness aging and death how do we respond to that in an appropriate way how do we respond to that in a way that can enable us to flourish more fully as persons if you read the Buddhist first discourse which is quite short you'll find that he presents the the middle way the Eightfold Path then he presents the Four Noble Truths and then he presents what it means to be enlightened or to be awake and he says it he's talking in the first person he's speaking of himself he says I could not consider myself to be awake until I had recognized performed and mastered for specific tasks in other words until I had embraced suffering had let go of craving reactivity I had seen the stopping of that craving and I had cultivated or developed a way of life in other words he doesn't treat these truths as metaphysical facts he treats them as as fields of action as things to do not things to believe now from here I have built up on that basis a way of understanding the Dharma that has no need whatsoever for any kind of metaphysical truth claim I don't to be a Buddhist or to practice the Dharma let's say does not require that we believe in reincarnation does not require that we believe in in in different realms of existence in which we might get reborn does not require that we believe in a natural karmic law that determines our outcome after death and somehow is the kind of invisible current that drives life on earth all of these things are simply not relevant I'm not saying that they're wrong and I'm not saying that they're right we just need we no longer need to think that way these are simply features of ancient Indian cosmology that in those times served a perfectly viable and useful purpose but they don't really fit the kind of worldview that we have today particularly the one that has emerged out of the Natural Sciences so in other words we can just let that go we don't need to hold those kinds of views or beliefs we can focus our practice entirely upon coming to terms with suffering our own that of others by working on how we habitually and instinctively react to suffering what a life and we get caught up in cycles of attachments cycles of fear cycles of worry cycles of hatred the point is not that these mental states cause us to suffer which of course they often do but that's actually again not the point the point is can you live a life that's not inflected by those kinds of emotions and desires and fears can you let go of that and this is of course where mindfulness comes into play mindfulness is not some marginal exercise in Buddhism it's right at the core so I find it extraordinary that something that is so central to the Buddhist vision has found a way of making becoming available to people who have no interest in Buddhism whatsoever and yet have found that by doing these spiritual meditative practices it has a transformative effect on the quality of their life but what they're talking about is a practice that's utterly indistinguishable from what a monk in Burma in a forest in a cave is also doing there's no there's no there's really no difference the actual practice is the same and so the approach this secular approach to the Dharma by turning what were once true into tasks turning what were once beliefs about how suffering emerges into instructions to let go of certain habits of mind and in having let go of those habits of mind even momentarily to allow oneself to come to rest in a still clear presence of mind that is not driven by those reactive patterns that is in fact Nirvana nirvana is not a Buddhist heaven Nirvana is not something that you might attain after years or lifetimes as practice as a Buddhist monastic Nirvana is actually right here and now and again this is not some Zen Buddhists claim you find it in some of the very earliest passages in the Pali Canon where the Buddha describes Nirvana as clearly visible immediate inviting uplifting and personally experienced by the wise not personally experienced by the Buddhists but by the wise Nirvana is constitutes all of those moments in our life when we find ourselves dwelling in a still clear nonreactive space Nirvana is part of our human legacy it's not an esoteric property discovered by Buddhists so this third task of seeing the stopping of grasping or reacting is beholding the presence of Nibbana here and now and in this secular approach Nibbana ceases therefore to be the goal of the practice Nibbana paradoxically for us becomes the origin or the source the practice in other words can I respond to the situation I find myself in now in a way that's not conditioned by greed by hatred by egoism let's say but is a spontaneous and empathetic response to the situation at hand and how I respond to that situation is essentially ethical I seek to make choices that I can live with as morally justified I can seek to speak and act in a way that brings me closer to the realization of what I most deeply value it gives a focus to the whole process of my flourishing as optimally as I can as a human being the secular Dharma I advocate is also founded on philosophical skepticism it values questions more than answers and it heats the Buddhist advice to follow a middle way a middle way that is suspicious of any absolute izing claims about the nature of truth or reality the middle way is not just a middle way between sensory indulgence and ascetic mortification which his heritage often presented but the middle way for the Buddha was also a philosophical skepticism in other words it was a refusal to affirm that something either is or is not in any kind of metaphysical way it was a state of approach to life which is founded on keeping an open questioning attentive mind that is constantly on guard against fixing and grasping on to some interpretation of what's going on in any kind of absolute way this is not at all similar to the skepticism we find in the Hellenistic philosophy of Pierrot of Ellis in fact the parallels there are really rather extraordinary that this skepticism of the Buddha is about keeping a mind that is free of the entrapments of any kind of dogmatic belief so I could go on and on and I don't want to spend the rest of the time just talking about various interpretations of Buddhist doctrines but I do think it important that in this secular Dharma that I am suggesting I'm not just sort of cherry-picking the bits of Buddhism that don't seem to be problematic don't talk of reincarnation or or spirits and gods and so on I'm concerned that this secularization of the Dharma is rooted in what is arguably the core teaching of the Buddha himself the Four Noble Truths which I would argue are better understood as the four great tasks or simply the four tasks I have my own view that others probably don't accept in the Buddhist world that the teaching probably started out as a set of tasks to perform and practice and then mutated and involved into a set of beliefs a set of doctrines to be adhered to and believed I think what happened is the Dharma as a pragmatic and skeptical ethic Muir evolved and again we don't need to go into all of the reasons but evolved into basically another Indian religion that competed with the Jains and the brahmins and others to offer a way to salvation a soteriology which for all Indian religions or at least the major ones has to do with breaking free of the cycle of birth and death achieving moksha liberation and the Buddhists and the Janes and the Brahmins all sought this goal and they have their own particular ways to achieve it as soon as that happened Buddhism became effectively a metaphysically based religion indian religion what's remarkable I think as the Dharma finds its way into modernity is that it becomes subject to the process of historical critical evaluation in other words we are in a much better position today than we were even say 50 years ago at understanding the the political social religious conditions under which the Buddha taught in northeast India in the 5th century BC we have a much better critical understanding of the different layers within the early canonical texts and I think we really do have by virtue of this Western type academic study a clearer picture a clearer sense of where we might be able to land with this material in such a way that we can rethink it from the ground up in a way that speaks to the kinds of conditions that men and women experience in 21st century Holland for example so where do we go from here I see this attempt to articulate a secular Dharma very much as a work in progress I certainly don't think it is a fait accompli its discussion it's a conversation that in many respects is mainly going on online into virtual communities around the world but I think it's just really another illustration of how Buddhism shows this remarkable capacity to reinvent itself in responding to the different needs of historical periods cultures and so on I've always found that very inspiring the fact that what we find in Buddhism in Japan or Tibet I'm sorry or Tibet or Sri Lanka or Burma or Mongolia wherever they all have got their own distinctive flavour their own distinctive style their own distinctive art forms their own distinctive teachings and teachers and practices and I think this emerges precisely because the Dharma comes into a new culture and it begins a conversation the conversation that began say in the 1950s 1960s here in Europe was largely with psychology with psychologists because there was a meeting point Buddhists had a lot of interesting things to sell out the mind psychologists obviously have a similar concern about the mind and they started talking to each other key book here was called Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis by Erich Fromm DT Suzuki and Richard DeMartino and that set in motion as it were again a very rich dialogue that continues till today between Buddhists and for example here in this university the department of psychiatry it's a continuation and and I suspect that this will be one of the key entry points of the Dharma into our wider society as is the case with so many people I meet on retreats I teach now who come not because of their interest in Buddhism but because they've done in a mindfulness course and they started practicing mindfulness and they like it they find it very helpful in living lives they then want to know more and so they start googling mindfulness and they end up on a Buddhist retreat this happens a lot and this points I think very much to how there's a kind of trickle-down effect from psychiatrists and psychologists talking to Buddhist monks translating that through forms of therapeutic practice mindfulness let's say and then that practice being a basis for people asking questions about their lives that are effectively philosophical and ethical and so and that's I feel where this secular Dharma will potentially begin to take root in other words what I'm looking for is an idiomatic European language that doesn't require any specialist knowledge in which we can articulate these values and these concerns and this notion of being on a path in ordinary speech and that may be well what happens with the further evolution of the whole mindfulness movement for those of us who lived in Asia 40 years ago and were doing Goenka retreats and so on it's it came as an enormous surprise the speed with which the practice of mindfulness took off I don't think any of my peers when we think back to living in India in those days would have ever imagined this would happen quite inconceivable if somebody had told me in 1972 let's say you know in 40 years time you'll be able to get mindfulness on the British National Health Service I would not have believed them I would have thought they were a bit of a fantasies but it has come to pass and that to me is really remarkable and in many ways an extraordinary confirmation of my own adolescent intuitions to head off to India and to look into Buddhism in the first place now some Buddhists feel that this whole secularization of the Dharma whether it's called secular Buddhism or not the whole mindfulness movement is somehow a kind of a dumbing down it's sort of an asset stripping of the Dharma you take out the mindfulness and a bit of matter and one or two ideas and the second arrow and then bingo you've got I think that's a very very trivial objection and I would argue the opposite namely the the the whole mindfulness movement might well help Buddhism to discover its own heart and its own roots by going back to these practices again it's not the West going to the East because as I said this process began in Burma or a hundred years ago it's been now as it were filtered through the Western Academy and is returning now ironically to places like China and Japan and Korea well we're all doing mindfulness in Korea they call it K mindfulness but like kpop in other words mindfulness practically the kind of Korean gloss another area that I think has tremendous potential in the development of a secular Dharma is our Capanna is the possibility of our recovering some of our own philosophical roots in the Hellenistic traditions in other words the sceptics that I've already mentioned the Epicureans and the Stoics when you read for example Epictetus or marcus aurelius or the fragments of Epicurus and you already know quite a bit about Buddhism you're constantly saying to yourself wait a minute I've seen that before oh yeah that's in that da-da-da-da-da Sutra and yet it's not coming from a culture that knew anything about Buddhism it's coming out of practices practical philosophies that were very influential in the origins of our own philosophical traditions and I feel this is a very exciting area in which mindfulness and such secularized Buddhist thinking might bring us back to a renewed appreciation for a similar kind of practical philosophy that we had already in Greece and finally a note really which is a personal note really I find that rather than itself identifying as a Buddhist which to be honest I find more and more difficult to do I find myself more comfortable in the spaces between traditions and if I'm honest with myself that's where I spend most of my time not with my Buddhist hat on but somehow moving between worlds between Buddhism and Christianity much of my work has been strongly influenced particularly by liberal Protestant theology my whole critique of Buddhist thinking the whole attempt to find a new language was initially inspired by the work of Paul Tillich the Lutheran theologian in America or Germany than America I also live in the space between religion and lay culture as it were in the space between different artistic traditions and I find that my life is informed as much by something that's coming out of the Gospels is coming out of the Stoics that's coming from the paintings of Vermeer that's coming out of a contemporary secular thinking that someone like richard rorty has been a great influence on me but I don't I rarely feel completely at home in any one of these spaces so a plea perhaps to think of secular Dharma is not trying to box itself into the Buddhist compartment but actually finding a freedom to move between the traditions that already inform the lives that we lead thank you [Applause] thank you very much Steven bachelor may I invite you to sit over there then and spikings sit over here and you'll sit in the middle exactly I can keep an eye on you both exactly and I'm at my clock of an ad for time no boy we started a bit late see um I'm sorry this floor seems to be too small for all of you to see everyone but I hope it works out fine somehow um and you know Steven quite well okay anyway you are a psychiatrist and you're also the director of the hot pot USA center for mindfulness um could you explain shortly how you use mindfulness in your practice what kind of treatments do you offer and how far which kind of patients yeah Steven already mentioned mindfulness as has come about in the dialogue between Buddhist practitioners in in this case you don't have a say in who practice meditation and psychologists and initially I think it's it's must be about must have been about 2008 had been applied in patients with recurrent depression s mind source based cognitive therapy combining elements from the mindfulness with elements from the cognitive therapy and since then it has elaborated and been offered and we have done quite some research ourselves with patients with other psychological problems like ADHD or unexplained physical symptoms or anxiety disorders it is for cancer patients you told me mm-hmm but also for cancer patients for example so as we are working in a General Hospital we're part of Department of Psychiatry but we are collaborating with a lot of colleague from from the hospital as a whole so with oncologists and also with gastro and a neurologist and neurologist and we offer my entrance to people with chronic somatic conditions so people who are confronted with severe illnesses and sometimes terminal illnesses and have to cope with that and then how does that work what exactly do they do what do you ever offer we offer a training we offer people a place to practice - to practice and to actually talk with each other about that practice so it says it's a an eight week course which takes place in groups and people meet each way week for two and half hours they do meditation practices so sitting meditation focusing on their breathing but also a body scan when people focus their attention on different parts of their body they learn to observe their thoughts and to let them come and go as they do and they talk with each other during those sessions and they practice that at home on a daily basis so it's a pretty intensive course it's like other skills like piano playing or even running you have to try to do it rather than talk about it yeah so that's what people do and they they find it very usually they find it helpful good and what would you say is the relation between mindfulness as you use it and Buddhism is it a direct source of inspiration or is mindfulness just a technique in its own well it's a it's got an interesting history john capitain practiced mindfulness and and meditation and thought it would be of real value to the people in hospitals people suffering from illnesses but he also thought and quite rightly at the time I think that talking Buddhism wouldn't bring him to his patients so he took the practice and the principles out of it and translated it in a language that we could all understand and that was accessible of all people without them having to convert to bosom yes and I think at a time that was really valuable and also I think was an important factor in the growth of mindfulness in the course of the years do you tell your patients that is based on Buddhism well times have changed so we do acknowledge more than at a time roots of mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition also because there's a lot to learn yeah I mean it is it has come into existence 2,000 years ago there there's been a lot of practitioners and scholars to thinking about it so there's a lot to discover and reflect on and deepen the knowledge and and the practice that we offer to patients so we do reflect on that as part of our teacher training program for mindfulness teachers because we we want them to know what money it originated where it originated from and also I think generally I mean people know a lot more about mindfulness now than they did 20 years ago so in the popular press in TV documentaries in in information on our web sites we do acknowledge that their roots the roots of mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition and the broader context and we also are actually with the help of the training programs of Bodhi college we're considering offering trainings in the Four Noble Truths the four foundations of - OH - offer the general public a way of of deepening their understanding and expanding their knowledge and practice oh yeah this okay so Steven if you're here and speaking about how she implies mindfulness in her work and the relationship with Putin is this the way you think a secular boost Buddhism ought to look like well I don't think we should use the word Oh in some ways what the fact is that we're going to be surprised I mean that to me was one of the most signal moments is wait a minute this mindfulness actually works outside of Buddhism in an extraordinary way I would never have guessed that as I mentioned yeah and I think we have to be open to the fact that we're exploring we're sort of we're opening up a path we're following our noses we're asking ourselves where this is going but we don't really know mm-hmm in the long-term what the consequences of all this might be they're probably not going to be anything we can currently anticipate we don't really know I from my perspective as a scholar and also someone very interested in the history of Buddhism I see that so many factors come into play and not just you know the core exercise of your practice or whatever but it'll be the kind of the the various literary and artistic traditions that might inform you it might have to do with other philosophers or psychologists developing ideas independently that suddenly come into alignment with what you're doing and that takes it off in another direction to me the most important thing is this ongoing creative and imaginative and risk-taking endeavor to find ways of really addressing effectively human suffering that's the bottom line that's whether you're a Buddhist or a psychiatrist how do we live in a way where we're less constrained and restricted by our attachments and fears and other sufferings that we encounter in our lives so so I don't I I really have a very open mind as to how this is emerging I do see nonetheless that the mindfulness movement seems to be operating in a practical way or let's say illustrating in a practical way what I'm trying to articulate in a theoretical way namely well I'm trying to I'm trying to understand I'm doing to work there you know I'm argue that you know messengers you don't need to believe in reincarnation all future lives or enlightenment but it's a practice for living a more ethical life in this world to be more aware and attentive and they're showing that that can actually be done and one of the directions is aligning with within healthcare I was thinking about during your lecture is that we are thinking about health exchanging as well we don't think about health anymore as absence of disease but we're thinking about it in a much broader sense and actually the concept of health that were discussing now it's much much closer to the pneumonia we were talking the flourishing we were talking about then it was in the past how did that change well that's that's a thing that changed in in our society in general yeah I think why well partly because in the past the diseases were more treatable they infectious diseases are more treatable it's easier to discern a course and to do something about it and now all those conditions are multifactorial and we recognize that that flourishing of people doesn't only depend on on physical health but also on their social conditions and psychological state so it's um yeah it's partly progress yes I we also might have to do with the fact that we've become more affluent though we have more space energy time finance if you delegate you to yeah okay well I mean us Ann is speaking and I'm reminded of course the the Buddha himself saw himself as a doctor lately oh yeah yeah sure but Buddhist all saw himself as that as a physician he saw the Dharma as medication uh-huh he saw the Sangha the community as nursing staff mm-hmm so the idea the the the the Dharma is somehow you know finding its way into healthcare is he's actually reverting to the very core metaphors the Buddha used to describe what he was doing and we'll find similarly that this is how the Greeks understood philosophy for long the philosopher was a doctor the the practice of philosophy was a therapy mm-hmm it was about the cure of the soul and in all of these traditions certainly the Buddha didn't understand his medication is about just sort of sorting out your mind so that you can be happier more of the time he saw this therapy this medication this the therapeutic procedure is occurring through what he calls the Eightfold Path which has to do not just with our spiritual or mental life it has to do with our our ethical life it has to do with our work situation it has to do with how we communicate all of those things together it develops an image that again is highly to me highly suggestive of this notion of of human flourishing human flourishing is about flourishing in all areas of your life in an integrated way that I think is that is the model of let's say the symbol of the Buddha the Buddha image is basically a symbol of integration so what's the Buddha also very concentrated on the individual Oh might you say for him it might have been more societal movement oh it was clearly yes and is that something of the west of the we've made it an individual health flourishing happiness assessment of the dangers of course hmm so that's another dimension that we might develop more and if you practice mindfulness you do discover that it has to do with your relationship with other people otherwise it would it wouldn't be anything yeah so that is inherent inherent in the inner practice but in in the sort of image of mindfulness that certain people tend to think about it as an individual mm-hmm thing and we could I think we could do more to to develop that and to stress that and to directly also practice that in a more explicit way the ethical dimension of course within healthcare hasn't got as much a place as it had in a in a tradition of cultivation of your own spiritual well-being but why not yeah so so one last question before we have to go to the second interview well if you if you use practices from Buddhism in the secular context in a healthcare context do you feel like it's being reduced in some way or rather something extra is added to this concept or to the mindfulness practice it's an evolving process I think so who knows where it will end up in practice I think I think it's a discovery for people and and for many of them it will mean that they continue practicing and they find other sources for inspiration or start reading about it to do other things whether the sort of use or application of pointers in a healthcare setting in modern Western society will add to the Buddhism or or - who knows I think it might because the more people sort of practice and think about it and play around with it that was the last point here lecture III do think that what if we step back a bit from our own specific work you know me as a writer on secular Buddhism and as a psychic and we just step back and look at the bigger global situation I think we are experiencing also an intercultural exchange we're breaking down the rather fictitious and I think negative boundary between east and west I don't think there is an East and a West anymore in in that kind of colonial sense that we had but rather we're finding that we're basically human beings dealing and struggling with the same issues and we're looking for a vision of how we can live together how we can as individuals and I think that this you know the development of mindfulness in healthcare and the secularization of Buddhism of science so there in other words with some of these boundaries that we might still be boundaries in our heads I was talking before here about philosophy philosophy in the West and that begins and ends and Athens laughs if you're east of Athens it ain't philosophy but this is stupid I mean this is makes no sense at all but that's the way we think and I think that as we moving into a more interactive global culture we're going to experience more and more these kinds of conversations that are going to play out in ways that we can't predict but I think have so far showed us that there's enormous richness and potential in its going both ways I hope I think Buddhism will probably be transformed by this and possibly elements of our own Western cultural also come to look at things in a new light from what they garner from Buddhist meditation or whatever but where is going who knows hmm well it sounds hopeful anyway thank you welcome to introduce your short t2d audience you're a systematic theologian and you're largely focused on public theology meaning a bit short short lease at translating theological concepts to a broader audience very roughly speaking thank you Steven you and that your lecture by saying that your research especially in the quest of the historical Buddha has been influenced by the work of Christian theologians can you explain a little bit more how that worked and why you were inspired by them well I spent my I became a monk in India at the age of 20 a couple of years after that I returned to Switzerland because my teacher guess she rapped and became the abbot of the Tibetan monastery in Switzerland and when I came back to Europe I started becoming very interested in how our own culture our own Western civilization had addressed the sorts of questions that I was working with in my Buddhist world and this led me to start reading in Western philosophy particularly existentialism phenomenology and so on and that led me to the study of certain Western theologians and also I was also studying young and Western psychology too I was greedy for this because I've been sort of cut off from it and I was particularly taken with how contemporary Christian theologians were trying to in a sense revitalize their own intellectual traditions their own way of understanding the Gospels in the context of modernity and I felt that they were effectively trying to do exactly what I wanted to do yeah and they did that you said right by looking for the historical Jesus all right swallow okay that wasn't actually my initial interest my interest really was using the language of existentialist philosophy particularly to riah articulate the core Buddhist values of the tradition which often obscured because they're in these rather arcane pali sanskrit words or they're in some sort of neo western jargon and i wanted to find a language that really spoke to people without those obstacles more recently in the last few years i've been very interested in the quest for the historical Jesus and how that has influenced my own quest for the historical Gautama uh-huh which I've done a lot of work on and that again it's without the Christian influence I don't know whether I'd be doing this work in the way I'm doing it do you think as a theologian that it's possible to find this historical this through Jesus heart is through Buddha and should we even strive for it there has been a long tradition whether the historical Jesus can be reconstructed and yeah old man for instance was for instance was absolutely not interested in this question I think recently people tend to go back to to the historical Jesus and to try to reconstruct whatever as possible so I think there is a similarity with reconstruction of the original teachings of the Buddha so I cannot judge on whether your reading of the original texts and then your interpretation of the original adoption of Buddhas is correct so I'm not a scholar in in in Buddhism but what what what strikes me is that you yeah our souls against this this meta physical interpretation of Buddhism I I think once you've you called it the the Buddhist orthodoxy and so if you look for instance there is a long discussion since since call the aspis on the actual age yeah it's it's it's on it is said that in increase in the the metaphysics the upcoming of metaphysics and Greek philosophy the Jewish the Jewish prophets Buddhism as well and and and also Confucianism as so that there's a up coming off of often you metaphysical thinking at a certain time round about 500 for Christ's around about and and where where which in a sense was a breakthrough so this is this discovery of metaphysical thinking which in a sense could be used to be critical on on worldly powers so in in the name of God or in the name of the logos of the news or whatever you could criticize earthly powers and my fear is that an a secular interpretation of any religious of metaphysical tradition tends to use this the disability to be critical on so this is this would be one one question to you whether whether a secular kind of Buddhism isn't isn't a kind of a gets gets rid of it of its of its critical power I've never really thought of it that way I certainly value the critical traditions that I've inherited from the Buddhists as I've mentioned and I don't I'm not quite sure what you mean by metaphysics as a feature of the axial age you would probably have to talk about that in more detail that we can now I also do think that the axial age theory of yah spurs is one that does make is very striking but I've never really thought of it as so much the emergence of metaphysics but actually more for example the emergence of a different sense of the human person a sense of a greater sense of compassion a sense of awareness of the demands of the other on one hand circles which we find in Confucius we find in the Buddha we find in cries we find in Socrates and so on but if I may reformulate your question and if I'm wrong and please correct me because it was my own question - is it not risky to try and find the one that we want to find rather than accepting the other having lived I don't know how many hundreds of years ago and and and seeing the complete other with which we have to struggle in order to find what he has - yes there is a risk but I think risks are worth taking very often and of course I'm totally alert to the fact that by somehow searching for the historical Jesus or the original teachings of the Buddha or whatever one is very much running the risk of basically just seeing what you want to see and there's a famous image one theologian used in looking for the person looking for the historical Jesus is like a person who looks down a well and sees their own face reflected back in other words they find themselves but actually I don't find that too problematic what I do think is crucial and this might also answer Christoph's point too is I think that for the for a Buddhist tradition to retain its critical vitality you need to be in constant ongoing conversation with the primary texts of that tradition and that is something that for me is very important in fact what my own journey through Buddhism has let taken me to is a letting go of the more abstract metaphysical theories of Mahayana Buddhism and tera vaada Buddhism and coming back more and more to these early texts in Pali but not in a fundamentalist kind of way if it says it in Pali it must be true no not at all it offers a new way of entering into a living conversation with the past with the tradition itself and that is not by any stretch of the imagination simply finding what I want to find in fact I do find constantly resistance from many texts and I'm not prepared just to dismiss them because they don't happen to agree with what I think if you do that then it just becomes a virtually a solipsistic exercise and that to me holds no interest so yes I struggle with these texts I struggle with these traditions I struggle with the figure of the Buddha I don't always find the earliest texts congenial at all I have to somehow cope with that so provided that I keep that kind of open mind and also a willingness to as it were acknowledge the foundational nature of the primary canonical material and whatever other historical facts that we can come to I think one would be relatively you know one would at least impose certain safeguards upon one's thinking that might prevent the work the most egregious forms of just projecting one's own fantasies onto it but of course creep my career critics will also throw this at me too you know I'm just I just see the bits in the Buddhist Canon that Steven Batchelor likes and then filled it up out of yeah I didn't know that's clearly at the implication but you see Thea it's one but you see that's how good if you look at how Buddhism has evolved historically it's always done this yes when Buddhism went to Tibet they translated I'll corpus of literature from Sanskrit but they only actually took seriously a handful of documents because those documents spoke to their condition at that time they're the texts that really addressed them and the same thing has happened in the West certain texts have become canonical in Western Buddhism like the Kalama sorter which is the Buddha's sort of highly you know skeptical approach to the tradition and so on but was never particularly important in Asia so Buddhism has this capacity to sort of reconfigure its canonical foundations as well yeah so first of all I would like to say so if if we come back to the historical Buddha a story of Jesus of course as I said there is some interest in the historical Jesus but if we have a look at the development of Christianity we see that very early Christians had to make use of for instance Greek metaphysics in order to understand what their were believing so it was it was a kind of attempt to to reconstruct what we are thinking in a coherent and consistent way in order to understand what you think and then and and Chris of course as you know in the Christian theology referred or he even built up metaphysics with strong truth claims fill up on on orthodoxy and I think in a sense this is unmissable or is yeah his cannot cannot be because because Christianity as I think any other religion or metaphysical tradition wants to give an answer to ultimate questions in your lecture you set the Buddha the captain has to be irrelevant but I think that that as human beings we cannot abstain from from asking ultimate questions let me give an example what is the meaning of life mm-hmm but where I'll be coming from where are we going - is there something as ultimate happiness or ultimate ultimate peace or what is the destiny of mankind and in questions of the like and and if if we begin to raise questions and and try to answer these questions we cannot but but to give metaphysical answers with with strong truth claims and I think this is not does not necessarily imply that we all have to be metaphysics or that we have to be religious because we can give negative answers so we can say if you speak about the ultimate meaning of human life this would be this but it does not exist so there must not think corresponding in reality to it but but to to not to raise these questions or to declare them as as irrelevant seems to me a kind of anthropological reductionism because people are not because because people ask these questions and because they ask them they cannot be said to be irrelevant yeah yeah yeah okay the ìiî I think personally that the Buddha was profoundly concerned with these ultimate questions but I think he was more interested in the power of the question itself than the capacity we have to articulate metaphysical answers to them and he his his basic philosophical position which I described his skepticism is is effectively avoiding affirmation or denial what he calls is or is not and that in practice leads to a deep fundamental uncertainty and questioning that is the ground for very questions that you say human beings passionately unnecessarily asked I've got no problem with that and my own training in in Zen Buddhism which I did in Korea all we did all I did for four years was ask myself the question what is this what is this and what that practice led me to was not an answer and certainly not an answer that I would frame metaphysically but it led me to the power of the of questioning itself that this questioning is really an opening to the sheer ineffable mystery of life is mm-hmm and that to me is more moving is more resonant through my flesh and my bones than any kind of ultimate truth claim I'm not interested in ultimate regimes like the Buddha was but I am deeply interested in ultimate questions hmm again I was inspired by Tillich his definition of faith is the state of being ultimately concerned yet that to me is the best definition of faith I can come up with so I'm concerned with actually deepening these questions that tend to give rise to metaphysical type theoretical answers of Buddhism has certainly come up with lots of them and as you say correctly Buddhism as a filler as a better as a religious tradition has evolved extremely complex and sophisticated metaphysical theories that give answers to all of these deep questions but the problem for me is that in doing so they often lose sight of the questions themselves and the metaphysical statements simply become things you believe in or expected to believe in if you are a card-carrying Buddhist you have to believe X Y and Zed and if you don't you're missing the point you'll get excommunicated with it and that's the important point is to keep coming back to the question but isn't intellectually satisfying only to raise questions and never trying to to answer them I think that I I would draw a distinction between answering a question and responding to a question now you may be that distinction may not be so possible in German or Dutch but I respond my response to these questions is not a matter of physical statement for answer my response to these questions is a book is a painting is a piece of music is the way I work in my garden that to me is a more appropriate response to those deepest questions rather than adopting a particular metaphysical truth claim which for some people might be the most appropriate response I think there's too great a risk in that approach to basically giving people consoling ideas to hold on to and to think that they have some access to truth where in fact they're simply adopting a the ideas of people in authority trees and theologians and so on I want my faith my Buddhist practice to be a deeply living thing that is constantly engaged with the deeply perplexing and mysterious and weird fact of being here at all that's where my practice has Center and that is where I feel the freedom of Nibbana resides once again we come to the question if I make a very bold statement but but just to for the sake of of the argumentation the person you described as yourself so being being happy to work in your garden I want you to to look at a painting or whatever listen to a piece of music it's exactly the the person that our capitalist world wants to there's no kind of critical engagement there is some kind of of critical looking at the world you've been talking about the the the question whether whether mindfulness is it's an anybody individualist thing to happen over the head is whether it has some some collective i I do not see the the collective so it's it's as it's a purely individualist be satisfied with with the life you live you misconstrued me I didn't say that I would read a book or listen to a piece of music or look at a piece of art I would seek to write a book or create a piece of compose a piece of music or paint a painting and that would be a form of responding to the conditions of the world in which I live I fully agree that if we adopt a kind of passive you know just individualistic life of mere sort of pleasure and peace that would be fitting into the model you know the kind of behavior that capitalist economy would like slavich's yet because you've probably aware has described buddhism as the opium of the middle class history and it Sam and mindfulness to us and it's not in Italy it's it's it's a good common mmm I take that to heart I think there is that danger I agree but that's not really see how I see it at all if Buddhism or mindfulness does lead to that kind of individual passivity then in my sense it's failed the this response to life I think needs to be one that is not just a you know passive kind of enjoyment but is actually a critical engagement with the world in which we live and I try through my own writing and through my own work to try to give voice to those things that to me is crucial it's about a creative engagement with the world and you know many Buddhists are struggling with this a lot of Buddhist like to think of themselves as engaged but but if you think of the examples I gave for example of ambekar the justice minister or although the Burmese political reformers they were using Buddhism in a totally political way and that to me is where I would find greater inspiration for sure absolutely and yes no I just wanted to know I thought I recognized somewhat a similar process but then the other way around with Buddhism being at risk of stacking being stuck in the process in the practice whereas maybe Christianity or theology may be at risk of stick being stuck in the in the in depth in the thinking or in the yes whereas both neat yes side as well I think you would already set but in it yeah out loud is it is it something you recognize all right am I saying something completely well I know you're not saying anything completely absurd the but I do think it is very difficult to make such broad generalization yeah basically I mean but we have been we happy that we can't avoid it for some reason but my what I enjoy in interacting with people outside my Buddhist world yes is that it actually you know triggers off conversations and dialogues that are in you know very enriching for me yes and hopefully for my conversation partners and I think that the the space between traditions is the space in which we can actually meet one another yes and I'll probably always be a Buddhist for the you know for the rest of my years I'll probably have to write Buddhist when I go into my last hospital visit for the priest will save me again but in some ways I don't think that's really a what's essential at all and yeah I have one one last tricky question before we go to the audience you've been accused of cherry-picking Buddhist tradition do you think what are the Christian cherries and what could we you know leave behind us yeah I think there are there are so I think at the moment we tend to to speak of loving God and to attend for size peace and love and and all the positive things and not to take seriously let's say the negative aspects of humanity which are also but also belong to the to these ultimate questions so question power to evil for instance so I think this is this is cherry-picking in in the Christian tradition which we have at the moment we have to be careful about that okay [Music]

Channel: Radboud Reflects

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Length: 86min 35sec (5195 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 10 2018