---
product_id: 1693425
title: "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist"
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---

# Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

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Confession of a Buddhist Atheist [Batchelor, Stephen] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

Review: A surprising book - At the end of "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist", Stephen Batchelor speaks briefly of the collage art he creates from found materials. This book is something of a collage, pieced together with three major themes, the whole forming a work that is complete and beautiful, with a wholly admirable integrity. The first theme is expressed as a memoir. Batchelor tells us, with just enough detail to bring the story to vivid life without distracting us from its narrative course, how he journeyed from a childhood in provincial England, raised without religious indoctrination by a single mother, through a classic '60s-style road trip, with plenty of drugs, little money and no clear end in mind, Eastward through Afghanistan and Pakistan to Daramsala, where the young Dalai Lama had recently settled with his community of exiled Tibetans, and where Batchelor first encountered the Buddhist thinking that would inform his life. He learned Tibetan, ordained as a monk in the Dalai Lama's Gelug tradition, and discovered the first of a series of teachers who would, through the next 30 years, conspire, albeit unknowingly, to form the person who has emerged as Stephen Batchelor, a very different person than any of them sought to form, but a person whose goodness and honesty would compel their admiration, being themselves good and honest people. In addition to Geshe Rabten, with whom Batchelor studied in India and later in Switzerland, those teachers included S.N. Goenka, from whom he learned the technique of mindfulness meditation (the fundamental practice of the Theravadin school of Buddhism), and Kusan Sunim, the Korean Zen master under whom Stephen practiced for seven years as a monk when his emerging doubts about the dogmatism of the Tibetan schools no longer allowed him, in good conscience, to stay with Geshe Rabten. Kusan Sunim, like Geshe Rabten, and like the Dalai Lama himself, with whom Batchelor was privileged to have close contact several times through those years, turned out to be attached to the rituals and texts of his particular tradition with an intensity that did not allow him to understand or accept the validity of the Dharma as Batchelor was increasingly coming to experience it. That first part of Batchelor's life ends with his decision to disrobe. He married Martine, a French woman whom he had met and come to love as the nun Songil at the monastery in Songgwangsa, and the two have been creating, ever since, a new way of being Buddhist teachers, without the protective authority of either a traditional sangha or an academic institution, but working from their continually deepening understanding of Buddhism, informed by meditative practice and far-ranging scholarship. The continuity of the memoir theme pretty much ends with Stephen and Martine's move back to the West. We learn some details of their life, the friends they've made, the work they do, and the influences they've felt, but the thrust of the book turns to the second and third themes: first Stephen's cogent articulation of what he has come to understand as the fundamental message of Buddhism and the urgent relevance of that message to our lives; and, second, his long and perceptive attempt to recreate the biography of Siddhattha Gotama, the wealthy and privileged son of a Sakiyan nobleman who Awakened as the Buddha. Each theme--memoir, Dharma teaching, and historical biography--is present from the beginning and throughout, but, as in a collage, as the book proceeds, each theme, in turn, assumes a dominance that completes it as a theme and gives the whole book structure and thrust. In " Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening ", Stephen Batchelor explained the Buddha's Dharma so simply, so persuasively, in such an approachable idiom, that it evoked my recognition that I was, in fact, a Buddhist, and no longer simply someone "interested in Buddhism" or "studying Buddhism". Now, in this book, the explanation is very much deeper, very much more tied to the phenomena we experience in the course of our noisy and surprising lives, but still clear, still free of jargon, even more persuasive. As the first book invited me to adopt it, this book invites me to reject the label "Buddhist", even as I realize that there is nothing to do, as each new surprise arrives and death comes every minute closer, but follow the Dharma that the Buddha elaborated with lively detail and remarkable subtlety in the teachings we find in the Pali Canon. In elaborating the theme within which his understanding of the Dharma is clarified, Batchelor explains his method for creating that understanding, which involves examining the canonical texts for elements which were part of Siddhattha Gotama's cultural environment, and those other elements, standing out from the rest of the texts, that could have been inserted later to justify the various orthodoxies that formed after the Buddha's death. Then, without necessarily rejecting those elements, we set them aside; what is left must be considered new and original, even radical. That is the Buddhadharma. Batchelor's method leads directly to the third major theme of the book, the author's story of the Buddha's life as an individual human being. Without understanding that, one cannot separate the extraordinary experience that the Buddha awakened to after deep examination from the experience that all other human beings of his time saw as ordinary, needing no examination. Recreating the Buddha's life is no simple task; much of what's been handed down is clearly myth, and the community of monks who remembered the Buddha's teachings with such deliberate effort, in such remarkable detail, and with such probable fidelity, were simply not interested either in the parts of the story that presented fairly the views of those with whom the Buddha held debate, or in any narration of events that we today would identify as "historical". So Batchelor is left to tease a plausible story from brief segments found here and there in the texts, from what we know about the men and women with whom the Buddha associated and whose way of life he shared, and from uncommonly well-informed guessing. The figure that Batchelor sculpts of the man Siddhattha Gotama looks real to me; that figure could very well be the man who delivered the teachings that have come to inform my life. It is certainly truer to that man than the fat happy Buddhas in Chinatown gift shops or the austere Hellenic statues in museum galleries. Beyond that, who can know? And that brings us to the essential message of "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist": the impossibility of knowing, and the freedom we gain from that impossibility--the freedom to trust our experience and follow that to an understanding of the Dharma that works on our lives, the freedom to create those lives, the freedom to cultivate a path that allows me to awake tomorrow morning (barring the inevitable surprises) a better person than the person who woke this morning. This is an important book. Batchelor's writing style is the very model of "right speech", articulating the most subtle and difficult notions with wit and clarity. For those who think they know Buddhism, the book will illuminate that knowledge. For those who are coming fresh to the study of the Buddha and his teachings, this is a wonderful introduction, requiring no pre-requisite study, demanding nothing of the reader but diligent attention.
Review: Excellent book on the value of Buddhism for those disinclined to the supernatural - This is one of my all-time favorite books. I'm reading it for the second time. Though "Confession" is a highly personal memoir, it is always interesting. I say this because I read a prominent review of the book that contended that the personal information was excessive and unnecessary. I strongly disagree. I find that the personal narratives add to the depth and completeness of the message it intends to share, and that perhaps that is so because so many readers will be able to relate to the feelings and thoughts, and intellectual turmoil, that Batchelor shares. My copy of this book has lots of asterisks, underlines, and "me too"s in the margins. Th memoir follows the author's search for meaning and authentic spirituality across decades, continents, monasteries and centuries of Buddhist literature. I found his search and struggle very similar to my own winding and zig-zag path on the relentless pursuit of the truth. Though I never had the luxury of studying in monasteries in India and Korea, I nonetheless related to his exhaustive religious studies and inquiry and eventual arrival at a non-thestic stance. What I absolutely love about this book, and what distinguishes it from so many atheist books, is that it delves then into what he did with his spiritual life once he arrived at that reality-- rather than simply rejecting religion and spirituality as unnecessary. I love his premise that the eightfold path still works in a modern and secular world. I also feel eternally grateful to Batchelor for doing the hard word of years of piecing together the essence of the Buddha's way, extracting it from the religious and social atmosphere from which it sprang. He discusses the work of several old and renowned Buddhist classics across many cultures and distills for the reader what he gathered from them -- often learned during years of painstaking translation. Priceless. He saved me years of searching. All I can say is I can't wait to read Buddhism Without Beliefs. I realize that book preceded this one, and many purchasing this book may have already read that, but it logically follows for me how he might outline the Eightfold Path for one without supernatural beliefs.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #526,805 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #57 in Atheism (Books) #432 in Religious Leader Biographies |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 569 Reviews |

## Images

![Confession of a Buddhist Atheist - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71wHACw3eSL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A surprising book
*by R***G on March 4, 2010*

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

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Excellent book on the value of Buddhism for those disinclined to the supernatural
*by M***D on January 11, 2014*

This is one of my all-time favorite books. I'm reading it for the second time. Though "Confession" is a highly personal memoir, it is always interesting. I say this because I read a prominent review of the book that contended that the personal information was excessive and unnecessary. I strongly disagree. I find that the personal narratives add to the depth and completeness of the message it intends to share, and that perhaps that is so because so many readers will be able to relate to the feelings and thoughts, and intellectual turmoil, that Batchelor shares. My copy of this book has lots of asterisks, underlines, and "me too"s in the margins. Th memoir follows the author's search for meaning and authentic spirituality across decades, continents, monasteries and centuries of Buddhist literature. I found his search and struggle very similar to my own winding and zig-zag path on the relentless pursuit of the truth. Though I never had the luxury of studying in monasteries in India and Korea, I nonetheless related to his exhaustive religious studies and inquiry and eventual arrival at a non-thestic stance. What I absolutely love about this book, and what distinguishes it from so many atheist books, is that it delves then into what he did with his spiritual life once he arrived at that reality-- rather than simply rejecting religion and spirituality as unnecessary. I love his premise that the eightfold path still works in a modern and secular world. I also feel eternally grateful to Batchelor for doing the hard word of years of piecing together the essence of the Buddha's way, extracting it from the religious and social atmosphere from which it sprang. He discusses the work of several old and renowned Buddhist classics across many cultures and distills for the reader what he gathered from them -- often learned during years of painstaking translation. Priceless. He saved me years of searching. All I can say is I can't wait to read Buddhism Without Beliefs. I realize that book preceded this one, and many purchasing this book may have already read that, but it logically follows for me how he might outline the Eightfold Path for one without supernatural beliefs.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A memoir of Stephen Batchelor, a biography of the Buddha
*by G***A on April 24, 2010*

The title of "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" summarizes the three perspectives of his life that Stephen Batchelor wanted to share with his readers: his religiosity--confession is a statement of religious beliefs, his adhesion to the Buddha, and his atheism in the non-theism meaning of the word. The "confession" as such is a detailed record of his spiritual evolution, which takes him to an enlightenment of a nature quite different from "the `standard' mystical experiences of oneness with the universe". Batchelor's confession vividly describes the viability of embracing the religiosity of the Buddha's Teachings without the dogmas of Buddhism and without renouncing to the goodies and beauties of life The "ist" of the Buddhist that Batchelor became is much closer to the "ist" in those who play an instrument (pianist, violinist) than to the "ist" in the advocates of a doctrine (socialist, communist) or the fanatics of biased views (racist, chauvinist). You do not need sectarian opinions to play piano or violin, you just play; you don't need beliefs for being Buddhist because being Buddhist is an experience, a way of living. In this book, the author, an impressive scholar, narrates his personal evolution and reconstructs the Buddha's one; both journeys are described with abundant spiritual, historic and geographical detail. It is well known that there are no dates in the Pali Canon. Still the writer proposes a very interesting sequence of different events in the Buddha's life; this is the first time I read a proposal for such sequencing. Even though the task involves much analysis and knowledge, Stephen Batchelor is humble enough to say that the source of the raw data already existed in the "Dictionary of Pali Terms" and that his role was simply "the joining up of the dots". It was indeed much more than that. To describe his cosmological/theological views, Stephen Batchelor seems to prefer the term "atheism" (again as non-theism) to "agnosticism" (the impossibility to know the ultimate reality) and avoids (probably on purpose) the word "spirituality". I find the author's view quite close to the atheist spirituality that French philosopher André Comte-Sponville defines as "our openness and connection to the infinite, the eternal and the absolute." Either as non-theism or atheist spirituality, these renovated and renovating views, both Batchelor's and Comte-Sponsville's, are much needed in the modern, confusing world, which, though more secular every day, it does need spirituality. Such intellectual non-theisms imply the "tolerant radicalism" of Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti (which Stephen Batchelor a kind of dislikes) and exclude the anti-theism of the "richarddawkinses" and "samharrises." There are quite a few interesting, historical events and anecdotes related in Batchelor's book running from the Buddha's time and life (which come from his knowledge and research) all the way to the Dalai Lama's modern era (which are the fruit of his experience and direct interactions). The author's enthusiasm for the beauty of the Teachings leads him to some overstatements. He says, for instance, that he has "yet to find a fragment of the Pali Canon that doesn't further illuminate the whole." (I find this exaggerated; many parts of the Canon are not only repetitive and boring but also obscure and with observations in contradiction with other sections.) These are minor spots that in no way reduce the quality of "Confession of a Buddhist Atheist." The book is an excellent reading not only for newcomers in search of non-affiliated view in the Teachings and for already faithful, open minded religious Buddhists but also an illuminating perspective for agnostics, atheists, pragmatics, skeptics and independent inquisitive minds of all kinds. Gustavo Estrada, Author of Hacia el Buda desde el occidente: Sus Ensenanzas sin mitos ni misterios (Spanish Edition)

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