Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

This is about buddha, not about buddhism. The author having spent all of his adult life practicing various forms of buddhism finally became a lay practitioner. He sees buddha as a man who adivices us to follow the noble path and lead a mindful life.

Good, logical, practical. No theology, no humbug. Much needed book.

A very unorthodox but engaging account

The author is very honest in his approach but I see that it is a very personal perspective and a western one at that. I was brought up in the east (India) and as in the current times all my perspectives were acquired through media and western one mostly (by chance rather than any design of my parents). My family was agnostic at best and atheist at worst. I consider myself having perspective on both the world's. I think the author is ignoring the criticism he himself claims given by others that "he is selective and only quotes from his perspective" by saying everyone does that. Which is not correct! I have been a novice and studied the suttas and been under Theravada teachers so I am more aware of the author's selectiveness then others would have been. I stayed in an international monetary where people from Europe, America, Australia etc studied and had the privilege of knowing them closely. The author don't represent them nor speaks from there side.Although no belief is a prerequisite for investigation he comes out to be trying to assert his vision of the truth about Karma and rebirth. Even though he claims to be agnostic on these concepts. I agree with him on the agonist bit as we can't see the past lives nor the working of kamma here and now. We can only work in the present and that is the only thing important.I don't agree with the image he has created of historical Siddhartha (Buddha) it is impossible to attribute emotions that goes through in a living people let alone decipher it through bits and pieces of text. It was clear he was just projecting his views/insecurities on to Buddha. That is not to say he was correct or wrong but something which is unknown and unknowable. Moreover it is not relevant and useful in the investigation of truth. The practice is in the present not in knowing the past of the teacher but in the teaching itself. The quest to know the real Siddhartha is a distraction at best which does not help in the realization of truth.With Metta!

good book

Don't buy this book if you are new to Buddhism and would like to understand it better.This is a kind of an autobiography of the author who arrives in India high on drugs during the hippie movement in the early 70s and soon after converts to a Buddhist monk. The author struggles to reconcile the modern secular western values with the Buddhist way of life and failed to convince me of his conclusions. Interestingly, the focus is more on finding the historical Buddha who travels across many kingdoms in a period of constant conflict and war. Here as well, there is much speculation and I doubt if he has a good knowledge of the history of India. In one place, he comments, "nothing changed here since the time of Buddha". How does he know? There is much attempt to portray Buddha's life on the lines of a blockbuster movie and pick incidents of murder, intrigue, during Buddha's time and guess the rest of the events. Lastly, there is much attempt to interpret material and than to practice and understand the teachings, which is the essence of Buddhas teachings. This, I guess, is typical of western writings from the post-colonial period. Even the Buddha's teachings are poorly explained in many places scattered throughout the text.I gave two stars because I learned a few things about differences between various Tibetan schools and some incidents related to schisms between them. Some historical references to Pali suttas related to Pasenadi's last years were useful because these are not usually discussed in Buddhist centers.

A well written book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist is a must read for anyone interested in Buddhism. From his time as a questioning monk to his current life teaching the dhamma around the world, Stephen Bachelor is easily understood and insightful in his portrayal of Buddhism without the metaphysics and mysticism.

Das Buch enthält zwei Lebensgeschichten, die vom Autor und die vom historischen Buddha. Es dauerte eine Weile, bis ich begriffen hatte, daß das eine Beschreibung des Seins, der Realität war, die sie zu akzeptieren hatten, um zu ihren Einsichten zu kommen. Tatsächlich hat das mir dann geholfen, mehr über Buddhismus zu verstehen, als ich wußte. Das ist kein Selbstfindungsbuch, es ist sehr theoriegeladen, Bachelor ist ein sehr seltsamer Intellektueller für mich. Ich habe das mit Vergnügen und Interesse gelesen, aber ziemlich langsam.

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.

Having been a practising 'Buddhist' in a Tibetan Tradition, reading this book has left my heart-racing, my brain-bending and my spirit-soaring. It has managed to clearly articulate the doubts and reservations that I have had about the Religious, dogmatic elements of 'Buddhism' that seem to be at such odds with the undogmatic teachings of the historical Buddha. This book is so well-researched and well-written and goes into the Suttra teachings or discourses of Buddha to flesh out the man behind the myth, and his teachings on how to best weather the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.One of my favourite passages of the book is where Batchelor quotes an altercation between Buddha and a disgruntled, former monk of his called Sunakkhatta. Sunakkhatta dismisively declares: "The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as occurs to him, and when he teaches the Dhamma to anyone, it leads him when he practises it only to the ending of pain." On being told of this criticism Gotama remearked: "Sunakkhatta is angry and his words are spoken out of anger. Thinking to discredit me he actually praises me." (p.183)For me this beautifully encapsulates what the gist or kernel of Batchelor's book is. The Buddha taught a path that led to the end of pain; this is something that in the midst of grand Mytical assertions can easily be forgotten. That the Buddha taught a path that led to the end of pain is something truly worthy of celebration and dare I say it 'worship'. All the add ons, and cultural colour that his teachings have acquired over the centuries as they migrated through various Asian countries are unnecessary and in some regards only serve to hide the strikingly simple, but profoundly important teachings that Gotama gave, teachings that set out how one can best live a life in balance and harmony with the world around them.I thank Stephen Batchelor from the depths of my heart and hope that his pragmatic wisdom can go some way to tempering the superstitious, ritualistic worship that is currently being endorsed in Buddha's name.Strive diligently and be a refuge unto yourself. x x

I recently became interested in and convinced by buddhist wisdom, but could not warm up to its religious traditional aspects, in the Tibetan and Zen branches. I cannot feel comfortable with the idea of specific rebirth, or other aspects of metaphysical beliefs. Batchelor, having lived traditional Buddhism in depth, came to a similar view. He subsequently defined the secular essence. This I feel is convincing. The book details Batchelor's biographic journey. Though I found some chapters about the Buddha's life frankly disorderly and somewhat boring, in total the book is what I had been looking for to find the wisdom of Buddhism that is relevant in our times.