Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor opens this series on Buddhism without Beliefs by returning to what he calls the great matter of birth and death—the foundational human question common to all spiritual traditions. He contrasts Buddhism’s traditional metaphysical framework, rooted in ancient Indian cosmology, with the radically different worldview we inhabit after five centuries of scientific discovery. Batchelor walks through the Big Bang, cosmic expansion, the emergence of life on earth, and evolutionary biology as hard science that is itself as perplexing as Buddhist philosophy. He then outlines traditional Buddhist cosmology—the six realms, reincarnating consciousness, karma, and the detailed hell-realms—and examines why these doctrines have functioned socially and ethically. His central tension emerges: we cannot simply preserve a pre-scientific Buddhist worldview and expect it to remain coherent within our current understanding of the universe. The talk ends mid-thought, suggesting this is session one of an ongoing inquiry.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 BwB.mp3
UUID: 1c98c053-7b8c-4037-8181-3dc3c5810a16
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,381
So this morning, I’d like to begin by referring back to what I mentioned last night as the great matter of birth and death. And this I feel, however we define it, is the starting point of all of the religions of the world. In other words, whether it be Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism or Islam. Strip away all of the, superstructure of belief and institution and dogma and hierarchy of priests and so on. And you get back to the primary question that life presents itself to any conscious human person on this earth.
Namely, what is this all about? Why am I here? What’s it for? What does it mean? These what one might call the great questions.
And I suspect that all of us at one time or another in our lives, have felt sufficiently impelled by some formulation or other of these great questions to pursue a line of inquiry, to adopt certain practices, beliefs, views that have led us to being here on this retreat today. And if we’re to get to the bottom of any of these traditions and to try to understand what is distinctive about their particular response to these questions, I think in the first instance, we have to remind ourselves. We have to be as clear as we can about these very questions themselves. And I don’t mean here in a philosophical or a necessarily intellectual way, but rather in the sense in which these questions impact us almost viscerally at the level of feeling, at the level of, sensation, of emotion. It may be that underpinning a question such as why is there anything at all rather than nothing.
There is also a concomitant sense of unease, of anxiety, of fear, of disquiet, or of wonder, of awe, of a sense of the sublime, perhaps a sense of something almost approaching the ecstatic or perhaps we sometimes oscillate between these poles, Between feeling very very insecure about our existence here. Becoming very acutely conscious of how tenuous our life on this earth is. And at other times, feeling that tenuousness, that impermanence, that fragility as a kind of openness, perhaps even a ground for creativity, for coming up with an original and meaningful answer to some of these questions. A kind of freedom, perhaps a dizzying freedom. And I feel very strongly that meditation practice is something that needs constantly to come back to these primary feelings, these primary questions.
Because as soon as meditation becomes too, caught up in the metaphysics or the theories of a particular religion or doctrine, it’s very easy for us to lose touch with what it was that prompted us in the first place to take an interest in these things. We may start becoming more concerned about trying to rationalize or accommodate certain points of Buddhist or Christian or whatever teaching, in the way that it somehow fits. We we want a nice internally consistent coherent world view in order that our meditation practice makes perfect sense within it. But life is rarely that straightforward And it’s usually far more it’s far too complex and unpredictable to allow such clear cut certainties. And yet there seems to be a very deep longing within us to arrive at such certainty.
Whether that be through gaining enlightenment or through having some, moment of revelation from some God or whatever. That I think deep down, we feel or at least a part of ourselves feels that meditation is going to bring us to that kind of certainty. That’s not to say that in such a practice, we will not, achieve insights and understandings. But it’s very likely, I suspect, if we’re honest with ourselves that such insights and understandings are often more at the level of realizing how much we don’t know, how much more weird and odd this life is than any kind of clear cut, convictions that somehow explain everything. And then we don’t have to worry about these things anymore.
Part of the vitality of a practice is being able to remain open, to the uncertainties and the bewilderments and the confusions that seem almost built in to our limitations as human beings. Now, when we confront the teachings of the Buddha in which we may find many very clear indications of a form of practice, a way of looking at the world that can help us in our own pursuit of these great questions. We also find that Buddhism is loaded already with certain views about the nature of the world. And such views about the nature of the world come from a time much earlier than our own. They come from the world view of ancient India, which would have been current about five hundred BC of the Buddha’s life and during the Buddha’s life.
But since the eighteenth century in Europe, we’ve experienced an extraordinary explosion of knowledge that goes under the name of another enlightenment. The European enlightenment of the luminaries of France and Germany and England and so forth. That began the whole process of what we now recognize as our scientific worldview. And this kind of knowledge that we have come to, is one that is the the the rests on now, you know, hundreds of years of experimentation, of testing hypotheses, of finding, truths about the non apparent world, the invisible world of atoms and microbes and so on, that actually allows us to put into practice certain techniques and technologies that actually work. We’re so we’re so familiar with this world.
All of us having, as it were, being born into it and having grown up within it, that we fail, I think, sometimes to recognize how extraordinarily radical it is in contrast to the pre scientific world that most of humanity, has grown up in. I remember speaking with some of my Tibetan friends who who came out of Tibet in nineteen fifty nine, walked across the Himalayas. And then I remember Geshe Rabten once saying that one of the things that really bewildered them, then they’re up in the high Himalaya, was looking down and seeing these, these pairs of red dots of light roaming the landscape below. They assumed that they were some kind of spirits or something. Whereas in fact, they were the tail lights of lorries.
And that was very touching I found because it was a very vivid impression of a person who is suddenly encountering a world for which they did not have a ready made system of explanation. I’ve also spoken with Tibetans about their first experience of getting on an airplane. And again, it’s very bewildering. How can this great big metal object fly in the sky like a bird? That there’s no system of explanation within their own, worldview that can account for that.
And yet weirdly, these things do actually fly. I still find myself shocked by this. Sometimes, intuitively. It is very when you see these big, jumbo jets. It it’s very, very counter intuitive that something like that could fly.
So, the world as we know it currently is explained by theories that are still very difficult for us intuitively to grasp. And take for example, the the notion of the beginning of the universe itself. Now broadly agreed, to have occurred, in what is sometimes called the big bang. Now the big bang took place fifteen billion years ago. And again, these measures of time are really very difficult if not impossible for us to to readily apprehend.
And what in your what’s the difference between seven million years and fifteen billion years? They’re just too big numbers. But according to this view, the whole universe as we know it now, everything within it. And that’s something like a thousand billion galaxies. And in each of these galaxies, an equivalent number of solar systems, which again is just mind boggling.
All of this began from what’s called a singularity. An extremely tiny dense point of space time, which suddenly erupted and expanded into the universe that we now know. Now, what’s very difficult to grasp, because of the way in which our brains are structured and our system of thinking is structured, is that questions such as, well, what gave rise to the Big Bang? Are actually meaningless. I mean, is a typical kind of reaction we have.
Well, what produced the Big Bang? But what’s difficult to grasp is that at that moment in which this explosion happened, there was no before that this explosion created time and space. So to ask what happened before exposes merely the structure of our own thinking, of our own perceptual apparatus that cannot think of things outside the frame of time and space. And again, when we when I talk of a tiny singularity exploding, you immediately think that, well, that must have happened somewhere. Maybe the big bang occurred where that light is.
But the point is that there was no there was no space then. There was no there then. There was no then then. Now, is not some piece of Buddhist esoterica. This is a hard science.
And it is every bit as baffling. I would argue even more baffling than some of the wilder shores of Buddhist philosophy or metaphysics. Very difficult to grasp. And then again, no one quite knows how, but after at least after about four and a half, know, four and a half billion years ago, this planet forms from interstellar dust and gases and coalescing into this planet, which after another couple of billion years begins to, generate self replicating life forms. Initially very simple single celled entities in the waters, in the oceans that again over periods of millions of years develop and evolve into fish and then into amphibians and then into land going animals and birds and the higher primates and finally us.
Now, again, there’s an enormous body of evidence that corroborates this view. It’s very hard to, reasonably doubt that this was the case. And yet this too is in many ways extraordinarily strange how such things came about. And again, we tend to think almost by instinct that all of this process of evolution has some kind of purpose. It’s, it it was all somehow aimed at arriving at beings like us.
But there is no discernible purpose in the process of natural selection. In fact, what governs it, is simply the adaptability of particular organisms in particular environments that gives them a greater chance of survival. And that adaptability is brought about through random mutations in the copying patterns of DNA. In other words, by copying mistakes, by genetic typos. That if a strand of DNA periodically doesn’t quite copy itself right, then that gives rise to mutation.
And under certain circumstances, that mutated form proves to be more resilient, more adaptive to a changing environment than one that’s more established. So that particular form continues. It’s an extraordinary illustration of what Buddhism calls dependent origination or contingency. How how how forms are constantly changing, mutating, surviving, adapting, growing, evolving. And yet we have the sense that what we are is actually a rather fixed thing.
We fail to see that beings anatomically identical to ourselves have only been around for, it’s estimated, between a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand years. It’s a very, very short time in the overall scheme of things. And yet it’s very, very hard for us to imagine that human beings have somehow not always been the defining form of life. They haven’t. And there’s no guarantee that they will continue to be.
And in fact, of the great crises facing our world now is precisely that generated by our, industrial behavior. Global warming and such things as this. We are actually now in a position where we could destroy life on earth. If not through nuclear holocausts, through the making of our environment no longer capable of sustaining life as we know it now. Now all of these, all of these questions, all of these issues are not things that traditional Buddhism had any inkling of whatsoever.
And so when we encounter Buddhism, although it may say things, and again, I’ve alluded to one or other of them. We’re very taken by the idea of dependent origination, let’s say. The idea that there’s no God. The idea that everything is a changing and evolving. All of this seems to fit very neatly with the world view that we currently hold.
But there are many other elements of Buddhism that do do not fit at all well. And this is, an object of ongoing debate and, discussion, which is often very acrimonious between those who feel that Buddhism has to preserve its traditional world views as opposed to those who feel that these need to be cast aside rather urgently. Let’s just take a brief look at how in contrast to the world I’ve very, very briefly sketched, how a traditional Buddhist would would understand the world in which they live. They would see themselves as as in in a way, an ongoing reincarnating consciousness of one kind or another. But this consciousness that I’m aware of now, that we’re each aware of, is not something that has arisen contingently upon this highly complex organism with its brain and its nervous system, but rather is something that is entirely immaterial.
And that has come into this body from a previous existence. If, and then that previous existence from a one before that, going back to what is rather curiously called beginningless time. In other words, an awful long period of getting reborn and dying and getting reborn and dying. And this process of of death and rebirth in which this consciousness is being tossed around hither and thither into all of these different life forms operates within six realms of existence. You have the heavens, where there are the gods, the Devas, and lower heavens where you have the Asuras, the titans, the sometimes called the jealous gods who are in constant conflict with the gods.
Then you have the human beings. We don’t have any trouble with that one. Then we have the animals. You know, we see them around us too. Then we have the ghosts or the the hungry ghosts as they’re sometimes called, who are not exactly invisible.
Sometimes they can be spotted, but are largely in a realm to which we have no access whatsoever. And then deep beneath the earth, we find a very complex arrangement of hells. Buddhism has generated a very detailed hellology, if such a word exists, in which you have eight hot hells, and eight cold hells, and four intermediate hells, and two peripheral hells. And if you’re a Tibetan Buddhist and you’ve broken your tantric precepts, an especially nasty one reserved for you, called the vajra hell. Now, in Buddhist cosmology, these hells are acknowledged to exist at certain measurable distances below the surface of the earth, which if you actually, you know, work that out, it turns out that some of these hells are actually somewhere in the space beyond Australia.
But never mind. This is is the world in which the Buddha grew up, in which in the last two and a half thousand years, all Buddhist societies have accepted as the nature of the world just as we accept the view I just sketched out. But this is a a world view that’s very difficult, I think, for most of us who are brought up in a modern scientific world to really accept. I personally cannot accept this at all. And yet, although certain elements of it would be dismissed even by the most pious Buddhists.
The world, the earth being flat for example, surrounded by a great big ocean. And in the middle of the ocean is the Mount Meru. And on top of Mount Meru, there live the gods and so on. Nobody will accept that I think much anymore. But everything else is more or less taken, as given and as necessary for the integrity of Buddhism and the Buddhist teaching.
And it’s true that Buddhist understandings of of life and so on are constantly expressed in terms of such a worldview. And this is not just about a description of some external reality. It’s rather more important than that because it touches on the very basis of ethics and morality. In other words, if we behave in a certain way, then that will cause us to be reborn in particularly desirable or undesirable places. And likewise, our existence here is explained very much in terms of what we have done in the past.
We begin to see therefore that these theories of karma and reincarnating minds and souls and so on. Has been extraordinarily useful and important, almost more as a kind of social function than as some kind of philosophical doctrine. Because these theories explain or provide explanations for what is otherwise inexplicable. If you, for example, give birth to a child who is severely handicapped, you have a way of rationally coping with this. You can say, well, it’s because in a previous existence, this being who’s been reborn as my child must have committed some unskillful or unwholesome act of which this is now the retribution.
This is now the effect. I mean, has got a positive side as well. You can then take much greater responsibility for what you do now. Because you recognize that that will have consequences too after one’s death. But I think for many, it’s a theory that provides a framework of explanation for what is otherwise inexplicable.
And at that level, the theory of karma is no different than the theory or the belief in God. Because the belief in God provides exactly the same kind of explanation. So a Christian family in whom a handicapped child would be born, will be able to say to themselves, we don’t understand this, but it’s the will of God. In other words, you appeal to something that is outside of your experience, God, or in Buddhist terms, karma. And you invoke that as an explanation for how things are in this world now, with their particular bearing on me.
And again, you can see the theory of the six realms as as as as a framework for a sense that in the end, people will get their just desserts. That this world might appear to be unfair and unjust. The people who do the most horrible things, they steal and they kill and they lie and they cheat. But nonetheless, they seem to live quite happy lives. Whereas other people, good people like us, do all sorts of virtuous things and refrain from all of the things we’d much prefer to be doing.
And then we end up with terrible diseases, and we’re poor, and disadvantaged, and we get into car crashes, and all sorts of terrible things happen to us. So to somehow sort of correct the balance sheet, the moral balance sheet, this theory of karma and different realms of existence and punishments and rewards built into it is a very consoling explanation. Things may not be fair in this world, but after my death. And that of course operates throughout all the religions of the world as traditionally presented. There will always be a theory of a heaven or a hell of some kind, and some sort of natural justice built into the structure of the world or built into it through the, the moral laws imposed by some deity or God.
But the problem is, there really is no evidence for this. It seems to function very well as a social theory, so it has functioned reasonably well. But the more that we understand the nature of this universe in which we live, we don’t see much evidence or any evidence in natural processes of a reason or justice. The world may not be a fair place. It may not be a just place.
We would nowadays, I think, be suspicious of such beliefs, because they smack too much of, of human design. It’s as though we’ve