Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor challenges foundational Buddhist metaphysics in this opening session of a week-long retreat on pragmatic Buddhism. He argues that traditional beliefs in karma, rebirth, and multiple realms of existence, while culturally rooted in fifth-century India, now obstruct meaningful engagement with urgent global crises like climate catastrophe. Rather than dismiss Buddhism entirely, Batchelor mines early Pāli texts for passages suggesting the Buddha himself prioritized immediate experience over metaphysical doctrine—particularly the Kalama Sutta and Shivaka Sutta—which hint at an alternative Buddhism grounded in intention, mindfulness, and observable consequence rather than cosmic theory. The session concludes with practical instruction on walking meditation as an equal counterpart to sitting practice, emphasizing that the Buddha’s core teaching was always about returning attention to present experience, moment by moment. Intended for serious practitioners willing to question inherited assumptions.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 BwB.mp3
UUID: 457f3da9-09b0-4a95-97d3-df22ad9ec401
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,271
Like, or we would try to live justly and fairly in our community, in in in our society. We imagine that on a higher level somehow in the the grander scheme of things, similar operations are at work. Similar calculations are being made. Similar forms of of reward and punishment can be expected. We can see this also in terms of our questions about meaning.
And again, for for some of us, the the one of the great questions will simply be, what is the meaning of it all? What is the meaning of this life? What’s it all about? And we then often somehow imagine that if say through through through meditation or prayer or whatever, we we we we practice rigorously and hard enough. We will discover and we will find the meaning of life.
But it could be that that too is again just an anthropomorphic projection. We’ve taken a very human concept, a perfectly valid human concept that of meaning. I mean statements have meaning. My actions can have meaning. And then we’ve projected that idea into something far grander than anything the human can encompass.
That the world or the universe somehow has meaning. And although Buddhism does not have a theology, a belief in some, creator God or anything like that. Nonetheless, one can see the attraction of such beliefs precisely because there is as it were some quasi human like person, directing the course of things, God. And so we can then perhaps be more comfortable with the idea that the meaning of life may not be apparent to me, but it’s somehow, incorporated into God’s grand scheme of life itself. But I feel that nowadays, these kinds of beliefs are less and less tenable.
And if we put it into a more pragmatic context, I also feel that these kinds of beliefs, whether they’re Buddhist, or Christian, or Islam, really makes little difference. These kinds of metaphysics, these grand theories are actually an an obstacle. In fact, a serious impediment to dealing adequately with many of the global crises that are currently besetting us. And let’s take for example, the issue of of the heating up of the biosphere and the atmosphere through the burning of carbon fuels. Which in terms of the actual evidence, now increasingly available and uncontested is showing that we are heading for some kind of grand disaster.
Now, if you believe in karma and rebirth and so forth and so on, and different realms of existence. I think you’re actually in a position in which it’s difficult to be totally engaged with that particular catastrophe or potential catastrophe. That because you believe in things being the way they are because of previous moral or immoral acts you committed in the past, you appeal to a different set of causes or an additional set of causes over which you really have no control. That’s already been stamped in the past. So from a traditional Buddhist perspective, if the planet heats up, that is not just because of what’s been done since the industrial revolution, but also it’s somehow the destiny or the fate of the beings who happen to be alive on Earth at the moment.
Because of certain unskillful, unwholesome actions they committed in the past. A kind of moral law, and a moral sequence of cause and effect is superimposed on the the primary causes which are human over consumption, over industrialization, and so on. So if if you hold that view, there’ll always be this x factor of unknown causes coming at you from the past that we can never really even understand. That are impacting the or are causing the experience we have now. But perhaps the more serious consequence of a world view of reincarnating minds in different realms.
Is that even if the world does go up in a nuclear holocaust, or if global war and warming gets totally out of control and the ice caps melt, and most of the land mass goes underwater. And millions upon millions of people die agonizing deaths. It somehow doesn’t really matter, because everybody’s gonna get reborn again anyway. That no form of life according to traditional Buddhism will become extinct upon death. It will simply or the the the kind of the psychic core of it will be driven by its previous karma into some other world system where it will carry on where it left off on Earth.
And I think that kind of world view, seriously undermines our capacity for a complete moral engagement with the only world we know for sure to exist, namely this one. And it’s strange in a way that we sometimes seem to want to give greater importance to future lives and so forth and so on, of which we really know nothing, rather than be primarily and arguably totally concerned with the fate of life on this earth. And I feel very strongly that if Buddhism is to have any meaningful impact, on human society, It has to relinquish these kinds of ancient metaphysical ideas. And direct his wisdom and its compassion at the world that we live in now. This is a point to which we’ll come back again and again.
We have to remember though, from a from a the view view viewpoint of Buddhism itself, that these were not ideas that the Buddha himself originated. The the Buddha accepted this world view. There’s no question of that. But simply because it was the most compelling, explanation of things that was currently on hand in fifth century BC India. This was the world view that had already been articulated in the Upanishads, which were bodies of text that predated the historical Buddha.
And although he was very critical of many of the core ideas of the Upanishads, and we’ll we’ll go on to look at that tomorrow. He nonetheless accepted what’s called the broad soteriological framework. Soteriological means, the, the way in which we think about liberation and salvation. So the karma and the rebirth and so on. But even so, we find that there are passages in the early texts, and it’s the early texts that I’ll be focusing on more or less exclusively during this week.
There are passages that suggest that he wasn’t as perhaps as completely committed to these views as nowadays might be thought. One of these texts is the Kalama Sutta, which is much loved by western Buddhists. It was very obscure text until until fairly recently actually. It’s a short piece in the I think the Anguttara Nikāya. And it’s best known for its opening statement which says you you you you, oh, you must not rely upon reason or hearsay or tradition or what’s handed down to you in scriptures.
But instead, you need to verify for yourselves what it is in this teaching that diminishes greed and diminishes hatred, and diminishes delusion. Only when you know that for yourself, should you accept a teaching as valid. So it’s very much a text that emphasizes the essentially pragmatic nature of the Buddha’s teaching. That you need to try and test these things for yourself, which of course resonates very strongly for us because it sounds almost scientific. You don’t take it on belief, but try it out.
Test it. That’s very appealing. But there’s another passage at the very end of this same text in which the Buddha says, even if there is no hereafter, if there even if there is no life after death, even if there is no law of karmic cause and effect. Nonetheless, to practice what I teach you, the meditation, the ethics, and so forth, this will be the most valuable and useful thing you can do. So he seems prepared to actually put aside those beliefs, which ninety nine percent of Buddhist would hold as largely sacrosanct.
And yet here we have a text in which the Buddha is saying, actually, doesn’t really matter whether you believe that or not. I have to emphasize that that is very atypical. That I as far as I’m aware, that’s the only passage that the Buddha even suggests such a thing. Broadly speaking, he takes it for granted that karma, rebirth, and so on are just givens in the nature of the world. But there is a gap.
And one of the values I found in, studying the the early texts of Buddhism that are preserved primarily in Pāli, is that you find buried amongst them in a passage here and in a passage there. Little nuggets like the one I’ve just cited that somehow jump out at you for not being in keeping with the dominant orthodox view. And I find it’s those little, points that, seem to suggest, that there’s another way of looking at Buddhism. Buddhism. If we could somehow recover, enough of these, passages, we might start to develop a whole other way of seeing this tradition, these teachings and these practices.
Let me give you another example and this concerns karma. And again another rather obscure discourse this time in the Samyutta Nikāya, which are the connected discourses of the Buddha. There’s a short text called the Shivaka Sutta. The discourse to Shivaka. Shivaka appears to have been some guy who was probably a wandering ascetic of some type.
He’s called Shivaka of the top knot. So he would have had braided hair and would therefore not have been a a Buddhist monk. And he comes up to the Buddha and says, master Gautama, Brahmins and Samanas or wandering ascetics maintain that every experience that, we have in this life, whether it be pleasurable or whether it be painful or whether it be, neutral, is the result of our previous actions. Does master Gautama uphold this view? And master Gautama, the Buddha says no.
He says there are eight reasons why we experience something, or we have a pleasurable or an unpleasurable or an indifferent experience. The first one is an imbalance in the in the bile humor. Now this refers back to classical Ayurvedic medicine, which regards the health of the body as being achieved by harmony between three principle humors, bile, phlegm, and wind. And not wind in the sense of, you know, farting, but prana, like sort of energy. So the Buddha says the first reason we suffer or we have pleasurable experience in this life is because of the the the.
The biological explanation for pain and pleasure, suffering and joy. In other words, if you’re ill, you’re gonna feel bad. And that’s an adequate explanation. You don’t need to appeal to things to think what you might have done in a, you know, ten thousand past lifetimes ago. So that’s four of them.
The fifth one is a seasonal change. The weather. Again, something which almost sounds rather preposterously mundane. The sixth one is improper exertion, which sounds suspiciously like what we nowadays call stress. I always forget the seventh one, but it’s along those lines.
Do you remember it? And the eighth. I thought you called heedlessness. Heedlessness. I think that’s improper exertion.
But anyway, I’ll look it up if you’re interested. But it’s again something of this nature. And then the eighth one he says, is your former actions. In other words, karma. And again, he doesn’t specify whether this is in a previous life or in this life.
But what’s striking about this passage is that it’s quite at odds with Buddhist orthodoxy. Which unless you look on the commentators have a great deal of difficulty with this passage. It doesn’t seem to fit. It seems to be coming at the whole question from a very different perspective. We can see that there is a considerable room for maneuver within even the most classical Buddhist texts.
And what we’ll be looking at over the next days would also be to see the extent to which Buddhism has somehow reverted again and again to a more normative, in other words, typical, kind of religious discourse. But I think there’s a strong counter argument to show that what the Buddha was doing was in many ways seeking to break with the assumptions of normative religion. But I’m not going to go into that now, but we’ll come back to that later. What the Buddha did emphasize, and something that we’ll be referring to again throughout this retreat, is that the primary concern of his practice is not actually about these things anyway. That the primary concern is to pay attention to our phenomenal experience as it unfolds from moment to moment that is felt in the body, that is experienced emotionally, that is present to our minds of primary, what he calls characteristics of being, impermanence, and suffering, and selflessness.
That he’s a that what we find constantly in this, in these early teachings, is the Buddha trying to turn the person’s mind away from the kinds of theories and speculations that I’ve been talking about. Even though he broadly accepts them himself. Particularly in moral questions. And to come back to the immediacy of your experience here and now. See, even in in terms of karma, for example, when the Buddha was asked, you know, what is karma?
Karma. He would consistently reply, karma is intention. In other words, he would take the doctrine of his time and give it a rather curious twist. And virtually every time he does this with any key term is to make it that much more immanent. That much more something that we can observe.
Something that, we can work with rather than have to believe in. So for the primary idea of karma, therefore is not of some theory of cosmic cause and effect, but rather by being more alert and conscious of what you intend in your mind. That leads you to speak and to act and to notice the consequences that such speech and such action have. Again the emphasis comes back to something profoundly pragmatic. We’re going to be exploring particularly through this week, this pragmatic, existential, immanent teaching we find the Buddha gave.
And applying that through forms of of meditation, of awareness, and so forth and so on. And hopefully, we’ll begin to find some kind of of meeting between the ideas and the theories of which he spoke, and the actual experiential practice or putting into practice of such ideas. I’d like to say a few words now, because we’re nearly, through with this session, on walking meditation. Now we’ll be dividing the formal sessions of practice between sitting meditation here in the hall. And we’ll then be having periods of walking meditation, hopefully outside if the weather holds up and it’s supposed to.
Although if you wish, there’s also next door here, a large room, a bare room which is dedicated to walking meditation as well. So please make use of that. But walking meditation is of course different from sitting meditation, but only really in the outward form. That we can practice this mindfulness and awareness just as effectively when we’re walking as we can when we’re sitting. It’s true that we tend to make sitting somehow the normative practice.
In other words, when you think meditation, you think sitting cross legged on the cushion. It will be, It will be very helpful during this retreat, if we could try to dispense with that assumption. And one way to do that is to give as much importance to the walking as to the sitting. Not to think of walking as kind of meditation light, But actually, simply a continuity of what we do when we sit, or likewise sitting being a continuity with what we do when we walk. Now I know that most of you perhaps have have done this kind of practice.
So you’re familiar with it. But those of you who are not, I would suggest going outside, finding a place that the in which you feel comfortable, and then selecting about ten yards or so, a little track. Start by standing still at one end of your chosen track, and just feeling and experiencing what it’s like to be standing. Of course, primarily that will be felt in the feet, but also the whole way your body is held. The the breezes and the temperature of the air against your exposed skin.
The colors and the shapes of everything around you. Just register all of that, and then slowly start walking up and down this track. You don’t have to go super slow, but it’s probably advisable not to just go at an ordinary pace, because then you’ll just slip into your habitual thinking and habits. If you slow down a bit, you become much more conscious of what it is like to be walking. Much in the same way as you are conscious of what it is like to be sitting.
And rather than the breath, although you can of course keep coming back to the breath, Have as the focus of your attention, the rhythm of your body as it walks. And you’ll become sensitized to that quite quickly. The way the shoulders and the hips and the legs move in this extraordinary concert. That enables you to keep your balance, but also enables you to go forward, to stand still, and to come back. You might find it helpful to ground your attention, to pay particular attention to the rising, the moving, and the placing of your feet.
If you’ve never done this before, it can feel a little artificial and contrived to begin with. But as you get used to it, it can become just as much a way to focus and cultivate attention as sitting on a cushion. And another advantage of it is that it allows us to cultivate meditation in an activity that’s more akin to what we may be doing when we go back home. And in fact the aim of this practice is really to be able to bring this quality of attention into pretty much everything we do. So to have the experience of sitting, and walking, and standing, and again when you go to bed lying down, all of this, allows you to get over the idea that meditation is identified with one particular posture.
Likewise remember that when you’re walking you’re not going anywhere. You’re just walking for the sake of walking. If you get distracted or your mind wanders off or you get caught up in something then stand still or sit down, and recover your attention say on the breath, or in the body, and then start again. And one final point, someone has asked about the library, whether we can have access to books in the library since I said last night that you could read. I’ve taken the sign off the library door.
And so if you wish, you can make use of the library books. There’s a book on the left as you go in, on a shelf in which you can sign them out. It’s rather important. And only take one book at a time. The, you can read in the library if you wish, but please don’t read in the grounds or in public places.
There are long term retreatants here who would find it distracting. So please read either in the library or in your rooms. They’ll now be walking until quarter to twelve, and we’ll meet back here then for a final sitting before lunch. Thank you.