Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor explores the Four Noble Truths through a pragmatic, modern lens, arguing that enlightenment is not an escape from the world but a transformation of how we relate to greed, hatred, and delusion. He begins by showing how honest recognition of suffering naturally leads to letting go of habitual patterns, then unpacks the misconception that we can simply will ourselves free from these drives. Using the image of a child outgrowing sandcastle building, Batchelor illustrates how maturity in Buddhist practice means gradually developing new perspectives that eventually become intuitive. He reframes nirvana not as a transcendent realm but as the absence of greed, hatred, and confusion, and critically examines the famous Udana passage, explaining that the Buddha’s true emphasis was on the conditioned, dependent nature of reality. The heart of his teaching is that experiencing even a brief moment of freedom from these imperatives is not the end of the path but the beginning—it opens into the Eightfold Path as a lived practice integrated fully into work, relationships, and daily life, renewed continuously through a feedback loop of deepening insight.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 BwB.mp3
UUID: 2bf24c93-9976-405a-b619-05e8fa2601e0
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,032
So there’s a kind of truth there’s a kind there’s a kind of truth telling here, a kind of honesty, and a willingness to say yes. That is the way things are. And as we do that, we quite naturally move into a relinquishing or a letting go of certain habits of behavior. Specifically, greed, hatred, and delusion. What are called the three fires or the three poisons in Buddhism.
And that is, of course, the injunction regarding the second truth. The first truth is dukkha and to fully know that. The second truth is craving or grasping and to let go of that. Now we often hear on meditation retreats when we go for an interview with the teacher, for example. We say, oh, I can’t get this thing out of my mind.
I’m really worried about this, and this is my my husband, my wife, my children, my workmates, da da da da da. And the teacher will very compassionately simply say, well, let go. As though all we had to do was find a magical off switch somewhere, and it would just disappear. Now sometimes that advice can be infuriating because it although it might sound like a very good idea, it doesn’t actually give us any clue whatsoever as to how one lets go. Letting go is not something that we can do willfully.
I can’t tell you, say, for example, at the count of three, you will all let go of your egoism. One, two, and there it’s gone. Now we can all go home. It’s not like that. Letting go is therefore something which also arises out of conditions.
It too is a dependently emerging phenomenon. In other words, in order to let go of something, we have to create the conditions whereby it will naturally fall away. And the first truth, fully no suffering is precisely that condition. When we come to see the world, not just intellectually but from a deep felt experiential place, we recognize its impermanence. We recognize its tragic nature.
We recognize that it’s not me or mine. By seeing the world in that way, by knowing the world in that way, those habits of trying to permanentize things, trying to create something and hold on to something that will be mine forever and ever after. Trying to somehow deny and exclude any possibility of discomfort or frustration. Trying to establish oneself or one’s possessions or one’s status as mine. When we we begin to see through all of that, then the very grip of greed, of hatred, of confusion begins to be undermined.
It’s not anymore a reasonable or even a particularly intelligible thing to try to do that or to perform that strategy of acquisitiveness and rejection and so forth within a profoundly transient impersonal reality. Just doesn’t make any sense. We might know that intellectually. We might buy into the Buddhist theory. But unless we translate that into our own felt experience.
It’s not gonna have any effect or it’ll have a very notional effect. So fully knowing dukkha morphs as they say, into letting go of grasping. An image the Buddha gives is that of a child who suddenly no longer is drawn to making sand castles. We’ve probably all had this experience up to a certain age. We go to the beach and we build the sand castles and we try to keep the sea away and it’s all we’re all terribly invested in all of this.
And then one summer, we go along to the beach and we see the other little kids doing this, and we think, what a waste of time. It’s no longer it doesn’t have the same kind of thrill to it as it did before. And I think a lot of what happens as we grow up, and I don’t mean just become children to adults. I think in a way, we’re trying to grow up all the time. Is that we kind of grow out of things.
And we don’t, as it were, like the child, the the ten year old child who once summer no longer is gonna get involved in the sand castle operation. The child doesn’t have some kind of major epiphany. Sand castles is a waste of time. It’s just the child has grown out of it. The child has grown out of it because the child has come to experience the world in another way.
There’s a certain maturity has taken place and certain other interests, concerns have replaced those that were previously so dominant. The Buddha in fact often uses this term of the childish to refer to those who don’t, as it were, apprehend these truths that he’s trying to communicate. There’s a certain immaturity in that. And so this is there’s there may be moments of deep revelatory insight on a retreat, for example. We might suddenly grasp in a very deep way the ephemerality, the impermanence of things.
But for that to have a lasting effect, it needs to be continuously affirmed and reaffirmed. It’s something we need to notice continuously and that’s why there’s this emphasis on on continuity of practice. Not just what we do here, but how we bring that perspective into our work, into our relationships, into our family life, and so on. So that we over time, these perspectives become more and more just second nature. They become intuitive effectively.
We don’t have to think about it anymore. It just becomes a feature of our conscious experience. And it’s in that sense that our behavior begins to be transformed into one that’s less acquisitive, that’s less driven by hate, that’s less driven by if only this wasn’t the case then I would be happy. If only that person wasn’t in the office then everything would be great. Thinking that we can somehow manipulate the world by just deleting a particular element of it or acquiring another one.
When when we see through that, then the way we relate to things will change. And as this dropping away of those habits of behavior continues, it can bring us to a point where perhaps for a few moments, perhaps for longer, there is a complete freedom from the imperatives of greed, of hatred, hatred, of fear. There’s a kind of stopping of those things. And that is called nirvana. nirvana is nothing but that.
nirvana lit literally means the blowing out of something. In this case, the blowing out of greed, of hatred, confusion. And initially, this is something that lasts for a very brief moment of time. And that’s one point that all the Buddhist traditions tend to agree on. That that that that that moment when we finally stop and and really stop, not not just, you know, sit down and sit still.
But there’s a deep stopping within ourselves of those accumulated tendencies and habits. Might be nothing but a glimpse. A kind of interruption to the normal pattern of things. And then very quickly, those old patterns will reassert themselves. And I think this is almost inevitable given what we would now understand about the the origins of greed and hatred and delusion.
These are not just kind of adventitious mental affects. You know, just sort of super superficial features of our mind. But they seem to be strategies of behavior that are instinctively wired into our brains. If we accept the evolutionary biological explanation for the emergence of greed and hatred and delusion, we find that their origins lie in our body, in our neurophysiology. In contrast to the classical Buddhist idea that they are aspects of our mind.
This mind that’s come from all these different past lives, and therefore by tinkering with the mind, you can somehow get rid of them. There’s another strand in Buddhist in early Buddhist teaching that we find around focused around the figure of Mara, which I’ve mentioned before, the devil, the demonic, in which the Buddha doesn’t speak of these things as being literally deleted, but speaks of entering into a profoundly new relationship with them. I’m not persuaded that something as deep seated as as as as as aversion and attraction are things that we can, with a bit of meditation, just get rid of. That doesn’t seem to be the point. The point really is to be able to be in this world, be in this body, be in this mind, but no longer be subject to those imperatives, those dictates of greed, hatred, and delusion.
The greed and the hatred might pop up in the mind, but that doesn’t mean that we have to believe in them or buy into them. One can just as well be free from them through a deep knowing of what they are. To observe them just as the play of the brain or the mind, and to no longer identify with them. And there are many passages, many of which I cite in my last book about the devil, in which this seems to be quite clear. And remember that even after the Buddha had become awakened, had conquered Mara as the texts say, Mara continues until the very end of his life to be around.
Mara has not been gotten rid of. The Buddha hasn’t become perfect in that sense, but rather he’s come into a whole other relationship with these instinctive deeply embedded drives. I think it’s certainly true nonetheless that the less we live from those drives, the less we will reinforce them, the less they will dominate, and the more that they will to some degree begin to fade away. And there seems to be neuro neurological evidence for this in the actual plasticity of the brain and the opening up of different neural pathways. But it would seem that some those deeply instinctive drives have their roots right down in the reptilian part of the brain itself, and I can’t imagine that they can literally be erased.
But the point is that we can see here that fully knowing suffering leads organically to a letting go of grasping of certain strategies of behavior that at a certain point or points in our life will lead us to moments of what we might call freedom. In which we’re no longer the victim or the puppets pulled by the strings of these cravings and and fears and hatreds. Even though the cravings and the fears and hatreds might be bubbling up. There’s an experience of of what the Buddha sometimes called cooling down or cessation. Now sometimes, nirvana has been elevated into another privileged religious object.
nirvana is often thought of as a kind of Buddhist sort of heavenly space or something. And the Buddha himself or at least attributed to him are statements in which he talks of having reached the unconditioned, the deathless. Phrases which we might have. More or less equivalent to God, but it’s called the conditioned or the deathless or the unborn. And there’s a very famous passage that is much loved of western Buddhists, which is in the Udana.
It says monks, is an unborn, an unbecome, an unconstructed, an unconditioned. Monks, that unborn, unbecome, unconstructed, unconditioned were not, there would be apparent no escape here from that which is born, become, constructed, and conditioned. This text is endlessly cited. Curiously, it only occurs once in the whole canon in a text called the Udana, which is kind of a collection of little short passages that don’t seem to fit anywhere else. And it’s often used as a kind of connecting point between Buddhism and the theistic traditions.
It sounds very much like some some profoundly other transcendent realm. But again, I think the Buddha is using those terms but not in a way in which they would be habitually understood or traditionally understood say in the Upanishadic tradition in this case. And to find out what the Buddha does mean by words like the unconditioned, nirvana, the deathless, the unborn. All we have to do is go to a text called the the connected discourses on the unconditioned, which is in the Samyutta Nikāya. And again, it’s quite straightforward.
And what bhikkhus is the unconditioned? The destruction of desire, of a, of greed, the destruction of hatred, the destruction of delusion. This is called the unconditioned. So again, it’s quite it’s quite clear. The the Buddha is not talking about some other space or some other realm or some other condition.
He’s simply using this term to describe what for him is the the highest good. Namely, the falling away of greed, the falling away of hatred, the falling away of delusion. In other words, nirvana, call it what you like. The the the enormous temptation, again, which follows from normative religious thinking is to set this up as some kind of privilege religious object. Just split the world into two.
The conditioned world and the unconditioned world. The the the born and the unborn. We love doing this. Religion loves doing that. It’s how it works.
It splits the world apart. It’s very striking though in both the the Sutta that I first cited where the Buddha describes his enlightenment. He doesn’t mention anything about the unconditioned. He says that what constituted his awakening was his insight into the conditioned. The contingent, the dependent, the arising.
Likewise, in the first discourse, no mention of the unconditioned. He doesn’t use that word. But rather he extrapolates his principle of conditionality into a form of praxis which becomes as it were a way of life. Through these different phases and I’m sorry to repeat this but to fully know suffering which leads to a letting go of craving, which leads to an experience and the word he uses is experience to see with your own eyes literally. An experience of that freedom, of that stopping, or as he calls the unconditioned, the loss of greed, of hatred, and delusion.
And that is the space in which one enters the stream. This this entering the stream is often translated as a moment of enlightenment or the initial moment of enlightenment. I don’t think it’s ever stated quite that way in the classical text, but it will do. But the point is that it’s pointing not to the fact that this cessation or this freedom is the end of the path, but actually it’s pointing to the fact that it’s the beginning.
So when the Buddha is asked, what do you mean by entering the stream? What is this stream you’re talking about? He says the stream is the eightfold path, which is true seeing, true thinking, true speech, true action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. So the experience of nirvana, and again, it’s probably confusing to keep using that word. This moment in which you’re letting go brings you to a point of having let gone as it were.
That moment of of stopping, that realization deep down that you don’t have to live your life dictated by your attachments and your fears and your hatred. That moment is when the path begins. That is what then morphs organically into the path itself. And again, this is not my interpretation. This is quite clear from the most primary sources.
It’s also a model that I was taught by my Tibetan teachers as well. That the process that the Buddha’s describing is one that culminates not in nirvana, but in the path. Now I think partly because of the world view in which Buddhism has been classically framed. The idea of escaping from the cycle of birth and death and things like that. The emphasis has tended to shift constantly back to the experience of nirvana.
Whereas in terms of this four truth model, it would seem simply in terms of how the four truths are ordered. The culmination of this process is the practice of the path itself. The path is the primary is what we’re heading for. The fourth noble truth, not the third, which would then be entirely logical given the way he’s laid this out. Now this part is therefore, and if we think, I I just sketched it, seeing, thinking, speaking, action, livelihood.
It includes everything that as human beings, we are involved in. It’s a description of life. It’s not privileging certain spiritual activities. It’s describing how we live and function in this world in terms of our own way of seeing things, of thinking about things, of communicating to other people, of acting in the world, of earning our living. And that then creates a foundation of which we can deepen our mindfulness, our concentration.
But it doesn’t end at concentration, the eighth step of the Eightfold Path. That concentration is then turned back to the very beginning of the path enabling us to know Dukkha more fully, to let go of craving and so on. What we have in this model is what nowadays would be called a feedback loop. The the eightfold path is not just a linear process from a to zed. And when we get to zed, then we can pack up and go home.
But rather when we get to zed in this case, Sama Samādhi, true focus or concentration, that focus or concentration requires an object. And that object is the first truth, the second truth, the third truth, the fourth truth. In other words, the process keeps renewing itself. There’s a constant sense of renewal. That with each phase of the practice, we somehow achieve a greater depth.
And from that depth, our practice somehow comes alive in a way that it hadn’t before. And I feel that this is something that goes on and on and on. It’s not there’s not some sort of definitive end point. So that’s where I will stop today. And we can explore.
I know there’s been quite a lot of material, particularly for those of you who are not familiar with certain of the Buddhist philosophical ideas. We can discuss this further this afternoon. Thank you very much. And now he’s walking. And we’ll meet back here.