Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor traces the Buddha’s inquiry into existence through the lens of “leaving home”—a metaphor for abandoning the comfort of received belief and convention to face fundamental existential perplexity. Drawing on the Ariya Pariyesana Sutta, Batchelor examines what the Buddha actually awakened to: not some transcendent absolute, but the principle of dependent origination—that when conditions arise, they give way to something else. This insight, summarized as “whatever arises ceases,” stands at the root of impermanence, suffering, and emptiness. Batchelor emphasizes that this is not abstract philosophy but an embodied, intuitive understanding that turns our common-sense view of reality upside down. For practitioners on retreat, his teaching asks: can we see the world as process rather than fixed identity, and does that shift open a different freedom?
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 BwB.mp3
UUID: 7d5bd062-4581-48c0-b44e-ad2ba8cb639d
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,385
Yesterday, we began by trying to get back to the primary questions that prompt the kind of inquiry we are pursuing on a retreat like this? What is it about our life that raises the sorts of puzzles, perplexities that move us to seek a way of resolving them that we don’t find, say, through our conventional forms of education or religion perhaps. And bring us to this kind of inward quest, this other way of paying attention to things. And today I’d like to go back to the beginnings of the Buddha’s own way of dealing with this and consider what is meant by this experience of awakening or enlightenment. Again, I think we can see the trajectory of Siddhartha Gautama’s own life as mirroring in many ways something rather universal.
In the legend that I mentioned yesterday afternoon, you have this young man who lives in this very privileged situation one day realizing that he’s somehow cut off from life in a way. And he then goes outside of his enclosed, privileged home and encounters sickness, aging, and death. Now it’s unrealistic to assume that he had literally never encountered these things before. But what this story points to is that at a certain point in his life, and perhaps at a certain point in our own lives too, the weight and the sheer extraordinariness of having been born only to one day be ejected from this very place into which we have been born, to suffer sickness, to suffer aging, and to disappear, that this is very much the great question that existence poses to us. Now for Siddhartha Gautama, he then chooses to leave his home in a way, something we also may have done.
And by home, we don’t necessarily here have to mean, you know, literally the house in which we grew up. But rather, to leave home, I think, is a metaphor for going beyond or taking the risk to go beyond, to leave behind all that is somehow familiar and comforting to us. And this, I think, is a step that is almost inevitable once certain questions of our existence reach a particular pitch, when they become so central to our concerns that we can no longer ignore them. And this entails a leaving behind of something, leaving behind the comforts, the complacency perhaps of received tradition of upbringing, of our cultural conditioning, and embarking into what, in a way, has to be an unknown. We have to take a risk to step into a form of practice or a way of life in which we can no longer fall back upon the securities of family, of home, of accepted belief, of convention that have, up until that point, given us a certain sense of being at home in the world.
At some level, we no longer feel at home in the world anymore. There’s a sense of going out into the wilderness, which is a metaphor we’d find in Christianity. In Buddhism, there’s a beautiful phrase the Buddha uses on on a number of occasions. He says, the home life is filled with dust. The homeless life is wide and open.
And if you think about it, any situation in which you somehow feel yourself at home is a place in which, over time, gradually, a kind of an accumulation of habit, an accumulation of familiarity begins to dull and dust the place, if you wish. Whereas when we’re on the open road, when we leave that situation behind, where there’s nothing somehow static and fixed that we hold in place so much anymore, then the world is open in all directions. A home, whether it be a physical home or whether it be a metaphorical home, like a set of beliefs, for example, necessarily will obscure our capacity to see around us, to see above us. We we we wall ourselves in. We build and erect or accept certain limitations.
And that, although it might give us security, also somehow closes us off to other possibilities. Yet once those things are are shared and discarded, the world is open wide. We can see in front. We can see to either side. We can see behind.
All of that familiarity is lost. Now that can be rather unsettling, certainly. But at the same time, there’s a wonderful sense of freedom, that we’re not constrained as we were up until that point. Because we don’t have the same securities either. This is the price we pay.
And so even something like Buddhism or any religion can, after a period of time, become another kind of home. It can give us a certain security, but often at the cost of somehow occluding and blocking our freedom to see things openly. We then become immured, which literally means closed within walls, within a certain set of views. So the Buddha’s example, I think, is something to which we can always return, even if we accept, for example, Buddhism. And as we were seeing yesterday, there are certain elements of Buddhism that I think are quite enclosing.
They offer or suggest a world view that we may not sit particularly well with any longer in the light of what we currently understand through the sciences and so on. And so yet again, we find a need perhaps to move out of those consolations and comforts into another set of unknowns. So Siddhartha Gautama leaves his home. He practices all the different meditations and ascetic disciplines that are available to him at his time. He lives in communities of people who are doing much the same kind of thing as himself.
In a way, perhaps somewhat similar to what we would do in, say, traveling to India or coming here on retreat or reading and studying different texts and so forth from different traditions. But at a certain point, this process too became unfulfilling. This also led him into another sense of somehow being unresolved. And it’s at that point that he decides that he really just has to sit still, and he chooses to sit beneath this particular tree, and resolves at that time to get to the root of what it is that most perplexes and confuses him. And then I think we come quite vividly to the idea of perplexity.
The Buddha’s driven now into a kind of impasse where nothing, whether his material or his social or his political situation, his spiritual and religious experiments have led him to a kind of brick wall. And that, I think, is very much a state of deep existential crisis. He really does not know what’s going on. And yet he is animated by a very deep confusion, which is also a kind of inquiry and openness into what on earth this is all about. And it’s here we then encounter after a number of days seated beneath this tree.
Again, we don’t know the exact details of all this really. But it, the, the, the, the end result is this experience called Bodhi. Usually translated as enlightenment, which is not entirely incorrect. But the word itself in Sanskrit or Pali does not in fact suggest anything to do with light. The the word is rooted in the the verb to wake up.
It’s an awakening. It’s a waking up. And that, of course, is metaphorical. It’s not not not as though he went beneath the Bodhi tree and he had a long nap, and then one day he woke up from a nap. But rather, what he experienced was akin, it was similar to the experience that each of us has every time the alarm goes off in the morning.
We wake up, we come back to this world we share with others. We come back to this world of the senses. We wake up from either deep sleep or a dream, and come into a much fuller, and I think, crucially, a world in which we are participating with other beings like ourselves. It’s a social world. It’s a shared world.
It’s a world that is not just the projection of our own mind, like a dream, but something that is far richer, at the same time more confusing perhaps, and one in which we have to coexist with others. The There are many accounts of this awakening or enlightenment that we find in the early texts. But I’d like this morning to focus on a passage from the Ariya Pariyesana Sutta, which is the twenty sixth discourse in the middle length sayings of the Buddha. And this is a very unusual text in that it is overtly autobiographical. The Buddha is asked to talk about his own history, his own story, how he came to be what he has become.
And so he tells this account, admittedly rather in outline. It’s not like a contemporary autobiography in which you go into every little detail of your life. But it is unusual in that the Buddha’s talking about himself in a way that we would recognize as autobiography. I also feel that he concentrates here very much on the key points of his process. He doesn’t elaborate it in some of the ways it’s elaborated in later texts, but it seems to get right to the heart of things.
And what I’d like to look at is section nineteen, in which he describes what it is that he woke up to. In other words, what was the content of this enlightenment or this awakening? We often find nowadays that this word enlightenment is bandied around rather uncritically, And you may read in a magazine article or in a the back of a book that so so so such and such a person achieved enlightenment, and now is teaching the world all the wonderful things that he or she has learned. You have discussions as to, very heated discussions sometimes, as to whether a particular teacher, a particular monk, a particular lama, a particular Roshi is enlightened or not. As though enlightenment was some kind of discrete property that certain people have and other people don’t.
Something that you can attain or you can get. And the word is used, I think, very uncritically, and also in a way that suggests that enlightenment is something sui generis, something that exists in and of it in its own right. But perhaps the more interesting question, which doesn’t seem to be asked so often, is enlightened about what? Awakened about what? The same can be said about the notion of freedom, liberation, which again, a a term that is often used, but very often without actually asking, but free from what?
Liberated from what? All of these terms have meaning within a specific context. They’re not free floating self referring notions that operate somehow independently of any framework of meaning. The Buddha is very clear about what it is that he woke up to. It’s not as though he woke up to something vague like reality or truth, which is really fairly meaningless, but he wakes up to something very specific.
So let me read you the text, and then you can see what he says. This is the Buddha speaking. He says, I considered this dhamma, this again, very difficult word to translate. This dhamma that I have attained is profound, hard to see, and hard to understand, peaceful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle to be experienced by the wise. But this generation delights in worldliness, takes delight in worldliness.
It is hard for such a generation to see this truth, namely dependent origination. And it is hard to see this truth, namely the stilling of all formations, relinquishing of attachments, the destruction of craving, Nibbana, nirvana. If I were to teach the Dhamma, others would not understand me, and that would be wearying and troublesome for me. Now here we have an account in which he he quite specifically, singles out the the core idea, or the core truth, if you wish, of his awakening, and that is dependent arising. Depend, or is this specific conditionality?
Another way you could translate it. Now, he says nothing here about understanding, coming to an insight as to say what it is that makes the universe tick. The ultimate nature of reality, the absolute, the divine, the transcendent. None of no such language is used. And in this sense, perhaps, it’s even misleading to think of this as somehow a mystical experience, particularly as we would understand a mystical experience in a theistic tradition, which inevitably refers to something about the nature of God, something transcendent, something absolute, something divine, something sacred.
There’s no suggestion of that here in this passage, but rather dependent origination, conditionality. Now, what does he mean by this? Again, we can find a number of passages in which he makes this clear. Perhaps, one of the most famous ones, when he’s asked to explain what dependent origination means, he says, when this is, that arises. That’s all he says.
When this is, that arises. So he’s talking about something which almost seems to be, perhaps for us, self evident, rather obvious, when this is, that arises. In other words, he’s talking very much about the structure of the phenomenal world. He’s not concerned with something outside or beyond or something which is unconditioned, but rather his awakening is about the nature of the phenomenal world itself. Another example of his description of dependent origination, which was almost, it seems in the early tradition, a kind of slogan runs like this.
Whatever arises is something that ceases. You often find this being said, at the end of the very first discourse to the five ascetics, one of the monks, Kondanna, understands what the Buddha has said, and to somehow put that into his own words, he says, whatever arises is something that ceases. When the Buddha later goes to Rajgir, it’s there that he meets two men who subsequently become his principal followers, Śāriputra and Moggallana. And when they first ask, well, what is it that this man teaches? They’re told by Assaji, another of the Buddha’s early followers, whatever arises is something that ceases.
And on hearing that, Śāriputra is immediately enlightened. So he goes back to his community, and his friend Moggallana says, well, what does this guy teach? And Śāriputra says, whatever arises is something that ceases. Mogalana then becomes awakened. Now, I find this very telling.
He’s saying, when this is that arises, whatever arises is something that ceases. This is almost, I think, like we might say the e equals m c squared of Buddhism. It’s it’s extremely simple, and yet from that premise, there then arises the whole of, you know, two and a half thousand years of philosophy, and thought, and practice, and culture, and literature, and art. It all springs from that primary insight. Now clearly, this insight is not something that the Buddha somehow figured out intellectually.
Again, at one level, we all know this. We all know that, you know, the thing things that arise will pass away. We all know that when certain conditions are present, that will give rise to something else. That there is a a causality built into the structure of the phenomenal world. That there is process continuously.
We observe it very beautifully nowadays in the study of biology or the study of history. We see that whole of life is saturated by one thing giving rise to another, which then gives rise to something else, and so forth. We might all almost say that dependent origination, which is a rather clumsy word in English, could perhaps simply be rendered as life. That, this is simply the basic law of living processes. That whatever arises ceases.
When conditions come into being, they will generate something else. And it’s at the very heart of the idea of impermanence, which is again something the Buddha reiterates almost ad nauseam. Everything changes. It also is at the heart of the idea that everything is unsatisfactory, that it’s suffering. Nothing remains long enough in place for it ever to be able to give us the kind of deep well-being and peace that we yearn for.
The phenomenal world cannot satisfy us by our somehow holding onto it or manipulating it, or controlling it in any way. It will always turn into something else. It will always change before our eyes into something that has somehow lost its luster or its initial appeal. And it’s also the idea that is just another way of stating the truth of emptiness, of selflessness, that nothing has any kind of intrinsic essence, whether it be me or you or a bird or a thing. When we look deeply into into any entity, anything, we find that we can never pin it down and say, well, this is what it really is.
That at the core of myself, there resides some permanent, unchanging, unaffected cell of me. That me, although it appears to be such a solid and such a fixed thing, as soon as we begin to probe it, either philosophically or neurobiologically or in meditation, it kind of dissolves. It becomes unfindable. It becomes fluid, slippery, evasive, ambiguous. And that too is because it is rising and passing away.
It’s coming out of conditions, generating other conditions. It’s processual rather than thing like in any way. So these three characteristics of existence that I mentioned and Martin mentioned yesterday, again, are all implicit in the idea of dependent origination or, as we might say, of life itself. There’s another passage in the early Pali text where the Buddha says, the one who sees dependent origination sees the dhamma. And the Dhamma, in this sense, means more it means both what the Buddha teaches is the Dhamma, but also, more importantly, the Dharma is the internalization of what the Buddha taught.
In other words, it’s one’s own personal experience and understanding of those things. That is, in a way, the true dhamma, not a body of texts or suttas and things like that, but the internalization of those ideas. Whoever sees dependent origination sees the dhamma, and whoever sees the dhamma sees the buddha. In other words, he himself somehow identifies with this principle. But again, the quality of his insight or our insight into dependent origination is one that clearly is a deeply embodied and intuitive insight.
It’s not just knowing this as a fact. I can read this text. You can read this text. I can tell you all about it. It might not make any have any effect on you at all.
It might just sound rather, you know, a curious bit of Buddhist history. But somehow, certainly for the Buddha himself and for his his first followers, this, teaching had an almost revolutionary impact on their lives. Well, it did have a revolutionary impact on their lives. It turned their lives upside down. It was so shocking for them that it woke them up to see the world in a totally new way.
But, and I think it’s here that we we can see therefore the the sense of the final sentence in this passage where he said, if I were to teach the Dhamma, others would not understand me, and that would be wearying and troublesome for me. In other words, he recognizes that in the world of his time, and it’s possibly just as true today, that although it sounds quite straightforward, it actually is an idea that’s quite difficult to grapple with and to internalize in the kind of way that he has understood it. It somehow turns everything on its head. And he phrases this very explicitly in a verse that follows immediately after the passage I’ve read. He said, those caught up in attachment, wrapped in darkness, will never discern this abstruse dhamma, which goes against the stream, subtle, deep, and difficult to see.
Now the keyword here is goes against the stream. It goes against the stream. I think a modern way in which we might say that would be it’s counterintuitive. Counterintuitive. In other words, what he’s saying is not something that is evident to common sense.