Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor uses the concept of dependent origination to explain why the Buddha’s teaching seems counterintuitive to religious worldviews. He opens by examining the gap between intellectual understanding of impermanence and our lived experience, which constantly reinforces the illusion of a permanent self and fixed world. He argues that meditation practice, not mere study, can bridge this gap by internalizing insight into actual experience. He then contextualizes the Buddha’s radical rejection of both Ātman (soul) and Brahman (God) against the prevailing Upanishadic framework of his time, where liberation meant reuniting the divine spark with the transcendent absolute. The Buddha instead locates awakening within close attention to the phenomenal world itself — breath, sensation, thought, sound — the very phenomena other traditions taught as traps. Batchelor compares this counterintuitive approach to modern physics, then notes how Buddhism, despite its revolutionary starting point, gradually shifted back into normative religious discourse after the Buddha’s death, as later Buddhist schools adopted mind-body dualism to answer questions the Buddha deliberately left unanswered.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 BwB.mp3
UUID: fa20d696-d86d-41f3-8c6b-9b0eb7969e92
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~2,922
Intuitively sense either ourselves or others or the world in that way. In fact, our intuitive sense of who we are is completely the opposite to this. Our intuitive sense is that actually I am not dependently arising and impermanent and vanishing and selfless, but rather the opposite. That the things that I’m attached to, whether it be my friends, and my relatives, my possessions, my status, all of these things about which we spend so much time and worry. We don’t perceive these things as ephemeral, transient, contingent, but rather the opposite.
We are in a kind of grip, a hold that constantly affirms these things as having a kind of fixed solid reality, particularly when it comes to our sense of ego, our sense of self. So it’s counterintuitive in the sense that although we intellectually might accept everything the Buddha says, intuitively, we continue to behave and to live and to think in a in a completely opposite way. And this is where, really, meditation practice comes in. Why you can have a degree in Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist studies, and perhaps be able to explain the subtleties of dependent origination perfectly well. But if you’ve not somehow sought to internalize that insight into the actual fabric of your felt experience, it will have little effect.
You will be just as neurotic, and attached to things, and greedy, and selfish as everybody else. And so, one of the reasons that I find it valuable to do these study retreats is precisely so that we don’t get sidetracked into speculations and theories and philosophical ideas, which can all be terribly interesting. But we try to take these ideas and internalize them through our own careful, attentive, mindful observation of what’s happening in any given moment. Dependent origination is not some remote and distant thing we might one day understand. It’s actually right here in every single moment, in everything that we see, and hear, and smell, and taste, and touch, and think, and feel.
We can detect the the pulse of the rising and the passing of things, the interconnectedness of conditions, the play of phenomena magically almost dancing together in the very moment of any experience. And this is why it’s so crucial if we’re to take these ideas to heart, that they need to be brought into being in our seeing, and hearing, and smelling, and tasting, and touching, and so on. So why is it then that the Buddha fields that no one will understand what he’s saying? I think there are different ways in which we can consider this question. Perhaps the first way is that is to try to put what he’s saying back into the framework of thought that was prevalent at his time.
And in many ways, I don’t think this has changed a great deal. I mentioned yesterday how the Buddha’s teaching somehow goes against normative religious discourse. And to give an example of normative religious discourse, discourse, I think we can just consider the world view laid out in the Upanishads. The Upanishads were probably the most influential spiritual doctrine, religious teaching that was around the Buddhist period, and they continue to be so. In modern India, in modern Hinduism, the Upanishads are still the key text.
Now the Upanishads lay out a vision of human life, very much like the one I sketched yesterday of a kind of a soul or a self, an Ātman, that is caught up through in an identification with the body and feelings and mind, and then driven to create actions that propel it from one birth to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next. In other words, the cycle of birth and death. But at the heart of each being, of each consciousness, of each soul is something which is actually untouched by this phenomenal world, which in the Upanishads is called the Ātman, the self with a big s. Something that is pure, that is it’s often called, true consciousness or truth consciousness and bliss. Something that in its very essential nature is not contaminated by its immersion in physicality, impermanence, rebirth, and so on.
But because of its deluded identification with the body and the mind and so on, it’s trapped. It’s stuck. It’s imprisoned in this condition. Now, for the Upanishads, the ultimate nature of reality, the absolute truth that lies beyond the phenomenal world is called Brahman, which we could probably translate as God. And this is the transcendent, mystical, divine nature of reality that the Ātman has lost touch with.
And this is curious because the very nature of the Ātman is in fact identical with the nature of God or Brahman. So a spiritual path in the Upanishads is very much a process of achieving a re reunion of the soul with God. So the core religious or spiritual ideas are on the one hand, the discovery and the affirmation of this divine spark within. And on the other hand, a recognition that the true home or ground of this divine soul is this transcendental, luminous reality of Brahman. So by bringing the two together through purification practices, through meditation, through devotion, then you can finally achieve liberation or freedom from this cycle of repeated birth and death.
Now, what’s curious about the Buddha’s teaching, particularly in these early texts, is that he has no time at all for either Ātman or Brahman. That he denies that there is in fact anything corresponding to this idea of a eternal, blissful soul. To him, that is just a fiction. It’s an illusion. And at the same time, he never even mentions the possibility of some sort of transcendent self.
Once he’s seen through the illusion of one, the other really has no place at all. There’s nothing in early Buddhism that we could translate as God. There is no sense of a transcendent divine reality whatsoever. And this I think is why, for one of the reasons, why he says nobody will understand me. Because what he’s presenting as a way of of spiritual fulfillment and liberation has nothing whatsoever to do with what would have broadly been accepted at his time as the necessary objects on which to focus our concern, namely the soul or God.
In fact, he’s saying something really rather weird. He’s saying that liberation, insight, awakening, fulfillment is found by paying attention, very close attention to the phenomenal world itself, to the rising and passing of your breath, the sensations in your body, the feelings that come and go, the thoughts that come and go, the sounds around you, the smells, the tastes, the touches, all of the things that in the Upanishads were seen as that which entraps you. In in in that more theistic model, the soul is delusively involved with all these things, And it needs to somehow abstract itself, detach itself from them in order to recover its divine identity with God. And the Buddha is saying, no, it’s not like that at all. The the freedom from and again, he would use the same metaphor, the freedom from birth and death, is found by actually looking closely and attentively at the very flux of living processes themselves.
There’s nothing divine about them. There’s nothing permanent about them, but that is where your salvation lies. By looking right at what it is that you thought was the problem. And we find this counterintuitive approach, for example, in the four noble truths, which we’ll look at tomorrow. The Buddha is saying the path to happiness lies in looking deeply into suffering.
That sounds odd. One one would think it would be the other way around. But there’s so many of these teachings he gives that actually are very much a counterintuitive. And here too, perhaps, we find another parallel with the sciences. Much of our scientific understanding of the world is also counter intuitive.
The example I gave yesterday of the Big Bang, for example. Or simply take the physical nature, the the the nature of physical matter. It seems solid, but if you probe into it, you find that it’s ninety percent space. It’s counterintuitive. Of course, the most counterintuitive thing is the fact that the sun rises in the east, and we see it travel the sky and set in the west, and yet that’s not actually happening at all.
In fact, we are going round it. But intuitively, in terms of common sense, that’s not what it looks like at all. And I feel that perhaps this is one of the one of the points that perhaps brings the Buddha’s teaching into harmony with the sciences. It’s not that it’s talking about the nature of matter or anything like that, but rather that the approach is counterintuitive. It’s not what we expect.
It seems to go against common sense. It certainly goes against the common sense view of religion. Now a normative religious discourse, I think, in all or most traditions, with the possible exception of Taoism, which is sort of on its own, really. But in all of the theistic religions, we find a similar sort of model, whether it’s well, let’s just take traditional Christianity. Also, is premised very much on a realistic sense of God, the creator, who is, as it were, utterly apart from the creation, and the soul, or what we truly are, has somehow become lost in its identification with the with the veil of sorrow called life, and salvation consists of turning one’s mind towards God, and at death, achieving the experience of the kingdom.
Central to religion of all kinds is the idea that there’s a part of ourselves which is not tied to the phenomenal world. There’s a bit of ourselves that is somehow detached. That when we die, when the physical body dies and the brain breaks down, factor x, whatever you call it, the soul, the self, the spirit, this will somehow not be, subject to that breakdown. That there’s a bit of us that will be exempt. This is the great dream of humankind, that there’s a part of us which is not subject to contingency, to impermanence, etcetera.
And that exempt spirit solved self, whatever it is, will then, if it’s directed properly through its devotions and so forth and so on, will find reunion with this transcendent, absolute, eternal kingdom of God or whatever it might be. I think the that way of thinking is so deeply embedded that even today, it’s it’s very problematic to include Buddhism within the broad paradigm of religion. And I’ve had experiences, particularly when we lived here in England, of being on panels of interfaith discussion and so on. And there would be a a a there’ll be a Protestant minister, and there’ll be a Catholic priest, and there would be a rabbi, and there’ll be an imam, and there would be me. Or in other most cases, fortunately, somebody else would have that privilege.
And there’s a usually, these discussions start out on a very upbeat kind of note. There’s a there is a very genuine recognition that, you know, we agree on a great deal of things, on the importance of of of compassion and selflessness and so forth and so on, and ethics and morality. There’s no problem there. But once the conversation gets underway, almost inevitably, at a certain point, the g word will raise its head. And then whoever is representing Buddhism finds him or herself in a bit of a fix.
And the fix is basically, well, do I just go along with this, or do I raise a an objection? And the easiest way, of course, is just to sort fudge the whole matter and just go along along along with it. But on one occasion, I remember I refused to do that, and I said, I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And this has the rather unfortunate event of bringing the conversation to an abrupt halt.
But I feel that that is probably the only honest way to deal with that particular issue. I was at another conference once organized by an Islamic institute in Cambridge, which was to bring together people of faith who would form a common front against the rising tide of godless secularism. And exact and and exactly the same problem occurred, was that as the Buddhist, the token Buddhist at this gathering, we couldn’t come up with a form of words that would actually include a Buddhist perspective. This is a big problem, at least for the organizers. But again, it made it quite clear to me that although in many regards, I do feel an affinity with people who are committed to religious and and faith based initiatives and so on, at a certain point, I feel that I’m not part of that way of looking at things.
But what we find in Buddhism, and this is something we’ll come back to later, is that despite what seems to me the very radical starting point, as is very explicitly stated in this text, as Buddhism becomes normalized as another religion, which happened very quickly, I think, after the Buddha’s death, and certainly is the form that it has assumed in all Buddhist cultures, it has at the same time tended to shift back into normative religious discourse. I mean, a good example of this is the whole business around what if there is no self, what is it that gets reincarnated? This is such an an old chestnut in Buddhism that people are almost tired of the question. I’m tired of being asked it, and so I will answer it before anybody else asks me. The Buddha there were certain questions that the Buddha was was simply not willing to address.
For example, such as does the universe have a beginning? Does it have an end? Is it finite? Is it infinite? Does the Tathāgata, the Buddha, exist after death or not?
Are the body and the mind the same or different? Are the body and mind same, the same, or different? Such a question, he said, is not to pursue such a question is not conducive to the path he teaches. In other words, he refused to go there. He remained silent on that issue.
And yet, every Buddhist school, pretty much, that came along subsequently did go there and came up almost invariably with what we would call a substance dualism. The body is one thing and mind is very much another, or at least some essential bit of mind. Mental consciousness or, you know, they get into very very fine calibrations of some kind of psychic entity that survives physical death. Now the problem lies also with the Buddha’s own teaching. Although he refused to say anything about the whether body and mind were the same or different, he did nonetheless continue to speak in the language of classical Indian metaphysics, which supposed the continuity of life after death.
So sometimes a disciple would come to him and say, you know, such and such a person has died. What is gonna happen to them? And the Buddha would say, oh, well, in twenty three lifetimes, he will become an ant, and then he will become this and become that, and then he will become an arhat. And so that frame of speaking was very much preserved by the Buddha. He didn’t challenge that.
He didn’t question it. It was quite adequate to his his teaching. But after his death, it left his followers in a quandary. Now here’s this man who’s been teaching us that we continue from life to life, and yet he said nothing about what it is that gets reborn. And as Buddhism became less a tradition among, you know, wandering monks and nuns in search of liberation, but rather a an established form of organized religion, very often allied to a political power, then it became the job of the Buddhist monks to offer a coherent and a consistent explanation of how the world is.
That was the function of religion all until the modern times, really. And so Buddhist monks were forced in a way to somehow sort this dilemma out. And their resolution was to adopt a body mind dualism, which I think is very much against the spirit of what the Buddha taught, but is nonetheless understandable given a lot of the other things he said. And so as soon as you do that, as soon as you talk of a mind that is somehow more that is that has a greater primacy, a greater importance, a greater value than the body, you begin to split the world in two. And once you’ve made that split, then I think you’re back very much into a normative religious kind of discourse.
In other words, you are evoking something that is supernatural. In other words, the mind or the essence of mind or the true mind or or something. But I’ll stop there and continue this tomorrow. And, yes, it’s now eleven o’clock. So we’ll have a discussion again at the end of the afternoon in which you can we can explore some of these ideas further.
And tomorrow, I’ll continue in this same vein, but we’ll be looking at the Buddha’s first discourse, the first teaching he gave shortly after his experience that I described today. Thank you.