Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this session, Stephen Batchelor turns the three marks of being—impermanence, dissatisfaction, and selflessness—back onto Buddhism itself, arguing that the tradition has survived not by preserving an unchanging doctrine but by continuously reinventing itself through cultural encounter and dialogue. He traces Buddhism’s extraordinary diversity across two and a half millennia, from Japanese Zen to Tibetan monasticism, showing how it adapted to Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, and indigenous beliefs rather than suppressing them. Batchelor challenges the sectarian insistence that any single form represents the “true Dharma,” pointing out how this rigidity mirrors the very attachment Buddhism teaches against. He then examines foundational problems in Buddhist institutions: the body-mind split that led to a spiritualised hierarchy of male priests over laity, and the departure from the Buddha’s own refusal to establish institutional succession. For modern practitioners, he suggests a liberating alternative: applying Buddhism’s core insights—dependent origination, the four truths, the eightfold path—without the later accretions of cosmology, reincarnation theory, and authoritarian structures, allowing the tradition to evolve creatively in contemporary pluralistic contexts.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 BwB.mp3
UUID: a8422716-19bd-4458-a957-15b70bf13fdb
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,479
We’ve said a lot, over the last days about these three, marks of being, these three characteristics of things that we tend to ignore. The things are impermanent, that they are dukkha, they’re somehow unreliable, unsatisfactory, suffering, painful. And the the nature of things is that there is no fixed, essential ego or self either within the person as a kind of unchanging identity, or within things or conditions or societies or anything else. And today, I’d like to turn that reflection back onto onto Buddhism itself. It’s ironic in a way that the very tradition that puts forth this vision of the world does not always seem to recognize that these characteristics apply equally to itself.
The Buddhism too is impermanent. It’s unsatisfactory, and it has no fixed identity. Now, we can see this very clearly from an historical perspective. When we look back over the last two and a half thousand years, we can see that there has no in no way has there been a kind of monolithic, unchanging Buddhist church that’s remained the same under all conditions. But rather, on the contrary, we see a tradition that has undergone extraordinary permutations and changes and adaptations, not only in its outward form.
Again, we can might think of, say, a Japanese Zen monk and a Zen monastery, and then flash to a Tibetan monastery in, Lhasa, and a very ornate gilded temple with all kinds of iconography. These things are really rather different. From an a Martian’s point of view, they would probably not appear to have much to do with the same thing at all. But also in terms of how Buddhism has evolved ideas, in terms of its own internal philosophies, very often philosophical ideas and views that have emerged through its interactions with, in India, Hindu philosophy in China, with Taoist and Confucian ideas, and elsewhere with other indigenous shamanic or or animistic concepts. And Buddhism has not generally found its way into new social and historical situations as a kind of conquering force that sought to suppress and to eliminate everything that it sees as other, but rather it has always, sought ways to accommodate native beliefs and views.
It’s been influenced through its dialogue with other traditions in such a way that entirely new forms of Buddhism have appeared. And this has really been the creative engine that has driven, the continuity and the flourishing of the very tradition itself. On the other hand, this historical perspective that for us perhaps seems entirely obvious. If, for example, I were to ask you why is Japanese Buddhism so different from Tibetan Buddhism? I suspect most of you would say, well, because Japan is a very different culture, very different history, a very different society to that of Tibet.
But many traditional Buddhists wouldn’t see it that way at all. They would say that the re if they were a Japanese Buddhist Buddhist, for example, they would say, well, no, it’s because in Japan we have the true Dharma. In Tibet, they don’t. I remember once when I I used to be a Tibetan Buddhist monk, then I went to study in Korea. Many of the Korean monks I met, when I told them about the Tibetan tradition, they would say, oh, the Tibetans, they’re just a bunch of shamans.
And then I remember going back to see my Tibetan friends in Switzerland and told them about Korea. And they said, oh, the Koreans, they’re just a bunch of shamans. So there’s been because of this and of course, neither side had ever actually met a real live Tibetan or Korean. These were prejudices and popular opinions that had been perpetuated over the centuries with not actually ever having encountered a representative of that other school. Buddhism has suffered in its history, particularly over the last few centuries, with a high degree of cultural and geographical isolation.
Each school tends to think of itself as somehow being the true one, And its own internal rhetoric is very much about, validating how this Dharma, this teaching is the true teaching of Gautama Buddha, and they’ll have some way of of justifying that. Either it’s a secret transmission from mind to mind, as in Zen, or else it’s some secret teaching given in some heavenly realm by the Buddha and then transmitted via the Dakinis and the Nagas until it ends up in Tibet. Or if it’s Theravāda Buddhism, it’s what the Buddha actually said and taught and has remained unchanged from this day to the next. All of these arguments do not stand up in the light of historical awareness and criticism. What we find, which I think is a far, richer discovery, is the capacity of the Buddhist tradition to continuously reinvent and recreate itself when it finds itself in a new situation, be it a cultural situation or historical situation, a political or whatever, it’s able and it has shown this ability over centuries to to reconfigure itself.
So Buddhism, I think, has survived not because it’s managed to preserve something completely uncontaminated by the forces of history and society and culture, but because it has been able to imagine itself in other ways. And I think it’s history is a great, example of human creativity and imagination. But having said that, I don’t think that is something that was consciously undertaken historically by Buddhists. These new forms emerge not because some bright person said, wait a minute, why don’t we do it this way? But rather just simply through the through the passage of time, through gradual adaptation, a bit like an organism adapting to a new environment, these new forms have evolved and emerged.
Perhaps one of the things that might make a difference, perhaps a crucial difference in the way in which Buddhist ideas and practices evolve in in in a modern society, and I don’t want to say Western here. I don’t think that geographical distinction is very meaningful anymore. But in a in a modern world, is that we I think for the first time, have this tradition of looking at historical contingency. And at the same time, we cannot but recognize Buddhism as incredibly diverse. And within any western country nowadays, you can within, you know, you can will take you maybe an hour or so to be able to have exposure to a Tibetan tradition, probably three or four different Tibetan traditions.
Likewise, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Burmese, as well as a number of new reform movements like Soka Gakkai or the FWBO or something like that. We cannot but acknowledge the plurality of this tradition. And I think it’s increasingly difficult, although this doesn’t prevent people from doing it, to insist that this particular version is the true one, and the other ones don’t quite cut the mustard, as they say in America. Unfortunately, sectarianism again seems to be a very adaptive strategy. And we always, I think, when it comes to our most cherished beliefs, somehow have to insist that that way of seeing the world is the true one.
And we cannot really accommodate someone holding a view that is in contradiction to that. In the kind of world we live in today, such such such kinds of division have become increasingly dangerous, and not just dangerous for our own spiritual or mental health, but dangerous perhaps even for the survival of the species and the planet. We only have to look at the two fundamentalisms that are currently at war with each other, those of the the Christian right in America and, the Muslim Islamist movement to see that the potential for, destruction and violence, is enormous. So somehow, we have to, I think, go beyond the insistence that a particular belief, be it Buddhist or Christian or Muslim or whatever, is is somehow absolute and not negotiable or somehow not anything that can be denied or refuted. And I think one starting point here with particular regard to Buddhism, which is what I’m going to focus on, is to begin to apply the three marks of being to the tradition itself.
To begin not to to pretend that some Buddhist doctrine teaching practice is somehow eternally validated for all time and all places, but rather to see that every form of Buddhism is likewise something that has emerged contingently and dependently on a variety of circumstances, which in turn have changed and shifted over time. And to begin to explore the possibility of a tradition that’s, that celebrates innovation, that celebrates transformation, that celebrates change, and to recognise also that any particular form may be adequate, may be appropriate for a given situation, but as circumstances shift and change, that form may show may be shown to be unsatisfactory, undependable, inappropriate in other conditions and at other times. And to recognize that the very heart of the tradition is the fact that it too is empty of any fixed essence or nature or identity. The Buddhism too is selfless. That it is a tradition, is a movement that’s continuously capable of evolution and transformation and adaptability to new circumstances.
And this I feel, or these different aspects I feel, are very much what might allow something in a way quite liberating and quite imaginative and quite creative to come forth in this tradition. I’m also aware that possibly the majority of of Buddhist institutions and schools and traditions that we find in the world today are very resistant to that kind of idea. There’s a strong attachment very often to particular ways of seeing things, particular doctrines, particular forms of practice. So the approach that I’ve been suggesting in these talks this week has been in many ways about trying to strip away what appears to be, a cult a cultural artifact of Buddhist tradition, ideas that are perhaps no longer appropriate in the kind of way, in terms of the kind of way we understand the nature of the world, the nature of life today. And what I found in my own study and practice is that I found myself going back more and more to the earliest strata of tradition.
That which is recorded in the Pāli. And I mean, some of these texts are also found in Sanskrit and Chinese and Tibetan. But the most complete body of early materials we find in Pāli. Now I’m not suggesting, as I think I mentioned before, that what we find here are verbatim transcripts of what Buddha said. I mean, that would be akin to a kind of literalist fundamentalism.
We find in the Pāli tradition too, exactly the same problem. We find that there are elements there that are clearly just a reflection of the ancient Indian view of the world. And I would include in that its cosmology, its system of different realms, the belief in reincarnating minds and souls and spirits, the idea that somehow everything that happens to us is the consequence of some distant unknowable cause of an action committed in a past life. All of these things are not intrinsic to what the Buddha taught, but simply a feature of the world, the world view in which he lived, in which he taught. But we also find, within these texts, we find certain core ideas, core intuitions perhaps, that seem to be quite distinctive in terms of what marks the Buddha’s teaching off from what was current even at his own time.
And what I’ve tried to present during this week are what I feel to be some of these core insights. The three marks of being, I think is one of them. The idea of dependent origination is perhaps the core one. The notion of the four truths, the eightfold path. And no Buddhist in any tradition would question that.
But what happens when we, as it were, strip everything away, we strip pretty much everything else away or at least suspend belief in such things and try to somehow having gone back to these basic ideas, try to imagine what kind of Dharma might emerge on the basis of those views. We also have, I think, at the same time as these doctrinal issues that I’ve been discussing, we also have in throughout Buddhist tradition, the issue of authority. And who has the authority to say these things? You know, what authority do I have, for example, to say what I say? On what basis do I say this?
On what basis do any of us, in fact, come to hold those beliefs that are most central to our lives? In many respects, we take a jump. We take a leap. It feels right on the basis of everything we’ve read and thought about and meditated about and discussed and so forth, then at the end of the day, this is what I believe to be the case. And each of us will arrive at that, although we like to think we’ve done so by strictly rational and empirical means, the chances are we’ve taken lots of leaps of faith.
We have drawn conclusions which feel true, that seem to be the case, but in fact, it’s quite difficult when to defend those in the face of those who would oppose them. But that I think is unavoidable. But one of the ways in which Buddhism has traditionally established structures of authority has been through its insistence on this splitting of reality, which again is something we’ve mentioned many times already, splitting reality between body and mind is a crucial one, probably a necessity in order to explain the theory of reincarnation. But at a more philosophical level, the splitting of reality into an absolute truth and a relative truth, or an ultimate truth and a conventional truth. But this, as I’ve already said, is not something the Buddha in the early tradition ever mentioned.
It’s far too similar, I think, to the kind of normative religious language that he was seeking to free himself from. And it’s not problematic merely in that it it carves reality into two, a kind of messy, corrupted world that we live in most of the time, holding out at the other pole, the notion of something pure and true and absolutely real. And Buddhism has bought into that. It does carve the world up that way. We saw it with Buddha nature, how that is done.
And even the body mind split is a very important basis for that kind of bifurcation. And as we see the development of Buddhist thought, more and more does there come to be a priority placed on mind, whether it’s then called the one mind, the in Zen or whether it’s called the true mind or Rigpa or whatever it might be. The the the emphasis, especially within about the first thousand years of Buddhist history begins to prioritize the the spirit, the mind, the soul. And the almost inevitable corollary of that is a demonization of the body, of the material world. And very often this is also a basis for a kind of patriarchy as well.
Women tend to be sided with the messy world, and the male principle tends to be that embodied in these spiritual ideals and so forth. And it’s not just a philosophical or a or a theological problem we have here, but I think it also underpins the hierarchies of power that Buddhist institutions have embodied. And as we’ll see, in in most Buddhist traditions, the institutions are controlled by an elite of male priests. This is undeniable. That has been a tradition of nuns, of women practitioners in all schools, but pretty much without exception, women have never really been enabled to assume positions of authority.
And I think one of the reasons for this, apart from the social and the cultural habits of those societies, is because there is underpinning it, this split, this dualism into these two sides. And what happens over the course of history is that there tends to be an ever widening gap between the experts, in other words, the priests and the monks and the lamas and the roshis and the ajahns on the one hand, and the humble mortals, men and women, who are left kind of stranded in the mire of Samsara. And if they’re lucky, and if they’re generous enough in funding the monasteries, then they might get reborn with a better chance next time around. And and although I might be speaking slightly cynically about this, you only have to go to an Asian Buddhist country to see the reality of it. For most, non monastic lay Buddhists throughout Buddhist history, their role has largely been one of observing certain moral codes and sustaining the institutions of the monastics.
Now whether that particular model is sustainable or not, I think, also has to be thrown into question. There have been movements historically in which the contradiction between extreme sort of monastic separation and affluence and power, versus the lot of the ordinary person on the street has become too extreme. And so you get breakdowns. You find it at the be in the origins of Zen, in the origins of the vajrayana, the tantric tradition, and you find it, for example, in the origins of the Pure Land tradition in Japan with Shinran. And also Nichiren would have been another person who who somehow said no.
You know, this is somehow not the way it should be. And I feel that at our time too, we are at a point of tension, in which a modern, liberal, more or less egalitarian, democratic society is now encountering these Buddhist traditions, which are very attractive in many ways. They seem to offer a spiritual practice, a way of life, a system of ethics, a system of philosophy that seems to be very much in accord with our own current ways of thinking. But at the same time, we often jar when at at the recognition that these are institutions of power that seem to be very authoritarian, seem to be rather embedded in their own dogmatic certainties, and are highly resistant to criticism, let alone change. And this is simply, I think, a description of the situation in which we find ourselves.
The consequence is that, historically, Buddhist institutions have, like most religious worldwide, tended towards infantilizing the ordinary person, making them into somewhat like children or treating them like children and demanding a kind of total submission. In some Buddhist traditions, particularly evident in Tibet to some degree also in Japan, you have effectively, a spiritual aristocracy in place, a closed system in which an elite preserves its own powers. That’s not to say that amongst these elite, almost invariably men, you will not occasionally find a very wise, very compassionate, and a wonderful exemplar of what Buddhism can be. It’s not I’m not suggesting that’s not the case. And in fact, in my own life, probably the most impressive and influential people that I’ve met have come from that background.
That’s not the point. The point really is whether that whether for people to evolve and and live enriched and highly individuated lives based on these basic ideas, it’s necessary to have those institutions of power in place. I personally don’t think it is. The other difficulty when we look at how Buddhism has evolved into these religious institutions is we find that it is departed rather radically from what the Buddha himself had in mind. And, again, I found this is one of the great, virtues of going back into the early Pāli materials.
We get a picture of a man who had no intention to create religious institutions. One of the, if you read the the the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, the the discourse on the great passing, the last months of the Buddha’s life described in quite some detail, it’s the sixteenth sutta of the longer sayings of the Buddha, the Digha Nikāya. You have repeatedly the Buddha saying, after I am dead, the Dharma will be your guide. He’s not, he refuses to appoint a successor. If you look at the middle length saying one hundred and eight, it’s called the Gopaka Moggallana Sutta.
There you find, very interestingly, a text that takes place about six to nine months after the Buddha has died. And the the political leaders of Rajagaha ask Ānanda, did the Buddha appoint a successor? Ānanda says no. Have the did the monks around the Buddha, at the end of his life appoint a successor? The Ānanda says no.
And it’s curious that this point somehow has to be made so explicitly. Of course, what did happen is that the first council, which takes place about nine months after the Buddha’s death, already is in