Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor challenges the conventional understanding of Buddhist practice as purely meditative technique, arguing instead that the Buddha’s earliest teachings point toward a radically autonomous, creative engagement with life. He traces how the post-Buddha sangha shifted from the Buddha’s egalitarian vision—where no authority is vested in a person, but in impersonal teachings—to a hierarchical institution led by Kāśyapa. Drawing on suttas like the Mahaparinavana and the Dhammapada verse on self-crafting, Batchelor reframes awakening not as a final attainment but as an ongoing process of openness that generates authentic thought, speech, and action. He argues that genuine ethical response requires situational compassion, not rule-based prescriptivism, and that Buddhist practice encompasses art, literature, philosophy, and creative imagination—not just meditation. Without such contemporary expressions rooted in the Buddha’s original vision, Batchelor warns, Buddhism risks remaining a ghettoized Asian institution irrelevant to modern secular life.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 BwB.mp3
UUID: bb04a5ac-cb25-4767-8f85-09da45ff440e
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,167
Mahakashyapa, the so called the the the flower holding guy. He held up a flower and Mahakashyapa smiled. There’s no evidence for that in any of the texts. But Kāśyapa clearly takes over. There’s a power struggle after the Buddha’s death between Ānanda, who I think has a much more kind of liberal egalitarian perspective, and Kāśyapa, the former Brahmin, who actually brushes Ānanda aside and takes control.
And that’s been pretty much the history of Buddhism ever since. So we have the Buddha putting forth an idea, an idea of a community, a Sangha, which includes monks and nuns, laymen, laywomen, in which which is directed and guided by a set of impersonal values and guidelines and teachings called the dhamma without that, without any authority being invested in a particular leader or person. This is a very radical break with the way in which, religious, practice and behavior had been conducted up until the Buddha’s time. The Buddha seemed to want to break with that altogether. We find also in the Mahaparinavana Sutta, very moving passages towards the end of the text where the Buddha says, you know, be an island to yourself.
Be a refuge to yourself. Let yourself be your refuge. This passage is repeated several times, not just in this text, but also after the death of Śāriputra that occurs sometime before, we find exactly the same reiteration of this point. In other words, it’s a teaching, it’s a practice that is rooted in a kind of self reliance. Another, passage, which I think is also, rather crucial, and again, we find repeatedly through the canon, is the is the Buddha’s injunction to his, particularly here, his monks and his nuns.
And he acknowledges, of course, that a period of some kind of training, of learning is indispensable and the monks and the nuns would meet together at least during the rainy seasons to go effectively on retreat, to discuss things, to study. The Sangha is crucial, but the Sangha, the community, serves really as a resource, a support network for each individual member of that community to become autonomous in their own lives. So you have this wonderful passage where the Buddha says, and I’m quoting from memory, you know, go forth into the world for the welfare of the many, for the benefit of the many, and let no two of you follow the same path. It’s that last sentence that I think is striking. That, of course, community working together, kinship, friendship, these things are crucial, but to what end?
Not, I feel, to the end of establishing some kind of institution, which will almost invariably become hierarchical, but rather to the end of giving each person a certain autonomy and authority to pursue their own path. Now, in this way too, we can begin to reconsider what in fact the very notion of awakening or enlightenment means, not as, you know, a spiritual condition, some kind of, you know, insight you might gain at some point or another, but rather seeing that awakening or enlightenment, for lack of a better word, is also understood as a process, not as a state. And it seems so difficult to break out of that habit of mind. This enlightenment or nirvana is something you attain at some point. And once you’ve got it, you’ve got it, and that’s, in a way, the end of the story.
All you then have all you then have to do is somehow disseminate your wisdom to the benighted people of the world. But that doesn’t seem to be the model that is at all implied when we think of these four truths as one leading to the next, to the next, to the next. As I outlined the day before yesterday, how fully knowing dukkha or suffering morphs into or leads organically to a falling away of grasping. And that falling away of grasping leads to a moment in which we are freed from the imperatives, the dictates of greed, of hatred, delusion. And that moment of of freedom and openness and transparency is the very beginning of the path itself.
It’s equivalent to Sammadiṭṭhi, a true seeing or true vision. And a path, remember, if we think remember that it is a metaphor, is essentially just an open space, an open unimpeded gap. It’s not a thing imposed on a landscape. It is actually a clearing. It’s a it’s a gap between the grasses, the trees, the boulders, whatever it is that would get in the way.
It’s an open space. It’s a free space. So when one goes one’s own way, when one enters this path, one somehow is, free at that point to live from your own intuition of freedom. One the characteristics that you find in the Pāli texts that defines a person who has entered the path is that such a person is no longer dependent on others. Very striking passage.
No longer dependent on others. So there’s a quite explicit affirmation here of a recovery of your own autonomy. Now that autonomy, that freedom, and here I think we have very much a meeting point between the western concept of liberty or freedom and the Buddhist idea of Mokśa or liberation. I think the two actually come really very much here into conjunction. That that freedom is the freedom to create the path.
And again, going back to this word Bhavana that I mentioned yesterday, that is precisely the injunction the Buddha gives to the fourth truth, is bring the path into being, create the path. In other words, in all areas of your life, in terms of how you see things, think about things, speak, act, function economically, commit yourself to what you value, cultivate mindfulness, concentration. All of these things are as it were, the framework of an autonomous life that is brought into being through one’s practice. Here, I think, it’s where here it’s it’s in this process, I feel, that the imagination comes into play. That although we talk of Samma Sankappa or right thought literally, what I think we’re getting at is the emergence of images, of ideas that have spring from this intuition we have of an empty, selfless, contingent, impermanent world.
As we allow ourselves to, to, as it were, inhabit such a space, that’s not the end of the process. But as I’ve mentioned already, the the experience of nirvana, or liberation, that’s not the goal, but that’s rather the the doorway, the passageway into another way of thinking, another way of imagining. So from that emptiness, if you wish, from that openness, there then arises the possibility of of thinking differently, of not just repeating the habits of what you’ve already thought a million times before, or what others have told you to think, be they your parents or be they your Buddhist teacher. It doesn’t make much difference. But when we become no longer dependent on the authority of others in that sense, we are freed, as it were, to imagine things otherwise.
In other words, our own practice, as Martine says, is one of of of creative engagement. But when we come into a situation, be it at work, be it with our kids, be it, with our friends, be it in facing some crisis, be it politically, socially, economically. What we are called upon to encounter that moment with the kind of openness and presence and non judgmental perception that we’re cultivating here on retreat. But the appropriate response is not just to sort of smile at everybody with a kind of benign Buddhist compassion. That’s fairly useless unless it actually brings forth an idea, an image, a word, a phrase, a gesture, then it is powerless.
It is incapable of really enacting or embodying what you may value. That’s why the path, when you look at the structure of the Eightfold Path, it moves quite clearly from a formless vision into degrees of form. The first step in the process of form is Samma Sankappa, right thought as it’s usually translated, authentic, imaging, ideation, concept, words. That then, in the next step, which is usually translated as right speech, I would say authentic speech, is the translation of that image or that word or that thought into an utterance. And when it becomes an utterance, it’s no longer something private to you, but it has now been released.
It’s now been given into the lives of others. It’s now become part of the public domain. It could be recorded and played back. It’s no longer in that sense yours. It’s been given away.
And I guess really the root of the whole idea of Dana or generosity is that one’s practice is, in the end, a giving a giving away of oneself. In one’s words, in one’s acts, in one’s expressions, in whatever it is that you present to others in any form. That is very as much a part of the practice as is the exercise of mindfulness or concentration or whatever you do in your meditation. And it’s in this sense that when we think of the practice as encompassing the totality of this path, when we think of Bhavana, and again, I mentioned yesterday, Bhavana is almost entire almost invariably now understood reductively in Buddhist traditions as meditation. Whereas in fact, the Buddha used it to describe the bringing into the being of this whole way of life.
Everything from the way we see the world to how we earn our living. And then speech then finds one form of expression, our bodily actions another. And it’s in this regard, I feel, that the practice of this path is in some ways more akin to an artistic process than to simply a technical procedure in which one moves from one stage to the next. Again, I think that not only in the West are we very much dominated by the paradigm of technology. In other words, we solve our problems by applying the right techniques.
We understand the nature of the problem, and then we put into action a set of techniques that can resolve it, and the problem will then go away. And many Buddhist apologists have somehow bought into that paradigm and present Buddhism in a similar way. Buddhism is a is a series of meditational techniques that can resolve the problem of your personal suffering and perhaps the suffering of the world. We just have to become technically proficient in meditation particularly. But that’s really, I think, only that’s reducing Buddhism to very much just one aspect of its overall vision, which is not reducible to becoming proficient in certain meditation techniques, but rather we are looking at a way of life that comes from an inner state of openness that generates images and ideas that leads to words, that leads to acts.
And any word or any act, any moral or ethical engagement with the world is not something that you can know in advance what the result will be. There’s an element here in which you are taking a risk that simply to blindly follow certain sort of rules and precepts is never going to be an adequate way of engaging with the specific suffering of a particular situation or a particular person. And we see in the evolution of ethics in Buddhism, a movement away from a legalistic and prescriptive ethic, perhaps finds its clearest example in the monastic rule in two hundred and twenty-seven vows, to what in theological language would be called a situational ethic. When Mahāyāna Buddhism evolved, one of the crucial insights that it brought was the insight into a situational ethic. In other words, you don’t ask yourself what is the right thing to do as opposed to the wrong thing to do.
You ask yourself what is the most loving, what is the most compassionate thing to do, in recognition that most real moral dilemmas are not resolvable by appealing to a set of rules. It’s all very well well to say, you know, I shall not kill, but it’s a whole other issue when you have to advise, let’s say, a young woman who already has six kids and is living in poverty whether or not she should have an abortion. The the specificity of that situation, the mother’s own health, the social situation, the welfare of the other kids, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, all of that has to be taken into account. I think it could actually be uncompassionate, even cruel, to say, well, the Buddha said you shouldn’t kill, therefore have the child. But you have to, I think, go into that situation with openness, with as much love and compassion as you can muster, and ask yourself, what is the most compassionate way to advise someone in such a situation.
There are many, many, many examples of such. The ethic of the Bodhisattva is very much about being able to somehow suspend a kind of rigid adherence to a rule based ethic and move to an ethic of compassion and love. All of this is very much a process, an emerging process, of ever greater authority and autonomy being placed on the individual person. It’s an acknowledgment of the authority of every person’s imagination, of every person’s capacity to respond to the unique situations that they encounter. But religious institutions, as a rule, are very afraid of the imagination.
Most religious traditions want to control the imagination. So you get, and I would think this is probably true in all of the Buddhist traditions, a very rigid kind of aesthetic. In other words, aesthetics is defined in terms of what expressions that our tradition has embodied over the centuries in particular states, and anything that somehow diverges or digresses from that is is somehow inappropriate or, unacceptable. And when we think of Buddhist art, at the moment at least, it tends to be defined by the normative aesthetic perspectives of, be it Japan or China or Tibet or ancient India or Thailand or Burma, and to be an artist in those cultures is very often a question of simply following very narrowly within the prescribed practices and traditions of those cultures. That’s not to say that these works of art are not profound and beautiful.
They are. But are they really, is that really adequate to the emergence of an aesthetic, a communication of these values through nonverbal means? One of the questions on a piece of paper had to do with this. I feel very strongly that if Buddhist practice cannot lead to an expression of its values in forms that speak to our contemporary secular condition, and by that I mean forms of art, forms of literature, forms of philosophy, of ethics, then Buddhism will remain very much immured within its Asian assumptions, and will never really become much more than a kind of ghettoized, religious, institution. But I feel the the the underlying imperative for this kind of transformation is right there in the earliest ideas that the Buddha himself put forth.
And perhaps, just to conclude, one of the a passage I came across, funnily enough, in in my Pāli reader, you know, Pāli for dummies book that I’m I’m studying at the moment. It gives you these passages in Pāli, but it doesn’t irritatingly give you the English translation or even tell you where you can look it up. You have to figure it out for yourself. And there was a verse in there that I struggled with for for a while, and this is what the verse said. It said, just as a farmer irrigates his fields by carving channels, just as an arrow smith or a fletcher, constructs an arrow, just as a carpenter fashions a piece of wood.
The wise person tames the self. Now what is striking about this passage is that Sorry? The dhammapada. It is actually in the dhammapada. It’s verse eighty or eighty eight, I forget which of the dhammapada.
I’ve read it, you know, I’ve read it before, but it’s never struck me in that way that it did when I read it in my Pāli reader. The main point being that the word self is in the accusative, The word self has the same relation to the pandita, the wise person, as does the field to the farmer, the arrow to the fletcher, and the piece of wood to the carpenter. This is a in all translations, I’ve checked them, They all say, and the wise person tames himself. They put it into a reflexive form because I think Buddhists are almost congenitally averse to the s word. But here you have quite clearly the s word, the self, and this doesn’t deny the fact that the Buddha also says endlessly, but he also says, He’s prepared to live with that ambiguity because that, I think, reflects the reality of our lives.
This goes back to your point. He’s perfectly at home with the autobiographical self. That doesn’t mean that he’s somehow dispensed with the notion of no self. The two ideas are quite compatible. In fact, the atta, the self, can be transformed like a piece of wood or channeled like a field or constructed like an arrow precisely because there is no core fixed identity to it.
It’s a fluid process. What this verse points to very much is the an idea of practice as a process of craftsmanship, of working on yourself, as we say nowadays, of actually taking this raw material of body, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness, and fashioning, reworking, reconstructing, changing all of that. That’s the field in which you work. That’s the the raw that that that that’s the uncarved block as you find in Taoism that you fashion. That’s what it is that you can reconstruct and create into something which is not yet there.
All of this, to me, suggests very much a practice which is inextricable from a process of creativity and imagination. Perhaps this also gives us a glimpse of a kind of dhamma, a kind of practice that may be able to evolve. Curiously, we find these ideas by the archaeology of the earliest texts, by going back to some of these core statements that we’re probably familiar with, but we’ve never really noticed, or at least I’ve not quite noticed exactly what they’re saying. So I’ll stop here, and this afternoon, we I’m getting increasingly questions on the board. In some ways, that’s not a bad idea, because it means I can think about them before I give the answer.
But it does break down the spontaneity of a discussion that would just emerge organically on the spot. So I’ll do a bit of responding to the notes, And hopefully this afternoon, those of you who haven’t had a chance to ask what you wish can have such a chance. Thank you.