Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor challenges two foundational Buddhist doctrines that he argues obscure the Buddha’s original therapeutic purpose. He begins by tracing how the sense of separation and alienation in ordinary experience connects to the Buddhist teaching of emptiness—not as an ultimate reality to meditate upon, but as an active letting-go of fixed views and reifications. Using straightforward attention to sensory experience and impermanence, rather than visualization or mantra, Batchelor shows how one discovers the unfindability of a solid self, much like a mirage that dissolves under scrutiny. He then critiques the doctrine of two truths—the split between ultimate and conventional reality—arguing it appears nowhere in the Buddha’s own words but was imported later under the influence of normative religious thinking, particularly Hindu Vedantic frameworks. Throughout, Batchelor insists the Buddha’s concern was never ontological but practical: attention to impermanence, contingency and selflessness liberates us from painful attachment and delusion, not through mystical insight into how things really are, but through direct noticing of how things have come to be.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 BwB.mp3
UUID: 5373470d-8e5f-4686-ba6c-08323cf2f9c4
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,227
We we we we we feel crucially separated from others. We know that we’re a part of this biosphere, but that’s not how we feel. We we feel lonely. We feel cut off. We feel lacking in any true intimacy with the world or with other people.
And this, I feel, is very much at the root of what it is that emptiness is trying to free us from. And to do that, one can pay simply more attention to how everything within one’s experience is constantly rising in dependence upon conditions and passing away. And the Buddha describes the whole process of consciousness in terms of an external sense object, a sound or a sight or a smell or a taste impacting one of the sense organs. And through that impact, there then emerges the consciousness of a sound, the consciousness of a taste. Consciousness, although some later Buddhist traditions emphasize it as being a kind of intrinsic property somehow within us, cut off from the body, is in early Buddhism thought of very much as again a contingently emergent property that occurs when this organism impacts the sensory world.
Consciousness has no privileged status at all. And so by paying attention to this and this kind of awareness meditation is very much about doing just that, just noticing. In this kind of meditation, we’re not asking you to introduce anything that’s not already apparent. You don’t have to visualize anything or say a mantra or kind of imagine some complicated mystical theory. You just have to stop, sit still, stand still or walk slowly and notice the sheer sensory experience that is happening to you in each moment.
That’s the exercise. And in fact it’s a practice in which we are stripping things away rather than adding anything on. We’re trying to get down to the kind of, the ground note, the base knower of experience itself. We’re trying to touch something in this meditation that is very, very primary in experience itself. So rather than being caught up in thoughts and memories and fantasies and so on, which is very much a way as it were skating along the surface of experience.
We pay less attention to that and we come back to the primary fact of sitting, of breathing, of listening, of being aware of the sensations in our body. And that I feel is an extraordinarily radical thing to do. It puts us into contact with another way of being in this world. One that initially may require a lot of effort and and hard work, and it’s some sometimes a bit of a struggle and sometimes rather tedious. And we’d rather be doing something more exciting like going to the beach.
But if we bring our attention back and we try to sustain and preserve this kind of attention, we begin to reorient our experience into a radically different perspective. Now this I so so things are empty therefore because they arise and pass away dependent upon conditions, become conditions for something else. There’s nothing self existent or inherently existent or necessary to any particular aspect or element of our experience. It’s constantly in flux, in process. It’s coming.
It’s going. It’s almost miraculously happening and passing into something else. And yet, we’re constantly somehow resisting opening ourselves to that perspective. And again, not just mentally, but I think almost physiologically. We’re somehow resistant to opening ourselves to that way of being in the world.
So we require, as it were, a kind of constant penetrating inquiry and investigation into things. What the Buddha called, the investigation of phenomena. And one of the ways in which this idea of emptiness is understood, again by Tsongkhapa, is that emptiness doesn’t refer to anything whatsoever. How no matter how, you know, transcendent or mystical. But emptiness is a way of talking about the ultimate unfindability of anything.
The ultimate unfindability. That when we look, for example, for this very, well, what appears for much of our lives to be center point of our entire existence, namely me, I mean, so much of our thoughts just basically circle around and are sort of running commentary on me. But when you try to actually pin this as this incredibly important thing down, whether you look in meditation or whether you consider it philosophically or whether you cut yourself open with a scalpel, you don’t find anything that corresponds to that sense of me. And this is a very curious discovery. What seems so real turns out to be utterly, elusive.
In a text that’s attributed to Nāgārjuna, but probably was written sometime later, there’s a, again, a a very good analogy. It says it’s like a bit it’s a bit like a person who’s lost in in a desert and sees in front of them an oasis with palm trees and camels and so on and starts heading towards it. But the closer they get, the more that image evaporates and is realized to be a mirage. And it’s a bit like that with this sense we have of of ego. From a distance, from the distance of say, ordinary day to day existence, it appears terribly real.
But as soon as you go, you get closer to it, it somehow vanishes. It’s less it becomes entirely ungraspable. That’s very curious. But it’s perhaps no more curious really than, let’s say a physicist’s examination of of let’s say a table. From an ordinary everyday perspective, it’s a table and he’ll put his his laptop computer on it.
But when you go deeply into what that table actually is, you don’t find anything table like at all or anything even matter like. Matter begins to break down into something very un matter like. Just swirling particles and electrons and atoms and quarks and electrons and whatever, which is largely space. And when you take it down into a quantum level, it’s just something like, you know, probabilities. It all becomes extraordinarily weird.
And yet, once that particular investigation is is suspended, then, you know, the physicist will have no difficulty putting his laptop computer on the table and will not worry that it’ll sort of collapse into a black hole. And I think the same goes in terms of the relation between our, what we, someone referred to yesterday as our autobiographical self, and as it were, its its empty nature. It’s not that the empty nature of the self or the contingent nature of the self somehow negates the self anymore than quarks and leptons and quantum probabilities negate the table. It’s simply another perspective, but a perspective that can be, at least in terms of the Buddha’s understanding of contingency, extremely liberating. And so as we settle in our meditation, as we become stiller and more focused, it’s this kind of perspective on things that can begin to open up.
So for example, if you have a pain in your knee, what can be quite revealing is to go into that pain instead of our usual way of saying, oh my god, don’t like this pain in my knee. I wish the bell would go. And we get into this aversive relationship with the pain in our knee. And we start having all sorts of fantasies like, my god, if the bell doesn’t go in a minute, I’ll never walk again. Which, by the way, you will.
But if you go into the pain, if you actually probe it with attention and mindfulness, you can get to a point where suddenly that little, that that that what feels like a sort of a solid needle of agony begins to break up, begins to resolve into effectively just a pattern of of vibrations, sensations. And you can actually get into that pain in a way that it ceases actually to be terribly painful anymore. And so what’s I think important on a retreat like this is to is to is to push the envelope, as they say, of the possibilities of our conscious experience. To still our minds and to apply that kind of attention to things that otherwise we would habitually just react against or we would try to grab. And instead, just try to look more deeply and more carefully with a kind of disinterest, not thinking of it exclusively in terms of me and mine, but considering yourself a bit like, you know, a scientist in a laboratory simply, you know, looking through a microscope at things for a change.
And thereby uncovering not just intellectually, as you would you could do just by reading a book, but experientially to recognize how we can, with not a huge amount of effort, we can actually learn to be in this world in it from another perspective altogether. Now since we’re on this subject of emptiness, another way I feel that is helpful to understand what it means comes from Nāgārjuna himself in which, in one of the verses that constitute his most important work, he says, Buddha say that emptiness is letting go of opinions. Believers in emptiness are incurable. Now believers in emptiness are incurable. In other words, if you have a a fixed view of emptiness as something, something a bit like God perhaps, then you’ve already missed the point.
And in fact, you’ll be doing something which is actually in complete opposition to what this idea of emptiness is intended for. For Nāgārjuna, emptiness is a letting go of opinions. It’s not an emptiness at all. It’s actually more like an emptying. It’s a letting go.
It’s a dropping off of fixed views and fixed ideas. And I think it’s helpful to think of emptiness this way because it gets us out of the almost inevitable assumption that because the word emptiness is a noun, it thereby refers to something. And you have books written on Buddhism like meditation on emptiness, which gives the unavoidable assumption that if you meditate long and hard enough, one day you will discover emptiness, and you will meditate on emptiness. But that I think is is extremely misleading. It it it makes it out again.
It’s really, I think, slipping back into a kind of normative religious language in which you privilege certain key terms. In Christianity, it would be God and Christ, whatever. In Buddhism, it would be nirvana, liberation, and emptiness. And we so and we so eagerly make things out of these things. We reify them.
We we we we make them into kind of absolutes. And so instead of thinking of emptiness as some kind of absolute reality or some ultimate reality, which is very, very dodgy to think in those terms. To think of emptiness actually is something that you don’t believe in or long for, but is something that you do. Each time you see your mind crystallizing into a a kind of fixed idea or a belief. Hope you do.
Don’t make the mistake of then reifying that as enlightenment, making it again immediately into a kind of iconic object. My enlightenment experience, which you’ll then go and bore your friends with for years on end. When I was in India, I was in Benares. And go, oh, no. Not that story.
As soon as you do that, you’re somehow again, you’ve crystallized. You’ve you’ve you’ve rendered something which is meant to be somehow releasing, and you’ve made it into another object of of of personal identity and attachment. So there’s very much, I think, a sense of this emptying, which is a sense of releasement, a sense of of letting go. And we’ll speak more about this tomorrow to because letting go again is a question that begs is this an idea that begs another question, namely, well, how do I let go? We’ll look at that tomorrow.
One of the ways in which I think Buddhism has fallen into the trap of normative religious thinking is in its adoption of the doctrine of the two truths. Those of you who are familiar with Buddhist literature and and philosophy will have no doubt come across this. Namely that, there is an absolute truth or an ultimate truth, the Paramartha-satya, on the one hand. And on the other hand, there are these relative conventional truths of the world. And emptiness is very often identified with what is absolutely true, which is what is ultimately true.
Whereas the ordinary truths that we use to negotiate the day to day existence of our lives, these are just conventional truths. The truths that, you know, the sun rises in the east and it’s going to be, you know, and then it was hot on Sunday, and Joe lives up at 2 Station Road. All of those kinds of things are true, but they’re only conventional truths. They’re only, as it were, just rather trivial or or partial truths that are useful for functioning in this world, but they do not tell us about what things really are. So it’s conventionally true to say, yes, I’m Steven.
But if I were to say, but what is Steven really? Then I would not be able to just say, well, Steven is Steven. But I would be called upon to say something more profound. The same thing with the table. There’s this table that we have, but if you look deeply into what the table really is, you come up with something rather different.
Now what is I’m not suggesting that that distinction can’t be useful. I think it can, but I think it’s probably outweighed by being more problematic than anything else. And what is very striking is that although all the Buddhist traditions, including the Theravāda, the early school, they all base their thinking very much in terms of these two truths. This the absolute truth and the relative truths. But nowhere in the entire Pāli Canon, in any of the discourses of the Buddha, in any of the texts concerning monasticism does the Buddha ever use these terms?
They’re completely absent. You find them in Mahāyāna Sutras, you find them in the Abhidharma, the latest systemization what the Buddha taught, but you don’t find the Buddha using this language whatsoever. And I think that’s a point that’s worth pondering upon. Why not? And why is it that later traditions so rapidly enclosed the Buddha’s doctrines within this two truth framework?
I think one of the reasons is because it somehow brought Buddhism more into line with conventional religious thinking. And if you think of what we spoke of yesterday from the Upanishads, that model is very much about an absolute truth, Brahman or God, and as opposed to the conventional truths as it were of the illusory world. So again, it’s a it’s a it’s a split world theory, a split reality theory. And the Buddha resisted this and probably because it would have drawn him back into the frame of thinking that he was quite clearly seeking to break free from. But it seems that at the hold of that kind of thinking is so strong in human beings that almost inevitably we tend to slip back into it.
What is also striking, of course, is that it’s overtly dualistic. It’s a bit like the body and the mind split. It seems convenient to us for whatever reasons to split the world in two. We split our experience into two, our physical experience and our spiritual experience, the body and the mind. And we split reality into two.
The ultimate reality, the absolute reality, and the conventional, the relative reality. But that I feel is symptomatic of an attempt to try to somehow explain things that otherwise appear ambiguous, appear difficult to grasp. I would like to imagine a Buddhist discourse in which any kind of dualism is is absent. A genuinely non dualistic discourse. No body mind split.
No absolute relative split. The other problem with this absolute truth idea is that it suggests very strongly an ontology. Now ontology is a word that some of you may not be familiar with. It comes from the Greek ontos, which means being, and logos, which means to think or to speak about. And it’s a theory of what things actually are.
In other words, you know, what is the nature of being? I don’t think the Buddha was remotely interested in this. And yet, as soon as you make emptiness into the ultimate truth, which most Buddhists do, then you’ve actually begun what’s called theory of being. What things really are is empty or contingent. That’s their ultimate reality.
That’s not what the Buddha was saying at all. He does use an expression, Yathā-bhūtaṃ, that is often translated as just as things are. See things as they are. And sometimes you’ll find in meditation instructions that if you if you somehow just clear the mind of of kind of deceptive concepts and words and ideas. If you cleanse the senses of all of those of that obstructive stuff, you will then see things as they are, which again suggests you’ll see reality as it is.
I think that language is entirely alien to what the Buddha was about. And in fact, when you look closely at the word Yathā-bhūtaṃ, it actually doesn’t mean that anyway. Yathā means thus or like this and bhūtaṃ means as things have come to be, as things have emerged. It means to emerge, to arise, to develop, not to be. And the Buddha was not concerned therefore with establishing or an enlightenment based on the nature of experiencing the nature of reality.
That that that I think that is completely false. The Buddha was concerned with paying attention to certain features of our experience that were we to understand more deeply and intuitively will free us, will liberate us from certain graspings, attachments, obsessions, compulsions that cause us, our lives to be painful and alienated and boring and dull and frustrating. The Buddha’s approach quite explicitly is therapeutic. It’s liberative. He’s not concerned with understanding the nature of reality in any kind of ontological sense, but rather paying attention to features of experience that we tend intuitively to ignore.
Impermanence, contingency, selflessness, dukkha. These things are are liberating because they free us from the counter view that things including myself are permanent. They’re kind of satisfactory, and they’re me or mine. It’s breaking the strangle hold of those perceptions that liberates us to become more fully what we can be. And that doesn’t require gaining some privileged mystical or philosophical insight into the way things are.
It’s the way things have come about that the Buddha is interested in observing. And again, not as any exercise in its own right. He’s not a philosopher in that sense, but he’s only concerned with noticing and experiencing these aspects of experience because they can liberate us from perceptions and views that cause us suffering. I feel that’s very central to what this whole business is about. And that brings us to the end of what I’m going to mention today.
Tomorrow, I’ll look more at how I’ll look more at how this process is constructed as a path by considering the model of the four noble truths. So thank you for that. So now we’re walking.