Right and what were we disagreeing over earlier regarding interpretation? — Janus
I told you already, there is an old dispute about the two truths doctrine in Buddhism
— baker
So what? I haven't said that Batchelor's position is entirely novel or original.
If the most reliable testament we have as to what Gotama actually said is the Pali Canon, and translator's interpret that freely, according to their own prejudices, then the only way you could possibly assess the accuracy of Batchelor's translations would be to be able to read Pali (and even then how would you free yourself from your own prejudices)?
You might get a sense of where he's coming from from "a few words" but you won't know anything of his arguments for holding the position he's coming from.
Even if, due to your own entrenched commitments, you are bound to disagree with someone's position, and you know that from "a few words" it pays to familiarize yourself with the arguments of those whose positions do not agree with yours, even if only to have a coherent understanding of just why you disagree with them.
What drives me is the question whether the Buddha of the Pali Canon as I know him was in fact not trying hard enough to find satisfaction in "life as it is usually lived" (and that such satisfaction can indeed be found, by everyone) and that his teaching on dependent co-arising is wrong. This is a matter of great importance to me. I address it with people who say or imply that he didn't try hard enough and that he was wrong. Batchelor is an author who quickly proved himself irrelevant to my quest. This is all that matters to me as far as he is concerned. — baker
I acknowledge that an enlightened person could know ("know" in the biblical sense of "familiarity") an enlightened disposition, a presence, openness and freedom from attachment that I don't, just as a great pianist knows a presence, openness and freedom I, as a pianist, cannot. — Janus
These are those dhammas, bhikkhus, that are deep, difficult to see, difficult to understand, peaceful and sublime, beyond the sphere of reasoning, subtle, comprehensible only to the wise, which the Tathāgata, having realized for himself with direct knowledge, propounds to others; and it is concerning these that those who would rightly praise the Tathāgata in accordance with reality would speak. — Brahmajāla Sutta
[Traditional] Buddhism sees human existence as embedded in the condition called samsāra, understood literally as the beginningless chain of rebirths. From this standpoint, humans are just one class of living beings in a vast multidimensional cosmos. Through time without beginning all beings have been roaming from life to life in the five realms of existence, rising and falling in accordance with their karma, their volitional deeds. Life in all these realms, being impermanent and fraught with pain, is inherently unsatisfactory—dukkha. Thus the final goal, the end of dukkha, is release from the round of rebirths, the attainment of an unconditioned dimension of spiritual freedom called nibbāna. The practice of the path is intended to eradicate the bonds tying us to the round of rebirths and thereby bring liberation from repeated birth, aging and death.
Secular Buddhism, in contrast, starts from our immediate existential situation, understood without bringing in non-naturalistic assumptions. Secular Buddhism therefore does not endorse the idea of literal rebirth. Some Secular Buddhists regard rebirth as a symbol for changing states of mind, some as an analogy for biological evolution, some simply as part of the dispensable baggage that Buddhism drags along from Asia. But Secular Buddhists generally do not regard rebirth as the problem the Dharma is intended to resolve. Accordingly, they interpret the idea of samsāra as a metaphor depicting our ordinary condition of bewilderment and addictive pursuits. The secular program thus reenvisions the goal of Buddhist practice, rejecting the ideal of irreversible liberation from the cycle of rebirths in favor of a tentative, ever-fragile freedom from distress in this present life itself. — Bhikkhu Bodhi, Facing the Great Divide
I wonder what makes you think that belief in Karma or rebirth would be necessary to the practice of Buddhism? — Janus
Wright, like his Bay Area and Boston predecessors, is delighted to announce the ways in which Buddhism intersects with our own recent ideas. His new version of an American Buddhism is not only self-consciously secularized but aggressively “scientized.” He believes that Buddhist doctrine and practice anticipate and affirm the “modular” view of the mind favored by much contemporary cognitive science. Instead of there being a single, consistent Cartesian self that monitors the world and makes decisions, we live in a kind of nineties-era Liberia of the mind, populated by warring independent armies implanted by evolution, representing themselves as a unified nation but unable to reconcile their differences, and, as one after another wins a brief battle for the capital, providing only the temporary illusion of control and decision. By accepting that the fixed self is an illusion imprinted by experience and reinforced by appetite, meditation parachutes in a kind of peacekeeping mission that, if it cannot demobilize the armies, lets us see their nature and temporarily disarms their still juvenile soldiers. — Adam Gopnick's review of Why Buddhism is True
Can we really tiptoe past the elaborate supernaturalism of historical Buddhism? Secular Buddhists try to, just as people who are sympathetic to the ethical basis of Christianity try to tiptoe past the doctrines of Heaven and Hell, so that Hell becomes “the experience of being unable to love,” or Heaven a state of “being one with God”—not actual places with brimstone pits or massed harps. Batchelor, like every intelligent believer caught in an unsustainable belief, engages in a familiar set of moves. He attempts to italicize his way out of absurdity by, in effect, shifting the stresses in the simple sentence “We don’t believe that.” First, there’s “We don’t believe that”: there may be other believers who accept a simple reward-and-punishment system of karma passing from generation to generation, but our group does not. Next comes “We don’t believe that”: since reincarnation means eternal rebirth and coming back as a monkey and the rest of it, the enlightened Buddhist tries to de-literalize the “that” to make it more appealing, just as the Christian redefines Hell. In the end, we resort to “We don’t believe that”: we just accept it as an embedded metaphor of the culture that made the religion.
Gotama was a pragmatist who discouraged metaphysical speculation — Janus
Buddhism nevertheless embodies a profound metaphysic, that of śūnyatā, however it is an experiential quality, not 'a doctrine' or 'a proposition'. — Wayfarer
Can we really tiptoe past the elaborate supernaturalism of historical Buddhism? Secular Buddhists try to, just as people who are sympathetic to the ethical basis of Christianity try to tiptoe past the doctrines of Heaven and Hell, so that Hell becomes “the experience of being unable to love,” or Heaven a state of “being one with God”—not actual places with brimstone pits or massed harps.
I would ask why we would need to tiptoe at all. — Janus
All secularized faiths tend to converge on a set of agreeable values: compassion, empathy, the renunciation of mere material riches. But the shared values seem implicit in the very project of secularizing a faith, with its assumption that the ethical and the supernatural elements can be cleanly severed—an operation that would have seemed unintelligible to St. Paul, as to Gotama himself. The idea of doing without belief is perhaps a bigger idea than any belief it negates. Secular Buddhism ends up being . . . secularism.
why would we be constrained to include them in our thinking now — Janus
As David Loy, another Buddhist writer, says, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.' And among those 'superstitious beliefs' are the fundamental principles of Buddhism. — Wayfarer
When do calculated changes and omissions made to a belief system transform that system into something else? — Tom Storm
Buddhism has a way of dealing with that in terms of calling them the 'second' and 'third' turnings of the wheel of dharma. It managed to retain the core principles through otherwise massive changes. — Wayfarer
So often people are fixated by identifying a practice in its purity or as originally intended. Hence pietist movements like Hasidism or Islamic State (not that the two are comparable) — Tom Storm
I think all that matters is whether the practice of the so-called secular Buddhists is as effective as the practice of traditionally oriented adherents. I see no reason why it shouldn't be if the same levels of commitment are in place. In other words, I see no need to consider questions about rebirth or karma in order to practice zazen or insight meditation. The important element is single-minded commitment. — Janus
I think all that matters is whether the practice of the so-called secular Buddhists is as effective as the practice of traditionally oriented adherents. I see no reason why it shouldn't be if the same levels of commitment are in place.
When do calculated changes and omissions made to a belief system transform that system into something else? — Tom Storm
It's not simply an "obsession with purity", but a matter of efficacy. Can the newer developments that are occuring under the banner of Buddhism deliver, or at least promise what the older one(s) did? — baker
What drives me is the question whether the Buddha of the Pali Canon as I know him was in fact not trying hard enough to find satisfaction in "life as it is usually lived" (and that such satisfaction can indeed be found, by everyone) and that his teaching on dependent co-arising is wrong. — baker
Secular Buiddhists, as far as I am aware, practice the same core way as traditionalists. — Janus
I think that's right too. What do you think of contemporary Wester secular Buddhism in its various expressions? — Tom Storm
What drives me is the question whether the Buddha of the Pali Canon as I know him was in fact not trying hard enough to find satisfaction in "life as it is usually lived" (and that such satisfaction can indeed be found, by everyone) and that his teaching on dependent co-arising is wrong.
— baker
This is more or less the question that preoccupied me 30 years ago. I personally have never felt dissatisfied by life, even though it has often been difficult, so the question lost urgency.
But as Adam Gopnick points out:
All secularized faiths tend to converge on a set of agreeable values: compassion, empathy, the renunciation of mere material riches. But the shared values seem implicit in the very project of secularizing a faith, with its assumption that the ethical and the supernatural elements can be cleanly severed—an operation that would have seemed unintelligible to St. Paul, as to Gotama himself. The idea of doing without belief is perhaps a bigger idea than any belief it negates. Secular Buddhism ends up being . . . secularism. — Wayfarer
But on the other hand, Batchelor's approach lends itself to many of those who otherwise would be driven away by the implications of belief in saṃsāra and rebirth and the other supposedly supernatural aspects of Buddhism. — Wayfarer
No. Secular Buddhists don't try to realize dependent co-arising. Traditionalists do. — baker
Kamma and rebirth are actually implied in dependent co-arising, it's strange to try to consider them separately, on their own. — baker
And whatever feel-good-feelings these secularists have in their "spiritual practice" come from their relatively good socioeconomic status, not from their "spiritual practice", and if anything, they have those feel-good-feelings _despite_ their "spiritual practice". — baker
I read the article and, sorry to say, I found no counterargument to Batchelor's interpretation there. The states you say that some Buddhists devote their lives to realizing are states of non-attachment. I can't sustain that and nor can you, but I've tasted enough to know that such states are at the same time radically different to ordinary states and yet the same. As I said this is knowledge of a kind, but it is not any form of 'knowing-that'- it is instead a radical 'know-how'.
I wonder what makes you think that belief in Karma or rebirth would be necessary to the practice of Buddhism? Soto zen consists in 'just sitting' and that is understood to be no different than enlightenment. Vipassana relies on not dogma, but just on the stages of 'calming' and 'insight'. I think you are clinging to outworn ideas; and I think they are just another form of attachment. — Janus
According to Batchelor there is little or no evidence in the Pali texts to suggest that Gotama was concerned with ontology or the question of truth. His argument is that Gotama was a pragmatist who discouraged metaphysical speculation and answered metaphysical questions differently depending on what he saw as the needs of the questioner. — Janus
The priest without borders doesn’t seize on what he’s known or beheld. Not passionate, not dispassionate, he doesn’t posit anything as supreme. One who dwells in “supreme” views and presents them as final will declare all other views “inferior”— he has not overcome disputes." — Janus
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