Stephen Batchelor > Quotes

“To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157)”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks. (65)”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death. (154)”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing within the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such works achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. We forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. We get caught up in rumination and fantasy, isolating us from the world of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations constantly bombarding our input sensors. To stop and pay attention to the moment is one way of snapping out of these mindscapes, and is a definition of meditation. This awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“We could decide simply to remain absorbed in the mysterious, unformed, free-play of reality. This would be the choice of the mystic who seeks to extinguish himself in God or Nirvana—analogous perhaps to the tendency among artists to obliterate themselves with alcohol or opiates. But if we value our participation in a shared reality in which it makes sense to make sense, then such self-abnegation would deny a central element of our humanity: the need to speak and act, to share our experience with others.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“The origin of the conflict, frustration, and anxiety we experience does not lie in the nature of the world itself but in our distorted conceptions of the world.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

“Patience is the specific antidote to anger and hatred. It is an attitude of accepting both the harm caused by others and the pains and discomforts found in life instead of angrily retaliating against them. Only in the calm afforded by patient acceptance is one able to clearly discern the nature of the situation and proceed to deal with it realistically. Once the mind becomes distorted and disturbed with anger, any possibility of objectivity is lost. One consequently embarks upon a course of action grounded in misconception that inevitably leads to a heightening of the initial conflict rather than its resolution.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

“[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“We are participatory beings who inhabit a participatory reality, seeking relationships that enhance our sense of what it means to be alive. In terms of dharma practice, a true friend is more than just someone with whom we share common values and who accepts us for what we are. Such a friend is someone with whom we share common values and who accepts us for what we are. Such a friend is someone whom we can trust to refine our understanding of what it means to live, who can guide us when we’re lost and help us find the way along a path, who can assuage our anguish through the reassurance of his or her presence.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“We took a bus to the nearby monastery of one of the last great Tang dynasty Chan masters, Yun-men. Yun-men was known for his pithy “one word” Zen. When asked “What is the highest teaching of the Buddha?” he replied: “An appropriate statement.” On another occasion, he answered: “Cake.” I admired his directness.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“Letting go of a craving is not rejecting it but allowing it to be itself: a contingent state of mind that once arisen will pass away. Instead of forcibly freeing ourselves from it, notice how its very nature is to free itself. To let it go is like releasing a snake that you have been clutching in your hand. By identifying with a craving ('I want this," don't want' that"), you tighten the clutch and intensify its resistance. Instead of being a state of mind that you have, it becomes a compulsion that has you. As with understanding anguish, the challenge in letting go of craving is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“The aim of mindfulness is to know suffering fully. It entails paying calm, unflinching attention to whatever impacts the organism, be it the song of a lark or the scream of a child, the bubbling of a playful idea or a twinge in the lower back. You attend not just to the outward stimuli themselves, but equally to your inward reactions to them. You do not condemn what you see as your failings or applaud what you regard as success. You notice things come, you notice them go. Over time, the practice becomes less a self-conscious exercise in meditation done at fixed periods each day and more a sensibility that infuses one’s awareness at all times.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“Gotama did for the self was Copernicus did for the earth: he put it in its rightful place, despite its continuing to appear just as it did before. Gotama mo more rejected the existence of the self than Copernicus rejected the existence of the earth. Instead, rather than regarding it as a fixed, non-contingent point around which everything else turned, he recognized that each self was a fluid, contingent process just like everything else.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“Every attitude we assume, ever word we utter, and every act we undertake establishes us in relation to others.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

“Instead of asking “What is the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ thing to do?” the practitioner asks, “What is the wisest and most compassionate thing to do?”
― Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age

“Evasion of the unadorned immediacy of life is as deep-seated as it is relentless. Even with the ardent desire to be aware and alert in the present moment, the mind flings us into tawdry and tiresome elaborations of past and future. This craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere, permeates the body, feeling, perceptions, will - consciousness itself. It is like the background radiation from the big bang of birth, the aftershock of having erupted into existence.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“The meaning of man's life, as we have seen, is not measured by what he has, but by what he is. No matter how many possessions we have amassed, how much wealth we have accrued, how respected and secure our position is in society, how numerous the pieces of information we have accumulated, in moments of lucidity we may still abruptly perceive the dreadful futility of it all, the overwhelming emptiness and pointlessness of such a life.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

“Our conceptions of the world affect our perceptions of the world which, in turn, condition the way we subsequently conceive the world.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

“Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“The root of all inauthentic manifestations of being-with-others is the attitude of self-concern. It is in this state of mind that, either consciously or unconsciously, we reduce the central aim of all value and meaning to the accomplishment of the welfare of ourselves alone. This attitude can operate very deviously even in the person who outwardly appears to be thoroughly altruistic. Despite all magnanimous commitments and generous deeds, it silently measures the ultimate worth of these things in terms of the personal satisfaction that results from them. It is the root of inauthentic being-with because it is primarily responsible in preventing our essential being-with-others from full and genuine expression.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

“Many centuries after the Buddha, the Chinese Chan (Zen) patriarch Yunmen (c. 860–949) was asked: “What are the teachings of an entire lifetime?” Yunmen replied: “An appropriate statement.”6 For Yunmen, what counts is whether your words and deeds are an appropriate response to the situation at hand, not whether they accord with an abstract truth.”
― Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age

“... We have to constantly confront our deepest anxieties, our emptiness, our despair, our doubts; and there is nowhere for us to escape and hide from them. It is impossible to ever turn back, and at times it seems impossible to ever make any further progress.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

“p. 62 "...meditation… exposes a contradiction between the sort of person we wish to be and the kind of person we are. Restlessness and lethargy are ways of evading the discomfort of this contradiction.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“Ignorance is not merely a deficiency of knowledge but, in addition, it positively apprehends reality in a distinctive way. And being a distorted mode of conception, it creates a view of the world that is in opposition to, and in conflict with, the actual way the world is.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

“Buddhism, it seemed, was a rational religion, whose truth-claims could withstand the test of reason.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“Life does not mechanically alternate between aloneness and participation, rather it embraces them both in an undivided unity.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism

“To pose a question entails that you do not know something. To ask “Who is the abbot?” means that you do not know who the abbot is. To ask “What is this?” means that you do not know what this is. To cultivate doubt, therefore, is to value unknowing. To say “I don’t know” is not an admission of weakness or ignorance, but an act of truthfulness: an honest acceptance of the limits of the human condition when faced with “the great matter of birth and death.” This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist