Confession of a Buddhist Atheist [Paperback]

Stephen Batchelor's new book is much more than a memoir, and certainly a world removed from that of confessional tales with similar titles. In fact, it's more like two books: the story of Batchelor's early life as a Buddhist monk, starting when he barely out of his teens, and a de-romanticized life of Siddhatta Gotama, man and monk, not god or supernatural being.

And as interesting as Batchelor's progression of awakening to the realization that he is not meant to be a monk might be, it's his careful telling of Gotama's post-enlightenment wandering life, a man in a land just like ours, filled with politics, patronage, and compromise, that gives the book its true strength. Both tie together in Batchelor's theme and thesis: that Buddhism, stripped of its accretions of gods and rituals over the intervening centuries, is a powerful way of awakening to life's reality here and now.

Having landed in India in the early 1970s, a young British hippie wandering in search of a spiritual home -- even if he didn't recognize it as such at the time -- he fell under the sway of Tibetan Buddhist exiles in India, donning robes and shaving his head. Following his teacher, he moved to Switzerland, helping establishing a monastery there, but his doubts about the melange of gods and demons that the Tibetans revere and fear in the end pushed him to the more Spartan Korean Zen tradition. He took up residence in a temple there, innocently meeting his future wife, a French Zen nun. After the master dies, he disrobed -- a "Buddhist Failure", as he calls himself.

Later, as a layman, he was inspired by the writings of a British Buddhist monk from the early 1960s, who like Batchelor can't reconcile the supernatural beliefs of local (in this case Sri Lankan) Buddhists with his secular views. (That monk, though, preferred to kill himself than do the dishonor of disrobing, proving that secular doesn't equal sane.) Batchelor was soon intrigued by the Pali Canon, the first written record of the sayings of Gotama, and through fortuitous circumstances, starts traveling in northern India, Gotama's stomping grounds in the four-plus decades following his awakening. In the book, Batchelor tries to reconstruct life in those times, as Gotama gains followers and draws on patronage of local kings. It's a powerful narrative, all the more so for being so different from the standard hagiographies.

Batchelor has obviously been pondering Buddhist thought and beliefs for decades and the way he conveys his understanding is remarkably clear. "The heart of Gotama's awakening lay in his unequivocal embrace of contingency," he writes. "He recognized how both he and the world in which he lived were fluid, contingent events that sprang from other fluid, contingent events, but that need not have happened. Had he made other choices, things would have turned out differently." That sums it up neatly, and is just a small sample of Batchelor's explication of what he sees as Buddhism's core teachings. In the end, Batchelor jettisons everything in Buddhism save these core points -- leaving no room for rebirth, karma, gods, demons, prayer -- just this moment to awaken to.

He does this in a direct and simple writing style that is personal and deeply felt. I'd never gotten through earlier books of his -- they seemed too cerebral -- but Confession has the stamp of his personal voice. When I saw him, in early March 2010 reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., he had a dry and self-deprecating wit that was engaging; it comes through here vividly. And more than all these thoughts, there's this: I have already re-read passages in the book, a high compliment.

This man seems to be a humanist with a spiritual heart, but not spiritual in the traditional dualistic sense of that term, that carves the world up into natural and super-natural, sacred and profane. Rather he is spiritual in terms of valuing the lived experience of the individual, one's loves and longings, one's aspirations and fears, one's confrontation with profound questions at a personal and immediate level. This is not the abstract, intellectual humanism of ethical or political debate, it is an authentic engagement with one's very own life, informed and permeated by meditation and reflection. He shares this vision by describing how he has arrived at it in an autobiographical account which is candid and courageous. In addition to Buddhist practices, part of Batchelor's engagement with his own life has involved a quest for the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama. Thus the book flows seamlessly into a biographical account of Gotama and his teachings, which is well supported with historical scholarship and reasoning. I have resonated with every page from cover to cover. I'd recommend it to anyone who prefers an authentic engagement with the astonishing fact of their own existence, beyond consoling beliefs and religious platitudes or dogma. It is inspirational.

Stephen Batchelor weaves together the tales of two lives to present a new - or possibly very old - form of Buddhism.

The first life is his own, a suburban London teenager who took the hippy trail to the Dalai Lama's exile in Dharamsala where he studied Buddhism and became a monk. From there he goes to Switzerland, and Korea where he joins a Zen monastery. Eventually he abandons the theologies of both, marries and disrobes, to concentrate on applying Buddhist practice and philosophy to the existential challenges that lurk beneath the surfaces of our everyday lives. In common with some (but not all) existentialists, Stephen Batchelor appears to appreciate the ridiculous side of life's essential absurdity - his memoirs are lively and occasionally, in a straight-faced way, laugh-out-loud funny.

The second life is that of the Buddha. By restricting his sources to the Pali canon (those scriptures written in the language the Buddha spoke) and by ignoring everything from the pre-existing Brahminical spiritual culture, Batchelor re-creates a set of teachings and a context which are, if not actually atheist, at least supportive of his own existential Buddhism.

The two stories work together. One of the existential themes running through the book is the contingency of life - the uncomfortable randomness that brings us into being (as illustrated by the moment his mother shows a teenage Stephen a war-time photo of a soldier, saying that if things had turned out differently this man "would have been your father"), and that dictates the course and duration of our lives. By highlighting the contingency in both his life and the Buddha's, Batchelor uses the structure of his book to demonstrate the deep acceptance of contingency that he advocates.

As an atheist with an interest both in existentialism and in mindfulness meditation, this book might have been written for me. I find it obvious that meditation should be about more than stress reduction, but like many in our age, I cannot use a "more" which relies on the supernatural. By re-engaging meditation with the well-developed ethics and philosophy of Buddhism, Stephen Batchelor has, I believe, found a way that will help many.