Andrew Cohen: Absolutely Not!

introduction

"I was walking through a pine forest, returning to my hut along a narrow path trodden into the steep slope of the hillside. I struggled forward carrying a blue plastic bucket filled with fresh water that I had just collected from a source at the upper end of the valley. I was then suddenly brought to a halt by the upsurge of an overwhelming sense of the sheer mystery of everything. It was as though I were lifted up onto the crest of a shivering wave, which abruptly swelled from the ocean that was life itself. 'How is it that people can be unaware of this most obvious question?' I asked myself. 'How can anyone pass their life without responding to it?'"

This experience, which befell Stephen Batchelor some twenty years ago during his tenure as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Dharamsala, India, and which he later recorded in his book The Faith to Doubt, was not, he says, "an illumination in which some final, mystical truth became momentarily very clear. For it gave me no answers. It only revealed the massiveness of the question." As a result, it seems, Batchelor became something of a "Renaissance monk," reading widely in Western philosophy, psychology and theology, and pursuing with particular interest "the ways in which existentialist concepts were used to understand religious experience." His intriguingly spare interpretation of his own experience was ultimately to provide the long-term model for an agnostic approach to spiritual life perhaps best articulated in his credo, "Questioning is the track on which the centered person moves." It is an approach he has pursued quite actively ever since, and to which, no longer as a monk but as an influential author, scholar, meditation teacher and director of the Sharpham College for Buddhist Studies in Devon, England, he remains unwaveringly faithful to this day.

The essence of Batchelor's view is that there is no truly authentic response to human life that does not acknowledge its inherent and underlying existential uncertainty. Western practitioners of Buddhism cannot hope to become truly free, he insists, as long as they walk the Buddhist path in thrall to an accumulation of unexamined dogmas—dogmas that have obscured and distorted their perception of the Buddha's message and inhibited their ability to give fresh and authentic cultural expression to their own distinct existential "perplexity." The aim of Batchelor's radical approach to the Buddha's teaching is therefore to liberate it from all the nonessential trappings of "religion" and "spirituality" that have effectively choked off what he takes to be its no-frills revelation of the existential dilemma of human life. "As in the beautiful parable of the raft," he writes, "the dharma [teaching] is merely a temporary device to get you from one side of a river to another. Its meaning is completely distorted if it is raised to the status of an end in itself. For myself, the end for which the Buddhist path is the means can only be the penetration of this mystery of being thrown into birth only to be ejected again at death."

With the publication of his book Buddhism without Beliefs, Batchelor hopes to propel the ever evolving teaching of Gautama the Buddha forward into yet another—the lightest and least encumbered by orthodoxy to date—of its unique historical incarnations. "While we may find certain stylistic aspects of his teaching alien . . . the wheel of dharma set in motion by the Buddha [has] continued to turn after his death, generating ever new and startling cultures of awakening," he writes. "The challenge now is to imagine and create a culture of awakening that both supports individual dharma practice and addresses the dilemmas of an agnostic and pluralist world."

Without question, Batchelor's blueprint for the future of a secularized Western Buddhism is daringly bold and revolutionary. And one can only admire his courageous willingness to stand alone, within his own chosen tradition, against the unquestioned adherence to Buddhist doctrines and practices that have lost their meaning for contemporary practitioners. Nevertheless, the fact that Batchelor sees his reformulation of the Buddha Dharma as an adaptation to the pluralistic climate of Western postmodernism caused us some existential perplexity of our own. The most salient characteristic of contemporary Western culture would seem to be an obsessive preoccupation with such noble ideologies as relativism, subjectivity and personal autonomy. It may well be, in fact, that Buddhism in all its globetrotting has never encountered a culture quite so at odds with the austerity and selflessness traditionally thought to be crucial to the pursuit of enlightenment. This prompted us to wonder whether the adjustments Buddhism might have to make in order to become truly "postmodern" could ever lead to anything other than the loss of its very heart. Could a teaching whose goal is enlightenment really be accommodated to the individualistic imperatives of the contemporary West? The answer to this question hinges, we realized, on a determination of what the "heart" of Buddhism actually is, and ultimately on our understanding of the nature of enlightenment itself. It is in light of the incredible variety of contrasting views on this subject, which seem to be able to coexist within even a single tradition such as Buddhism, that we have asked: What is enlightenment? Is it, as Andrew Cohen believes, the discovery and realization of a singular and timeless absolute context for all human experience which, once it is recognized, can only be surrendered to? Or is it rather, as Stephen Batchelor's existentialist reading of the Buddha's attainment seems to suggest, a more relative matter—a courageous willingness to confront, over and over again and in an endless variety of circumstances, the inherent emptiness and essential mysteriousness of existence? Is it the final and irrevocable realignment of a human consciousness with the ultimate meaning and purpose of life—or the unobscured perception of a random and contingent reality in which any sense of purpose is a product of human invention?

These are subtle but vitally important questions, because the ability to distinguish that which is absolute from that which is relative, far from being a matter of mere semantics, could be said to be the foundation for any clear understanding of what enlightenment is and is not. This crucial distinction between absolute and relative is the subject of the fascinating dialogue you are about to read, which, in the subtlety of its discrimination and the urgent liveliness of its back-and-forth, resembles nothing so much as the "dharma debate" said to have been an important feature of Buddhist life in the bygone eras of its rich and varied history.

–Simeon Alev

interview

Buddhism without Beliefs

Andrew Cohen: After reading your book, Buddhism without Beliefs, it was clear to me that you could be seen as a revolutionary in the field of contemporary Buddhism in that you seem to be trying to present the essence of what the Buddha taught free of any cultural baggage, including all forms of what could be regarded by the contemporary mind as superstitious ideas or beliefs.

Stephen Batchelor: Yes, some people might say that, I suppose.

AC: Before we begin, though, I'd like to be certain that I have as clear an understanding as possible of exactly what you mean by "Buddhism without beliefs."

SB: Yes, good. The expression "Buddhism without beliefs" is not meant to suggest that beliefs are completely dispensable in every sense of the word "belief." One still has to believe—if one is doing a practice, for example—that it has value, that it's worthwhile, that it's worth sitting on a cushion; and that is definitely one form of belief. But the way I'm mainly using the word "belief," as you've correctly understood, is to express the idea that the practice of Buddhism is somehow contingent upon buying into certain metaphysical beliefs. We may or may not think of such beliefs as superstitious, but they usually are views of the world that we are expected to accept on the basis of a kind of blind devotion or faith, without actually having any experience of our own on the basis of which to accept or reject them. So "Buddhism without dogma" would perhaps be more precise. I don't think it really matters, you see, what one's metaphysical views are, because the practice of Buddhism, as I try to make clear in the book, is to my mind a practice of freeing ourselves from certain psychological delusions.

AC: I see. And since you are advocating what you refer to as a kind of "agnostic Buddhism," and devote an entire chapter of your book to a discussion of "agnosticism," could you please define how you're using that term?

SB: Well, agnosticism I understand in two different ways. Firstly, I use the word "agnostic" in the way that it's fairly conventionally understood in the West, and I know that in that sense it is problematic because to many people "agnosticism" and "atheism" are sort of blurred together as a kind of dismissive attitude towards any kind of spiritual practice—and some people have complained that "agnostic" is therefore too confusing a word and automatically gives a negative slant. But the way in which the word "agnostic" has traditionally been used since about the nineteenth century is very much about not taking anything for granted unless it can be somehow demonstrated through experience—holding a view, in other words, in which you acknowledge a kind of unknowing, or not knowing, which I think is very parallel to the Buddhist idea of "no-mind" as it is found in Zen. It has to do with being able to accept and acknowledge within yourself primary questions about life to which you do not know the answer, and this, to me, is a far more genuine starting point than beginning a practice on the basis of something that some teacher or some religion or some tradition has told you to believe. It is a fundamental acceptance of unknowing, of not knowing.

AC: Even though it's obvious, as you said before, that in order to begin practice in earnest one would have to have some faith, for example, in the possibility of awakening.

SB: Oh, sure. I distinguish between "belief" and "faith," although that may not come out clearly in the book. "Belief" would be, as I said, a particular holding on to certain metaphysical ideas as necessarily true—and this could apply also to a practice if it was intended only to confirm the validity of those views—whereas "faith" is really nothing more than a trust in the capacity of the human being to transform itself from a deluded to a less deluded or even an awakened state, "awakening" being a metaphor for the relinquishment of delusion. As I said, there clearly has to be some kind of belief in the possibility of that kind of transformation and that opening of experience. The difference is that from an agnostic position one doesn't have any preconceived ideas as to what that transformation will lead to. Practice is too often premised on the idea that if I meditate I'll become omniscient or something, or arrive at some state of mind that has been described in some religious texts to be like A, B, C, D or E.

AC: Including a Buddhist text?

SB: Oh yes, certainly. Of course, the whole idea of a genuine awakening, at least as I understand it, is that it must necessarily be a journey into the unknown. But I tend to think that many people practice religion—Buddhism or Christianity or Hinduism or whatever—with a subconscious or perhaps even a conscious expectation of what the outcome of their practice will be, whereas if one has a genuinely agnostic starting point, a profound acceptance of "I don't know," then one has made room for the possibility of deep questioning. To really think about it, to really question—to say, "What is this? Who am I?"—is an acknowledgment, in that very moment of questioning, of not knowing. We wouldn't need to ask a question, after all, if we knew any kind of answer.

AC: Of course.

SB: So to me the spiritual quest has as its driving engine a questioning which is necessarily impregnated with a kind of unknowing. And a Buddhist text, for example, or a religious text of any tradition for that matter, can perhaps give us clues and pointers, and maybe very supportive metaphors, but a danger arises if we in any way literalize those metaphors and treat them, as it were, as if they were adequate representations of what it is that our practice is leading towards.

Clarity or Perplexity?

AC: Would this process of inquiry and questioning that you've so eloquently described lead to the discovery—since we're talking about enlightenment, after all—of an answer that has the potential to finally liberate? Or would it simply lead to an inner position from which one recognizes that no answer will ever be found? Is the answer that one is searching for something that could be called "enlightenment," or is "enlightenment," in your view, only the discovery of the fact that one will never know the answer?

SB: I think one would have to suspend both possibilities and begin to question without an expectation of either.

AC: Fair enough. The only reason I'm asking is because in your book you do seem at times to be implying that it wouldn't be possible to find a final or absolute answer. Is that your view?

SB: As I said, that's not a point about which I think it's particularly helpful to speculate.

AC: I understand that, but I just wanted to clarify it because it seems to be an implication of your frequent and favorable-sounding use of the term "perplexity" in your book that the "not knowing" you've been speaking about is the appropriate attitude or relationship to one's experience if one wants to awaken, if one wants to be free in relationship to one's own experience. So I'm left wondering if this perplexity, or not knowing, is supposed to be a final resting place or is just a means to an end.

SB: Okay, it's a good question. I prefer the term "response" rather than "answer." Maybe that's making a rather minor semantic distinction, but the process of questioning, the process of awakening that I'm interested in, is one that leads to a response to the matter of, let's say, birth and death. My own experience is that that perplexity is something that one not only starts out with but that actually stays with one. But that does not preclude the possibility, you see, of a very profound and authentic response to what it is that one is perplexed about. And the term "answer," to me, particularly if it's prefixed with an adjective like "absolute," introduces an element of finality that I'm uncomfortable with, because I am quite profoundly concerned about any suggestion of a kind of stasis, a fixed state or position that comes, as it were, as a final answer to that perplexity. I'm more of the mind that perplexity is in fact the key trigger for authentic responses to life, to death, to being here—to experience, to existence.

AC: But that "response," if it was the expression of an awakened mind, would not be an expression of what we understand "perplexity" to be, would it? Even though that perplexity may well have been the catalyst for it, wouldn't it rather be the expression of some kind of profound clarity, of a very clear and accurate perception?

SB: I don't see a contradiction there.

AC: Oh, good. It's just that this relationship between perplexity and a very clear response didn't seem to be very clear in your book.

SB: Okay. Well, perhaps we could say that we start with perplexity, and perplexity leads to responses to our experience, and the clarity that emerges out of such responses does not render the world less perplexing. In a strange way—and to me this is very central—that kind of clarity of mind reveals the world to be even more mysterious than we may at first have assumed it to be. And awakening, for me, is not about rendering the world unmysterious. It's about penetrating the mystery of life, not canceling it out as though it were a problem that you've somehow solved. Clarity and insight enrich and deepen our sense of the profound mystery that we are. And in terms of our rational capacities, our intellectual capacities, I think it's quite legitimate and meaningful to say that we don't arrive at some kind of answer. But that does not mean that we do not arrive at an authentic response that radically transforms our sense of being in the world and our capacity to be with ourselves, with others, with society. We do, but not in a way that is fixated on any position or stance.

AC: Would it therefore be fair to say, and please help me with this, that in your view a profound enlightenment would still be a relative matter?

SB: I think there's a certain problem with terms here.

AC: I appreciate that what we're speaking about is very subtle and delicate, and I'm aware of the inherent dangers in both directions when speaking in terms of relative and absolute, but—

SB: I'm just not happy with this distinction between absolute and relative. I find it somewhat dualistic. I know Buddhism has used that language—although it seems that in fact the Buddha himself never actually used those terms, at least in the early discourses—but, again, I'm concerned about the possibility of fixing a term like "enlightenment" in any kind of absolute position. I find it a little too simplistic, because I feel that those sorts of distinctions seem to fade away.

AC: What do you mean?

SB: I don't claim fully to understand this at all, but my intuition and experience lead me much more to a sense that the absolute/relative dichotomy is something that actually needs to be let go of, and that the awakening, as it were, is an awakening to, in a way, the letting go of precisely that dividing of reality between those two poles. And that's why I prefer this idea of response. The response to experience through, say, insight or awakening may open up to us the depth of reality, and the profound mystery of reality, but not in a way that alienates us from the contingencies and the exigencies of the relative, ambiguous world that we inhabit. But perhaps all I'm saying is that we lack any ability within the categories of conventional language to really speak coherently about what is essentially mysterious. Does that make sense?

AC: It makes sense, but in terms of this whole notion of the Absolute, or an absolute—which, as you've acknowledged, you feel very uncomfortable with—it does need to be stated that from the perspective of those who do see or perceive awakened consciousness from a perspective that is absolute, the approach you're describing would probably be construed as the relativization of an absolute perspective, and that's simply a different way of seeing it. But I still think what you've said is very clear and very intriguing, and perhaps we can move on, since basically most of my questions are concerned with this anyway.

SB: Okay. All right.

Relative or Absolute?

AC: In your chapter on "Awakening," you write: "Despite the Buddha's own succinct account of his awakening, it has come to be represented (even by Buddhists) as something quite different. Awakening has become a mystical experience, a moment of transcendent revelation of the Truth. Religious interpretations invariably reduce complexity to uniformity while elevating matter-of-factness to holiness. Over time, increasing emphasis has been placed on a single absolute truth such as 'the Deathless,' 'the Unconditioned,' 'the Void,' nirvana, Buddha-nature, etcetera, rather than on an interwoven complex of truths." Could you please explain what you mean?

SB: Well, I suppose what's coming through there is, in a sense, my Buddhist faith and the fact that I'm speaking from within a Buddhist tradition, but in that context trying to clarify not just the questions the Buddha himself asked but also how Buddhism as a system has responded to, and has subsequently articulated, the early Buddhist tradition. And in particular, I'm trying to make it clear that when I am speaking about the Buddha, from my point of view there are limitations inherent in that.

AC: What do you mean by "inherent limitations"?

SB: What I mean, in the book and also for the sake of this conversation—since in your magazine you try to represent many different perspectives—is that because I'm coming from a Buddhist perspective, certain questions may not be so intelligible. I'm not going to be able to talk very meaningfully about anything to do with God, for example, and I don't want to get drawn into areas that I'm not particularly concerned with myself. The whole point of what I wrote there is that questions, for example, of an "absolute," although they refer to an idea that has come into Buddhism, are not central nor even particularly pertinent, really, to what I think the Buddha was trying to get at.

AC: That could be true, I suppose, but what intrigues me, and what is, speaking for myself personally, the thrust of my whole life and investigation, is what the word "enlightenment" means, and the point of my question is that "enlightenment"—which is supposedly what Buddhism is about—does generally refer to something that is absolute. Now I understand that from your point of view, for example, that may not be true. But I think if we said that an absolute component could never be a part of what enlightenment is and means, that would take away some of the power inherent in that word.

SB: What do you mean by "absolute"? I have, actually, some difficulties in understanding what you mean.

AC: That which would be final, unequivocal—something like that.

SB: Transcendent?

AC: Transcendent, yes, but not in the sense of being separate from.

SB: Separate from the world.

AC: Correct—not in that sense at all.

SB: Right. Okay, well, let's go back, then, to the passage that you quoted. The reference there to "the Buddha's own succinct account of his awakening" is to the Dhammacakkappavatana Sutta, which means "the turning of the dharma wheel." It is supposedly the first discourse the Buddha gave, and it contains a very, very clear statement in which the Buddha declares that until he had come to a full awareness and understanding of the Four Noble Truths in three particular ways, he could not claim to have realized full awakening. In other words, this is a very basic starting point from which to begin any attempt to understand a Buddhist perspective on awakening or enlightenment; in fact, this experience of the Four Truths is the defining characteristic of what the Buddha understands by awakening.

Now what's interesting about that is that the Buddha is not laying claim to an experience of some absolute as the defining characteristic of what awakening is, but rather to an interwoven complex of truths that have to do with suffering, the origins of suffering, the ending of suffering and the path that leads to the ending of suffering. It's that whole complex that defines what it means to awaken. And what I find distinctive about that, and profoundly inspiring and resonant with my own experience, is that his concern is not with defining the answer in terms of a revelation of God or faith or an experience of an absolute—be it a transcendent or an immanent absolute—but rather a vision of the dilemma that human beings experience, which he calls dukkha, or suffering; a vision of its origins; a vision of a resolution or response to that dilemma, which he understands as the cessation of its origins—the cessation of craving, momentary or otherwise; and, finally, a vision of a way of life that is conducive to such cessation.

So if we were to use the words "final" or "definitive" in the sense that you're using them, there might be some legitimacy in applying them to the Third Truth—I agree with you there.

AC: You mean freedom from craving?

SB: Yes, I mean the freedom that the Buddha spoke of—the freedom of the heart and mind from craving—which he describes as the breaking of the ridgepole of a house that, as a result, can never be built again. There is certainly something very definitive about that.

AC: Yes.

SB: Very, very definitive—but he doesn't make that into the defining element of what he calls "awakening." Awakening is far more encompassing than that. His process of awakening is one that embraces as much the dilemma of life as it does a resolution to that dilemma. In other words, it's a holistic sense of the world, a sense of one's place within the world that includes insights and understandings that are both relative and also, as you say, somewhat more ultimate, as well as a way of life.

AC: A clear and right relationship to the world of time and space.

SB: Exactly, yes.

Existential or Transcendent?

AC: A little further on in the same chapter, you state: "The Buddha was not a mystic. His awakening was not a shattering insight into a transcendent truth that revealed to him the mysteries of God. He did not claim to have had an experience that granted him privileged, esoteric knowledge of how the universe ticks." Then you say, "Only as Buddhism became more and more of a religion were such grandiose claims imputed to his awakening."

SB: That's right, yes.

AC: So my question would be: Given that the experiential recognition of the Four Noble Truths is, as you've just stated, the most important element of awakening in the Buddhist path, it would have to be more than a strictly intellectual revelation—right?

SB: Yes, of course.

AC: What would be the component, then, in the revelation of the Four Noble Truths that would make it more than merely an intellectual insight or recognition?

SB: The component that would make it more than a merely intellectual recognition would be the fact that the momentum, let's say, or the driving force that propelled the Buddha to this awakening, was the question of life and death. In other words, the concerns that were resolved through his awakening were not philosophical questions, and they were not psychological or religious or spiritual questions. They were deep existential questions, which we find perhaps best illustrated through the legend of his encounter with the four visions of the corpse, the old person, the sick person and the monk. In other words, the Buddha's quest was an existential quest and, as I see it, we can only understand awakening as something that is a resolution to the primary existential dilemma that every human being faces—the fact of having been born and the fact of death. So if we understand the Buddha or any practicing Buddhist of today as setting off on this path, I feel its authenticity is registered to the extent that it is an outcome of that individual's deep, almost preconceptual response to being, to what the Chinese call "the great matter of birth and death." And in responding to such questions, the intellect can be helpful—it can give us useful ideas and so on—but fundamentally this is a matter that grips our entire body/mind and is, as it were, the basis upon which we then focus our attention through meditation or spiritual inquiry or whatever it is that we're doing. And it's the unrelenting honing in on, focusing in on, that existential sense of questioning that triggers and awakens the mind to another response to birth, sickness, aging and death, which historically, for the Buddha, was the revelation of these Four Truths.

AC: But in what we could call this heroic or, even though I know I shouldn't say it, absolute confrontation with these existential questions—which obviously few human beings actually have the courage to engage in—would there not have to be a transcendent element of the sort you refer to in your book as "the Deathless" or "the unconditioned," the discovery of which creates, shall we say, an experiential context that transcends a merely three-dimensional sense of what life is? Wouldn't it be the direct experience of this fourth dimension, which some have also referred to as "the supermundane," that would empower the discovery of these Four Noble Truths—that would give them their liberating power—and that would enable one to recognize the truly liberating power that is inherent in them? Is there not, in other words—and this is just a question—another element that empowers this profound existential inquiry?

SB: Well, I think there's a danger here of getting caught up in certain linguistic problems. Of course you start out, let's say, with a question, and the reason it's a question, or a dilemma, is because you're unable to step out of it. You're unable to see a way out of a situation to which you have no response. And clearly, if you're going to find a response that addresses that question at the depth from which it is asked, then you're going to have to discover a perspective that is not "mundane." But "mundane" simply means the condition in which we find ourselves stuck, so any kind of resolution to a question of such an order is going to require that you somehow transcend the limitation that has stuck you with that question. To that extent, one could say, yes, of course, there must be some degree of self-transcendence. But transcendence, to me, is a relative term. In other words, one can say that one has a transcendent experience only in relation to that in which one was previously trapped. To then reify that notion of transcendence into some kind of state, I think is a mistake.

AC: Again, though, in the way I'm speaking about it, the supermundane would be an experiential context that would reveal the ultimate power to liberate inherent in the Four Noble Truths. So I'm simply asking if there's not another element besides the profound or even heroic confrontation with these existential questions that you have described.

SB: I think not, actually. I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I guess that really my answer would be no.

AC: Okay, fair enough. But just to pursue this a little further, there are several passages in the Nikayas [the earliest recorded recollections of the Buddha's teachings], which you're no doubt very familiar with, in which the Buddha describes what he himself calls "the Deathless": "Where water, earth, heat and wind find no footing, there no stars gleam, no sun is made visible, there shines no moon, there the darkness is not found; and when the sage, the brahmin, himself in wisdom knows this place, he is freed from happiness and dukkha." And in another passage, he says, "Monks, there is that which is not born, not become, not made, not conditioned. Monks, if there were not that which is not born, not become, not made, not conditioned, there could be made known no escape from that which is born, become, made, conditioned here. But since, monks, there is that which is not born, not become, not made, not conditioned, therefore the escape from that which is born, become, made, conditioned is made known." Obviously, the Buddha is here very directly and clearly pointing to the profound importance and significance of the experiential discovery of a mystery which, at least in these formulations, alone makes liberation possible.

SB: I know what you're getting at, but that passage—the second one—is quoted endlessly, and the interesting thing is that it only appears once, and in a relatively minor text found in a subsection of the Khuddaka Nikaya. I therefore take such passages to be primarily inspirational in nature rather than literal.

AC: What does that mean?

SB: It means that if you read through the Buddhist sutras, of which there are so many that it's unlikely anybody's read them all, you'll find all manner of passages which appear, actually, to be at odds with many other passages. And I think it's particularly striking how Western interpreters of Buddhism have latched on to that last passage you've just quoted. It's endlessly reiterated and yet, as I said, it only occurs once in all of the canon. It's a passage that I think is attractive precisely because it lends credence to a kind of mystical absolutist interpretation of Buddhist doctrine that is actually not so widely found elsewhere in the texts. If one reads through the Majjhima Nikaya, for example, you won't find that sort of language very widespread. I'm not saying you can't find passages elsewhere that use that kind of language, but even leaving aside contemporary views on Buddhism, there have been commentators as far back as two thousand years ago who shed doubt on the legitimacy of such passages and saw them as inspirational rather than literal. In other words, for many people that kind of language inspires them to reach beyond themselves. It inspires them to believe in the possibility of something quite other than the sort of experience they feel trapped and stuck in at the present. But that those inspirational injunctions of the Buddha are meant to be taken literally, I personally find problematic.

The problem with Buddhism, you see—and I think this is not only historical but contemporary as well—is that you do not have a single consistent voice running through the tradition. What you have is a plurality of voices that articulate understandings of say, awakening, of the path, of the nature of reality and so on, which are not internally consistent. So we ultimately find "Buddhism" to be really a sort of generic term that points not to any single view but to a diversity of strategies and tactics that different followers of the Buddha throughout history have adopted, some of which are religious or devotional or inspirational in nature, and others of which are more pragmatic or, one could almost say, relativist—down to earth. And what that suggests to me is the sense of a community, a sangha, which is able to incorporate a diversity that reflects the different temperaments and dispositions of those who are inspired by the Buddha to follow their paths in ways that authentically respond to their particular language and the particular experiences that they themselves have had. I'm very resistant to the idea of trying to reduce Buddhism to one particular dominant voice, because I see it as a pluralistic culture of awakening which allows for a diversity of possibilities. Now of course that doesn't mean that we can't have debate and discussion and disagreement. In fact, it's precisely the fact that we are having this kind of conversation that is to me the positive thing.

AC: Your own feeling, though, is that you question the notion that the Buddha put any emphasis on the significance of an absolute or transcendent dimension.

SB: Yes, my own reading of the text—and I know that there are passages like the ones you mentioned—is that those are in balance fairly marginal comments that are actually at odds with the thrust of the Buddha's message that speaks to me. So while I see those passages, as I said, as having inspirational value, I personally can't take them literally because I feel that they would put Buddhism back into the context of religious experience that we find, say, in the Upanishads [esoteric Hindu scriptures], which for all its beauty is not something that I think the Buddha was endorsing.

The Revealed Path

AC: In your chapter on "Imagination," you write that awakening is "by its very nature . . . free from the constraints of preconceived ideas, images, and doctrines. It offers no answers, only the possibility of new beginnings." My question here would be: Doesn't genuine awakening clearly and unambiguously reveal that perfect middle place between all pairs of opposites, in other words, the revealed path, the knowledge of which is the source of all genuine doctrine?

SB: That's not the language I myself would use. Again, though, I think I know what you're getting at, but maybe you could explain what you mean by "the revealed path."

AC: By "the revealed path" I mean that in profound insight it would always become clear what the only right response could possibly be.

SB: Okay, yes, I would sort of accept that and I think, in this case, that we're not actually saying much that's totally different. When I say that it gives no answers, only new beginnings or the possibility of new beginnings, I think that what you've just described is really the same thing I'm pointing to.

AC: Okay, but the reason I'm pursuing this is because when you say that it "offers no answers," again—and I might be misconstruing or misunderstanding it—the implication seems to be that there really isn't any Answer with a capital "A."

SB: That's right.

AC: Whereas what I would say is that what I'm calling this "perfect middle place between all pairs of opposites" would be the answer. In other words, one would never be able to know beforehand specifically what the appropriate response would be, but that place from which it is revealed at any given moment would be discovered to be always one and the same.

SB: Well, I don't know . . . maybe. Again, you see, I think this is not language I find so helpful. When I say, for example, that awakening does not give answers, only the possibility of new beginnings, what I'm getting at is that any kind of genuine insight experience—whether you call it awakening or anything else—is something that will only ever find expression in response to the specific and unique demand of the situation in which one finds oneself. The form that it takes will always be different because our situations are always changing due to the fact that they're fluid, they're contingent on different factors, there are different demands and so on and so forth. But I still think we're probably quibbling over words here.

AC: Well, no, because again, what I'm suggesting is that the insight itself—that depth of insight that is free from all fixed ideas—is the answer. But I get the sense in reading your book—and I think it's because you obviously feel strongly, and for many very good reasons, about staying away from anything that is absolute—that you believe there simply couldn't be one. Now that's fair enough, but it is my own experience that there is indeed an answer, and that answer is the discovery of that place—which, interestingly enough, I do agree you might be pointing to—where there are no fixed ideas. My point, though, is that when we are able to discover that place, it becomes possible for us to always know, or to always find out, what the right response actually is.

SB: Well I can accept that as long as we don't literalize that place as something that we can fix, as it were. I mean, I'm rather at home with the notion in Zen that one constituent of the awakened mind is that it is one in which there is no place to rest. And I think that what I'm trying to get at here is that I feel that the Buddha was always shying away from the idea that there was some kind of final absolute resting place—that although he recognized that through various disciplines and practices and lifestyles you can free yourself from the constraints that hold you in particular places and lock you into positions and fixations and so on, still, that process of liberation is not in itself a place but a possibility. It's an opening to a fresh and unprecedented response to the contingencies of the world. In other words, I see Buddhism and Buddhist practice as operating within a very dynamic context, one that is not concerned with, and in fact is highly suspicious of, the rhetoric and language of place, of ultimates, of absolutes, of positions of any kind.

AC: Well, as you say, when we're using language we can sometimes get into a little bit of difficulty. But when I say that the place I'm referring to is between all pairs of opposites, it ought to be pretty clear that from the point of view of the rational mind, it's not really a place that can be imagined, because it's inherently free from all the constrictions of any view. And yet, it is precisely the discovery of that "no-place" that makes a truly enlightened response to life possible.

SB: Yes, okay. In that way I can go along with it, I suppose. But to me, the point is really about freeing myself from fixations that trap one in a fixed set of images, ideas, views, patterns and so on, and once that style of being or way of being is realized, it's not as if you've discovered a place to rest, but rather an openness to responding to the world in a way that is not cluttered and labored and tied down with fixations and places.

Re-imagining the Self

AC: In the same chapter, "Imagination," you go on to say that the "notion of a static self is the primary obstruction to the realization of our unique potential as an individual being." Now it wasn't completely clear to me when I read this whether by "static self" you were referring to notions about the ego/personality or about the Self Absolute. But in either case, while I can understand why the notion of a static self could easily be "the primary obstruction to the realization of our unique potential as an individual being," it isn't so clear to me why the realization of our "unique potential as an individual being" would be so important to begin with, particularly in the context of enlightenment.

SB: Well first of all, in that particular passage I suppose I'm primarily referring more to a notion of ego. But at the same time, I would also include metaphysical and religious ideas of a kind of absolute Self, only with rather more caution because I know that that concept can be understood in a number of ways that are not at all similar to the way we hold an ego. I do believe, though, that for many people the notion of Self with a capital "S," however it is defined, is in many ways a kind of consolatory device to give one something to hold on to, something that you can identify with as being "me." Otherwise, I don't really see why someone would feel any particular need to perpetuate the use of the "S-word." For me, you see, one of the attractions of Buddhism is that the Buddha is fairly ruthless in refusing any kind of legitimacy to the term "self," and I think that whether we're speaking in terms of a contemporary psychological experience in which we're trapped in a kind of egoic, narcissistic self-preoccupation or in terms of the more mystical stance of resting in one's true Self with a capital "S," the problem is still the same. And that is that one is still trapped in a language of things and points and places rather than allowing oneself to become open to the possibility of imagining things otherwise. You mentioned that the passage we're speaking about came from my chapter on imagination, and I'd like to pursue that because for me, imagination is the key issue here.

Again, it's my understanding that the experience of insight or awakening is not something final in itself, and should not be thought of as an answer in itself, and the reason for that is that it's not really complete, really fulfilled, until it finds a form in the world, and that form is realized through the activation of the imagination. In other words, an authentic response is found not through satisfaction or fulfillment for me in my own personal domain, my own personal territory—be it the ego or the mystical Self—but at that point where I reenter the world of images, ideas, forms, suffering, pain and confusion that is all around me—all of which is, after all, not in my own psyche but in the world I inhabit. Awakening, therefore, if we're to expand the word out further, is not an exclusively subjective or private experience. It is actually an experience that embraces one's own personal expression as one pole of it, but then expands imaginatively through and into words and acts and images that take form in the world we share with other beings. And that is really, I feel, another way of expressing the more traditional idea of the integration of wisdom and compassion, which states that awakening is not just about wisdom but is the unification, the integration, of these two. So I don't see awakening as a private state at all, but rather as a description of a way of being in the world. The breaking down of these borders of self is tantamount to an opening to, an exposure to, a vulnerability or transparency to, the plight of the world, of the other—and that to me is really the core of what I understand by awakening. So I hope that helps to explain some of my critical points.

AC: That's very beautiful; it's what I would call a truly nondual view. What you're describing is truly holistic in that it's inclusive rather than exclusive.

SB: Yes, exactly.

AC: At the same time, I find it interesting that you're putting a great deal of emphasis on the autonomous individual's freedom to realize his or her unique capacity for personal and social fulfillment. Of course, from a certain point of view it definitely makes sense; the only question I have about it has to do with the fact that at some point, if someone is truly interested in becoming a liberated person, even the notions of autonomy, individual freedom and personal fulfillment are going to have to be left aside in order to find out what it actually means to be in the unknown—wouldn't you agree?

SB: I agree, but I wouldn't say "left aside." This is an important question, I think. I don't feel that the status of the individual and their personal autonomy are notions that need to be abandoned so much as radically reconstrued. In other words, one needs to recognize that one's sense of personal autonomy or individuality, from a deluded or nonawakened state, is one that is premised on the idea that underpinning one's sense of who one is is some kind of esoteric substance called "me," some kind of fixed, static point within my experience that represents the ground of my being. Now through exploring and inquiring into the nature of self, into the nature of who or what one is, that image is exploded in the sense that one begins more and more to recognize that who I am, which is unique and individual to a degree, is not what it is because of some fixed point within me but because of the unrepeatable matrix of conditions and causes and contingencies and so on that differentiate this being here from that being there. In other words, it's a recognition that who and what I am is a unique reflection of the whole, a unique reflection of everything else that is.

Now obviously, a notion of individuality or autonomy such as this is radically different from the more commonsense, gut-feeling notion of individuality or autonomy that we normally hold. I am who I am, in this case, not because of a deep sense of me, but because of my unique position, as it were, in relation to everything else—even physically. I mean, each person stands on the earth and looks at the world in a way that only that person could see the world.

What Defines a "Culture of Awakening"?

AC: It's obviously true that in a certain sense a liberated human being would be, and should be, a very clear example of a person who had realized his or her creative autonomy. The only point I'm trying to make is that if an individual is truly interested in awakening, then in order to take that leap into the unknown—which, as we all know, is not necessarily an easy thing to do because there is a profound existential fear of not knowing—they have to find a way to avoid the temptation of seeking solace in the belief that no matter what happened, they didn't have to worry because they were always going to remain quite unique. Quite often what we human beings are most afraid of is losing our uniqueness, precisely because, as you pointed out, this is what we hold on to in order to be able to recognize ourselves. So in order to become free, we obviously have to get to that point where we're no longer so compulsively looking to find ourselves.

SB: That's an important point, and it takes us back to the notion of what it actually means to pursue existential questions in a radical sense. What it means, of course, is to put everything up for question. And if you're not prepared to do that, then you're not really prepared to open yourself to another response to life.

AC: Absolutely true.

SB: But at the same time I think it's important to remember that it's a sequence of steps that is implied here, and initially the very possibility of making those steps depends upon the person feeling empowered to act, to take a step. Now it could be that the next step you take is one in which you then begin to radically question every assumption you have about yourself or your individuality, your personhood, and clearly, I agree that that is a very necessary part of the process, and that it is a very radical, unsettling and scary thing to do. But as I said at the beginning, one would only take that step were one confident in one's own personal power and ability, as it were, to do so. So these two things—autonomy and radical questioning—somehow go hand in hand, and for that reason I'd be reluctant to accept that there is any kind of language sufficient for all instances and all phases of the process itself. One needs to value and recognize different vocabularies, as it were, at different stages of one's engagement with this process.

I'd like to add to this another idea I believe I mentioned earlier, that of the "culture of awakening." I think there's a tendency in the West to sometimes give too much importance to the centrality of the individual embarking on a heroic quest, rather than looking from more of a historical distance and seeing that the possibility for that heroic quest rests on there being a place in the culture that values and supports it. What I see as the role of Buddhism in society—and of other traditions, too—is not as some kind of personal strategy for individuals but rather as the foundation for a culture in which such behavior is legitimized, valued, clearly articulated and encouraged in all strata of our society. And that, I think, is in many respects a far more important challenge for those of us who are engaging with these ideas today than always bringing it back again and again to the heroic individual quest. Now some people will, of course, feel that to be the prime motive for their response to their own existential or spiritual concerns, and I have no problem with that. But it does somehow exclude or put in second place those who are more concerned, perhaps, with creating structures that will give rise to a culture of awakening that will hopefully, over a much longer term, provide us with a means to transform this highly materialistic and very narcissistic culture that we live in at present into one that supports the kinds of values that we're discussing at the moment.

AC: One would think that they would go hand in hand. But unless at least a few are willing to be so heroic as to go beyond the known completely, what exactly the vision of those new structures would be couldn't become very clear—could it?

SB: Yes and no. Of course that element is crucial, without a doubt. But I think it also perhaps underestimates, or doesn't sufficiently value, the innate intuitive capacities of creative people—poets and artists and others—who may not be drawn toward that kind of intense spiritual practice but are nevertheless somehow intuitively in touch with other possibilities and forms, which, to me, also represent very legitimate forms of practice. So again, it's a question of recognizing that this awakening thing does not necessarily correspond to the model you seem to have of the heroic individual striving to let go of all of their stuff and embrace the unknown and so on as very much the solitary quest. That kind of approach, the heroic quest, is very much one that values transcendence over immanence. Clearly that's crucial, but it's important to recognize that awakening is also something immanent. It's also something that is in a sense already present in the ordinary mind. And it's there, I think, that the artist comes into his or her own. There are forms of practice, and forms of expression of these kinds of things, that are not reducible to the insights of people who've had intense transcendent spiritual experiences. I think that awakening percolates through, and is percolating through, in our time in history, in forms of culture, music, literature and art that are not even necessarily self-consciously engaged in that kind of heroic quest but are simply trying to express an intuitive kind of gut feeling of something else, something other. So I would say that a culture of awakening embraces and values both.

Autonomy or Authority?

AC: I appreciate the model that you've presented. My point, though, is that any genuine "culture of awakening" is obviously going to be defined by the realization and the deepest insights of the individuals involved, and those insights that make it a "culture of awakening"—if it really is one—are most likely to come from the individuals who've gone the farthest. But what you've said helps me to make a little more sense of the fact that despite your apparent dislike for the notion of the "solitary quest," you consider it a positive development that contemporary dharma practice, as you write in your book, "is becoming individuated," and that "in valuing imagination and diversity, such an individuated vision would ultimately empower each practitioner to create his or her own distinctive track within the field of dharma practice."

SB: That's right.

AC: What you describe there is a view that seems to be very popular these days, particularly in Buddhist circles. My question is: How could a dharma practitioner who is sincerely seeking enlightenment truly be able to create his or her own distinctive path? Isn't the evolutionary movement toward awakening a movement from the gross to the subtle, from the known to the unknown? Unless there is a profound and heartfelt willingness not to know, how could anyone ever get enlightened in the first place? Even in the relationship with a spiritual mentor—assuming, of course, that the mentor is enlightened—isn't it essential that the student be willing to submit to the mentor's guidance in order to find his or her way to the unknown—in other words, to liberation? Otherwise what we're left with is something on the order of, "Master, my inner Buddha is telling me that what suits my awakening today is to sleep in."

SB: I would cite, in this instance, the famous passage from the end of the Buddha's life, where he refuses to appoint a successor and gives expression to this whole idea of being "a lamp unto yourself," of taking the dharma as your guide—which is what speaks to my heart, as it were. But actually this discussion quite accurately reflects the whole Buddhist tradition if we look at how it tracks out historically, because it always has been caught in precisely this tension between the valuing of individual responsibility and self-reliance on the one hand, and the recognition, on the other, of the value of discipline—of giving yourself over to monastic orders, let's say, or giving yourself to the uncritical following of a teacher or a guru or a guide, whether it be a Zen master or a Tibetan lama or whatever.

Every historical phase of Buddhism has had to deal with responding to the past, to the tradition as it has been handed down, and that tension is always going to be there, and every response is going to be, to some extent, a new beginning. So while I personally find myself to be more in harmony, and more comfortable, with the path of self-reliance, I certainly wouldn't suggest that this alone is sufficient. And I value very highly the importance of giving oneself to the guidance of those who are wiser and more awake and enlightened than oneself. That, I think, is an unavoidable component, and if you take it away, then the whole thing does just become whatever you want to make of it.

AC: Exactly. And that's the question I have about the thrust of much of what you've written in your book. I feel that when push comes to shove it could too easily boil down to exactly that, because as you know, many people think they want to be free, but when they start finding out what it really entails, they often start backpedaling. It is at those times that are most critical that one often needs to be willing to take great risks in order to make that unimaginable leap into a completely different relationship to life.

SB: I think it's also a temperamental thing. I mean, some people do seem to have such a capacity for isolation and self-reliance that they have relatively little to do with communities and teachers and so on, and others have the very opposite temperament and require that sort of support as a precondition for any kind of progress along the path. But again, I wouldn't want to reduce the process to one extreme or the other. We need to recognize that in practice, it's a question of acknowledging and recognizing the shortcomings and advantages of both. And just as you can follow a very wise teacher and fall into dependency and a kind of disempowerment and a rather unhealthy reliance upon some authoritarian figure, following purely your own intuition and instincts and impulses can lead you to a kind of narcissistic absorption in your own fantasies.

AC: That's for sure.

SB: So it's a question, really, of finding a balance. I still feel, nonetheless, that the aim of the practice is freedom, and that includes freedom from being in the throes, as it were, of an authority figure to whom one endlessly defers.

AC: Even the Buddha, you mean?

SB: Yes, even the Buddha, sure.

AC: But if the Buddha was really the Buddha, would it be possible to be in that kind of a relationship with him, if he was who he is supposed to have been? I mean, would such a thing be possible?

SB: Oh, I don't know.

AC: To be disempowered in the way that you're describing?

SB: Well, yes, actually, I do think that's possible, and again, I don't want to elevate the Buddha into too much of a sort of superhuman person. He certainly was a very good organizer and probably ran a very tight ship, but what has always been telling for me are those injunctions he gave at the end of his life, where he actually said, in a sense, "Well, I've done my job. You get on with it." At that point, he rather seems to be emphasizing self-reliance over anything else. But I also think we have to see this in the context that it's somewhat dangerous to try to define what true Buddhism is, as it were, by locating it within a certain body of older texts. I see Buddhism as a 2,500-year ongoing experiment in awakening that is continuously trying out new things. It's continuously adjusting and changing, modifying, questioning what it's doing, and that to me is precisely where the richness of the tradition lies: that you can have Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism, all of which are amazingly different and yet nonetheless retain the core, the primary threads, of that which was set in motion by the historical Buddha.

The Buddha unleashed into history, as it were, a whole series of cultures of awakening, all of which would have been completely unpredictable in the Buddha's own time, each one reflecting the needs and specificities of the different situations in which the dharma found itself. So the kind of dharma that is going to emerge in our culture is not going to be like anything else that's happened before. It's going to have its own peculiar characteristics, and our challenge is to somehow keep aware of the diversity of approaches that we inherit and not allow ourselves to get drawn into one particular aspect of that and lose sight of the whole. And that, I think, is the great opportunity that we have in the West, because we can see that bigger picture perhaps better than it's ever been seen before; we can see Buddhism as an historical movement, as a series of contingent cultures.

AC: In your book, you describe the situation of being in your kitchen and then going out for some milk for your tea and coming back to drink it. Even though something like this obviously could never happen, if, when you went out for your milk one morning—and you hadn't even quite woken up yet because you still hadn't had your tea—you suddenly saw the Buddha before you with a throng of ten thousand monks, and he came up to you and said, "Stephen, your time has come. Follow me."—would you do it?

SB: Well, it's such a hypothetical question, I can't really answer. . . . I probably would, yes. . . . Yes, sure—why not?