Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor has just published a new book called Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, which tries to pare away the theistic/religious trappings of contemporary Buddhism to get to the philosophical core of Buddhism, which has a lot of non-theistic elements to it. This book review in the Manchester Guardian by religion writer Mark Vernon explains the root of Batchelor’s observations. Batchelor writes that the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism resonate with non-theism: the focus on self-reliance and self-awareness, the derivation of meaning from real experience, and the acceptance of the world as it is without supernatural explanations or magical beliefs. The book has drawn praise from none less than Christopher Hitchens, and has also been embraced by Harvard humanist Greg Epstein, both of whom should be familiar to readers of this blog by now.
A lot of my own approach to an atheistic worldview is similarly informed by those parts of Buddhism, though I would never consider myself a Buddhist in any way. I’m not sure how I feel about the effort to attach that to the touchy-feely humanist movement, but I can see where using the sort of arguments Batchelor is making about demystifying religious cultures certainly can be applied. Looks like this book and it’s predecessor, Buddhism Without Beliefs, are worth a read.
Having been a Buddhist for years, this really resonates. What attracted me initially (particularly having grown up surrounded by Lutherans) was Buddhism’s underlying tenet that the answers we seek lie within ourselves. It’s not about turning our problems over to Jesus, Pat Robertson, or Kobe Bryant. It’s about having the honesty and the clarity to look within our own selves. Pretty powerful stuff if you think about it. ;-)
Just so, but, as you know, along the way Buddhism has been clouded up with the usual moralism and the transformation of the Buddha into a god-like figure, along with the need for a clergy to “correctly interpret” things, so stripping away all that stuff is really worthwhile. I was very drawn to Zen Buddhism for a while because it seemed to not fall into those traps of organized religion, but came to realize that there were traps to Zen thinking, too. I’m quite interested to read this latest book by Batchelor, because he seems to have come to a similar place.