Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor
Review
I liked reading about the difference between buddhism and the (less “religious”) dhamma of siddharta gotama and now understand what Stephen means with secular buddhism. The book is written as a comprehensive collection of all the stories that were known about gotama, which was bit much for me. I liked the parts where Stephen explained his interpretations best.
Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
Chapter 18 - A Secular Buddhist
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Mindfulness focuses entirely on the specific conditions of one’s day-to-day experience. It is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine.
I love this specific distinction between dogmatic Spirituality and Secular Spirituality. It opened my mind to experiment with techniques that are usually found in theology but can be applied in a more scientific manner.
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Gotama called this way of life an “eightfold” path: i.e., appropriate vision, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. S
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exposed belief in an unknowable God as an irrational claim, unsupported by either experience or reason, based solely on the assertion of a teacher or a scripture that is reverently repeated.
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No matter how unbearable at times were the travails of this unjust world, they faded to insignificance when compared to the sufferings of all beings throughout endless time and space.
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. As the words of Siddhattha Gotama metamorphosed into the religion called “Buddhism,” I began to suspect that something might have gone awry.
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To live on this shifting ground, one first needs to stop obsessing about what has happened before and what might happen later.
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nirvana is not the goal of the eightfold path, but its starting point. The person who enters such a path is one who aspires to a life no longer conditioned and dictated by the narrow demands of craving. T
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G. P. Malalasekera’s invaluable Dictionary of Pali Proper Names,
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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
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Buddha said that people who hold such a view “go beyond what is known by themselves and what is reckoned to be true by the world” and are therefore “in the wrong.
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In that discourse he unambiguously described his awakening as the result of having recognized, performed, and completed four tasks: fully knowing suffering letting go of craving experiencing cessation [of craving] cultivating an eightfold path
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Religion is life living itself: not a mechanical repetition of dogmas motivated by threats and fear.”
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Belief in the existence of a non-physical mental agent, I realized, was a Buddhist equivalent of belief in a transcendent God.
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On what grounds should I choose to believe a Buddhist meditator rather than a Christian mystic or, for that matter, someone who claims to have been abducted by aliens and taken to a spaceship docked behind Alpha Centauri?
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Of all the possible forms in which one can be reborn, the human is the most precious, since it alone provides the leisure and opportunity to practice the Dharma, which shows the path that leads to the end of suffering.
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The aim of meditation, for Dharmakirti, was not to gain mystical insight into emptiness, but to arrive at an unfiltered experience of the fluctuating, contingent, and suffering world.
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Dzogchen (Great Perfection) is an awareness practice, in some respects similar to Vipassana, taught in the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism.