About Batchelor's Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (Loy)

Most versions of Buddhism, including Shakyamuni's teachings as presented in the Pali canon, understand the spiritual goal as release from samsara - the round of death and continued rebirth into the world of suffering and craving - into a realm beyond samsara, namely nirvana. No modern scholar questions that this was the goal of the path as articulated in the earliest texts, which remains the main problem for any attempt to derive a more secular and empiricist Buddha from those same texts.

One might see some support for Stephen Batchelor's position in later Mahayana emphasis on the nonduality of samsara and nirvana. According to Nagarjuna, the bounds (koti) of samsara are not other than the bounds of nirvana, in which case the goal of the Buddhist path is simply to realize the true nature of the world, "beyond deluded thought" yet nonetheless right here and now. But there is still an all-important epistemological distinction between the way deluded beings experience this world and the way an awakened person does.

So perhaps we do not need to choose between a transcendental release from samsara or the secular world as generally understood today. Contemplative practices open us up to different ways of experiencing the relationship between ourselves and the world. The challenge today is to bring those alternative modes into conversation with Western modernity.

Almost every religious reformer tries to return to the original teachings of the founder, only to end up projecting his or her own understanding back onto those origins. Batchelor's Buddha too seems too modern: humanistic and agnostic, skeptical and empirical - by no coincidence, a superior version of us, or at least of Stephen Batchelor. Instead of constructing the Buddha one wants by trying to extract him from his cultural context, I think we should accept that even Shakyamuni Buddha was largely and inevitably a product of his time (just as conditioned arising implies), and undertake the more difficult project of determining for ourselves what aspects of his teaching remain valid for us today. (from "Secular Buddhism?", by David R. Loy, in Tricycle, Fall 2010)