Not a Matter of Belief

Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Bachelor.  Random House.  320 pp. $14.99

Some years ago, when I was trying to get my head around Christianity, I read various works by C.S. Lewis, including Mere Christianity.  Lewis is widely regarded as an effective proselytizer for the religion, offering not a passionate but a reasonable approach to the subject.  After some early arguments, he says something to the effect of, “If you’ve gotten this far, you might be ready to take a crack at prayer.  So let’s have a go of it.”  Something like that.  I was supposed to stop reading the book and pray?  I decided to skip that part.  I plodded dutifully along, trying, trying, to accept what he said.

I couldn’t do it.  I always got to a point where I said, Wait a minute, I’m supposed to believe this?  I couldn’t decide if there was something wrong with Christianity or with me.

Years later, I ran into a woman who was deeply and naturally religious, a Catholic, but her religion had nothing to do with rational persuasion.  There were all kinds of Catholic doctrines she didn’t agree with at all.  She didn’t even like the man who was Pope at the time.  And yet there was some part of her that was profoundly religious, and profoundly Catholic.  She couldn’t understand why I didn’t get it, or why I was so angry about it.  (I felt rejected, was part of the reason.  I felt deficient.)

Hoping to connect in some spiritual way, she suggested we take a class in Buddhist meditation.  I had my guard up, but during the early months, our teacher never suggested we believe anything.  He just told us how to sit, and suggested we do that every day.  As I did that practice, I not only discovered something I’d been looking for all my life—a sense of connection with something larger—but the teachings of Christianity, which I knew quite well (I’d read the Bible extensively, and other theologians) suddenly began to make sense.  It wasn’t rational sense.  It was more intuitive, or emotional.  I started to get it.

Stephen Bachelor, though my rough contemporary (he’s five years younger) had a rather different experience.  He was raised in an entirely secular, non-religious household, and wound up drifting toward the East, literally traveling there, as a young man who was smart but disaffected, had not gone to university.  He eventually wound up in Dharamsala, where a number of Tibetans had taken up residence after fleeing their country, and enthusiastically took up Tibetan Buddhism because he was so impressed by the people he met.  It included much more study than what I’d been exposed to (the Theravada tradition), and at some point, though it took him some years, he thought, Wait a minute.  I don’t believe all this.  In the meantime, he’d done a Theravada retreat with the famous teacher S. N. Goenka, and was struck by that deep immersion in meditation.

When he eventually broke with Tibetan Buddhism, he made his way to Korea, where they practice a severe form of Zen, including two three-month retreats per year.  He soon gave himself to that practice, and stayed for several years, long enough to do seven of those retreats.  Eventually he decided to return to Great Britain, give up being a monk of any kind, and become a lay Buddhist, making a living, eventually, as a writer.  I remember his early work, and resonated with a lot of it, especially Buddhism Without Beliefs (I responded to that title by thinking, Of course!  Is there any other kind?).

But he lost me with this title, which came out around the same time Christopher Hitchins, Richard Dawkins, and others were taking great delight in proclaiming themselves atheists.  I don’t like that word because it proclaims something—there is no God—which I don’t happen to agree with, but also because it seems needlessly aggressive, and arrogant.  I once heard Mel Weitsman say that Buddhism is not atheistic, but non-theistic, and I agree with that.  The Buddha didn’t positively assert there is no God.  He didn’t take up the question.

More recently, though, I saw Bachelor in a series of YouTubes with Brad Warner, who takes a more moderate view of the whole matter (having written a book entitled, There Is No God and He Is Always With You), and I found Bachelor to be an intelligent, engaging, and modest man, who admitted he didn’t object to a theologian like Paul Tillich, who saw God not as a great being who lives in the sky somewhere, but as the Ground of Being (echoing something St. Paul said, “In him we live, and move, and have our being”).  So I thought I’d take a second look.

Again, I find his personal experience interesting, and sympathetic.  I think that a lot of what he went through had more to do with his age than with what he encountered; he was going through a natural process of growth, which included not just Buddhism but also some Jungian therapy, and wide reading in theology and philosophy.  And the man has some creds as a meditator: seven three-month retreats are nothing to sneeze at.  He has also studied the Pali Canon extensively, and admits that he, like everyone else, is cherry picking from it, selecting passages that agree with his personal prejudices.  We all do that.  I do it too.

But honestly, I feel that the portrait he eventually presents of Buddhism is, to say the least, reductive.  He bases his understanding on the Four Noble Truths—which I too see as the Buddha’s most basic teaching, not something to believe but to do—but winds up making them sound like the equivalent of a self-help book.  You work through those truths, you’re not so reactive and grumpy, you get along with people better.  Ain’t that wonderful.  And the portrait he gives of the Buddha makes him sound more like a cunning statesman than a spiritual teacher.  I’ve read various accounts of the Buddha’s life—including Karen Armstrong’s—but nothing that even remotely sounds like this.

I agree with Bachelor that karma and rebirth seem to be cultural artifacts, and that the Buddha didn’t actually teach them (that’s more true, though, of rebirth than of karma).   And I agree that the Buddha focused on relieving suffering.  But one passage from the Pali Canon that Bachelor doesn’t mention is one that really struck me, and was first mentioned by my original teacher, Larry Rosenberg.  The Buddha was walking with his students through the forest, and he took up a handful of leaves.  Are there more leaves in my hand or in the forest, he asked his followers.  There are more in the forest, they said.  The leaves in my hand are what I’ve taught you.  The leaves in the forest are what “I have known with direct knowledge.”  What the Buddha was giving his followers was a profound spiritual practice that would teach them far more than what he had spelled out.  What he was teaching was the practice, not some doctrine.

I agree that, when I sit in meditation, I don’t find an immutable self.  There is therefore no Other, because to have an Other, there must be a self.  But what I encounter when I sit is so large and overwhelming, so full—as Larry Rosenberg said—of “all the energy and love and compassion you could ever want”—that I personally don’t hesitate to call it God, though I don’t care if others don’t use that word.  It’s as if I’m part of that larger thing (though it’s not a thing) also as if I am that thing, though not in an ego-inflating way.  I’m nothing myself, but part of something much larger.  I can’t prove that.  I wouldn’t try to persuade someone of it.  And it doesn’t happen every time I sit, or every minute of any sitting.  But it’s happened enough, and it happens to some extent almost every time.

That was the overwhelming experience I was looking for when I studied Christianity, but you don’t get it from reading a book, even one by a great writer.  You can’t be persuaded of it.  It’s not a matter of belief.  It’s something you experience.  And then you live out of that experience.  You carry its effect into your life.

It’s not that there are no teachings in Buddhism.  It’s that there’s nothing to believe.