Home > Author > Stephen Batchelor

Stephen Batchelor QUOTES

Stephen Batchelor QUOTES

1 " This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

2 " The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death. (154) "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

3 " 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. (65) "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

4 " We took a bus to the nearby monastery of one of the last great Tang dynasty Chan masters, Yun-men. Yun-men was known for his pithy “one word” Zen. When asked “What is the highest teaching of the Buddha?” he replied: “An appropriate statement.” On another occasion, he answered: “Cake.” I admired his directness. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

5 " What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176) "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

6 " Ironically, we may discover that death meditation is not a morbid exercise at all. Only when we lose the use of something taken for granted (whether the telephone or an eye) are we jolted into a recognition of its value. When the phone is fixed, the bandage removed from the eye, we briefly rejoice in their restoration but swiftly forget them again. In taking them for granted, we cease to be conscious of them. In taking life for granted, we likewise fail to notice it. (To the extent that we get bored and long for something exciting to happen.) By meditat- ing on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life. "

― Stephen Batchelor

7 " To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157) "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

8 " I know very little with anything approaching certainty. I know that I was born, that I exist, and that I will die. For the most part, I can trust my brain's interpretation of the data presented to my senses: this is a rose, that is a car, she is my wife. I do not doubt the reality of the thoughts and emotions and impulses I experience in response to these things. . . . Yet apart from these primary perceptions, intuitions, inferences, and bits of information, the views that I hold about the things that really matter to me--meaning, truth, happiness, goodness, beauty--are finely woven tissues of belief and opinion. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

9 " I am empty only in the sense that there is nothing fixed or intrinsically real at the core of my identity as a person.
Recognition of such emptiness therefore liberates one to change and transform oneself. And this, it seems, is precisely what the Jungian theory of individuation describes, yet in a language that is affirmative rather than negative. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

10 " No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of giving more importance to a hypothetical, post-mortem existence than to this very life here and now.
Moreover, the Buddhist teachings and practices that had the most impact upon me did so precisely because they heightened my sense of being fully alive in and responsive to this world. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

11 " I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive. The standard subjects of history, geography, mathematics, and English seemed perversely designed to ignore the questions that really mattered. As soon as I had some inkling of what 'philosophy' meant, I was puzzled as to why we were not taught it. And my skepticism about religion only grew as I failed to see what the vicars and priests I encountered gained from their faith. They struck me either as insincere, pious, and aloof or just bumblingly good-natured. (p. 10) "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

12 " [Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130) "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

13 " Without relying on any deities, mantras, or mandalas, without having to master the intricacies of any doctrine or philosophy, I vividly understood what it meant to be a fragile, impermanent creature in a fragile, impermanent world.
The mindfulness sharpened my attention to everything that was going on within and around me. My body became a tingling, pulsing mass of sensations. At times when I sat outside I felt as though the breeze were blowing through me. The sheen of the grass was more brilliant, the rustling leaves were like a chorus in an endlessly unfolding symphony. At the same time there was a deep stillness and poise at the core of this vital awareness. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

14 " Much of what animated me in those days I now recognize as the romantic yearnings of an idealistic, alienated, and aimless young man. I endowed these strange, exotic people, about whom I knew little, with all the virtues that my own culture seemed to lack. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

15 " For me, Buddhism is like a living organism. If it is to flourish outside self-enclosed ghettos of believers, it will have to meet the challenge of understanding, interacting with, and adapting to an environment that is strikingly different from those in which it has evolved. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

16 " I was encouraged to ask in all seriousness what this life is for, what matters most for myself and others, what non-negotiable values I might even be willing to die for. At the same time, I started to notice the poignant ephemerality of things. I sensed the immanence of death in my bones. I felt the urgency of knowing that this day on earth might be my last. Yet rather than making me gloomy and morbid, such reflections intensified my sense of being alive. They induced a kind of rapture, which snapped me out of the dull routines of the familiar and confronted me with the miracle of life as it unfolds and vanishes each instant. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

17 " A person who is asleep is either lost in deep unconsciousness or absorbed in a dream. Metaphorically, this was how the Buddha must have seen both his previous self as well as everyone else he had known: they either were blind to the questions of existence or sought consolation from them in metaphysical or religious fantasies. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

18 " We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by our outward show of ‘civilized’ manners and ‘cultured’ social behavior into believing that self-concern, desirous attachment, aversion, and indifference are steadily losing their hold over us. "

― Stephen Batchelor

19 " After all, people desire immortality and do not wish to embrace the inescapable reality of death; they long for happiness and shy away from the contemplation of pain; they want to preserve their sense of self, not desconstruction it into fleeting and impersonal components. It is counterintuitive to accept that deathlessness is experienced each moment we are released from the deathlike grip of greed and hatred; that happiness in this world is only possible for those who realized that this world is incapable of providing happiness; that one becomes a fully individuated person only by relinquishing beliefs in an essential self. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

20 " Buddhism has become for me a philosophy of action and responsibility. It provides a framework of values, ideas, and practices that nurture my ability to create a path in life, to define myself as a person, to act, to take risks, to image things differently, to make art. The more I prize Gotama's teachings free from the matrix of Indian religious thought in which they are entrenched and the more I come to understand how his own life unfolded in the context of his times, the more I discern a template for living that I can apply at this time in this increasingly secular and globalized world. "

― Stephen Batchelor , Confession of a Buddhist Atheist