12. Breaking Through — A Discussion With Stephen Batchelor
Podcast: Download (21.2MB)
Stephen Batchelor is a Buddhist writer and teacher, who trained in both the Tibetan and Zen traditions. He is well known for bringing contemporary worldviews to bear on traditional Buddhist teachings, some find his rejection of karma and rebirth controversial. I met up with him at Gaia House, a retreat centre in Devon, UK whilst he was teaching his annual Meditation and Study retreat with his wife Martine. A huge thank you to Stephen for taking the time to be interviewed :)
The music is by tom and is an arrangement of Yann Tiersen’s Comptine d’un autre été, which was popularised by the classic French film Amélie.
July 14th, 2010 at 2:33 am
Wonderful discussion! SB is a treasure.
July 14th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Nice work, Tom! Great interview. But I still don’t get Batchelor. I’m not quite convinced that he’s speaking from experience rather than ideas and I don’t understand his project to make Buddhism comprehensible to Western secularism.
The guy studied in the east for years and years, yet most of what I hear from him sounds like stuff you can read in the Sunday supplements!
The danger with the ‘ordinary’ approach, as I’m sure you must have considered ad infinitum, is that it can be taken too far – or not taken anywhere at all. Surely, the Buddha mind is *not* the ordinary mind. It’s just *not*! Yet the risk of emphasising the ordinary is that we may be taken to mean that they are the same thing.
I just can’t decide whether Batchelor is speaking from Buddha mind or the ordinary mind. If it were the former, I’m not sure how he can seem so confident in his dismissal of karma and rebirth, or so keen to make concessions to western materialism.
Seems a nice and clever bloke, though! I had the privilege of cleaning his rooms when I was at Gaia House… ;-) Interested to hear what your gut feeling was during the interview…
July 14th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Thank you for this podcast. I like to hear Stephen Bachelor speak. So very clear. And the word ‘breakthrough’ I never heard before in the non-dual context but perfectly captures the ‘experience’ of realizing that One is Being.
July 16th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Thanks for the kind comments Tom, Duncan and Ria.
@Duncan: Thanks :) Well, I think the thing with ordinariness, like I mention in the podcast, is that it is a bit of mischievous provocation. If I was really pressed I would have to say that the fundamental nature of reality is neither ordinary nor extraordinary, in fact it has no expressible quality to it whatsoever. For me, and I suspect Mike as well, the promotion of the ordinary is just another voice in the rich dialogue, and perhaps one that is not given much attention for fear that people might find it unappealing.
So I’ll say it on record now, an engagement with the spiritual dimension of life can have an utterly profound and mind-blowing effect. In fact, in many ways this deep shift that spirituality can precipitate can be a prime factor in providing an unprecedented confidence in one’s view. In the sense that it can allow us to formulate opinions that break from the status quo; we are able to hold fast to ideas regardless of who and how many others share them.
Ultimately, my barometer for Stephen has been getting to know him over many years and after many retreats. I’ve never witnessed his views take first place over genuine human warmth and concern for others. He is first and foremost engaged in the dharma of understanding the experience of suffering.
August 30th, 2010 at 1:11 am
Very useful…Thank you!