Gary Dean
After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, Yale University Press, 2015
Sometime in the three or four centuries after Gotama died, while his discourses were still being carried from memory to memory across the Gangetic plain, somebody committed a quiet act of editorial sabotage. Nobody knows who, and nobody noticed for well over two thousand years. In 1930 an English translator named FL Woodward, working through the discourse tradition calls the Buddha’s first sermon, stumbled on a sentence that could not mean what it said: “This noble truth of the origin of suffering is to be abandoned.” One does not abandon a truth. One abandons craving, which is what the sentence plainly intends; the phrase “noble truth” has been bolted onto an older instruction and the bolt-heads are still visible. Woodward confined his puzzlement to a footnote and moved on. It took until 1982 for the philologist KR Norman to follow the thread all the way down and conclude that the earliest form of the discourse contained no “noble truths” at all. The most famous doctrine in Buddhism, the one every introductory pamphlet leads with, appears to be a later graft. As Woodward put it, with the mildness of his profession: the frame has obscured the picture.
That footnote is the seed of Stephen Batchelor’s After Buddhism, and the best way to judge the book is to watch what he grows from it. His argument runs roughly so. Gotama originally taught four tasks: embrace suffering, let go of the reactivity it provokes, notice the moments when reactivity stops, and build a life from those moments. Things to do, not things to believe. In the centuries after his death, as the movement competed with brahmins and Jains for patronage in an India that increasingly wanted its teachers to possess ‘the Truth’, the tasks were reframed as truths, the doing turned into believing, and a practical ethics ossified into a metaphysics complete with an ‘ultimate truth’ and a professional clergy to administer it. Buddhism, on this account, is what happened to the dharma when it stopped being a practice and became a religion. Batchelor wants the picture back out of the frame.
Whether the history is right I cannot say, and neither, strictly, can he. But the philological core is solid, the argument is conducted in the open with named opponents (Norman and Gombrich recruited as allies; Walshe and Bhikkhu Bodhi courteously dismantled), and the reader is never asked to take anything on the author’s say-so. Batchelor spent eight years as a Geluk monk and four more in a Korean Sŏn hall; he is demolishing a house he lived in, and he knows where the wiring runs. When he shows that the celebrated ‘two truths’ doctrine appears nowhere in the Buddha’s discourses, or that “the end of suffering” cannot mean what it says (whoever removes the arrow of reactivity is still an ageing body that sickens and dies), the demolition is precise and, to my eye, permanent.
The book’s second achievement is less advertised but may matter more. Interleaved with the doctrine, Batchelor reconstructs the lives of five people around Gotama: a compromised vassal chief, a gluttonous and paranoid king, a disillusioned deserter, a court physician, and the loyal attendant Ānanda. Out of these dissonant fragments comes the most convincingly human portrait of the Buddha’s world I have read anywhere: a teacher who flatters kings because his community’s survival depends on them, who loses his temper and calls his cousin a “lick-spittle” in front of royalty, whose homeland is annihilated in his old age, and who dies of what was probably a mesenteric infarction in a provincial town, his movement already splitting behind his back. This is not hagiography. It reads, at times, uncomfortably like the current affairs pages.
And it is in this human material that the book’s sharpest lesson sits, though Batchelor half-buries it. Gotama’s deathbed settlement, as reconstructed here, was remarkable: no successor, no appointed authority, the teaching itself as the only refuge, and explicit permission for the community to “abolish the minor rules” after his death. Within months, at the first council in Rājagaha, the ascetic hardliner Mahākassapa pushed through the opposite resolution: nothing already laid down shall be repealed, nothing new shall be added. Ānanda, who had nursed the old man and memorised the entire teaching, was made the council’s water-boy and forced to confess “faults” he politely declined to regard as faults. The founder had left the pen on the table; the committee picked it up and locked it in a drawer, where, Batchelor notes, it substantially remains: monks today still keep rules drafted case-by-case for the circumstances of iron-age Magadha. Every tradition should be made to study this episode. It shows how quickly a teaching that was all verbs gets converted into an institution that is all nouns, and how the conversion is always announced as loyalty.
So much for the diagnosis, which I recommend without much reservation. The prescription is another matter.
Batchelor’s constructive proposal, set out in ten theses at the book’s end, is a “secular dharma”: the four tasks, an ethics of care, a this-world-only horizon, and a community of “autonomous individuals” mutually supporting one another in Quaker-style equality, informed, he cheerfully concedes, “more by writings and podcasts than by a teacher”. He has anticipated the obvious objection and printed it himself: the hierarchical monasticism he deplores is “one of the most enduring human institutions the world has ever known”, and may be precisely what carried the dharma through its fraught first centuries. Having raised the point, he waves at it and moves on. Nothing in these theses explains what will do the work that vows, robes, ritual and mutual obligation did for a hundred generations. Anyone who has watched a Javanese village absorb a death (the neighbours arriving unasked, the food, the seven-day and forty-day gatherings, the sheer machinery of shared obligation) will notice what is missing from a dharma of consenting adults on cushions. Batchelor himself describes, with real sympathy, the Korean death-rites that comfort the grieving whether or not anyone believes the reincarnation theory behind them, and then offers his secular practitioner nothing at the graveside beyond equanimity. His sangha will hold its members about as firmly as a podcast holds its subscribers. The difference between a community and an audience, on his own evidence, is what decides whether a teaching survives.
The historical reconstruction, too, is looser than the philology. The claim that Gotama’s final journey to Kusinārā was a strategic relocation to a rising Mallān power-centre, or that Megasthenes’ wandering “Physicians” were probably Buddhist mendicants, is speculation stacked three storeys high; each storey is honestly flagged, yet the finished tower is asked to bear weight. And the method cuts selectively. Passages that embarrass orthodoxy are ruled authentic precisely because they embarrass orthodoxy, whilst passages that embarrass Batchelor are assigned to “anonymous hands”. Perhaps both rulings are correct. The reader should notice, though, that the same knife only ever cuts one way.
None of this sinks the book, because Batchelor does one thing almost no founder-figure in the history of religion has done: he shows his working and signs it. He tells the reader he writes as a secular European of Protestant instincts; he calls his reconstruction a wager rather than a recovery; he expects to be revised. The theses are dated, and the version printed here is already an amendment of an earlier draft. A teaching offered on those terms can afford to be wrong in places, because being wrong is survivable when the people who take the teaching up are permitted to say so and act on it. That, more than any doctrine about emptiness or nirvana, is the real dividing line the book draws through Buddhist history, and Batchelor lands, deliberately and at some personal cost, on the defensible side of it.
For what it is worth, I have pressed at half a dozen copies of this book on friends and relatives over the years, and expect to press more. Deficiencies and all, it remains one of my favourites, and I hope many more people get to read it. Read it for the demolition, which is masterly; and read it for the five lives is depicts, which are worth the cover price alone. Bring your own scepticism to the history, and do not expect the ten theses to keep you warm. The frame is off the picture at last. What Stephen Batchelor and his community has not yet built is a wall to hang it on.
