This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Secular Dharma with Martine Batchelor & Bernat Font (Class 2). It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Martine Batchelor at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So, very nice to be with some of you again. Today, we’ll do it like last time. We’ll have 15 minutes each of me and Bernat talking around the subject, and then we’ll have a little bit of meditation. Then we will open up to a question-discussion. Of course, we will have a break, and then again the same type of session: 15 minutes each, then small groups, and then we’ll finish with a discussion and a meditation if we have the time. So, a warm welcome to everybody.
In this first part of our time together, as we mentioned previously, for us, secular Dharma is really the Dharma of this secular, of this time. And this time, in the first part, we wanted to reflect a little bit on culture, on the fact that the Buddha’s teaching started 2,500 years ago in India, then it went to different countries. Each time, you could say you have a kind of geographical change, you have a cultural change, you also have a part of history and what happened in each of these countries, what happened in each of these Buddhisms. And then, of course, Buddhism encountered modernity, not only in what is called the West, but also in the East. And in encountering modernity, there was some change with that.
I wanted to look a little bit at the case of China. Because when Buddhism entered China, slowly around the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries AD, you had a very highly cultured society. At times, Buddhism entered a society and brought culture with it. At other times, Buddhism entered an already highly cultured society. In a way, the culture had to adapt to it, and Buddhism had to adapt to the culture. This is what happened in China, because some of the concepts were new. For example, in China at the time when Buddhism entered, they did not have a concept of the self. So the fact that the Buddhists were negating the self was actually hard for them. They did not have a self in the first place, so they did not see the point of negating something they did not have. So in a way, they had to be taught about the self before they could be taught about the not-self.
What was interesting that happened with that notion of not-self, which introduced the notion of self, was that before, there was this very Confucianist culture which really thought in terms of society, in terms of relationship, in terms of ancestors, and so less in terms of individual rights and more in terms of ancestor rights, family rights, the connection with the emperor, and things of that nature. One of the things that Buddhism influenced at the beginning was actually in terms of law, in the legal profession, by influencing this idea of individual rights.
There are two very interesting books in terms of China and Buddhism: one is how Buddhism changed China, and the other is how China changed Buddhism. Both influenced each other. For example, when Buddhism first entered China, they used Taoist terms to translate Buddhist terms, which gave a very Taoist flavor to Buddhism. Then, 250 years later, they realized, “Ah, the term does not exactly mean what the Taoist term means.” So then you had a second phase of translation, when you had enough people knowing both languages to really see what was meant, what the subtle meaning was. So again, you had this very Taoist influence, for example, in Chan Buddhism, which is now known as Zen Buddhism. China changed Buddhism in the way it developed.
I was reflecting on this, and what is a word that has entered our language that was not there before? One of the words which has entered what I would call Western culture is “karma.” You read an article in a newspaper, and suddenly you have this term: “instant karma.” This is one of the things people seem to slightly rejoice in, is that if somebody they don’t like has something bad happen to them because they’ve done a bad thing, “Ah, instant karma,” which is very close to the German Schadenfreude, I would say.
Here, I think we have to reflect on how we use this ancient word nowadays. We seem to use it as strictly, there is a cause, there is an immediate effect. When actually, if you look in the text, karma1 is one of the most mysterious things to explain because it has so many different aspects. It’s part of conditionality. And the Buddha was clear that karma did not mean that everything we experience is the fruition of our action. In one sutta, somebody said to the Buddha, “Everything we experience in terms of Vedanā2 is because of our karmic fruition.” And the Buddha said, “No, no, no, there are eight causes for what you experience, and only one of them is actually karmic fruition.” He said, you know, it’s things like illnesses, external accidents, heedlessness, and so on and so forth.
So we have to be careful when we think of karma because we start to think that karma is like science, that there is a cause and there is going to be a definite effect. But we have to see that for the Buddha, thinking about karma was more about ethics, but not in a “if you do a bad thing, you’re going to hell” type of thing, but more looking at responsibility. What are we responsible for? I think it’s about looking at what is going on and, at one level, can we transform what is possible and accept what is not possible to transform? Personally, I think we have to be really careful of looking at karma in a totally scientific cause-and-effect way.
Another thing which I found interesting, looking at karma from this secular perspective, is that a few years back I read a book called The Drunkard’s Walk by Mlodinow, a researcher in randomness. The secondary title of the book is How Randomness Rules Our Lives. By the end of the book, he nearly convinced me that cause and effect did not exist. He did not say everything is random, but what he was saying is that things are more random than we think. And it really made me question, how do I hold the theory of karma? How do I hold the theory of cause and effect nowadays? To me, it’s back to what the Buddha says: there is a certain part where there is a cause and effect we can affect, and there is also cause and effect we cannot affect. But then the question is, how can we creatively engage with what arises? So that’s what I wanted to share with you today in terms of secular dharma, change, and karma.
On the topic of culture, Martine mentioned how Buddhism changed when it went to China, and it changed China. Obviously, Buddhism has changed a lot when it has come to the West, and the West is also changing. But sometimes in secular Dharma, or in general in contemporary Buddhism, we have this fiction that what we want to do is to strip away the culture and just get to the real Dharma. Just take away all these things they’ve put on top of it, as if somehow Buddhism was a sort of banana split with too many toppings and you just have to take away the toppings and then you’ll get to the pure Buddhism.
Well, Buddhism is always cultural. It’s part of culture. It is a culture. It doesn’t exist independently of culture. To say it in Buddhist terms, it’s empty. Certainly, some things are more universal and timeless than others, but still, if you try to take away all the layers, you end up with nothing. We also have a culture. So sometimes the problem with this fiction that we will strip away all the cultural accretions is that we don’t think, “Are we not going to impose our own cultural accretions?” We have to be a bit more self-aware and humble, and then see how our culture is interacting with the Dharma and changing it and changing us.
I want to give a couple of examples. One is our view of religious texts. For most of us, our reference for religious texts is the Bible, Christian texts. The Gospels are accounts of Jesus’ life. And it’s very tempting to just see the Buddhist texts in the same way, the sort of Buddhist version of the Gospels. And sure, the human Buddha is a very inspiring thing. But at the same time, are Buddhist texts the same as the kind of thing we call holy texts of the Abrahamic religions? I think Asia has seen texts differently. If you think about it, there is no Buddhist equivalent of the Bible. There isn’t. There’s no text that all traditions read. Tibetans don’t read the Pāli3 suttas or the Āgamas.4 They don’t read the early discourses. In Japan, they probably don’t read them either. And until very recently, even in Southeast Asia, they read many other texts mixed in with the suttas or even more than the suttas. So they have never seen it as a problem to keep adding layers of texts. Just like in the history of Western philosophy, you have Plato and then you have Aristotle and then you had people just keep evolving the message.
But sometimes we try to create this kind of Bible. “Okay, let’s go to the earliest texts.” And again, don’t get me wrong, I love the early texts. But the point is, why do we do this and how aware are we of our own presuppositions and our assumptions and our biases? We go looking for what’s really authentic, what did the Buddha really teach? As if the Buddha’s Buddhism is not also affected by his own culture. Or sometimes we think, can we go behind the page of the book and find the Buddha before the texts? As if that notion made any sense at all. We just have the texts. We don’t have a time machine. I’ve often thought that if I had access to a time machine, the first trip I would make would be to go see the Buddha. And who knows, maybe I’d be incredibly disappointed.
There’s a very interesting paradox in this quest for origins: that we need to project everything of our understanding of Buddhism back to the founder, back to the Buddha. And what’s paradoxical about this, especially in contemporary and secular forms of Buddhism, is this is a very religious impulse. Philosophers don’t try to say, “Well, actually Plato, this is what he really meant.” But we have this thing, we have a sort of personal relationship to this figure. And we want him to have said the things we want to hear. That’s not necessarily bad. It’s good to become aware of it, though. Because we can go into a certain way of thinking as if the only valuable thing were the early discourses, and from that, everything started to decline.
Something interesting here is how it can play into colonial arrogance, where we just become dismissive of what people in Sri Lanka or Thailand have been writing and practicing for centuries. Like they kind of got it wrong, but here we come, and we’re going to access the earliest layer and interpret it properly. “We’re going to tell you what your tradition is really about.” Obviously, usually we don’t go that far, but I recognize in my own path there have been times where this notion of stripping away all the unnecessary toppings was a driver for me. And then with time I realized, hmm, some things here are not particularly wholesome maybe. Maybe there’s some arrogance, maybe there’s some dismissive attitudes to forms of knowledge from a different culture and from a different time.
So what is a critical and respectful relationship to the Buddhist traditions, to the Buddhist texts? Aware that we don’t need to agree with everything, and at the same time, we can understand and not just be blind to our own toppings that we are going to add.
Another example is ritual. Many people think of secular Buddhism as some sort of Buddhism that is devoid of ritual. And again, that has a history in the West with the Protestant movement. It evolved a particular conception of spirituality as an entirely private affair that should not be part of our external behavior. So our religiosity or spirituality just stayed within the confines of our skin. So ritual, which is something external and shared, went out the window.
I read a book a few years ago by the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han,5 a book called The Disappearance of Rituals. It speaks of the disappearance of ritual also as an effect of capitalism and our highly individualistic societies. Because ritual creates shared spaces of meaning which don’t depend on verbal communication. They can be actually completely silent. Whereas today, we have a lot of verbal communication, but we really struggle to keep and maintain community, shared spaces. Rituals create those shared spaces, and with the dismemberment of community in the individualistic world also came the disappearance and falling out of fashion of rituals, which stimulate the symbolic mind. They engage the bodies. We’re not just brains.
So I’m going to take Martine’s idea of creative engagement. To creatively engage with the notion of ritual. Because to me, lack of ritual is not what defines secular Dharma. Either with or without ritual is completely valid. But how can we creatively engage? Rituals are performed acts; they can be creative. And maybe we can create new ones because they can be non-discursive teachings, they can be reminders.
About twice a month, we buy a bunch of bananas at home and offer them to the Buddha on our altar, as is classic in Southeast Asian countries. We buy them quite raw, green. And so for a few days, you have to be aware of when it’s time to take them out of the altar because they’re ready to eat. If you leave them for too long, then they go to waste. And doing that kind of became a natural reminder of change and impermanence.
I suggested to a few students who were studying the theme of impermanence to create some sort of reminder or ritual around it. Someone came up with the idea of, with certain regularity, buying a flower and then throughout the days, you see it wither and you smile at it every day. So that is a teaching. It’s not discursive, it’s not conceptual. We don’t need to understand impermanence. We already know that things change. What we need is not to be forgetful about it, to really keep it in mind. So we can engage something symbolic like this or a little ritual to help our practice. This was an example of engaging creatively with something rather than just reacting with aversion against it out of our conditioned habits and histories.
Questioner: I feel like there’s a fundamental need in human nature for devotion and worship. I’d love to hear more about what that impulse is, where it originates, and how it manifests. I was also thinking about Dante while Bernhardt was talking, and this idea of the hungry ghosts and the equivalent in the Christian tradition, and how interesting it is that these stories are meant to teach us and are more readily absorbed through the arts.
Martine: I think worshipping we can understand in many different ways. One of the rituals which touched me the most when I was a nun in Korea was when they had a new Buddha statue in the main Buddha hall. They had the ceremony of opening the eye of the Buddha statue. What the ceremony entailed was that everybody—the monks, the nuns, the lay people—were sitting on the floor. A red thread was attached around the Buddha statue, and then the very long red thread was passed through everybody. Everybody was holding the red thread. The ceremony was chanting and holding the thread because basically, we were giving life to the Buddha. There was an exchange of Buddha nature there. So in a way, some people want to worship something higher than themselves, but here, there was this connection, the recognition, “Oh, the Buddha nature is within each of us.” We’re giving our Buddha nature to this statue so it can come alive for us. It was our sincerity, the Dharma we practice, which we were putting in the statue. I found that so moving. Personally, I would say worshipping is nearly an excuse to be doing something together. Because I think there is something special about doing an act together in which often we forget ourselves.
Bernat: Byung-Chul Han mentions repetitiveness as an important value in ritual. The fact that a lot of the times you have to slow down, you have to be contemplative. I mean, sitting meditation is a ritual. A retreat is very ritualistic, even if there’s no chanting. I think there are a lot of important moments that we want to mark that are ceremonial. I remember my graduation. But to not make this too long, a couple of comments on worship. I guess the worshipping depends on where you do it from. One can be worshipping out of a sense of inferiority and of lack, or out of a sense of respect, a sense of humility. I think we find it meaningful when we are not at the top of the world, when we are belonging to something larger than ourselves. It can be the planet, it can be history, humanity. We’re part of a narrative. The coziness of that idea is a part of wisdom. Selfing is stressful, and letting go and connecting is not. And again, we always worship things. It might be Christ, it might be Steve Jobs, it might be a politician. So the question is in the details.
Martine: For this second half of the session, I would really like to look at community, Sangha.6 You have the three jewels of the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. We can interpret it in different ways. The Buddha, the historical Buddha, or the Buddha within, or the Buddha we can become. The Dharma, the teaching, or the practice that we can do ourselves and experience the wisdom, the compassion. And the Sangha, of course, from the time of the Buddha was a fourfold Sangha: the monks, the nuns, the lay women, the lay men. At some point, the Sangha seemed to have been represented mainly by the monastics.
The function of the monastics has changed. For many centuries, for example in Thailand, the monasteries were places where people got some education, they got some medical help. They were really a resource for the people around them. But then, with modernization and secularization, all these functions were not done by religious people anymore. Medicine got into hospitals, education got into schools. The monks were left to do religious rites, meditation, or study.
Nowadays, especially in Asia, you still have the monastic tradition, though the conditions are changing for them too. If I look at Korea, when I was there in 1975, especially for women, nunneries were considered a place where they could be free from being forced to be a wife, a mother, a daughter in a very constricted, Confucianist culture. As a nun, they could become a religious person, an artist, a gardener, or whatever they wanted to do. But nowadays, the problem for the monastics in Korea is that for women, there are so many other ways to be free. They don’t have enough monks and nuns to sustain the temples.
Our possible difficulty in our time in Europe or America is that we don’t have the help of monasteries or nunneries. You can have a retreat center, but how can you have a hub without a building? The sangha is a very important part of any dharma. It’s within the sangha that you have the opportunity to create something together. How do you have business meetings? How do you have community meetings? How do you do things together? In which way can we nourish the community, and in which way can we be nourished by the community?
Being part of the Sangha is also cultivating the practice as we relate to others. To me, the Sangha is very much about the Dharma of relationship. We have the sangha of Buddhists around us, but also the wider concentric circle of people we relate to. This is something for secular dharma: the dharma of relationship. How do we relate to each other? How do we cultivate bonds? How can we work together? A great example of this is the Thich Nhat Hanh7 Sangha, where the Sangha is one of the most important things.
Another thing about secular Dharma is the place of women. This is part of the secular. It makes a difference nowadays that a lot of women are teachers. It was not so possible in ancient times. The secular has influenced the hierarchy of how things are done. This is a really important facet, not just in the West, but also in the East. There is this rebalancing of authority and also of how to be an authority, how to be a teacher. This is another thing about secular Dharma: reminding ourselves of the Kalyāṇa-mitta,8 of cultivating good friendship.
Finally, there is the place of science. To me, what is very interesting is how now we nearly look to science to prove meditation or to prove Buddhism. And then often I think, but what if science does not prove it? Am I going to stop? And I would say no. I was associated with a scientific study teaching meditation to seniors to see if it would improve their well-being. It was a super-duper scientific research, done so meticulously. But what I learned is that science does not necessarily deal with a human being. It deals with an analysis of a mean. It does not represent one meditator. It’s all about analytics. Our study, although it was 18 months, did not find any biological change in the people. Is it why we’re doing meditation? So we have a better brain? Or is it that we do meditation because we value wisdom and compassion? And that’s what we want to be in the world, cultivating the dharma of relationship.
A few years ago, there was this book published, Secularizing Buddhism, which was quite critical of secular Buddhism. Reading parts of it, my feeling was, “I don’t know who they’re talking about, but clearly not me.” So I guess it’s a flexible label. Some people might include the mindfulness movement in secular Buddhism. I would not. One thing for me that keeps secular Buddhism being itself is a connection to explicitly Buddhist things: a certain awareness of mortality and practices dealing with that, and a reflection of what this practice is for. Are we doing this to be more productive? What is the point? What is guiding the technique? Secular dharma is still dharma because it still very explicitly tries to find a way to cultivate awakening, whatever that means for us.
The Sangha, at the very beginning, was the fourfold Sangha. But with time, that became more restricted. The Sangha started to mean monastics only, and even more, awakened beings. This has changed now. I think what Sangha means is the answer to the question, “Who is helping me awaken?” And that includes teachers, fellow practitioners, and people who work and volunteer at retreat centers. All that is Sangha. It’s community. But it’s not black and white, like either I’m part of a community or I’m completely alone. Maybe I have a couple of friends who are meditators. To cultivate this spiritual friendship, these dharma friendships, that is community. And in an even broader sense, the Sangha is just any interaction I have with another human being. Because if I want to make it into a practice, everyone can help me awaken.
Secular dharma is usually understood as lay Buddhism. This touches on what I call the central contradiction of contemporary Buddhism, which is that most of us are lay people, but we’re still practicing on the basis of renunciation texts. These texts were put together, shaped, and passed down by people who were celibate, who didn’t have families. Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of wisdom applicable to our life, but it also means there are gaps. I don’t know how many of you in a retreat have heard a talk about money and finances, or sex. It’s talked about much less.
This brings me to the concept of stream entry. One of the characteristics of a stream-enterer is letting go of the fetter of clinging to rites and rituals. To me, this is about conceiving of the practice as mainly a meditation technique. “If I sit for enough hours, it will solve everything.” Instead, the stream-enterer moves towards a different conception: that this is an integral way of life. The practice is not just the cushion.
Often we go on a meditation retreat and hope that this will flow out to the rest of our life. This happens to an extent. Interesting to notice, though, that in the traditional paradigm, it has been the opposite. First, you start by changing your behavior (the five precepts, generosity). Then you move on to cultivating mindfulness in daily activities. And then, maybe you’ll go to a secluded place and do formal meditation.
So, what are retreats for if we’re not hermits? Retreats can be about training skills intensively so that we can bring them to life. But we have to do that on purpose, not just expect it to happen. Another way to see retreats is as a break, a relief from our stressful lives. We have responsibilities as lay people, and we might feel called to engage politically in a way that is maybe not so suitable for a lot of serenity and calm. So retreats can also be an end in themselves, an opportunity to experience something different, to experience more calm and clarity and maybe kindness. It’s a reminder that we can be in those states, and it can charge our batteries to go on.
Questioner: I was thinking about the religion of science. Science is meant to be a method, and the religion currently being practiced with that method is reductionism. It made me think about applying science, but not in a reductive way, to my practice.
Martine: I was thinking more about statistics. Not being so scientifically minded, I thought that science was very rigorous and factual. But having been part of a long study, I realized a lot of it is about statistics. I started to see that no matter what you do, even science is subject to conditions. For me, what was interesting was looking at science in a much lighter way, learning not to take it as the gospel that everything science says is true and totally factual.
Bernat: When we’re using science to prove Buddhism, what is it that science can study? It has to be something that can be measured, so you have to select. If you’re practicing for the reduction of cortisol levels, then I can maybe use science for that. But if it’s about meaning and cultivating, it’s a different study. I would recommend a book by Evan Thompson called Why I’m Not a Buddhist.
Questioner: My question that still remains is, to what degree can there be a kind of a wholesome way of practicing Dharma regardless of the culture in which we find ourselves?
Bernat: Buddhism can be used for good or for bad. In history, it has been used for bad as well. Karma is sometimes used to make people feel responsible for their misfortunes. So what is a wholesome way to practice? You could every now and then pose yourself the question, “How am I using the practice? What am I practicing for?” And always look at one’s own mind. There’s this advice from Ajahn Chah9 that said, “Observe your mind, not the mind of others.” If you use your practice to look at the mind of others, you’ll just start finding fault with everyone. And as you’re doing that, you’re not looking at whatever reactivity is happening in you, i.e., being judgmental.
Karma: A Pāli word literally meaning “action.” In Buddhism, it refers to the principle of cause and effect where intentional actions (mental, verbal, or physical) lead to corresponding results in the future. It is a complex process influenced by many factors, not a simple, deterministic law. ↩
Vedanā: A Pāli word for “feeling tone,” one of the five aggregates (khandhas). It refers to the raw, immediate quality of an experience as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, before emotional reactions arise. ↩
Pāli: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the language in which the earliest Buddhist scriptures, the Pāli Canon, were preserved. ↩
Āgamas: A collection of early Buddhist scriptures, parallel to the Pāli Nikāyas. They are preserved in the Chinese Buddhist canon and were transmitted through different early Buddhist schools. ↩
Byung-Chul Han: A South Korean-born German philosopher and cultural theorist. He is a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and has written extensively on topics such as capitalism, technology, and society. ↩
Sangha: A Pāli word that can refer to the community of Buddhist practitioners. It can mean the monastic community of monks and nuns, the community of all followers of the Buddha (lay and monastic), or the community of enlightened beings. ↩
Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022): A Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, and founder of the Plum Village Tradition. He was a major figure in the popularization of Buddhism in the West. ↩
Kalyāṇa-mitta: A Pāli term for a “spiritual friend” or “virtuous friend.” In Buddhism, it refers to a mentor or companion who supports one’s practice of the Dharma through their wisdom and good example. ↩
Ajahn Chah (1918-1992): A highly influential Thai Buddhist monk of the Forest Tradition. He was a renowned meditation master who established monasteries in Thailand and the West, including Wat Pah Nanachat for international monks. ↩