This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Buddha, Socrates, and Us: A Conversation with Stephen Batchelor & Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Host (Rob): Good morning, afternoon, or evening, everyone, wherever you are. Thank you for joining us. It’s my pleasure today to welcome Stephen Batchelor as well as Gil Fronsdal in conversation. I imagine the conversation will touch on many topics, but one of the reasons that we’re here today is that Stephen has a new book coming out next month, August 26th, I believe, called Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times.
I don’t have a physical copy, but Stephen has one right there. So, it’ll be available wherever you purchase books, Amazon or your local bookshop, I hope. I believe there’s a Kindle as well as an audiobook version, right, Stephen?
Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, that’s right. They’ll all be coming out at the same time.
Host (Rob): So, I’ll just start things off here. I was fortunate Stephen sent me an advanced copy of the book, so I’ve had a chance to read it. I’d say it feels like a synthesis of many threads that you’ve been talking about and teaching about over the last several years. It’s very wide-ranging. It’s part memoir, part account of your own path of practice, and also a weaving together of the lives and the teachings of the Buddha as well as Socrates1, who, as you point out, were near contemporaries but separated by thousands of miles in different cultures. But they also advocated similar teachings.
Along the way, you really touch on a whole bunch of different things: Greek playwrights, later Buddhist and Greek thinkers including Stoicism2 and Epicureanism3, as well as many modern philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. I’d love for you to share more about the book, its central themes, and what moved you to write it.
Stephen Batchelor: I’ve been working on this book for a long time. I think I wrote some of it before COVID, which shows how long ago that was. So maybe seven or eight years I’ve been working on this book. It started out really as an attempt to write a kind of account of my philosophical journey through Buddhism, starting with my Tibetan training and then going on into my study of the early canon particularly.
But when COVID hit, I suddenly found myself in this very blessed state where I had nothing to do for an unpredictable amount of time in the future. And that gave me the opportunity to turn my attention to a field I’ve been interested in for many years, which is ancient Greek philosophy. But until then, I’d focused almost entirely on what are called the Hellenistic philosophers: the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics. I’ve done that because, like others in this field, there are obvious parallels and points of connection between those Hellenistic schools of thought and particularly early Buddhism, and early Mahayana too, I guess, as well.
But COVID allowed me the time and the space to then go deeper into the roots of Greek thought, and that was to start reading Plato4, which to my embarrassment I hadn’t really looked at much before. And through Plato, of course, you encounter the figure of Socrates.
Recent scholarship in the Buddhist world, particularly by people like Richard Gombrich and Heinz Bechert, have fairly persuasively shown that the dating of the Buddha should be moved forward by about 80 years. So that his dates would now be about 480 to about 400 BCE. That’s the broadly accepted scholarly consensus, although that of course could change, and there are people who now challenge that as well. But the point is that that dating shifts the Buddha into almost the exact span of life that we know in the fifth century BC in Athens with the birth and the death of Socrates.
So the two men who arguably between them had comparable impact on the evolution of thought and spiritual practice in Asia, in the case of the Buddha, and the foundations really of Western philosophical thought and practice in the West—I find it quite striking that these two men were walking the earth at probably the same time. They never met each other, and they almost certainly knew nothing whatsoever about each other, but they still inhabited the same world.
So I thought I would include a chapter on Socrates as part of this book, and I soon discovered that a chapter would not do justice to this figure at all. And so that meant my book morphed into something else. It became, in a way, a Buddhist portrait of Socrates, an attempt to get a handle on this man and his thinking and his life and the world in which he lived, but to see it from a Buddhistic kind of perspective.
I imagine myself or a hypothetical ancestor being present in Athens at the time that Socrates was alive. It would have been possible—quite unlikely, but possible. And what was really the discovery, which was quite unexpected, was when I raised the question, “Well, how did the Greeks address the issue of suffering?” Plato never talks about suffering. Greek philosophy rarely mentions it. And yet, of course, it’s utterly central to the Buddhist tradition.
It seems that the primary medium for engaging with suffering was through tragic and comic theater. And it seems that Socrates had a very close connection to the playwright Euripides5. The two of them were said to be bolted together by some ancient writers. So that became another thread in the book: not just the philosophical parallels and differences, but also the exploration of how to engage with dukkha6, with human suffering, by means not of meditation or what we might consider to be recollections of suffering—the first noble truth and so on—but actually engaging with suffering via the medium of the performing arts.
And the third thread of the book is really, “Well, all this is very interesting, but what does it mean for us now?” Does this really still speak to our condition in 21st-century California or Europe? That’s a bigger question. I think it does. In fact, I would argue quite strongly that it does. But how to disentangle the core universal principles of either the Dharma or Socratic thought and translate that into ways of thinking, ways of behaving and living in a kind of world like the one we have today, which is so different from that of the fifth century BC in Greece or in India, requires a fair amount of thought, reflection, but also speculation. And also teasing out what the possibilities might be by bringing these two founding figures of global philosophy together and seeing how that union of those two people might provide us with some clues as to how to respond to the kind of crisis the world faces today.
Host (Rob): Would you like to start the conversation, Gil?
Gil Fronsdal: I’m happy to. I’m delighted to be here with Stephen. I don’t know how Stephen thinks of his relationship to the Insight community, but some of us, at least me, have kind of adopted Stephen as our elder philosopher. [Laughter] And I love his thinking and his honesty, his engagement with all this. He’s been a very important person for us and for me. I feel very appreciative of his way of thinking, his approach to Buddhism.
So it’s very nice, and the surprise in reading your new book, which I delighted in reading—it was kind of an adventure to go on. I was so surprised; the journey was so vast. I haven’t, I don’t know much about the Greek philosophers, but it was not just the Greek philosophers, it was even modern philosophers. And what you engaged in, it was so much fun going back and forth.
One of the delights of it was that we seem to share a central focus on ethics. As I’ve studied the Pali7 sutras, I’ve come to the conclusion that even though the word “ethics” doesn’t seem to exist in Pali in the way that we think of it, it doesn’t have to be, because the whole path, the whole orientation is ethical inside and out, all the way right up to enlightenment. And enlightenment itself is an ethical transformation, the way it’s described. So I was delighted that you were pulling this out and bringing this forth as well, and to see that in Socrates.
Near the end of the book, you talk about someone complaining to Socrates that he didn’t leave any teachings. And he said, “My life is a teaching. I’ve been consistent throughout my life in how I lived.” And that was his ethical life, his behavior, that was what he had to teach. And I just, that was just a delight to read.
Maybe it’s just a personal question that I’d like to ask you, to see what you have to say. It has to do with your scholarly ancestors in Victorian England. When I was young, I read some of these early writers, Rhys Davids and people like that, who made the claim that the Buddhist teachings in the Pali canon were very ethical, thoroughly ethical. And I dismissed them at that time. And now in my old age, I’ve come around and said that they were on to something. But I wonder, was their understanding of ethics different than what your understanding is? Has our understanding of ethics changed from what the word meant in Victorian England?
Stephen Batchelor: Well, I really don’t know, actually, to be honest about that. But I do share, as you have just shared, the increasing conviction that the Dharma is basically ethics all the way down. And I think the most succinct model of that is the Noble Eightfold Path. In other words, I understand the Eightfold Path is, in a sense, what the whole practice is really leading to on every level: to engage with our existence on earth with the totality of our human faculties.
The practice of the Dharma, from my perspective, cannot be reduced to being proficient in certain meditative skills and gaining certain deep jhanas or insights into emptiness and so on. I mean, that’s part of the story, obviously. But my fear is that what’s happened to Buddhism over its history is it has tended to become more and more specialized in terms of epistemology and ontology, the nature of reality, an enormous amount of attention on meditation of different levels, and the whole understanding of freedom and Nibbana8 and so on being absolutely tied in to those kinds of spiritual exercises.
But my sense, when I go back to the earlier layers of the sutras, is that the Buddha is more concerned really with how we can lead a flourishing life. And that’s kind of how I understand ethics. Now, I distinguish ethics very clearly from morality. Morality I understand really as following precepts, which again, it’s part of the picture, but I think it’s reductive to think of ethics just as taking precepts and following them in the basic sort of legalistic framework of what’s skillful and unskillful in traditional Buddhism.
But ethics is really based on the idea of the cultivation of one’s character as a human person. The word ethos in Greek means something like “character.” It’s the kind of person you are. But as an ethical being, you’re not just the person you are. You’re not a fixed ego, as Buddhism will tell you very clearly. But you are a work in progress. You are a life that’s unfolding in relation to the world and to other people. And every moment that you have to make a choice, or you have to say something or do something, you’re called upon to ask yourself implicitly, “What is the appropriate, skillful thing to do in this situation?”
My understanding of meditation, of mindfulness, is very much about how that quality of mind—the still, clear, present mind—is not a goal in itself, but actually it is the best kind of mind we can aspire to if we want to make appropriate judgments. That doesn’t mean we’ll always get it right. We might make a judgment with all of our wisdom and our compassion and still make things worse. That’s always the nature of ethics; it’s a risk. There’s no certainty involved. And this is why I emphasize in the book how what I’m presenting is an ethics of uncertainty. It’s about how we live optimally in a radically uncertain, contingent, unpredictable world.
This, I feel, was also very much Socrates’s approach. He’s understood in very early Greek tradition as being the first philosopher who took ethics as his sole concern. Earlier in his life, it appears that he may have studied what was called natural philosophy—in other words, trying to figure out what the nature of the world is. Is it fire or water or earth or whatever? And he abandoned all of that and instead took up the question of, “How do I lead a good life?” And that, I feel, is exactly what the Buddha is also asking, although maybe not quite in those words. How do I lead a good life? How do I lead a life in which my potentials can flourish as a human person?
And not just individually, but ethics necessarily involves our relationship to others. In other words, ethics is always a practice that’s embedded in relationship. It has an impact on other people. It requires that one’s mindfulness, one’s attention, is just as much attuned to how others feel, how others are experiencing suffering, and how to respond appropriately to that. So in that sense, these two founding figures, if one accepts that they are in fact such, are both effectively coming back to the primacy of ethics. Now, how the Victorians in England understood ethics, I honestly don’t know. It’s not a field I’m familiar with. But I do find it striking that people like the Rhys Davids and others did have a view which is not too far away from the one that I would also share now, and perhaps, Gil, you likewise seem to be on that page as well. So that’s a very good connection to have.
Gil Fronsdal: So, I want to ask you though about this word “flourishing.” I was struck in your book, you talked about the ethics of Socrates, and some of those things I would think, from a Buddhist point of view, are not ethical that he did. His sense of duty and being a soldier and going to war and other things that he did. So there are different ethical orientations or bases. So in his idea of flourishing and your idea of the Buddhist teaching on flourishing, what is the reference point for making any ethical decision? Is there any reference point that orients a person, or is it simply some personal idea of flourishing?
Stephen Batchelor: I don’t think ethics can ever be purely one’s own personal position on something. It’s always embedded in a social framework. I would say that the Greek understanding of ethics is rooted in the sense that all of the early Greek philosophers share, and that is of what they consider to be their primary virtues. There are usually four or five: wisdom, courage, piety (sometimes it’s called reverence), and sophrosyne, which means something like mindfulness but is very difficult to translate. It’s often translated as moderation, which I think is only part of it; self-control is perhaps the best summing up of that.
So, Socrates didn’t just say, “Okay, these are the key virtues, how do you live those out?” No, they were already regarded in his society as virtues that all clear-thinking people would naturally and organically recognize to be what constituted a good life. What Socrates is showing, though, is that we all have ideas about what these things are, but when you probe someone to find out what really is courage or justice—justice is another one, dikaiosyne, which the Buddhists don’t really have, but justice is very, very important for them. So ethics there, at least in that Greek framing, would be basically, “How do I lead a life that is founded upon the primary sense of the good?” And in so doing, one would understand that to be a kind of flourishing.
Now, in the Buddhist tradition too, there are lots of sets of virtues, probably a lot more than you’ll find in the Greek. When the Abhidhamma came along, they categorized all these: the 10 virtuous ones and the 20 bad ones and so forth. So you have a framework once again. This framework was probably not totally invented by the Buddha but would have been the environment in his samana (renunciant) community of which he was a part. You again get sets of virtues, things that people intuitively feel to be good.
I break them down primarily into 32 virtues, although Buddhist tradition usually says 37, but let’s not go there. I think 32 works rather better, frankly. And those 32 virtues are then, at least in the Sarvastivada tradition which found its way into Tibet, correlated to what they call the four paths of practice, which to me overlap very tidily with the tasks that, at the end of the Buddha’s first discourse, he encouraged needed to be practiced in relation to the Four Noble Truths.
So I feel there is a framework there, and to be quite honest, a rather more sophisticated framework than we find in the simple list of four or five virtues that underpins the Greek understanding of ethics. But if we think of the path as culminating in the Eightfold Path, it starts with embracing suffering, letting reactive patterns just be, letting them go, allowing oneself to settle in a non-reactive space of awareness and attention. And that, I understand, to be the foundation for then being able to make more appropriate judgments in how we respond, rather than simply react to the world that we encounter.
The Greeks have this word eudaimonia9, which is to lead a good or blessed or happy life. But scholars nowadays rather prefer to use this word “human flourishing,” and that fits very well with a secular take on Buddhism, where the Eightfold Path becomes the framework for human flourishing. We flourish through how we think and how we imagine and how we work and how we speak. It’s all of these things. It’s not just mindfulness and samadhi; it’s this eight-fold integral framework for living that, to me, serves much the same purpose as the primary virtues in Greek thought.
And going back to your earlier point, yeah, there are many things… I mean, Socrates was a soldier, a foot soldier. And I open the account of Socrates precisely to give Buddhists a bit of a shock, because it’s not what you’d expect. I wasn’t really aware of that at all until I started delving into Plato. And then when you line up the battles that Socrates was fighting in with the plays that were then being performed when they came back from the battle, you really see that he was leading a life that would have been quite incoherent for the Buddha, I think, for a Buddhist practitioner.
In the same way, for the Greeks, the Buddha’s life would have been very difficult to comprehend as a spiritual practice. The Greeks and the Buddhists differed on sex and violence. The Greeks saw it as a duty, whoever you were in the society, to protect the city, your family, and your society. The Buddhists, at least those who were part of the monastic community, withdrew from all that activity.
There are points of parallel. Socrates did not engage in the politics of his time, except towards the very end of his life. Broadly speaking, he renounced that level of engagement with the world. He didn’t attend the assemblies; he wasn’t part of the democratic process. He saw himself as a gadfly to wake up the slumbering souls of Athens. And again, you get the image of awakening, waking people up, getting them to think for themselves, getting them to take responsibility for their lives. And I think that mirrors in some ways the Buddha’s own approach as a dialogical teacher, someone who didn’t just stand on a platform and say, “Well, this is reality, this is the truth as I understand it. Now, you just listen to this and shut up.” No. So much of the Pali canon is dialogue. It’s the Buddha exchanging with people from all walks of life.
The trouble is, we don’t have in the Buddhist canon such a reliable record of what he said compared to what we find in Plato and in the playwrights and in Xenophon and Thucydides and so on. The Buddha comes across as having far less personality, as it were. He’s often just a mouthpiece for his doctrines and teachings. You get a much more granular and vivid picture of Socrates and his circle, which has been lost in the Buddhist tradition. But I think by putting the two together, especially since they’re living at the same time, you can somehow reflect the Buddha’s teaching and his life against the counter-image of what was going on in Athens, about which we know so much. About the Buddha’s lifetime, particularly the lives of his lay followers, we know very little.
I imagine—this could be my fantasy—that there was a vital Buddhist community emerging, not just in the Jeta’s Grove and in the monasteries, but amongst the people living in the world, his lay followers. There are passages in the sutras where he praises his lay followers and enumerates some of them, but you don’t really know exactly what their lives were like. Whereas with Socrates, it’s kind of the opposite. You get a very, very detailed and vivid picture of the world in which he worked and lived.
Gil Fronsdal: Great. Yeah. I mean, we don’t know much about the lay Buddhists, but we have enough evidence to know that lay Buddhists didn’t take ethics as seriously as the Buddha expected the monastics to take it.
Stephen Batchelor: Well, I’m not so sure about that. Basically, we don’t know. But there is a passage in the Anguttara Nikaya that I’ve always found very helpful. It’s only a few sentences. He lists and names 19 or 20 lay followers, householders as he calls them (gahapati). When he describes them, the language he uses is very close to the language he uses to describe the senior monks. He describes them as people who went about in their lives from the perspective of the deathless. He says they’ve achieved noble wisdom, noble liberation, and noble something else, which is a phrasing that is uncommon when applied to lay people.
One has to ask, since it was the monastics who preserved these teachings—without the efforts of those men and women, we wouldn’t have Buddhism at all—clearly the monastic community is absolutely central to sustaining the tradition. But it also sustained it in ways that were primarily, and perhaps more and more, the preserve of monastic life. So the lay society, I get the sense, became more and more distant from the center of the active Buddhist community. But again, once we go past the sutras into the early centuries of Buddhism in India and in China, you get even less sense of what these lay communities were like. We just don’t have a clue. There was nothing written down that I’m aware of. There was no record really of how these people lived. We have no idea what a little township in the northeast of India that was following the teachings of the Buddha, you know, how the people would have led their lives. Did they go to theater? Did they write plays? We just don’t know. The only reason we know that they did is because monks were forbidden to attend them.
So it’s difficult to say. I’m not willing to really make hard and fast judgments on the basis of the paucity of materials that we have to make them on. So I have to sort of leave that open as a question. But I think the real question for me, rather, is if I’m inspired by Socrates, which I am—I think his is an extraordinary life of incredible integrity—whether I would become a foot soldier in his wake, I don’t think so. But given the conditions under which he lived, given the values of that society, I don’t feel that to be a problem, to be quite honest.
And yet, on the other hand, if you look at how Buddhist traditions have dealt with war and violence, I don’t see a terribly good track record there either. One of the issues that’s probably on people’s minds as I speak is the conflict in Gaza, Ukraine. It’s very difficult, I think, for Buddhists to really have a clear view as to how to respond to that, apart from simplistically saying, “Well, we should love and have compassion for people who suffer, and we should avoid violence.” That’s about it. And that’s fine in principle, but it doesn’t actually translate very easily into concrete advice for somebody living in Israel today, for example.
Buddhism, in some ways, because it has been so centrally monastic, it’s never really had to engage questions like just war theory, for example. When is violence legitimate? And yet, take Burma today, Sri Lanka just recently. Here we have Theravada Buddhist countries with populations of many monks and religious figures committed to these teachings. And yet, when you get a minority group like the Rohingyas or the Tamils in the north of Sri Lanka, the reaction of these Buddhists is just the same. They pick up their weapons and they wipe out the people they see as standing in the way of their own flourishing. I feel very, very disappointed in many ways by how Buddhist countries actually work in the frame of violence. The monks don’t seem to encourage them to be nonviolent and to not fight. You look at Japan during the war; Zen at War by Brian Victoria paints a very, very clear picture of how the Japanese monks and priests were fully on board with the war. In Korea too, same. So in some ways, I think there’s a weakness in Buddhism in that it hasn’t addressed the questions of war and violence in the ways in which, say, the Greek philosophers did, or even later in Christian and Islamic theories of just war.
Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, this is true. But what you just said now was kind of to a point that I want to address. You said the Sri Lankans attacked the immigrants because they were challenging their own flourishing. And so when flourishing is the reference point, it’s easy to reify flourishing. It’s easy to reify the virtues that are associated with flourishing. So when I read your book, I felt that there was a big difference between an ethics of flourishing, which seems to be what you were championing, and what I feel I see in the early Pali canon: an ethic of non-harming is at the center of it. The ethics of non-harming is different than the ethics of flourishing. I agree that you find flourishing emphasized by the Buddha—the Pali word is vipula, probably closest to it—and that he encourages people to flourish, to become abundant in these wholesome qualities. But I see that non-harming is at the center.
Stephen Batchelor: Well, that was how I was taught. I mean, that is the traditional view. But I’ve always had a problem with non-harming because, how do you know that what you’re going to do is not going to harm? That’s the whole problem with ethics. It’s all very well in certain clear-cut cases. You can follow all the precepts—you don’t kill, you don’t steal, you don’t abuse people, and so on—and that works probably pretty well most of the time as a kind of rule of thumb. But the trouble with ethics and morality, if we bundle them together, is that the real ethical and moral dilemmas we face are precisely those things that don’t have clear-cut solutions. Like, how do you respond to this crisis in Gaza, for example? Or how do you deal with the question of abortion in the case of a woman who would otherwise die if she did not have an abortion? All those kinds of blurry, fuzzy issues that I think are absolutely central to our ability to think and to struggle with ethics, these do not lend themselves to a generalized principle like non-harming.
What does non-harming mean in these cases? How do you know that what you will do will not actually lead to a situation that’s far worse in the future? We don’t know. So I think non-harming… of course, I don’t want to harm anybody, and I imagine that’s true with most people. I do my best to avoid it, and I do my best to understand what it is that I might do that could cause harm. But you also have situations where sometimes you do need to cause harm. For example, if you’re a parent and you have a child who’s very unruly, you may need to discipline them in some way. You may need to cause them some kind of harm, ground them, which the kid hates. So where does harm… it gets a bit foggy. I find it very difficult to pin down and quite difficult to make a basis for ethics. But possibly no more difficult than what flourishing means; that’s also a bit fuzzy once you start prodding it.
This is what I so much like about Socrates in his dialogues with people he accosts on the street. He takes their assumptions—okay, let’s say non-harming—and he’ll really then probe into that. He’ll really push that idea. “What do you mean by non-harming? What does it mean to not cause harm? What about this case? What about the other case?” He will push it instead of leaving it as just a kind of a generic idea that seems like a good thing. And that kind of critical ethical inquiry, you don’t find so much in Buddhism. I think partly this probably has to do with the doctrine of karma, that there are certain actions which are going to get you, you know, if you kill, you’re going to get reborn in a hell or something. That kind of legalistic calculation—”I don’t do this thing because if I do it, I’ll go to some nasty realm in the next life”—that may be true, I have no idea. But frankly, it doesn’t seem to be an approach that will really force you to engage with the immediacy of the suffering in the particular situation you find yourself.
What I like about a lot of the Mahayana ethics, particularly as you find say in Shantideva10, is that the bodhisattva vow overrides the Vinaya and the other vows that you may have taken as a monk or a lay person. If the virtue of compassion is primary in a particular instance, then that should be followed, and the other ethical or moral precepts can be left behind. That points to what in the West we would call a situational ethic. I first came across this in the writings of Christian theologians, and I find it a very helpful way to understand the ethics of Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism is actually going beyond legalism. It’s basing one’s ethics in terms of how you respond with compassion and with love and with bodhicitta11—with this aspiration to become awake for the sake of others. How do those principles inform your response to a particular situation in your life? And there you’re no longer beholden to the strict rules.
Gil Fronsdal: Well, I’ve seen people operating under what I think is genuine compassion, but in doing so, they’re blind to the effect they have. They’re blind to the effect it has on themselves. Compassion by itself is not a very good ethical guideline.
Stephen Batchelor: No, I agree. It’s not. And that’s I think why perhaps the Greeks and the Buddhists… there’s a suspicion, I think, of laying the whole of ethics on one particular virtue. But rather, there are sets of virtues, whether it’s the five virtues in Greek or the 10 virtuous actions in the Abhidhamma or whatever it is. Virtues always operate as team players in a set of different skills and virtues.
Gil Fronsdal: Maybe, but the things that inspire me the most in the Pali sutras about ethics are the situational ethics of the Buddha, where he doesn’t offer answers, he offers guidelines for how to find an answer.
Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, right.
Gil Fronsdal: And the simplest one is where he has all kinds of things that he says, including the development of a sense of self. He says, “I don’t tell people not to develop a sense of self. I tell people that if developing a sense of self helps one to have more wholesome qualities, then develop that. But if it’s unwholesome, don’t develop that.” But there’s a reference point of what is wholesome and unwholesome.
Stephen Batchelor: No, I completely agree. I’ve always felt that the self is over-negated in Buddhism. Whereas you find many passages in the sutras, like the famous passage towards the end of the Buddha’s life where he says, “Your atta (self) should be your refuge.” This is usually muddied in English by saying, “Be a refuge unto yourself,” in this rather clumsy old Victorian-type English. But basically, he’s saying you yourself, the person, you need to be responsible for your own lives when the chips are down. It’s not just the self; it’s the Dharma as well, because both are considered to be islands and refuges. So I understand that as meaning that the Dharma that you have integrated into yourself and has somehow formed and shaped you…
Gil Fronsdal: In that famous passage you just quoted, he goes on to explain how to do that, and it’s developing mindfulness.
Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly.
Gil Fronsdal: And I have this sense that the greater that attentiveness to oneself—mindfulness of the body, mind, dharmas, all these things—creates a greater sensitivity to what causes harm and what doesn’t cause harm.
Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, no, I agree. This capacity for heightened sensitivity to that, I think, is one of the hallmarks of this Buddhist practice. But I would still argue… [a heart emoji floats up the screen] …that may be the case in immediate situations, but a lot of the harm that’s being caused in the world today is not going to affect us, it’s going to affect future generations, in the climate crisis for example. We assume it’ll cause harm, we don’t really know. I just find “harm” a weak word. I accept it as you describe it, it sounds okay, but as you’ll know from my book, I don’t think I hardly ever use that word at all.
I’m very keen on the word “care,” which is how I translate appamada12. And that I think is quite central to how I conceive of ethics in a Buddhist sense. The Buddha describes care, or sometimes translated as diligence which I think is too weak, as the elephant’s footprint. In other words, it’s the virtue that includes all other virtues. And of course, the Buddha’s supposed very last words were to tread the path with appamada, with this kind of caring attention.
That, I think, is really an overarching sensibility, as you put it. A sensibility that is more and more alert and attuned to whatever reactions and impulses are rising up in your own mind. As the mind gets stiller and quieter and more present, you begin to read situations more clearly. You get a much more clear, empathetic sense of where a particular person might be coming from or what they may be suffering, even though you may not understand exactly. You sensitize yourself to all these things, and it’s that sensitivity that informs your practice of care. Care for yourself, care for others, care for the world. And of course, if you care for something, you don’t want them to suffer. You don’t want them to be harmed in any way. So that would be a necessary outcome of care. But to me, to care in that way is prior to the wish not to harm. I think the wish not to harm is really a consequence of a heartfelt care for oneself, for others, for the world, both here and now in this life and also in terms of the consequences that our actions will lead to after we’re dead.
Gil Fronsdal: This is great to hear from you. Thank you, Stephen. I also have come to this idea that care is at the heart of this whole enterprise. Part of the challenge with these kinds of conversations is that maybe the human being is an ecosystem, and so we can’t really pull one thing out and give it too much priority without the others being right there, necessary pieces to hold. But now, caring for all these people, the community that came to join and hear you, I bet they would like to ask you questions and have that chance to engage. So I think maybe it’s time for that.
Stephen Batchelor: Sounds like a good moment. Yeah, let’s do that.
Host (Rob): Why don’t we have people raise their hands so there’s some degree of order, and we’ll try to get to as many as we can with the time that we have available. Why don’t we start with Cody?
Cody: Hi Stephen, thanks for your talk. I’m just finishing up a book that was recently released by Mel Weitsman and the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, and it’s talks of Suzuki Roshi. The book mainly focuses on Zen ethics and precepts. In one of the chapters, he talks about how the precepts are like having a hat on your head that you sometimes forget about. And it also talks about how the precepts are not to be taken as commandments. I got the sense, kind of how the two of you were talking, it’s the type of thing where you refine your understanding of ethics over time, and that process is facilitated by awareness first and foremost. I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are on how your ideas in your book compare to those Zen concepts, especially Suzuki Roshi’s concepts of precepts and how that might compare to your ethics.
Stephen Batchelor: Well, not having read the book you’ve mentioned and not having read books by Suzuki Roshi for a very long time, I can’t really answer that with much clarity. Maybe Gil could focus on that. My sense though, broadly speaking, in Buddhist communities, let’s say Zen communities more generally, is that there is a much greater emphasis on morality than ethics in the way I would understand it. Precepts for me are moral precepts. They’re basically guidelines, if you like. Although actually, if you look at the Pali text, it actually sees them as trainings. I think that’s something that often gets overlooked. Precepts are trainings; they’re practices. They’re not things that you say, “I will not kill anymore,” full stop. You will say, “I will train myself to lead a life in which I do not end up killing people.” And that makes it more of a practice than just a rule to follow. In that sense, it’s closer to what I would understand by the practice of ethics. Ethics is a practice just as much as meditation is a practice, and the two support each other. The sila, samadhi, pañña model—ethics, contemplation, and wisdom—is a model which my Zen teacher in Korea found very central to his teaching. It was to harmonize these three principles and to make ethics part of your contemplative practice and also a necessary condition for the emergence of a deeper kind of wisdom and understanding as well. So that’s really all I can say about that. Gil, you would be more familiar, I think, with the work of Shunryu Suzuki. Is that not correct? Didn’t you study with him or meet him?
Gil Fronsdal: No, I never met him, but I practiced at his center for years. I’m happy with your answer. I’d be happy to leave it that way. Thank you.
Audience Member 1: Hi, Stephen, Gil, Rob. Thank you so much. This is a wonderful conversation. Two things. One, I started out in the secular spaces and moved the last three years into inhabiting monastic spaces. It’s been a really amazing change for my practice to keep five precepts for the last two and a half years. Even though I wasn’t much of a drinker before, for example, not having it at all is really a helpful mindfulness tool. But also, dana has become a central part of my day-to-day life and practice. The awareness that I need to not harm makes me stop and say, “Okay, how do I respond in this situation where I’m feeling some tension?” And maybe I can even catch myself feeling the tension and relax it before responding. I even do some renunciation, which I found really helpful. So for me, it’s actually been really helpful, and like you said, like a training. It’s felt like that. But I see both sides and lots of room for people on all ends of the spectrum of secular versus more religious, for lack of a better term.
And then I had a question. Have you seen Ajahn Sona’s recent documentary on how he said the Greeks were in India during the time of the Buddha? Because there’s so much overlap between their philosophies, I was wondering if you found that in your research as well, that there was some intermingling of India and the Greeks? Thank you.
Stephen Batchelor: Well, yes and no. There was certainly intermingling between Buddhists and Greeks from about the time of Alexander the Great, who arrived in India at the end of the 4th century BC, so about 325 BC. But I think there’s no evidence whatsoever that Greeks would have been in the parts of India where the Buddha was while the Buddha was alive. The main source we have on that is Herodotus, who was a contemporary of Socrates. He was a historian, and he has a good knowledge of and describes the world of his time. He gives a very detailed account of Persia and Egypt and as far as Afghanistan and the Indus Valley area, but beyond that, he knows nothing. And that’s where the Buddha would have been. It’s very unlikely that during the Buddha’s lifetime any of his followers would have made it as far west as, say, Gandhara, what is now Pakistan. So I think there’s very, very little possibility that the ideas of the Buddha would have in any way come across to Socrates, and vice versa. We just don’t have the evidence to support that.
There are, however, and I do cover this in the book in actually quite some detail, increasing interactions between Buddhists and Greek settlers after Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire. In northwest India particularly, you have lots of Greek remains there even today. You have a famous text in Pali, The Questions of King Milinda (or Menander), which is a hypothetical dialogue between a Greek king in that part of India with a Buddhist monk called Nagasena. And other fragments, a famous one being of the skeptic Pyrrho, the founder of the skeptical movement, who went to India with Alexander and in Greek records is said to have studied with Indian sages. So from that period, I think there is a case to be made. There is a vague hint that the philosopher Democritus, who was a contemporary of Socrates but not from Athens, may have gotten as far as India, but that’s somewhat speculative.
So I think the main points of contact occur in the centuries following the deaths of the Buddha and Socrates. And there, I think there was actually quite a lot of interaction. One might even begin to speak of a kind of Heleno-Buddhist culture that extended from Afghanistan, Pakistan, through the countries of Central Asia, and perhaps further into India as well. We know there’s a famous temple in Maharashtra called Karli, which was built around the first century AD, and three of its sponsors were Greeks. That’s one of the few bits of hard information we have because it’s chipped into the rock. So I think there was a lot of interaction going on, but very few records of what that might have been. But I find it quite intriguing to follow some of those lines of thought, but with the caveat that one must be careful of reading too much into what is actually quite meager evidence.
Audience Member 2: Hello. Thank you so much. That was really interesting. And also just a comment, I am really grateful for you pointing out the difficulty sometimes of operationalizing Buddhist ethics for moral dilemmas. I’d be really curious as to how to move forward from that. But my question is more imaginative. If the Buddha and Socrates were to have met, what would they have discussed? What questions would they have asked each other?
Stephen Batchelor: Sorry to put you on the spot. That’s quite a hard question. It’s a very good question, actually. And it is hypothetically possible. To be quite honest, I don’t know. Your question has stumped me a bit. Nothing springs to mind. I imagine they would have embarked on a conversation. I don’t think either of them would have been the passive partner to such a discussion. It could have been, arguably, they might have had one of the most fruitful conversations that humankind had ever had. But maybe they wouldn’t have gotten each other at all. That’s also possible. Perhaps on the grounds that Gil suggested, the Buddha would not have been terribly impressed with a lay person who fought as a soldier and was very openly attracted to young men. That wouldn’t have maybe sat so well with the Buddha, I don’t know.
And Socrates might have thought of the Buddha… I think it would have been very difficult for the Greeks to have actually understood the Indian renunciant tradition. It was so alien to them. You have no examples of comparable figures leaving the world and going off and meditating in a cave. You get that a bit with Democritus, but otherwise, no. They were wired quite differently in many ways in how they thought about the world. It’s a good question, but I’m afraid a lousy answer.
Audience Member 2: You did great. Thank you.
Audience Member 3: Thank you for this fascinating discussion. I really look forward to reading the book. I’m in an interfaith sort of world, and I’m finding that many hardcore atheists who practice many Buddhist practices, so the secular Buddhists if you will, and then of course the secular mindfulness movement, which is modern psychology… strangely enough, it seems every now and then there’s a need for some kind of spiritual foundation. I’ve noticed lately a rise in what I would consider animism, even in Western Buddhism itself. A strange aversion to any kind of actual spirituality, except on the other hand, an embrace of all the realms and the devas and the spirits, which I see as a kind of almost animism. I would love to hear you comment on that, because even in ancient Greece, of course, there was a great spectrum of beliefs, and a lot of the Greek philosophers rejected the pantheon of the Greek gods in favor of a more, I would call it, a more mystic, interior spirituality that was more rationally based. So I’m seeing that now too in our modern-day world with all of our science and technology, and for me, it’s kind of mystifying. I’d love to hear your comments on that. Thank you.
Stephen Batchelor: Okay. I’m aware that there’s quite a number of hands up, so I’m going to try and make my answers as succinct as possible. I have a problem with the word “spirituality.” I’m not quite sure what it means. But I do recognize what you’re saying. In this more secular side of contemporary Buddhism or mindfulness, there is a danger, I think, that it becomes a bit dry and overly rational and too schematic, perhaps. People are drawn, I think also as one’s meditation practice becomes more mature and maybe more integrated and embodied, it does open up a sensibility, intuitions that somehow question the voice of the strictly rational mind.
I’m aware that a number of people I know, including myself, have recently been exploring plant medicines with shamans from South America and Mexico and so on, as a way to somehow connect with a spirituality, if we use that word, that’s not contained within an organized religion, but is actually opening up to a dimension of life that organized religion, almost by definition, tends to strangle in some way.
That was the case with the Greeks. You correctly point out that the Greek philosophical tradition didn’t concern itself with religious issues at all, but most of the Greek philosophers, as far as we know, would have belonged to one of the mystery cults, like the Orphic or Eleusinian mysteries. These were secret meetings about which we know very little because they kept these meetings secret. They were private occasions where men and women would engage in practices that we don’t know anything about. You get a hint of this if you read Euripides’ play The Bacchae, which is very much about a radical embrace and participation in the raw, natural energy of the world itself.
This, I think, is also what gets opened up in some of these shamanic ceremonies. It’s about, in a way, temporarily suspending some of the safety mechanisms of our rational mind and allowing ourselves to open up to the raw, unstructured wonder of being alive at all. I think at that point, we also tap into deeper contemplative experiences, to say, in the jhanas or in other practices, whereby likewise you put aside the overly conceptual, rational parts in order to connect more bodily and emotionally with the sheer mystery and wonder of life itself. So I’m very much on board with that, but how exactly we integrate all this is a bit of a bigger question.
Audience Member 4 (Darlene): So earlier in the conversation, it was clear that being ethical is central to living a flourishing life. And then Gil asked, “What’s the reference point for ethics?” And I kind of took away it depends on the society and time that you live in. There were a different set of ethics for Socrates’ time and place and the Buddha’s time and place. But what about me here and now? Am I to choose a set of ethics that just seems right to me? Or should I have an ethical sense that comes from my place in time and follow those ethics to be flourishing? Or should I place my confidence in those that have followed the Dharma and seem to be living a flourishing life and follow those ethics? That’s my question.
Stephen Batchelor: Well, thank you, Darlene. That’s a very good question. I think it’s impossible to grow up in any society without inheriting a set of ethical norms and values that you just take as being given. Even though I consider myself a Buddhist, I’m fully aware that many of my deeper moral intuitions are probably more Christian than Buddhist, in fact. And I don’t think there’s any way we can dispel that. I don’t think becoming a Buddhist means you sort of cancel out everything that’s gone before in terms of your ethical upbringing. If you look at how Buddhism went to China, for example, it took on a Chinese ethical character which was informed by Daoism and its relationship to nature, and Confucianism and its valuing of maintaining harmony within a society. Buddhism comes along and it fits into that ethical frame very successfully, and that continues right up until today.
But I also recognize, and I see this very much in my own case, that by the time I got to be about 18 or 19 years old, I really didn’t feel my life had any orientation or bearings at all, or at least I wasn’t conscious of them. I had no religious upbringing at all. And I felt by the time I got to be a young adult that something was missing. I couldn’t have put a label on it then, and I almost certainly wouldn’t have called it ethics, but a need was not being met. And that’s what led me into Buddhism quite clearly. Many of my friends who ended up in India in those days too, we were looking for something. That implies that there was something in our lives that had not been adequately provided in our upbringing.
So you do get to a point in one’s life, I did certainly, where I had to consciously say, “Okay, what would be the best way to live?” I was fortunate in studying with Tibetan lamas who taught a body of teachings called the Lamrim, the stages on the path. It’s a literature that lays out, at least from the Tibetan Buddhist point of view, the main stages of the path that lead you to being awake. When I look back on that now, I see it really as a course in practical ethics. We were invited to question what our motivations were, what it was that we aspired to become, what sort of person we wanted to be. Those are, to me, the core ethical questions.
I found it very valuable, actually, to have to think that out from scratch. It wasn’t something I was being taught at Sunday school. This was coming from a culture completely different from the one in which I had grown up. And yet they were offering a vision of how to lead a fully realized human life in a set of terms quite alien to my own upbringing. And that perhaps allowed a certain clarity, a certain freshness, that allowed us to see those things in a way that perhaps traditional Buddhists have become blind to, in the way that we are often blinded by the things that are closest to us. Buddhism, I think, has given me both the distance to reassess my own ethical past and upbringing, and not to reject it, but actually to value many of the impulses and intuitions that I was raised with. It’s led me to appreciate more the Christian tradition in particular, the Jewish tradition likewise. But the Buddhist framework, for me at least, seems to be the one that is the most comprehensive on the one hand, and on the other hand offers a very practical, structured set of guidelines whereby you can actually bring these virtues into your life and cultivate and realize them through your interactions with your society and world.
Audience Member 5: First of all, I totally appreciate your willingness to talk about the ambiguity that is in everybody’s experience almost all the time. I have a couple of questions. One is, have you read Agnes Callard’s book Socrates? And the other is, when you talk about struggling or learning more about your own ethical position in the world, has that continued as you’ve gotten older? Because I live in a community where everybody is getting close to 80 or over 80, and I’m very interested in how human development and the question of ethics go hand in hand.
Stephen Batchelor: Okay. Well, I have read the book by Agnes Callard called Socrates, or to be totally honest, I’ve read about half of it. I got bogged down. I really enjoyed the first half of the book because she actually does take on very much the challenge of living a life in the way that Socrates seemed to encourage. For her, it’s a practice. I enjoyed that very much; I found that very refreshing and very exciting. But then I felt she got bogged down in Meno’s paradox and Moore’s paradox and these rather abstract ethical reflections that I found it difficult to maintain much interest in, and I moved on to another book.
As to the question of aging, I find as I get older, I find two things. One is that I recognize how I have learned to trust certain values, certain ways of doing things, certain ideas, certain perspectives, because they have actually, over the last 50 years—and I’ve been doing this for that long now—somehow borne fruit. They’ve actually somehow justified themselves. And I find that very reassuring and very grounding.
But at the same time, I also find that having that groundedness and perhaps a greater stillness and clarity in my mind, these larger questions of how to develop as a human being and how to practice ethics, if anything, they become more puzzling, not less puzzling. How to live is a question I think I will continue asking no matter how long I live. I’d be very suspicious of anybody who says, “Yeah, I figured all this out, I’m enlightened, and I’ll tell you what to do.” I find that sort of scenario one that I avoid quite scrupulously. I’m not looking for a religious or a spiritual or a philosophical authority. I don’t think I really ever have. But I’m seeking a way of life that can over time enable me to make more appropriate judgments in terms of what I say and do, how I live. And I think that’ll be an ongoing practice until either my brain gives up functioning properly or I die.
Audience Member 6: Stephen and Gil, thank you so much. I feel like a lot of this has been fairly conceptual, and where my head goes is, how do I use this? What does this look like in my life? Where does the rubber meet the road? I’m just wondering, Stephen, if you could offer a reflection on how this deep dive into “what’s the best way to live,” how has this informed the life that you live? I feel like you were just speaking to that, but I’m curious to hear you speak more about it.
Stephen Batchelor: Okay. Well, for me, what has turned out to be the very core practice of my life has been that of a writer and an artist. In other words, my practice lies not in meditating every day, which I do and I value that enormously, but what the meditation practice has allowed me to do is to really tap into my own deepest intuitions. It’s really about how meditation has activated my imagination. Not in a way that’s all chaotic and all over the place, but actually it’s provided a framework within which to channel and focus my imagination.
And that takes concrete form in the writing. I see myself as a writer more than as a Buddhist teacher, to be honest. Writing is for me a vocation. Ever since I started translating Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara12 back in 1974, I have had a book on the go. In other words, I’m always in a process of writing. I’m in a bit of a gap at the moment, but that won’t last long. And I fill that up by making collage; I’m working on an art piece at the moment. And that to me is incredibly important to how I live. It’s incredibly important in that learning to trust and follow that flow experience, that deep inner movement of life, is what I now recognize quite unconditionally to be what will lead me to the next project. And it’s those projects, that work that I’m engaged in, that I find gives my life its central sense of meaning and purpose.
Audience Member 7 (Dunker): Hello. In your former books, you were mentioning often philosophers and thinkers of our time now. Are there any in your new book also, thinkers currently alive? Heidegger, for example, is dead.
Stephen Batchelor: Dunker, it’s very nice to see you here. The figure who I refer to the most amongst 20th-century thinkers is Hannah Arendt13. And that is perhaps a slightly surprising inclusion. She takes up quite a bit of the latter part of the book, partly because she was a very important student of Heidegger, who I’ve referred to quite a lot in my previous books, and he gets a look-in in this one as well, and Nietzsche also. But where I’ve landed with this book is really with the work of Arendt. Primarily because she’s someone who struggles with the question of ethics, and she’s someone who also is passionately concerned as to how we govern ourselves politically. She doesn’t really come up with any grand political theories at all. But what I like about her work is that you can somehow join her in her own attempts to grapple with the question of how do we lead a life as a human community, as societies in a world with others? How can we optimize our capacity to be actively engaged in the societies in which we live?
It’s also interesting that Arendt, in an essay that was not published in her life simply called “Socrates,” did in fact draw a great deal of her inspiration in her thinking from the figure of Socrates himself. And she also spends a lot of time working with the Greek paradigm of the contemplative life and the active life, or the political life and the life of thought. I found that very helpful too. In fact, towards the end of the book I’ve just written, I reframe the Eightfold Path in the terms that she uses of the contemplative dimension of one’s life and the active dimension of one’s life. It’s somewhat similar to the Buddhist idea of wisdom and means, skill in means and wisdom. But I find that her thinking about this has been very helpful in enabling me to also find a way through this material, the Buddhists and the Greeks. And perhaps one of the other most important things about Arendt is she was totally uninterested in Buddhism. And I think that’s actually a good thing, frankly. I think Heidegger was probably too interested in Buddhism, to the extent that he tried to disguise that quite a bit. But I think Arendt, for whatever reasons, provides a clarity in her thinking about these issues in a way that I found quite fruitful.
Audience Member 8: Hi. Thanks so much for the talk. I’m curious, Stephen, about something you said at the beginning about the fact that in Buddhism you have a lot of discussion about suffering, but I hadn’t thought about this before, in the dialogues Socrates says so little about suffering. I guess you make something of this, you talk about this more in your book, and you also said, despite Socrates’s silence about suffering, at the same time culturally the Greeks are very much engaged with it through the tragic works.
Stephen Batchelor: That’s right. Yeah. I’ll say a little bit about that. I’m realizing we’re running out of time. I don’t know if you’re aware of a 3rd-century AD Greek writer called Diogenes Laërtius. He wrote a book called The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. It is one of the primary sources we have for much information that we know of who these men were and what their basic ideas were. Of these 80 figures, one of them is inevitably Socrates. When Diogenes Laërtius introduces Socrates, first of all, he gives the name of his two parents and where he was born. And then the first thing he says about Socrates is that he was renowned for being very close to Euripides. It’s the very first thing he says in a book on philosophy. And then he gives a number of ancient citations that back him up. So it was clearly, for this guy writing in the 3rd century AD, that was the impression or the image he had of who Socrates was.
We find evidence both in Aristophanes, the comic playwright, and other sources of how Euripides and Socrates were basically buddies. Some of the ancient sources say that Socrates helped Euripides write his plays. I don’t think that’s probably true. I have a theory as to what his role might have been in those plays, but it does point very strongly to how Socrates was engaging with probably the most important tragedian of his time. Aristotle later said that Euripides is the greatest tragedian of them all because he shows people how they are, rather than how they should be.
This points to the fact that Socrates was concerned not with abstract philosophical ideas; he was interested in engaging actual men. Unfortunately, probably no women. He would literally collar people, and then he would interrogate them and force them to get themselves to think clearly. Now, this to me is very much an engagement with the suffering of those people’s lives. They’re leading unfulfilled lives. They’re just living on automatic pilot. They’re living superficial existences. And Socratic inquiry, therefore, is to somehow disrupt that state of comfortable slumber and to wake up to the actual conditions in which you live, which are both moral, ethical questions—”How do I lead a good life?”—but also, “How do I enable my life to contribute to the survival of the city?” In other words, “What are my social and political responsibilities in this world in which I live?” And I think that actually is a much more fleshly, worldly engagement with ethics than you would tend to find in the Buddhist tradition, which tends to think of ethics as somewhat, you know, it’s very fine, it’s very beautiful, but it doesn’t really tackle the nitty-gritty issues of actual human individual or collective pain, which is very much the case in the tragic drama, and the comic drama too.
Host (Rob): I think we’ve got time for just one more.
Betsy: Thank you so much for this really marvelous opportunity to dive deeper into ethics and how we live it. I hope your book is a wild success out there. I was reminded of a long-ago dharma talk that Gil gave on the subject, and he raised Waldorf schools as emblematic. There had been a national study he referenced that pointed to college-age kids that seemed to all coalesce on having come from Waldorf schooling. And as we were speaking later, he conjectured that perhaps this was because of movement and a sense of embodiment that had been carried through their schooling. I wanted to ask whether that embodiment aspect, how that surfaces in your research and your writings, and/or personally as you’ve explored this rich subject. And with great thanks again.
Stephen Batchelor: Thank you very much, Betsy. I’m a great admirer of Waldorf education. I don’t have children myself, so I’ve never had to figure out how to educate them, but I have a number of friends who sent their kids to Waldorf schools, and I’m very impressed with the outcome. At least the ones I’ve met, I really do feel that they somehow produce a much more integrated human person. It’s an education that doesn’t privilege simply academic excellence and ability to pass exams and do all that kind of stuff. It’s probably not suited for everybody, but many of the children who’ve been educated in that school, I think, have turned out to be wonderful human beings.
I do think embodiment is extraordinarily important in our day and age. I think we live in an increasingly cerebral society. The very fact of a meeting like this—I can see all of you on a computer screen and you can hear me perfectly well, but it’s not an embodied encounter at all. It’s kind of weirdly intimate and yet at the same time very distant and remote. I do worry about how, especially younger people today, seem to spend most of their time staring at their phones. I worry that that might lead to a less vivid sense of our fleshly, physical embodiment as human persons.
As I was saying earlier, I make art, I write books, and to me, this is an embodied activity. It’s not just something going on in my head. Even my daily meditation, sitting cross-legged on a zafu, I think is a very important thing to do. Even if my mind happens to be all over the place that day or I’m half asleep, I still do it. And I think just sitting in that posture actually does stabilize and remind you of a certain posture towards life that is encoded in that posture as one sits. So yeah, I’m all for it. Many teachers now include yoga or qigong in their retreats, and I think that’s all for the best. I think that’s great.
Betsy: Thanks so much.
Stephen Batchelor: Thank you. I’m sorry we didn’t have time for more. I’m fading a bit. It’s half past 7:00 in the evening, and we have guests for dinner tonight. Well, thank you, Rob, very much, and particularly thanks to you, Gil, for our first conversation in many years, which I greatly enjoyed. I’m also very satisfied that we seem to be very much on the same page, particularly when it comes to ethics. So, I wish you all well. The book comes out in about a month. I’ve recorded it myself, so you won’t have an actor reading it, you’ll have me, unfortunately. And, I wish you all well. Thank you.
Gil Fronsdal: Thank you, Stephen, very much. It was a delight for me.
Stephen Batchelor: Oh, good. Okay.
Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE): A classical Greek (Athenian) philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy. He is known primarily through the accounts of his students, particularly Plato. ↩
Stoicism: A school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens in the early 3rd century BCE. The Stoics taught that virtue, the highest good, is based on knowledge, and that the wise live in harmony with the divine Reason that governs nature. ↩
Epicureanism: A system of philosophy founded around 307 BCE based upon the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. It emphasized the goal of a happy and tranquil life, characterized by peace and freedom from fear and the absence of pain. ↩
Plato (c. 428–348 BCE): An Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He was a student of Socrates. ↩
Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE): A tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom a significant number of plays have survived. ↩
Dukkha: A Pāli word, central to the Buddha’s teachings, that can be translated as “suffering,” “stress,” “dissatisfaction,” or “unease.” ↩
Pali: An ancient Indo-Aryan language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures, the Pāli Canon, and is the sacred language of Theravada Buddhism. ↩
Nibbana (Sanskrit: Nirvana): The ultimate goal of the Buddhist path, representing the cessation of suffering (dukkha) and the cycle of rebirth (samsara). ↩
Eudaimonia: A Greek word commonly translated as “happiness” or “welfare”; however, “human flourishing” or “a life well-lived” has been proposed as a more accurate translation. It is a central concept in Aristotelian ethics. ↩
Shantideva (8th century CE): An Indian Buddhist monk, scholar, and philosopher at the Nalanda monastic university. He is known as the author of the Bodhicaryavatara. ↩
Bodhicitta: In Mahayana Buddhism, it is the mind that strives toward awakening, empathy, and compassion for the benefit of all sentient beings. ↩
Appamada: A Pāli word that translates to heedfulness, diligence, vigilance, or care. The Buddha emphasized it as a foundational virtue that encompasses all other wholesome qualities. ↩ ↩2
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975): A German-American political philosopher. Her work deals with the nature of power and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. ↩