Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist

Stephen Batchelor

There are not only one hundred, or five hundred, but far more men and women lay followers, my disciples, clothed in white, enjoying sensual pleasures, who carry out my instruction, respond to my advice, have gone beyond doubt, become free from perplexity, gained intrepidity and become independent of others in my teaching. —Siddhattha Gotama

Confession of a Buddhist Atheist tells the story of a thirty-seven-year journey through the Buddhist tradition. It begins with my encounter in India at the age of nineteen with the Dalai Lama and the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, and concludes with the reflections of a fifty-six-year-old secular, nondenominational lay Buddhist living in rural France.

my struggle to come to terms with doctrines—such as reincarnation—that I find difficult to accept,

I began to realize that much of what was presented to me in good faith as “Buddhism” were doctrines and practices that had evolved many centuries after the Buddha’s death, under very different circumstances from those in which he lived.

Many of the people who appear in this book are or were Buddhist monks. Yet the term “monk” (or “nun”) in Buddhism does not mean quite the same thing that it does when used in a Christian context. The Pali word for “monk” is bhikkhu, which literally means “beggar.” (“Nun” is bhikkhuni, which means the same.) A bhikkhu or bhikkhuni is one who has dropped out of mainstream society in order to devote him- or herself to the practice of the Buddha’s teaching.

They commit themselves to a life of chastity and poverty but—traditionally at least—are encouraged to lead a wandering life and survive by begging alms.

If it is to flourish outside self-enclosed ghettos of believers, it will have to meet the challenge of understanding, interacting with, and adapting to an environment that is strikingly different from those in which it has evolved.

Tibetan uprising in Lhasa in 1959, which triggered the flight of the Dalai Lama into the exile

They repeatedly said to accept what they taught only after testing it as carefully as a goldsmith would assay a piece of gold.

Educated in the monasteries of old Tibet, they were ignorant of the findings of the natural sciences. They knew nothing of the modern disciplines of cosmology, physics, or biology. Nor did they have any knowledge of the literary, philosophical, and religious traditions that flourished outside their homeland.

There you would learn that the earth was a triangular continent in a vast ocean dominated by the mighty Mount Sumeru, around which the sun, moon, and planets revolved.

followers of the Mahayana (Great Vehicle), Tibetan Buddhists

Unlike some of my contemporaries, whom I envied, I would never achieve unwavering faith in the traditional Buddhist view of the world.

It was the summer of 1972. This was my first encounter with the remains of a Buddhist civilization, one that had ended with Mahmud of Ghazni’s conquest of Afghanistan in the eleventh century.

Like others on the hippie trail to India, I thought of myself as a traveler rather than a mere tourist, someone on an indeterminate quest rather than a journey with a prescribed beginning and end.

Had I been asked what I was seeking, I doubt my answer would have been very coherent.

My parents had emigrated from Scotland to Canada in 1957 in an attempt to save their marriage.

When I was eight or nine, I remember being struck by a BBC radio program that mentioned how Buddhist monks avoided walking on the grass in order not to kill any insects.

bourgeois, middle-class Britain.

I failed all my A-levels except French, thereby losing the place I had been offered at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London to study photography. My mother was distraught. Suddenly I found myself freed from the prospect of returning to the drudgery of another educational institution that autumn. I could still take photographs, yet without the constraint of their having to be judged by an academic system for which I had little respect.

Ram Dass, a.k.a. Richard Alpert, had been expelled from Harvard with Timothy Leary in 1963 for providing students with psilocybin.

I soon abandoned the conceit of pursuing any lofty cultural goals and simply went wherever the next ride was heading.

“It’s like the Buddha said. Life is suffering.”

On September 4, I enrolled in Geshe Dhargyey’s two-month introductory class on Buddhism at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.

My conversion to Buddhism was more or less immediate. I did not have to be persuaded either by philosophical arguments or religious polemics.

The word dharma, he explained, came from the Sanskrit root dhr-: “to hold.” The teachings of the Buddha were like a safety net that “held” one from falling into hell and other painful realms.

So I decided to sell my photographic equipment in order to help finance my studies in Dharamsala.

It was not only Geshe Dhargyey who impressed me. I was moved by the faith and courage of the ordinary Tibetan men and women, who lived in shacks made from discarded slats of wood and flattened cooking-oil cans and survived by working on road gangs and selling sweaters donated by Western charities to the Indians. They had followed the Dalai Lama over the Himalayas into India with little more than the clothes they wore, many were sick and exhausted, all had found it hard to tolerate the heat and humidity of the plains. Now they lived in poverty in one of the poorest countries of the world. But despite all of this, they radiated an extraordinary warmth, lucidity, and joie de vivre.

For the first time in my life, I had encountered a path: a purposive trajectory that led from bewilderment and anguish to something called “enlightenment.” Although I had only the dimmest idea of what “enlightenment” might mean, I embraced the path toward it.

I RENTED A disused cowshed with a slate roof and crumbling walls on a terrace below Glenmore, a grand but neglected Raj-era house in the forest near McLeod Ganj. I cut off my shoulder-length hair, which had become infested with lice, reduced my consumption of hashish, bought a set of prayer beads, and started to decipher the Tibetan alphabet.

I became, almost overnight, a rather devout and serious seminarian.

I would trade English for Tibetan lessons in the village, then return to my cowshed to study my notes by the sooty light of a kerosene lamp, memorize vocabulary, and experiment with meditation.

According to Geshe-la, the chance of taking a human rebirth was as remote as that of a blind turtle who surfaces only once in a hundred years inserting its neck through a golden yoke being tossed about on the surface of the oceans.

One needs, therefore, not only to abandon all interest in the transient joys of this life, but also in the rewards of heaven that come from living virtuously. Thus one aspires for nirvana, the final “blowing out” of the ignorance and craving that trigger the acts that propel one through the frustrating rounds of rebirth.

Geshe Dhargyey taught that each living creature had, at one moment or other in the course of its infinite lifetimes, been my mother.

For if I genuinely wished to alleviate their suffering, I needed to show them a path that leads to the end of rebirth and hence the end of pain.

Yet to be able to guide someone else along such a path required that I had reached its goals myself. Therefore, I needed to dedicate my life to realizing enlightenment for “all mother sentient beings” and not relax my efforts until each one of them, without exception, was liberated from birth and death. This is the bodhisattva vow, the altruistic commitment that animates Mahayana (Great Vehicle) Buddhism as opposed to the Hinayana (“Inferior Vehicle”), which leads merely to one’s own personal salvation.

In order to become a Buddha as quickly and effectively as possible, the Tibetans practice a unique body of teachings inherited from India called the “Diamond Vehicle” (Vajrayana, i.e., tantric Buddhism). Unlike the Buddha’s sutras, which were discourses given to the general public, the tantras were taught only to select disciples.

Having taken the bodhisattva vow and come to an adequate understanding of the sutra teachings, we were strongly encouraged to receive a tantric empowerment in order to enter the “swift path” to complete enlightenment.

After I had been a year or so in Dharamsala, Geshe Dhargyey arranged for a group of us to receive the tantric empowerment of Yamantaka from Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche, one of the senior advisors to the Dalai Lama.

Over the following months, I received further empowerments from Serkong Rinpoche, Trijang Rinpoche—the Dalai Lama’s junior tutor—and the Dalai Lama himself. I soon had to spend at least an hour a day reciting ritual texts in order to honor the commitments I had taken.

In order to receive these empowerments, I had to regard the officiating lama not as an ordinary human being, but as a living Buddha, a perfect embodiment of enlightenment, who had taken birth in this world solely out of compassion for deluded creatures like myself. I had to acknowledge any fault I saw in him as my own negative projection, the consequence of my impure view that obscured his radiant perfection. I took a vow never to disparage such a teacher. To break my tantric commitment to him would result in rebirth in the worst of all possible hells. For solely through the inspiration and blessings of these extraordinary men was progress along the path to enlightenment made possible.

My decision to become a monk was a natural outcome of this passionate dedication to Buddhism. For a young man without any ties or responsibilities, who wanted to focus his life entirely on the Dharma, a life of monastic simplicity, celibacy, and abstinence provided the optimal environment for study, reflection, and meditation. When I first asked Geshe Dhargyey to ordain me shortly after my twentieth birthday, he refused. He sent me away to reflect more carefully before taking such a step. A year later, I asked him again. This time he accepted.

In the presence of five fully ordained monks, I was ordained as a novice (sramanera) at three p.m. on June 6, 1974, in Geshe Dhargyey’s private quarters at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. I had just turned twenty-one. I had been a Buddhist for less than two years. Now I was a shaven-headed, red-robed, celibate renunciant.

Although I wrote to my mother regularly from Dharamsala, I said nothing about my deepening personal engagement with Buddhism.

On hearing the news, she said: “My heart sank into my feet.”

I was still the same person, subject to the same emotions, longings, and anxieties. Unshaven and unwashed, I would walk through McLeod Ganj with grim determination, my eyes nailed to a point on the ground six feet in front of me, desperately trying not to notice the hippie girls in their diaphanous dresses. The inwardness of monasticism appealed to me; it seemed to legitimate my growing tendency toward introspection and solitude.

For the first three days, we concentrated on the inflow and outflow of breathing, gradually narrowing attention to the sensation of the breath as it touched the upper lip. This served to focus concentration. For the remaining seven days we slowly “swept” the body for sensations, going from the crown of the head to the tips of the toes and then back again. When doing this “body-sweeping,” we gave particular attention to the impermanence of every sensation. After doing this exercise for several hours a day in an atmosphere of complete silence, with only one pithy talk each evening, I came to experience myself in a way I never had before.

The mindfulness sharpened my attention to everything that was going on within and around me.

Once the course was finished, more mundane habits of mind took over again. But I had been shown a way to know what I would now understand as the contingent ground of life itself. For this, I am forever grateful to Mr. Goenka.

The retreat opened up the first crack in the edifice of my faith in Tibetan Buddhism.

After my encounter with Vipassana, I briefly considered going to a monastery in Burma, Thailand, or Sri Lanka to develop this practice further. Yet my commitment to the tradition in which I had been ordained as a monk and initiated into the Vajrayana remained strong, as did my devotion to my Tibetan teachers.

In the autumn of 1974, I was among a small group of students from the Library who met with the Dalai Lama to seek his advice on a project to translate Shantideva’s eighth-century A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (Bodhicaryavatara), a classic text of Indian Mahayana Buddhism much loved by the Tibetans. His Holiness was enthusiastic about the idea and encouraged us to go ahead.

According to Shantideva, such empathy requires that one undergo a radical emptying of self, so that instead of experiencing oneself as a fixed, detached ego, one comes to see how one is inextricably enmeshed in the fabric of the world.

The self does not exist “from its own side,” as the Tibetans say, as an object that can be isolated and defined. The more you search for it, whether through meditation, philosophical inquiry, psychological analysis, or dissection of the brain, you will not, in the end, discover any “thing” that corresponds to it. Nonetheless, this is not to deny that a self exists. It exists, but not in the way we instinctively feel it to exist. An empty self is a changing, evolving, functional, and moral self. In fact—and this is the twist—if the self were not empty in this way, it would be unable to do anything. For such a hypothetical self would be utterly disassociated from everything in the living world, existing in a purely metaphysical sphere, incapable of either acting or being acted upon.

I could theoretically grasp what “emptiness” meant, but this had little if any impact on the actual experience of being me.

I recall saying to myself: “I will never arrive at something. I will never arrive at nothing. Emptiness is the infinity of things.”

“Imagine there is a frog three feet from the bank,” she said. “If each jump it takes is always half as long as the one before, how many jumps would it take the frog to reach the water?”

This child’s version of Zeno’s paradox, enhanced by Mr. Goenka’s collapsing impermanence and the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, was, I now realized, a premonition of “the infinity of things.”

I would soon follow him to Switzerland in order to pursue a training in Buddhist philosophy. Elysium House was also the base in Dharamsala for a small community of Vipassana meditators with whom I would sit morning and evening, watching my breath and sweeping my body from head to toe.

first time to be struck by how mysterious it was that anything existed at all rather than nothing. “How,” I asked myself, “can a person be unaware of this? How can anyone pass their life without responding to this? Why have I not noticed this until now?”

As a young Western novice of twenty-three, I was inclined to trust more in the wisdom of the tradition than in my own imperfect understanding.

But that is what he taught us: that the person is nothing but a fleeting configuration of the fugitive elements of body and mind; that there is nothing substantial to it, nothing enduring, nothing constant. Yet Geshe was the very embodiment of substance and constancy. This was a man who had endured and gave every impression of intending to endure.

We compared him to Atisha, the Indian abbot who had brought Buddhism to Tibet in the eleventh century.

We would be expected to memorize texts, receive oral instruction, study commentaries, and debate the meaning of it all in Tibetan (a language I was still struggling to master).

The scholarly Geluk tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, to which Geshe belonged, maintained that through the study of formal logic and the practice of debate, one could achieve rational certainty about such key Buddhist doctrines as karma and rebirth. I hoped that this training would resolve my remaining doubts about these issues and provide a sound intellectual basis for my vocation as a Buddhist monk.

Buddhism, it seemed, was a rational religion, whose truth-claims could withstand the test of reason.

I spent five years in Europe under Geshe Rabten’s guidance, mainly in Tharpa Choeling, the monastery he founded in the Swiss village of Le Mont-Pèlerin, above the town of Vevey, overlooking Lake Geneva and the mountains of the Rhône Valley. For the first two years our group of a dozen monks and laymen studied a simplified version of the philosophy of Dharmakirti, a seventh-century Indian scholar-monk whose work, in Tibetan monasteries, provides the foundation in logic, epistemology, and critical analysis, upon which one then advances to the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy of emptiness.

Rather than saying that ultimately everything was empty of inherent existence, as I had been taught until then, Dharmakirti maintained that the changing, functional, causal, and conditioned world, present to ordinary sensory and mental experience, was what was ultimately real. To be real, in Dharmakirti’s terms, means to be capable of producing effects in the concrete world. Thus a seed, a jug, wind in the trees, a desire, a thought, the pain in one’s knees, another person: these are what are real. Emptiness of inherent existence, by contrast, is just a conceptual and linguistic abstraction. It may serve as a strategic idea, but it lacks the vital reality of a rosebud, the beating of one’s heart, or a crying child. The aim of meditation, for Dharmakirti, was not to gain mystical insight into emptiness, but to arrive at an unfiltered experience of the fluctuating, contingent, and suffering world.

What prevents you from experiencing the world in such a way? The problem lies in the instinctive human conviction that one is a permanent, partless, and autonomous self, essentially disconnected from and unaffected by flux and contingency.

For Dharmakirti, however, the point is not to dwell on the absence or emptiness of such a disconnected ego, but to encounter the phenomenal world in all its vitality and immediacy once such a conception of self begins to fade.

To realize the absence of a permanent, partless, autonomous ego enables hitherto unknown vistas in one’s life to open up. The dark, opaque perspective of self-centeredness gives way to a more luminous and sensitized awareness of the shifting, contingent processes of body and mind.

Once one gets used to this, one ceases to notice the absence of such a self. It is replaced by another way of living in this world with others, which, after a while, becomes entirely unremarkable.

Without subjecting one’s ideas to such scrutiny, it is easy and reassuring to cherish opinions that, in the end, are found to rest on the sloppiest of unexamined assumptions. This training in philosophical analysis, however, was a two-edged sword. It only worked up to a point. As soon as it encountered a Buddhist belief that did not stand up so well to its critique, it risked undermining one’s faith.

I could not have foreseen then, at the height of my enthusiasm for Dharmakirti, how a few months later I would be waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, agonizing about whether the primary cause of a mental state was necessarily another mental state.

Mind, for Dharmakirti, is said to be “clear and knowing.” Clear means that mind has no material properties: it cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. Yet the mind is not a mere abstraction either, for it has the capacity to know things, initiate acts, and is thus capable of producing effects in the world. Being by nature immaterial, mind cannot, in principle, be produced by something material, such as a body or a brain. Therefore, the mind of a newborn baby must have come from a previous continuum of mind; it cannot have emerged out of mindless physical causes alone.

I was skeptical. Given current scientific knowledge of the brain, I did not find it difficult to believe that such an organ was capable of producing thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. That seemed an entirely reasonable hypothesis to explain the origin of mental phenomena. Yet Dharmakirti does not even mention the brain. He has no knowledge of it at all. When pressed as to how one could know with certainty that mind is immaterial and thus only capable of being produced by a previous immaterial mind, Geshe Rabten replied that in advanced states of meditation one came to know this directly, through one’s own firsthand experience. Thus the “proof” of rebirth rested on a subjective experience of a non-physical entity in a non-ordinary state of awareness. If you lack such an experience yourself, then you have to trust the word of meditators more accomplished than oneself.

But if the proof of rebirth finally depends on having faith in the reports made by others of their subjective experiences, then how is it any different from claiming that God exists because mystics—why would they lie?—claim to have had direct experience of God? On what grounds should I choose to believe a Buddhist meditator rather than a Christian mystic or, for that matter, someone who claims to have been abducted by aliens and taken to a spaceship docked behind Alpha Centauri?

All may be equally moral, sincere, and honest people, passionately convinced in the truth of what they have experienced, but their claims are going to persuade only those who are already predisposed to believe them.

Why does all this matter so much? Why did it cause me so many sleepless nights? It matters because the entire edifice of traditional Buddhist thought stands or falls on the belief in rebirth. If there was no rebirth, then why would one expend any effort in trying to liberate oneself from the cycle of birth and death and attain nirvana, the final aim of Buddhism?

If there was no rebirth, then how would moral acts that do not ripen before one’s death ever bear their fruits? In such a case, provided you were not caught and punished in this life, you could get away with murder without ever having to face its consequences. If there was no rebirth, why would you vow to attain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, a task that will take endless lifetimes to complete? If there was no rebirth, then what does it mean to say that the Dalai Lama is the fourteenth reincarnation in a line of Tibetan monks, the first of whom was born in 1391? If there was no rebirth, why did generations of supposedly enlightened Buddhist teachers say that there was?

Yet for rebirth to be possible, something must survive the death of the body and brain. To survive physical death, this “something” must not only be non-physical but also capable of storing the “seeds” of previously committed moral acts (karma) that will “ripen” in future lifetimes.

Since Buddhists reject the existence of a permanent self that persists from life to life, they posit an impermanent, non-physical mental process to account for what is reborn.

This unavoidably leads to a body-mind dualism. Dharmakirti’s “clear and knowing mind” that inhabits a material body seems no different from Descartes’s res cogitans (a knowing entity) that inhabits a res extensa (an extended entity, i.e., a body).

How can such an immaterial mind ever connect with a material body?

Being immaterial, it cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. If it is untouchable, how can it “touch” or have any contact with a brain? How does it connect to a neuron or a neuron connect to it?

I rebelled against the very idea of body-mind dualism. I could not accept that my experience was ontologically divided into two incommensurable spheres: one material, the other mental. Rationally, I found the idea incoherent.

I could not accept that, in order to be a Buddhist, I had to take on trust a truth-claim about the nature of the empirical world, and, having adopted such a belief, that I had to hold on to it regardless of whatever further evidence came to light about the relation of the brain to the mind.

Belief in the existence of a non-physical mental agent, I realized, was a Buddhist equivalent of belief in a transcendent God.

As soon as you split the world in two parts—one physical and one spiritual—you will most likely privilege mind over matter. Since mind—even an impermanent Buddhist mind—survives bodily death and is the agent of moral choice, then it is not only more enduring and “real” than mere matter but also the arbiter of one’s destiny.

It dawned on me that we were not expected to use logic and debate to establish whether or not the doctrine of rebirth was true. We were only using them to prove, as best we could, what the founders of the tradition had already established to be true.

If the arguments failed to convince us, that did not really matter. For in the end, reason was subordinate to faith.

“Do not accept [my words] just out of faith in me,” said the Buddha, but in reality we were expected to do just that. I realized then that to pursue my vocation as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, belief in rebirth was not optional but obligatory.

These issues were not merely academic. They had a direct bearing on my social identity as a monk and my material survival in the world. I could not, without being a hypocrite, present myself in public as a Buddhist monk (Geshe had started asking me to instruct classes of laypeople and younger novices), while privately aware that I could not accept one of the cardinal tenets of Buddhism. I experienced a disconcerting gap between my external persona and my inward state of mind.

Then one sleepless night I realized that even if there was no life after death, even if the mind was an emergent property of the brain, even if there was no moral law of karma governing my fate, this would have no effect whatsoever on my commitment to the practice of the Dharma.

Yet Tibetan Buddhism taught that one could not even consider oneself a Buddhist if one valued this life more than one’s destiny after death.

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

When I told Geshe Rabten of my difficulty in believing in rebirth, he was shocked. The idea that one might subject such a doctrine to rational analysis simply in order to test whether or not it was true was, for him, nyon-pa: “crazy.”

For Geshe, belief in rebirth was not just an intellectual preference. It was an essential part of his moral identity. If you did not believe that your actions would have consequences after your death, then why would you be motivated to behave in anything but a greedy, self-centered way during your brief span of life on this earth?

I recognized that were I to be questioned on the subject, the only honest answer would be to say that I did not know whether there was life after death or not.

Such self-serving casuistry was what Siddhattha Gotama—the Buddha himself—would have called “eel wriggling,” but it allowed me a respite from the turmoil of doubt and enabled me to continue, for the time being at least, with my training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk.

Her main concern was still that of how I would be able to support myself, particularly as I grew older, if I persisted in this marginal and bizarre vocation as a Buddhist monk in Europe. I remember her saying: “You cannot stay in nirvana forever, dear.”

While walking with her through this small English market town, exchanging nods and greetings with her neighbors and fellow dog walkers, I was able to see myself through her eyes. Despite that well-honed British social skill of maintaining a veneer of polite and affable civility, I could sense the agonies of inward embarrassment she was obliged to endure on my behalf. In Switzerland I could always take refuge in the privilege of distance accorded to the foreigner; here, among my own people, I was exposed and had nowhere to hide. At the same time, I took a perverse delight in how my appearance upset the complacency and conceits of middle-class England.

I flew from Geneva to London, then traveled by train to Church Stretton, the village in Shropshire on the Welsh Marches where my mother had retired from her work as an occupational therapist earlier that year in order to pursue her passion for hill-walking. She was waiting for me on the platform. A cold wind blasted me as I stepped off the train, causing my red robes to billow and flap.

Although I had spent less than a week with my mother, I was relieved to return to the comforting familiarity of another Buddhist ghetto.

The weeks in Cumbria gave me the opportunity to step back and re-examine my vocation as a monk and my commitment to the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism.

At times I wondered whether I should not consider becoming a Christian monk. At times I worried that monasticism was causing me to be sexually attracted to men.

I returned to Church Stretton to spend Christmas with my mother and brother, David, who was studying fine art at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham. “Art,” as David practiced it then, had nothing to do with such bourgeois preoccupations as drawing and painting. He and his fellow art students seemed to spend most of their time composing subversive political tracts inciting revolution. He listened to my clumsy attempts to expound the Buddhist vision of a life animated by universal compassion and the wisdom of emptiness with barely disguised scorn.

I WAS BEING indoctrinated. Despite a veneer of open, critical inquiry, Geshe Rabten did not seriously expect his students to adopt a view of Buddhism that differed in any significant respect from that of Geluk orthodoxy. I realized that to continue my training under his guidance entailed an obligation to toe the party line.

I could not accept that one view of Buddhism formulated by Tsongkhapa in fourteenth-century Tibet could be the definitive interpretation of the Dharma, valid in all places for all time.

I am here to pursue a genuine spiritual inquiry but, to be honest, that is far from what is being encouraged.

All of this came to a head in 1979. On my return from Cumbria at the beginning of the year, Geshe Rabten asked me to help organize the visit of the Dalai Lama to the French-speaking part of Switzerland, scheduled for July. Tharpa Choeling was to be the first stop on His Holiness’s historic first visit to Europe. My sole qualifications for this complex administrative task were my language skills (English, French, and Tibetan) and ability to drive a car.

In particular, I was troubled by how my monastic training provided no effective guidance in dealing with sexuality. When I raised this issue with Geshe Rabten, he would encourage me to meditate on the foulness of the human body by visualizing it as composed of blood, organs, pus, excrement, and viscera. This traditional Buddhist meditation was supposed to generate a sense of revulsion that would overcome any feelings of sexual attraction.

Likewise, no matter how much I practiced this meditation, it failed to undermine my tendency to fall wretchedly in love with beautiful young women who attended the classes at Tharpa Choeling.

Dora Kalff suggested that the root of this dilemma lay not in unfulfilled sexual longing, but in my failure to integrate my own feminine side into my psychic life. This led me to romantically project my sense of incompleteness onto flesh-and-blood members of the opposite sex, in the futile belief that union with them would result in the sense of completeness I craved. For Frau Kalff, this “sickness” was a symptom of the excessively rational, abstract, and technological culture of the West that was founded on a collective repression of the feminine: i.e., the intuitive, feeling-based, nurturing and creative dimension of human existence.

Whether these hours of therapy succeeded in integrating the repressed feminine dimension of my psyche, I honestly cannot say. After four years of sandplay, I still had crushes on women, and imagining myself as a dakini every morning did not seem to make any difference.

In the end, the most important idea I gained from Jungian psychology was the concept of “individuation.” For Jung, once one has dealt with the neuroses of one’s personal unconscious, the psychotherapeutic task becomes that of differentiating one’s sense of “I” from its dominance by what he calls the “archetypes” of the collective unconscious of humanity. Rather than being possessed by the idea that one is a “mother,” “sage,” “child,” or, in my case, “monk,” one seeks to evolve into the unique and complex individual that one has the capacity to become. Superficially, this might seem to conflict with the Buddhist idea of the “emptiness of self.” Yet I found that the concept of individuation enriched and elaborated the central Geluk notion of a fluid, moral, and contingent self. As Geshe Rabten repeatedly told us, to say the self is “empty” does not mean that it is non-existent. I am empty only in the sense that there is nothing fixed or intrinsically real at the core of my identity as a person. Recognition of such emptiness therefore liberates one to change and transform oneself. And this, it seems, is precisely what the Jungian theory of individuation describes, yet in a language that is affirmative rather than negative.

Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Just to pose this question, which, I discovered, had its origins in Plato and has resurfaced in the Western tradition ever since, sent tingles down my spine. The question was far more interesting to me than any of the traditional religious answers, such as “God,” in the monotheistic faiths, or, in the case of Buddhism, “the actions (karma) of sentient beings.”

Such experiences made it all the more difficult for me to accept that mind and matter were two separate things. The idea that mind existed independently of matter as a kind of formless, ghostly “knowing” made no sense.

I was first drawn to existentialism, which led me to the phenomenological writings of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger

This resonated with my own experience of practicing mindfulness. I had noticed that when listening to the song of a bird, it was impossible to differentiate between the cooing of the wood pigeon, on the one hand, and my hearing of it, on the other. Conceptually, the two were clearly different, but, in immediate experience, I could not have one without the other, I could not draw a line between them, I could not say where the birdsong stopped and my hearing of it began. There was just a single, primary, undifferentiated me-hearing-the-birdsong.

Being-in-the-world means that I am inextricably knit into the fabric of this fluid, indivisible, and contingent reality I share with others. There is no room for a disembodied mind or soul, however subtle, to float free from this condition, to contemplate it from a hypothetical Archimedean point outside. Without such a mind or soul, it is hard to conceive of anything that will go on into another life once this one comes to an end.

Heidegger describes how being-in-the-world is permeated by the “mood” of anxiety that prompts one to “flee” and attach oneself to particular things in the world in a desperate attempt to find something stable and secure to hold on to.

He recounts in detail how one’s life is invariably a being-toward-death. Death is not an event among other events, something that will just happen one day like anything else, but an ever-present possibility that quivers inside us each moment.

Heidegger believed that the entire project of Western thought that began with Plato had come to an end. It was necessary to start all over again, to embark on a new way of thinking, which he called besinnliches Denken: contemplative thinking.

When at last M. Levinas did address the subject of Buddhism, it turned out that his main reservation was that it denied the finality of death, which he regarded as axiomatic for a Western thinker.

It made me realize that belief in rebirth was a denial of death. And by removing death’s finality, you deprive it of its greatest power to affect your life here and now.

I was disappointed by my meeting with Professeur Levinas; whatever thoughts I may have had of returning to university to study for a degree evaporated. It brought back everything I had rejected at school in Britain: an overriding emphasis on the acquisition of information, the purely cerebral approach to learning, that same unwillingness to confront felt experience.

Two days before the Dalai Lama was due to arrive, Geshe Rabten summoned us all to his room. He demanded that any questions we wished to raise with His Holiness must be first submitted to him (Geshe) for approval. He did not want any of us to go over his head by appealing to a higher authority to solve our problems.

The Dalai Lama particularly enjoyed watching marmots appear and disappear from their holes in the ground. “For the first time,” I wrote in my diary that night, “I was able to get a glimpse of him as a person, free from the institution in which he is encapsulated. He is simple but incredibly lucid. There appear to be few knots in his mind. His humility is so overpowering that it constitutes a charisma. It was striking to see him among people in the street unaccompanied by any subservience or pomp.”

Two days later (July 18), my diary entry reads: “Firmly decided to leave at the year’s end. First to India to study Dzogchen and slowly to Japan.” Dzogchen (Great Perfection) is an awareness practice, in some respects similar to Vipassana, taught in the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. My wish to travel on to Japan was likewise motivated by my interest in pursuing the less elaborate and more direct kinds of meditation found in Zen Buddhism. In both cases, I was drawn to Buddhist practices that did not require the visualization of complex deities and mandalas and the endless recitation of mantras.

‘People adopt robes in order to lead a simple life, but the noise of their simplicity prevents them from being simple.’

When a man in the audience quoted something a guru had told him, Krishnamurti raised a trembling hand and berated him with the words: “Sir. You must never, ever, submit to the authority of another person.” Unless, it would appear, that authority happened to be Krishnamurti.

On October 22, I wrote: “Just before going to bed last night, the absurdity of mindlessly reciting all these prayers and mantras struck me with its full force. I stopped immediately.

In spirit I had stopped reciting them long ago; the last vestige of mechanical vocalization just dropped off. I don’t believe that a horrible hellfire is awaiting me either. I cannot justify the pursuit of a routine that does not assist in the production of more abundant life.

Religion is life living itself: not a mechanical repetition of dogmas motivated by threats and fear.”

By acting solely on my own conviction, I broke with the authority of Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

I was also attracted to Rudolf Bultmann’s idea of “demythologizing” Christian tradition, stripping it of mythic and supernatural elements in order to gain a clearer sense of what the original teachings meant in the context of Jesus’s time. On reading these authors, I realized that a similar method might be fruitfully applied to Buddhism. Rather than preserving unchanged what had been taught for centuries in the monasteries of Asia, one could rearticulate the core Buddhist ideas in a contemporary language that spoke directly to the concerns of men and women living in twentieth-century Europe and America. “The

I saw myself, arrogantly perhaps, as a participant in a groundbreaking experiment to redefine traditional religious thinking in a way that transcended sectarian identities.

This experiment was neither Christian, Jewish, nor Buddhist: it was an attempt to humanize and secularize religion, to free it from the prison of metaphysics and supernatural beliefs, to allow it to speak out in a lucid, impassioned, and committed voice.

I told Geshe Rabten of my plans to leave Hamburg at the end of the year and go to a monastery in South Korea to train in Zen.

Why, he must have wondered, would I abandon my training with him in order to practice in a school that had been outlawed in Tibet ever since the Indian pandit Kamalashila had roundly defeated in debate the Chinese Zen teacher Hoshang Mahayana?

This debate had taken place in Samye Monastery, south of Lhasa, at the end of the eighth century, but, as far as Geshe was concerned, it could have happened a week ago.

I AM AWOKEN—as I will be every morning for the next three and a half years—by the Dok! Dok! Dok! of a moktak struck by a monk with a stick. In syncopation with his beat, the monk chants a liturgy in a deep, mournful voice that fades and grows louder as he makes his way around the pitch-black courtyard outside. I fumble for the light, grab my glasses, then stand with bare feet on the still-warm paper-covered floor as I hastily put on my gray trousers and jacket. I go out onto the wooden maru, step down into my rubber slip-on shoes, and hurry to the stone tank, where I splash bitingly cold water onto my face. Two minutes later, as rapid metallic chimes sound from the courtyard, I am walking blearily with nine other gray-clad, shaven-headed monks counter-clockwise around the hall, waiting for the Ibseung Sunim to strike the djukpi to announce the start of our first meditation session of the day, from three to five a.m.

We sit for fifty minutes, then walk briskly around the hall for ten, until the sharp clap of the djukpi instructs us to sit down again. Apart from a small shrine to Munsu Bosal (Manjushri—the bodhisattva of wisdom) in a niche to one side, the room is bare, with white walls and a dull yellow-ocher floor on which ten square cushions are arranged in two rows. Suspended from the ceiling is a bamboo pole on which hang our gray, butterfly-sleeved, pleated gowns and brown ceremonial kesas (monk’s robes). The latticed doors (there are no windows) are pasted over with white rice paper. If I open my eyes, I see only a uniform wall of white before me. And all I do, hour after hour, is ask myself the question: “What is this?”

I was drawn to Zen’s pithy, enigmatic sayings, its down-to-earth simplicity, its stark aesthetic, its ruthless honesty.

Of all the schools of Buddhism, it seemed the only one that embraced the arts—poetry, painting, calligraphy, landscaping—as integral features of its practice rather than decorative adornments of its rituals and beliefs.

in Korea the monks still adhered to the celibate monastic rule laid down by the Buddha, which was much the same as that observed in Tibet and Southeast Asia.

She also confirmed that the monastery would accept my Tibetan monastic ordination. I would thus be exempted from the usual six-month probationary period, which entailed working from dawn to dusk in the monastery kitchen and fields.

I had severed my links to the Tibetan Buddhist world in which I had spent most of my adult life and was now on my way to an unknown monastery in a distant country, to train with a teacher I had never met in a language that I could neither read nor speak.

Songil lived with two other Western nuns in a small room in a separate compound across the river from the main monastery complex. As a monk, I was housed in Munsu Jon, a walled compound with its own Sonpang (meditation hall) within the monastery grounds. Songil presented me with a set of gray and brown Korean robes to replace my red Tibetan ones, told me how to bow in the “right” way, instructed me in the use of the four bowls used for meals in the dining hall, and gave me a crash course in how not to offend Koreans with my insensitive Western manner.

He listened with patient bemusement as I nervously explained why I had come to Korea and expressed my wish to study with him. He confidently told me just to look into the nature of my mind and ask myself: ‘What is this?’”

When the retreat began and I started meditating in earnest on the question “What is this?” my mind insisted on coming up with clever answers. Each time I tried to discuss my latest theory with Kusan Sunim, he would listen patiently for a while, then give a short laugh and say: “Bopchon [my Korean name]. Do you know what it is? No? Then go back and sit.” Irrespective of how suitably enigmatic they seemed, my answers were either trite or predictable.

For eight years, my Tibetan teachers had sought to convince me that the answers to the great questions of life were enshrined in their hermetic system of beliefs. The aim of their training had been to arrive at certainty: to reach a place where all questions had finally been resolved and all doubt vanquished. From their point of view, I had failed. While I valued the rich framework of Buddhist ideas they had given me, I could neither submit myself unquestioningly to the authority of the lamas nor uncritically accept their view of the world and the place of humans within it.

The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks. The certainties of Tibetan Buddhism had had a suffocating effect upon me, while the uncertainty celebrated in Korean Zen brought me vividly, if anxiously, to life.

“When there is great doubt,” says a Zen aphorism that Kusan Sunim kept repeating, “then there is great awakening.” This is the key. The depth of any understanding is intimately correlated with the depth of one’s confusion. Great awakening resonates at the same “pitch” as great doubt. So rather than negate such doubt by replacing it with belief, which is the standard religious procedure, Zen encourages you to cultivate that doubt until it “coagulates” into a vivid mass of perplexity.

Great doubt is not a purely mental or spiritual state: it reverberates throughout your body and your world. It throws everything into question. In developing such doubt, you are told to question “with the marrow of your bones and the pores of your skin.” You are exhorted to “be totally without knowledge and understanding, like a three-year-old child.”

To cultivate doubt, therefore, is to value unknowing. To say “I don’t know” is not an admission of weakness or ignorance, but an act of truthfulness: an honest acceptance of the limits of the human condition when faced with “the great matter of birth and death.” This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.

By the time I reached Korea, I realized that no single Asian form of Buddhism was likely to be effective as a treatment for the peculiar maladies of a late-twentieth-century post-Christian secular existentialist like myself.

To my surprise, Kusan Sunim was just like Geshe Rabten. Despite their largely incompatible versions of Buddhism, they were otherwise very similar.

“The purpose of Zen meditation is to awaken to the Mind….

There is a Master who rules this body who is neither the label ‘mind,’ the Buddha, a material thing, nor empty space.

Once again, I found myself confronted by the specter of a disembodied spirit. The logic of Kusan Sunim’s argument failed to convince me. It rested on the assumption that there was “something” (i.e., Mind) that rules the body, which was beyond the reach of concepts and language. At the same time, this “something” was also my true original nature, my face before I was born, which somehow animated me. This sounded suspiciously like the Atman (Self/God) of Indian tradition that the Buddha had rejected.

Since Mind was inconceivable, Kusan Sunim told us to abandon any notion of what we were inquiring about when we asked “What is this?” For, as unawakened beings, we could not have the remotest idea of what it was.

Ironically, the orthodox views of Korean Zen traced themselves back to the idealist Mind Only school of Indian Buddhism, which my Tibetan teachers had been at pains to refute with their Middle Way doctrine of emptiness. I now found myself in the curious position of practicing meditation in a school whose philosophy I rejected, while adhering to the philosophy of a school whose meditation practices I had rejected.

Buddhism had arrived in Korea from China in the fourth century CE.

Until then, I had lived either in Tibetan refugee communities in India, a country where Buddhism had not existed for a thousand years, or Switzerland and Germany, where Buddhism had barely been introduced.

For one who had only known Buddhism among exiled Tibetans and white, middle-class, twenty-something dropouts, I now saw how the Dharma, when removed from its lofty spiritual pedestal, impacted the lives of people from widely diverse backgrounds with very different needs.

Life in a Korean Zen monastery was centered around the notion of “group spirit.” There was no place here for the prissy demands of Western individualism, such as the “need” to have one’s own room. “If the group decides to go to hell,” one monk gravely told me, “then you must go to hell too.”

Korea was a Confucian society and the Zen monastery was a Confucian society in miniature. Each individual had to accept his assigned role, which would change over time, and fulfill it dutifully in order to maintain the harmony of the greater whole. This contrasted with the feudal structure of Tibetan Buddhism, where the lamas formed a privileged spiritual aristocracy who lived and ate separately from the ordinary monks, while possessing an almost absolute authority over their disciples. It became clear to me that Buddhism, as it moved from one country to another in Asia, had adapted itself not only to different intellectual cultures, but also to different social norms.

I now found myself in a Buddhist culture that valued the integration of creative expression into the practice of the Dharma.


By emphasizing doubt rather than belief, perplexity rather than certainty, and questions rather than answers, Zen practice granted me the freedom to imagine.

These years at Songgwangsa were the happiest that I spent as a monk.

I enjoyed the contemplative rhythm of the three-month retreats twice a year, and the cultural refinement and emotional warmth of the Koreans, who embraced us as part of their community.

In 1983 Songil and I began work on a book of Kusan Sunim’s teachings. Songil translated his lectures, then I edited her drafts. We spent many hours together, working and reworking these texts until we arrived at a version that both captured our teacher’s voice and read fluently in English. In the course of this labor, we also grew closer together as friends, and I came to look forward to these sessions in a way that raised questions about my continuing vocation as a monk.

Sometimes, even in the midst of a three-month retreat, the younger Korean monks would exchange their robes for camouflaged fatigues, climb onto the back of a truck, and depart for a day of military training. (South Korea was—and still is—technically at war with the North.) Despite their vow not to kill, Buddhist monks are not exempt from this duty. I met one monk who had bound his trigger finger with surgical gauze, dipped it in oil, set it alight, then offered it as a candle to the Buddha. I knew another who had chopped off all the fingers of his right hand with an ax. But these were exceptions. Most monks accepted their position in the reserve army, which recalled for them, perhaps, the monastic militias raised by Zen Master Sosan that played a crucial role in the defeat of the Japanese army that invaded Korea in 1592.

When I queried my Korean friend “Strongman” (among ourselves we foreigners gave the Korean monks nicknames since their real ones sounded so similar to us) about the morals of participating in the state killing machine, he looked at me and asked with disbelief: “Then you would not fight for your country?” No one had challenged my knee-jerk pacifism quite so bluntly before.

“To be honest, Strongman,” I said, “no. I would not.” He shook his head in amazement, then marched off with his fellow monk-soldiers for target practice and combat drill, leaving the unpatriotic Nose People to stew on their cushions.

In the early 1980s South Korea was beginning to emerge from the catastrophe of thirty-five years of Japanese colonial occupation, followed shortly after by the devastating civil war with the Communist North.

The country was ruled by the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who had seized control in December 1979 during the turmoil that followed the assassination of Park Chung-hee, another military dictator, who had ruled since 1961. (Park was felled during a cabinet meeting in a volley of bullets fired by the head of the Korean CIA.) Both Chun and Park were Buddhists. In May 1980, one year before I arrived, Chun had dispatched paratroopers to suppress a popular uprising in Kwangju, the city nearest our monastery, in which at least two hundred civilians were killed (the figures are still disputed) and three thousand wounded.

As a Western convert, I saw Buddhism as a set of philosophical doctrines, ethical precepts, and meditation practices. For me, to be a Buddhist simply meant to accord one’s life with the core values of the tradition: wisdom, compassion, nonviolence, tolerance, calm, and so on.

Living in Korea made me realize how naïve I was. By my narrow criteria, a military dictator who violently suppressed a popular uprising could not possibly be a Buddhist. But why not? Is Buddhism reserved only for the morally upright and doctrinally correct, who piously sit in meditation every day? I began to see it as a broad cultural and religious identity, one that provides a framework for fallible humans to make complex decisions in a precarious and unpredictable world.

In September 1983, Kusan Sunim fell ill and was confined to his quarters. None of us was told what was wrong or allowed to see him. It was a troubled time. On the first of the month, a civilian Korean airliner (KAL 007) on a flight from New York had been shot down by Soviet jet interceptors just west of Sakhalin Island, near Japan, on its way to Seoul. All 269 people on board, including the U.S. congressman Larry McDonald, were killed. Korea was in a state of national mourning. People wore little black ribbons and shopfronts displayed large wreaths, while Octopus used the occasion to ratchet up anti-Communist feeling to a hysterical pitch.

Kusan Sunim died at 6:20 p.m. on December 16. He was seventy-four. “Since then,” I wrote two weeks later, “my life has been turned inside out in a way in which I would never have foreseen.” I had never mourned anyone that completely before. I stayed awake for days on end in a state of fragile lucidity, interrupted by bouts of sobbing, as the monastery went through the rituals of bereavement. For the first three days his coffin (L-shaped to accommodate the cross-legged sitting posture in which he had been placed to die) stood on dry ice and the monks sat silently before it in a rota day and night.

Then the body in its coffin was carried on an elaborate bier studded with chrysanthemums to a terraced field above the monastery, where it was cremated on a bed of charcoal beneath a huge pyre of wood, which burned steadily until dawn the next day.

When the embers had cooled, the ash and fragments of bone were collected and taken to Kusan Sunim’s room, where we meticulously sifted through them in search of sarira—little crystalline droplets believed to be a sign of spiritual attainment, but probably just a natural consequence of a human body being burned at a sufficiently high temperature for a long enough time. We found fifty-two sarira, of different sizes and colors, which were reverently placed on red velvet inside a glass dish. Then we crushed the pieces of bone between roof tiles and poured the coarse, white powder into a celadon vase.

He had failed to appoint a successor, and none of the monks seemed to know who would assume his position as Zen master.

After a month or two of anguished indecision we made up our minds to leave the monastery the following winter and get married. This, of course, raised other unsettling questions: where would we live and how on earth would we support ourselves?

I turned my gaze to Songil—or “Martine” as she now insisted on being called—who was seated across from me, our knees bumping together each time the train lurched through another set of switches.

We posted banns to be married at Hong Kong City Hall, then boarded the train to Guangzhou (Canton).

Yun-men was known for his pithy “one word” Zen. When asked “What is the highest teaching of the Buddha?” he replied: “An appropriate statement.” On another occasion, he answered: “Cake.” I admired his directness.

Once Tibetans realized, to their astonishment, that I spoke their language and had lived in Dharamsala with the Dalai Lama, they took me aside and vented their rage and pain against the cruelty of the Chinese, who had entered their country uninvited only to attack every aspect of Tibetan culture, while imprisoning or executing anyone who resisted being “liberated” from “feudal slavery.” There were other voices too. One man, on overhearing me criticize the Chinese, said calmly: “It was not only the Chinese who destroyed things, you know. Tibetans did that too.”

The enormity of the Tibetans’ loss was overwhelming. The Dalai Lama and his retinue were men who had formed the inner circle of power in Tibet. Their rule and influence extended over an area as large as Europe. As senior prelates of the Geluk church, they saw themselves as representatives of a regime that had governed Tibet as a compassionate Buddhist state since the seventeenth century. Suddenly, in the wake of distant political upheavals that seemed to have little bearing on their lives, they found themselves on the wrong side of history. The time-honored rituals and supplications to the deities who had safeguarded Tibet for so long did not work anymore. The Protectors seemed to have abandoned them. Many assumed that some deeply heinous karma was coming to fruition. As the rest of the world looked on with indifference, the Dalai Lama and his followers were forced to abandon their precious land and trek over the snow peaks into exile.

Martine and I were married in a brief civil ceremony on our return to Hong Kong, witnessed by our friends Peter and Nicole, another former monk and nun who had also married, and now worked in Kowloon. Two days later, we flew to England.

We moved into a single room on the upper floor of Sharpham House where we were to spend the first six years of our married life.

Our community life involved meditating together morning and evening, sharing in a cooking, cleaning, and shopping rota, tending the walled vegetable garden in the grounds, spending hours at weekly meetings in exhausting attempts to resolve our conflicts in a compassionate and non-aggressive manner, and running a program of weekly talks, meditation days, and weekend workshops.

Inspired by a visit some years before to Green Gulch Farm, a rural Zen center in California, they had come to believe that Buddhism, of all the world’s religions, would be best suited to help them realize the goals of the Sharpham Trust.

I arrived in Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain without any money or qualifications, my sole work experience having been the six-month stint as a cleaner in an asbestos factory thirteen years previously. Having left the monastic order, I could no longer expect to be sponsored by other Buddhists.

Despite many years of studying and writing about Buddhism, I had no academic degree in the subject that would have enabled me to teach in a school or university.

Martine was in a similar position. Having spent ten years as a nun, she too lacked any formal qualifications or work skills. To supplement the meager income we earned from teaching together, she worked as Maurice and Ruth’s housekeeper.

I did not once regret my decision to disrobe and return to the anonymity of lay life. It was a relief. No longer would I have to stand out in such a public way. To be a shaven-headed man in exotic robes, especially in a secular, non-Buddhist culture like Switzerland, had come to feel like the visual equivalent of screaming.

As hard as I had tried to convince myself to the contrary, I do not think I ever really had a monastic vocation. Throughout my years as a monk, I had often suffered the disquieting suspicion that I was an imposter.

Since the time of the Buddha, celibacy has been mandatory for every Buddhist monk and nun. The solitude of monastic life was regarded as a necessary condition for anyone who sought to accomplish the arduous task of realizing nirvana.

Throughout the history of Buddhism, only in Japan and some of the Tibetan tantric orders has such monasticism been replaced by a married priesthood. A celibate monastic order remains the norm throughout the rest of the Buddhist world in Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Tibet.

The question of celibacy is as controversial an issue in Buddhism as it is in Christianity. Traditionalists will argue that Buddhism has survived for two and a half thousand years because it has preserved intact a celibate monastic order that has provided each generation since the time of the Buddha with a body of professionals committed to upholding the Dharma. Others will point out that one of the reasons Buddhism failed to survive in India and came close to being wiped out in parts of Asia during the twentieth century was because of the vulnerability of the monastic institutions on which it depended. Since celibate monks tended to live in isolated monasteries that lay outside the protective walls of townships and cities and were forbidden by their vows to bear weapons and engage in combat, they were defenseless against armed force, whether of Muslim armies in India or bands of Red Guards in China.

In traditional Buddhist societies, to become a monk was equivalent to receiving an education. Monasteries like Sera or Songgwangsa were seminaries and training centers rather than closed communities of silent contemplatives.

If they wished to do more, they were encouraged to accumulate “merit” and offer prayers for a better rebirth in their next life.

The people who read my books and attended our retreats were well-educated men and women, often with families and careers, who had sufficient leisure time to pursue their religious and philosophical interests, but no wish at all to be ordained as a celibate monk or nun. For many of them, the traditional practices of lay Buddhism appeared uncritically devout, simplistic, and superstitious. They were looking for a coherent and rigorous philosophy of life, coupled with a meditative practice that made an actual difference in their lives here and now, not a set of consoling beliefs and aspirations that promised rewards in a hypothetical future existence. A third way seemed to be called for: one designed for a reflective and educated laity.

At one point, Geshe describes how he came to the conclusion that for something to be empty means that it is “neither existent nor non-existent.” Although he had arrived at this insight through his own meditative inquiry, he knew that it contradicted the official view of the Geluk tradition in which he had been trained, which maintains that emptiness is nothing but “the simple absence of inherent existence.”

From the time I was in Dharamsala, I had been aware that the Dalai Lama himself had been receiving instruction on Dzogchen from the eminent Nyingma lama Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. I respected the Dalai Lama’s openness in embracing practices from schools of Tibetan Buddhism other than the one in which he had been trained. He sought to develop a synthesis of Tibetan Buddhist teachings in order to overcome the sectarianism that often plagued relations between adherents of the different Tibetan traditions.

Rather than being a manifestation of the Buddha’s wisdom, as adherents of the protector believed, the Dalai Lama now declared that Dorje Shugden was just a mundane spirit and should be accordingly downgraded. If the Dalai Lama was correct, this would imply that some of the most revered teachers of the Geluk tradition—including the saintly and much loved junior tutor—had somehow been hoodwinked by a malefic spook.

I found all of this extremely weird. The same people who expounded a finely reasoned philosophy of emptiness turned out to be fervent believers in what to me was little more than occult mumbo jumbo.

Geshe Rabten died on February 27 the following year. He was sixty-six years old. He had suffered enormous hardships during his life: he had fled his home in Eastern Tibet at the age of nineteen to become a monk; he had suffered severe malnutrition at Sera because he had no benefactor; and then he had to cross the Himalayas to arrive as a destitute refugee in India. At the same time he had risen, through his own efforts, from a simple farmboy to become a philosophical assistant to the Dalai Lama.

the Theravada school, the tradition of Buddhism that prevails in Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand.

I was beginning to suspect that the Mahayana traditions had, on certain points, lost sight of what the Buddha originally taught. During my years as a monk, I had periodically stumbled upon startling passages

The Kalama Sutta

One of the most striking Pali texts I came across was called the Kalama Sutta, a discourse the Buddha gave to the Kalama people, in the town of Kesaputta in the Kingdom of Kosala. The Kalama people were confused. They tell Gotama how when different teachers arrive in Kesaputta, they “expound and explain only their own doctrines, the doctrines of others they despise, revile and pull to pieces.” They ask his advice on how to distinguish between those who are speaking the truth and those who are not.

And the Buddha replies: “it is proper for you, Kalamas, to doubt, to be uncertain. Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been heard by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; or upon what is in a sacred teaching; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias toward a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, “this monk is your teacher.” Kalamas, when you know for yourselves: these things are bad, these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill: then abandon them.”

This unambiguous call for the valuing of uncertainty and the need to establish the truth of things for oneself rather than rely on the authority of others struck a deep chord within me. The Buddha encourages the Kalamas to observe for themselves the consequences of greed, hatred, and stupidity on human beings, so they can judge for themselves what thoughts and acts lead to harm and suffering and which do no. His sole criterion for evaluating a doctrine is whether it causes or mitigates suffering. Even more startling is a statement toward the end of the text, where he tells the Kalamas of the benefits of such an approach: “Suppose there is no hereafter and there is no fruit of deeds done well or ill. Yet in this world, here and now, free from hatred, free from malice, safe and sound, and happy, I keep myself.”

The Kalama Sutta presents a vision of the Buddha’s teaching that goes against the grain of much Buddhist orthodoxy. Rather than deference to tradition and lineage, it celebrates self-reliance; rather than belief in doctrine, it stresses the importance of testing ideas to see if they work; and rather than insisting on a metaphysics of rebirth and karma, it suggests that this world might indeed be the only one there is.

I realized that what I found difficult to accept in Buddhism were precisely those ideas and doctrines that it share with its Indian sister religion: Hinduism. Rebirth, the law of Karma, gods, other realms of existence, freedom from the cycle of birth and death, unconditioned consciousness: these were all ideas that predated the Buddha. For many of his contemporaries, such notions would have been uncritically accepted as a description of how the world worked. They were not, therefore, intrinsic to what he taught, but simply a reflection of ancient Indian cosmology and soteriology.

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