Stephen Batchelor

Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

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Written with the same brilliance and boldness that made Buddhism Without Beliefs a classic in its field, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist is Stephen Batchelor's account of his journey through Buddhism, which culminates in a groundbreaking new portrait of the historical Buddha. Stephen Batchelor grew up outside London and came of age in the 1960s. Like other seekers of his time, instead of going to college he set off to explore the world. Settling in India, he eventually became a Buddhist monk in Dharamsala, the Tibetan capital-in-exile, and entered the inner circle of monks around the Dalai Lama. He later moved to a monastery in South Korea to pursue intensive training in Zen Buddhism. Yet the more Batchelor read about the Buddha, the more he came to believe that the way Buddhism was being taught and practiced was at odds with the actual teachings of the Buddha himself. Charting his journey from hippie to monk to lay practitioner, teacher, and…
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Quotes

  • Muriel Pacheco Orozcohas quoted6 years ago
    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.”
  • Muriel Pacheco Orozcohas quoted6 years ago
    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.
  • Muriel Pacheco Orozcohas quoted6 years ago
    Despite all the emphasis Buddhism gave to the importance of cultivating inner qualities of mind as the only genuine source of well-being, this outward recognition of my worth—in the form of a flimsily bound Indian paperback—gave me a sense of self-worth and fulfillment that meditation alone had so far failed to provide.

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