Stories of Self (Vol. 5)

Stories of Self is a(n approximately) monthly essay series by Scott F. Parker that explores the nature of the composed self through conversations with memoirists, theorists, artists, and possibly musicians.

Tending Toward Edification with Stephen Batchelor

For Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism is an empty concept—empty in the sense that it’s not fixed. When you reach toward Buddhism, what you end up contacting are your own beliefs about Buddhism. The practice of Buddhism, says Batchelor, is to let go.

Batchelor’s books Alone With Others and Buddhism Without Beliefs were instrumental in shaping my early understanding of Buddhism. In many ways, the narrative arc from confusion to enlightenment served as a precursor to my own interest in memoir. But Batchelor, who loves paradox, exposes the riddle of the self at the heart of personal narratives, pointing out that it, too, can be empty. Here is the opening of his translation of Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna’s poem “Self”:

Were mind and matter me,
I would come and go like them.
If I were something else,
They would say nothing about me.

This is just the kind of thing I’m trying to feel my way around when I read memoir. I checked Batchelor’s schedule online and learned that he would be leading a retreat in Santa Fe that aligned with my spring break from teaching high school math. I sent him an email and he responded enthusiastically about meeting.

Ahead of my trip I reread Batchelor’s own memoir, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, which frames his life story as a quest. From his early years, he was searching for a meaningful response to his existential condition. “I remember lying awake at night trying to stop the incessant outpouring of anxious thoughts. I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive.”

When Batchelor finished school in Britain, he set out looking for the kind of answers that mattered to him and, following the “hippie trail” and the insights of hallucinogens, found his way to India. There, in 1972, he made contact with Buddhists and landed in Dharmsala, where he studied Tibetan Buddhism and became a monk. But by 1981, Batchelor was growing disillusioned with the centrality of metaphysics in Tibetan Buddhism and traveled to Korea to train in Zen. Zen offered Batchelor a new response to the insecurity he had known. Instead of solving the problem, Zen taught him how to live in 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....