Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

I picked up this book by Stephen Batchelor for the sole purpose of reading his account of how and why the Buddha was murdered. Some may recognize Batchelor for his work in the Buddhist quarterly Tricycle and his book Buddhism without Beliefs. Batchelor was one of the first Westerners during the 1970s to make the journey to the East and study Buddhism with the Dalai Lama. After years of study he became a monk and then a teacher. The title of his latest comes from his status now as a married man, no longer a monk, who claims to practice Buddhist beliefs in conformity to secularism and modernity. This is the story of his journey from his first days as a believer to today's position as a lecturer, historian and something of a skeptic. This is also a parallel journey back to rediscover the historical Buddha and his original teachers.

What he discovers is a world of intense political intrigue and warfare. He believes the Buddha before his great awakening had journeyed to the end of the Persian empire and learned about Zoroasterianism. From this experience, Batchelor notes the emergence in Buddhist literature of the concept of the Devil, Mara, which did not exist in India at the time.

Buddha's teaching themselves created formidable enemies in India. Batchelor discovers that the founder of the Jains had been assassinated in the same place as Buddha finally is poisoned. Rival principalities warred against each other based on the religious teachers of their leaders. The Buddha had made enemies and came to meet his end at the house of man called Cunda the Smith. Here he was served tenderized pork and sensing something was wrong, he insisted the rest of his disciples be served the remaining food. He then told Cunda to bury all remaining pork in a pit, got violently ill and called for his devoted companion Ananda to take him to Kusinara, about ten miles away where he died under the canopy of sal leaves.

This story and how Batchelor reconstructs it from ancient Buddhist texts was why I was interested. But the real surpise of the book concerns his writings about the fierce struggles inside modern Tibetan Buddhism and the resistance, sometimes armed, against the Dalai Lama. In the 1980s, I talked with the Dalai Lama about his efforts to modernize his religion. At that point he had started his annual seminars of scientists teaching Tibetan Buddhists the latest findings in neuroscience, astrophysics and the like. "If we see something that contradicts our religion,then we'll change it," he rather cavalierly said.

But apparently, it was not so easy and the Dalai Lama has far more enemies inside his own camp than I ever realized. The Tibetan lamas did not want to abandon some of their medieval practices and beliefs. Only a few years ago some of the dissident monks sent assassins to kill the Dalai Lama's senior aides. This doesn't even include what the Chinese government was up to.

Batchelor details the fragmented state of Tibetan Buddhism along with accounts of known dissident lamas who maintain their distance from both the Dalai Lama and his most heated enemies. Throughout the book Batchelor paints the intimate landscape he encounters throughout the Buddhist world.

For those seeking to practice the Four Noble Truths, one will surpised how bloody the path is.