[Buddha-l] Shamatha book--clarification

[curt]

Piya Tan wrote:
> Although I admire Batchelor's agnostic courage

There is nothing "courageous" about Batchelor's agnosticism. He himself 
characterizes it explicitly as an ethnocentric retreat from the 
rebellious and defiant idealism of his youth - as an admission that, for 
him, it is impossible (and "unsustainable" as he puts it) to embrace 
anything so fundamentally foreign to "our own culture" as Buddhism. 
Check out Batchelor's essay "Deep Agnosticism" ( 
http://www.stephenbatchelor.org/deepagnosticism.htm )

"I discover as I grow older a reconnection with the roots of my own 
culture. Maybe many of us of my generation were drawn to Buddhism as a 
kind of act of defiance, a kind of rebelliousness against what we 
viscerally disliked—often for rather naive, adolescent, and idealistic 
reasons—in our own culture and we saw Buddhism, or at least I saw 
Buddhism, as a kind of vindication of that dissent.

But as the years have gone by I’ve found that this denial of one’s 
roots, this denial of one’s cultural upbringing, is not actually 
possible to sustain. If one seeks to sustain it, one often ends up as a 
kind of mock Tibetan or pseudo-Japanese. Although I have tried to do 
that on occasion, dressing up in all of the appropriate regalia, more 
than that I feel it to be still seeking to find an identity outside that 
of my own culture. It’s, as Freud might say, impossible to repress these 
things. They simply come out in other ways."

- Curt