[Buddha-l] Batchelor

[JKirkpatrick]

Stephen was interviewed after publishing Living with the Devil,
and had this to say about pratityasamutpada, contingency, and
samsara (excerpt):
http://www.dharmalife.com/issue25/devil.html
 
'Some of the first material I wrote for the new book was a
development of material that appeared years ago in a booklet
called Flight, which was an afterthought to Alone with Others. I
wanted to develop the idea that existential flight, which is the
human tendency to flee the difficult reality of experience
towards distraction or entertainment, is a natural response to
contingency. This word 'contingency' is how I translate
pratityasamutpada, or Dependent Arising, the Buddha's fundamental
teaching on the nature of Reality.' 

Batchelor's previous book, Verses from the Centre, was a poetic
rendering of a work by the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, in
which this contingency is identified with sunyata or emptiness,
the lack of essential identity in phenomena. Samsara, the endless
cycle of suffering, is, Batchelor might say, this flight from
contingency. Instead of opening to the contingent, empty nature
of things, we endlessly seek for identity, security and
permanence. But this sets us in a vicious circle, since in our
quest for happiness we are evading Reality. In German, Batchelor
notes, a vicious circle is a Teufelskreis, a 'devil's circle': it
is the devil who deceives us into circling, getting nowhere. In
Buddhism this devil is called Mara.

'Mara,' he tells me, 'is a way of talking about the contingent
and imperfect structure of the world. A lot of western Buddhists,
and maybe Asian Buddhists, too, tend to read Mara as a
psychological function: as negative states of mind, attachments,
grasping and so on. This is only part of the picture. It fails to
see that Mara is a metaphor for the very structure of the
contingent world that is constantly breaking down, and exposing
you to death and the unpredictability of life itself. All that is
Mara.'