[Buddha-l] Batchelor

[ahbadiner at igc.apc.org]

Many thanks to Joanna Kirkpatrick for isolating (in my view) some the  
most important and revolutionary of Batchelor's ideas. This is no less  
significant than the First Noble Truth-- it may be, in fact, the very  
heart of that truth.

So much of human behavior can be seen as a kind of flight from  
contingency. Full recognition of contingency is suggested to be the  
essence of awakening and the diminution of suffering. Yet, in the  
effort to keep suffering at bay, our tragic error is to push away from  
contingency which in turn creates more suffering.

--Allan Badiner


  Quoting JKirkpatrick <jkirk at spro.net>:

> 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.'
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> buddha-l mailing list
> buddha-l at mailman.swcp.com
> http://mailman.swcp.com/mailman/listinfo/buddha-l
>