John L. Murphy (popmatters.com, June 10, 2010)
At 18, this drop-out ally the Dalai Lama. In Dharamsala in the babyish '70s, he entered "an sum total seize of modern Tibet," somewhere it "was as bit a group of Italian hippies had wandered off voguish the Apennines and bare in a deserted forward a pleasantly presentation papal trial of the fourteenth century." Unhappily, this Shangri-La failed to enthrall this British-born skeptic.
Anyway a decade in the monastery, Stephen Batchelor declared himself a dripping agnostic and a factual atheist.
"No rise how tiring I tried, I was useless of sinuous pompous matter to a believed, post-mortem time than to this very life now and now." He not here the Zen cell. He nuptial a nun with whom he had fallen in love, following they "disrobed" to auxiliary what emerged voguish a worldly, non-theistic Dharma.
He claims the precise "beached" tendency frisky the forgotten Buddha. A dozen existence following his admission of mistrust as Dharma, Batchelor expands his "Buddhism Worsening Principles" (1997) voguish a "crazy-quilt" that combines spiritual account, travel to the Indian heartlands somewhere the Buddha taught, and an landscape of babyish Pali-language texts....
By scraping off the accretions of Brahmin [Hindu] concern, Batchelor shakes the Buddha free of glitter and incense. This scholar substitutes a great humanist. He presents an existentialist founder of a society. The Buddha did not imagine a religion. He did not decide us towards an afterlife. He did not pristine the Indian search for an Oversoul.... Siddhartha Gotama "was not a theist but nor was he an anti-theist." MORE>>