The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/03/21/the-art-of-solitude-stephen-batchelor/

The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/02/11/the-art-of-solitude-stephen-batchelor/

A Quiet Life

All through our repeated pandemic precautions and lockdowns, when physically attending corporate worship of any kind has been difficult, not to say inadvisable, and Zoom meetings have remained their distracting and inadequate selves, there has been plenty of time to be quiet, and to allow the assumptions and traditions by which our spiritual lives are usually conditioned to settle out, as it were, like the cloudiness in a newly-established aquarium.

Wikipedia defines religion as “a social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements.”

Contemplation, however differently it may be defined in different traditions, is at root a kind of inner seeing, an experiential encounter with the ground of being that gives rise to, and sustains, all that is. The many techniques of contemplative practice may in the end give rise to contemplation, but their intention is generally more modest: to train attention and consciousness sufficiently to still the field of awareness, and to recognise the incessant activity of the mind as a process, or bundle of processes, that runs on beneath awareness all by itself, rather than assuming it to be a discrete and permanent self or soul, set over against its perceptions. Of course the outer forms of mediation or contemplative practice are very different, and conditioned by the religious tradition within which they arise, but very broadly something like this seems to be intended by them all.

In this period of quiet settling, separated from the religious atmosphere and bustle of corporate worship, I, as I suspect many of us, have begun to sense that the “social-cultural system” of religion is something quite separate from the “experimental faith” (cf. Quaker faith  & practice 19.02) of contemplative practice, and that, crucially, the one does not depend upon the other.

Churches and religious groups seem mostly to be operating on the assumption that once the pandemic is under control, and something approaching normal life is restored, their worshippers will flood back, Catholics to Mass, Quakers to their meetings, everyone to their accustomed place. It may not happen, at least not in the way, or to the extent, that most people appear to expect. The sea change of the pandemic, and the enforced crash course in information and communications technology it has brought, have accelerated a process of secularisation that has been gathering momentum for a long time.

Now, secularisation is a term loaded with assumptions and prejudices on the part of both those espouse it, and those who oppose any such idea. Stephen Batchelor points out (After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, p.15, Yale University Press, Kindle Edition) that both the word “religious” and the word “secular” are difficult terms in our present time. He writes,

Secular critics commonly dismiss religious institutions and beliefs as outdated, dogmatic, repressive, and so on, forgetting about the deep human concerns that they were originally created to address… “Secular” is a term that presents as many problems as “religious.”… there seems to be no reason why avowedly “secular” people cannot be deeply “religious” in their ultimate concern to come to terms with their brief and poignant life here and now.

I have written elsewhere of my growing sense that the contemplative life is once again moving out from the monasteries and ashrams into a new desert, that of the world, or at least of places set apart within the world. I wrote then:

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century AD, the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. [Our present political uncertainties], scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

I have no idea where this is leading, but there is a clarity developing that I had not expected, nor intentionally “worked towards”. The inward solitude of these unusual times is proving strangely fruitful. This is what Martin Laird once called a “pathless path”: as Dave Tomlinson wrote, “Human language is unable to describe the external realities of God with any precision. As we have seen, this does not make language useless; it simply means that we have to accept its limitations… Religious language or talk about God and the spiritual realm is therefore inherently provisional and approximate in nature.”

There is no obvious name for what is happening. It seems not to be “secular” in the way religious people might fear, but it isn’t “religious” either, in the way that secularists might assume. It is not eremitical exactly, certainly not in the traditional sense of hermits as ones living in geographical isolation.

Perhaps it is time that silence and practice are allowed to stand untitled: the ground still, and open. It seems to be so for me.

[Parts of this post were published earlier on The Mercy Blog, but have since been adapted and expanded.]

#contemplation #contemplative #DaveTomlinson #desert #MartinLaird #pandemic #religion #secularism #solitude #StephenBatchelor

Looking for a language

All contemplative traditions seek, in one way or another, to look past the shifting pattern of thoughts and emotions which we take to to be ourselves, and to know directly that which is unthinkable, and is.

But thinking is what we always do, if only to find some way of pointing out the ineffable, of showing others the beginning of the way to this unconditioned treasure. But it is always difficult, and painfully easily misunderstood, as contemplatives have long found to their cost in their dealings with religious authorities.

I think the reason why most contemplatives are in fact allied with some religion or another may be that, not only do we ourselves find the way to our own contemplative practice within a religious tradition, but within that tradition we find a path that others have walked, a thread others have followed, and a language with which to talk, and more importantly to think, about contemplation and its purpose. In many traditions contemplative practice is seen and experienced as a form of prayer, which comes with its own questions, and its own ways to think and talk about them.

One of the difficulties with treading a secular contemplative path is that these frameworks of tradition and language fall away. This is of course a great freedom, but it is easier perhaps to see what it is a freedom from than it is to see what it may be a freedom to, because of the sheer difficulty we have in finding new words for that which is beyond words, and in looking for ways to understand what we have perceived directly.

Happily, in most cases, bereft of a traditional Buddhist, Christian, or whatever language for contemplative experience, with all its baggage of doctrine and metaphysics, some have turned to Western philosophy, or to neuroscience, for paradigms. Those who are trained in these fields, Susan Blackmore, for instance, or Sam Harris, have made contributions that I for one find useful to say the least. Others, like Stephen Batchelor, seem to work more nearly by pruning the language of an existing tradition to express a secular practice, repossessing well-tried (in Batchelor’s case Buddhist) words to chart a secular path.

I am very late to the game. My four decades, more or less, of broadly Christian contemplative practice have left me missing their rich tradition of expression, and the depth of thought and teaching that underpins that tradition in both the Eastern and Western church, and in the great body of writing that predates the Great Schism of 1054, and, come to that, in the Quaker way since the 17th century in England.

I am finding it hard, as readers of this blog may have noticed, to pick up an alternative framework in which to think and write about practice and experience. I don’t have an alternative expert language, like the philosophers and the students of consciousness, and yet there is a sense that my own stream, my own practice and its fruits, has not gone astray so much as found a deeper bed on its way to the sea. The question is, how to talk about it?

#contemplation #contemplative #experience #faith #language #practice #religion #SamHarris #StephenBatchelor #SusanBlackmore #theWay

Frames

The spiritual life can be a difficult thing to live with. Once one realises for oneself the emptiness of the “universe of concrete things in eternal categories” (Brian McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed and the Disillusioned), of Newtonian mechanics and dualistically interpreted perceptions, the question of how to live arises in ways that are not only personally unsettling but potentially disruptive to the society in which most of us have grown up.

The Abrahamic religions in their popular, one might say political, forms provided a solid dualistic foundation for life and society – “God’s in his heaven–all’s right with the world” as Robert Browning had it – just as classical mechanics formed a solid, readily calculable foundation not only for physics but for all the sciences. As the revolution in mathematical physics initiated by Einstein and others, and the revolution in biology and paleontology initiated by Darwin, shook the scientific community, so the invasion of Eastern thought and practice (and the revival of the non-dualism inherent in the Christian contemplative tradition), together with the developing psychological disciplines, shook many of the foundations of Western self-understanding.

For those of us who grew up in the turmoil of the 60s the problem could easily become acute. Were we to cling to the imagined certainties of the past, or cast ourselves adrift on the foam of the psychedelic ocean? Were we to seek for no less imaginary certainties among the outward forms of Eastern religions, or were we to become Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin, tracing our own paths on the leaf-litter of philosophy and metaphysics?

It is easy, at times fatally easy, to fall into New Age formlessness on the one hand, or into some kind of fundamentalism on the other. Perhaps some of the cults and cult-like groups that have formed over the years have been failed attempts to blend these two incompatible directions.

I don’t wish to seem to condemn any of my fellow seekers after truth and insight. Once the medieval conception of a state-sponsored compulsory religion – such as still holds sway in some Muslim societies – has fallen away, choice becomes inevitable. (Even atheism and agnosticism are in this sense choices, albeit nominally negative ones.) The spiritual life needs teachers, though, and teachers often imply institutions, if only to validate their teachings. Many teachers of the spiritual life whom I most admire have remained within, or thrown in their lot with, traditional religions, from Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault in the Christian tradition, to Pema Chödrön and Brad Warner in the Buddhist. But there have been others who have not, whether like Jiddu Krishnamurti they rejected an institutional role, or like Sam Harris never adopted one outside of the academic community.

For myself, I feel that while I will always be grateful to the institutional teachers I have encountered over the years – in my case mostly within the Christian contemplative tradition – I have been happiest and most settled in myself outside religious institutions altogether. I wrote recently:

As I have found myself increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, so my naturally eremitical inclinations seem to have strengthened – dramatically so since the enforced isolation in which so many of us found ourselves during the earlier months of the recent pandemic. The opportunity for online fellowship and collegiality of one kind or another changes our expectations of community and communication almost daily.

Despite the value of frameworks of doctrine as a protection from delusion and indiscipline, I am profoundly indebted to those who have sought to delineate the spiritual path outside those traditional frameworks, whether like Tara Brach or Stephen Batchelor they still call themselves Buddhists, or whether like Harris today or Alan Watts in the 60s, they reject such definitions. As I grow older, paradoxically perhaps, I feel less dependent on them myself.

#AlanWatts #BradWarner #community #contemplative #CynthiaBourgeault #PemaChodron #practice #RichardRohr #SamHarris #StephenBatchelor #TaraBrach #trust

Sangha and solitude (slight return)

https://anopenground.com/2021/06/14/sangha-and-solitude/?page_id=153

It occurs to me that this post, though it was written when the pandemic was still near its height, says some things I’d wish to say now. In any case, more recent readers may have missed it first time around!

#community #contemplative #HenriNouwen #MartinHeidegger #practice #solitude #StephenBatchelor #TaraBrach #WintonHiggins

Sangha and solitude

In classical Buddhism the Three Refuges are the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The third of these is a Sanskrit word used in many Indian languages, including Pali (saṅgha) meaning “association”, “assembly”, “company” or “community”. In Buddhism the term is used more or less narrowly to imply the monastic community, or sometimes more widely to include all people who practice Buddhism correctly, whether lay or clerical. (Wikipedia)

Interestingly, Tara Brach chooses to redefine the three refuges as awareness, truth, and love: “The three facets of true refuge – awareness, truth, and love – come alive as we dedicate our presence to them. As we open to these three gateways, they reveal the one taste of freedom inherent to all paths of awakening.” She goes on to suggest that this implies “a yearning for more belonging” that we can “fully inhabit [as a] refuge of love”. (Reflection: The Three Refuges)

Winton Higgins has some harsh, even sarky, words for those who may decide that the concept of the sangha can be bypassed in our modern world:

After all, they may think, I have access to a plethora of how-to-meditate books and podcasts, and I can even download a meditation app. I can meditate by myself in my own bedroom, where I can also jump online and read or listen to any number of dharma talks. I can listen to dharma podcasts anywhere and any time, even while driving to work. If I want to talk to others about it, I can join an online chat room.

Okay, I understand that in other times and places people needed their sanghas because they had nowhere else to sit in peace and had no other access to the dharma. But it’s not like that any more. Besides, I’m a busy person and can’t afford to be tied down to a fixed weekly commitment (unless it’s for something really important like football training). And finally, frankly, I’m simply not a joiner. Sorry. Two refuges are enough for me.

Winton Higgins, Revamp, Tuwhiri 2021 (p.152)

He goes on to explain that in his view we are dependent beings who discover ourselves in community, in relationship, and that the sangha is best understood as “unmediated face-to-face communication with others who are actually present.” (p.153) Undoubtedly this is correct within Higgins’ own terms, but – leaving aside for a moment the effects of the present global pandemic on our face-to-face possibilities – solitude is an equally vital component of the contemplative life. The Buddha himself, after all, came to awakening in solitude. Stephen Batchelor:

There is more to solitude than just being alone. True solitude is a way of being that needs to be cultivated. You cannot switch it on or off at will. Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it. When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.

For those who have rejected religion in favor of secular humanism, the notion of solitude may imply self-indulgence, navel-gazing, or solipsism. Inevitably, some may be drawn to solitude as a way of escaping responsibility and avoiding relationships. But for many it provides the time and space to develop the inner calm and autonomy needed to engage effectively and creatively with the world. Moments of quiet contemplation, whether before a work of art or while observing your breath, allow you to rethink what your life is about and reflect on what matters most for you. Solitude is not a luxury for the leisured few. It is an inescapable dimension of being human. Whether we are devout believers or devout atheists, in solitude we confront and explore the same existential questions.

Stephen Batchelor, The Art of Solitude, Yale U.P. 2020, loc. 76

Higgins does, I am sure, understand this, for he writes, in his section on “Intensity as a modern virtue” (p.110 ff):

One of the thinkers that Peter Watson gathers into his fold is precisely Martin Heidegger, whom we met in chapter 4. He also identified care (Sorge) as the mainspring of an authentic human life, one intensely lived. Like the Buddha, Heidegger also introduced the tempering value of letting-go (Gelassenheit).

To live intensely must never translate into wilfulness – into our turning into meddling control freaks as we cultivate receptivity. Were we to fall into that trap, we’d be blocking the sensitive exploration of our experience. Thus Heidegger extols calm, composure, detachment, release – letting things be. This principle comes close to the Buddha’s upekkha (equanimity), one of the four vital ‘immeasurable’ emotional tones of the awakening mind.

(op. cit. (p. 112)

Solitude and Gelassenheit (a wonderful word that Heidegger presumably sourced from the 14th century contemplative Meister Eckhart) are to me indivisible. But what strikes me in this passage is the way Higgins connects this with Sorge (care, concern, even worry, for others) with the process of letting things be. There are echoes here of Tara Brach’s “awareness, truth and love”!

I have long felt that there is an immense freedom in solitude. The heart expands, somehow, in this unaccustomed space, and deliberate thought becomes more free and spacious too. Somehow I find myself able to think recklessly about, feel compassion for, even love, people against the mere thought of whom I’d have felt I had to defend myself had I not had this freedom.

Henri Nouwen wrote,

Solitude greeting solitude, that’s what community is all about. Community is not the place where we are no longer alone but the place where we respect, protect, and reverently greet one another’s aloneness. When we allow our aloneness to lead us into solitude, our solitude will enable us to rejoice in the solitude of others. Our solitude roots us in our own hearts. Instead of making us yearn for company that will offer us immediate satisfaction, solitude makes us claim our centre and empowers us to call others to claim theirs. Our various solitudes are like strong, straight pillars that hold up the roof of our communal house. Thus, solitude always strengthens community.

Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey, HarperOne, 2009 (loc. 930)

My own love of solitude was well established long before our lives were redefined by the pandemic neologism “lockdown” – from childhood it has been both a refuge and a source of life to me. Earlier this year I wrote here,

Churches and religious groups seem mostly to be operating on the assumption that once the pandemic is under control, and something approaching normal life is restored, their worshippers will flood back, Catholics to Mass, Quakers to their meetings, everyone to their accustomed place. It may not happen, at least not in the way, or to the extent, that most people appear to expect. The sea change of the pandemic, and the enforced crash course in information and communications technology it has brought, have accelerated a process of secularisation that has been gathering momentum for a long time…

There is no obvious name for what is happening. It seems not to be “secular” in the way religious people might fear, but it isn’t “religious” either, in the way that secularists might assume. It is not eremitical exactly, certainly not in the traditional sense of hermits as ones living in geographical isolation.

Perhaps it is time that silence and practice are allowed to stand untitled: the ground still, and open.

There is much more to explore here, and generous-hearted guides like Winton Higgins and Stephen Batchelor will no doubt have more to teach us as we all come closer to understanding what life will be like on the other side of this present crisis, and we come to face more closely the other crises, social, political and environmental (Higgins is especially good, and deeply hopeful, on this in the final section of Revamp) that are no doubt coming down the pike. Meanwhile, our own practice is our North star. In sitting we can find all we need.

#community #contemplative #HenriNouwen #MartinHeidegger #practice #solitude #StephenBatchelor #TaraBrach #WintonHiggins

Faith and watching

In an extract published in Tricycle Magazine, from his 1998 book Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor writes:

THE FORCE OF THE TERM “agnosticism” has been lost. It has come to mean: not to hold an opinion about the questions of life and death; to say “I don’t know,” when you really mean “I don’t want to know.” When allied (and confused) with atheism, it has become part of the attitude that legitimizes an indulgent consumerism and the unreflective conformism dictated by mass media.

For T H. Huxley, who coined the term in 1869, agnosticism was as demanding as any moral, philosophical, or religious creed. Rather than a creed, though, he saw it as a method realized through “the rigorous application of a single principle.” He expressed this principle positively as “Follow your reason as far as it will take you,” and negatively as “Do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.” This principle runs through the Western tradition: from Socrates, via the Reformation and the Enlightenment, to the axioms of modem science. Huxley called it “the agnostic faith.”

First and foremost the Buddha taught a method (“dharma practice“) rather than another “-ism.” The dharma is not something to believe in but something to do. The Buddha did not reveal an esoteric set of facts about reality, which we can choose to believe in or not. He challenged people to understand the nature of anguish, let go of its origins, realize its cessation, and bring into being a way of life. The Buddha followed his reason as far as it would take him and did not pretend that any conclusion was certain unless it was demonstrable. Dharma practice has become a creed (“Buddhism”) much in the same way scientific method has degraded into the creed of “Scientism.”

Just as contemporary agnosticism has tended to lose its confidence and lapse into skepticism, so Buddhism has tended to lose its critical edge and lapse into religiosity. What each has lost, however, the other may be able to help restore. In encountering contemporary culture, the dharma may recover its agnostic imperative, while secular agnosticism may recover its soul. An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the dharma as a source of “answers” to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc. An agnostic Buddhist is not a “believer” with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense is not “religious.”

But in order to practice, whatever method one follows, one must have faith: faith that something is possible, whether one calls it enlightenment, encounter with God, minding the Light, or something else. From within the Sōtō Zen tradition, Daishin Morgan writes:

Zazen is not an absence of thought, feeling, perception and volition, it is awakening to their emptiness. The same is true of purpose and the path. Some of the best advice is never to believe that you were lost in the first place, and never hesitate to do that which you know to be needed.

To awaken is to love, and in that love the tiresome need to put up and defend our views and opinions dissolves, and right there is an insight into things that nothing else compares with. We have to discover through personal experience how that insight, our faith and our intelligence all interrelate. For me, words and the effort to give expression to the truth continue to be of profound necessity in training. To awaken and not give expression to that awakening would be a contradiction. The struggle to find the words and the struggle to find the form our lives must take are the same struggle.

Morgan, Daishin. Buddha Recognizes Buddha . Throssel Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Faith and language may be more closely related than we know. But in love, as Morgan points out, much of the difficulty does not so much resolve as dissolve. Quakerism is sometimes described as an “experimental faith”. Daishin Morgan’s words, “We have to discover through personal experience how… insight, our faith and our intelligence all interrelate” could almost be a restatement of that. It is the wholeness of love that contains all things.

#contemplative #DaishinMorgan #faith #language #StephenBatchelor

#StephenBatchelor has another book on the way

#Buddhism

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Boeddhisme en seks: het meer totale plaatje

Het thema ‘boeddhisme en seksualiteit ‘ blijft actueel, ook in Nederland, ook als we het er liever niet over willen hebben. Wat de diepere oorzaken van de problematiek kunnen zijn, is het onderwerp van een essay van Stephen Batchelor dat ik hieronder – door mij vertaald – weergeef.

Oorspronkelijke titel: Buddhism and Sex: the Bigger Picture .

In het licht van de schijnbaar eeuwigdurende controverse rond de kwestie van boeddhistische leraren die misbruik maken van hun gezag om seksuele gunsten te winnen van hun leerlingen, is het misschien nuttig om wat afstand te nemen van de analyse van specifieke gevallen; en elementen van het grotere geheel, waarin deze vorm van misbruik zich manifesteert, in de beschouwing te betrekken.

1. Seksueel verlangen is de meest krachtige biologische drift die we kennen van de mensheid.  Ongeacht welke geloften men heeft genomen om het te beheersen, kan lust zich ongevraagd onder alle omstandigheden voordoen en anderszins verantwoordelijke en goede mensen ertoe brengen zich aan handelingen over te geven die ze zonder aarzelen betreuren in anderen.

2. Overal waar mensen zijn in een positie van macht over andere mensen, is het onvermijdelijk dat sommigen die macht zullen gebruiken om hun eigen seksuele verlangens na te streven en te bevredigen. Ongeacht de redenen en de rechtvaardigingen die worden gebruikt om dergelijk gedrag te legitimeren, maakt de persoon aan de macht (meestal een man) misbruik van het vertrouwen van degene zonder macht (meestal een vrouw of, in een klooster: een jongen) òf om zowel te voldoen aan de fysieke lust òf aan een verlangen naar intimiteit.

3. De Boeddha zelf werd beschuldigd van het hebben van geslachtsgemeenschap met de vrouwelijke asceten Sundari en Cinca. Volgens de traditie waren deze beschuldigingen ongegrond, ze werden gebruikt door degenen die jaloers waren op zijn succes teneinde hem in diskrediet te brengen.
Seks hebben met zijn leerlingen is niet een hedendaagse kwestie die pas zijn kop is gaan steken in de tegelijkertijd tolerante als puriteinse samenlevingen van het Westen. Het is gewoon wat mensen in posities van gezag vatbaar voor zijn of van beschuldigd worden te doen.

4. Zijn er leerstellige of institutionele elementen binnen de boeddhistische traditie, die dergelijk gedrag waarschijnlijker zou maken?  Kunnen we evenzo andere elementen identificeren die werken in de richting van het minder waarschijnlijk maken dat dit gedrag plaatsvindt?  Ik neem het als gegeven dat er geen set van regels is, hoe nauwgezet omschreven ook en hoe precies ook toegepast, die ooit waterdicht zal kunnen worden.

5. De wortel van de machtsongelijkheid tussen leraar en leerling ligt in de overtuiging dat de eerste in zekere mate “verlicht” is, terwijl de laatste dat niet is. Dit weerspiegelt het verschil tussen de ariya (edel wezen) en de puthujjana (gewone wezen) die teruggaat tot de vroegste teksten.  Vervolgens kreeg dit onderscheid een leerstellige basis toen boeddhisten de theorie van de ‘Twee Waarheden’ een sleutelrol toekenden in hun exegetische denken. Waar de Boeddha (in de Pali canon) nooit onderscheid maakte tussen ‘conventionele’ (samvrti) en ‘ultieme’ (paramartha) waarheid, werd de theorie omarmd door alle scholen, waaronder het Theravada.  Het ‘Twee Waarheden’ leerstuk heeft niet alleen een didactische betekenis, het versterkt ook een ’twee-klassen-model’ [Engels: two-tier-model ] van autoriteit: zij die directe kennis van de ultieme waarheid dragen, zijn ariya; terwijl degenen die dat niet doen louter puthujjana zijn.  Het gezag van de leraar krijgt daarmee een mystiek-ontologische in plaats van een louter institutionele rechtvaardiging.

6. Toen de boeddhistische traditie zich in de loop van de tijd ontwikkelde in een georganiseerde religie, werd de kloof tussen de ariya en de puthujjana breder en breder. De professionals (d.w.z. monniken, priesters en yogi’s) kregen een steeds grotere charismatisch gezag als ‘verlichten’ toebedeeld; terwijl de leken steeds meer een eerbiedige en onderdanige rol moesten gaan spelen.  Dit culmineerde in het soort situatie dat we terugvinden in het Tibetaans boeddhisme heden ten dage waar de leraar (lama / guru) gezien moet worden als een volledig ontwaakte Boeddha, terwijl van de leerlingen wordt verwacht dat zij zich en hun ‘zelfbestemming’ aan hem overgeven teneinde eventuele vorderingen op het pad te maken, die, zo wordt hen verteld, alleen mogelijk is door de ‘zegen’ van de lama.

7. Als men zich weloverwogen een vorm van boeddhisme probeert voor te stellen die het best geschikt zou zijn om seksuele de mogelijkheden voor een leraar te optimaliseren, zou men moeilijk het model kunnen verbeteren dat in Tibet is ontstaan. In combinatie met een feodale opvatting van absolute macht en een geloof in tantrische seksuele praktijken als middel om verlichting te bereiken, komt men tot een kant-en-klare rechtvaardiging voor mannelijke leraren om te profiteren van de vrouwelijke leerlingen.
Deze situatie is veel opzichten hetzelfde in het Japanse Zen, waar een feodaal model eveneens de overhand heeft, zij het zonder het gebruik van tantrische elementen.

8. Het is geen toeval dat de meeste gemelde gevallen van misbruik van leerlingen afkomstig zijn uit de Tibetaanse en Japanse Zen tradities; dat wil zeggen, daar waar de grootste nadruk op onderwerping en gehoorzaamheid wordt gelegd. Dit wil niet zeggen dat dergelijk misbruik afwezig is in de Theravada – het komt daar ook voor. Het wil ook niet zeggen dat er geen leraren in de Tibetaanse en Zen tradities zijn die zich ethisch integer gedragen – want dat zijn er zeer vele.  Terwijl misbruik altijd een onethische handeling is, verricht door een bepaald mens, die daarvoor verantwoordelijk en aansprakelijk moet worden gehouden, moeten we ook erkennen dat bepaalde leerstellige en institutionele contexten dit soort gedrag meer bevorderen dan andere.  Zolang systemische ongelijkheid van institutionele macht onaangetast blijft, zal geen gewetensonderzoek in welke omvang dan ook noch het formuleren van steeds meer gedetailleerde morele ‘richtlijnen’ slagen in het samenhangend aanpakken van het kern-thema van het misbruik van macht.

9. Volgens de vroegste teksten is de rol van de ariya (leraar) niet, de puthujjana (leerling) afhankelijk van hem te maken, maar om de leerling in staat te stellen ’te veredelen’ door de stroom te betreden (sotapatti) van het achtvoudige pad. Dus de rol van de leraar is om de leerling te helpen zo snel mogelijk op zijn eigen benen staan.
Want met het ‘betreden van de stroom’ wordt de persoon autonoom in zijn of haar beoefening en is niet langer afhankelijk van het gezag van een andere persoon (aparapaccaya) om door te gaan op het pad.  De suttas definiëren stroombetreden als het verkrijgen van ‘lucide vertrouwen in de Boeddha, de Dharma en de Sangha’ en het bereiken van het ‘koesteren van de deugden dierbaar voor de edelen.’  Wat verandert is iemands oprechte ethische betrokkenheid op de beoefening. Stroombetreden heeft niets te maken met het bereiken van een esoterische ‘verlichting’, die vervolgens een bevoegdheid geeft om macht uit te oefenen over anderen.

10. Ten tijde van de Boeddha was het stroombetreden dat waartoe mensen uit alle lagen van de bevolking, ongeacht geslacht, hetzij monastieke of leek, werden uitgenodigd te doen.
‘Sangha’ verwees niet alleen naar monniken, d.w.z. de machthebbers, maar naar iedereen die de stroom van het pad had betreden. Zelfs iemand als Sarakani de Sakiyan, een man veracht door zijn collega’s als de lokale dronkenlap. Door herstel van dit begrip van de stroombetreder, herstellen we een inclusief model van gemeenschap die bestaat uit autonome individuen die werken aan het ondersteunen en handhaven van elkaars beoefening.  Sommige van deze mensen kunnen ‘heiligen’ zijn, terwijl anderen mogelijk ‘zondaars’ zijn. Dat is niet het probleem.
In plaats van een reeks overeengekomen (geloofs)overtuigingen of een gedeelde toewijding aan een guru, is wat iedereen aan elkaar bindt, een bereidheid om de wijsheid elke sangha-lid hoog te houden, hem of haar tegelijk verantwoordelijk houdend voor zijn of haar tekortkomingen.

Tot zover de beschouwing van Batchelor.
Bron: http://sweepingzen.com/buddhism-and-sex-the-bigger-picture/ . Inclusief vele reacties!

Ik wil daar een paar kanttekeningen bij maken.
Zijn verklaring van seksueel wangedrag van de leraar komt wellicht wat al te exclusief uit de ontwikkeling van het boeddhisme zelf. Voor mij is niet alleen de gezagsverhouding maar de afhankelijkheidsrelatie tussen leraar en leerling de bron van de problemen, net zo als die fout kan gaan tussen therapeut en cliënt/patiënt. De leraar (of de therapeut) is zich er dan niet van bewust dat de schijnbare vrijwilligheid van de kant van de vrouw of het kind er niet echt is.  Ik voeg ‘het kind’ er aan toe, en bedoel ‘jongen(tje)’, want pedofilie door monniken moet m.i. ook ‘seksueel wangedrag’ genoemd worden, en komt waarschijnlijk niet alleen in de Theravada voor.

Verder noemt Batchelor de rol van het celibaat niet. In de Theravada, met een ‘vrouwonhandigheid’ tot vrouwvijandigheid die ik voor het gemak maar ‘Aziatische cultuur’ noem; (zie mijn samenvatting van de ‘Achttien fouten van een klooster ‘ in m’n blog ) kan dit laag waarderen van vrouwen en leken risico-verhogend werken.
Om het wat ongebruikelijk te formuleren: het aanbieden van seksuele diensten kan (ook door de monnik) gezien worden als een van de vormen van dana van de leek aan de monnik, net zo als het aanbieden van voedsel of een nieuwe pij. Voor de zekerheid zeg ik er maar bij: een heel kromme redenering.

En dan de vraag:
Wat kan een (mede)leerling doen als hij of zij merkt dat er (wellicht) iets loos is in het contact tussen zijn/haar leraar en een ander? Ik ben geen (ervarings)deskundige op dit gebied en wil niet maar wat theoretiseren. Daarom alleen de opmerking dat er nooit een makkelijke route is; en een aantal bronnen:

Het meest concreet en toegesneden op de Nederlandse situatie is:  www.simsara.nl/ethisch-drieluik/
Beslist niet alleen bruikbaar voor beoefenaren van de inzichtsmeditatie. En ook goed om te lezen voor iedereen, uit preventief oogpunt.

Ook praktisch op het niveau van de individu is mijn vertaling van een Duitse tekst over heilzame en onheilzame structuren

Twee boeken:  Sex and the Spiritual Teacher: Why it happens, When it’s a problem, and What we all can do door Scott Edelstein . O.a. via Amazon
en m Buddha Betrayed: When Spiritual Relationships Go Awry door Gerti Schoen. Ook via Amazon

Meer op beleidsniveau: hoe om te gaan met een ‘schandaal’ door de boeddhistische gemeenschap.  Een aankondiging van een Ronde-tafel-discussie deze zomer. Door de Buddhist Geeks.  Beslist niet overbodig in de Nederlandse situatie van de bevindingen kennis te nemen, want het gaat er hier meestal nogal onhandig aan toe, kunnen we bv in *Open Boeddhisme* lezen.

Letter from Roshi Joan regarding Eido Shimano
Moeten we Joan Halifax nog nader aanbevelen?

Een aankondiging die enig verband heeft met bovenstaande:
Een lezing door Rita Gross
Hoe het vasthouden aan sekserollen verlichting ondermijnt
Op maandag 1 juli vanaf 19.30 uur in  Rigpa , ingang De Kuiperstraat ter hoogte van nr. 148, in Amsterdam. De voertaal is Engels. Uit de toelichting:
“ Het boeddhistische onderricht van alle periodes en scholen van het boeddhisme is sekseneutraal en seksevrij, en proclameert dat vrouwen en mannen in gelijke mate in staat zijn realisatie te bereiken. Niettemin zit er een diepgewortelde tegenspraak in het hart van het boeddhisme tussen dit onderricht en de institutionele praktijken waar het om sekserollen gaat. In de geschiedenis hebben boeddhistische instituten vrouwen en mannen niet gelijk behandeld en dit probleem is door boeddhistische leraren niet krachtig genoeg bestreden. Deze algemene praktijk strekt zich zelfs uit tot het westerse boeddhisme. Maar waar het sekserollen betreft is het versterken van en het vasthouden aan conventionele normen en praktijken funest voor diepzinnige beoefening en realisatie. Het is duidelijk dat het vasthouden aan sekserollen verlichting ondermijnt. ”

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#Boeddhisme #boeddhismeEnSeksualiteit #JoopRomeijn #seks #sekserollen #seksueelMisbruik #StephenBatchelor #verlichting
#Boeddhisme #boeddhismeEnSeksualiteit #JoopRomeijn #seks #sekserollen #seksueelMisbruik #StephenBatchelor #verlichting