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Read e-book online Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World PDF

By Stephen Batchelor

ISBN-10: 0300223234

ISBN-13: 9780300223231

An crucial selection of Stephen Batchelor’s so much probing and demanding paintings on secular Buddhism

because the perform of mindfulness permeates mainstream Western tradition, increasingly more everyone is conducting a standard type of Buddhist meditation. besides the fact that, a lot of those humans have no interest in the non secular features of Buddhism, and the perform happens inside of secular contexts comparable to hospitals, colleges, and the office. Is it attainable to get over the Buddhist teachings a imaginative and prescient of human flourishing that's secular instead of spiritual with no compromising the integrity of the culture? Is there a moral framework which could underpin and contextualize those practices in a quickly altering world?
 
during this accrued quantity of Stephen Batchelor’s writings on those topics, he explores the complicated implications of Buddhism’s secularization. Ranging widely—from reincarnation, spiritual trust, and agnosticism to the position of the humanities in Buddhist practice—he bargains an in depth photo of latest Buddhism and its try and discover a voice within the sleek world.

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Unlike many other Sanskrit works translated into Tibetan, the Sanskrit of the Bodhicaryāvatāra has been preserved. Why then, were I genuinely interested in what Śāntideva had to say, did I not learn Sanskrit and read his work in the language that he himself had used? Surely many of the same difficulties I faced in rendering the text from Tibetan into English would have been faced by the translators who rendered it from Sanskrit into Tibetan. They too would have been forced to choose one word among many possible options to translate a Sanskrit term just as I had to make similar judgments in translating a Tibetan term.

To interpret these figures as symbols or archetypes only made matters worse. For the idea of conducting a meaningful conversation with a symbol struck me as even more absurd. In the end, while still a Tibetan Buddhist monk, I abandoned these practices altogether. And it was around this time that I first came across the work of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72). Feuerbach was a student of Hegel who came to reject his teacher’s emphasis on the primacy of Spirit in the unfolding of history and advocated instead a liberal, materialist, and atheist view of the world.

Yet reading Śāntideva means to converse with Śāntideva: to agree and sympathize with him but also to argue and dispute. In this way, I slowly came to know him. And what mattered most in forging this acquaintance with an invisible stranger were the threads of shared concern, which bound us together as practitioners of the dharma across the twelve hundred years that separated us in time. As a sympathetic reader, I absorbed his understanding in a way that changed me: I came to share his spiritual and literary aspirations, I assumed a similar stance to my own life and death, my yearnings were affirmed and strengthened by his, even my delight in the natural world was enhanced by his praising the opportunities it afforded for contemplative solitude.

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Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World by Stephen Batchelor


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