Shambhala Sun | July 2010
You'll find this review on page 75 of the magazine.

Was the Buddha an Atheist?

Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
By Stephen Batchelor
Spiegel and Grau, 2010; 336 pp., $26 (cloth) 

Spiritual Atheism
By Steve Antinoff
Counterpoint Press, 2009; 151 pp., $14.95 (paperback)

Reviewed by Gaylon Ferguson

Thirty-seven years ago, I became a Buddhist. Here is how it happened: I formally entered the Buddhist path in a short ceremony called “taking refuge,” an ancient ritual that stretches back to the time of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, some two and a half millennia ago. The preceptor who conducted my refuge ceremony was a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, formerly a fully ordained monk, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

On that snowy evening in Vermont, he carefully explained to the assembled dozen or so “refugees,” in a distinctly Oxonian English, that Buddhism was a nontheistic tradition. We were not taking refuge in the Buddha as a God—a divine or supernatural being—but as an example of a human being, who, starting with an abundance of neurotic confusion and existential uncertainty quite similar to our own, gradually unraveled his cocoon of delusion and finally awakened into vast, compassionate wisdom for the benefit of many beings. Thus, the ceremony marked our formal, public commitment to walking the path of meditation and study, and to a basic, ethical discipline of not causing harm to others through speech or action—in short, to waking up, just like the Buddha.

Reading these two books, I was reminded of the penetrating words of that simple ceremony: “I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the dharma. I take refuge in the sangha.” Here are two longtime Buddhist practitioners and teachers vigorously asserting that belief in the existence of God is not necessary or helpful for enlightened awakening; indeed, both affirm forms of spiritual atheism. Is this trendy “new atheism,” I wondered, the same as that gentle-voiced proclamation of basic sanity and nontheistic spirituality I heard so many years ago? When compared with the faiths of theism, are atheism, agnosticism, and nontheism all basically the same?

Stephen Batchelor, the author of seven previous books, including Buddhism Without Beliefs, and the translator of several important Buddhist texts, wants to recast the outlook of the entire tradition, starting with the historical Buddha himself. Here, Shakyamuni is re-envisioned as an amazingly modern secular humanist whose teachings arose entirely from reason and the evidence of experience, and certainly not from faith or belief in any “things unseen.”

Batchelor weaves a charming memoir of an early 1970s spiritual search that began with Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen, and Ram Dass’s just published Be Here Now, and moved on to the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. “I grew my hair long, wore beads, and attended all-night rock concerts with liquid light-shows on Parliament Hill Fields, where I would listen to the Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, and the Edgar Broughton Band.” This is Batchelor’s brief though vivid evocation of a particular moment in the making of a counterculture; one can practically smell the hashish smoke wafting from the crowd.

By 1972—in an archetypal quest similar to thousands of that era—he arrived in Dharamsala, India, where he attended an audience with the Dalai Lama on a hill below the village of McLeod Ganj. “My ‘conversion’ to Buddhism was more or less immediate,” he writes. “I did not have to be persuaded either by philosophical arguments or religious polemics.” The bravery and cheerfulness of the steadfastly devoted Tibetan refugee community around the Dalai Lama made a particularly strong impression:

I was moved by the faith and courage of the ordinary Tibetan men and women…. They had followed the Dalai Lama over the Himalayas into India with little more than the clothes they wore.... Now they lived in poverty in one of the poorest countries in the world. But despite all this, they radiated an extraordinary warmth, lucidity, and joie de vivre…. Much of what animated me in those days I now recognize as the romantic yearnings of an idealistic, alienated, and aimless young man. I endowed these strange, exotic people, about whom I knew little, with all the virtues my own culture seemed to lack…. Yet at the core of my muddled quest lay a quiet certainty that I had stumbled across something authentic and true, which I could neither doubt nor adequately name. For the first time in my life, I had encountered a path: a purposive trajectory that led from bewilderment and anguish to something called “enlightenment.” Although I had only the dimmest idea of what “enlightenment” might mean, I embraced the path toward it.”


Gaylon Ferguson is the author of Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were born With. He teaches interdisciplinary studies at Naropa University.

Excerpted from the July 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun.