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Title: Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening by Stephen Batchelor ISBN: 1-57322-656-4 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: March, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.91 (66 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Not for beginners, but great later on...
Comment: I read this book at the beginning of my Buddhist path, and found very little that connected for me. After a year of practice, though, I went back to it and found it full of wisdom and insight, and very helpful in allowing myself to maintain a "don't know" stance toward those culturally-conditioned aspects of Buddhism brought to us from the East.
Although the core of Buddhist dharma-transmission over the centuries has been wonderfully consistent, it seems obvious that barnacles of beliefs associated with the original feudal/tribal/animist/deist cultures through which it's passed would of course find their way onto the hull (excuse the clumsy metaphor!). The Buddha stressed over and over that we were to test *everything* against our own experience, to believe nothing until proved true for each of us. All Batchelor is up to here is saying this, clearly and from a modern Western perspective.
The vitriol evident above in some of the mini-reviews from dogmatized Buddhists is all the motivation I would think one needs to read Batchelor's book. It's partly about the non-compassionate controversies some kinds of "Buddhism *With* Beliefs" have side-tracked students and cultures in the past.
Rating: 5
Summary: Purest dharma. Hard-won insight.
Comment: Mr. Batchelor's dual background - first as a Tibetan monk and translator then later as a Korean Zen monk - gives him two eyes to see Buddhism with. It gives him cross-cultural depth perception that allows him to see the essense of awakening separate from the cultures that encrust it. Perhaps that helps him write such a succinct, clear, and radiant book.
It's odd that Batchelor is an unwitting lightning-rod for the Buddhist religious right. (Bet you didn't think that was even POSSIBLE, did you?! Surprise! Sadly, Buddhism isn't all that different from any other religion.) He doesn't attack their beliefs. He stays in the vast middle and says that he honestly doesn't know.
When I saw him lecture, I saw a student of Thinley Norbu's stand up and beg him to believe in rebirth! It was like watching a fundamentalist Christian begging someone to accept Jesus as his personal savior, as though Buddhism was about embracing the right conceptual beliefs. It was the oddest and saddest thing! Why bother becoming a Buddhist if you're going to behave like that?
He handled it with great patience and compassion, I thought. I asked him about it afterwards and apparently it happens to him all the time!
Wonderful book.
Rating: 4
Summary: Isn't it odd...
Comment: That so many of the negative reviews of this book seem to say precisely the same thing? Isn't it even odder that, if you click on the links to the negative reviewers, you find that so many of them have reviewed exactly the same books? Is there some sort of organized effort underway here to discredit "heretics"?
Oh, um... the book. It's good. Read it.
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Title: Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen ISBN: 0767903323 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 29 December, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: The Faith to Doubt: Glimpses of Buddhist Uncertainty by Stephen Batchelor ISBN: 0938077228 Publisher: Parallax Pr Pub. Date: March, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.50 |
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Title: Meditation for Life by Martine Batchelor, Stephen Batchelor ISBN: 0861713028 Publisher: Wisdom Publications Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor, John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld ISBN: 0802151272 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: December, 1983 List Price(USD): $13.50 |
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Title: What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula ISBN: 0802130313 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 1986 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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