Ethical Living in Uncertain Times

Stephen Batchelor: I would argue that imagination is crucial in any kind of ethical act, because if we cannot imagine the consequences of our actions and our thoughts and our words, if we cannot imagine how the other person we’re speaking with or relating to will feel about what we’re going to say or do, if we cannot imagine the kind of future world for our grandchildren, we are not going to be motivated to do anything about improving our behavior now. 

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Stephen Batchelor. Stephen is a writer and longtime Tricycle contributing editor based in southwest France. In his new book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times, he explores how the Buddha and Socrates can teach us to live a just and dignified life in an unstable contingent world. In my conversation with Stephen, we talk about how Socrates and the Buddha both posited what he calls an ethics of uncertainty, the parallels between Hellenistic and Buddhist thought, how creativity can help us imagine another way of living and another kind of society, and how Buddhist and Greek philosophy can support us in navigating existential challenges of our time. So here’s my conversation with Stephen Batchelor.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer and longtime Tricycle contributing editor Stephen Batchelor. Hi Stephen. It’s great to be with you.

Stephen Batchelor: Hello James. It’s wonderful to be here again.

James Shaheen: Yes. So Stephen, we’re here to talk about your new book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times. So to start us off, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Stephen Batchelor: Well, that’s actually a simple question to which there is no simple answer. Many, many different threads and streams in my life have come together in this book. It started out about five or six years ago when I wanted to put together an account of my philosophical journey through Buddhism, just focusing on the development of ideas rather than anything else, which went back a lot to my Tibetan training with the Gelugpa tradition.

When we got to Covid, I suddenly had this long period of time before me. I didn’t know how long it would be, but basically I knew I couldn’t leave where I was in my village in France, and I could basically start focusing on a much grander kind of writing and study project. And I chose to look into Plato. I’d already been interested for some years in Hellenistic philosophy, the Stoics, Epicureans, and so on. But I’d never really, I think, had the courage to embark on a close reading of Plato primarily, but also the Socratic tradition and likewise the world of Athens in which all of those things took place. And I thought this would probably be just a chapter in the book, but it turned out once I delved deeper into this material, it was going to be far more than that. It was going to be basically a second primary thread through which I would interweave my own Buddhist philosophical journey through it.

It then occurred to me that I’m not interested in writing a historical comparison between these two figures of the past; I’m always concerned with how what these people say actually speaks to my condition now. And as a writer, someone who then expresses this in books and so on, then how does that affect the lives of people who will read my books? And so it came together really as a three-part structure: a Buddhist telling of the life of Socrates and a Buddhist-inflected reading of Greek philosophy on the one hand, my own story as a Westerner informed obviously by Greek and Latin and Christian tradition following and pursuing a path in Buddhist philosophy, and thirdly, the question of how does this help us to live as better human beings in the world we inhabit now, not back in the 5th century BCE. And so when those three threads started emerging in my imagination, then the writing kind of unfolded of its own accord in many ways. It required a lot of study because I’m not a Greek scholar. I don’t know Greek. I don’t have a professional engagement with Greek philosophy. And so I had to do a lot of background reading, and that opened up a whole world to me that I had previously been very, very unclear about the world of ancient Athens, in which theater as we know it, philosophy as we know it, and so many other forms of our culture had their origins. So it’s very exciting to, in a sense, recover something of my own tradition as a Westerner and then try to bring it into conversation with my adopted tradition of Buddhism.

James Shaheen: You know, a mutual friend of ours suggested that I read a book by Ward Farnsworth, and it’s this practical application of the Socratic method, and he said you had read it too. So there’s a very practical application here, an emphasis on ethics and what does this actually have to do with my life? And you say that Socrates and Gotama addressed in strikingly similar ways the core questions of how to lead a good, just and dignified life in an unstable contingent world. So could you say more about that? 

Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, that’s true. One has to bear in mind here that the Gotama that I’m speaking of in this book is the Gotama that I’ve discovered in my previous writings, in which I’ve sought to disentangle the human figure of Gotama from the rather almost godlike figure of the Buddha. And so I’m not comparing Socrates to the Buddha in that grandiose religious sense of who the Buddha is but rather to what we can access about the life of the historical person Gotama who in fact walked the earth at exactly the same time as Socrates. They’re contemporaries, these two men. And given that proviso then, I feel that what Gotama was really seeking to communicate was a practice of what we call the eightfold path in Buddhism—in other words, a way of life that incorporates the entirety of our human condition from the way we think to the way we speak to the way we work to the way we cultivate our mindfulness and so forth and so on. And what’s quite clear in that reading is that the Buddha did not primarily emphasize becoming proficient in certain forms of meditation that will then lead you to nirvana or to liberation of some kind. That is very often how Buddhism is pitched in many of the traditions that are popular in the West today.

James Shaheen: I would say that that’s the received understanding. I mean, that’s the general understanding.

Stephen Batchelor: That’s the received understanding. Yeah. So, my comparison therefore with Socrates is comparing Socrates not to the received version of the Buddha but the version that I’ve been spending quite some years now trying to disentangle from that received version. And I think you kind of have to do that first. Otherwise, you feel that there is really quite a lack of equivalence at some levels between Socrates, with whom we have in the West a very vivid, quite detailed account of who this man was and what he said and what he did, and the Buddha about whom we really know very little in terms of his actual life on earth. So to bring the two together means to try to, in a way, recognize the humanity that constitutes their being and how both, I feel, really sought to break away from the philosophical attempts in their time to access what is the nature of reality itself, the ultimate truth, or something like that.

Socrates pursued a sort of prescientific type philosophy, trying to figure out the nature of the material world, the Buddha studied with different Hindu and other teachers of his time, largely following metaphysical theories and so forth, and both of them got to a point where they broke abruptly with their respective backgrounds and traditional practices and embarked suddenly on a totally new way of doing things. Socrates was the first Greek thinker to really focus exclusively on ethics. That is an understanding that goes back deep into the history of Greek thought and is completely well recognized. And the Buddha, or Gotama, as I prefer to call him, also broke away from this quest for ultimate truth and ultimate liberation and all of these things and sought instead to lead a life that is engaging our full humanity but in such a way that that experience of being human is grounded in our capacity to embrace nonreactively our suffering, the suffering of the world, to not get entangled in our instinctive reactions, greed, hatred, delusion, and so on, to come to rest in a still clear space of nonreactivity, which traditionally is called nirvana, and from that ground to then be able to respond to life, both one’s own life, the life of others, the life of the world, in such a way that you have a more refined capacity to judge what is the appropriate thing to say or do or think in any given situation. And to me, that is ethics. Ethics is not simply following precepts, the five precepts or the monastic vows, but it’s really about a practice of learning how to make more appropriate judgements in the actual course of one’s life from day to day, arguably from moment to moment, to live fully in the moment in a still, clear space, but in such a way that you enable your life to flourish optimally in terms of how you live. And I think on that level, and I think it’s a very important level, it’s distinctive to both men. And that is, I think, what holds them together perhaps most deeply.

James Shaheen: Right. You said a few things there. One of them is that you put the metaphysics and ontology aside, so rather than what are things or what is their nature, what ought I do. That is the movement from the metaphysics to the very practical understanding of how one lives an ethical life. I should also mention that you summarized your understanding of the four noble truths, which people may not be aware of. If you could just quickly go from the first noble truth of suffering, the second noble truth, and so forth, your understanding of it, which you just expressed, I think that would be lost on people that those are the four noble truths.

Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, fair enough. I kind of assume that everybody in the world must have read all of my books. The way I sum it up is that the Buddha essentially moved from a truth-based metaphysics to a task-based ethics. Buddhist tradition reinstated a metaphysics, the metaphysics of what are known as the four noble truths. The four noble truths are the truth of suffering, the truth of the origin of suffering (craving and ignorance give rise to all this suffering), the truth of the cessation of suffering, which is nirvana, and the truth of the path that leads to the cessation of suffering, which is the eightfold path.

These four truths are basically propositional truths. In other words, they’re making four claims as to what is in fact true with reality. Reality is suffering (dukkha), or however you interpret that. The origin of all of this dukkha is our attachment craving, greed, hatred, ignorance, and so on. The end of that dukkha is the ending of greed, hatred, attachment, and so on. And the way to get there is through the practice of the noble eightfold path. And that’s Buddhism in a nutshell. I think most Buddhists would agree with that.

But if we go back to the Buddha’s first sermon, where we first find these four noble truths, it doesn’t quite frame it like that. In fact, what the first sermon tells us is what is the nature of being fully awake? What is the nature of enlightenment? Enlightenment is when you have recognized, performed, and mastered four particular tasks in relation to each of those so-called truths.

Now, I don’t take those truths, therefore, to be propositional truths, but basically truth understood simply as fact. I would say there are four facts of life. Suffering is the first fact. Reactivity and what arises in reaction to suffering is the second fact of life. The fact that this reactivity will of its own accord die down and cease. That is the third fact of life. And the fourth fact of life is that one can live a flourishing life by following a middle way, a path, an eightfold path that is founded on a nonreactive stance that is the result of having let reactivity go or let it be, which is the consequence of having embraced your suffering, your life, the situation you’re in, rather than somehow back off from it or be already predisposed to behave in a certain way. And that’s how I reread the core logic, as I describe it in the book, of what Gotama did that was so radical and distinctive. I think that got somehow lost as Buddhism evolved into a metaphysical system, a religious orthodoxy, and so forth and so on. But I feel that that version of my interpretation, if you wish to call it that, is in fact the one that leads to the most fruitful engagement with the life of Socrates, his work, and the way he lived in Athens at that time.

James Shaheen: So now we get to the heart of the book, which is how a life of rigorous ethical commitment can be compatible with a perspective founded on the radically contingent, impermanent, and uncertain nature of human experience. So can you say more about this question? I’m borrowing all your words, Stephen.

Stephen Batchelor: No, I know you are, so I have to be able somehow to say something intelligent in response. You see, basically, I think what the Buddha certainly—and this is not at all controversial, the Buddha stressed the importance of recognizing the kind of world in which we live: one that is constantly in a state of change, in a state of flux. It is shot through with discomfort and disappointment and pain of different kinds and that it is highly contingent upon a whole array of conditions and circumstances and cultural elements and so forth and so on. In other words, it’s a highly contingent view of the world.

Now, Socrates may not state that in so many words, but in having broken with metaphysics and having led a life of philosophy that is primarily about actual person-to-person engagement on the streets of Athens with just anybody who came by who wanted to talk to him, he was concerned not with addressing abstract questions and metaphysics or theories about the nature of reality. He was concerned with actually getting people to think for themselves, to no longer be just parroting what they’ve been told by their traditions and their society and their religious beliefs and so on, much in the same way as the Buddha and sought basically, again, in the same way as the Buddha, to wake people up. This is the metaphor he uses: He’s like a gadfly that stings the slumbering horse of Athens, is how he describes it, which is, of course, a very vivid metaphor of waking up from sleep into a state of greater clarity and greater acuity of mind in your day-to-day experience.

So instead of thinking of the cause of suffering as being ignorance and so on, and thereby believing that if I really understood the very nature of reality as it really is, then I would somehow get to the root of the suffering, I completely don’t have any time for that anymore. What I think ignorance is really, why ignorance is so key to this, is because, in my experience, my trouble with ignorance is not whether or not I understand emptiness or something, but the real struggle with ignorance is when I’m faced with a question: What do I do now? It’s in those moments that I experience ignorance and confusion in a much more real and visceral way than I do when I find myself puzzling over the nature of emptiness or the nature of ultimate mind or something that I don’t really viscerally engage with those kinds of questions. They’re abstract; they’re metaphysical; they may be very interesting, but the thing is they’re not really getting to grips with the core confusion that I think most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, confront, and that is, the confusion of What do I do now? That’s an ethical question. It’s not a metaphysical question. And that has become more and more, in my practice of Buddhism and the dharma, really, I feel, all that in the end matters. I can have the most brilliant understanding, the most deep, mystical insights, but how do I actually deal with the moment-to-moment conflicts and struggles and disappointments that I deal with all the time? That’s where I feel the practice has to really hit home. And what we find there is not just ignorance but also ethical uncertainty.

James Shaheen: OK, yeah, this is where I was going next. I mean, you don’t dismiss the precepts, but they’re not always adequate to help us understand what we should do in a very uncertain world. So you posit an ethics founded on uncertainty. You claim that Socrates and the Buddha likewise did this, or that’s how you understand it. So what do you mean by an ethics of uncertainty, and what does it look like in practice?

Stephen Batchelor: Well, I think probably the easiest way to access this is there’s all sorts of phrases nowadays of an ethics of care or a green ethics or an ecological ethics. You know, we can always attach any adjective we like to the word ethics and give it another spin.

James Shaheen: Or situational ethics is what it seems closer to.

Stephen Batchelor: Right, situational ethics or an ethics of care. All of these terms, I feel, in some ways they all bump into each other at different points. So what I’m doing by highlighting uncertainty is acknowledging that at the core of any real ethical challenge or moral quandary we find ourselves in is the fact that we don’t know what to do. In other words, there’s a deep uncertainty as to what is the right thing to do in this instance. How do I respond optimally to this particular situation? In other words, in the same way that an ethics of care highlights the value of care in ethics, an ethics of uncertainty highlights the fact that built into the very structure of our experience as temporal, mortal, fallible creatures is a deep uncertainty. And this uncertainty is one that leads us to the recognition that any ethical act will be a risk, because uncertainty is really about the fact that I cannot know in advance whether what I say or do will have a good effect or a bad effect. I just don’t know. It’s impossible to know. We don’t know the future. So whenever we make a crucial decision in our lives as to how to do something or how to relate to someone, we are taking a risk. In other words, to highlight that sense of risk is the function of emphasizing the essential uncertainty of any ethical act.

Now, most religious traditions—and Buddhism is certainly included here—cancel that out. It says, well, if you act from an angry mind or a craving mind or a confused mind, then that will lead to an unskillful action as though that’s just the nature of things. That’s the law of Kama. In so many of the Indian traditions, there’s a kind of a law written into the structure of reality: If you perform certain acts with certain motivations, that will lead you to suffering. Again, that’s a purely metaphysical claim. We don’t actually know in reality. And so that sort of framework of precepts-based, or what in Western ethical thought they call legalistic ethics, I mean, for example, you find that very much in Judaism, you find it in Islam, you find it in Christianity, you find it in the Buddhist vinayas. The fantasy, really, is that if you could just get an accurate enough description of the cause-effect relationship between mind-states, words, acts, and their consequences, then you wouldn’t have any ethical uncertainty at all, and people who are deeply religious committed to these views are somehow absolved of having to encounter the essential uncertainty and risk that is built into ethics. And to me, to simply think of ethics as following a set of rules is a cop out, basically. You’re basically saying, “Well, I don’t want to struggle with that. Because I’m a good Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, I just do what the book says, and then I’ll be OK.” But to me, that’s entirely unsatisfactory to lead an integral and dignified and autonomous human life.

James Shaheen: So you see an ethics of uncertainty or uncertainty itself or embracing that uncertainty as a source of strength rather than weakness.

Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the striking things about Socrates is that he says, “I don’t know anything. I’m not a wise person. I haven’t got a clue what these virtues are, what justice is, or what courage is. I don’t know. But on the other hand, I never give up the inquiry into trying to find out,” understanding implicitly that we’ll probably never get there, that it’s always a question.

Now you don’t find anything quite so specific in Buddhism because Buddhism is always, well, not always, but generally backed up with the theory of karmic retribution in the background and future lives and so on, which pretends at least to have a kind of an understanding of all of these laws, and you just have to follow them. But if we go into Mahayana Buddhism and Zen in particular, I think we find there’s a kind of a rupture with that view of the world and one that puts the emphasis not on what is the right thing to do, but what is the most compassionate thing to do? What is the most loving thing to do? What would a bodhisattva do in this case? And that would transcend, and it does transcend in Mahayana Buddhism, the strict legalistic adherence to a set of rules and precepts and so on. There’s also a definition of stream-entry, entering the eightfold path, that we find in all the Buddhist traditions but particularly pronounced in the early traditions of the Theravada and so on, where one of the things that you lose on entering the stream of the eightfold path is the attachment to moral rules, silabbata or silabbata-paramasa, the attachment to moral rules. In other words, once one has grounded oneself in this kind of still, nonreactive attention to oneself and to life, you attain thereby for the first time, perhaps, a degree of moral autonomy, ethical autonomy. You’re no longer bound by essentially the precepts. Traditionally, Theravada Buddhists wouldn’t say that and they would interpret it differently. They usually say attachment to rites and rituals, which is actually not what the text says. It says sila, and Bhikkhu Bodhi translates that as I think rules and vows, which I think is much better.

And so there is this idea already there in the very earliest Buddhist tradition that to somehow commit oneself to living other than one is instinctively or culturally prompted to do opens up the possibility of freeing oneself from those cultural and religious habits into a much more raw encounter with the suffering of the situation in which you find yourself. Whether that’s purely personal or whether it’s climate change doesn’t really matter, but it forces you to acknowledge your lack of understanding, your lack of certainty about what this situation is, and at the same time, by embracing that situation, by being totally open to it and understanding oneself to be an ethical being, then you cannot not act. We find ourselves again and again in situations where we feel very hesitant to act. We’re not sure what we’re going to do is going to be the right thing to do, but on the other hand, we can’t just step away from the situation. We are, as it were, obliged, compelled, perhaps, to respond to the situation rather than to just ignore it. So ethics, when you start coming at it from these very different angles, begins more and more to become the central focus of one’s practice of the dharma.

James Shaheen: You know, Stephen, what you’re saying makes sense. Obviously, it can be a double-edged sword because once you consider yourself to be freed of the constraints of traditional ethics, you can go terribly wrong, so I guess humility and integrity play a really important role, sSomeone’s honest attempt to navigate uncertainty with, I would say, humility and integrity.

Stephen Batchelor: I mean, I would actually consider the ethical value that is perhaps the most important here is that of care: to care for oneself, to care for others, to care for one’s society, to to care for animals, to care for the environment. And in caring, if you care for something or someone, you do not wish that someone or something to suffer. I care for my cat because I don’t want my cat to suffer. If my cat suffers, I immediately respond to that. And so if we bear in mind the overarching value of care, what the Buddha encouraged in his very last words, if we are to believe that, he said, “Tread the path with appamada,” with care, with heedfulness, with conscientiousness. And that again puts the emphasis very, very firmly onto the primacy of ethics, at least an ethics of care, by constantly reminding oneself of one’s duty of care. And this, I think, is refined through the practice of mindfulness or the practice of any kind of meditation that lets go of the ego’s insistent voice and demands and fears and so on. Once the mind calms down, when you become more still, more lucid, more clear, that opens up a kind of sensibility that makes it increasingly difficult to not care—in other words, to simply ignore or dismiss the suffering of another person. You become much more vulnerable, in a way, through these practices, and that, of course, necessarily leads to a kind of humility. It also leads to a respecting of the dignity of the other being, the other person, even a nonhuman being. All of those factors have to come into play before I think one can adopt what one might call an ethics of uncertainty. Now, uncertainty alone would be a rather dodgy basis for ethics. Just simply, “I don’t know anything, I know nothing.” But that’s not the case. If one is doing this from within the perspective of the Buddhist tradition of the dharma, then you are already formed by a certain sensibility, a certain set of values, certain historical figures and teachers, exemplary Buddhists through history and contemporary as well. And all of that modifies, or in a sense contextualizes, how uncertainty can remain at the very core of your life without descending into an abyss of nihilism and confusion. I think that’s very important, and I think you can say the same thing about the idea of emptiness too.

Emptiness is a very radical idea: the ultimate unfindability of anything, as Tsongkhapa said, the fact that nothing can be pinned down with any certainty. It’s, again, a form of uncertainty. It’s built into the very core of Madhyamaka philosophy that we don’t know what things ultimately are, and that also at the same time opens up another dimension of human experience, which is the sense of mystery. I mean, not knowing something is not just a sort of, “Oh, I dunno,” but actually in meditation, particularly when you tap down into a much more clear and less conceptual version of your experience, you begin to realize how little you really know and how strange and weird it is to be here at all. And that sense of mystery, too, I think grounds and deepens the ethics of uncertainty, which I feel is very closely married to that kind of sense of being in the world.

James Shaheen: You know, Stephen, we look for signposts or guidance in different ideas, and although things are uncertain, you use as sort of an overarching principle care, as you just mentioned a moment ago, and you refer to a cartography of care as a way of responding to the existential challenges of our time. So can you tell us about the cartography of care? Because I found that as I found it a helpful framework in the absence of any certainty at all.

Stephen Batchelor: Yes, well, the cartography of care, which I do talk about in the book, but I’m also developing it as a mindfulness-based intervention as well, but that’s another story that we don’t need to go into now.

James Shaheen: Yeah, there’s a whole table and a guide.

Stephen Batchelor: It’s a whole table. It’s a map. It’s a map of how I understand the basic ecosystem of Buddhist ethics. And so it’s constituted out of what I call the four tasks—embracing suffering, letting reactivity be, seeing it stop, cultivating a way of life or a path—which are correlated to the four paths you find in Sarvastivadin or in Tibetan Buddhism of formation, unification, vision, and cultivating. And you see how, at least in the Sarvastivada, those four paths are correlated to sets of the primary virtues. So the path of embracing suffering, or the path of formation, is correlated to the four mindfulnesses, the four resolves, and the four steps of creativity. The letting reactivity be, the path of unification, is correlated to the five powers, the five strengths. The seeing and stopping of reactivity correlates to the seven factors or facets of being awake. And cultivating the path correlates to the eightfold path.

I have a very visual imagination, and I make collages, as you probably know, and all of that has to do with picturing things. And to me, reading these texts over the many, many years I’ve been doing it, it begins to appear to me in visual form, and this cartography, I think, is in a way the most detailed articulation of how I can picture the dharma. I’ve also correlated the four seasons and the four elements and all those kinds of things. It’s certainly the case that Buddhism loves the number four, and I don’t think that’s accidental. I wonder whether before the texts were written down or even memorized, perhaps the basic ideas could be visualized, with the thirty-two marks the Buddha’s body, the thirty-two virtues, it’s all thirty-twos. And my sense is that what that points to is a very early model the Buddhist community used prior to the advent of written texts to somehow hold in mind the basic picture of what you’re doing. And so I’m trying to recover that. It’s definitely speculative. But the more I work with this, the more I find how well it works and how surprisingly I find bits that have previously been missing from my map, I bump across a text or someone mentioned something to me and I suddenly get the solution and then fill in that gap. So, yeah, the cartography of care, that constitutes the context or the framework for this ethics of uncertainty.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I was going to say if there’s a raft in the book, that’s it.

Stephen Batchelor: That’s it. Yeah. Absolutely.

James Shaheen: So you also write that to embark on a path of human flourishing, like the cartography of care, what’s required is creativity or to imagine another way of living in this world. Can you say more about how the Buddha and Socrates viewed creativity?

Stephen Batchelor: I can’t say much about Socrates’s view of creativity, to be honest, but I think one can have a sense of how the Buddha may have understood creativity. Now, some of our listeners here might be wondering, as I wondered for many, many years, where do we find imagination in Buddhism? Where do we find creativity? Do they even have words for these things? And for a long time I thought they didn’t. But recently in the last three or four years perhaps, I’ve actually started to recognize that there are ideas in early Buddhism that run through the tradition, which work very well with the notion of imagination and creativity.

Imagination is, I think, captured in this pali word sankappa. That’s usually translated as intention, and it’s one of these steps on the eightfold path. You have right view, right intention. It’s how it’s usually translated. I would take that as perspective instead of view, which is problematic as a term, and instead of intention, imagination.

Now, the reason I say that is because there’s a perfectly good word in Pali for intention. It’s cetana. The Buddha uses it a lot. It’s very central, and he understands karma, action, as intention, for example. Here, he doesn’t use that word. He uses a very different word that has to do with organizing, making things, shaping things, putting things in order, imagining. All of those ideas are there, but the term has really been taken to mean motivation, intention. So I challenge that. I would argue that imagination is crucial in any kind of ethical act, because if we cannot imagine the consequences of our actions and our thoughts and our words, if we cannot imagine how the other person we’re speaking with or relating to will feel about what we’re going to say or do, if we cannot imagine the kind of future world for our grandchildren, we are not going to be motivated to do anything about improving our behavior now. So imagination is, I think, essential to ethics. Imagination is central to empathy. The capacity to imagine what it’s like to be someone else rather than ourselves. And so I build it in there, into the eightfold path itself.

As for creativity, I believe—and I might be the only person to believe this—that when the Buddha speaks about magical and mystical powers like walking through walls and walking on water and touching the sun and the moon, which is a stock text that appears everywhere in the canon, he’s not talking about actually walking through walls or anything like that, but he’s talking in fact about how we may be freed to think about solutions to problems that we can’t figure out how to resolve. Because when he talks about magical powers or psychic powers or however it’s translated, he gives an example. He said it’s like an artisan who is able to picture the kind of object made, a golden bracelet or a pot or something that he or she wishes to make, and then is able to realize that goal, that image, that aspiration that has come about in his mind.

The very strange thing is that the four steps of creativity, as I call them, not the four kinds of magical powers, are found right at the very beginning of the path. You have mindfulness, resolve, and creativity in the first task, the first path. And if it actually means that you could walk through water and walk through walls, then why is nobody able to do that anymore? Why is it listed in exactly the same as given the same status as the practice of mindfulness and resolve and what are the four steps, aspiration, effort, citta, mind, soul, intuition, and experimentation or investigation, as it’s usually translated? The suttas, the commentaries are totally silent on all this. It’s as though there’s a whole set of virtues of creativity that seem to be there at the beginning but very quickly disappear altogether. And you can look up the iddhis in the suttas and the commentaries, and you get no help whatsoever in understanding what they are, let alone how to achieve them. And most importantly, let’s say I could walk through the wall. What would be the point? How would that improve my life? How would that serve any purpose at all? It wouldn’t, it’s just, as the Buddha himself says in the sutta, magical tricks, conjurer’s tricks.

So in that sense, I think creativity and imagination need to be restored, as I would understand it, to this cartography of care, which I’ve done at least on paper. But I do think there’s a considerable challenge still in trying to evolve a Buddhist theory of what creativity means, how it works, and particularly how it forms an integral part of your practice of the dharma that’s simply really not being addressed. Only in East Asia, particularly Japan and Korea, perhaps, are the creative arts considered to be part of your practice. Usually any kind of creative work is looked upon a little askance by serious monks who are intent on enlightenment and so on. It’s a bit of a distraction. It’s not really what things are about. I disagree. I think that creativity and imagination have always, to me, very central parts of my own flourishing, if that’s what it is, and certainly my struggle to understand how the dharma can be practiced in the sort of world we live in now.

James Shaheen: Well, speaking of which, you use creativity as a tool not only for how an individual should live, what ought I do, but also how a society might be formed, which is particularly relevant now. You write, “By startling people into greater self-awareness and encouraging them to examine themselves more critically, Socrates—and I would imagine the Buddha too—was forming a different kind of person and implicitly envisioning another kind of society.” So you address the collective as well.

Stephen Batchelor: Absolutely. Yeah. And I don’t know whether I mention it in that particular passage, but I think I must elsewhere in the book, is that that was what the Buddha himself envisaged. I mean, we have this famous discourse on the city or the parable of the city, where the Buddha describes going into a forest and finding an ancient path and following the ancient path, and it leads to the ruins of an ancient city. He comes out of the forest and gets the king and the ministers to rebuild the city. And then once that work’s done, then the city is flourishing again. And when he explains it, he says that that ancient path is the noble eightfold path. But the noble eightfold path here in that parable doesn’t lead to the cessation of suffering, which is the standard Buddhist view or nirvana. It leads to the rebuilding of a city. In other words, this for me is a very, very important confirmation of my reading of the eightfold path not as something that leads to cessation of suffering or some sort of mystical transcendence and freedom, but rather it’s a way of life that leads to the creation of another kind of society or the restoration of a society that’s in antiquity that you have come to value.

That’s very similar, I think, to what Socrates was doing. And you find it also in Plato, and again, Socrates is a sort of mouthpiece for Plato very often, but in the Republic Plato also envisions an ideal city. And in fact, if you read the Republic, you find that the guardians of the Republic are very much like Buddhist monks and nuns. They’re not celibate, but they don’t touch money. They’re not involved in business, they’re not involved in politics. They’re basically wise people who direct the governance of the city. So there are hints in early Buddhism of the fact that the Buddha’s vision was not concerned primarily with individual liberation and enlightenment but was actually about establishing the foundations of a more flourishing life for each individual, which of course can only actually be realized if you have the social framework, you have a rule of law, you have the image of the city.

Remember, a city in ancient times was a walled city. A city is equivalent to a space that is lived under the rule of a commonly accepted set of principles and laws. It’s not like modern Los Angeles, which has no borders at all. It just sort of just goes on forever. A city in those times always meant a confined space with doorways where some people are allowed in and other people will be kicked out. It’s a very different concept of the word “city” today. What would the equivalent of such a city be in the kind of global village that we live in now? How would we actually move towards creating such a society founded on these principles? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do think that if we are to move ahead into a livable future on this earth, we’ve somehow got to figure that out. We’ve somehow got to break away from being locked into these nation states, with their monopolies on violence and their endless conflicts between one another, toward a way of transcending that and living in a world in which we have responsibility not just for our own local area or for our own country but actually for the planet as a whole.

James Shaheen: Well, now you’re talking about a whole new way of thinking, and you do point out that we may reach a point where our historical, religious philosophies, political systems, and cultures will no longer be adequate. So how can creativity and uncertainty support us in navigating the existential challenges ahead? And I think more particularly about the climate crisis because you do address that. You say you don’t know the answer. But you did translate Nagarjuna’s Versus from the Middle, and that is an inflection point in the history of Buddhism because there’s a reformulation of the teachings. And I wonder if you see it as our collective task to do something akin to that. I mean, it’s maybe not going to come from one person, but is that sort of reformulation what you have in mind? And is that a good description of your project?

Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, that’s a fairly good description, and again, I’m basing that not just on my own personal desires but actually by looking at Buddhism as an historical culture and civilizational force, let’s say, and the way that Buddhism has contributed to cultures outside of India, particularly China, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and so on. And it has actually contributed to the formation of those societies as we know them today. 

I was particularly struck by this when I was in China in June this year, to really appreciate how the Chinese sensibility is a fusion of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. They’re all different threads, and Buddhism has been a continual presence in the life of the Chinese people for 2000 years. It’s an awfully long time. It went there in the first century AD. And so you can see through that example how Buddhism has somehow come to inflect a whole civilization with its particular values, and that gives us at least an example as to how Buddhism, when it enters into a new historical phase or a new cultural epoch, or I think what’s happening really with Buddhism now is that it’s encountering a global globalization. It’s encountering a world that’s way, way smaller than anything it had been in before and not hemmed in by national boundaries, but suddenly we’re encountering people from of all over, you know, different cultures, different religions, and also for Buddhists, different kinds of Buddhism, which most Buddhist traditions have been ignorant of or disinterested in for hundreds of years. Suddenly all this is coming together, and I think that’s going to be a very fissive period where there’s going to be a lot of conflict, probably a lot of disagreement, a lot of debate, a lot of argumentation. But I think that’s really good.

I feel that Buddhism has stagnated somewhat historically over the last few hundred years. And I think it’s time now perhaps for Buddhism to wake up. And it may no longer call itself Buddhism, for example. I mean, that’s a fairly recent term anyway. But the dharma, let’s say, I think has to find a new way of articulating itself, embodying its values and really engaging with the major collective sufferings that our world is facing at the moment, like the climate crisis, obviously, but also the advent of artificial intelligence, the increasing destructive power of weaponry, the possibilities of further global pandemics. All of these things, I think, are issues that we are not really very well equipped to confront. And I’d like to think that by relaxing or letting go of some of our certainties and convictions and beliefs that we might hold as Buddhists or Christians or Jews or Muslims or whatever, that’ll open up a space of uncertainty. 

I personally feel that it’s uncertainty that is the source of creativity. If you live in a world in which everything is laid out, everybody knows what’s what, everyone believes the same stuff, there’s no room for creativity. There’s not even any interest in imagining things otherwise and then pursuing the steps that will be able creatively to realize what you are imagining as otherwise than you have now. So creativity, again, taps deep into uncertainty. It taps deep into mystery. It taps deep into the challenge that I think more and more people globally now find that they are confronting.

So I think all of these ideas together I hope will provide a kind of a crucible in this probably quite conflicted near future we face and will perhaps be able to not necessarily completely resolve itself but at least give rise to ideas and visions that will help us move forward in a way that doesn’t end up destroying life on earth.

James Shaheen: Yeah, well, maybe that uncertainty can help us to think longer term.

Stephen Batchelor: Yeah. Exactly. I think uncertainty helps us think longer term. Uncertainty makes us perhaps less ready to jump to judgments and conclusions, to ponder and reflect more before we think and speak and act, to have that humility, as you mentioned, in which we don’t just give into the first impulse or the first reaction that our mind pops up with and then act on it.

I think meditation is constantly making us aware of the limitations of our understanding and so on. And I do feel very much that if you weave together a lot of these different threads, and they’re not all just coming out of Buddhism, that I feel we have a resource there that can help guide us as ethical creatures to live more responsibly with a greater concern for those who are not yet born and to live out our lives in a way in which we live as fully as we can, and we can perhaps die without any great regrets that we’ve done our best, as it were. That’s all I can really hope for.

James Shaheen: So I’m going to have one last question. I’ve skipped a bunch. I wanted to talk about parables, I wanted to talk about Greek tragedy and all sorts of things, but our listeners will have to buy the book to hear more about that, or you’ll probably be back on at some point. But the last question I have is that we’ve been talking about the ethics of uncertainty. But you point out that by itself, uncertainty is an inadequate basis for leading an ethical life. And you suggest that the tension between uncertainty and certainty underscores the distinction, for instance, between justice and care. So what do you mean by this? How can we balance, say, justice and care?

Stephen Batchelor: Well, I think in some ways this paradox is captured in the rather flippant comment, “The only thing we’re certain about is uncertainty.”

James Shaheen: Or the only thing that’s permanent is impermanence.

Stephen Batchelor: Yeah, the only thing that is permanent is everything changes. In other words, the danger of framing any human endeavor in binary terms—certain/uncertain, care/justice—is that there’s a great temptation to privilege one pole of the binary over the other and have the illusion that if we just stuck with uncertainty, everything would solve itself, or if we just stuck with justice, everything would resolve itself. That, I think, is undermining the very core principle of what the Buddha understood as sammaditthi, true perspective, which he defines as a view of the world in which we are no longer committed to the ideas of “is” and “is not.” That’s how it’s framed in the Kaccanagotta Sutta, for example. That’s also the idea that informs Nagarjuna’s work entirely. That’s the only text Nagarjuna quotes by name in his Verses from the Center.

So there’s a great danger of falling prey, and we do it very easily as human beings, to preferring one pole of a binary over another. So in talking about the ethics of uncertainty, a lot of people might think, “Oh, uncertainty’s good, certainty’s bad.” And I do probably fall into that a bit, you know, certainty I see as a problem, uncertainty I see as a possibility of a more creative response, but in actual experience, in actually dealing with, let’s say, a moral dilemma, I can certainly acknowledge my uncertainty, and I think that’s very important. But at the same time, if I’m going to do anything that I can really be committed to, I need a strong element of certainty that given everything I know and don’t know, this is what I’m convinced is the best thing to do. Now, I might be wrong, but if I don’t have the capacity to to embody a certain sense of conviction in what I’m doing, then I will not really have the motive or the strength or the inner strength to pursue a course of action, even if I keep finding that it’s running into obstacles and problems.

I mean, one of the striking things about Socrates in his trial, for example, is that he claims that he knows nothing, that he’s not a wise person at all. But that doesn’t stop him from being completely certain about the value of what he’s doing. So it’s the same problem, it’s the same dilemma. You know, in Buddhism you might say, “Well, everything is empty,” for example, which is uncertainty, as it were. But at the same time, I need to respond to the suffering of sentient beings, which is a form of certainty. This is what I’m committed to do. This is what I feel is of importance and value. So we’ve got to somehow negotiate a sort of middle way. I think that’s what in a sense the middle way is really pointing to is to find a way between these binary oppositions, the splits between right, wrong, good, bad, and so on, without abandoning that terminology but recognizing that we’re not talking of two poles, we’re talking of a spectrum of which we spend most of our time in the middle, in some fuzzy space in the middle. And that I think is more characteristic of the actuality of our human experiences, that we’re always a combination of both, and we’re sort of struggling with each other all the whole time, and as long as you stay in that struggle, in that questioning, I think you’ll be OK. If you opt for one pole or the other, the chances are you’ll end up in a new kind of dogmatism.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, one observation, you talk about language as an adaptation that insists upon a binary practically, but also the creative use of language that can subvert that, and that’s why I want to talk about parables and the Greek tragedies or poetry, that those are creative uses of language to subvert language’s insistence on those binaries, and I think that comes through in the book.

Stephen Batchelor: Oh, good. I’m glad it does. That’s a very good way of fleshing that out further. Absolutely. And I think some readers might find reading through these Greek plays they’ve never heard about is a rather odd way to get to grips with Socrates. I don’t think so. I think it’s crucial, actually, to understanding how he actually engaged and worked with the actual lived suffering of people in Athens at that time.

James Shaheen: OK, Stephen, you’re almost off the hook. Anything else before we go?

Stephen Batchelor: Not really, except to say that Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living for Uncertain Times will be published on August 26, and I hope you enjoy the book. It’s been a great privilege to have had the time and the opportunity to explore these ideas, and I’m very, very grateful to my publisher and others who have supported my work to enable this book to be out and for you to perhaps share some of this journey too. And I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it helps you flourish a bit more.

James Shaheen: That’s a good word, flourish, to end on. I can only say that having read earlier versions of the book, it’s been wonderful to watch the trajectory of your thinking and to see in its final form, which is an excellent read. So Stephen Batchelor, thanks so much for joining. It’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Buddha, Socrates, and Us, which is available now. So thanks again, Stephen, it was wonderful talking to you as always.

Stephen Batchelor: Thank you so much, James. It’s been a great discussion, and I look forward very much to seeing you in September.

James Shaheen: Absolutely. Me too.

James Shaheen:  ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Stephen Batchelor. To read an excerpt from Stephen’s book, visit tricycle.org/magazine. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!