Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor explores scientific materialism and secular Buddhism.

photo by: Stephen Lasky
I remember the first time I tried meditation. The anxiety it stirred gave me a stomachache. When sitting meditation didn’t work I tried walking mediation as taught by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. That wasn't much better -- to confining, too restrictive, too many rules. It felt like church. But despite my inability to "do meditation," I couldn’t escape feeling there was something to this Buddhist practice of quietly looking within.

Today’s guest on Skeptiko, Buddhist teacher and author Stephen Batchelor, has probably done more than anyone else in the last 20 years to change how Westerners approach Buddhist meditation. His books, Buddhism Without Beliefs, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, and his latest, After Buddhism, stripped Buddhism of its robes and prayer wheels to consider mediation from a Western, scientific, reductionistic perspective. And while this approach has met resistance from many traditional Buddhists teachers, it has also been a tremendous boon to millions who wish to explore the well-documented scientific benefits of mediation without giving up their modern, secular worldview. Batchelor even made it okay for atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris to give meditation a try.

Join Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Buddhist teacher and author, Stephen Batchelor.

Alex Tsakiris: I think your orientation--your secular, atheist orientation--has been a great fit for the social movement [surrounding Buddhism]... but I think what you’re doing is a little bit of “shut-up and [meditate]” here in that we’re skipping over the deeper, philosophical implications of what this "mindfulness" really means...

... I can shift over to another area where it’s even [clearer]... and that's the idea of reincarnation. Again, it’s another area that back [when you began] wasn’t anywhere close to being studied scientifically, but since then it has been studied scientifically... and they offer rather compelling evidence highly suggestive that something like reincarnation is really happening. So again, where are you with all of that? And are you trying to fit that back into a secular orientation that may not hold up when we really look at the science?

Stephen Batchelor: I’m not a scientist and I can only--if evidence appears through scientific study and so forth of the possibility of a non-material consciousness that floats free from the material world…if evidence can be compiled that indicates that reincarnation is a possibility then that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that. I just don’t think that those issues are actually central to what the Buddha was trying to do. I think these are fascinating areas and I’m fully supportive of all of this kind of research.

Alex Tsakiris: Follow through with that thought because I think this is an area where you’re probably at odds with [the traditional Buddist community] when you [claim that reincarnation wasn't] central to what the Buddha was teaching. And even if he wasn’t "teaching it"... they went inside, in the same way that you have, and they came to the conclusion that consciousness is fundamental and reincarnation is real. Can’t we assume that the Buddha came to that same conclusion?