Living with the Devil

by Stephen Batchelor

  More Praise for

  Living with the Devil

  “The author of Buddhism Without Beliefs and a former monk in the Tibetan and Zen traditions, Batchelor . . . demonstrates how the anguish associated with the transient nature of life has preoccupied humans for centuries . . . that mankind has always relied on the temptations of the devil to still anxiety and create an aura of permanence. Although he explores a number of philosophies, Batchelor’s focus is on the path to nirvana (a cessation of desires) . . . [His] genuine concern and desire for a better world come through clearly.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Stephen Batchelor opens the door to the fascinating dilemma of suffering and evil with prose so beautiful and lucid that just the reading of the book shows us the way out of delusion. This is a revolutionary text, a classic, and a must-read.”

  —Joan Halifax,

  author of Shamanic Voices

  “Stephen Batchelor once again offers us the rare gifts of his probing intellect, elegant prose, and provocative spiritual insights. With grace and refinement, he opens the doors of understanding we might not even have known were closed. This book is an illuminating read.”

  —Joseph Goldstein, author of

  One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism

  Most Riverhead Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs.

  For details, write: Special Markets, The Berkley Publishing Group, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ALSO BY STEPHEN BATCHELOR

  Alone with Others

  An Existential Approach to Buddhism

  The Faith to Doubt

  Glimpses of Buddhist Uncertainty

  The Awakening of the West

  The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture

  Buddhism Without Beliefs

  A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

  Verses from the Center

  A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime

  LIVING

  WITH

  THE DEVIL

  A MEDITATION ON

  GOOD AND EVIL

  Stephen Batchelor

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2004 by Stephen Batchelor

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with all copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:

  Batchelor, Stephen.

  Living with the devil : a meditation on good and evil / Stephen Batchelor.

  cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66308-0

  1. Religious life—Buddhism. 2. Good and evil—Religious aspects—Buddhism. 3. Buddhism—Doctrines. I. Title.

  BQ4301.B37 2004 2004042759

  294.3’5—dc22

  First Riverhead hardcover edition: June 2004

  First Riverhead trade paperback edition: June 2005

  Cover design and art by Raquel Jaramillo

  Book design by Chris Welch.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the author nor the publisher is responsible for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Hay

  CONTENTS

  ONE THE GOD OF THIS AGE

  1. Parallel Mythologies

  2. This Need Not Have Happened

  3. Mara—The Killer

  4. Satan—The Adversary

  5. Boredom and Violence

  TWO CREATING A PATH

  6. Fear and Trembling

  7. The Devil’s Circle

  8. A Devil in the Way

  9. An Empty Space

  10. From Home to Homelessness

  11. What Is This Thing?

  12. The Riddle of the World

  13. On Being Conscious

  14. This Body Is Breathing

  15. Learning to Wait

  THREE LIVING WITH THE DEVIL

  16. An Ordinary Person’s Life

  17. “Do Not Hurt Me”

  18. The Anguish of Others

  19. Incarnation

  20. A Culture of Awakening

  21. The Kingdom of Mara

  22. Hearing the Cries

  23. The Anarchy of the Gaps

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  I do not know who put me in the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am in a terrible ignorance about everything. I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects on itself and everything but knows itself no better than anything else. I see the terrifying spaces of the universe enclosing me, and I find myself attached to one corner of this expanse without knowing why I have been placed here rather than there, or why the life allotted me should be assigned to this moment [rather] than to another in all the eternity that preceded and will follow me. I see only infinity on every side, enclosing me like an atom or a shadow that vanishes in an instant.

  —BLAISE PASCAL

  ONE

  THE GOD OF THIS AGE

  1

  Parallel Mythologies

  THIS IS A BOOK for those like myself who find themselves living in the gaps between different and sometimes conflicting mythologies—epic narratives that help us make sense of this brief life on earth. Some of these mythologies originate in distant times and places, while others are products of the modern world.

  Whether the myths we inherit from the past come from a monotheistic religion such as Judaism or Christianity or a non-theistic tradition such as Buddhism, they share the view that a human life is fully intelligible only as part of an immense cosmic drama that transcends it. Both believe hidden powers to be at work—whether of God or karma makes little difference—that have flung us into this world to face the daunting task of redeeming ourselves for the remainder of eternity.

  The myths of modernity are so close at hand that it is hard to recognize them as myths. Just as those who lived in a premodern Christian or Buddhist society did not regard their understanding of the world as mythological, we too fail to see the mythologies that underpin our sense of who we are and the kind of universe we inhabit. A dominant myth of modernity is provided by the scientific understanding of the world that has blossomed in the West during the past two centuries. So compelling is its account of the origins of the universe and sentient life, so awesome its explanatory and predictive power, so impressive the technologies made possible by its understanding of the physical world, that we refuse to acknowledge anything mythical about it at all.

  Even if what we believe is empirically verifiable, that does not prevent it from functioning as a myth. No matter how “true” the modern
scientific worldview may be, it plays a similar role in our lives today as prescientific worldviews played in the lives of those in premodern cultures. For it too explains how human life is only fully intelligible as part of an immense cosmic drama that transcends it. It too is sustained by beliefs. We believe the universe exploded out of nothing fifteen billion years ago; we believe that humans evolved by random selection of genetic mutations from more primitive forms of life; we believe in the existence of electrons and quarks. But would we be able to demonstrate the truth of any one of these claims to someone who did not believe them?

  Human knowledge is invariably limited and partial. There is only so much any one person, however intelligent and well informed, can reasonably claim to know with certainty. Whatever he knows is necessarily mediated through his instruments, his senses, his reason, his brain. It is impossible for him to have access to an unmediated vantage point independent of his instruments and apart from his organism whence he could check to see whether his mediated knowledge corresponds to reality as such. No matter how well it can be explained, reality remains essentially mysterious. And on the great questions of what it means to be born and die, do good and evil, the natural sciences are silent.

  But the old ancestral myths run deep. We continue to draw on them for answers to such questions. The avowed atheist and materialist is uncomfortably stirred by passages from the Bible. The convert to Buddhism discovers a more intimate sense of the sacred in a crumbling village church in England than in all the monasteries she has visited in Tibet. In moments of despair, neither can help calling out to the god they have abandoned.

  As a Westerner who has practiced Buddhism for the past thirty years, I am aware of the parallel mythologies within me that compete for my attention. I was not raised a Christian, but recognize how I have imbibed the myths and values of Christianity from the post-Christian, liberal humanist environment around me. Temperamentally, I incline more to the arts than the sciences, but I thrill to the emerging scientific worldview that informs the society of which I am a part. My entire adult life has been devoted to translating Buddhist texts, teaching Buddhist meditation and philosophy, and writing books that offer a contemporary interpretation of Buddhism. As I struggle to understand and articulate the teachings and myths of my adopted faith, I am continually aware of other voices I equally cherish.

  At the heart of Buddha’s awakening lies a counterintuitive recognition of human experience as radically transient, unreliable, and contingent. By paying sustained, unsentimental attention to life as it unfolded within and around him, Siddhattha Gotama (the historical Buddha) realized that no essential self either underpinned or stood back and viewed the integrated display of colors, shapes, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and feelings that arise and vanish in each moment of consciousness. This startling insight shook him to the core of what he felt himself to be. The instinctive conviction of being an unchanging, isolated “I” collapsed. Life was just a dazzlingly tentative array of contingent processes, playing themselves out in complex sequences of causes and effects but with no discernible beginning and no divine power mysteriously directing them to a preordained end.

  Gotama found this revelation of a selfless and Godless reality to be deeply liberating. He was freed from the self-centered compulsions and fears that had trapped him in seemingly endless cycles of boredom and anguish. He referred to this freedom as “nirvana”—literally a “blowing out” of the “fires” of such existential discontent. Elsewhere, he spoke of this as “emptiness”: an open space where the idea of being an isolated and permanent self is no longer able to ensnare one. This emptiness is “the abode of a great person,” where one can encounter and respond to the world from a selfless but caring perspective.

  A bleak, nihilistic void in which meaning and value have been lost is the exact opposite of what Buddha meant by “emptiness.” For him, an understanding of emptiness transformed a compulsive cycle of fears and cravings into a path of wisdom and care that enhanced inner freedom and empathetic responsiveness. Rather than an absence of meaning and value, emptiness is an absence of what limits and confines one’s capacity to realize what a human life can potentially become.

  As soon as emptiness is thought of as a subtle dimension of reality or a mystical state of mind, it risks becoming fetishized as another privileged religious object. Nagarjuna, the great second century Indian thinker, was acutely aware of this danger:

  Buddhas say emptiness

  Is relinquishing opinions.

  Believers in emptiness

  Are incurable.

  Emptiness is not something sacred in which to believe. It is an emptying: a letting go of the fixations and compulsions that lock one into a tight cell of self that seems to exist in detached isolation from the turbulent flux of life. This emptying leads to a falling away of constrictive and obstructive habits of mind that—as in removing a barrier across a river—allows the dammed-up torrent of life to flow freely.

  Letting go, even momentarily and unintentionally, of that desperate and obsessive grip on self does not obliterate you but opens you up to a fleeting and highly contingent world that you share with other anxious creatures like yourself. This can be frightening; for the only certainty in such a world is that at some point you will die. You realize that your self is not a fixed thing or personal essence but a tentative and confused story hastening toward its conclusion. This might prompt you to scurry back to the familiar perceptions, beliefs, and routines in which you feel secure. But once the process of emptying has started, to cling to such consolations will hinder you from feeling fully alive. To become empty, as Nagarjuna insists, is to encounter the raw, unfiltered contingency of life itself. The challenge of emptiness is to plunge into life’s torrent rather than hover uncertainly on its brink.

  “Contingency” is a concise and reasonably accurate translation of the Buddhist concept paticcasamuppada (usually rendered as “dependent origination”). Whatever is contingent depends on something else for its existence. As such, it need not have happened. For had one of those conditions failed to materialize, something else would have occurred. We make “contingency” plans because life is full of surprises, and no matter how careful our preparations, things often do not turn out as anticipated. The devilish complexity of living systems makes it hard to foresee how a given system (be it a person or a flock of birds) will behave in the next moment, let alone next month or next year. Contingency reveals a chaotic freedom at the heart of causally ordered events. However tempting it is to invoke the hand of God, karma, or destiny to inject a hidden order into what seems random, embracing contingency requires a willingness to accept the inexplicable and unpredictable instead of reaching for the anesthetic comfort of metaphysics.

  The opposite of “contingency” is “necessity.” No matter how ephemeral and insignificant I recognize this human life of mine to be, I cannot shake off an intuitive conviction that, deep down, my existence is necessary in the scheme of things. By paying close and sustained attention to the contingent nature of experience, the practice of Buddhist meditation challenges the instinctive feeling that we are, in the words of Milton’s Satan, “self-begot, self-raised / By our own quick’ning power.” In eroding this sense of our own necessity, we come to see how the unprecedented and unrepeatable person we are emerges from a sublime matrix of myriad contingent events—no one of which need have happened either. Insight into the emptiness of self is achieved not by eliminating self but by understanding it to be contingent rather than necessary.

  When the stubborn, frozen solidity of necessary selves and things is dissolved in the perspective of emptiness, a contingent world opens up that is fluid and ambiguous, fascinating and terrifying. Not only does this world unfold before us with awesome subtlety, complexity, and majesty, one day it will swallow us up in its tumultuous wake along with everything else we cherish. The infinitely poignant beauty of creation is inseparable from its diabolic destructiveness. How to live in such a turbulent world
with wisdom, tolerance, empathy, care, and nonviolence is what saints and philosophers have struggled over the centuries to articulate. What is striking about the Buddhist approach is that rather than positing an immortal or transcendent self that is immune to the vicissitudes of the world, Buddha insisted that salvation lies in discarding such consoling fantasies and embracing instead the very stuff of life that will destroy you.

  This book is a meditation on some of these age-old questions. Much of it is an interpretation of Buddhist myths, doctrines, philosophy, and practice. Yet as one who finds himself inhabiting the gaps between cultures and traditions, the Buddhist ideas are juxtaposed and interwoven with material from sources as diverse as the Bible, Baudelaire, Roland Barthes, and evolutionary biology. Although I cite the monotheistic scriptures, I do not believe in God any more than I believe in Hamlet. But this does not mean that either God or Hamlet has nothing of value to say. The pages of this book are populated with mythical and historical figures from various traditions who happen to speak to my condition. The path I trace follows the gaps between different religious and secular mythologies that help make sense of my life. The further I proceed, the more I suspect this path to be nothing but the anarchic gaps themselves.

  2

  This Need Not Have Happened

  I WAS ABOUT SIXTEEN when my mother inadvertently undermined the instinctive conviction that my existence was necessary. It was Christmas. She and her sister were leafing through a volume of photographs on the kitchen table. They came to a snapshot of a man in military fatigues—eyes squinting against the desert sun, pipe clenched between teeth. Mother said, “If things had worked out differently, he would have been your father.” I thought: If he had been my father, would I have been me?

  This adolescent glimpse of my own contingency has haunted me. In spite of an intuitive conviction that my presence in this world is somehow necessary, the treacherous and unsettling possibility that I need not have happened at all keeps gnawing away. Leaving aside her choice of suitor, had another of my actual father’s myriad spermatozoa impregnated my mother’s ovum, would the child born from such a mingling of chromosomes have been me? Or had the same spermatozoon burrowed home in her next ovarian cycle, would that baby have been me?