Secular Buddhism with Stephen Batchelor

Episode 51 of the Secular Buddhism Podcast

Host: Noah Rasheta Guest: Stephen Batchelor

Introduction

Noah: Okay, I am live with Stephen Batchelor, author of many books. Two of his most recent ones are After Buddhism and Secular Buddhism. We'll be discussing this one a little bit in this interview, but I want to give a quick introduction to Stephen. It's always interesting to have the opportunity to speak with someone who's been so influential in my own journey. It seems to be quite an honor, so I'm very grateful to you, Stephen, for joining me today and for taking time out of your day to have a discussion on secular Buddhism.

By way of introduction, I want to make sure I get this right, but in a nutshell: Stephen was at one time a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Correct me if I'm wrong, but after you studied for some time as a Zen Buddhist monk, is that right?

Stephen: Mm-hmm.

Noah: Then ultimately transitioned into leaving the monastic life and teaching Buddhism from a much more secular standpoint. I'm sure there's a lot more to that. Is there anything you would want to add to that, Stephen?

Stephen: No, that's pretty good. I guess the only thing I might add is that since I left the monastic communities, my interest has really gone to what I call early Buddhism—trying to get back to what the Buddha was doing before it became Buddhism. For me, that's closely tied into what I understand as secular Buddhism. They're very closely connected, these two interests.

Noah: Great. I think that's a really fascinating process—to help us get back to understanding what was taking place in terms of the teachings that are truly powerful teachings. I think with most traditions, especially religious traditions, you have what at one point was teachings, and it evolves into the teachings about the teachings. I feel like Buddhism is not an exception to that. Sometimes in that process of teachings about the teachings, we can get hung up on things that impede us from benefiting from the original teachings.

Stephen: Absolutely.

Noah: Just quickly with my journey: I transitioned out of an orthodox form of Christianity and for a while was not interested in any form of religion. But I came across quotes online and heard snippets of wisdom attributed to the Buddha, Thich Nhat Hanh, or the Dalai Lama, and I thought, "Man, there's something to this Buddhism stuff. I want to learn more about it." All the while, I had a hint of reservation—I didn't want to be entangled in any kind of dogmatic, metaphysical, or supernatural beliefs.

That's when I came across Buddhism Without Beliefs. It was such a fascinating presentation of the teachings—just very simple. It's like, "These are the teachings. No beliefs attached to them." It was extremely influential in helping me decide, "Okay, this is a philosophy I want to study and learn and understand." With time, that has evolved into teaching and having a podcast.

What I'm finding is there's a really large community of people. I think we've got two angles here, right? From the Buddhist side, there are people wanting a more secular approach. But also from the secular side, people who are disaffected from religion are looking for some form of spirituality—I'll use that word with quotes—some form of path that feels satisfying and fulfilling but doesn't feel religious. They're encountering Buddhism as a philosophy, and this movement is just taking off. You're at the forefront of it and have been extremely influential with it. That's part of why I wanted to spend time and talk to you about it, because it's really exciting. It's a really exciting time, and I thought it would be really fun to pick your brain. Again, thank you.

Stephen: Thank you. No, I think you summarized that extremely well. That's exactly how I feel. I think we're at the intersection of two powerful cultural streams: people disaffected with religion on the one hand, and people disaffected with secularism on the other. Buddhism, of course, famously thinks of itself as the middle way. Maybe that's the way the middle way is playing out in our time in the world today. If we can contribute to this and address the concerns that are uppermost in the minds of these two groups of people, then I think we may do a great service. I'm very honored to be part of it.

The Four Noble Truths as Tasks

Noah: Great. With that in mind, let's jump into a couple of topics I want to discuss. Something you mentioned in your most recent book, Secular Buddhism—but before we jump into that, I do want to highlight that from my understanding, Buddhism Without Beliefs does a really good job of being a foundational text to understand Buddhist concepts. With that understanding, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist was kind of like your biography or your transition story. I know you have many more books than the few I'm mentioning, but After Buddhism kind of presents what's next, what do we do with this now. And I know a lot of podcast listeners have enjoyed it. I always recommend Buddhism Without Beliefs as the foundational text to podcast listeners or people who want to understand secular Buddhism.

Then comes your most recent book, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, and something I really enjoyed from this process was seeing—and you discussed this in the book—the evolution of your understanding of some of these key concepts, specifically the Four Noble Truths and the transition from the Four Noble Truths being truths to being tasks. Talk to me a little bit about that process of understanding and that transition, because I think it's a powerful shift in perspective.

Stephen: Yeah, you've summarized that very well. As the author of books, it's very difficult to have a perspective from which I can look at them from the outside, as it were. I see my books as a way in which I share my journey with others. I see each book as a kind of way station on a journey that is far from over. It does clearly describe a trajectory. You're quite right that probably the key idea in all of my work over the last 40 years has been rethinking the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths.

The Four Noble Truths is quite self-evidently the foundational teaching of what we think of as traditional Buddhism. There's no Buddhist school that would sideline this. It's clearly the paradigm or template out of which traditional Buddhism has been based and developed.

I first started having questions about this when I was still a Tibetan Buddhist monk—about thirty years ago. We were studying a very obscure Tibetan text on philosophy, and there I came across this idea of these four tasks. They didn't describe them as tasks per se, but it made very clear that the person who realizes these four truths has effectively done four things: they have embraced or fully understood dukkha, or suffering; they have let go of certain reactive patterns or graspings; they experience the stopping of those patterns; and they have cultivated and developed a way of life in the world.

That was in a Tibetan text—not something the Tibetans were actually teaching as their main thing—but there it was. For some reason, that really jumped off the page for me. I had never heard this before, never heard it again in the Tibetan tradition or other traditions, really. And yet it's there. As I found out later, it's right at the conclusion of what's considered to be the Buddha's first discourse.

Clearly, this idea that the Four Truths are to be enacted in a way that has a transformative effect on one's life was there from the very beginning. I've always found it strange that something presented as the conclusion of the Buddha's first discourse is never further developed in any of the orthodox traditions. You'll find little, if anything, on these four tasks as I now call them.

Over time, I became more and more dubious about some of the metaphysical claims of Buddhism. I soon began to realize that it wasn't just karma and rebirth that were metaphysical doctrines—the Four Noble Truths themselves were metaphysical doctrines. To claim that life is suffering is a metaphysical claim. You're making a generalized statement about the nature of existence, wherever it might occur in the universe, and that it is dukkha. The origin of dukkha is craving—that's also a metaphysical claim. It's no different, really, from saying that God created heaven and earth. It's not something you can prove. It's not something you can disprove. It stands outside the reach of reason.

When I started thinking that the Four Noble Truths were actually metaphysics, that brought me back to another world where the Buddha had presented these truths not as things to believe, not as metaphysical doctrines, but actually as indicators of how to live. In other words, I feel quite passionately that the dharma started out as a pragmatic, therapeutic way of life primarily concerned with ethics—ethics in the widest sense of how do we become the kind of people we aspire to be? How do we lead a good life? How do we flourish as human persons and human societies here on earth? These are ethical questions, and my sense is that the Buddha was an ethicist through and through. Ethics is not just part of the path. The path is ethical in its very nature. The whole of the Eightfold Path is really a way of life. It's an ethos. It's an ethic.

The next step in this process came when I was reading the letters of a British monk called Ñāṇavīra Thera—Harold Musson—who was a big guru in Sri Lanka during the 1950s. I came across his collected letters really by chance. They were on a bookshelf in a retreat center where I was teaching, and I was completely taken with this man's ideas. He was the one who actually coined the term "the four tasks." He presented the Four Noble Truths as what he called the optimal task for a human person's performance or something like that. That really nailed the point to me in a very final way.

That became the basis for my own working out of these truths as tasks in a much more detailed way than Ñāṇavīra ever got down to doing. It provided a whole other template, a whole other paradigm in which we can practice the dharma—something that you can't consider to be something invented in the twentieth century, dreamed up by some later commentary or tradition. It's actually something you find at the very root and core of the dharma itself.

This secular approach to the dharma is, for me, a radical way of reforming Buddhism, much in the way that Luther and Calvin and others sought to reform Christianity. I do think we're at a time where Buddhism, if it is to really survive as a force for good, a force for wisdom and compassion in our world, has to rethink its fundamental ideas in a very radical way. This may be foolhardy, but it's what I'm trying to do.

Noah: I love that, and I love what you mentioned in your book—how as a living tradition, you're more interested in the ongoing dialogue and not arriving at a final conclusion. I think as someone who studies and practices Buddhism, I would agree wholeheartedly that understanding the nature of things being impermanent and the nature of things continually changing—that's the only logical way that any of this would make sense. It would be an ongoing transformation and an ongoing evolution that should be approached and discussed in this way. At least that's how I view it from my perspective.

I understand that from other perspectives, this may be threatening. This may seem scary because it's a change from how things have been. That's always scary. We encounter that in any school of thought, any religion, any ideology.

Buddhism 1.0 and 2.0

Noah: I want to address something you mentioned in the book that I really liked. You discussed the idea of thinking of Buddhism 1.0 as kind of the traditional Buddhism, and secular Buddhism as kind of a reboot or Buddhism 2.0, as you call it. What stood out to me when I first heard this was the idea of software being updated. Any software that we use that's useful will be updated periodically. That's the nature of good software.

What stood out to me was this thought: it's one thing to claim, "This is the right operating system," and it's another to say, "This is another operating system that may be contingent on the hardware." I like to think of the hardware as the culmination of my personality and our societal way of thinking. All of that hardware may suggest, "Hey, this operating system may be more effective for this hardware," but it's not necessarily saying, "This operating system is better than that operating system."

I think about this all the time with friends in the tech world. Is a Mac better than a PC? There are arguments that prove one is better than the other, but there are also arguments that prove the opposite. So in a way, the answer is yes—it is better—and the answer is also no, it's not better.

I like applying that to this concept of secular Buddhism as an operating system. It's like we're saying, "Hey, here's another way to think about it," but it's not in competition with it. You addressed that specifically in your book when you mentioned that the mythic and the historical are both valid and don't necessarily compete. Talk to me a little bit about that. What role does the mythic play in Buddhism in general, and does it play any role in this new operating system?

Stephen: That's right. The danger with a secular approach is that you might read some story about the Buddha—like, for example, how he grows up as a prince and leaves the palace and sees a sick person and an old person. It's a beautiful, mythical story, but it's very unlikely anything like that actually happened. The danger is that we would then say, "That is no longer relevant." What we're doing there is making a category error, basically. We're taking a myth, judging it as though it were historical, and because it doesn't live up to our standards of historical truth, we're thereby discarding it.

The point is that myth works very well in its own terms, and it needs, though, to be constantly reminded. We need to be constantly reminded that it's not history. It's doing something else. One of the most powerful myths for me—in one of my books that you didn't mention called Living with the Devil—after I wrote Buddhism Without Beliefs, my publisher gave me basically a blank check. They said, "Okay, just do what you want." It sounds like a writer's greatest dream come true.

Actually, it's a nightmare because you have no guidance whatsoever. You have no points of reference. You have no task to perform. You're just told to do what you want. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I actually wanted to say. In the end, after a number of false starts, I stumbled into the idea of Mara, the demonic. This is purely mythical material. It's right through the early Pāli Canon—the encounters of the Buddha and Mara. Of course, it's also picked up in many other traditions as well. The figure of Satan has a very similar role.

I've found that using the Mara material, the idea of the demonic as a personification, as a character who interacts with another character and embodies certain values and perspectives in opposition to others, works in many ways more powerfully for me than analyzing these things in terms of Buddhist psychology. Buddhist psychology is quite amazing—Buddhists came up with psychological insights long before they were thought of in the West. We're naturally quite attracted to that aspect of Buddhism. Much of the world of mindfulness draws upon Buddhist psychology, really. That's done at the cost of losing sight of the potency of mythic material.

I continue to use the example of Mara today. In fact, next month in New York there will be a performance of an opera that I've written called Mara. I've spent a few years now writing a libretto that tells the story of Buddha and Mara through two acts sung by a soprano, a baritone, and a tenor. The music is being composed by my friend Sherry Woods, and we're going to have a performance in the Rubin Museum on October 18 and 20 in New York City, if you're interested. Tickets are now available.

Noah: Wow. Yeah, check that out.

Stephen: That's another example of using a secular form—opera—converting classical Buddhist material into the language of the Western musical tradition and presenting these ideas not intellectually or abstractly but through figures moving, singing, and acting on stage. You couldn't do this with thinking of Buddhism purely psychologically or philosophically. To me, this is probably the best example of how we've been very careful not to dispense with mythology because it doesn't meet our criteria of historical or psychological accuracy. It allows us to engage with this material through the imagination, and that, for me, is a very important part of my practice—the cultivation and incorporation of the creative and imaginative into my practice.

In fact, in the book Secular Buddhism, the last section is all about the arts. I feel that's hopefully a way in which the secular movement within Buddhism will start to take more and more interest in finding new forms of expressing the dharma and bringing it into our lives in quite nontraditional ways.

Noah: Cool. I love that. I'd like to get your thoughts on this. From my perspective, I see the secular Buddhist movement that's emerging as something I wouldn't want to replace the traditional Buddhist movement or anything else. I kind of view it like the concept of love languages—the idea that some people express something so universal like love very differently. For some people, their key love language is words of affirmation. For others it's physical touch, or whatever their love language is works for them.

I've come to understand that secular Buddhism, for me, is like another spiritual language. It's a language that works for me. That's why I enjoy teaching these concepts from a secular lens and practicing them from a secular approach. But I've never felt like I'm crossing the line to say, "This is the right way for everyone."

I feel like it's important to emphasize that what we're trying to do as part of this movement is provide another language that may work for some people because the language that's out there isn't working for someone. That involves, at times, telling people, "Hey, this tradition works, but you may want to check out the Tibetan tradition or Zen," because it's not a competition of "Hey, you need to be here." I'd like to hear your thoughts and your perspective on that.

Stephen: That distinction taps right into the core shift from truths to tasks. As long as you're invested in the language of truth, it's very difficult not to get into comparative judgment. If this is true, then that can't be true. If the Tibetan Buddhist teaching of this is true, then Zen or Theravada clearly can't be true. At the root of this secular approach is that it has discarded the polemic of truth and replaced it with the vision of pragmatism.

In other words, what matters is that we're not trying to persuade ourselves or others that this or that idea is true. We're only interested in whether or not it works. That's the key insight of William James and others in the pragmatic tradition. It's not about whether it's true. It's whether it works. Does this practice of mindfulness actually make a difference in the quality of my life? I'm not going to try and persuade people to do it because the Buddha said it and the Buddha wasn't lying, therefore it's true. I'm basically offering an exercise, and the question is: is this helpful? Does this work? Does this actually improve the quality of your life?

If you're really serious about that approach, then of course you will assume an extremely tolerant attitude towards all other forms. But you will acknowledge that for certain people, perhaps this is not an approach that's very helpful. You might, as you suggest, direct them elsewhere. Maybe they should do their own practice or whatever. In other words, you need to adapt the dharma to suit the needs of the practitioner rather than seeking to remodel the practitioner to somehow fit the idea you have of what constitutes Buddhism.

My experience, particularly in the Tibetan tradition, was that in order for me to function in good faith as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, I had to accept certain doctrinal propositions as being true and to be able to defend them in public. If I were unable to do that, I would have no business being a Tibetan Buddhist monk. That's one of the reasons I could not really work within that environment.

The point is that a secular approach is effectively a tolerant approach. This has been brought forth quite strongly in recent writings and speeches by the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama is also using the word "secular" a lot. If you've read his book Beyond Religion—which is an unusual title for the head of one of the world's biggest religions—the thing he emphasizes is how we live in a world today where we can no longer expect any one religion to provide the ethical foundations for how people should live in this world. We need a secular approach that recognizes the diversity and plurality of different religious traditions and gives equal respect to them all, yet provides a space in which tolerance is the key.

He gets this idea from reading the Indian constitution, a secular constitution set up in 1948, which is explicitly secular in order to work within the highly diverse religious world of India. You've got Muslims and Hindus and Jains and lots of different groups. You cannot run a country like that by taking a sectarian stance in terms of your identity as a nation. The secular vision is not just about putting religion to one side or even rejecting religion, as it's often understood. It's actually about having an open and tolerant attitude that is able to accept more.

Having said all of this, I do think we also need to leave enough space to have a critical engagement with religious traditions. There's a critical relationship to the Buddhist traditions that have evolved historically. I don't think we could just say, "Well, this works for you—that's fine. This works for you—that's fine." There's a danger we slip into a kind of noncritical individualism. I do think we need somehow to find a balance between, on the one hand, tolerance and respect and, on the other hand, a willingness to look clearly and critically on the basis of empirical evidence, historical research, archeology, and so on to try to get a much clearer sense of how these traditions evolved. We need to be quite open and frank with our concerns about where they might be going in directions that are contradicting their own principles or whatever it might be. Criticism and respect need to go hand in hand.

Noah: Yeah, absolutely. What comes to mind is: "Hey, that tradition that's working for you—it's not working for the rest of us because you're trying to kill us," or something along those lines. Or not even going to that extreme, but a set of beliefs that may be causing unnecessary suffering for a whole group, like the LGBT community or something like that.

Stephen: That's right.

Noah: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. Okay, a couple of things I want to mention based on what we've talked about: Even from writings that talk about the Buddha's ability to teach people where they were, to meet someone where they are and teach them what's appropriate for them—that seems to be echoed in what we're discussing here, what you explained about this approach. Also, the idea that we shouldn't take these things just because someone said them or because they're written somewhere. That's also deeply rooted in what a lot of people understand Buddhism and what the Buddha was teaching to be: "Hey, try this." That's why I love this transformation into tasks—because you can take these and apply them and try them.

ELSA: Embrace, Let Go, See, Act

Noah: I wanted to talk about this because you have an acronym that you use that makes it easier for us to remember this idea of letting go. The acronym is...?

Stephen: ELSA.

Noah: ELSA. And as any of us with kids know, Elsa teaches us the message of let it go, right? Playing off the Disney movie. Walk us through ELSA as an acronym. Maybe apply it—if someone's listening to this thinking, "How do I apply this as a task to an ordinary instance of anguish or suffering," like I'm stuck at a red light or I just lost my job—how would we apply these as tasks to an instance of suffering like that?

Stephen: Okay, the example I usually give is working as a therapist. Let's first break down ELSA so we're all on the same page here. ELSA is E, embrace; L, let go; S, see; and A, actualize or act. That is a highly condensed secular Buddhist version of the Four Noble Truths. In other words: embrace suffering, which means embrace the situation at hand; let go of your instinctive reactivity to it; see the stopping of that reactivity; and then act or respond—either say a thing, act, do something, whatever it might be.

To concretize that, imagine that you're a therapist working with a client. The knock on the door, a person appears. E, embrace. Embrace that person as unconditionally as you can. Accept that person for who they are. Read the face, what they're saying to you through their eyes, through their expression, through their body language. Be totally open to that.

L, let go of the reactions that arise in your mind. Maybe if you're a heterosexual male and it's a beautiful young woman, you will experience desire. You'll experience saying, "Oh, she's nice," or whatever. Notice that, be totally with it. Don't condemn it, but let it go. Don't buy into it. Just see that as the natural, completely ordinary response of one organism to another. It's okay. There's absolutely nothing wrong with reacting to it. It's what we do with it that's problematic.

The second step is let go of that reactive pattern. It might be a client that you really have a great deal of difficulty with on some personal level, and you experience resistance, dislike, frustration. You notice that. You embrace it. You let it go. That allows you to come to settle into that nonreactive, mindful potential you're trying to sustain as this person walks into your room.

S, see the fact that when you're aware of these things, that seeing is actually nonreactive. You can be non-reactively aware of your reactivity. This is the essential principle behind all mindfulness therapies, basically.

That's not the end of the path. That's not your nirvana, as it were. That is actually where you now seek to respond to the situation. You seek to respond to this person's suffering—in this case, the client. You seek to respond to them in a way that's not determined by your instincts, your reactions, your likes, your dislikes. It's responding in a way that's not conditioned by your greed, your attachment, your fear, your hatred, your egoism, or whatever it might be. That is what then leads you to say something, to maybe reach out and take their hand, whatever it is that you subsequently do.

Of course, in reality, what I've just described could be happening within a second or less. It's very fast. The reason we do formal practice is to somehow break the process down into manageable training segments. So we'll spend time actually cultivating attention that embraces our situation, which is largely just being mindful and aware. We'll pay more attention to what it means to not get caught up in our reactive patterns. We'll learn to know what that feels like. We'll become particularly attuned to the tastes and feel of what it's like to be in a nonreactive state of mind as a foundation for being able to respond rather than react to the person who's before you or the situation that is at hand.

As you suggested at the beginning, we can apply that to any situation in life—whether we're stuck in a traffic jam, which is trivial in this sense, or whether we're facing a major life decision in a marriage or work situation. We can apply those principles just as effectively in any human scenario. The difficulty is that it's happening very fast. The world is impinging on your life. You're under deadlines. You've got colleagues and friends and partners pressuring you to do this, that, and the other. You don't have the luxury to go on a two-week meditation retreat before you get back to everyone else.

We need, I think, to find a way in which we can integrate a formal practice in which we quite systematically cultivate these skills and then the real practice, which is actually living from moment to moment, from day to day, in the midst of what is often a very conflicted and sometimes very stressful situation. We can do all of that without believing anything about Buddhist doctrine or metaphysics. Really, that plays no role at all. It's actually kind of just a big irrelevance.

I used to make the mistake of really getting upset with people who believed in reincarnation and making a big effort to try to show that it can't possibly be true and so forth. That's just the same problem in reverse. I'm reacting to a belief rather than being attached to it. What I've come to now is that rebirth, reincarnation, karma, different realms of existence—this is all completely irrelevant. It has no bearing whatsoever on how we actually live our lives from day to day. So we just let it go. We don't have to get upset about it or whatever. We just don't need to be driven by opinions and views.

Noah: Yeah, I really like that word, "irrelevant," because it's not a matter of "I've got to prove or disprove." It becomes a side note. It's just...

Stephen: Yeah, it's a side note. It's just off the map. It doesn't play any role at all.

Living Authentically

Noah: With the understanding that certain things are irrelevant to how we practice, I think it also gives us a lot more freedom. Because when you're not tied to defending a position, when you're not invested in proving or disproving something, you're kind of free to explore and to practice and to see for yourself what works. I think that's where the real power lies in a secular approach to Buddhism. It's more of a personal experiment than it is a doctrine that you have to defend.

Stephen: That's exactly right. I mean, the whole point is that you're conducting an experiment. You're not asking someone to believe something. You're essentially saying, "Look, try this. See what happens. See if it works for you. If it does, great. If it doesn't, that's fine too. Try something else. We're not talking about orthodoxy here. We're talking about practice that is pragmatic and driven by your own experience."

And I think that's a crucial difference. When you're in a traditional setting, you're very often trying to fit your experience to the doctrine rather than allowing the doctrine to serve your experience. Whereas in a secular approach, the doctrine—if we can even call it that—is really just a kind of mapping of how people have discovered that they can reduce suffering and flourish as human beings. It's not written in stone. It's something that has evolved and can continue to evolve.

Noah: Yeah, and I think that's what makes it so accessible to so many people right now. The idea that you don't have to sign on to a whole package of beliefs—you can come to it with skepticism, with questions, with your own worldview intact. You can explore the practices and see if they help you. That's really appealing to people who have been hurt by religion or who are just naturally skeptical.

Stephen: Absolutely. And I think we've also, in doing this, recovered something that was perhaps lost in some of the traditional Asian forms of Buddhism. I mean, if you read the Buddha's teachings in the early discourses, there's this constant refrain of "don't believe me; test this for yourselves." The Buddha is very clear that he's not asking for faith in the traditional sense. He's asking people to investigate their own experience. That empirical, experimental approach to the dharma has sometimes been buried under layers of devotion and doctrine in various Buddhist traditions.

What we're doing in a secular approach is recovering that original spirit of empiricism and investigation. And I think that's historically justified. It's not like we're inventing something new. We're actually going back to something very old.

Closing Thoughts

Noah: That's such an important point, and I think it connects everything we've talked about today. Whether it's the shift from truths to tasks, or the idea of Buddhism as an operating system rather than a claim to absolute truth, or the acronym ELSA as a practical application rather than a dogma—it all comes back to this spirit of pragmatism and personal investigation.

Thank you so much for your time today, Stephen. This has been really illuminating, and I think for anyone listening who is interested in exploring secular Buddhism or who has been struggling with more traditional approaches, your work and this conversation offer a really important alternative. I appreciate you sharing your insights and your journey with us.

Stephen: Thank you, Noah. It's been a real pleasure. I admire the work you're doing with the podcast, bringing these ideas to a broader audience in such an accessible and thoughtful way. I think you're making a real contribution to this movement, and I hope our conversation has been helpful to your listeners. Keep up the great work.

Noah: Thank you.

For more information about Stephen Batchelor's work, visit his website or check out his books including Buddhism Without Beliefs, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, After Buddhism, and Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World.

For more about the Secular Buddhism podcast and Noah Rasheta, visit SecularBuddhism.com