Agnostic Buddhism without karma or rebirth
After reading Buddhism Without Beliefs  by Stephen Batchelor, as well as critiques by Sangharakshita and Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, it strikes me that Batchelor's understanding of Buddhism corresponds roughly to what I privately worked out for myself many years ago when I first read about Buddhism and the Four Noble Truths.  I grew up in a protestant Christian family in Texas.  In my early teens I became aware of an apparent conflict between the religious cosmology of Biblical times and modern scientific cosmology.  For example it bothered me that dinosaurs were not mentioned in the Bible.  Then one day in my bedroom while reading about the gentle pantheism of Spinoza, the thought surfaced, "Would God be angry with me if I stopped believing in Him?"  I was silently asking for permission to disbelieve. Suddenly I realized that my belief had vanished.  I felt light headed.  I put my book down and went out for a walk.  Somewhat later, on coming across a history of the Buddha and Buddhism, I embraced it for three reasons: the dramatic personal example of renunciation by Siddhartha and his subsequent heroic struggle for enlightenment, the compelling logic of the Four Noble Truths, and the absence of a requirement to believe in God.  The Buddhist literature available in my community in those days (circa 1956) was nothing like the wealth of information available now on internet.  For many years I did not know that the Buddha believed in rebirth, karma and divine beings.  I only understood that he did not believe in the reality of a personal self. In my twenties, I practiced yoga a few years with Swami Satchidananda at the Integral Yoga Institute in New York City, then moved on to a working career as an electrical engineer.  On retiring early at age 50 I returned to my early interest in Buddhism. At age 53 I took the three refuges and the eight precepts at  a Theravada monastery, Wat Metta, surrounded by avocado orchards near Escondido, California.  Only then did I began to read the Suttas and delve into Buddhist teachings.  However, since my early practice never required anything more than a grasp of the essential core teachings of the Four Noble Truths, which were enough to give meaning to my life, I never saw a need to embrace the additional beliefs in karma and rebirth.  Believing in them would not have changed my practice significantly.  Moral conduct, for example, does not really need to be reinforced by a karmic fear of hell or a desire to accumulate merit for a favorable rebirth.  It can be sufficiently motivated by an understanding of the suffering resulting here and now from mental states of lust, aversion and ignorance, and from unwholesome actions such as harming others, taking what is not given, acting unchastefully, speaking falsely or drowning in intoxicants. The universe is vast; much of it is unseen and unknown.  Recent astronomical discoveries about the accelerating expansion of the universe require a quantity of "dark energy" in addition to the "dark matter" required to explain the rapid rotation of galaxies.  Adding up total mass due to the sum of dark matter and the equivalent mass of dark energy results in a figure of only 5% of the universe visible, 95% invisible.  This scientific admission of 95% ignorance gets worse.  Science has not explained what is consciousness, a gorilla in the scientific living room.  Furthermore, ordinary perception can be distorted by drugs which raises doubt about the reality and depth of normal experience.  Altered states of consciousness reveal severe limits to ordinary perception. Therefore my own experience strongly suggests that my concepts of the universe are not complete. This includes the culturally conditioned materialistic view that consciousness must depend on a physical body.  The Buddha rejected both extremes of eternalism and nihilism (materialism).  Beyond the limits of my knowledge, for all I know multiple levels of heavens may be occupied by hierarchies of deities.  Divine laws of karma and rebirth might operate across multiple lives and worlds as far reaching and fine grained as the law of gravity.  The heavenly abodes might be located in the invisible regions of the universe.  The Buddha once instructed some villagers who were confused about deciding which doctrines to believe, that in the absence of certainty, a belief should be adopted if it has wholesome results (see MN 60: The Incontrovertible Teaching).  Therefore if believing in the concepts of karma and rebirth would benefit my life and practice, I would soften my stance into provisional acceptance, but the need for this has not been strongly felt. As mentioned above, for most of my life I did not enjoy contact with other living Buddhists.  Even now my life continues solitary with few Buddhist friends or daily contact.  Therefore the issues raised by Batchelor and Sangharakshita and Ven. Bodhi about the future of Buddhism as a social institution or community lie outside my domain.  The way in which Western Buddhism may evolve does not concern  me.  Before his passing, even the Buddha himself expressed equanimity concerning the future of the Order.  He told Ananda that if anyone was concerned about it, then that person should give out the instructions.   Even so, regarding the Sangha community, I do wonder if my practice would have been reinforced by more contact with other Buddhists. I think Batchelor should emphasize the importance of moral conduct more strongly (i.e. the five precepts). In my experience, meditation practice will not obtain relief from suffering without a firm basis in moral conduct to quiet the agitation of emotions and the mind.  The conventional "religious" Buddhist communities firmly support rules of behavior such as the five precepts.  Good conduct begins with physical and verbal restraint and should progress to mental restraint such as abandoning lustful thinking.  European existentialism or merely intellectual agnostic Buddhism may fail to emphasize the importance of morality before wisdom.   In my case I did not make any progress until I finally began understanding this. Among the three Refuges, the practice of agnostic Buddhism in my life has depended mainly on the Dhamma teachings and the personal example of the Buddha, more than contact with an absent Sangha community, especially a traditional community devoutly believing in karma and rebirth which were not part of my heritage.  The historic absence of Sangha in my life has conditioned my practice along the dry lines of agnostic Buddhism.  It may be enough to understand the Four Noble Truths but it has not been easy.  I think of Rahula who was guided at every step by his father.  He was nicknamed "Lucky" by his many friends because of his fortunate birth as the Buddha's own son. References Wikipedia biography of Stephen Batchelor Batchelor's web site A Canadian thesis about Batchelor's agnostic Buddhism Sangharakshita's essay Bhikkhu Bodhi's critique   Bhikkhu Punnadhammo's critique   Home Page