Two Buddhist Bad Boys

"I am unable to identify myself with any organized body or cause; even if it is a body of opposition or a lost cause. I am a born blackleg.”

“I have the same problem (if a problem it be). For the more I pursue my study and practice of the Dhamma, the more distant I feel from Buddhism as an institutional religion. And the closer I get to the life and teaching of Gotama, the further I find myself from the complacent certainties of any Buddhist orthodoxy.”

— Stephen Batchelor

Stephen Batchelor is an English Buddhist teacher and author. He is probably the most well-known “Buddhist atheist” today, and the most important proponent of a
“Buddhism without beliefs.” His contribution to Buddhist thought cannot be exaggerated: there is a “before and after Batchelor.”

Following years of laborious soul-searching during the early 1970s, Stephen mysteriously landed in Dharamshala in 1974 and immediately ordained as a novice Gelug monk. He spent five challenging years exploring the tricky terrain of Tibetan Buddhism but never managed to come to terms with its slippery metaphysics; deep down, he simply couldn’t accept the idea of rebirth:

Why does all this matter so much? Why did it cause me so many sleepless nights? It matters because the entire edifice of traditional Buddhist thought stands or falls on the belief in rebirth.

His skepticism grew exponentially until it reached its peak: in 1979, he had had enough of it — of having to ceaselessly walk on eggshells to helplessly conceal his “unacceptable atheism” — and eventually resolved to disrobe.

The second part of his monastic career was spent at a South Korean monastery, where he dedicated half the year to sitting cross-legged in front of a white wall, asking himself the most inscrutable of all questions:

What is this?

Batchelor not only studied and practiced Dharma in great depth, but also took an interest in existentialism to better understand the tragedy of being human. These rich and diverse experiences have provided him with a fresh and unorthodox perspective on the Buddha’s teachings, one that is both lucid and down-to-earth; no, Humble.

In his wonderful book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, Batchelor introduced the world to the enigmatic 20th-century English Theravada monk Nanavira Thera. Nanavira was a fascinating and extremely bright — but seemingly traumatized — man:

Nanavira Thera was born as Harold Musson in 1920 into an upper-class military family. An only child, prone to moody introspection, he grew up in a graystone mansion in Hampshire. In 1938, he went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and then modern languages. He enlisted in the army at the outbreak of the Second World War and, in 1941, was commissioned as an officer in the Intelligence Corps. His task was to interrogate high-ranking Italian Fascists. In 1945, he was hospitalized and became absorbed in a newly published book on Buddhism called La dottrina del risveglio (The Doctrine of Awakening) by the Italian far-right philosopher Julius Evola.

During his work in the Intelligence Corps, Nanavira befriended Bertie Moore, a fellow officer also bewitched by Buddhism:

After the war, the two men remained close friends, and moved into a flat together in London. Harold, thanks to a private income, passed his days translating Evola's book into English, while the impecunious Bertie worked in the Italian section at the BBC. As their shared disillusion with and distaste for postwar Britain grew, they began to think seriously of taking their interest in Buddhism to its logical conclusion. They learned of the existence of a small community of European Buddhist monks in Ceylon. With hardly any warning to their friends, parents, and colleagues, Harold and Bertie abruptly fled England in November 1948. The two men were eventually ordained as Buddhist monks at the Island Hermitage (a Buddhist forest monastery in Sri Lanka). In 1954, Nanavira left his friend and the monastic community in order to become a hermit. He settled in a solitary hut in the jungle but soon succumbed to an endless succession of tropical diseases. In 1962, he began to be overwhelmed by incapacitating erotic fantasies. He regarded this as a disease: satyriasis (‘hypersexuality’).

On December 11, 1962, he wrote the following in a letter to his doctor:

Under the pressure of this affliction, I am oscillating between two poles: if I indulge the sensual images that offer themselves, my thought turns towards the state of a layman; if I resist them, my thought turns towards suicide. Wife or knife, one might say.

On July 5, 1965, at 2:45 pm, Nanavira, age 45, took his Leave:

Owing to chronic (and apparently incurable) ill-health, I have decided to put an end to my life. I have been contemplating such action for some considerable time; indeed, I made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide in November 1962; since then, the situation has deteriorated rather than improved. The responsibility for this action is purely mine, and no other person whatsoever is involved.

Nanavira had experienced profound insights but was apparently never able to reconcile them all. Batchelor appreciated many of his intellectual and literary qualities¹ but found his “religious fundamentalism and ascetic streak disturbing and repellent”: despite his penetrating mind and wide erudition (especially regarding Buddhist and existential philosophies), Nanavira could not relinquish his attachment to the abominable doctrine of reincarnation.

However, unlike Batchelor, Nanavira fully understood the First Noble Truth. His life-purpose was fundamentally Dharmic (i.e. of Indian origin): to “put a stop to existence” — and this, according to him, can only be achieved if we have the “courage to let go of our cherished humanity.”

Not unlike previous thinkers such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, Nanavira’s impressive lucidity came at a heavy price: sophisticated theological escape.²

In the crowning paragraph of his chapter devoted to Nanavira, Batchelor hands us his own Achilles' heel on a silver platter:

Mahayana Buddhism is no more a life-affirming creed than the Hinayana doctrine it claims to supersede. By reflecting on Nanavira's dilemma, I came to realize how little my own sense of the intrinsic value of life had been affected by my years of exposure to Buddhist thought. Whether I liked it or not, I was a secular, post-Christian European. Unlike Nanavira, I had no wish to let go of my cherished humanity.

Yet, for having helped purify and secularize Buddhism (or at least for having planted the seed for a potential positive reformation), we offer a deep bow of gratitude to Mr. Batchelor. Likewise, for having lovingly planted the most exquisite of all flowers — the Flower of Suicide — into the “Big Buddhist Garden,” we extend our heartfelt thanks to the Venerable Nanavira Thera, while closely keeping in mind the wise words of the Buddha (whoever he was and whatever he actually pronounced):

A raft needed to cross the river is discarded when the other shore is reached, not carried about on one’s head.

And this is how we went beyond Batchelor (and his irrational and stubborn attachment to history’s most cruel species: Homo sapiens) — and beyond Nanavira (and his fanatical adherence to Buddhist dogma) — to embrace the impossible:

The Betrayal of Birth.

1. “Whoever Nanavira Thera was, I sensed an immediate affinity with him. I took Clearing the Path home and read it from cover to cover. I was captivated by the prose — its playfully sardonic tone, its wide-ranging erudition, the wry-verging-on-black sense of humor — and, above all, by the rebellious candor of the author. I had never before been so powerfully affected by a Buddhist book written in English.”

2. Nietzsche’s escape was not theological in nature but more of an “intellectual pirouette” and “cowardly transcendence” (e.g. the Übermensch) — or one might even say, a philosophical sleight of hand — akin to those of Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger.