Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times

Review of the book Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times by Stephen Batchelor:

Raised in Britain as a post-Christian secular humanist and trained in Asia as a Tibetan and Zen Buddhist monk,” Stephen Batchelor writes at the end of his book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us, “I find that I can no longer identify exclusively with either a Western or an Eastern tradition.” 

Decades of dwelling in these traditions—each with its own intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical riches—have left him strangely homeless. Far from making him unhappy, though, this state of existential homelessness has given Batchelor access to what he sees as a higher life. For, while “unsettling and disorienting” at times, such “spaces of uncertainty seem far richer in creative possibilities, more open to leading a life of wonder, imagination, and action.”

At its core, Batchelor’s Buddha, Socrates, and Us may be read as a response to a simple, yet important observation: everything in life tends to fall into patterns, to settle into habits and routines. Not even matters of the spirit—religion and philosophy, beliefs and ideas, thinking and writing—seem to escape this fate. Such mindless repetition makes our lives easier and more comfortable, at least on the outside, but to do things mechanically and unthinkingly is to invite emptiness and meaninglessness into our existence. The older we get, the more spiritually ossified we become. Eventually, if nothing challenges us, our slumbered existence will be indistinguishable from spiritual death.

That’s what awakenings are for.

Batchelor focuses primarily on two masters of awakening: Gotama and Socrates. As chance would have it, they were contemporaries, even if they lived worlds apart. For all the cultural differences between fifth-century BCE India and Greece, however, Batchelor identifies a series of compelling parallels, from the merely anecdotical to the more substantive, which makes his book the delight of any comparatist of cultures. His narrative shuttles nimbly between the two figures, between East and West, the Indian world and the Greek one, in a compulsively readable way. Batchelor is not only a seasoned practitioner of Buddhism, and a great scholar of it, but a gifted storyteller to boot.

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“I want to make Buddhist and Greek thought more than merely compatible,” Batchelor writes at the beginning of this book. “I am seeking a new language, a synthesis that would transcend the binary of East/West, Greek/Buddhist altogether.” But to find such a voice, he adds, “I first have to come to terms with the Greek and the Buddhist inside me.” The project has taken him a lifetime, and he is still on the road. The delay may be by design, though. For the point of a project like his may be never to settle into a destination, but to keep your head on fire for as long as you can.