Will I love Buddhism Without Beliefs?

Batchelor’s book rocked the Buddhist world. He stripped away the mysticism and institutional superstructure which, over the centuries, has turned Buddhism into an organized religion.

Bachelor presented Buddhism not as something to believe in but as a down to earth practice available to anyone seeking on their own to relieve the stresses and anxieties of modern life. His work, coming out of the Buddhist community (Batchelor started off as a Buddhist monk), provided further evidence of the common approach to practical, personal liberation explored in my own work based on comparing Pyrrhonism and early Buddhism. 

By my nature, I really enjoy polemical writings and controversial thinkers who challenge the status quo. Rightly or wrongly, I wouldn’t typically associate such works with the Buddhist tradition. While it does contain its heretics and firebrands, it is also naturally a tradition that encourages respect for the transmission of teachings from generation to generation.

Batchelor is a Buddhist polemicist and a highly controversial one, at that. In this book, I loved how he really took on many aspects of Buddhism that could be seen as ‘unnecessary ossified relics’ and attempted to present the essential aspects of Buddhism, stripped of… show more.

In Buddhism Without Beliefs, Batchelor deftly lays out the precepts of Buddhism for anyone and everyone and puts to rest any notion of Buddhism as a religion. I love how simple, approachable, and timely he makes the Buddha’s teachings. And particularly brilliant is the way he shows us that what the Buddha taught is not something to believe in but something to do. Whether you are a long-time practitioner of meditation or someone who has always been curious and also confused about mindfulness and meditation, you will find easy, accessible exercises here to strengthen or kickstart your practice.