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A review by yellowdaniel
Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor
5.0
This book has much more than I thought it would. It not only deals with the life and the way of thinking of the author, but also reformulates and elaborates on the Four Noble Truths and gives a more realistic account of the Buddha's life. The book also touches on existentialism for example.
If it sounds interesting to you at all, you definitely should give it a read.
In one of Sam Harris's podcasts Joseph Goldstein talked about how in the Four Noble Truths the word suffering is essentially a mistranslation. The original word dukkha means something more like unsatisfactoriness. Since then the reformulations on the Truths in this book are the only remotely new thing I've read about Buddhism. Putting together those two just really makes this proto version (meaning you're really trying to get as close to the core teachings cutting trough the thousands of pages of canon) of Buddhism even more relevant in my life than before. I like telling people I'm a proto-buddhist, if not for anything else but to provoke a conversation about what that means.
I can kind of compare this to one of my favorite movies, the documentary Kumaré. The premise is that the director of the movie is of Indian descent so he can dress up and act like an Indian guru. But he was brought up in the USA and wasn't even religious so it's as fake as possible. But things that happen just go deeper and deeper into the rabbithole and it finishes as true as fake it started. This book doesn't go that far, but it starts as a simple biography but really it goes way deeper.
If it sounds interesting to you at all, you definitely should give it a read.
In one of Sam Harris's podcasts Joseph Goldstein talked about how in the Four Noble Truths the word suffering is essentially a mistranslation. The original word dukkha means something more like unsatisfactoriness. Since then the reformulations on the Truths in this book are the only remotely new thing I've read about Buddhism. Putting together those two just really makes this proto version (meaning you're really trying to get as close to the core teachings cutting trough the thousands of pages of canon) of Buddhism even more relevant in my life than before. I like telling people I'm a proto-buddhist, if not for anything else but to provoke a conversation about what that means.
I can kind of compare this to one of my favorite movies, the documentary Kumaré. The premise is that the director of the movie is of Indian descent so he can dress up and act like an Indian guru. But he was brought up in the USA and wasn't even religious so it's as fake as possible. But things that happen just go deeper and deeper into the rabbithole and it finishes as true as fake it started. This book doesn't go that far, but it starts as a simple biography but really it goes way deeper.