Crashingly Beautiful

“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”

~Joseph Campbell, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (last paragraph)

Thank you Uncertain Times

Question: What then, did you conclude were distinctly Buddhist ideas?

Answer: Four things stand out.

1. One is the principle of dependent origination, or “conditioned arising” as I call it;
2. the second is the practice of mindful awareness—being focused upon the totality of what is happening in our moment-to-moment experience;
3. the third is the process of the Four Noble Truths, which includes the Eightfold Path; and
4. fourth, the principle of self-reliance—how the Buddha really wanted his students to become autonomous in their understanding of the dharma, and not to generate dependencies upon either the memory of him or upon some authority figure within the monastic community.

By getting down to the bare bones of what the Buddha was teaching, one is then perhaps in a position to begin to rethink Buddhism from the ground up. And I feel the four points that I listed are entirely adequate for constructing a new vision of the dharma, both as a worldview and as a form of spiritual and ethical practice, which speaks to our condition here and now.

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From an interview with Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism without Beliefs and the recently published Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist in the Spring 2010 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.