On the evening of Thursday, September 11, 2025, Tricycle Magazine sponsored a book talk and reading by the renowned secular Buddhist scholar and teacher Stephen Batchelor, whose new book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times, has just been published by Yale University Press.  The event was held at the Liederkranz Club, a cultural institute located on New York City’s Upper East Side, just across the street from Central Park.

Batchelor noted that his new book is part of a single, collective body of work in which he has explored a secular approach to Buddhism. Each successive book, while resting upon the previous ones, always has its own unique message, and he makes every effort to avoid restating things that he has already said in one of the earlier books.  Accordingly, he sees this latest book as the newest entry into the tapestry of his “oeuvre."

The unique message of Buddha, Socrates, and Us, he told us, is “finding one’s own voice.”  He quoted T.S. Eliot’s description of poetry as “a raid on the inarticulate,” and confided that, while writing the book, he viewed his efforts as raiding his own inarticulateness, and thereby finding his own voice.

To do so, he allowed himself to dig deep into his own imagination.  Since recent scholarship has now identified Buddha’s life span as approximately 480-400 BCE, and we have historical records that show Socrates lived from 470 - 399 BCE, these two iconic teachers can now be considered as contemporaries.  Batchelor’s act of imagination, then, was to suppose that someone familiar with the Buddha’s teachings made their way over to Athens, and sat before Socrates as he addressed the Greek public with his teachings.  While of course we have no evidence that any such person ever made such a pilgrimage, Stephen reminded us that it could have happened.  And so, he imagined that it actually did happen.

As he interspersed his remarks with readings from the book, he recalled his years of  monastic training in India some fifty years ago.  He told us that he had found the parables cited in the books on Buddhism that he was reading at that time, including the parable of the raft across the river and the parable of the second arrow, to be of more value in his understanding of the teachings than were the dogmatic precepts being taught by the monks who were training him.  The lesson he took from that experience – that we retain so much more from stories than we do from abstract concepts – is implicit in the teaching styles of both Socrates and the Buddha.

Another critical theme in Stephen’s talk focused on creativity.  He argued that this attribute – while seemingly absent from traditional Buddhist texts – can actually be understood through the Buddha’s use of the term “cultivate the path” with regard to the Eightfold Path.  Stephen used the analogy of a hen sitting on her eggs, and moving them around so that each eggs gets neither too much nor too little warmth in the nest, but instead gets just the right amount of warmth, so that each will hatch in good health.  He compared that phenomenon – which he assured us he had verified with a real-life farmer! – to how practitioners cultivating the Eightfold Path should be moving their attention around each of the eight tasks, in no particular order, so that each one receives exactly the proper amount of attention, with none over-emphasized to the detriment of the other seven.  The Eightfold Path, he explained, is not an arbitrary list of individual items to be followed in some strict order, but rather, an integrated collection of tasks that needs to be attended to in holistic fashion.

He went on to further explain his own creative effort to redefine what it means to cultivate the Eightfold Path.  He has come to see this path as comprising two distinct sets of related tasks - the first four of them dealing with individual contemplation, and the last four concerned with community engagement and action.

“Finding one’s own voice” in the context of this new framing of the Eightfold Path means embracing the suffering in the world, letting go of one’s reactivity to that suffering, seeing the suffering anew from a place of non-reactivity, and then acting to alleviate the suffering from that non-reactive place.  This requires each person to integrate both the contemplative and active dimensions of the Eightfold Path.

Fittingly enough, Stephen ended his talk where he began – with a parable.  This time it was the parable of the city. A seeker follows a path into a forest and discovers deep within the forest the ruins of an ancient city. He reports his discovery to the region’s king and pleads for the resources to rebuild the city anew.  Stephen explained that he interprets this parable to mean that the ultimate goal of secular Buddhism should be building a city based on mindfulness and compassion. This connects with the critical importance of the active dimensions of the last four items on the eightfold path.

In sum, Stephen's talk emphasized that creativity, imagination, social engagement, and cultivating one's voice should be at the center of Buddhism. This approach constitutes a distinct movement away from the monastic emphasis on precepts and meditation. 

Stephen’s talk and his readings were enjoyable, enlightening, and quite possibly transformative for those of us fortunate enough to be present in his audience for this memorable event.

Click here to purchase Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times.