Editor's Note: Stephen Batchelor has kindly granted us permission to post Chapter 25 (The Parable of the Snake) of his new book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times, which has just been published by Yale University Press. This chapter provides an excellent description of a secular approach to the dharma.

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The Parable of the Snake

Had I not been exposed to the Indo-Tibetan soteriology of the four paths and trained in logic, I may never have noticed the centrality of the four tasks in the practice of the dharma, which was hidden in plain sight in Gotama’s first discourse. For buried beneath the epistemological surface of what Geshe Rabten taught me lay the deep logic of awakening. While the Pali tradition of Theravada Buddhism lost sight of the four paths and their correlation with the thirty-two virtues, this doctrine survived in the Mahayana traditions that made their way to Tibet. What may have been just an historical accident enables us to understand how Gotama’s dharma is concerned with cultivating an eightfold path that engages the whole of our humanity rather than the complete end of suffering and thereby of life itself.

The ethical path Gotama advocates is a lifelong project. Its transformative effects on one’s character only become apparent over time. And since you are the person undergoing this gradual change, the effects may be more obvious to others than yourself. In letting reactivity be, you need faith in a process that may not deliver either immediate or permanent results.^[1] Since reactivity is built into the limbic system of the brain, it is liable to keep flaring up no matter how many years you have devoted to mindfulness, discernment and collectedness. To be in harmony with oneself is a fragile achievement, constantly threatened by renewed eruptions of reactivity and, as you age, with the breakdown of your physical and mental faculties. This is a faith that requires patience, humility as well as a sense of humour.

In examining the connections between the paths, tasks and virtues presented in the Cartography of Care, it becomes clear that mindfulness serves as the guiding thread of the entire process of awakening. For among the thirty-two virtues, mindfulness alone is found on each of the four paths and involved in each of the four tasks, working in concert with the other virtues it accompanies. By grounding each task in immediate experience, mindfulness ensures that one’s practice is informed by emotional intelligence and embodied know-how as well as cognitive reasoning. And by holding in mind what each of the four tasks is for, mindfulness serves as the compass that keeps each group of interconnected virtues directed toward one’s ethical goals.

As an ethical system founded on a non-binary perspective, Gotama’s dharma is constructed from basic fourfold units — similar to the way four nucleotides make up the structure of DNA, the genetic code for all forms of organic life. This fourfoldness is everywhere: four paths, four tasks, four mindfulnesses, four immeasurables and so on. When Koṭṭhita asked Sāriputta to explain what perception perceived, Sāriputta answered: “it perceives yellow, it perceives red, it perceives white, it perceives blue.”^[2] These are the four primary colours in Buddhism, which can be correlated to the four elements: earth (yellow), fire (red), air (white), and water (blue). Rather than providing factual examples of visual percepts, Sāriputta could have been reminding Koṭṭhita to embrace life (yellow / earth), let go of reactivity (red / fire), see its stopping (white / air), and enter the stream of the path (blue / water).

In the Parable of the Snake,^[3] Gotama compares practising the dharma to the handling of a poisonous snake. Such a snake is swift, silent and lethal. I imagine this creature as having thirty-two vertebrae, which grant it both strength and flexibility. If the dharma is to enable human flourishing, it needs to be treated with the kind of sensitivity, dexterity and care with which a doctor would handle such a snake in order to extract its venom. While being neither repelled nor frightened by the snake she holds in her hands, the doctor has no intention to cause it harm. She treats the creature with respect, fully aware that should the snake feel threatened by anything she does, it could bite and kill her.

The manner in which you approach, take hold of and configure the dharma is likewise crucial. If you organize its elemental ideas and values to “criticise others and win in debates,” as Gotama warns, then you risk turning the dharma into an ideology. You are liable to succumb to the conceit of being certain about what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong. Given our insecurity, finitude and ignorance, the craving for certainty can be hard to resist. More insidiously, we may not even notice how deeply we are in thrall to the longing to be right.

As someone who criticises Buddhist orthodoxy, rejects time-honoured doctrines such as the Four Noble Truths, and regards his interpretations of the dharma as closer to the original intent of Gotama than many eminent Buddhist thinkers past and present, I lay myself open to exactly the same charges as those I level against others. For how, despite all my disavowals of dogma, is this “secular dharma” I advocate not laying the groundwork for yet another dogmatic system? Am I any less convinced than other interpreters that my reading of the canonical texts is the right one? In rejecting the very idea of “truth claims,” am I not implicitly making yet another truth claim? Is it even conceivable that an author can relinquish the authority that is intrinsic to the very concept of authorship? If I dig beneath the surface of this “ethics of uncertainty,” might I not find buried there unacknowledged certainties of which I am barely conscious? 

The question that lies at the heart of this book is this: how can a life of rigorous ethical commitment be compatible with the non-binary perspective of radical scepticism?  Here too I appear to contradict myself by framing my argument in terms of yet another binary split: that between certainty and uncertainty. Do I not thereby suggest that certainty is suspect and to be avoided, while uncertainty is desirable and to be adopted? That the former is somehow “bad” and the latter somehow “good”? As long as I persist in using a human language, will I not always be susceptible to its bewitchments, no matter how sincerely I strive to be free from their spell?

Perhaps the only safeguard against such objections is never to lose sight of them. No matter how fervently I believe in what I am saying, I need to keep reminding myself of the contingent and provisional nature of every statement I make. Whenever I use binary terms, I have to recognise them as a structural feature of language rather than a mirror of nature. Binaries are just a convenient shorthand for a spectrum with numerous fine gradations that blur into each other like the colours of a rainbow. In most ethical contexts the polar conditions of “certainty” and “uncertainty” are entangled with each other. Whatever choice I make will contain elements of both. I may have mustered sufficient conviction to embark on a course of action, but lingering doubts still haunt me. I may be viscerally anxious about a decision, but am convinced it is the right thing to do. Such is the consequence of inhabiting an unstable world like ours. I cannot possibly take into account every single variable and unknown that confronts me before making an ethical choice. And whatever I decide to do, with the very best of intentions, I can never be sure in advance that I will not make matters worse.

In comparing the dharma to a snake, Gotama imagines it as a living, breathing creature, rich in vitality and possibility. By treating it as an ideology, you confine it inside a cage. Using the dharma as a Nietzschean hammer “to criticise others and win in debates” reduces it to a set of immutable truth claims, valid for all time, which need to be constantly defended against those who hold conflicting views. The dharma ceases to be a living, evolving current of ideas and practices that adapts to changing circumstances. It freezes into a body of inflexible opinions whose certainties need to be preserved. Handling the dharma in this way paralyses and incapacitates you. It becomes the very sickness it was meant to cure.

Embracing, letting be, seeing and cultivating are activities that respond to the contingencies of this fugitive, tragic world. Like a snake they weave their way through the vicissitudes of life, keenly alert to opportunities and threats. Sensitive, creative and alive, they behave unpredictably. To treat these four tasks as Four Noble Truths risks converting a creative strategy of responsiveness into a predictable body of doctrines and techniques. This, I believe, is what happened when Gotama’s “clearly visible, immediate, inviting, effective and universal” dharma mutated into the orthodoxies, orthopraxies and power structures of the Buddhist religion. The Parable of the Snake shows that Gotama was well aware of the dangers that could befall his teaching. Perhaps he could already see these tendencies at work in the behavior of some of those closest to him, such as his former attendant Sunakkhatta, his cousin Devadatta and the stern ascetic Kassapa.  

If the dharma is to serve as the matrix for a culture of awakening in the twenty-first century, capable of addressing the global issues of our time, it needs to be systemically reimagined and reconfigured. Simply offering psychological reinterpretations of classical doctrines is unlikely to be adequate to this task. As a living current of ideas, values and practices, throughout its history the dharma has demonstrated a capacity to reinvent itself. This process has involved both a return to forgotten sources within the tradition as well as an engagement with fresh currents of thought, culture and practice that lie outside the tradition.            

The goal of a rigorously secular dharma is the survival and flourishing of all sentient life on earth. Each one of us will die and in all likelihood disappear back into the elementary particles from which we were made, but our fleeting presence here will continue to echo through the lives of our children and our children’s children until we are forgotten. Our artefacts — like this book — will outlive us for a while until they too turn to dust. Yet what matters in the end is whether we have led a life of care, compassion and wisdom that has played a role, however slight, in inclining human life away from reactivity to creativity, from injustice to justice, from aridity to flourishing, from selfishness to love.

^[1] Cf. On Cultivation (Anguttura Nikaya. 7.71)

^[2] Majjhima Nikaya. 43

^[3] This is found in the Alagaddūpama Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya. 22.