This is a complicated book. It's a straightforward read. Batchelor has an agenda and that's got quite a few facets. A lot of the crucial facets get sort of slid by. This book probably deserves a book length analysis. I'm just going to note a few aspects that come to mind here.

Batchelor has been around the Buddhist scene for a long time. He is certainly very knowledgeable and very experienced. Indeed, his presentation of the foundations of Buddhism is excellent. He does not mislead the reader about the point of Buddhist practice.

One curious point Batchelor makes... the order of the Four Noble Truths, or what he calls the Fourfold Task... Nirvana is usually seen as the goal, but then why would it be #3 in the list? Of course there is a logical pattern: effect and cause, of suffering and release. The idea, though, that nirvana is more like a glimpse of freedom, and then one cultivates that glimpse... it's a nice way to understand practice. It's a mature understanding. But it really shortchanges the truth. Really, the more one cultivates, the more one sees, and the more one sees, the more one cultivates. There is a nice discussion of this in Sangharakshita's Survey of Buddhism, how the twelve links, the nidanas, can run in either direction.

The core problem with Batchelor's book is that he posits a polarity, a split, between genuine Buddhism and orthodox Buddhism. As Batchelor would have it, his understanding of practice is a recovery of the original meaning that was lost almost immediately after the death of the Buddha. But this is really preposterous. The idea that nirvana is not something remote, but is just ordinary reality, clearly seen... this is utterly traditional. Batchelor has to put up this strawman notion of the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth, and then practically ridicules the Heart Sutra. Well, the guy has nerve, that's for sure!

There is no doubt that orthodoxy, institutionalization, etc. have ossified Buddhism more or less the same as any other religion. That's just how people are. But I imagine if you go poking around most any religion, you can also find the profound juicy living stuff too. Read the book Civilized Shamans, by Geoffrey Samuels. Somehow Batchelor has an agenda. He's not exactly cherry picking. It's more like some kind of scandal mongering.

I don't know. Maybe there really is a crisis in Buddhism. Westerners have strange ideas about Buddhism, and the traditional Buddhist institutions don't do a good job of dispelling those confusions. I haven't been around as much as Batchelor, but one could say: Westerners often think that Tibetans are all saints, and lots of Tibetans are not wholly above exploiting that lack of precise discrimination. So maybe a kind of rude bursting of the bubble is called for.

Batchelor is surely aware that his polemic is not very precise either. On page 319, toward the top: "we need to consider that the picture of Buddhism presented by its apologists - as a religion of nirvanic tranquility and enlightenment - may be just a pious caricature that fails to account for how most Buddhists in history actually lived." Batchelor's basic idea is to propose that Buddhism be practiced as full engagement with experience... and then he admits that really that's how it's always been! His revolution is no revolution!

But anyway... it is true that the confusions he complains about, e.g. ultimate truth is something separate from conventional truth, etc. - these confusions are indeed widespread. One problem with his approach is that, well, starting with the Heart Sutra... there is an enormous amount of literature, and many living teachers... the traditions are full of resources to dispel such confusion. Batchelor would have us think that such wisdom was lost with the death of the Buddha's attendant Ananda and it's only now that it has been recovered. He doesn't serve the reader well by turning them away from the many treasures that the intervening millennia held.

Another major problem with this book... Batchelor has this idea that Brahminism sullied the purity of the original teaching of the Buddha. It's funny, he calls Shankaracarya, the great Vedantist, "anti-Buddhist". Well, probably he was, but Shankaracarya has also been accused of being a crypto-Buddhist. Yeah, it is very funny, in the Ten Theses of Secular Dharma, Batchelor would have us find inspiration in non-Buddhist religious teachings. Well, that's been going on the whole time. Buddhism was thriving in India for almost two thousand years. All the various strands of Indian religion were in constant dialog. Really this whole idea of original purity... it's really bogus! Batchelor criticizes the conservative monastics for getting stuck on formulaic doctrine, but then Batchelor would have us reject the way that Buddhism has evolved over the millennia!

The idea that Buddhism needs to be adapted to modern times... this is problematic too. Of course there is a lot of truth in it! Batchelor does discuss the idea that a culture can be Buddhist. But he doesn't confront a key issue, how our modern culture needs to change in order to become Buddhist, in order to incorporate and live the wisdom of the Buddhist path. On page 304: "Compared with the finely detailed descriptions of the emergence of life from the singularity of the Big Bang, the mind-boggling extent of the galaxies in this expanding uniuverse, the extraordinary unfolding of myriad life-forms from single-celled organisms, and the sublime complexity of the human brain, the theories of rebirth and karma appear crude and simplistic."

One nice contrast could be from David Loy's book, A Buddhist History of the West. Loy talks about the religious wars in Europe, from Luther to the Treaty of Westphalia. Renaissance European thought was very rich. Loy compares science to the wingless fly of the Galapagos. Our thinking got narrowed down to those topics that were so pedestrian to be safe. We retreated out of fear.

I would point to philosophy of science as the great blind spot of modern times. For sure, our modern scientific knowledge is amazing. Nowadays with all the controversies about coronavirus vaccines, climate change, etc., it has become very clear that we don't agree about what science is.

Our whole modern culture is in crisis. It is falling to pieces. Liberal democratic politics, fossil fuel powered industry and transportation, any kind of coherent consensus view of reality, these things are breaking down. The Buddhist tradition is an amazing resource for getting a perspective on what's happening. It's a miraculous doorway to new cultural possibilities, for communal thriving. A Buddhist understanding of modern culture is what we need! A modern understanding of Buddhism, to cut Buddhism down to fit in the prison of our modern ideas... well, drive through fast food is sure convenient on long drives, but if a person tries to live on that food... it's a poor substitute for the real thing! ( )

This is by far the best book I've ever read examining as best scholarship can provide - the original words and teachings of Buddha - without the cultural fru fru that eventually been infused into meditation practices. Batchelor is the master interpreter of secular Buddhism. ( )

Scanned this more than gave it a close reading. Interesting thoughts mixed in with some biographical info on a number of the Buddha's adherents. Of course there is no actual evidence that these things actually happened or these people even existed, but, hey, whaddya gonna do? ( )