Review: After Buddhism Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age by Stephen Batchelor

In After Buddhism Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age author Stephen Batchelor discusses the importance of Buddhism to the modern world. He sees the importance of Buddhism not in the traditional and cloying setting of its founding, but instead as what Buddhism can and does mean in the modern world, the secular world.

The author of the 2010 work Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, Batchelor says he intends to write a "philosophical, ethical, historical, and cultural framework for mindfulness and other such practices."

He discusses a great deal of the history of Buddhism and the founder, Siddhartha Gautama. All of this adds to the readers understanding of how Buddhism fit into that world. How it worked within that society. By illustrating the depth of its history, Batchelor shows us how Buddhism might be better viewed and used in our modern world.

He also addresses the issues of gender inherent within the more devout and traditional practices of Buddhism. He says we must take a fresh look at what the Buddha wished the community to look like--egalitarian. He believes, "to persist with the inequalities upheld by orthodoxy is unjust and anachronistic."

Batchelor has a historian's understanding of tradition vs. modernism. He recognizes that all institutions are created by people to serve the needs of those people. As needs change across time, so must the institutions evolve if they are to survive and remain relevant. He understands how history shapes the present. The history of Korea or Japan allows for a very different style of Buddhism to be accepted from what is relevant in the United States or Europe.

This is a book worth reading if you are interested in Buddhism, history, religion, or philosophy and are of a scholarly bent.

Thanks to NetGalley.com for the review copy. Thanks also to Yale University Press.