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Fire Philosophy welcomes back Stephen Batchelor to further explore his new book Buddha, Socrates and Us and the surprising possibility that the Buddha and Socrates were true contemporaries. We discuss what it means to paint a “Buddhist portrait” of Socrates, and how his relentless questioning echoes the critical, dialectical side of Buddhism that often gets overshadowed by its non-conceptual, “stop thinking” reputation. We also dive into complex territory: Buddhism’s uneasy history with violence and pacifism, Socrates’s role as a soldier, and what an honest, secular Buddhist ethics might look like in a world of wars, nation-states, and messy human motivations.

Along the way, Stephen reflects on how East and West now coexist inside many of us, the dangers of turning the Dharma into spiritual ego, and why the Buddha’s parable of the snake is still such a sharp warning. It’s a conversation about thought and silence, war and compassion, tradition and reinvention—anchored in the concrete ongoing question of how to live now.

You can listen to our first conversation here:

You can find Stephen’s work, his art, and his other interviews and teachings at www.stephenbatchelor.org.

Books by our own Dale Wright:🔥 The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character Philosophical 🔥 Meditations on Zen Buddhism🔥 Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life🔥 What Is Buddhist Enlightenment?Buddhism: What Everyone Needs to KnowA series of five books on Zen Buddhism co-edited with Steven Heine and published by Oxford University Press—🔥The Koan🔥The Zen Canon🔥Zen Classics 🔥Zen Ritual🔥Zen Masters🔥 Theological Reflection and the Pursuit of Ideals, co-edited with David Jasper

Below are some excerpts from our conversation above. We hope you enjoy it and respond with your own insights, questions and resonances.

Because of the hypothesis that Buddha and Socrates lived at the same time, I was then able to more realistically imagine someone who had been born in India had maybe spent the first 10 or 15 years of the Buddhist teaching career with the Buddha, and for whatever reasons, then found themselves heading westward, crossing over the Persian Empire, and finally landing in Athens.  So it enables me, as it were, to then have to been able to see ancient Greece, Socrates, the playwrights and so on through the eyes of a Buddhist of that period.

 But what does Socrates or these Greeks say about human suffering?  Because Plato doesn’t mention suffering at all. The Greek philosophers don’t really seem to think it’s an appropriate topic for philosophy. It’s as simple as that.

 And in the School of Buddhism in which I which I was studying, the Gelugpa, they actively instruct you in dialectics and debate. And in fact this training, which goes on for some years, is very much embedded in the importance of critical thinking. And the critical thinking that I was trained in was largely, first of all becoming much more conscious of the trickiness of language itself.

 I think we have to see for ourselves the contradictions within our own thinking patterns, within our own concepts and ideas in order to to be able to put them down. Otherwise, we’ll just think that we might have seen through these ideas where in fact they’re still operating quite actively within us and just perpetuating the same pictures of the world.  So what I like about Socrates is that his way of getting people to come to terms with their preconceived ideas is to subject them to a very intense kind of testing or inquiry to make people become conscious of the contradictions and conflicts within their own.

 If you think that meditation is just about stopping thinking, then you’re really no different from a cow sitting in a field.

The thing that differentiates Gotama and Socrates the most is their relationship to violence. And yet the Buddha is basically saying, don’t kill anyone and don’t if you’re a monk, especially, have any sexual engagement with another person at all. So you have a very, very strong rejection of sex and violence. And in the Greek world, you don’t have anything remotely similar. Both are seen as part of life. They’re never really held up for criticism. So that is a big difference, obviously.

 Buddhism is traditionally pacifist for the lay person or for the monk. To kill a human being is completely not allowed. But if you look at the actual history of Buddhism, you’ll see that Buddhists have behaved just like everybody else.

 So coming to Socrates, I think there’s a level of honesty going on there that I’m not finding in Buddhism. I think Buddhism has got a very ambiguous relationship with violence.

 I think what really is important in this process, is at some point being able to have within yourself a genuine dialogue between what I sometimes call my inner Buddhist and my inner Greek these are two things that have grown up, not simultaneously, but in the course of my life.

 A lot of my life has been spent with Buddhism. So clearly a large hunk of me is Buddhist. But I don’t feel totally comfortable self-identifying just as a Buddhist. I’m not just a Buddhist. I don’t think any of us are. I don’t think it’s possible.

 And that’s a clear reference to the parable of the snake in the Pali canon where the Buddha is saying that the dharma is basically dangerous, like a snake is dangerous. If you don’t handle it properly, it will actually come back and bite you.

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