Buddhism Without Beliefs

After listening to this interesting lecture about a "Buddhist Reformation", I was excited to read Stephen Batchelor's modern agnostic take on Buddhism.  By analogy to Luther's more personal update of Christian dogma, Batchelor's, "Contemporary Guide to Awakening" (as the subtitle calls it) aims to rethink some of the standard ideas of Buddhism so that they appear more relevant to our modern secular culture.  This seems to me a truly noble enterprise.  Naturally, it risks pissing off traditional buddhists on the one side, and delivering a bunch of new age psycho-babble on the other.  Batchelor, however, is a clear thinker with a lot of traditional experience, and he is mostly able to steer a middle road.  Essentially, he ends up treating Buddhism a bit like a version of existentialist philosophy, which I think does some amount of justice to Buddhism, while also providing some amount of useful wisdom for living in the modern world.

Perhaps, then, it's mostly a reflection of how much our Western relationship to Buddhism has changed sine this was written in 1997 that it doesn't really feel important anymore.  There are a lot of interesting thoughts in the book, particularly regarding how to interpret Buddhist ideas like the Four Noble Truths outside of a religious context.  And yet ... it fell a little flat for me.  Maybe this existential and psychological version of Buddhism makes it more universally understandable, but robs it of some of its profundity?  Or maybe we've just incorporated a lot of this perspective already by domesticating "mindfulness".  I'm not clear quite what I'm looking for here, but I know that with the exception of some the couple of chapters at the beginning and towards the end of the book, it read a bit like the sort of sound and thoughtful advice you might get from any wise old grandfather type.

I did find the end of the book, focused on freedom as the liberation from the illusion of freedom and the role of perplexity and questions, quite interesting.  And I also thought it opened strongly, with a great discussion of how to think about the Buddha as an empiricist and an agnostic whose very last goal would have been to found some new religious authority.  These ideas resonate with my own experience of meditation as a sort of great experiment, insofar as they encourage us to think of Buddhism as a set of practices, rather than a system of beliefs.  I particularly liked the way he explained the difference between those perspectives, and what seeing Buddhism as an esoteric set of religious beliefs robs us of:

And the crucial distinction that each truth requires being acted upon in its own particular way (understanding anguish, letting go of its origins, realizing its cessation, and cultivating the path) has been relegated to the margins of specialist doctrinal knowledge.