When Stephen Batchelor ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in 1974, the vow he took included belief in rebirth. He was twenty-one, living in Dharamsala, studying with Tibetan teachers recently arrived from Chinese-occupied Tibet. The doctrine of rebirth — the idea that consciousness continues after death and is reborn in new bodies according to karma — was not presented as optional. It was structural to the whole system.
He kept the vow for nine years, then left the Tibetan order for Korean Zen, and eventually left monastic life altogether. By the time he published Buddhism Without Beliefs (Riverhead Books, 1997), he had arrived at a position that caused considerable controversy in Western Buddhist communities: that the historically verifiable core of the Buddha’s teaching — the four noble truths, the eightfold path, dependent origination — is separable from the cosmological beliefs that came to surround it. That one can be a serious Buddhist practitioner without assenting to rebirth, karma as cosmic justice, or literal nirvana.
What Batchelor Is Actually Claiming
The argument in Buddhism Without Beliefs and the more developed version in Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (Spiegel & Grau, 2010) is historical as much as philosophical. Batchelor draws on Pali Canon scholarship to argue that the historical Siddhattha Gotama was agnostic on certain metaphysical questions — whether the cosmos is eternal, whether the self continues after death, whether the mind and body are identical — and that he explicitly refused to answer them, because he considered them irrelevant to the practice of reducing suffering.
This is not Batchelor’s invention. The relevant canonical text is the Cūḷamālukyasutta (Majjhima Nikāya 63), in which the monk Malunkyaputta demands that the Buddha answer a list of metaphysical questions, threatening to disrobe if refused. The Buddha’s response is the famous “arrow” parable: a man struck by a poisoned arrow does not need to know who shot it or what it was made of before removing it. The metaphysical questions are the questions about the arrow. The practice of removing suffering does not depend on their resolution.
Batchelor argues that this agnosticism was early. What came after — the elaboration of karma as cosmic justice, the detailed maps of rebirth realms, the cosmologies of later Abhidharma scholasticism — reflects the Buddhism of India, Sri Lanka, and eventually East and Southeast Asia: cultural and institutional accretions, not the core teaching.
The Counterarguments Worth Taking Seriously
The most substantive objection to Batchelor’s position comes from scholars and practitioners who argue that the path of practice — particularly the Theravāda path toward liberation — cannot be understood without its metaphysical context.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, the American monk whose translations of the Pali Canon are the scholarly standard in English, has engaged with Batchelor’s argument directly in essays collected in The Buddha’s Teaching as It Is (Buddhist Publication Society, 2011). His position is that rebirth is not an optional cosmological decoration but a load-bearing element of the Four Noble Truths. The third noble truth — the cessation of suffering — is understood in Theravāda specifically as the cessation of rebirth. Remove rebirth, and the architecture of the path changes fundamentally.
This is a genuine disagreement, not a misunderstanding. The question is whether the path optimized for liberation from the cycle of rebirth is the same path, or even a similar path, to one optimized for reducing suffering in this life. Batchelor thinks the latter is the deeper teaching. Bhikkhu Bodhi thinks the former is what the Buddha actually taught.
What This Means for Practice
For Western practitioners, the disagreement has practical consequences worth thinking through.
If you practice in a Theravāda or Tibetan Buddhist tradition, rebirth is not typically presented as a doctrinal option. Teachers in these lineages generally hold that commitment to the traditional teachings — including their metaphysics — is part of what structures the practice’s effectiveness. Taking the metaphysics à la carte risks producing something more like self-improvement than liberation.
If you practice in a more secular context — through MBSR, mindfulness apps, or the emerging secular mindfulness movement — the metaphysics are typically absent. What you are doing is real and may be genuinely helpful. Whether it is “Buddhism” in any meaningful sense is a separate question, and it matters if you want to understand what tradition you’re drawing from and what its internal logic is.
Batchelor’s contribution is less a resolution than a clarification. He has made visible the distinction between Buddhism as a cultural-religious tradition (which requires assent to its full framework) and Buddhism as a set of practices and insights (which may be separable from that framework). Both are legitimate objects of attention. The error is to confuse them.
The confusion typically goes in one direction: secular practitioners often assume they are doing something continuous with what Theravāda monks do, differing mainly in intensity. The scholars of both traditions suggest the difference may be more structural than that.
Go deeper: Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (Yale University Press, 2015) — a more developed and nuanced position than the earlier Buddhism Without Beliefs, engaging seriously with canonical scholarship. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s essays in The Buddha’s Teaching as It Is for the Theravāda counterposition.