Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism (Grove Press Eastern Philosophy and Literature) by Stephen Batchelor

Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism (Grove Press Eastern Philosophy and Literature) Reviews

• 
  Steve Woods

  I have been tired lately and not so well. I have opened myself to others and they have done what seems to pass for normal these days and I have been disappointed and hurt. As is my wont in any of those circumstances I experience a strong urge to withdraw behind my walls both physical and psychological and curse the human race in general and the offending parties in particular. At best I want nothing to do with people and at worst I want to rip off arms and legs and if I really give it a run the fantasies based on experience in combat kick in and I begin to entertain murder as an option. Not really, but that does reflect the extremity to which the aversion in me can rise.
  
  Now I love to wallow in that shit, but unfortunately for the monster in me I have chosen another path and if all the work I have done counts for anything and the direction I have taken is to be true for me I have to let all that go as limiting to my spiritual growth. Not only do I simply become one of those whom I, in my righteous indignation, despise I cut myself off from the light.
  
  Since I began this journey nearly six years ago I have often found that the message comes into my hand when I am most tightly wound up in a hard place. That has been the case here. I know that to move towards my personal liberation from the bondage of self, to experience the peace and gladness of life which I have glimpsed from time to time, I must be with others, extending love and compassion equally to all no matter what. This has been the task for me now for over a year, and it has not proven to be an easy one.
  
  Batchelor's message here is timely and as always inspiring. Thankfully because today I need That.
• 
  Lauren

  I am alone, and yet not alone, for I am together on this planet with trillions of living creatures, all as eager as myself for happiness, all as afraid of pain and sorrow as I am, all presumably the same right to grasp happiness and flee pain and sorrow to the maximum possible extent. How ought I to relate to these fellow sentient beings in a positive, constructive way?

  
  
  Big questions and this book is full of them. Of course, with a subtitle that includes "Existentialist Approach...", I expected it. Not an entry-level text or survey, this book assumes a lot of philosophical and theoretical knowledge, and a good working history of Buddhism.
• 
  Jasmine

  I originally started this book for a project for school I stopped reading it because I got bored, in fact
  ...
  I am bored. Very very bored, so bored in fact that thinking about this book makes me bored. Does Batchelor understand Buddhism? Really it is tough to say since he seems to be trying so hard to make sure buddhism sounds non-religious and modern that he has forgotten to say much about it at all. And his refusal to pick a buddhism inherently undermines him simply because if you don't pick one nothing means anything at all.
  ...
  I'm sure people would like this book...I will be sticking with Brad Warner.
• 
  Jo

  I can’t believe this book was written over forty years ago! I have absolutely loved Stephen Batchelor’s more recent offerings, which made me curious for this one, and conscious as I read it of what an interesting and genuine journey he has been on. He was only in his late 20s when he wrote this, and you can tell, in comparison with his later stuff. But that makes it no less valid, for aren’t all our thoughts situated in a place and time.
  
  At university in the late 80s, I had the pleasure of reading most of the western existentialists Batchelor engages with here, so this book transported me into a kind of time warp to my own 20s, and the intellectual excitement of trying to wrap my head around words and ideas that need to be read slowly several times to sink in. It all felt rather ‘male’ in its expression, but at the time there was not a lot else available. When I did my own PhD as a mature student, I was very committed to trying to express complex ideas in more penetrable language. Not to make the ideas simple, necessarily, but to have confidence in my own academic credibility and not to hide treasure inside beautiful verbal gorse bushes. I do occasionally like sticking my hands in those gorse bushes however, and this book was fun from that point of view. But I think the fact that Batchelor’s later books are easier to read is a sign of his growing up in confidence and maturity, rather than their content being any less complex.
  
  In terms of content, it was fascinating, though not new territory for me. I think it would be written a bit differently now. The last forty plus years have changed the tone of these kinds of discussions for better and worse. But the deep human questions remain, as does the existential angst. To contemplate another person’s reflections upon them is a challenging and helpful exercise and I feel grateful for it. And exhausted by the inner work! 🤣
  
  One of the things that struck me - which is really an aside - when Batchelor was describing human society as distorted around ‘having’ (a very helpful unpacking of it), I found myself aching for how much simpler my wants seemed in those days, before we even thought we needed home computers, let alone smart technology, and 24hr news cycles, and branded identities in global social media. Wah! Getting older has changed some of my attitudes to ‘having’, in all kinds of ways which are hard to define as good or bad … I’m finding most things less certain than they ever used to be. 🤣
• 
  Craig

  This was a good book for me as a young Zen student, filled with doubts about religion, ritual, and hierarchy. I felt quite comfortable with Batchelor's secular/existentialist (b)uddhism. It probably influenced me to go to a Zen monastery to train. For this, I am grateful. Over the years I have had to drop my ideas about practice in order to practice. Mr. Batchelor's more recent books don't show a similar shift. While this puzzles me a bit, I am encouraged by his ability to bring unsuspecting people into this difficult practice.
• 
  Alan

  Decent views on different modes in which humans go about their day, and the ultimate answer to that: existential Buddhism.
• 
  Jerry Smith

  Another re-read but it's been years.
  A good look at modern buddhism.
• 
  Joe Dwyer

  I'll put this book alone with the other insipidly banal mistakes i've read. Though the fact that Mr. Batchelor not only quotes but attempts to link the philosophies of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre (the most notable) to the prolific cut-and-pasting of fundamentally different branches of continental philosophy to establish what he claims to be Mahayana Buddhism (I.e a middle way between nihilism and eternalism) within 130 pages. He does however triumph in distorting each random excerpt, from Dostoevsky and Sartre to T.S. Eliot and R.D. Lang, to the point where I not sure if this is a clever mockery of existentialism; or, maybe the simple truth is that the most profound axioms are recited poetically faux-naïf as s/he surrenders herself to the aphorisms on the preverbal bathroom wall of divine omniscience. (As to no longer to "alone")
  
  Professor Paul Williams, brilliant work Mahayana Buddhism writes: "The Doctrinal Foundations Thus enlightenment comes from ceasing to grasp even the most subtle sources of attachment, and this ceasing to grasp requires seeing those things which could serve as sources of attachment as empty, mere conceptual constructs. All things are empty. On the level of what is an ultimate, primary existent there is nothing. On such a level therefore there is an endless absence, an endless emptiness."
  
  One last question, Mr. Batchelor:
  Is the tathagatagarbha implying that enlightenment is predeterminable, but we as laymen taint and shroud its purity though the objectification of daily life which it demands or is it necessary to begin corrupted in order that we can see through the impurity of our existence?
  
• 
  Aisling

  "Our present situation is fundamentally similar to that of the Siddhartha. In both cases life has come to be dominated by the unrelenting forces of material and secular values. The concern of man is utterly absorbed and lost in the depersonalised mass of the particular entities of the world. In both cases an existential reaction, motivated by a deeper and more compelling awareness of the question of life as a whole, has arisen. The story of the Buddha indicates that his seeing an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering mendicant, impelling him to renounce his palatial life. This reaction is evident nowadays in the questioning of our basic values, our notion of progress, and our attitude towards technology. It reveals itself in Kierkegaard's study of anxiety, Marx's concern with alienation, Heidegger's analysis of inauthenticity and death. It is expressed throughout modern literature in the terrifying imagery of Kafka, the despair of elliot, and the nauseating pointlessness of life as described by Sartre. In this light, the 'awakening' of the Buddha should be seen as the actualisation of a meaningful answer to the questions implied within existence, and the teachings of Buddhism as a description of the processes involved in the realisation of authentic life."
  
  Image (photography): Jennis Cheng Tien Li, 'Let's Be Together, Separately.', 2010
  
  
• 
  Sasha

  I originally picked this up on-sale at a bookstore for the name alone. Not particularly interested in Buddhism, I started it more so for the existentialism aspect and insight into human relations. Many of the concepts, I found, were articulated clearly and communicated in such a way, one doesn't need to be thoroughly familiar with the Buddhist religion to make the connections to every day life. The text prompted so many "Mmhm" and "A-ha" moments, I travelled with a pen specifically to underline and make notes in the margins. I'd definitely recommend.
• 
  Germaine Hypher

  Quite a convoluted style of writing that I found took a lot of concentration to keep on top of but this made me really focus on the text, often re-reading passages a few times until I felt I'd fully grasped them, so that I ended up absorbing the book more deeply than if it had been an easier read. Thankfully, the book was short enough for me to read it this carefully without giving up on it as I really appreciated it's teachings.
• 
  Tom Cummings

  The first entry in Stephen Batchelor’s illustrious bibliography, and also the shortest (if it were fiction, it would almost certainly be classified as a novella rather than a novel), Alone With Others, published in 1983, serves as a fascinating preface to his later, more well-known books such as Buddhism Without Beliefs (1997) and After Buddhism (2015).
  
  True to its subtitle, “An Existential Approach to Buddhism”, the book’s early chapters (there are only six) delve deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of phenomenology and existentialism. Here a basic familiarity with the ideas of Heidegger, Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, and Paul Tillich will prove helpful to the reader, but not essential – Batchelor’s intellectual ease with these concepts carries over into his writing, and the connections he draws between them and some fundamental tenets of Buddhism are readily accessible even to those who are not so philosophically inclined.
  
  Batchelor’s overriding concern in this book is to demonstrate how Buddhism offers us a pathway to what he calls an “optimum mode of being”. This mode, unsurprisingly, turns out to be exactly what the title “Alone with Others” refers to – being fully aware of one’s inescapable condition of aloneness while simultaneously being fully engaged in the conditions of the world to which one inescapably belongs.
  
  The clarity that emerges from probing deeply into this existential paradox is more than worth the time it takes to read and reflect upon this early piece of writing from one of contemporary Buddhism’s most acclaimed scholars and teachers.
  
• 
  Daniel

  This book has some great parts, but it's mostly a really boringly worded experiment to talk about buddhism with the language of existentialism. Both of those I prefer to be talked about with just everyday language instead of obscure terminology.
  Probably reading the authors newer books is a better idea.
  I've only read Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist and it's one of the best books I ever read, and despite being boring, this book still has some really great insights in it, so I think this is probably the worst Batchelor gets so in the end this just made me more sure I want to read everything he wrote.
• 
  Martha

  A dense book, and the author uses the word "ontological" about 3 times per page. Might be considered a 95 theses for Buddhism as Batchelor calls for a living faith beyond dogma and ritual that can be applied to daily life in the historic period where the reader finds himself. If you stick with it and puzzle out his long sentences, you will find explicitly stated aims and methods to guide you on the path to enlightenment.
  This book was followed more than decade later by Buddhism Without Beliefs, a more easily readable and more practical guide to Westerners trying to follow the eightfold way.
• 
  Rob O'Hearn

  When I told Stephen this was one of my favourites, he dismissed it as mere "juvenalia", but I loved this mesh of existentialism and Buddhism. The time is now and the action is clear within existentialist imperatives. This book is a key to Stephen's later work, and Secular Buddhism as a thing.
• 
  MJD

  I'm interested in philosophy in general, with particular interests in existentialism and Buddhism; and I enjoyed this book. If you share my interests you will probably share my enjoyment of this book.
• 
  Abby

  Existentialism AND Buddhism?! This is right up my alley! It's gonna be amazing!
  
  I gave up about 1/3 of the way through because the writing was so dry. Lots of jargon, passive voice...just needlessly complex prose that unfortunately buried the content.
• 
  Donald Schopflocher

  A short but impassioned interpretation of Buddhism using the concepts and language of existential philosophy, primarily Heidegger’s. Compelling though clearly focused on intellectual understanding rather than Buddhist practice.
• 
  Bruce Brian

  I should have stopped right after reading the lukewarm (at best) forward.....
• 
  Kale

  I read about 3/4 of the book and dropped it.
  
  Why do you have to be so nerdy about it? Interesting topic, but reads like a thesis.
• 
  Francisco J.

  One of the most boring, dry, and irrelevant books I've read. It's definitely a book best left for academics.
• 
  Chant

  It could have been better.
• 
  Heathyr

  This book has nudged me further on my path towards enactivism. Highly recommend.
• 
  Steve

  I thought--what do I want to read? and I wanted to read this book. It's a book that tries to update Buddhism with existentialism, among other things.
  
  I've read it before, after I read what I think is his best seller, Buddhism Without Belief. I wanted to see if it stood up the way I remembered it.
  
  Batchelor is skeptic, doesn't want to just follow the herd, and is an original independent deep thinker. I've met him in person and he's a swell guy. I think my only criticism of him is that he hasn't built a movement, and doesn't seem to value deep friendships the way my order does. Now, I can't actually know how deep his friendships are, but when asked who was sangha to him, he reported other celebrity Buddhists. I find that hard to believe.
  
  At times the jargon of Existentialism feels a bit forced, but for the most part this book is filled with gems of insight. It touches on all the major important ideas of Buddhism, and feels congenial with my tradition, which is inclusive, but it also hits home at similar points. While this is a short book, it is jam packed with important stuff, that makes it hard to write a general review.
  
  Like many books, this book leads to other books. I want to read Heiddiger's Being and Time; A better understanding of that book would help me to see more what this book is trying to do. But this books stands on it's own.
  
  I'm not tempted to read the Christian theologians he does, but I'm happy to read the nuggets he finds. I've read all his Buddhist books, and reread Buddhism Without Belief, and this one. I think this one might be his best, though for the average reader I'd probably read his last one Confessions of an Atheist Buddhist, which is the fullest memoir to date. And if you want the declaration of independence in Buddhism Without Belief, you can try that one. The Devil one is the one I want to reread now. I read the last one recently, so it's still fresh, and is more of a memior anyway, I don't tend to reread those, though lately I've been thinking I want to reread Liar's Club. This rich book will be reread by me.
• 
  Anthony

  I do not identify myself as a Buddhist, however I do find that I align myself with many of the Buddhist concepts about one’s perception of reality and I do lean towards existential philosophy when framing my worldview concept, so this book did present a unique perspective that I found likable and readable. Batchelor does a great job of being concise to express the concepts he aims to communicate, and for that, this was an easily digestible read. The central argument is that each human being is essentially living a dichotomous life: one life is a life of interior thought and reflection on experiences that are essentially unknowable by anyone other than the self while the other life is a life of interaction and inter-reliance upon the peoples in our familial, social, and cultural influences. He expresses these concepts with great articulation in the following quotes:
  
  “Every attitude we assume, every word we utter, and every act we undertake establishes us in relation to others. Our thoughts mold the images we have of ourselves in relation to others and our words and actions help suggest the impression that others have of us.” (77)
  
  “Our emotional relation to the content of our experience does not interpret and classify but rather colors the world in shades of meaning that are only subsequently expressed in words. Thoughts and ideas enable us to construct multifaceted ‘dimensions’ that transcend the spatial and temporal limitations of particular concrete situations….In this confusion a conflict ensues between the world in the world as it is and the world we believe it to be.” (99-100)
  
  I must say that this book isn’t a treatise simply promoting Buddhism, it is a well contrived explication of Buddhism’s relation to the difficulties of modern life. For that, it is notable read. Batchelor additionally includes some good thoughts on the necessity for any religion to be malleable with tradition in order to remain persistently relevant in an ever changing world.
• 
  Sirpa Grierson

  Years ago I read some of the work of Soren Kierkegaard, an existential Christian writer, whose work fascinated me. Stephen Batchelor also tries in this book to answer some of the big questions of existence, but through a Buddhist lens. At times, this book is profound, at others I felt it was a bit less finished, but on the whole, this is a very insightful look at what it means to truly be present with yourself as well as with others. The idea of becoming enlightened is really fascinating as it includes self-acceptance and ultimately a turning outward of oneself to truly care for the needs of others. For me, as a Christian, this book reminds me of what we can strive for as humans.
  
  Some favorite quotations:
  
  Through yoga and meditation I have learned a little about the principle of one-pointed concentration (Samadhi) but Batchelor reminds us with a quote from Tzong Khapa that "one should mount the wisdom which clearly discerns the way things are upon the immovable horse of concentration."
  
  On an optimum way of being: ". . . such a person is characterized by three principle qualities. He appears to be possessed of great intuition and wisdom, he radiates deep concern and compassion for others, and he seems to be endowed with an unusual inner strength and will power."
  
  "It is only when the optimum mode of being is realized that one achieves the capacity to spontaneously act in such a way that one's every word and deed serves to intimate to others the possibility of experiencing a much fuller and richer existence."
  
  "Buddha is nothing but the optimum mode of being possible for man in his present condition."
  
  
• 
  Alex Memus

  Basically, the books argument consists of two parts:
  * Buddhism (like any other religious practice) was born and adjusted for a specific time. Since then, the environment changed a bit, so it would be wise to update the teaching for the modernity. (This statement makes a lot of sense.)
  * The easiest way to do so is to declare that buddhism and existential philosophy are equal (or at least very similar) in their messaging and approach. (This statement is much more problematic.)
  
  In the first half of the book, Batchelor compares Fromm's metaphor of 'having mode' and 'being mode' and buddhism. Here, he finds out that they actually are very similar and disclose the same existential question. This works.
  
  In the second half of the book, Batchelor tries to recap Heidegger's work briefly (i.e. dichotomy of being-alone and being-with-others) and the book becomes almost incomprehensible. First of all, Heidegger's ideas don't get justice in Batchelor's recap. If you're not familiar with original works, you'll likely get lost. Second of all, these ideas don't map particularly well to buddhism. So the book becomes a chaotic mixtape of buddhist concepts and Heidegger's preaching.
  
  And then the final question arrives. Yes, existentialism and buddhism are similar in some places, and different in others. So what?