[67Irralphaisa]

Thanks for your thoughtful response Aloka-D. I'm glad to hear you're finding the teachers at Amaravati helpful and relevant.

But I'm not quite sure I understand your comment about considering Batchelor a teacher being "preposterous." As I (and the majority of his readers) don't have any actual access to him, he is more of an author than teacher. I don't consider myself a student of his and I'm not even avery ardent fan. I simply think he articulates some important points of discord at the juncture of modern secularism and Buddhism. If others have followed a similar journey, why should they not write books about it? Writing is a powerful way of communicating ideas and it is never a bad thing to have a diversity of voices available. I personally find it nice to hear that people have the selfsame doubts as myself and learn about what conclusions they have come to, even if they differ from my own.

There are any number of people in whose work I have found wisdom, with whom I have not had personal contact: Ajahn Chah, Bhikku Bodhi, Pema Chodron, et al. They exist to me only as writers. I don't have a student-teacher relationship with them, and I don't resonate with everything they have written. Furthermore, even if I were to consider such people "teachers", such a relationship does not entail subjugating your own intellect or opinion to that of another. You can doubt and disagree with your teacher and still learn some things from them. As such, I don't see why such a relationship, to any person, should be "preposterous."

I also think you're setting up a false dichotomy between the Thai Forest Tradition and people like Batchelor. Why are you pitting them against one another as if their right to exist is mutually exclusive? Where in my posts did I ever say the Thai Forest Tradition should go away? Why even posit such a scenario? (As you can tell from all the question marks, I am truly quite perplexed, lol.) I am simply saying that the modernist approaches to Buddhism (of which the Thai Forest Revival is one!) have their place and can be quite valuable. I wouldn't want to do without the more orthodox Sri Lankan schools who have preserved much of the Theravada canon. I also certainly would not want to do without the work of Jack Kornfield or Gil Fronsdal -- two teachers in the Western Insight Meditation tradition -- whose teaching makes "kitchen-sink level" Buddhism come to life for laypeople. A lay practice, the sort I am practicing and I assume you and most people on this forum who are not monastics are practicing, is a fairly novel phenomenon. It's nice to have people who are talking about how they have navigated the intersection between this 2,500-year-old body of philosophy and their 21st-century workaday reality.

As for Confession..., like you I found parts of it boring and Batchelor's prose sometimes hard-going, but I enjoyed his reconstruction of the Buddha's pragmatism and his reading of the Four Noble Truths more so than the memoir aspect. I also am not quite convinced that one can safely say that the Buddha didn't literally believe in the metaphysical aspects of the philosophy preserved in the suttas. Still, I enjoyed reading his thoughts. I appreciate that he is voicing some of the reservations people looking East for wisdom might have.