Stephen's talk draws upon both Buddhist and Greek philosophy to articulate an ethics that is grounded in compassion and unknowing rather than a priori moral convictions and metaphysical certainties. By returning to the early discourses of the Buddha and the dialogues of his Greek contemporary Socrates Stephen seeks to identify common philosophical and ethical threads that transcend the binary between “East” and “West”. In particular, he focuses on exploring the kind of ethics that might best respond to the climate crisis and other threats to human and animal survival.
Stephen Batchelor is a writer, translator, teacher and artist. Born in 1953, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk at the age of twenty-one and spent ten years training in the Tibetan Geluk and Korean Son orders. Stephen has translated Shantideva’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life and Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center, and is the author of Buddhism without Beliefs, Living with the Devil, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist and After Buddhism. His most recent publication is The Art of Solitude. In 2015 he co-founded Bodhi College, a European educational project dedicated to the understanding and application of early Buddhism. He lives in south-west France with his wife Martine. Stephen and his wife are also co-authors of the book What is This? Ancient Questions for Modern Minds, published in 2019. You can find out more about this book here: www.tuwhiri.nz/what-is-this