This Question Can Change Your Life
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Juliette from New York Times Games and I'm here talking to fans about our games. You play New York Times Games. Yes, every day. There's this little tab down here called friends. So you can add your friend. That feels new to me. It is. It's nice to have the social aspect. Oh my god, and you have OLED Times. That's crazy. Right? You can look at spelling B, Wordle, Connections. Oh my god, amazing. Love that. I'd have to get the app.
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So I was like at the beginning of the year to do a couple of episodes that are around things that I am working on in my own life. Resolutions episodes, you might say. And something I've been working on over these Past months, years. Is being able to sit with doubt. Not just doubt, being able to sit in the wonder of uncertainty. Because the first person we believe our own easiest marks. Are ourselves the stories we tell, the things we think we already know. So maintaining a an openness, a curiosity, I think it's important politically. I think it's very important in my work as a podcast host, but it is as much as it is anything. A spiritual practice, a practice of remaining Present. In the fundamental unknowability.
Of this life and and this earth. And my guest today has helped me with those practices in in ways that that maybe he would not have known. Stephen Batchelor is the author of many books on Buddhism and meditation, including this book he wrote with his wife Martine Batchelor, called What Is This? Which is from a Meditation retreat, a San meditation retreat that that they held some time ago. And psalm meditation works around the question of what is this? Just asking it again and again and allowing it to arise in you, this feeling of doubt, and then to sit with that and to see what that might reveal. Boucher's latest book is Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times. There he draws on a different tradition of doubt, Socratic questioning, and explores kind of the wisdom that Buddhist and Hellenistic philosophy might offer us today.
So I want to invite him on the show to talk about Taoist practice and what it could open. For us personally and even politically right now. Is always my email as reclined show at n by times dot com. Steven Bachelor, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Ezra.
So from the age of twenty-seven to thirty-one, you say you sat facing a wall for ten to twelve hours a day, asking the question, what is this? repeatedly. So I guess the obvious first question is why did you do that?
Um, well, I became a Buddhist monk when I was twenty-one years old, and I was involved uh with a Tibetan tradition that put a great deal of emphasis on on studying the texts, uh studying logic, epistemology, and really trying to get a a a clear conceptual understanding of what Buddhist philosophy was really about. At a certain point, I found that this kind of uh inquiry, as fulfilling as it was, did not really delve deep enough into my existential experience, as it were. And I felt an increasing longing to be able to actually put all the books aside, all the things I'd learned, all of my knowledge about Buddhism, and go to a place where I could just go back. to the primary questions of what it means to be human, basically.
And I went to South Korea. And there I entered a Zen monastery. Um, the teacher s had one simple instruction. Ask yourself this question, what is this? And nothing else. Just get to grips with that primary question of your life. And initially, of course, the mind comes up with all kinds of clever answers, but after a while, you know, hour after hour after hour after hour, the mind kind of gives up. And you find yourself actually in a state of puzzlement, curiosity, wonder, perplexity, in which a lot of my knowledge of Buddhism was just gently put to one side. A very good um way of summing this all up is an aphorism that we find in Zen Buddhism.
What is the “What is this?” practice and why does Ezra start the year with it?
Great doubt, great awakening. little doubt, little awakening,
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:02
2
What is the “What is this?” practice and why does Ezra start the year with it?
5:02–14:07
3
Why did Stephen Batchelor spend years asking “What is this?” while facing a wall?
14:07–26:07
4
How does the wall‑meditation experience feel and what does it reveal?
26:07–51:27
5
What are the different kinds of doubt and the four Buddhist tasks Batchelor describes?
51:27–1:07:50