A Poetic Legacy and the Paradoxes of Being Human

A Buddhist scholar and former monk, Stephen Batchelor is well known to American readers as the author of the best-selling “Buddhism Without Beliefs.” Now comes “Verses From the Center,” his version of the poetic legacy of Nagarjuna, a visionary monk who lived in India in the 2nd century and who is, Batchelor writes, “arguably the most important figure in Buddhism after the Buddha himself.” The original Sanskrit collection of poems, comprising 448 verses in 27 chapters, is a profound reflection on insight and awareness, on our attachment to the contingencies of what we perceive to be real, and on the possibility of awakening to the sublime.

Nagarjuna’s “center” is the Buddha’s “Middle Way”--the path between attachment and aversion, which are the root causes of all human suffering. This is the place of “emptiness,” which the Buddha described as “the abode of the great person,” that place of freedom from the fixations that serve only to multiply our suffering. “Living in emptiness,” writes Batchelor, in his excellent introduction to the texts, “is equivalent to following the path to awakening itself. It not only entails letting go of craving and confusion, but cultivating awareness of and insight into the nature of one’s self and one’s world. Emptiness is a metaphor for authenticity.”

In addition to providing useful guidance to the key philosophical concepts, Batchelor’s introduction also delves into the colorful strata of myth and legend surrounding the man and his work, and traces the historical traditions of centrist thought all the way from Nagarjuna’s Chinese contemporary, Laotzu, to the English Romantic poet John Keats, who describes his “negative capability” as that moment “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritating reaching after fact or reason.”

Those who need to reach after fact or reason will have a hard time with this book, whose central theme is the paradox that faces us everywhere we look in search of answers to the core questions of human existence. “I treat [the text],” writes Batchelor in his preface, “in the spirit of a Zen koan, which provokes intuitions of the sublime by forcibly challenging entrenched opinions about ourselves and the world.” At its best, his translation approaches the rich, authentic voice of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies,” exploring the mystery of being human with anguished amazement, and with quiet acceptance.

At such moments, the poem becomes experience. This is no mean feat in dealing with an original text in which abstraction predominates--a far cry from Western poetic traditions, where image and metaphor reign supreme. Conscious of this potential difficulty, Batchelor has tried to resolve it “by making the most of concrete imagery whenever it appeared in the original,” and by occasionally introducing “a concrete image to flesh out an idea.”

For this reason, the reader has little sense of how faithful Batchelor’s translation may be to Nagarjuna’s original text. But better a live sparrow, they say, than a stuffed eagle, and for the most part Batchelor succeeds admirably in keeping the bird alive, as in the marvelous poem that analyzes the simple act of “Walking”--and of course its paradoxical nature--with meticulous precision: “I do not walk between / The step already taken / And the one I’m yet to take, / Which both are motionless.” Most frequently, too, he even manages to meet the challenge of abstraction with surprising deftness as in this passage from “Life”:

What do you think

Of a freedom that never happens?

What do you make

Of a life that won’t go away?

Or from “Connection”:

Were I other than you,

Then even without you

I would be someone else;

I cannot be your other without you.

Such jewels work because they play in the mind with our impulsive need to reduce them to simple “understandings,” even as they resist the rational explanation we seek. As these brief samplings suggest, “Verses From the Center” is a book to spend time with, to dip into at leisure, rather than to be read from cover to cover. Like a collection of “a hundred Zen koans,” it’s a paradox in itself, and will easily make a mockery of the eager reader who is used to turning pages anxiously in the expectation that the answer will finally reveal itself. This is a book about wisdom, not understanding; it invites us to acknowledge paradox with equanimity, and to dwell without question among the questions that it poses.

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Peter Clothier is the author of “While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man’s Heart.”