The Dharma and the West

Toward the end of his life Nanavira was convinced that the Dhamma was "very far from being understood in the West." For whether aware of it or not, Europeans were still fundamentally preoccupied with the question of God, the very idea of a "moral but Godless universe" being utterly alien. Yet behind the belief in God lies the even more deeply entrenched sense that the universe has a meaning or purpose. He approvingly quotes Nietzsche: "Has existence then a significance at all?—the question that will require a couple of centuries even to be heard in all its profundity."

Nietzsche's question disturbs in the same was as Nanavira's suicide. For such statements challenge those collectively held, Christian-based views about the nature of life which still dominate our instinctive moral sense of good and evil. For Buddhism to penetrate deeply into the European psyche it will have to reach such pre-articulate strata of experience. Otherwise it is liable to become merely a consoling set of beliefs and views still founded on a theistic ethos. Enlightenment is not a transcendent mystical rapture but an ethical experience that reveals the nature of the existential dilemma and the way to its resolution.

~Stephen Batchelor, in Secular Buddhism