This Question Can Change Your Life
About this episode
For this episode, Klein talks with Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor about doubt as spiritual and political practice. Batchelor recounts becoming a monk at 21, then spending ages 27 to 31 in a South Korean Zen monastery, sitting 10 to 12 hours a day facing a wall and asking 'What is this?' — cultivating an existential, embodied doubt: 'Great doubt, great awakening.' He presents the Buddha's teaching as four tasks: embrace suffering by saying yes to life, let reactivity be, dwell in the nonreactive space that is nirvana, and cultivate a value-aligned way of life. Turned to politics, Batchelor argues opinionatedness is reactivity — on par with greed and hatred — and contrasts Carol Gilligan's ethics of care, which treasures uncertainty, with justice, which treasures certainty. Socrates, whose relentless questioning ends in aporia, joins the Buddha as an exemplar of an ethics of uncertainty — one that might loosen polarization's grip.