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I was reading Stephen Batchelors website when I came across his biography (here) and on reading it I found it interesting that he had started out with the classic seekers questions, such as “what is the meaning of life?” Upon journeying to India and ending up in Dharmsala he found the Tibetans he encountered there to have much knowledge and an integrated spiritual practice. He became a monk and stayed with them for a number of years.

If you look at the kind of things Stephen did during that time (translations for example) you’d say he was no longer a seeker but had turned into a scholar instead. His latest book, Buddha, Socrates and Us (2025), makes a comparison between Buddhist thinking and Ancient Greek thinking, and again seems to be more a scholarly work than an example of being.

Nor is Stephen Batchelor the only one to walk this path, the Danish monk Samhita Thera also did something similar (here). It seems that enveloping the mind in knowledge is a favoured journey for someone to set out to become a monk. You are kind of expected to learn the Dhamma, but it is a seduction into knowledge which leads away from the questions which started it all.

Now it seems to me that the meaning of life has more to do with experiencing than learning from books. There is a famous quote by Alan Watts, “life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be lived.” Not just in the sense that one should go out and see the world, but that experiences — like sickness, success at a job and being fired from a job, the death of ones parents, an accident — bring a certain ripeness and appreciation of the meaning of living.

What do you think? Does wisdom and an understanding of meaning come automatically? Does book learning help?