By Cathryn Jacob
As the COVID restrictions were tentatively easing off in November 2021, I arrived at Kairos House in Richmond, Surrey, for the first module of a year-long Bodhi College secular dharma course. Like most things at that point in the pandemic, attending a residential course felt slightly adventurous. I arrived clutching the reassuring evidence of a negative lateral-flow test and wondering whether getting together with a group of strangers was entirely sensible.
There were only sixteen participants, partly because of the restrictions still in place, but what might initially have seemed a disadvantage quickly became one of the gifts of the course. We ate together, meditated together, studied together and spent a great deal of time talking about the teachings. We got to know one another remarkably quickly and, over the year that followed, became a warm and close group, with friendships that have continued long after the course ended.
The course was taught by Stephen Batchelor, Martine Batchelor and Bernat Font. There were four five-day modules at Kairos House, each centred on one of the four tasks at the heart of Stephen’s approach to secular dharma – Embrace life, Let reactivity be, See reactivity stop and Act to cultivate a path – together with a week-long Seon retreat at Sharpham House, led by Stephen and Martine around the question What is this?
On our first evening, Stephen asked us to introduce ourselves and say why we had come. When my turn arrived, I heard myself say that I wanted ‘to learn to live life on life’s terms’. At the time, it was simply my answer to a question. I certainly didn’t imagine that several years later those words would be printed across the cover of a book.
Too good to lose
It didn’t take me long to realise how fortunate I was to be there. There were phrases, observations and ideas scattered throughout the talks that I wanted to remember, return to, and think about more deeply. Stephen, Martine and Bernat each approached the dharma differently, so that sometimes the same subject would be explored from several directions.
I also began to realise that what we were hearing was unusual. These were not simply talks that could easily have been found somewhere else. Ideas were being explored, questioned and developed by the teachers, sometimes in conversation with one another and with us. I felt extraordinarily fortunate to be there, and also began to think it would be a shame if all of this simply disappeared once the course had finished. So I started making notes from the audio recordings, mainly for myself and perhaps to share with the other participants.
Knowing absolutely nothing about transcription software, my method involved a great deal of playing, pausing, typing, rewinding, and when I discovered that I hadn’t heard something correctly I would just start again. Eventually I discovered Otter and thought my problems had been solved. They weren’t. The early version I was using in 2021–22 often failed to recognise Pali terminology. and had particular difficulty with Martine’s French accent and Bernat’s Spanish accent. At times, Otter seemed simply to invent its own version of what had been said, producing interpretations that ranged from confusing to genuinely hilarious.
Even once I had corrected the words, there was another problem. These had been live teachings, and sometimes a gesture, an expression or an emphatic movement of the hands had conveyed what the words alone had not. I occasionally had to find words for something that had originally been communicated nonverbally, while being careful to remain faithful to what the teacher had meant.
Despite the technology, I still found myself working through the recordings line by line, listening, correcting, rewinding and listening again. At this stage I was only producing fairly rough notes that I could return to later. I wasn’t thinking about publishing a book. But then one day I had an idea.
An idea at my kitchen table
I remember the moment very clearly. I was sitting at my laptop in my kitchen, working through one of the recordings, when it suddenly occurred to me that these talks were simply too useful to remain available to just the small group of people who had been on the course. Other people should be able to read them. And then came the slightly more ambitious thought: perhaps I could transcribe them properly, so they could become a book.
There were a few fairly obvious problems with this plan. I had never written anything for publication, knew nothing about editing, and even less about publishing. I had absolutely no idea what was involved in taking fifty recorded dharma talks and turning them into something that someone might eventually hold in their hands. Naturally, I ignored my complete lack of relevant experience and opened the email software on my laptop.
I wrote to Stephen, Martine and Bernat explaining what I was thinking, and asked whether they would give me permission to transcribe the talks with the possibility of turning them into a book. They agreed, which was wonderful, although this was the point at which I realised that I now had to do what I had so casually suggested.
My rough notes were no longer sufficient. If these talks were potentially going to be published, I needed to go back to the beginning and transcribe each of the fifty talks properly, line by line, while preserving as closely as I could both what each teacher was saying and the distinctive way in which they said it. Each talk took several days. What had begun as note-taking became a project that occupied me for around eighteen months.
What I hadn’t expected was what all that repeated listening would do to me. Listening once to a dharma talk is very different from listening repeatedly to almost every sentence. I began noticing things that I had missed completely the first time. A phrase that had passed me by during the original teaching would suddenly make sense, and connections appeared between talks given months apart. The work might certainly be laborious, but the transcription gradually became a practice in itself. My understanding of the teachings deepened simply because I had forced myself to listen so carefully.
This might actually be a book
Not long after I began the transcription project, Stephen emailed to introduce me to Ramsey Margolis at Tuwhiri. The three of us arranged a Zoom meeting, where I explained what I had started doing and what I hoped might eventually come from it. Ramsey kindly agreed to work with me on the project and to edit the transcripts as I completed them. Until then, the whole enterprise had existed between my kitchen, my laptop, and a large number of audio recordings. For the first time, it began to feel as though there really might be a book at the end of it.
There was, however, another problem. Fifty talks would have made an extremely long book. Having spent around eighteen months painstakingly transcribing all of them, we then had to decide which ones not to publish, which felt slightly cruel.
After a great deal of deliberation, we narrowed the collection down to eighteen talks; six by Stephen, six by Martine, and six by Bernat. I wanted them to capture collectively the four tasks and the spirit of the course, while ensuring that each talk could also be read and appreciated on its own. I looked for those that approached the dharma from particularly fresh, useful or thought-provoking perspectives. And, I should admit, there was one other criterion: some were simply the talks I loved most.
And somehow, a book
Living life on life’s terms: Turning the wheel of secular dharma is thus not a book that anyone originally set out to write. It grew almost by accident from a small residential course held at a very particular moment in time, when sixteen people were emerging cautiously from the isolation of a pandemic and found themselves studying together in Richmond.
When I started making those first rough notes, I had no idea where they would lead. I simply knew that I had come across something I didn’t want to lose. In the foreword to the book, I described it as discovering ‘a mine full of precious gems’, and that still describes how I feel about those teachings. The reason I wanted to turn the recordings into a book was very simple: I wanted people who had not been fortunate enough to be in that room with us to have access to some of what we had heard.
Looking back, there is something rather fitting about it. A course concerned with responding creatively to the conditions of our lives produced something that none of us had planned. One chilly evening in November 2021, I arrived at Kairos wondering whether coming at all had been a good idea. A few hours later, I told a circle of strangers that I wanted to learn to live life on life’s terms. I didn’t expect those words to end up on the cover of a book.
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