It all started when I took an optional subject on world religions in secondary school—I heard it was easy to pass. Upon finishing it, I remember saying to myself, perhaps as a premonition: ‘I’m not religious, but if I had to choose, I’d choose Buddhism’. Fast forward more than 20 years, and I teach meditation & dharma, and have a PhD in Buddhist Studies.
Along the way, I have shifted from an initial fascination with Tibetan Buddhism towards the Pali tradition (the early Buddhist texts and Theravāda), and I gradually put aside my career as a jazz pianist and composer. My approach to meditation has been mainly influenced by the Burmese teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya, besides my own study and experimentation.
I trained as a community dharma leader (CDL) at Gaia House, and later as a dharma and meditation teacher at Bodhi College. From Stephen Batchelor, my primary mentor, I’ve learnt that our dharma needs to keep being updated, and this applies to secular Buddhism itself—otherwise it would ossify into yet another dogma.
My doctoral thesis at the University of Bristol explored the notion of vedanā (the pleasant, painful or neutral’ feeling tone’ of experience) in the Pali canon, focusing on how it contributes to awakening, especially through positive affect and forms of ‘spiritual pleasure’. In the book based on my thesis, I argue that early Buddhism was a form of refined hedonism. Doing research supervised by Rupert Gethin taught me a lot about approaching the texts and their traditional interpretation, while shattering some biases and colonial attitudes present in forms of Buddhist modernism.
Today I combine spiritual and scholarly approaches. I’m interested in the dharma’s evolution, as long as reform and creative interpretation are informed and respectful. To me, this is a two-way street: to be critical of tradition and let tradition criticise you. Instead of defining secular Buddhism with reference to the concept of religion, to ritual forms, or to cultural aspects, I prefer to do so in terms of valuing this vulnerable life rather than aiming for a reality outside of it, reinterpreting the Buddhist doctrine that anything conditioned and impermanent is unsatisfactory.
At the same time, I’m suspicious of over-adapting these teachings to modern consumerist life. We cannot change our lives without changing our lives. The dharma needs to challenge as much as it needs to comfort. Instead of psychotherapy and neuroscience, as interlocutors to the dharma I prefer communal ethics, practical philosophy and art.
I teach mostly in practical settings—meditation retreats and courses—and I’m convinced this can still be well grounded in the Buddhist texts. ‘Theory’ has a bad rep, but when in service of the practice I believe it is essential, so I teach them together. I particularly engage with the LGBTQIA+ and Spanish/Catalan-speaking communities, to which I belong, and I maintain some scholarly activity such as research and the translation of Buddhist texts from Pali into Spanish.
Bernat Font 