Noah Levine teaches Against the (Dharma)?

Seth Auberon and Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

He's a Dharma punk and not dumb, so how does he know so little about the Buddha?

In a devastating blow to Buddhist history, author and "Against the Stream" founder Noah Levine turned the Buddha's life into an unrecognizable mishmash of revisionist thought, doubt and outlandish speculation. At one point he had Siddhartha tying stones to his privates, all the while laughing and engendering laughter from an eager American audience. The constant refrain was, "We just don't know. These things weren't written down. There was a lot of mythologizing..." Therefore we can throw anything into the story we like and it'll be just as true/doubtful as all the rest of it? Levine's heart was obviously in the right place.

(LINK) BBC documentary: "The Life of the Buddha"

   

Maybe its less Buddhism than recovery and punk

But one would have to guess -- based solely on his bumbling through the life story -- that he only recently became acquainted with Buddhism as a sacred tradition of the East. The Buddha's life, certainly much informed by mythological elements prevalent in ancient India, is retold to inspire our own path: We live luxuriously, we suffer, we assume that the only antidote to suffering is hedonism, then one day occurs to us that this has never worked. So we try something else. We go on a quest. We question convention. We go have a look for ourselves. And inasmuch as we question or reject society, we look inward for answers: What is true? What can I know to be true? How can I bring suffering to an end, not just for myself, but for all beings who suffer?

• See Noah Levine continue Wednesdays live in Hollywood

Siddhartha did not set off on this quest only once; he (reappearing in various transient forms, not as the same being but not altogether another) spent many lives developing the perfections. These enabled him to become a master physician for what ails living beings, a superlative teacher able to communicate that subtle and profound discovery of what's been going wrong in our own search for a way out, a samma-sam-buddha or "right and fully awakened one." Levine is not alone in sowing doubt and, possibly inadvertently, ridiculing the "less important" Buddhist teachings, such as its venerable history and origins.
  
Former Buddhist monk and continuing British iconoclast Stephen Batchelor, author of Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, seems to have profoundly influenced Levine's view of not only Buddhist history but its theology (yes, it has one in spite of being a non-theistic tradition) and cosmology as well. There's more than a little of fellow punk and Zen Master Brad Warner in Levine's approach as well.
   

(ABC News) Stephen Batchelor talks about his confessions with ABC

To hear Levine tell it, Buddhism doesn't know its zafu from its zabuton and is ass-backwards on everything but its core insight (vipassana) teachings. With teachers like Jack Kornfield and his own father, Buddhist author Stephen Levine, that comes as a surprise. One would imagine his time in prison gave him time to reflect, grow hungry for answers, and then satisfy that hunger through books, monastics, and comparative religion professors.

 

Is Levine opinionated? It would not seem so, for when local meditator Sherry asked him to define "atheist," he suddenly had no personal opinion and turned the question on her like a reticent therapist.

  

Wisdom Quarterly would retell the story of the Buddha's life just for Levine's benefit. But any child with a picture book and even Keanu Reeves can get the highlights right.
  

   
It is difficult to see how one can have a sense of the Buddha's teaching, the Dharma, without a basic understanding of what the historical Buddha went through to arrive at the breakthrough that gave rise to the dispensation and the mythological elements that got added.

• FULL INTERVIEW: Stephen Batchelor's Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist