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Why Buddhism Is True - Wikipedia, Amazon, Goodread, New Yorker, NPR

Why Buddhism Is True - Wikipedia

Why Buddhism Is True
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Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

Author Robert Wright
Country United States
Language English
Subject Buddhism
Publisher Simon & Schuster

Publication date August 8, 2017
Media type Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages 336 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4391-9545-1 (Hardcover)
Preceded by The Evolution of God

Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment is a 2017 book by Robert Wright.

As of August 2017, the book had peaked at The New York Times No. 4 bestseller in hardcover nonfiction.[1]

Contents
1Content
2Reception
3See also
4References
5External links

Content[edit]

In Why Buddhism is True, Wright advocates a secular, Westernized form of Buddhism focusing on the practice of mindfulness meditation and stripped of supernatural beliefs such as reincarnation.[2]
He further argues that more widespread practice of meditation could lead to a more reflective and empathetic population and reduce political tribalism.[2]
In line with his background, Wright draws heavily on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to defend Buddhism's diagnosis of the causes of human suffering.[3]
He argues the modern psychological idea of the modularity of mind resonates with the Buddhist teaching of no-self (anatman).[3]

Reception[edit]

Why Buddhism is True received a number of positive reviews from major publications.

A review in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik stated, "Wright’s book has no poetry or paradox anywhere in it. [...] Yet, if you never feel that Wright is telling you something profound or beautiful, you also never feel that he is telling you something untrue. Direct and unambiguous, tracing his own history in meditation practice—which eventually led him to a series of weeklong retreats and to the intense study of Buddhist doctrine—he makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear."[4]

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, reviewing the book in The New York Times, wrote, "Wright's book is provocative, informative and, in many respects, deeply rewarding."[5]

Kirkus Reviews called the book a "cogent and approachable argument for a personal meditation practice based on secular Buddhist principles."[3]

Adam Frank, writing for National Public Radio, called it "delightfully personal, yet broadly important".[6]

The Washington Post gave a more mixed review, writing that "while [Wright] does not make a fully convincing case for some of his more grandiose claims about truth and freedom, his argument contains many interesting and illuminating points."[7]

In 2020, Evan Thompson questioned what he called Buddhist exceptionalism, "the belief that Buddhism is superior to other religions... or that Buddhism isn't really a religion but rather is a kind of 'mind science,' therapy, philosophy, or a way of life based on meditation."[8]

Thompson questioned both Wright's version of secularized and naturalized Buddhism and, conversely, Wright's conception of evolutionary psychology that Wright claims Buddhism is uniquely equipped to address.[8]

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Why Buddhism is True

1 Taking the Red Pill

At the risk of overdramatizing the human condition: Have you ever seen the movie The Matrix?

It’s about a guy named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), who discovers that he’s been inhabiting a dream world. The life he thought he was living is actually an elaborate hallucination. He’s having that hallucination while, unbeknownst to him, his actual physical body is inside a gooey, coffin-size pod—one among many pods, rows and rows of pods, each pod containing a human being absorbed in a dream. These people have been put in their pods by robot overlords and given dream lives as pacifiers.

The choice faced by Neo—to keep living a delusion or wake up to reality—is famously captured in the movie’s “red pill” scene. Neo has been contacted by rebels who have entered his dream (or, strictly speaking, whose avatars have entered his dream). Their leader, Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne), explains the situation to Neo: “You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch—a prison for your mind.” The prison is called the Matrix, but there’s no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The only way to get the whole picture, says Morpheus, is “to see it for yourself.” He offers Neo two pills, a red one and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his dream world, or take the red pill and break through the shroud of delusion. Neo chooses the red pill.

That’s a pretty stark choice: a life of delusion and bondage or a life of insight and freedom. In fact, it’s a choice so dramatic that you’d think a Hollywood movie is exactly where it belongs—that the choices we really get to make about how to live our lives are less momentous than this, more pedestrian. Yet when that movie came out, a number of people saw it as mirroring a choice they had actually made.

The people I’m thinking about are what you might call Western Buddhists, people in the United States and other Western countries who, for the most part, didn’t grow up Buddhist but at some point adopted Buddhism. At least they adopted a version of Buddhism, a version that had been stripped of some supernatural elements typically found in Asian Buddhism, such as belief in reincarnation and in various deities. This Western Buddhism centers on a part of Buddhist practice that in Asia is more common among monks than among laypeople: meditation, along with immersion in Buddhist philosophy. (Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism—that it’s atheistic and that it revolves around meditation—are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don’t meditate.)

These Western Buddhists, long before they watched The Matrix, had become convinced that the world as they had once seen it was a kind of illusion—not an out-and-out hallucination but a seriously warped picture of reality that in turn warped their approach to life, with bad consequences for them and the people around them. Now they felt that, thanks to meditation and Buddhist philosophy, they were seeing things more clearly. Among these people, The Matrix seemed an apt allegory of the transition they’d undergone, and so became known as a “dharma movie.” The word dharma has several meanings, including the Buddha’s teachings and the path that Buddhists should tread in response to those teachings. In the wake of The Matrix, a new shorthand for “I follow the dharma” came into currency: “I took the red pill.”

I saw The Matrix in 1999, right after it came out, and some months later I learned that I had a kind of connection to it. The movie’s directors, the Wachowski siblings, had given Keanu Reeves three books to read in preparation for playing Neo. One of them was a book I had written a few years earlier, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life.

I’m not sure what kind of link the directors saw between my book and The Matrix. But I know what kind of link I see. Evolutionary psychology can be described in various ways, and here’s one way I had described it in my book: It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.

Don’t get me wrong: natural selection has its virtues, and I’d rather be created by it than not be created at all—which, so far as I can tell, are the two options this universe offers. Being a product of evolution is by no means entirely a story of enslavement and delusion. Our evolved brains empower us in many ways, and they often bless us with a basically accurate view of reality.

Still, ultimately, natural selection cares about only one thing (or, I should say, “cares”—in quotes—about only one thing, since natural selection is just a blind process, not a conscious designer). And that one thing is getting genes into the next generation. Genetically based traits that in the past contributed to genetic proliferation have flourished, while traits that didn’t have fallen by the wayside. And the traits that have survived this test include mental traits—structures and algorithms that are built into the brain and shape our everyday experience. So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?” the answer, at the most basic level, isn’t “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.” No, at the most basic level the answer is “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.” Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don’t. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Some of my happiest moments have come from delusion—believing, for example, that the Tooth Fairy would pay me a visit after I lost a tooth. But delusion can also produce bad moments. And I don’t just mean moments that, in retrospect, are obviously delusional, like horrible nightmares. I also mean moments that you might not think of as delusional, such as lying awake at night with anxiety. Or feeling hopeless, even depressed, for days on end. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward people, bursts that may actually feel good for a moment but slowly corrode your character. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward yourself. Or feeling greedy, feeling a compulsion to buy things or eat things or drink things well beyond the point where your well-being is served.

Though these feelings—anxiety, despair, hatred, greed—aren’t delusional the way a nightmare is delusional, if you examine them closely, you’ll see that they have elements of delusion, elements you’d be better off without.

And if you think you would be better off, imagine how the whole world would be. After all, feelings like despair and hatred and greed can foster wars and atrocities. So if what I’m saying is true—if these basic sources of human suffering and human cruelty are indeed in large part the product of delusion—there is value in exposing this delusion to the light.

Sounds logical, right? But here’s a problem that I started to appreciate shortly after I wrote my book about evolutionary psychology: the exact value of exposing a delusion to the light depends on what kind of light you’re talking about. Sometimes understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn’t, by itself, help very much.

An Everyday Delusion

Let’s take a simple but fundamental example: eating some junk food, feeling briefly satisfied, and then, only minutes later, feeling a kind of crash and maybe a hunger for more junk food. This is a good example to start with for two reasons.

First, it illustrates how subtle our delusions can be. There’s no point in the course of eating a six-pack of small powdered-sugar doughnuts when you’re believing that you’re the messiah or that foreign agents are conspiring to assassinate you. And that’s true of many sources of delusion that I’ll discuss in this book: they’re more about illusion—about things not being quite what they seem—than about delusion in the more dramatic sense of that word. Still, by the end of the book, I’ll have argued that all of these illusions do add up to a very large-scale warping of reality, a disorientation that is as significant and consequential as out-and-out delusion.

The second reason junk food is a good example to start with is that it’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings. Okay, it can’t be literally fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings, because 2,500 years ago, when the Buddha taught, junk food as we know it didn’t exist. What’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best. One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing—the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase. But the thrill always fades, and it always leaves us wanting more. The old Rolling Stones lyric “I can’t get no satisfaction” is, according to Buddhism, the human condition. Indeed, though the Buddha is famous for asserting that life is pervaded by suffering, some scholars say that’s an incomplete rendering of his message and that the word translated as “suffering,” dukkha, could, for some purposes, be translated as “unsatisfactoriness.”

So what exactly is the illusory part of pursuing doughnuts or sex or consumer goods or a promotion? There are different illusions associated with different pursuits, but for now we can focus on one illusion that’s common to these things: the overestimation of how much happiness they’ll bring. Again, by itself this is delusional only in a subtle sense. If I asked you whether you thought that getting that next promotion, or getting an A on that next exam, or eating that next powdered-sugar doughnut would bring you eternal bliss, you’d say no, obviously not. On the other hand, we do often pursue such things with, at the very least, an unbalanced view of the future. We spend more time envisioning the perks that a promotion will bring than envisioning the headaches it will bring. And there may be an unspoken sense that once we’ve achieved this long-sought goal, once we’ve reached the summit, we’ll be able to relax, or at least things will be enduringly better. Similarly, when we see that doughnut sitting there, we immediately imagine how good it tastes, not how intensely we’ll want another doughnut only moments after eating it, or how we’ll feel a bit tired or agitated later, when the sugar rush subsides.

Why Pleasure Fades

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain why this sort of distortion would be built into human anticipation. It just takes an evolutionary biologist—or, for that matter, anyone willing to spend a little time thinking about how evolution works.

Here’s the basic logic. We were “designed” by natural selection to do certain things that helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation—things like eating, having sex, earning the esteem of other people, and outdoing rivals. I put “designed” in quotation marks because, again, natural selection isn’t a conscious, intelligent designer but an unconscious process. Still, natural selection does create organisms that look as if they’re the product of a conscious designer, a designer who kept fiddling with them to make them effective gene propagators. So, as a kind of thought experiment, it’s legitimate to think of natural selection as a “designer” and put yourself in its shoes and ask: If you were designing organisms to be good at spreading their genes, how would you get them to pursue the goals that further this cause? In other words, granted that eating, having sex, impressing peers, and besting rivals helped our ancestors spread their genes, how exactly would you design their brains to get them to pursue these goals? I submit that at least three basic principles of design would make sense:

1. Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.

2. The pleasure shouldn’t last forever. After all, if the pleasure didn’t subside, we’d never seek it again; our first meal would be our last, because hunger would never return. So too with sex: a single act of intercourse, and then a lifetime of lying there basking in the afterglow. That’s no way to get lots of genes into the next generation!

3. The animal’s brain should focus more on (1), the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you’ll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might, for example, start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more. Before you know it, you’ll be full of ennui and wishing you’d majored in philosophy.

If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure. Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

Scientists can watch this logic play out at the biochemical level by observing dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is correlated with pleasure and the anticipation of pleasure. In one seminal study, they took monkeys and monitored dopamine-generating neurons as drops of sweet juice fell onto the monkeys’ tongues. Predictably, dopamine was released right after the juice touched the tongue. But then the monkeys were trained to expect drops of juice after a light turned on. As the trials proceeded, more and more of the dopamine came when the light turned on, and less and less came after the juice hit the tongue.

We have no way of knowing for sure what it felt like to be one of those monkeys, but it would seem that, as time passed, there was more in the way of anticipating the pleasure that would come from the sweetness, yet less in the way of pleasure actually coming from the sweetness.I,† To translate this conjecture into everyday human terms:

If you encounter a new kind of pleasure—if, say, you’ve somehow gone your whole life without eating a powdered-sugar doughnut, and somebody hands you one and suggests you try it—you’ll get a big blast of dopamine after the taste of the doughnut sinks in. But later, once you’re a confirmed powdered-sugar-doughnut eater, the lion’s share of the dopamine spike comes before you actually bite into the doughnut, as you’re staring longingly at it; the amount that comes after the bite is much less than the amount you got after that first, blissful bite into a powdered-sugar doughnut. The pre-bite dopamine blast you’re now getting is the promise of more bliss, and the post-bite drop in dopamine is, in a way, the breaking of the promise—or, at least, it’s a kind of biochemical acknowledgment that there was some overpromising. To the extent that you bought the promise—anticipated greater pleasure than would be delivered by the consumption itself—you have been, if not deluded in the strong sense of that term, at least misled.

Kind of cruel, in a way—but what do you expect from natural selection? Its job is to build machines that spread genes, and if that means programming some measure of illusion into the machines, then illusion there will be.

Unhelpful Insights

So this is one kind of light science can shed on an illusion. Call it “Darwinian light.” By looking at things from the point of view of natural selection, we see why the illusion would be built into us, and we have more reason than ever to see that it is an illusion. But—and this is the main point of this little digression—this kind of light is of limited value if your goal is to actually liberate yourself from the illusion.

Don’t believe me? Try this simple experiment: (1) Reflect on the fact that our lust for doughnuts and other sweet things is a kind of illusion—that the lust implicitly promises more enduring pleasure than will result from succumbing to it, while blinding us to the letdown that may ensue. (2) As you’re reflecting on this fact, hold a powdered-sugar doughnut six inches from your face. Do you feel the lust for it magically weakening? Not if you’re like me, no.

This is what I discovered after immersing myself in evolutionary psychology: knowing the truth about your situation, at least in the form that evolutionary psychology provides it, doesn’t necessarily make your life any better. In fact, it can actually make it worse. You’re still stuck in the natural human cycle of ultimately futile pleasure-seeking—what psychologists sometimes call “the hedonic treadmill”—but now you have new reason to see the absurdity of it. In other words, now you see that it’s a treadmill, a treadmill specifically designed to keep you running, often without really getting anywhere—yet you keep running!

And powdered-sugar doughnuts are just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, the truth is, it’s not all that uncomfortable to be aware of the Darwinian logic behind your lack of dietary self-discipline. In fact, you may find in this logic a comforting excuse: it’s hard to fight Mother Nature, right? But evolutionary psychology also made me more aware of how illusion shapes other kinds of behavior, such as the way I treat other people and the way I, in various senses, treat myself. In these realms, Darwinian self-consciousness was sometimes very uncomfortable.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.

Okay, fine; that’s a form of painful self-consciousness that would be worthwhile—the kind that leads ultimately to deep happiness. But the kind I got from evolutionary psychology was the worst of both worlds: the painful self-consciousness without the deep happiness. I had both the discomfort of being aware of my mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” Well, with evolutionary psychology I felt I had found the truth. But, manifestly, I had not found the way. Which was enough to make me wonder about another thing Jesus said: that the truth will set you free. I felt I had seen the basic truth about human nature, and I saw more clearly than ever how various illusions imprisoned me, but this truth wasn’t amounting to a Get Out of Jail Free card.

So is there another version of the truth out there that would set me free? No, I don’t think so. At least, I don’t think there’s an alternative to the truth presented by science; natural selection, like it or not, is the process that created us. But some years after writing The Moral Animal, I did start to wonder if there was a way to operationalize the truth—a way to put the actual, scientific truth about human nature and the human condition into a form that would not just identify and explain the illusions we labor under but would also help us liberate ourselves from them. I started wondering if this Western Buddhism I was hearing about might be that way. Maybe many of the Buddha’s teachings were saying essentially the same thing modern psychological science says. And maybe meditation was in large part a different way of appreciating these truths—and, in addition, a way of actually doing something about them.

So in August 2003 I headed to rural Massachusetts for my first silent meditation retreat—a whole week devoted to meditation and devoid of such distractions as email, news from the outside world, and speaking to other human beings.

The Truth about Mindfulness

You could be excused for doubting that a retreat like this would yield anything very dramatic or profound. The retreat was, broadly speaking, in the tradition of “mindfulness meditation,” the kind of meditation that was starting to catch on in the West and that in the years since has gone mainstream. As commonly described, mindfulness—the thing mindfulness meditation aims to cultivate—isn’t very deep or exotic. To live mindfully is to pay attention to, to be “mindful of” what’s happening in the here and now and to experience it in a clear, direct way, unclouded by various mental obfuscations. Stop and smell the roses.

This is an accurate description of mindfulness as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. “Mindfulness,” as popularly conceived, is just the beginning of mindfulness.

And it’s in some ways a misleading beginning. If you delve into ancient Buddhist writings, you won’t find a lot of exhortations to stop and smell the roses—and that’s true even if you focus on those writings that feature the word sati, the word that’s translated as “mindfulness.” Indeed, sometimes these writings seem to carry a very different message. The ancient Buddhist text known as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness—the closest thing there is to a Bible of Mindfulness—reminds us that our bodies are “full of various kinds of unclean things” and instructs us to meditate on such bodily ingredients as “feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine.” It also calls for us to imagine our bodies “one day, two days, three days dead—bloated, livid, and festering.”

I’m not aware of any bestselling books on mindfulness meditation called Stop and Smell the Feces. And I’ve never heard a meditation teacher recommend that I meditate on my bile, phlegm, and pus or on the rotting corpse that I will someday be. What is presented today as an ancient meditative tradition is actually a selective rendering of an ancient meditative tradition, in some cases carefully manicured.

There’s no scandal here. There’s nothing wrong with modern interpreters of Buddhism being selective—even, sometimes, creative—in what they present as Buddhism. All spiritual traditions evolve, adapting to time and place, and the Buddhist teachings that find an audience today in the United States and Europe are a product of such evolution.

The main thing, for our purposes, is that this evolution—the evolution that has produced a distinctively Western, twenty-first-century version of Buddhism—hasn’t severed the connection between current practice and ancient thought. Modern mindfulness meditation isn’t exactly the same as ancient mindfulness meditation, but the two share a common philosophical foundation. If you follow the underlying logic of either of them far enough, you will find a dramatic claim: that we are, metaphorically speaking, living in the Matrix. However mundane mindfulness meditation may sometimes sound, it is a practice that, if pursued rigorously, can let you see what Morpheus says the red pill will let you see. Namely, “how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

On that first meditation retreat, I had some pretty powerful experiences—powerful enough to make me want to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. So I read more about Buddhist philosophy, and talked to experts on Buddhism, and eventually went on more meditation retreats, and established a daily meditation practice.

All of this made it clearer to me why The Matrix had come to be known as a “dharma movie.” Though evolutionary psychology had already convinced me that people are by nature pretty deluded, Buddhism, it turned out, painted an even more dramatic picture. In the Buddhist view, the delusion touches everyday perceptions and thoughts in ways subtler and more pervasive than I had imagined. And in ways that made sense to me. In other words, this kind of delusion, it seemed to me, could be explained as the natural product of a brain that had been engineered by natural selection. The more I looked into Buddhism, the more radical it seemed, but the more I examined it in the light of modern psychology, the more plausible it seemed. The real-life Matrix, the one in which we’re actually embedded, came to seem more like the one in the movie—not quite as mind-bending, maybe, but profoundly deceiving and ultimately oppressive, and something that humanity urgently needs to escape.

The good news is the other thing I came to believe: if you want to escape from the Matrix, Buddhist practice and philosophy offer powerful hope. Buddhism isn’t alone in this promise. There are other spiritual traditions that address the human predicament with insight and wisdom. But Buddhist meditation, along with its underlying philosophy, addresses that predicament in a strikingly direct and comprehensive way. Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.

Some people who have taken up meditation in recent years have done so for essentially therapeutic reasons. They practice mindfulness-based stress reduction or focus on some specific personal problem. They may have no idea that the kind of meditation they’re practicing can be a deeply spiritual endeavor and can transform their view of the world. They are, without knowing it, near the threshold of a basic choice, a choice that only they can make. As Morpheus says to Neo, “I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” This book is an attempt to show people the door, give them some idea of what lies beyond it, and explain, from a scientific standpoint, why what lies beyond it has a stronger claim to being real than the world they’re familiar with.

I. This and all subsequent daggers refer to elaborative notes that can be found in the Notes section at the end of the book. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Nonzero, The Moral Animal, Three Scientists and their Gods (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Why Buddhism Is True. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the widely respected Bloggingheads.tv and MeaningofLife.tv. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Time, Slate, and The New Republic. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University, where he also created the popular online course “Buddhism and Modern Psychology.” He is currently Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

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Review

"I have been waiting all my life for a readable, lucid explanation of Buddhism by a tough-minded, skeptical intellect. Here it is. This is a scientific and spiritual voyage unlike any I have taken before."
--Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Authentic Happiness

"This is exactly the book that so many of us are looking for. Writing with his characteristic wit, brilliance, and tenderhearted skepticism, Robert Wright tells us everything we need to know about the science, practice, and power of Buddhism."
--Susan Cain, bestselling author of Quiet

"Robert Wright brings his sharp wit and love of analysis to good purpose, making a compelling case for the nuts and bolts of how meditation actually works. This book will be useful for all of us, from experienced meditators to hardened skeptics who are wondering what all the fuss is about."

--Sharon Salzberg, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and bestselling author of Real Happiness

"What happens when someone steeped in evolutionary psychology takes a cool look at Buddhism? If that person is, like Robert Wright, a gifted writer, the answer is this surprising, enjoyable, challenging, and potentially life-changing book."
--Peter Singer, professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of Ethics in the Real World

"Joyful and insightful... both entertaining and informative."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A well-organized, freshly conceived introduction to core concepts of Buddhist thought.... Wright lightens the trek through some challenging philosophical concepts with well-chosen anecdotes and a self-deprecating humor."
--Kirkus Reviews <br

"A sublime achievement."
--Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

"Cool, rational, and dryly cynical, Robert Wright is an unlikely guide to the Dharma and 'not-self.' But in this extraordinary book, he makes a powerful case for a Buddhist way of life and a Buddhist view of the mind. With great clarity and wit, he brings together personal anecdotes with insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive science to defend an ancient yet radical world-view. This is a truly transformative work."
--Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University and author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

"What a terrific book. The combination of evolutionary psychology, philosophy, astute readings of Buddhist tradition, and personal meditative experience is absolutely unique and clarifying."
--Jonathan Gold, professor of religion at Princeton University and author of Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu's Unifying Buddhist Philosophy

"Regardless of their own religious or spiritual roots, many open-minded readers who accompany [Wright] on this journey will find themselves agreeing with him."
--Shelf Awareness --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Review

“A sublime achievement.”
―Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

“Provocative, informative and... deeply rewarding.... I found myself not just agreeing [with] but applauding the author.”
―The New York Times Book Review

“This is exactly the book that so many of us are looking for. Writing with his characteristic wit, brilliance, and tenderhearted skepticism, Robert Wright tells us everything we need to know about the science, practice, and power of Buddhism.”
―Susan Cain, bestselling author of Quiet

“I have been waiting all my life for a readable, lucid explanation of Buddhism by a tough-minded, skeptical intellect. Here it is. This is a scientific and spiritual voyage unlike any I have taken before.”
―Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Authentic Happiness

“A fantastically rational introduction to meditation…. It constantly made me smile a little, and occasionally chuckle…. A wry, self-deprecating, and brutally empirical guide to the avoidance of suffering.”
―Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

“[A] superb, level-headed new book.”
―Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

“Robert Wright brings his sharp wit and love of analysis to good purpose, making a compelling case for the nuts and bolts of how meditation actually works. This book will be useful for all of us, from experienced meditators to hardened skeptics who are wondering what all the fuss is about.”
―Sharon Salzberg, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and bestselling author of Real Happiness

“What happens when someone steeped in evolutionary psychology takes a cool look at Buddhism? If that person is, like Robert Wright, a gifted writer, the answer is this surprising, enjoyable, challenging, and potentially life-changing book.”
―Peter Singer, professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of Ethics in the Real World

“Delightfully personal, yet broadly important.”
―NPR

“Rendered in a down-to-earth and highly readable style, with witty quips and self-effacing humility that give the book its distinctive appeal and persuasive power.”
―America Magazine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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From Australia

Gina

3.0 out of 5 stars Oscillating thoughts

Reviewed in Australia on 8 January 2018

Verified Purchase

From the onset, I immediately liked what I was reading, but as I progressed further and further into the book, I started losing interest. This is not to discount the author and his superior knowledge on this subject, with all due respect, but more about my mindset at the time of reading this book.

Let me explain.

I'm by no means an expert on meditation or on any science around the philosophy of meditation and enlightenment, so my boredom came about because I felt like I'd acquired this knowledge before, either through having read similar, or from having explored meditation in my earlier life (this sounds arrogant of me, but I promise you, it's not intended to sound like that at all), and because the author tended to sermonise too much, in my opinion, which I found very annoying.

I think that the minute I realised this about the book, is about the time that I simply switched off and lost interest, but regardless, I still read it to the end, because I don't like leaving books unfinished and at least wanted to give the author the due respect to read his book to the end.

Having said this, there were bits in the book that resonated with me, especially because it seemed 'common core' as the author puts it. The bits where he speaks of questioning an emotion and getting an answer, and suddenly the emotion is gone! I've done this many times before in the course of my entire life, and I was thrilled that the author had also had this experience. An example of this experience would be in which I'd suddenly be in a situation where I'd placed a judgement call (be it subconsciously) of someone new to me, and because of that judgement call, I'd find myself feeling aggravated, only to then realise in an instant that I'm feeling this way and to check-in with myself and ask the magic question, why? Why am I feeling this way about that person? And as soon as I'd get my answer, it's like an epiphany and the sky opens up and the angels in the universe are all suddenly playing a harp together, and instantly, whatever feelings and thoughts I had of that person, positive or negative, it's gone.

Other than that, the other stuff in his book, was 'common core,' stuff that you may already know and may have tried before, such as; meditate. Still the mind. Feel the emptiness. Know you are nothing and simultaneously know that you are something, that is in the here and now, forever more. Easy done for some of us, but not so easy for some of us. For me. What can I say? I'm here, right now. My mind is actively active, but can be a blank as I focus on my breath or focus on simply being.

You get the gist.

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Scott K

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for everyone

Reviewed in Australia on 21 July 2020

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Although I have been meditating and reaping the rewards for year, little did I know that if I improved my technique, the benefits would double.

This book taught me how to improve my technique and reap the benefits.

It's easy reading and even if you have no interest in Buddhism, it's much more about that.

It teaches how ’not to take anything for granted’ wonderful whether you are a meditater like me, or for someone who just needs a little assistance getting out of the daily anxieties and potholes we find ourselves in.

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David N, Canberra, Australia

4.0 out of 5 stars Ignore the title - a secular investigation of western Buddhism psychology and why meditation helps

Reviewed in Australia on 6 March 2020

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Not-self – the idea that there is no executive function within our conscious mind – the self is an illusion as we react to many stimuli within our minds, esp feelings. The best given example is jealousy, when it arises and we are not in control.

Robert Wright “Budhhism is right” – (you have to get beyond the awful title!) His position is that modern and esp evolutionary psychology accords with Buddha on much of this (so what), and that mindful meditation can help get some measure of clarity..

Seemingly knowledgeable and uses lots of citations (haven't investigated how credible they are, but presented as eminent psychologists and taken on trust). His delivery is a little flippant and irreverent to a degree – so easy to read and amusing at times.

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enrico

2.0 out of 5 stars I was waiting for this book like a kid waiting for a lolly

Reviewed in Australia on 27 June 2018

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I was waiting for this book like a kid waiting for a lolly.

and always when you image something big, reality is different..from the title, i was expect a book that can open my mind, with scientific proof about Buddhism, and the why, the book is very hard to understand ( i'm not english native), and very very boring about personal history, personal fact from the past, so he became heavier and heavier, i didn't finished it, but i was expecting something more focus on why, examples, studies, scientific way plus personal experience. i found other book much more interesting than this one.

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meditatecreate

5.0 out of 5 stars An absolutely brilliant book. A thorough and entertaining dissertation on Buddhism ...

Reviewed in Australia on 10 February 2018

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An absolutely brilliant book. A thorough and entertaining dissertation on Buddhism in a way that is accessible to those who are not Buddhist. Wright is a captivating writer. This book is a must read.

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Claire Martenson

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting

Reviewed in Australia on 23 December 2019

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SO interesting. Love this book. I have suggested this to many friends

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Geoffrey

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Buddhism book I've read for a long time

Reviewed in Australia on 13 February 2018

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Best Buddhism book I've read for a long time. But you have to take time, trying to understand the influenced of Western psychology and Buddhism can be difficult. He is a great writer. Read The Moral Animal also.

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Andrew G. Marshall

4.0 out of 5 stars Emptiness and Not-Self Two Buddhist ideas and how they could change your life

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 January 2018

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We see the world through the distorting lens of natural selection - that's the central idea in Wright's enlightening book - but what is good for getting our genes passed onto the next generation (all that natural selection cares about) does not necessarily make for the good life. However, many centuries ago Buddhism came up with a way to look beyond our knee jerk reactions of attraction and repulsion. It is called mindfulness meditation and Wright adds modern knowledge from neuroscience and psychology to show how we can have a truer sense of our best interests and thereby gain more self-control.

In particular, he is interested in two Buddhist concepts: not self and emptiness. Incidentally, these are two ideas I have long struggled with... Let's start with emptiness because Wright helped me finally nail this idea. Although we see, for example, our home as the source of security, continuity and lots of warm feelings associated with family, it is really just a pile of bricks and mortar. In the Buddhist sense it is an empty concept onto which we have projected all these emotions. Sure, our home evokes lots of strong reaction but a passing stranger would just see a house and react to the architecture or the location - which once again carries various cultural projections about whether a detached house is better than a semi-detached and how close it is to shops or how remote (which are all equally arbitrary criteria). As a therapist, I'm used to the concept that nothing is inherently good or bad but coloured by how we marshal our experiences, our prejudices and our expectations.

So good so far... but not-self is a much tougher idea. What I did find interesting is that Wright scuppers the idea of self as CEO which sits somewhere inside us and decides rationally what actions to take. Instead he uses neuroscience to explain that we have various modules that take charge. Rather than fighting temptation - for example to eat high sugar and fat foods - he suggests using the acronym: RAIN. Recognise the feeling, Accept it, Investigate the feeling and finally - the hard bit but meditation apparently helps - to Non-identify with the feeling and have Non-attachment to it. In this way the urge is allowed to form but does not get constantly re-inforced by the short term pleasure of, for example, eating the cake. Thus the link to the reward is broken and although the urge might still blossom without gratification it reduces and ultimately subsides.

The downside to this book is that Wright - like the majority of us - is a relative beginner to meditation and when it comes to seeking clarifications about Buddhism and enlightenment, he has to interview people further along the road. My suspicion is he often hears what he wants to hear, simplifying the arguments and glossing over the complexities of his case. Having said that I am convinced that I need to meditate more and take on board the concept of emptiness - because it is my attachment to particular things and outcomes which is often the source of so my unhappiness.

A useful book that I will stay with me for a long time and I recommend to others who want to take the red pill and see the 'truth'.

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Matt Mills

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books I've read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 March 2019

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As someone who's a scientist but also has an interest in secular buddhism, this book is amazing and I can't recommend it enough. Wright does a great job of taking you on a journey of logic, not for the purpose of converting anyone to a buddhist way of thinking, but just to simply show that the buddha's philosophy makes a lot of sense. The buddha made observations about human psychology thousands of years ago, and Wright excellently puts that into the context of modern living.

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Andrew Bill

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, prepare to start being challenged.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 December 2017

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Just read Evolutionary Psychology by David Buss and as I have been trying to understand Buddhism for 50 years or so, I wondered how the two related to each other. The net immediately identified Why Buddhism is True and the rather brave author delivered abundantly. He confirmed the idea that dukkha as interpreted as unsatisfactoriness would enhance survival to reproduce. Mr Wright's honest description of his experiences during meditation are very helpful. He clarified the emptiness/formless ideas and helped me understand 'conditioning' very clearly. His discussion of no self enabled me to identify two slightly different points of view, one where the thoughts and feelings are not part of you which is his point of view, and the other where the thoughts and feelings are part of you, but not all of you, which I lean towards. Perhaps the other aspect he clarified that the word attachment could, depending on context, mean being 'lost in thought' i.e. conscious awareness being entrained in the thought stream as opposed to the mindfulness observation of the thought stream, is related to the two points of view about no self. His discussion about how the loving kindness towards all sentient beings could arise was not convincing to me, and would obviously be a great step towards avoiding conflict, but if we did see through the little tricks natural selection has programmed into us we may stop reproducing.

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From other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Don’t Miss this Superb Book...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 February 2019

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This book is very different (in a good way) to many on Buddhism because it dares to approach the subject from some unique and intriguing perspectives that I suspect will thoroughly enthral you.

While my Favourite Book on Eastern Philosophy / Religion remains Freedom From the Know (by that acknowledge Master Krishnamurti) the Book under review is now firmly in my Top 3 Sharing a shelf with the aforesaid, and with Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now.

To share bookshelf space with Krishnamurti and Eckhart Tolle, you’ve really got to deliver something special - this book most definitely does! Think you’ll love it.

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Dennis Farcinsen Leth

5.0 out of 5 stars Buddhism and modern psychology.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 October 2020

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This is an amazing book that tries to unveil why buddhism is true. I started reading the book with a little background from various mindfullness and meditation books and as an experienced meditator.

It's a great book and it reaches some of the same conclusions as prof. Peter Elsass did in my native danish language. Modern western world can learn a lot from buddhism in ways that would bring our mental state in balance (if it is in unbalance).

The book is written with enormous insight into meditation, buddhism and psychology.

Sometimes Robert gets a little bit to educating and 'know it all' but that actually suits this book.

I can highly recommend it.

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Tham Chee Wah

5.0 out of 5 stars A breakdown of an illusive concept

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 September 2019

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For someone who would like to have the illusive meditation dissected and explained, this is the go-to book. The theories are being structured and explained with insights and laid out in their simplest form.

Pick this up if you’ve doubts about meditation. In this book’s context, the author uses his own meditation experiences and encounters to bring readers to at least understand that the actions or inactions will lead to a blissful awareness. In this book, the author talks about the Buddhist meditation practice.

A lively and genuine experience-to-conceptual presentation of a daily practice, when done conscientiously, liberates the mind. For any novice, first timer, even a doubter, the message from this book is - why not? Try it.

For me, I’ve been doing daily meditation for decades. I truly appreciate the author’s work, beautiful, genuine and touching.

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TimG7

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 August 2020

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Disappointed. The reviews suggested almost a life changing read. It started very well. As the book progressed I switched off. I felt it was over complicated in parts and explanations could of been clearer and shorter. If you are looking at an introduction to Buddhism I wouldnt suggest this as a starting point. It was like reading a book by someone who never quite gets to the point until the last minute. I try very hard to focus on the positives but it felt like the author was trying to make the subject over intellectual in his presentation. Less is more.

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savagegardener

3.0 out of 5 stars Unsatisfying Mishmash.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 January 2021

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After reading any book, I spend some time asking myself if I learnt anything useful from it, or if it made me look at the world in a way that I hadn't considered before, and in this case the answers to both these questions is a resounding "no". The trouble is that this attempt by an academic, who happens to have dipped his toes in a bit of meditation, to then try and pull together strands of philosophy, science, and various flavours of Buddhism into a coherent whole is a complete failure. In the realms of the spiritual and the mystical, logic , and dissection by the intellect , rarely, if ever, will arrive at the truth. The book has interesting parts, but at times it's simply too long winded, and in the end it was a relief to finish it. For any serious spiritual seeker, I strongly recommend reading and watching the work of Eckhart Tolle or Sadhguru, or lesser known teachings from Robert Goodwin. If you want science, go to a scientist, if you want spirituality go to the great spiritual teachers of our time. If you want a wishy washy soup of both that satisfies neither appetite, read this.

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J. Morgan

1.0 out of 5 stars Became annoying.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2021

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This if course may just be me as a lot of things in my life start out OK but end up being annoying (I'll introduce you to a string of my X's one day if you like).

Take this sentence: "I don't know from first hand experience what it would be like to take LSD and follow it with a heroin chaser..." But guess what? Within one sentence he's off comparing this imaginary experience that he's never had - to one he HAS had meditating. Huh? It's all a bit like that. And it's all a bit 'let's sit down and me explain how to be happy'. Really? Basically he's a bit of a bliss ninny. Looking for permanent happiness. Never a good idea that.

Up to you but I'd save my money if I knew now what I didn't know then.

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(Who knows)

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it! Thought provoking.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 November 2018

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The book got me thinking. Always a good sign from a book.

I also agree with the title of the book (Though it does come across as arrogant). If any spiritual movement has got it right, Buddhism has got the closest in my honest opinion. The book describes a grown up version of spirituality thats not stuck in the middle ages and actually encourages you to use and master your mind (rather than shutting it down and believing what you are told to believe).

Most recommended from me!

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Thomas H.

3.0 out of 5 stars More the science of meditation than a real discussion on buddhism

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 April 2020

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A largely average book on Buddhism. I think the naming is largely wrong. It's a good book if you want the health benefits of meditation and the health benefits of 'buddhism,' which the book oversimplifies to the point where it ignores the spirituality Buddhism entails but not good if you actually want to discover more about buddhism as I did. Maybe not a fault of the book, but perhaps a mis-advertisment.

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MikeW

1.0 out of 5 stars Uninspiring and boring.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 December 2020

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This book started off with a lot of promise, relating our natural reactions to evolution. I was hoping for some useful insights. However after a while I found it became tedious and I lost interest. It became so boring that I struggled to get to the end. It didn't seem to progress and it certainly didn't attract me to Buddhism at all. The tenets of Buddhism are far too vague and difficult to understand and frankly don't make sense. If you are looking for some inspiration or a way to help you cope with problems I advise you to give this a miss.

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Paulo

5.0 out of 5 stars Good mix of science and faith ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 February 2021

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If of course, faith is the right word...

I listened to the audio book, as is almost always the case the audio was off putting at times, because I am from the UK not the USA and we are different. I gave five stars because in the end all the distracting language, phrasing and accent didn't matter. I learned and developed from reading this book and I will go back to it time and again.

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Sejin, start your review of Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

Jan 23, 2018Roy Lotz rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: misanthropology, religion-mysticism-theology, orientalism

A far more accurate title for this book would be Why Mindfulness Meditation is Good. For as Wright—who does not consider himself a Buddhist—admits, he is not really here to talk about any form of traditional Buddhism. He does not even present a strictly “orthodox” view of any secular, Western variety of Buddhism. Instead, this is a rather selective interpretation of some Buddhist doctrines in the light of evolutionary psychology.

Wright’s essential message is that the evolutionary process that shaped the human brain did not adequately program us for life in the modern world; and that mindfulness meditation can help to correct this bad programming.

The first of these claims is fairly uncontroversial. To give an obvious example, our love of salt, beneficial when sodium was hard to come by in natural products, has become maladaptive in the modern world where salt is cheap and plentiful. Our emotions, too, can misfire nowadays. Caring deeply that people have a high opinion of you makes sense when you are, say, living in a small village full of people you know and interact with daily; but it makes little sense when you are surrounded by strangers on a bus.

This mismatch between our emotional setup and the newly complex social world is one reason for rampant stress and anxiety. Something like a job interview—trying to impress a perfect stranger to earn a livelihood—simply didn’t exist for our ancestors. This can also explain tribalism, which Wright sees as the most pressing danger of the modern world. It makes evolutionary sense to care deeply for oneself and one’s kin, with some close friends thrown in; and those who fall outside of this circle should, following evolutionary logic, be treated with suspicion—which explains why humans are so prone to dividing themselves into mutually antagonistic groups.

But how can mindfulness meditation help? Most obviously, it is a practice designed to give us some distance from our emotions. This is done by separating the feeling from its narrative. In daily life, for example, anger is never experienced “purely”; we always get angry about something; and the thought of this event is a huge component of its experience. But the meditator does her best to focus on the feeling itself, to examine its manifestation in her body and brain, while letting go of the corresponding narrative. Stripped of the provoking incident, the feeling itself ceases to be provocative; and the anger may even disappear completely.

Explained in this way, mindfulness meditation is the mirror image of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In CBT the anger is attacked from the opposite side: by focusing on the narrative and subjecting it to logical criticism. In my experience, at least, the things one tells oneself while angry rarely stand up to cool analysis. And when one ceases to believe in the thought, the feeling disappears. The efficacy of both mindfulness meditation and CBT, then, is based on the interdependence of feeling and thought. If separated—either by focusing on the feeling during meditation, or the thought through analysis—the emotion disappears.

This, in a nutshell, is how mindfulness meditation can be therapeutic. But Wright wants to make a far more grandiose claim: that mindfulness meditation can reveal truths about the nature of mind, the world, and morality.

One of the central ideas of Buddhism is that of “emptiness”: that the enlightened meditator sees the world as empty of essential form. The first time I encountered this idea in a Buddhist text it made no sense to me; but Wright gives it an intriguing interpretation. Our brain, designed to survive, naturally assigns value to things in our environment based on how useful or harmful they are to us. These evaluations are, according to Wright’s theory, experienced as emotional reactions. I have quite warm and fuzzy feelings about my laptop, for example; and even the communal computers where I work evoke in me a comforting sense of familiarity and utility.

These emotions, which are sometimes very tiny indeed, are what give experiential reality a sense of essence. The emotions, in other words, help us to quickly identify and use objects: I don’t have to closely examine the computers, for example, since the emotion brings their instrumental qualities quickly to my attention. The advantages of this are obvious to anyone in a hurry. Likewise, this emotional registering is equally advantageous in avoiding danger, since taking time to ponder a rattlesnake isn’t advisable.

But the downside is that we can look at the world quite narrowly, ignoring the sensuous qualities of objects in favor of an instrumental view. Visual art actively works against this tendency, I think, by creating images that thwart our normal registering system, thus prompting us into a sensuous examination of the work. Good paintings make us into children again, exploring the world without worrying about making use of things. Mindfulness meditation is supposed to engender this same attitude, not just with regards to a painting, but to everything. Stripped of these identifying emotional reactions, the world might indeed seem “empty”—empty of distinctions, though full of rich sensation.

With objects, it is hard to see why this state of emptiness would be very desirable. (Also it should be said that this idea of micro-emotions serving as registers of essential distinctions is Wright’s interpretation of the psychological data, and is rather speculative.) But with regards to humans, this mindset might have its advantages. Instead of attributing essential qualities of good and bad to somebody we might see that their behavior can vary quite a bit depending on circumstances, and this can make us less judgmental and more forgiving.

Wright also has a go at the traditional Buddhist idea that the self is a delusion. According to what we know about the brain, he says, there is no executive seat of consciousness. He cites the famous split-brain experiments, and others like it, to argue that consciousness is not the powerful decision-maker we once assumed, but is more like a publicity agent: making our actions seem more cogent to others.

This is necessary because, underneath the apparent unity of conscious experience, there are several domain-specific “modules”—such as for sexual jealousy, romantic wooing, and so on—that fight amongst themselves in the brain for power and attention. Each module governs our behavior in different ways; and environmental stimuli determine which module is in control. Our consciousness gives a sense of continuity and coherence to this shifting control, which makes us look better in the eyes of our peers—or that’s how the theory goes, which Wright says is well-supported.

In any case, the upshot of this theory still would not be that the self doesn’t exist; only that the self is more fragmented and less executive than we once supposed. Unfortunately, the book steeply declines in quality in the last few chapters—where Wright tackles the most mystical propositions of Buddhism—when the final stage of the no-self argument is given. This leads him into the following speculations:

If our thoughts are generated by a variety of modules, which use emotion to get our attention; and if we can learn to dissociate ourselves from these emotions and see the world as “empty”; if, in short, we can reach a certain level of detachment from our thoughts and emotions: then, perhaps, we can see sensations arising in our body as equivalent to sensations arising from without. And maybe, too, this state of detachment will allow us to experience other people’s emotions as equivalent to our own, like how we feel pain from seeing a loved one in pain. In this case, can we not be said to have seen the true oneness of reality and the corresponding unreality of personal identity?

These lofty considerations aside, when I am struck by a car they better not take the driver to the emergency room; and when Robert Wright gets a book deal he would be upset if they gave me the money. My point is that this experience of oneness in no way undermines the reality of distinct personal identity, without which we could hardly go a day. And this state of perfect detachment is arguably, contra Wright, a far less realistic way of seeing things, since being genuinely unconcerned as to whom a pain belonged, for example, would make us unable to help. (Also in this way, contra Wright, it would make us obviously less moral.)

More generally, I think Wright is wrong in insisting that meditation can help us to experience reality more “truly.” Admittedly, I know from experience that meditation can be a great aid to introspection and can allow us to deal with our emotions more effectively. But the notion that a meditative experience can allow us to see a metaphysical truth—the unreality of self or the oneness of the cosmos—I reject completely. An essentially private experience cannot confirm or deny anything, as Wright himself says earlier on.

I also reject Wright’s claim that meditation can help us to see moral reality more clearly. By this he means that the detachment engendered by meditation can allow us to see every person as equally valuable rather than selfishly considering one’s own desires more important.

Now, I do not doubt that meditation can make people calmer and even nicer. But detachment does not lead logically to any moral clarity. Detachment is just that—detachment, which means unconcern; and morality is impossible without concern. Indeed, it seems to me that an enlightened person would be even less likely to improve the world, since they can accept any situation with perfect equanimity. Granted, if everyone were perfectly enlightened there would be no reason to improve anything—but I believe the expression about hell freezing over applies here.

Aside from the intellectual weakness of these later chapters, full as they are of vague hand-waving, the book has other flaws. I often got the sense that Wright was presenting the psychological evidence very selectively, emphasizing the studies and theories that accorded with his interpretations of Buddhism, without taking nearly enough time to give the contrasting views. On the other hand, he interprets the Buddhist doctrines quite freely—so in the end, when he says that modern science is confirming Buddhism, I wonder what is confirming what, exactly. And the writing, while usually quite clear, was too hokey and jokey for me.

Last, I found his framing of meditation as a way to save humanity from destructive tribalism as both naïve and misguided. In brief, I think that we ought to try to create a society in which the selfish interests of the greatest number of people are aligned. Selfish attachment, while potentially narrow, need not be if these selves are in enmeshed in mutually beneficial relationships; and some amount of attachment, with its concomitant dissatisfactions, seems necessary for people to exert great effort in improving their station and thus changing our world.

Encouraging people to become selflessly detached, on the other hand, besides being unrealistic, also strikes me as generally undesirable. For all the suffering caused by attachment—of which I am well aware—I am not convinced that life is better without it. As Orwell said: “Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.” (less)

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Aug 13, 2017Darwin8u rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, religion

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― Philip K. Dick

description

For years I've told people I was a Zen Mormon. More as a way to squirm into the edges of LDS cosmology, and less because I was practicing anything really approaching a hybrid of Buddhism and Mormonism. But I've always been attracted to Buddhism, like many Westerners before me. I'm thinking of Herman Hesse, W. Somerset Maugham, Jack Kerouac, and Peter Matthiessen. I've always been attracted to the intersection of cultures, philosophies, etc. So, I guess it is natural for me to be attracted (if somewhat lazily) to Western Buddhism, Zen gardens, and the potential of mediation.

I'm also a big, nerdy fan of Robert Wright. I've read most of his books. It is probably easier to just post the one book of his I haven't read, rather than list the ones I have.* I enjoy Wright's evolution from Evolutionary Psychology to Buddhist writings. I think the premise of Wright's book is mostly correct. There is something that evolution has burdoned us with, that meditation (specifically Mindfulness Meditation) and Buddhism can help us with.

The books title, I should note here, IS a little off putting. I think Wright almost meant it as a joke (with a hook of truth). It comes across like some Mormon, Southern Baptist or Jehovah's Witness tract; a bit evangelical. But Wright is not just trying to convert the reader (and he's not exactly NOT trying to convert the reader either). He lays out pretty good arguments about how Evolutionary Psychology and behavioral psychology show (lots of caveats, obviously the mind is complex and not everyone agrees with everything) that a lot of our feelings, motives, choices are built on genetic coding which might actually make us unhappy, unhealthy, etc. The Buddhists seemed to have climbed that mountain before us. Wright seems less of a philosophical or religious Buddhist and more of a pragmatic Buddhist. I think his time studying how religion, the mind, behaviors, etc., have evolved over time has also provided him with ample evidence about how these traits that were evolved to help our more primitive selves reproduce, survive, etc., don't always help us in a modern age that includes HR departments, Facebook, politics, etc. Buddhism, Wright would argue, can help untangle some of these evolutionary knots.

So? What does this book mean for me? Someone who calls himself (mostly in jest) a Zen Mormon who has spent exactly 10 minutes mediating in a half-assed way? Well, I'm thinking of hooking up with a local Buddhist/Meditation group and giving Mindful Mediation a try. I'm pretty chill, but I think mindfulness can only help. I'm also not above exploring truth beyond my own familiar cosmology. When I told my wife and kids of my plan, they did laugh however. My wife suggested meditation might not be easy for me, given my competitive nature.

Wife: "You can't win at meditation."
D8u: "Sure you can, isn't enlightenment basically winning?"
Daughter: "Yeah Mom, the Buddha definitely won."
D8U: "See?"

My daughter, laughing, said the closest I've come to meditating was my nightly scalding bath, with headphones in my ears, a cold diet Dr. Pepper, and candy. She thinks anything that would help me unplug one or two of my sensory addictions might not be a bad thing. I agree. It is worth a shot.

* I haven't read Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. (less)

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Aug 11, 2017Mehrsa rated it it was amazing

I've read every book Wright's written and all have been fantastic. This is my favorite. It's the perfect book for the cultural moment we're in. Forget the title--it's misleading. The book is a nice primer on meditation and evolutionary theory with some helpful insights. Basically, our brains are not wired for peace and happiness--only to propel our genes forward. There's a yearning for more programmed into us and the only antidote is mindfulness meditation. I've read a ton of evolutionary theory and a bunch of buddhism lite, but this one is exactly the synthesis I've been waiting for (without knowing it). It changed the way I think about meditation and my thoughts and feelings. Read it and pass it along. We all need this book right now or we're going to nuke ourselves off the planet or otherwise destroy it through greed in no time. (less)

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Dec 17, 2019Mario the lone bookwolf rated it really liked it

Shelves: 0-mental-strength, wright-robert

This is a fact-based and serious book that uses brain science, evolutionary psychology/biology and sociobiology to prove each claimed assumption and maybe one of the best explanations of how and why mindfulness and a livelong training and evolution of meditation and self-reflection might be advisable.

A few examples: Someone working hard and achieving amazing results after decades of training and exercising to become a leading expert, master, maybe even a prodigy, world elite. People bursting full of enthusiasm, charisma and happiness, spreading it as if it was a renewable energy source they could never run short of. A classical, stereotypical Buddhistic monk or a kung-fu master. A surgeon, soldier or emergency doctor, staying cool and focused for hours. Etc.

They all have what all others are desperately searching for, control over their minds. Be it innate, epigenetic or just regular practice, guess what way could work for nearly everyone? By starting practicing right now and never stop being mindful again many of personal, unreachable seeming goals can become possible. But that´s just about controlling the mad monkey in one´s single brain.

Where other books about the topic end, Wright begins to dissect the functioning of all aspects of a human mind and how a loss of objective serenity just always leads to problems, no matter if it is a family of 4 or a state of hundreds of millions or humankind. All those group dynamics, ego, being right or wrong, getting angry, sad, etc. were really fancy vehicles as long as we were nothing more than animals, but in highly developed civilizations, where uncontrolled emotions are no evolutionary advantage anymore, they just bring pain and sadness. Of course, it´s about the bad, negative emotions, not cutting love and joy out of one's soul.

Wright has the idea of a new, real-life based Buddhism without focus on afterlife, reincarnation, heaven, hell, etc. and instead a basis on the philosophical and scientific ideas that help everyone to become a better human by integrating the knowledge of psychology and evolutionary biology/psychology at a purely scientific base without any faith or potential for extremism.

Happiness and joy is a free choice and everyone can freely choose between it and neutral or pessimistic, but both the neurological and Buddhistic approach show that it might just hurt oneself. It is much healthier and makes one stronger, because we are social animals that are functioning better, be it as extroverted people lovers or as introverted stay at homers, when we enjoy what we do. It´s a shield against any harm and it´s an armor that is easy to wear and impossible to permeate, because if someone is cool about everything and takes everything negative, even provocations, positive, she/he is indestructible. In contrast, someone who protects her/himself by anger and hate, is permanently boiling her/himself in everything negative the biochemistry of the body can provide and is much easier to attack or be provoked to overreact.

As long as we were even more primitive and hairier apes (how I love calling everyone a monkey, hey, chimpanzee over there, yea, looking at you, do you want a banana? Don´t forget, anger is your enemy, I am just helping you, don´t throw sh** at me please.) many of those mental dysfunctions were helpful. Find oneself great and think that everyone else is an idiot. Check. Prone to group dynamics, opportunism and hierarchies to build mighty tribes. Done. Building a conscience, ego and higher intelligence by repeatedly believing and thinking the same things to shape the wetware. Bingo. And then, well, it quickly escalated, because narcissistic, cognitive dissonant, psycho primates (ha, got you again!) are a true pain in the gluteus maximus for themselves, all other groups and those poor, innocent planet under their swift paws.

A short utopia: Out of calm and mindful minds grow more when they reproduce and the more they get the more influence they have on the state and if everyone would be enlightened and realized how destructive ego and negative emotions are world peace and a sustainable economic system would come and, but wait, stop, dystopia just called, saying humans are humans. The sad end of the story.

No, just joking, forget the misguided and deluded ones who aren´t guilty, just had no chance and are impossible to heal, focus on the next generation instead. With each kid, able to control her/his emotions, self-reflection, self-criticism, stay objective, believe nothing, stay evolving and adapting and always curious, you make Buddha laugh.

And questioning and changing anything may bring us away from many self-destructive paths we are currently on as humankind, to realize that there may be the too objective, too easy and egoistic and wrong Buddhistic approach to say that there is no right and wrong, nothing matters, no true or false, the mind is empty, total objectivity is king, all is an illusion, etc. That´s a sophisticated way to say that one's own peace of mind and easy, stressless life is more important than to stay motivated, positive, neutral and engaged in both civil society and politics to make a change happen.

Not all that seems bad is just evil and not all that seems good is pure gold, instead the wrong, destructive, dangerous and misleading ideas out of all ideas humans ever had, have to be eliminated because there is just a collective way in the middle of the road together, not with everyone walking angrily, sulky and offended as far at each side of this metaphorical entity that is our all lives.

But all compromises have to be evidence-based, no soft science, no mumbo jumbo humanities, just real, hard-science based long term, reproducible studies, not funded by anyone interested in a certain outcome. This is also how this amazing author wrote a must-read book and how we as a society can overcome our animalistic roots, urges and instincts to something more worthy of the Latin name sapiens in the article description.

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindful...

Look, in a nutshell made a video too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPPPF... (less)

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Oct 18, 2020Sean Barrs rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 4-star-reads, spirituality-buddhism

“Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”

True happiness is exceedingly hard to find in this life. And when I hit hard times I always find myself drawn to Buddhist teachings as a way to detach myself from my thoughts, feelings and desires in order to become mindful and live in the moment.

Whilst not a miracle cure, the strongest benefit gained by Buddhist practice is the ability to gain perspective and understand that often it is our own reactions that cause us to suffer internally. The wisdom gained through achieving contentment with our life can lead to the emptiness Buddhist's strive for. But these are just words. Achieving them is an entirely different matter.

This is what Wright discusses here, the philosophy of Buddhism and the truth and positiveness behind it. Because it is true if we can embrace it. If we can learn to live it everyday we can achieve some small sense of internal happiness. Initially this is all marginal and preoccupied with the self; however, once we learnt to transform the self we can transform the world and others around us.

So I believe in the truth of Buddhism and this book provides a deep, stimulating and intellectual discussion behind exactly why the truth is such a potent one.

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You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree.
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Oct 25, 2019Otis Chandler rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, self-improvement, psychology, philosophy, buddhism, happiness

3 notes & 42 highlights

This was a really compelling book for me - it made me think deeply about myself and the world and opened my eyes a bit too. It's no coincidence that multiple of my smarter friends have told me to read it!

Meditation is a subject that is interesting to me because of how many smart/successful people that I've talked to or read about highly recommend it. I wanted to better understand it, but I didn't predict all the directions this book would take.

One of the main interesting takeaways was how strongly the book ties the theory of natural selection with meditation.

"So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?” the answer, at the most basic level, isn’t “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.” No, at the most basic level the answer is “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation."

This makes sense, we evolved over millions of years according to an algorithm that simply said: the ones who live pass on their genes. This has a lot of implications however, the foremost being that our ancestors - the ones that passed their genes on to us - evolved to be particularly good at finding food, mating and having kids, being alert to and surviving various dangers, and being positive contributors of their tribe (as outcasts don't survive). They did NOT evolve to be "happy".

"Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting."

This to me was a huge insight. I am constantly seeking new experiences, and am fortunate to have experienced many amazing things. But each thrill quickly fades and I find myself worrying about whatever is next remarkably quickly. To know that we were evolved that way on purpose - because our ancestors who killed a mammoth would only survive if they killed another one next week - is both fascinating and illuminating. This is why it is true that money doesn't make you happy, nor do successes in career.

The book delved into our emotions around human relationships a lot, which I found very interesting. Because as much as I would love to say "I don't care what others think of me", it's simply not true. In fact, random encounters with people I don't know and will never see again - can bother me. Also, encounters with people I do know can worry me quite a lot too. So it's somewhat comforting to realize that we evolved to be this way. Interestingly, interactions with strangers is a newer thing to us and has likely added to our modern day stress. The book also talks a lot about essence, as many of us have impressions of others (eg nice, not nice, helpful, jerk, selfish, weird, etc) that aren't really "accurate" - they are just our perceptions, and by being aware of this, it can better help us interact with such people.

"We're designed by natural selection to care—and care a lot—about what other people think of us. During evolution, people who were liked, admired, and respected would have been more effective gene propagators than people who were the opposite. But in a hunter-gatherer village, your neighbors would have had a vast database on your behavior, so you’d be unlikely, on any given day, to do anything that radically revised their opinion of you, for better or worse. Social encounters wouldn’t typically have been high-pressure events."

So meditation can help us by recognizing that our mind is running these "algorithms", which come in the form of emotions, and cause us to "worry" about things, instead of focusing on being present in the moment. By observing which emotions and worries pop up, we can become more aware of them, and somewhat strangely - worry a lot less about them.

"The routine business of mindfulness—observing the world inside you and outside you with inordinate care—can do more than tone down troublesome feelings and enhance your sense of beauty. It can, in a slow, incremental, often uneven yet ultimately systematic way, transform your view of what’s really “out there” and what’s really “in here.” What begins as a modest pursuit—a way to relieve stress or anxiety, cool anger, or dial down self-loathing just a notch—can lead to profound realizations about the nature of things, and commensurately profound feelings of freedom and happiness. An essentially therapeutic endeavor can turn into a deeply philosophical and spiritual endeavor. This is the third virtue of mindfulness meditation: it offers a path to liberation from the Matrix."

The book had an interesting section on "the self". Most of us think there is an "I" inside of us that is calling the shots in our lives, or as the book calls it, our internal "CEO". But in Buddhism, one of the key concepts as you advance is you are supposed to learn that there is no self. But we aren't really in control of ourselves - if we were we wouldn't have all kinds of thoughts all day worrying about or contemplating all kinds of random things. The book proposes that what is really going on is that there are a number of "modules" (or algorithms as I prefer to think) that are competing for our attention. There is the "mating" module, the "get food" module, the "look good socially" module, etc. Any thought or anything we see or hear or smell can easily trigger the emotion that starts any of these modules.

"Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation."

So, to summarize, humans suffer from "dukkha" or unsatisfactoriness, which means we have a constant craving or thirst or desire, which can't be quenched because if we attain our desire we will just have a new one. The only solution is to be mindful of the desires we have. To notice when we have a feeling, to examine the feeling, turn it over until you understand its root. By doing this, it loses its power over you. You can also start to recognize patterns in your thoughts if you do this a lot. The book says meditating 20min a day is a great start, but the difference between 30min a day and 50min is huge, as is the difference between 30min and 90min. But it also seems to imply that a weeklong retreat is likely also required if you really want to see benefits.

"You might say that the path of meditative progress consists largely of becoming aware of the causes impinging on you, aware of the way things manipulate you—and aware that a key link in that manipulation lies in the space where feelings can give rise to tanha, to a craving for pleasant feelings and an aversion to unpleasant feelings. This is the space where mindfulness can critically intervene."

This all leads to a question that is interesting to ponder but the book only touches lightly on, which is that: is the way we evolved the way we need to behave to be happy and thrive in modern times? The answer is likely not as humans over the past 1000 years have changed a lot - even the past 100 years. So how could we help a lot more people be aware of this and what impacts could that have? A good question!

"There’s a lot to dislike about the world we’re born into. It’s a world in which, as the Buddha noted, our natural way of seeing, and of being, leads us to suffer and to inflict suffering on others. And it’s a world that, as we now know, was bound to be that way, given that life on this planet was created by natural selection. Still, it may also be a world in which metaphysical truth, moral truth, and happiness can align, and a world that, as you start to realize that alignment, appears more and more beautiful." (less)

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May 18, 2019William2 rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I disagree with the author’s view of meditation as a study of one’s thought. But then there are so many schools of meditation… I’m primarily interested in the evolutionary psychology angle here, but have to sit through these pages that don’t entirely accord with my Soto Zen dharma. But as Shunryu Suzuki-roshi once said—read Zen Mind, Beginners Mind—there’s something to be gained from all schools of meditation, and we should seek those aspects of any dharma which strengthen our practice instead of seeking to tear down by way of a brittle Western-style critique, which, let’s face it, is little more than dogma-mindset or just plain envy masked by pedantic connoisseurship.

The author goes through the many self-delusions evolution instills in us as a means of making our genes more viable in a hunter-gatherer society. These include our ability to generate fundamentally baseless feel good stories about ourselves as a means of instilling confidence in others; our tendency to convince ourselves that we are more valuable than the average team member.

Our egocentric biases are aided and abetted by the way memory works. Those certain painful events get seared into our memories—perhaps so we can avoid repeating the mistakes that led to them—we are on balance more likely to remember events that reflect favorably on us than those that don’t. . . which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true. (p. 84)

We are in short a species of hustlers. No wonder the one percent is flourishing. (!) Overall the book is too colloquial, too chatty, to be genuinely engaging. I like the evolutionary biology angle but it’s buried among too much padding. Meh. Stopped reading at p. 109. The prose being dull as dishwater. (I say this not really knowing how or why dishwater is dull, just that the simile seems apposite.) (less)

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Aug 07, 2017Brian Bergstrom rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a truly remarkable, fantastic book. It is one of those rare volumes that will turn your head inside out and leave you seeing the world differently, not because he (or it) is extreme, but because reality is extreme; he is sewing together science and philosophy and offering readers a breathtaking tapestry for their consideration. Briefly, his argument is that our minds are populated by evolved psychological adaptations that were naturally selected for their adaptive utility, NOT for seeing the world objectively. And especially when it comes to our feelings and emotions, our minds often saddle us with perceptual and conceptual distortions that lead to unnecessary suffering. This state of affairs, as revealed by psychological science, aligns well with Buddhist renderings of the human predicament, and (even more remarkably) psychological science is also showing that the Buddhist prescription of mindfulness meditation can indeed help alleviate much of this suffering. Mindfulness meditation works as a kind of cognitive exercise (a kind of mental resistance training), that over time affords us distance from the tumultuous workings of our mind and allows us to see things more clearly (which often drains anxiety and anger of their motivational power) and helps foster our ability to chart where our mind goes next. Not only does mindful distance get us closer to the Truth (or at least further from delusion), but Wright argues that it can also bring us closer to moral truth, enhancing our capacity for responding in idealistically ethical ways.

And that's just scratching the surface. The deeper details, duly contemplated, will leave readers enchanted (head often spinning, occasionally agitated). Robert Wright has always had a keen ability to integrate disparate ideas in science and philosophy (stepping back to view things in wider perspective than the original scientists whose work he builds upon) and this book is a gem that will not disappoint those who enjoyed his earlier books (e.g. The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Evolution of God), especially his dry wit, everyday-guy accessibility, pragmatic reasoning, and clear writing.

As a psychology professor who teaches courses in evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and psychology of religion, I'm in something of a unique position to review the work. Certainly I can say that Wright's command of the subject matter, ranging from evolutionary psychology to abstruse Buddhist philosophy, is excellent. (Experts in those fields will find details to quibble about, of course, but Wright does his homework and--to his credit--modestly concedes that his interpretations are his own best renderings. And they are good renderings.)

I think everyone should read this wonderful and important book. I worry that many will be put off by the title alone. I worry that those conversant with the subtleties of Buddhist thought will not invest the time and effort to grapple with the subtleties of psychological science and evolutionary biology (and vice versa). It IS a book that, I think, requires more of a cognitive commitment from readers than others. But it will reward all who do. Whether readers come away in general agreement with Wright or not, I don't think it is possible to read the book and come away WITHOUT a better understanding of yourself and a better appreciation what it means to be human. That alone makes it an engine of insight.

(Thank you to NetGalley for the advance review copy!) (less)

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Sep 29, 2017Radiantflux rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, self-help, spirituality

62nd book of 2017.

I imagine the author at a diner party, demanding complete attention from those present, while he describes at length being at an intense macho meditation retreat in the Maine woods, having the unfortunate luck of sitting next to a fat flatulent person. Telling all present very seriously that he's not the sort of person who is OK with flatulence, especially from other people, especially if they are fat, but because of his very serious (but also very modest) attempts at mediation he was able to step-back from his intense hatred of the person sitting next to him, and was able to experience the beauty of each particular fart in turn, smelling different notes, and if not loving them, at least seeing their beauty for what they are. He also felt some sort of oneness with the farter next too him. Now he tells us how some super-meditator, that he (blush) could never be, was put in a brain scanner, and showed almost no brain response when smelling evil odours. Imagine that! Now throw in some random passage from either Buddhist scripture or some other pre-20th C source to make some sort of weak point. Now repeat for another +300 pages.

I would have been much happier if it had either (1) been a serious attempt at accessing the science and philosophy of meditation and enlightenment; or (2) been offered a serious discussion of Buddhism. The book offers neither. It's a shame because I think the topic itself is worthy of a serious book. (less)

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Oct 02, 2017Indran Fernando rated it did not like it

Even if this book has its occasional thought-provoking moment, my overwhelming reaction is shock at how fluffy and slipshod the writing is. It seems as if Wright submitted a rough draft to make some quick cash. (Why waste time on an editor--just throw a goldfish on the cover and wait for the Whole-Foods-goers to take out their mandala-adorned hemp wallets.) A promising book was undermined by the author's unwillingness to do research or teach himself about Buddhism or anthropology.

Instead, he often takes the easy route by focusing on his own personality, his own anxieties & insecurities. This might have been okay if he had come across as a more likable person, but I felt trapped in a room with an uptight, narcissistic, falsely-modest bloviator. I'm glad to finally be liberated. (less)

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Oct 31, 2017Murtaza rated it really liked it

Growing up I always had a problem reading philosophy books, which often seemed to be written in a way that made them deliberately obtuse and inaccessible. For that reason I was really glad when I discovered the writing of Will Durant, an early 20th century writer who became popular for revisiting the arguments of the great philosophers in a clear and unpretentious language. It struck me as a very American thing to do, and I think with this book Robert Wright does much the same thing with Buddhist philosophy.

The book traces through the core teachings of Buddhism and how they relate to evolutionary biology, which is Wright's area of expertise. Many of our ingrained yet seemingly irrational social behaviors (i.e. flying into a rage while driving, gorging on sweets past the point of hunger) are evolutionary remnants from the time we lived as hunter-gatherers or in small tribes. While once useful these behaviors and feelings are not actually good for us today living in a modern society, nor are they good for what evolutionary biology gears us towards: protecting and spreading our own genes. Since feelings are in some sense a means of getting us to do what's good for us, these behaviors and emotions could be said to correspond to what Buddhists call "false" feelings. This was an interesting hypothesis and is clearly a product of Wright's own expertise in this field.

Much of the book also deals with Wright's own journey as a Buddhist, and he provides many helpful tips about both meditation and mindfulness. Among these are:

1) Consciously recognizing that your mind is wandering during meditation is actually a good thing, because it shows that you aware of the moment, which is the first step towards mindfulness.

2) Rather than you creating them, "thoughts think themselves" in your mind. They try to draw you into embracing them, but you are neither their slave or master. Once you become aware of that, it is easier to dismiss the ones you don't want or that are harmful to you. For example: frivolous thoughts during meditation or anxious ones when you have no reason to be unhappy.

3) Accepting and analyzing your feelings or temptations about something are a means of truly "owning" them and then deciding whether you want to accept them or not (again, you don't have to).

4) Declining to satisfy your temptations is a means of reducing their hold over you in the long term, as it gradually weakens the temptation-reward circuit in your brain.

Wright also briefly discusses some of the more blissful and you could say "supernatural" experiences that he has had while on the Buddhist path. Like writing about how a piece of cake tastes to someone who has never eaten one, this is a difficult thing to do and in a sense it is not really possible to convey in text to someone a thing that they just have to experience. He seems to be aware of this and the book is written in full humility about the limitations of text. It was interesting to me to contrast some of the teachings of Sufism, which I'm more familiar with, with the ideas that animate Buddhist meditation. While there are areas of crossover and perhaps the ending point is similar, I think that they are genuinely different paths.

All in all this was a rewarding book and the product of a deeply humane and thoughtful mind. (less)

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Jun 26, 2019Gabrielle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy, recommended-for-jason, reviewed, non-fiction, own-a-copy, buddhism, read-in-2019

The title is a bit misleading, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. This book is really about Wright wanting you to know why he thinks secular Buddhism makes sense, and why mindfulness meditation is good for you. Wright goes with the basic idea that suffering is caused by our desires, and that our desires are caused by our illusory perception of reality. Buddhist practice aims to bring people out of that state of delusion and suffering, but Wright wanted to know, very practically, how that works. How does keeping the mind still and counting your breath while sitting in front of a wall make things clearer? He uses evolutionary biology and neuropsychology to dig at that question, and I must say that he comes up with very interesting explanations.

I have read plenty about the overlaps of Buddhism and psychology and physics, but the evolutionary biology is a new perspective I hadn’t dwelled on before, I found the information provided by Wright fascinating. Biology, after all, affects our behavior, and the way Wright connects it to the Teachings makes an awful lot of sense. As does the way he explains the role of our conscious mind and the way our emotions often end up taking the wheel.

I liked the passages on fundamental attribution error, as this is something I try to remain very aware of; it goes back to the axiom of grandmotherly wisdom that you should be nice with everyone because you never know their story, and their rudeness might have nothing to do with you, but be part of a greater context you have no knowledge of. Cheesy, but nevertheless important to remember when faced with difficult people.

This book is written in a very accessible, conversational tone, and quite relatable to anyone who first came across Buddhism in the Western world. To anyone who isn’t familiar with the practice and philosophy, it is a clear book on how it all works, but it doesn’t contain any sutras, or anything like that. This is really a purely practical work on how the mind and brain work to defuse harmful habits and behavior when we engage in regular meditation practice.

There is no mysticism or superstition in this book, which I appreciate greatly, as it can be a really helpful resource even for the biggest skeptics. You don’t have to believe in anything supernatural to understand what Wright is saying, nor to understand how meditation works and its effects. I was practicing cognitive behavioral therapy, as recommended by a mental health professional, for a long time before I started practicing zazen; it has been a very important tool for dealing with anxiety, anger, self-confidence and abandonment issues, and when I started getting serious in my Zen practice, the parallels were quite obvious right away. But I was also aware that they had different goals: the first one was to help me function in my daily life without getting paralyzed by the tricks my mind was playing on me, and the second was about reaching a very different kind of clarity. While there are similarities between CBT and zazen, it’s crucial to remember that they do not have the same purpose. I am not 100% on board with blurring the lines between therapy and spiritual practices, even when they feel very similar – which is really the main bone I have to pick with this book. Mindfulness meditation is great tool, but Buddhism is not therapy and should not be sold as such.

I can see how it could have felt very fluffy to some people, but I really think this was meant as an introduction to Buddhist ideas: there are plenty of other books with which one can deepen their understanding of Buddhist philosophy, practice and history. Anyone curious as to how their brain works while they meditate will find this interesting, if occasionally a bit irritating. (less)

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Oct 09, 2017Ken rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: finished-in-2017, contemporary, philosophy-religion

In book titles, the sub-title after the title is a popular but often unnecessary thing. In this case, it's necessary. Why Buddhism Is True is very much indeed about The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.

Especially the science. Or so it struck me, who at times grew impatient with the science aspect. Frankly, I was much more engaged by the Buddhism part of the book--Wright's experiences, chiefly, and his attempts (in Buddhism, there can be nothing but attempts) to explain the religion (which isn't a religion so much as a paradox).

Speaking of, if you read this book, prepare for the paradoxical. Not even Buddhists can agree on Buddhism--and I mean Buddhists from the same branch (be it Mahayana or Theravada or Zen or whatever other sub-categories there might be... and there might very well be).

But back to science, is it that important that Buddhism's precepts be "proven" by science or, more sketchily, by psychology (which, like Buddhism, can be pretty paradoxical itself)? Wright seems to think so. He is in argument mode here, out to show that the "weird" parts of Buddhism are a lot less weird than first glance would lead you to believe.

Me, I'm not worried about such truck when it comes to ~~religion~~ philosophy. But I had no choice but to be here. Meaning: move over Siddhartha. Make room for Darwin. Lots of natural selection, because natural selection works against Buddhism which works against natural selection.

And lots of talk of modules here, too. Good grief. Modules? Something to do with adopted behaviors. Somewhat like the lecture hall in Psych 101, I dozed a bit but kept hearing the word. Like a mantra, maybe. Om... module.

Happily, Wright sees Buddhism-style thinking as the only hope for an increasingly hopeless world. He never mentions He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Neither the one in Washington nor the one in Korea, but both could use a healthy dose of meditation and soul-searching, if there be one to search:

"...we're living in an age when information technologies make it easy for relatively small numbers of people bound by a common enmity to find each other, no matter where on earth they are, and then coordinate to deploy violence. Hatred, even when diffuse and far-flung, has increasingly lethal potential.

"What causes all the hatred? At some level it's always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it's not a reflection of the 'real us'; whereas they and theirs aren't in the right and aren't by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it's not a reflection of the 'real them.' And it doesn't help matters that these reality-distortion fields often magnify, even out-and-out fabricate, the threat posed by them and theirs.

"So, yes, we need to reject the core evolutionary value of the specialness of self. Indeed there's probably never been a time in human history when this rejection was more vital."

The poisonous tribalism Wright sees Buddhism as an antidote for works not only from an international standpoint but from an intranational one. I mean you, red state and blue state where never the purple shall meet. So here's one science quote I did like that might apply:

"[Einstein] said, if you want a deeper understanding of physics, you need to detach yourself from your particular perspective--from any particular perspective--and ask: Suppose I occupied no vantage point? Since I wouldn't be able to ask how fast things are moving relative to me, what exactly would it mean to ask how fast things are moving?"

The answer, of course, is it would change the question entirely, just as Buddhism does. "After all," Wright writes, "without a perspective to serve, there would be no feelings in the first place."

Hoo, boy. Giving up feelings is a hard thing to do. Which is why you best get meditating. Another hard thing to do. But look at how far we've come taking the easy way out by ignoring self-awareness and catering to our desires.

Kind of like the band playing on as the Titanic took on Atlantic, in its way. (less)

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Feb 14, 2018Jake rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, ideology, mind, neuroscience, body

Wright looks at Buddhism through the lens of modern psychology, but with a primary focus on his specialty: Evolutionary Psychology. The book served to be pretty enlightening , as it gave a solid overview of a secular, or "naturalistic " perspective of Buddhism - by showing how many psychological theories that are currently entertained by the scientific community have, all the while ,been accepted(albeit in a implicit sense... very implicit sense) by Buddhists for thousands of years . Well, at least some of them. He acknowledges that there are a ton of schools of thought that can be classified under the category of Buddhism - therefore drawing a universal understanding of all schools is kinda hard. Which, partially invalidates the universality of his thesis. But , I digresss. The book was pretty good as an introduction to some secular perspectives of Buddhism, some modern perspectives in psychology , and an ehhh intro to evo psych. yay

It is well complimented by wrights earlier book on evolutionary psychology, the moral animal . (less)

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A Critic at LargeAugust 7 & 14, 2017 Issue

What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t

Examining the science and supernaturalism of Buddhism.

By Adam Gopnik

July 31, 2017

An author owns a snappy title, and then the snappy title owns the author. Robert Wright, having titled his new book “Why Buddhism Is True,” has to offer a throat-clearing preface and later an apologetic appendix, in order to explain exactly what he means by “Buddhism” and exactly what he means by “true,” while the totality of his book is an investigation into why we think there are “whys” in the world, and whether or not anything really “is.” Wright sets out to provide an unabashedly American answer to all these questions. He thinks that Buddhism is true in the immediate sense that it is helpful and therapeutic, and, by offering insights into our habitual thoughts and cravings, shows us how to fix them. Being Buddhist—that is, simply practicing Vipassana, or “insight” meditation—will make you feel better about being alive, he believes, and he shows how you can and why it does.

Robert Wright argues for meditation as a fully secular form of psychotherapy.

Robert Wright argues for meditation as a fully secular form of psychotherapy.Illustration by Anne Laval

Wright’s is a Buddhism almost completely cleansed of supernaturalism. His Buddha is conceived as a wise man and self-help psychologist, not as a divine being—no miraculous birth, no thirty-two distinguishing marks of the godhead (one being a penis sheath), no reincarnation. This is a pragmatic Buddhism, and Wright’s pragmatism, as in his previous books, can touch the edge of philistinism. Nearly all popular books about Buddhism are rich in poetic quotation and arresting aphorisms, those ironic koans that are part of the (Zen) Buddhist décor—tales of monks deciding that it isn’t the wind or the flag that’s waving in the breeze but only their minds. Wright’s book has no poetry or paradox anywhere in it. Since the poetic-comic side of Buddhism is one of its most appealing features, this leaves the book a little short on charm. Yet, if you never feel that Wright is telling you something profound or beautiful, you also never feel that he is telling you something untrue. Direct and unambiguous, tracing his own history in meditation practice—which eventually led him to a series of weeklong retreats and to the intense study of Buddhist doctrine—he makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear. Buddhist thinkers tend to bridge contradictions with a smile and a paradox and a wave of the hand. “Things exist but they are not real” is a typical dictum from the guru Mu Soeng, in his book on the Heart Sutra. “You don’t have to believe it, but it’s true” is another famous guru’s smiling advice about the reincarnation doctrine. This nimble-footed doubleness may indeed hold profound existential truths; it also provides an all-purpose evasion of analysis.

Still, the Buddhist basics are all here. Sometime around 400 B.C.E.—the arguments over what’s historically authentic and what isn’t make the corresponding arguments in Jesus studies look transparent—a wealthy Indian princeling named Gotama (as the Pali version of his name is rendered) came to realize, after a long and moving spiritual struggle, that people suffer because the things we cherish inevitably change and rot, and desires are inevitably disappointed. But he also realized that, simply by sitting and breathing, people can begin to disengage from the normal run of desires and disappointments, and come to grasp that the self whom the sitter has been serving so frantically, and who is suffering from all these needs, is an illusion. Set free from the self’s anxieties and appetites and constant, petulant demands, the meditator can see and share the actualities of existence with others. The sitter becomes less selfish and more selfless.

Buddhism has had a series of strong recurrent presences in America, and, though Wright doesn’t stop to trace them, they might illuminate some continuities that show why his kind of Buddhism got here, and got “true.” Its first notable appearance was in late-nineteenth-century New England, where, as Van Wyck Brooks showed long ago, Henry Adams was “drawn especially to the lands of Buddha.” Another New England Buddhist of the day was William Sturgis Bigelow, who brought back to Boston some twenty thousand works of Japanese art, and who, when dying in Boston, called for a Catholic priest and asked that he annihilate his soul. (He was disappointed when the priest declined.) These American Buddhists, drawn East in part by a rejection of Gilded Age ostentation, recognized a set of preoccupations like those they knew already—Whitman’s vision of a self that could shift and contain multitudes, or Thoreau’s secular withdrawal from the race of life. (Jon Kabat-Zinn’s hugely successful meditation guide, “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” is dotted with Thoreau epigraphs in place of Asian ones.) The quietist impulse in New England spirituality and the pantheistic impulse in American poetry both seemed met, and made picturesque, by the Buddhist tradition.

The second great explosion of American Buddhism occurred in the nineteen-fifties. Spurred, in large part, by the writings of the émigré Japanese scholar D. T. Suzuki, it was, in the first instance, aesthetic: Suzuki’s work, though rich in tea ceremonies and haiku, makes no mention of Zazen, the hyper-disciplined, often painful, meditation practice that is at the heart of Zen practice. The Buddhist spirit, or the easier American variant of it, blossomed in Beat literature, producing some fine coinages (Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums”). Zen, though apparently an atypically severe sect within Buddhism, came to be the standard-bearer, so much so that “Zen” became an all-purpose modifier in American letters meaning “challengingly counterintuitive”—as in “Zen and the Art of Archery” or the masterly “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” where you learn how not to aim your arrow or how to find a spiritual practice in a Harley. It was this second movement that blossomed into a serious practice of sitting lessons and a set of institutions, the most prominent, perhaps, being the San Francisco Zen Center.

Though separated by generations, the deeper grammar of the two Buddhist awakenings was essentially the same. Buddhism in America is simultaneously exotic and familiar—it has lots of Eastern trappings and ceremonies that set it off from the materialism of American life, but it also speaks to an especially American longing for a publicly productive spiritual practice. American Buddhism spins off museum collections and Noh-play translations and vegetarian restaurants and philosophical books and, in the hands of the occasional Buddhist Phil Jackson, the triangle offense in basketball.

The Buddhist promise in the American mind is that you can escape and engage. “Ten minutes a day toward Enlightenment” is the sort of slogan that has inspired the current generation to unimaginably large numbers of part-time meditators. (Among whom I number myself, following guided meditations recorded by Joseph Goldstein, a seventysomething Vipassana teacher who has the calming, grumpy voice of an emeritus professor at City College, though my legs are much too stiff for the lotus position and I have to fake it, making mine in every sense a half-assed practice.) “Don’t just sit there, do something” is the American entreaty. With Buddhism, you can just sit there and do something.

Wright, like his Bay Area and Boston predecessors, is delighted to announce the ways in which Buddhism intersects with our own recent ideas. His new version of an American Buddhism is not only self-consciously secularized but aggressively “scientized.” He believes that Buddhist doctrine and practice anticipate and affirm the “modular” view of the mind favored by much contemporary cognitive science. Instead of there being a single, consistent Cartesian self that monitors the world and makes decisions, we live in a kind of nineties-era Liberia of the mind, populated by warring independent armies implanted by evolution, representing themselves as a unified nation but unable to reconcile their differences, and, as one after another wins a brief battle for the capital, providing only the temporary illusion of control and decision. By accepting that the fixed self is an illusion imprinted by experience and reinforced by appetite, meditation parachutes in a kind of peacekeeping mission that, if it cannot demobilize the armies, lets us see their nature and temporarily disarms their still juvenile soldiers.

O.K. so well have sex and if that works out well go out for a nice dinner and maybe a movie.

“O.K., so we’ll have sex and if that works out we’ll go out for a nice dinner and maybe a movie.”

Buddhism, alone among spiritual practices, has always recognized this post-hoc nature of our “reason,” asking us to realize its transience through meditation. (“Not much really there, is there?” Joe Goldstein murmurs about thought in one of his guided meditations.) Meditation, in Wright’s view, is not a metaphysical route toward a higher plane. It is a cognitive probe for self-exploration that underlines what contemporary psychology already knows to be true about the mind. “According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly,” he writes. “What’s more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings. And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place—becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior.”

Our feelings ceaselessly generate narratives, contes moraux, about the world, and we become their prisoners. We make things good and bad, desirable and not, meaningful and trivial. (We put snappy titles on our tales and then the titles own us.) Wright gives the example of a “buzz-saw symphony” as a small triumph of his emancipation: hearing a buzz saw whining in the background, what would usually have been a painful distraction became, robbed by meditation of any positive or negative cues (this is a pleasant sound / this is an unpleasant one), somehow musical. Meditation shows us how anything can be emptied of the story we tell about it: he tells us about an enlightened man who tastes wine without the contextual tales about vintage, varietal, region. It tastes . . . less emotional. “All the states of equanimity come through the realization that things aren’t what we thought they were,” Wright quotes a guru as saying. What Wright calls “the perception of emptiness” dampens the affect, but it also settles the mind. If it isn’t there, you don’t overreact to it.

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Having gone the full Buddha route, Wright gives us accounts of meditation retreats, and interviews with enlightened meditators; he explores sutras and explains dharma. Given that he’s more product-oriented than process-oriented, Wright tends to reflect on the advantages of meditation rather than reproduce their pleasures. Meditation, even the half-assed kind, does remind us of how little time we typically spend in the moment. Simply to sit and breathe for twenty-five minutes, if only to hear cars and buses go by on a city avenue—listening to the world rather than to the frantic non sequiturs of one’s “monkey mind,” fragmented thoughts and querulous moods racing each other around—can intimate the possibility of a quiet grace in the midst of noise. The gong with which Goldstein’s meditations begin on YouTube, though a bit of Orientalia, does settle the mind and calm its restlessness. (Yet many sounds of seeming serenity—birds singing, leaves rustling—are actually the sounds of ceaseless striving. The birds are shrieking for mates; even the trees are reaching insistently toward the sun that sustains them. These are the songs of wanting, the sounds of life.)

Wright has, for the purposes of his book, tied himself to a mechanical view of the constraints that operate on the human mind—the same one that he has posited in previous books, rooted in the doctrines of evolutionary psychology. This is the view—to which Wright is, as a Buddhist might say, overattached—that our deepest desires are instincts implanted by natural selection in our primeval past. Whether or not evolutionary psychology is a real or a pseudoscience—opinions vary—one can believe that human beings are afflicted with too much wanting without thinking that we are that way because once upon a time those cravings helped us have more kids than our neighbors. Even if our desires were implanted by evolution rather than inculcated by culture, they’re still always helplessly double: altruistic impulses encourage us to look after our tribe; genocidal ones encourage us to get rid of the neighboring tribe. Pair bonding is adaptive, but so is adultery: fathers want to care for their offspring and see them thrive; they also want to have sex with the woman in the next cave in order to cover all genetic bets. Desires may arise from natural selection or from cultural tradition or from random walks or from a combination of them all—but Buddhist doctrine would be unaffected by any of these “whys.” If every doctrine of evo-psych turns out to be false—if it’s somehow all culture and inculcation—it wouldn’t affect the Buddhist view about our need to get out of it.

Other recent books on contemporary Buddhism share Wright’s object of reconciling the old metaphysics with contemporary cognitive science but have a less doctrinaire view of the mind that lies outside the illusions of self. Stephen Batchelor’s “After Buddhism” (Yale), in many ways the most intellectually stimulating book on Buddhism of the past few years, offers a philosophical take on the question. “The self may not be an aloof independent ‘ruler’ of body and mind, but neither is it an illusory product of impersonal physical and mental forces,” he writes. As for the mind’s modules, “Gotama is interested in what people can do, not with what they are. The task he proposes entails distinguishing between what is to be accepted as the natural condition of life itself (the unfolding of experience) and what is to be let go of (reactivity). We may have no control over the rush of fear prompted by finding a snake under our bed, but we do have the ability to respond to the situation in a way that is not determined by that fear.” Where Wright insists that the Buddhist doctrine of not-self precludes the possibility of freely chosen agency, Batchelor insists of Buddhism that “as soon as we consider it a task-based ethics . . . such objections vanish. The only thing that matters is whether or not you can perform a task. When an inclination to say something cruel occurs, for example, can you resist acting on that impulse? . . . Whether your decision to hold the barbed remark was the result of free will or not is beside the point.” He calls the obsession with free will a “peculiarly Western concern.” Meditation works as much at the level of conscious intention as it does at the level of unreflective instinct.

Batchelor wants to make Buddhism pragmatic not just in the idiomatic sense—practical for daily use—but in the technical philosophical sense as well: he thinks that the original doctrines of Buddhism were in accord with the ideas of truth put forward by neopragmatists like Richard Rorty, for whom there are no firm foundations for what we know, only temporary truces among willing communities which help us cope with the world. Buddhism, in his view, was long ago betrayed into Brahmanism; the open-ended artisanal practice of meditation became a caste-bound dogma with “truths” and ceremonies. It is a process of fossilization hardly unknown to other spiritual movements—there was a time when Hasidism was all about spontaneity and enthusiasm, and a break from too much repetitive tradition—but in Batchelor’s view it led to a needlessly ornate and authoritarian faith, while his own brand of Buddhism has been restored to its origins.

Batchelor also tackles the issue, basically shelved by Wright, of whether Buddhism without any supernatural scaffolding is still Buddhism. As a scholar, he doesn’t try to deny that the supernaturalist doctrines of karma and reincarnation are as old as the ethical and philosophical ones, and entangled with them. His project is unashamedly to secularize Buddhism. But, since it’s Buddhism that he wants to secularize, he has to be able to show that its traditions are not hopelessly polluted with superstition.

Here Batchelor’s pragmatic turn, made tightly on a sharply curving road, begins to fishtail more than a little. He insists that reincarnation is just an embedded doctrine in the ancient Pali culture—a metaphor like all the others we live with, a cosmological picture that works well, not unlike the metaphors of evolutionary fitness and cosmology that are embedded in our own culture. The centrality of reincarnation doctrines shouldn’t be held as a mark against Buddhist truth.

Maureen Alsop is leaving her magnolia and her delphinium and her cats with us this weekend.

“Maureen Alsop is leaving her magnolia, and her delphinium, and her cats with us this weekend.”

Can we really tiptoe past the elaborate supernaturalism of historical Buddhism? Secular Buddhists try to, just as people who are sympathetic to the ethical basis of Christianity try to tiptoe past the doctrines of Heaven and Hell, so that Hell becomes “the experience of being unable to love,” or Heaven a state of “being one with God”—not actual places with brimstone pits or massed harps. Batchelor, like every intelligent believer caught in an unsustainable belief, engages in a familiar set of moves. He attempts to italicize his way out of absurdity by, in effect, shifting the stresses in the simple sentence “We don’t believe that.” First, there’s “We don’t believe that”: there may be other believers who accept a simple reward-and-punishment system of karma passing from generation to generation, but our group does not. Next comes “We don’t believe that”: since reincarnation means eternal rebirth and coming back as a monkey and the rest of it, the enlightened Buddhist tries to de-literalize the “that” to make it more appealing, just as the Christian redefines Hell. In the end, we resort to “We don’t believe that”: we just accept it as an embedded metaphor of the culture that made the religion.

Then there’s the shrug-and-grin argument that everyone believes something. Is it fair to object that most of us take quantum physics on faith, too? Well, we don’t take it on faith. We take it on trust, a very different thing. We have confidence—amply evidenced by the technological transformation of the world since the scientific revolution, and by the cash value of validated predictions based on esoteric mathematical abstraction—that the world picture it conveys is true, or more nearly true than anything else on offer. Batchelor tap-dances perilously close to the often repeated absurdity that a highly credulous belief about supernatural claims and an extremely skeptical belief about supernatural claims are really the same because they are both beliefs.

A deeper objection to the attempted reconciliation of contemporary science and Buddhist practice flows from the nature of scientific storytelling. The practice of telling stories—imagined tales of cause and effect that fixate on the past and the future while escaping the present, sending us back and forth without being here now—is something that both Wright and Batchelor see as one of the worst delusions the mind imprints on the world. And yet it is inseparable from the Enlightenment science that makes psychology and biology possible. The contemporary generation of American Buddhists draws again and again on scientific evidence for the power of meditation—EEGs and MRIs and so on—without ever wondering why a scientific explanation of that kind has seldom arisen in Buddhist cultures. (Science has latterly been practiced by Buddhists, of course.)

What Wright correctly sees as the heart of meditation practice—the draining away of the stories we tell compulsively about each moment in favor of simply having the moment—is antithetical to the kind of evidentiary argument he admires. Science is competitive storytelling. If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing pure in itself. Only a restless Western Newton would say, “Now, what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from branch to ground? Sprites? Magnets? The mysterious force of the mass of the earth beneath it? What made the damn thing fall?” That’s a story we tell, not a moment we experience. The Buddhist Newton might have been happier than ours—ours was plenty unhappy—but he would never have found the equation. Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend. The stories improve over time in the light of evidence, or they don’t. It’s just as possible to have Buddhist science as to have Christian science or Taoist science. But the meditator’s project of being here now will never be the same as the scientist’s project of connecting the past to the future, of telling how and knowing why.

Both Wright and Batchelor end with a semi-evangelical call for a secularized, modernized Buddhism that can supply all the shared serenity of the old dispensation and still adjust to the modern world—Batchelor actually ends his book with a sequence of fixed tenets for a secular Gotama practice. But does their Buddhism have a unique content, or is it simply the basics of secular liberalism with a borrowed Eastern vocabulary? What is the specifically Buddhist valence of saying, as Batchelor does, that the practitioners of a secular Buddhism will “seek to understand and diminish the structural violence of societies and institutions as well as the roots of violence that are present in themselves”? Do we need a twenty-five-hundred-year-old faith from the East to do this—isn’t that what every liberal-arts college insists that its students do, anyway, with the help of only a cultural-studies major?

All secularized faiths tend to converge on a set of agreeable values: compassion, empathy, the renunciation of mere material riches. But the shared values seem implicit in the very project of secularizing a faith, with its assumption that the ethical and the supernatural elements can be cleanly severed—an operation that would have seemed unintelligible to St. Paul, as to Gotama himself. The idea of doing without belief is perhaps a bigger idea than any belief it negates. Secular Buddhism ends up being . . . secularism.

Can any old faith point a new way forward? No doctrine is refuted by the bad behavior of the people who believe in it—or else all doctrines would stand refuted—but the stories of actual Buddhism in large-scale practice in America do not encourage the hope that Buddhism will be any different from all the other organized faith practices. One of the best books about Buddhism in contemporary America, Michael Downing’s “Shoes Outside the Door” (2001), takes as its subject the San Francisco Zen Center and its attempted marriage of spiritual elevation with wild entrepreneurial activity. Downing’s novelistic and nuanced account focusses on the charismatic, Bill Clintonish master of the Zen Center, Richard Baker, who got embroiled in a Bill Clintonish sex scandal. American Buddhism seems as susceptible to the triple demon of power, predation, and prejudice as every other religious establishment.

A faith practice with an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a horror; a faith practice without an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a hobby. The dwindling down of Buddhism into another life-style choice will doubtless irritate many, and Wright will likely be sneered at for reducing Buddhism to another bourgeois amenity, like yoga or green juice. (Batchelor refers to this as a “dumbing down of the dharma.”) Yet what Wright is doing seems an honorable, even a sublime, achievement. Basically, he says that meditation has made him somewhat less irritable. Being somewhat less irritable is not the kind of achievement that people usually look to religion for, but it may be as good an achievement as we ought to expect. (If Donald Trump became somewhat less irritable, the world would be a less dangerous place.)

If there is something distinctive about a Buddhist secularism, it is that the Buddhist believes in the annihilation of appetite, while the pure secular humanist believes in satisfying our appetites until annihilation makes it impossible. Appetite, though, has a way of renewing itself even after it’s been fed; no matter what we do, some new gnawing materializes. Dissatisfaction with our circumstances, the frustration of our ambitions, something no bigger than a failure to lose enough weight or to have an extra room to make a nursery out of: even amid luxury, the ache of the unachieved seems intense enough. It is these dissatisfactions that drive so many Americans—who cannot understand why lives filled with material pleasure still feel unfulfilled—to their meditation mats.

Secularized or traditional, the central Buddhist epiphany remains essential: the fact of mortality makes loss certain. For all the ways in which science and its blessed godchild scientific medicine have reduced the overt suffering that a human life entails, the vector to sadness remains in place, as much as it did in the Buddha’s time. Gotama’s death, from what one doctor describes as mesenteric infarction, seems needlessly painful and gruesome by modern standards; this is the kind of suffering we can substantially alleviate. But the universal mortality of all beings—the fact that, if we’re lucky, we will die after seventy years or so—is not reformable. The larger problem we face is not suffering but sadness, and the sadness is caused by the fact of loss. To love less in order to lose less seems like no solution at all, but to see loss squarely sounds like wisdom. We may or may not be able to Americanize our Buddhism, but we can certainly ecumenicize our analgesics. Lots of different stuff from lots of different places which we drink and think and do can help us manage. Every faith practice has a different form of comfort to offer in the face of loss, and each is useful. Sometimes it helps to dwell on the immensity of the universe. Sometimes it helps to feel the presence of ongoing family and community. Sometimes it helps to light a candle and say a prayer. Sometimes it helps to sit and breathe. ♦

Published in the print edition of the August 7 & 14, 2017, issue, with the headline “American Nirvana.”

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.”

Buddhism

“Why Buddhism Is True”

Robert Wright

Religion

“After Buddhism”

Stephen Batchelor

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Why 'Why Buddhism Is True' Is True

September 26, 201710:50 AM ET

ADAM FRANK

In his new book, Robert Wright wants to focus on Buddhism's diagnosis of the human condition, as opposed to the traditional aspects of Buddhism as a religion.

Gargolas/Getty Images

Why Buddhism Is True

The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

Hardcover, 321 pagespurchase

Here is one thing author Robert Wright and I agree on when it comes to Buddhist meditation: It's really, really boring.

At least, it's boring in the beginning. But there is another thing we agree on, too. That initial meditative boredom is actually a door. It's an opening that can lead us to something essential, and essentially true, that Buddhism has to teach us about being human.

Wright's insight on this point is just one of the many truths in his delightfully personal, yet broadly important, new book Why Buddhism Is True.

The "true" in Wright's title doesn't refer to the traditional kinds of scriptural truths we think of when we think of religions and truth. Wright is explicitly not interested in the traditional aspects of Buddhism as a religion. The book, for example, makes no claims about reincarnation or Tibetan rainbow bodies or the like. Instead, Wright wants to focus on Buddhism's diagnosis of the human condition. The part that is relevant to the here and now. It's Buddhism's take on our suffering, our anxiety and our general dis-ease that Wright wants to explore because that is where he sees its perspective lining up with scientific fields like evolutionary psychology and neurobiology.

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To his credit, Wright is more than cognizant that exploring just these aspects of Buddhism means he is filtering out quite a bit of its history. As he reminds his readers:

"Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism — that it's atheistic and that it revolves around meditation — are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don't meditate."

Wright also acknowledges that even within this "scientific" Buddhism he is interested in, there are also enormous differences between various philosophical schools of thought, many with 1,000-year histories.

"I'm not getting into super-fine-grained parts of Buddhist psychology and philosophy," he tells us.

"For example, the Abhidhamma Pitaka, a collection of early Buddhist texts, asserts that there are eighty-nine kinds of consciousness, twelve of which are unwholesome. You may be relieved to hear that this book will spend no time trying to evaluate that claim."

I was happy to see Wright address these issues of history and interpretation head-on. No matter where Buddhism's encounter with the West takes it, ignoring history doesn't do anyone any good (I've tried to explore these issues myself here at 13.7 and elsewhere, including here and here).

But with those important caveats, Wright is then forceful in his main argument that "Buddhism's diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct, and that its prescription is deeply valid and urgently important."

To back up this claim, Wright leans heavily on evolutionary psychology, which he says, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, "is the study of how the human brain was designed — by natural selection — to mislead us, even enslave us." That misleading and enslaving, however, is all in the service of getting our genes into the next generation. As he writes:

"Don't get me wrong: natural selection has its virtues, and I'd rather be created by it than not be created at all — which, so far as I can tell, are the two options this universe offers."

These lines give you hint of Wright's tone throughout the book. He is very funny and uses his own experiences to drive to the book's questions. In particular, it was his first experience at a week-long meditation intensive two decades ago that launched his journey into Buddhism and "contemplative practice" (i.e. meditation). His accounts of time spent on "the cushion" are full of self-effacing humor and real insights.

Wright's main point is that evolution hardwires us with intense emotions that are in fact delusions. (He has discussed this in an interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross.) They developed as survival responses to the environments we evolved in and they were tuned to those environments. Now they just don't make sense and need to be seen for what they are. As he puts it:

"These feelings — anxiety, despair, hatred, greed — ... have elements of delusion, elements you'd be better off without. And if you think you would be better off, imagine how the whole world would be. After all, feelings like despair and hatred and greed can foster wars and atrocities. So if what I'm saying is true — if the basic sources of human suffering and human cruelty are indeed in large part the product of delusion — there is value in exposing this delusion to the light."

According to Wright, Buddhism, at least its more contemplative side, offers specific insights into, and a path out of, these delusions. In particular, the direct experiences gained via contemplative practice can, he says, weaken the hold of these evolutionary once-needed delusions. In the process, Wright argues, we can all learn to wreak a little less havoc on ourselves and the rest of the world. As he puts it:

"There are other spiritual traditions that address the human predicament with insight and wisdom. But Buddhist meditation, along with its underlying philosophy, addresses that predicament in a strikingly direct and comprehensive way."

That broad nonsectarian approach is an important part of Wright's approach. Raised as a Southern Baptist, he left the church in his teens. But he doesn't look back in anger. Perhaps that is why he isn't arguing that people need to become a Buddhist to practice its truths. As he writes: "Asserting the validity of core Buddhist ideas doesn't necessarily say anything, one way or the other, about other spiritual or philosophical traditions." Later, he reminds us of the Dalai Lama's admonition: "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are."

Which takes me back to that whole meditation is boring (at least in the beginning) thing. One of the best parts of Wright's book is its realism. No matter how many books you read on Buddhist insights into human beings, they won't mean much unless you find yourself a regular practice. It's the practice that counts. It's the practice that slowly lets you see the delusion in our constant stream of desires and aversions. That is, after all, why they call it practice. Wright does an excellent job of unpacking this reality for his readers, demonstrating again and again how contemplative practice can lead to understanding and how understanding can lead to an important kind of freedom.

Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, and author of the upcoming book Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth. You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4

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