Why Buddhism Is True (2017)
Robert Wright (1957)
321 pages
Despite whatever in-roads mindfulness training has made into corporate wellness programs, telling someone that you practice meditation continues to carry a strong whiff of the exotic, a lingering connection to a kind of hippie, counter-cultural lifestyle --- and its links to eastern spiritual practices such as Buddhism only seem to deepen many people’s skepticism. Even as a vocal subgroup in the West herald it as a cure for anxiety-fueled lifestyles overflowing with stress, the idea of meditation still prompts many people to ask: ‘is there a there there?'In his book Why Buddhism Is True, journalist Robert Wright explores recent developments in a variety of scientific disciplines that have led him to answer that question with an unequivocal Yes. He draws, in particular, on the latest understandings in psychology and neuroscience, and uses his own experiences while learning meditation practice to explore the connections between the findings in these disciplines and the teachings of Buddhism. Of course there are limits to these connections, and in an opening note he makes clear the specific aspects of Buddhism that he finds to have scientific backing:
I’m not talking about the “supernatural” or more exotically metaphysical parts of Buddhism --- reincarnation, for example --- but rather about the naturalistic parts: ideas that fall squarely within modern psychology and philosophy. That said, I am talking about some of Buddhism’s more extraordinary, even radical, claims --- claims that, if you take them seriously, could revolutionize your view of yourself and the world. This book is intended to get you to take these claims seriously. (xiii)
Much of the evidence central to Wright’s argument in favor of a scientific underpinning to Buddhism’s naturalistic teachings comes from the field of evolutionary psychology; Wright reported on the research in this field --- and its surprising implications --- in an earlier work, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life. In his present book he summarizes evolutionary psychology’s main thesis as that the existence of the biological imperative driving a human being to pass on its genes into the next generation has guided not just our physical evolution, but also the evolution of our “mental traits --- [the] structures and algorithms that are built into the brain and shape our everyday experience.” (3) More critically, beyond an understanding of the mechanisms through which the human brain has developed, evolutionary psychologists have examined the resulting impact on the brain’s function; their findings have led Wright to the conclusion that “the human brain was designed --- by natural selection --- to mislead, even enslave us.” (3)
In his study and practice of meditation, and in particular of the naturalistic aspects of Buddhist thought, Wright discovered that Buddhism had already over two thousand years ago come to a similar understanding, describing these “misleading” and “enslaving” characteristics of our ways of thinking, and identifying them as delusions that negatively impact the way we live our lives. In response, Buddhism developed practices and taught methods to enable people to recognize the harm in these natural thought processes, and so see through the resulting delusions, thus freeing themselves from the damaging behavior that has arisen as a result of human biological and environmental history.
Wright’s approach in the book is to evaluate Buddhist teachings in the context of modern scientific findings, and so explore, as stated in his subtitle, The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.
After prefacing with what he refers to as “some careful qualification” (xiii) --- clarifying his scope and basic terminology --- Wright opens the book by recalling the ‘red pill / blue pill’ meme from the movie The Matrix, the idea of a person choosing either to see reality as it is, or, conversely, choosing to ignore it and so continue on in delusion. He makes the connection between that modern meme’s popular representation of people blinkered by willful delusion and the ancient Buddhist doctrines that identified this same condition several millennia ago; he then demonstrates its implications through examples of destructive ways of thinking most all of us commonly exhibit. Using his own experiences learning to meditate, he also explores how the Buddhist practice of meditation can lead a person to recognize, and free themselves, of these harmful delusions.
The remainder of the book elaborates and expands on these connections, describing findings from evolutionary psychology, clarifying them through examples of everyday human behavior and thought patterns, and then linking them to the teachings of Buddhism. By returning repeatedly to what he has learned from meditation retreats and through discussions with meditation teachers, Wright grounds the discussion in concrete experiences, and ultimately demonstrates the ways in which he has benefited from what he has learned along the way to developing a daily meditation practice.
For a hint into one of the central themes of the book, return again to the statement I quoted earlier, in which Wright noted this conclusion from his understanding of evolutionary psychology: “the human brain was designed --- by natural selection --- to mislead, even enslave us.” By boiling that statement down to its fundamental relationship, that “the human brain … enslaves us,” we discover a dichotomy of significant consequence, one that Wright finds to be fundamental to the learnings from both Buddhism and modern psychology: that “the human brain” and “us” are not the same thing.
But, if “we” are not centered in the human brain, then who, or what, are “we”? This distinction is key to Buddhist teachings, and has become a point of increasing focus for psychologists and neuroscientists. Much of Wright’s discussion revolves around this point --- how evolution has trained us to believe that our thoughts and decisions originate from a central place within us, a rational actor guiding our behavior. It turns out to be the principle delusion; how have we come to believe it?
Wright describes an important aspect in evolution’s training of our behavior as having been the use of feelings to guide our thoughts and actions: feelings of attraction lead an organism toward things useful to its survival, while feelings of aversion cause an organism to avoid things dangerous to it. For human beings, this evolutionary path has been found by psychologists to have a consequence that is non-intuitive: the decisions we make are not the outcome of rational deliberations --- a series of thoughts that involve a weighing of pros and cons --- but rather are based on a kind of weighing out of feelings.
In response to these findings, psychologists have proposed a description of the mind as modular, as “composed of lots of specialized modules --- modules for sizing up situations and reacting to them --- and it’s the interplay among these modules that shapes [one’s] behavior.” (86) (These modules are not considered to be separate physical areas of the brain; rather, the function of a particular module can be distributed across different parts of the brain.) The critical point is how these modules are activated: according to Wright the current thinking is that “it’s feelings that “decide” which module will be in charge for the time being,” (96) with the strongest feeling winning out.
Wright points out that “these feelings may be informed by reason,” (123) however, he also describes tests that have shown how easily our feelings can be manipulated, either by incidental events, such as how tired or hungry we are, or through intentional influences, as any good advertising agent knows. A consequence of this manipulation is that our decisions --- which feeling wins out --- can be very situation dependent, and often impacted by unconscious influences. And, to complete the delusion of control, evolution has trained us to be ready if someone asks us why we decided as we did: psychology experiments have shown that we quickly and unconsciously create a logical set of reasons that give our decision a rational sheen.
Thus, according to evolutionary psychology, what we perceive of as a thoughtful process of rationally considering competing objectives before deciding how to proceed consists instead of a competition of feelings with much of their basis in how natural selection trained our species millennia ago, in an environment radically different form the one in which most of us operate today.
As an example Wright points out that the tendency for road rage can be seen as arising out of “the desire to punish people who treat your unfairly or show you disrespect [and] is deeply human.” (31) He argues that while such a reaction may have been “attractive … in a small hunter-gatherer village” (31), in which you needed to prove to your aggressor and the entire village that you were not someone to be taken advantage of, it makes little sense
on a modern highway [when] the disrespectful driver you [instinctively] feel like punishing is someone you’ll never see again, and so are all the drivers who might witness any revenge you wreak. (31)Yet so many succumb to it, and even those who don’t would be hard pressed not to admit to at least fleetingly contemplating such a reaction from time to time.
Perhaps even more profound and surprising, however, than the role feelings play in human decision making is evolutionary psychology’s understanding of how feelings impact our view of reality. Borrowing a term from Buddhism to describe this idea, Wright notes that our feelings about something or someone define for us the essence of that thing or person. Our perception of reality, then, is not somehow logically built up from the characteristics that we observe with our senses at a particular moment, but rather by the feelings we have about what we are observing. These feelings can range from intense attraction through neutral to intense aversion, and can, of course, also vary depending on circumstances.
Wright gives a variety of examples and psychological experiments that support these findings, but to adapt one of his simplest personal anecdotes to my own experience: the purple-flowering weed that I find an evil pest as I do violent battle with it each summer in my garden has at other times appeared to me as a colorful and beautiful flower in roadside ditches, before it dawned on me it was the same plant; my feelings are clearly impacted by more than the plant’s specific characteristics.
In a more consequential sense, Wright touches on the dramatic implications this can have for our perception and treatment of other human beings, as we react to them not based on who they are as individuals, but instead to a large extent on previously formed feelings of the group to which we identify them as belonging. Thus, he concludes:
From natural selection’s point of view, the whole point of perception is to process information that has relevance to the organism’s Darwinian interests --- that is, to its chances of getting its genes spread. And organisms register this relevance by assigning positive or negative values to the perceived information. We are designed to judge things and to encode those judgments in feelings. (161)
Of course, as Wright point out, some such reactions remain appropriate: the instinctual fear triggered by seeing something that even just looks like a snake can still be beneficial at the moment we cross paths with an actual snake. Many such reactions constitute, however, what Wright refers to as obsolete urges, attractions or aversions that once served an appropriate purpose, but in our modern environment lead to inappropriate or even dangerous behavior --- behavior that can now actually be counter-productive to natural selection’s original goal of getting our genes into the next generation.
As part of tying these findings from modern psychology to the naturalistic teachings in Buddhism, Wright examines the Buddhist concepts of not-self and emptiness.
He explains the term not-self as the
Buddhist idea that the self … is an illusion [and that] the “you” that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn’t really exist. (24)He describes the fundamental idea here as related to people’s belief that within themselves there is a CEO, a central place in the brain that is in control, makes decisions and takes action.
Wright notes that the Buddha, in his Discourse on the Not-Self, argued that if one looks for such a self within one’s body and experience, it cannot be found. The Buddha stated that a key element to the idea of a self is the idea of having control, and listed five principal areas, or aggregates, of our body where such control could exist: the physical body, basic feelings, perceptions, mental formations (emotions, thoughts, inclinations, habits, decisions), and consciousness. He then went on to argue that none of these, if we examine them closely, can be found to have actual control. Thus, for example, we cannot control that our bodies not be afflicted in some way, we cannot control that our feelings not be a certain way, and so on. Of course, we have the impression (the delusion, in Buddhist teaching) that control can be exercised over these areas, but full control remains unachievable. (60-61)
Wright goes on to show how this ancient concept of the non-existence of the self as outlined by the teachings of the Buddha aligns closely to the modular theory of the modular mind as understood by modern psychology, and described above. Thus both Buddhism and modern evolutionary psychology describe our decision making function as being the result of processes for which no central coordination point, or self, can be found.
As challenging as it may be to understand the not-self, a second fundamental idea of Buddhism that can seem even more radical is the concept of emptiness. Wright acknowledges its complexity by calling it
a subtle idea that is hard to capture in a few words (or in many words) but certainly holds at a minimum that the things we see when we look out on the world have less in the way of distinct and substantial existence than they seem to have. (24)Instead, Buddhist teachings argue that the essence that we find in objects is one that we impose on them, that is, an illusion that we create in order to make sense of the world around us. Wright explores this concept of emptiness through his study of Buddhism, and his own experiences meditating, to help a reader interpret the Buddhist understandings --- plural --- of this concept.
He then proceeds to explore the scientific basis for the Buddhist concept of emptiness. A clear such connection is again the critical impact of our feelings on our thoughts, and so on how we view the world. Also tied to it are results from psychology and neuroscience that have demonstrated the ways in which our brain processes the information coming in from our senses, in part by thinning out a surprising amount of it. This significantly reduced set of information is then used by our brain to build for us a model of reality, one constructed in a way that is heavily influenced by our feelings and expectations about objects, and that results in a model we are strongly motivated to consider, to believe, is ‘reality.'
Summarizing these concepts, Wright notes:
If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together --- the idea of non-self and the idea of emptiness --- you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems. (25)Thus, according to Buddhism our natural perception of ourselves and our experience of our environment are delusions. And this concept is supported by findings in modern psychology and neuroscience, even if psychologists might choose a different word than ‘delusion’ to describe it.
As surprising as such a conclusion may be, the devil is actually in its implications, because it turns out that Buddhism teaches that these delusions are not harmless --- instead they lead us to experience what Buddhists call dukkah, which translates as suffering, or ‘unsatisfactoriness’. This suffering arises, according to Buddhist thought because of
tanha, a word usually translated as “thirst” or “craving” and sometimes as “desire” … [and specifically] the unquenchability of tanha, the fact that attaining our desires always leaves us unsatisfied, thirsting for more of the same or thirsting for something new. (209)Critically, Wright explains, Buddhism includes within tanha both
the desire for things you find pleasant … [but also] the desire to be free of things you find unpleasant… not just attraction to alluring things but also aversion to off-putting things. (209)
To avoid suffering, the Buddha argues that we must free ourselves of the “three poisons [of] greed, hatred and delusion” (212). Wright explains that these ‘poisons’ are intimately related to the concepts of tanha, not-self and emptiness. Beginning with greed and hatred, he notes that:
greed refers not just to greed in the sense of thirst for material possessions but also to thirst in a more general sense: to any grasping attraction to things. And the word for hatred can mean not just negative feelings toward people but negative feelings toward anything --- all feelings of aversion. (213)
The third poison, delusion, can be understood at two levels, according to Wright. The first of these comes from the Buddhist idea that tanha, desire, is “tightly bound up with the sense of self” (213), in that the feeling of attraction or aversion to something necessarily reinforces our delusion of self, a self that wants to be satisfied. It is precisely this delusion of self, according to Buddhism, that leads us to suffer from the first two poisons, of greed and hatred. More broadly, however, delusion comes about from our
illusion of essence …. Our intuition that things have essence … is shaped by the feelings that infiltrate our perception of these things. On close inspection, these feelings would tend to be either positive or negative, involving either attraction to things, a kind of craving for them, or aversion to things. (213)
All of these findings and understandings, finally, point to the purpose of meditation. Buddhism developed meditation practice as a method to enable us to free ourselves from our delusions. Through meditation, according to Buddhist thought, we can strip reality of the feelings we impose on it --- feelings that lead us to believe that a self exists, and to give reality a particular essence. By freeing ourselves from being controlled by our feelings, we overcome our delusions, liberate ourselves from desire (tanha) and, so from suffering (dukkha).
And lest one conclude that recognizing and overcoming delusion and its impact on our view of reality means that we will no longer feel pleasure or pain, Wright argues the contrary. He writes that, based on his own experience and that of teachers of meditation he has interviewed,
one virtue of mindfulness meditation is that experiencing your feelings with care and clarity, rather than following them reflexively and uncritically, lets you choose which ones to follow --- like, say, joy, delight, and love. (192)More concretely, when you see a lovely sunset, you will simply be able to enjoy it’s beauty, you won’t find your mind being carried off by distracting and unproductive thoughts that might otherwise have held sway in the moment.
The physicist Carlo Rovelli made a similar observation about quantum mechanics and particle theory in <u>Seven Brief Lessons on Physics</u> a beautifully written book on physics, of course, but also philosophy and history, all told in a prose that sings on the page; my review of that book is linked to at right. In a short passage that contains all the wonder of our cosmos, he makes clear that understanding that everything is just particles in transformation does not take anything away from the beauty of nature. He explained in the following exchange with Krista Tippett on her show <i>On Being</i> (also linked to at right):Ms. Tippett: I want to read another passage from your writing: “A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space, even when it seems that nothing is there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountain, woods, and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars.” [p.37]
Mr. Rovelli: Thank you for reading this. I think what I wanted to convey is the sense that, if you think that reality is just quantum fields — or atoms, nothing else — it does not mean that it’s dry. It means that there is, out of that, space for incredible complexity, including the galaxies, the woods, the forest, and including our own emotions, our own complexity as human beings. To think that the scientific description of the world, [that] it’s basically right, that there’s nothing else to it — that does not mean denying the complexity of what we are. To the opposite, it means bringing together, in a unitary way, what we know about the world.
Wright sprinkles a generous helping of his own experiences learning to meditate, including attending meditation retreats, and gradually building a daily meditation routine. His accounts provide a reader with concrete examples to how meditation can lead one to a better understanding of the Buddhist teaching he discusses. But, perhaps as important, the chronicle of his journey gives readers who may be little more familiar with meditation then a mindfulness training course at work a peek behind the curtain at what happens on meditation retreats, what it means to develop a daily meditation practice, and a concrete idea of the potential benefits, even if one remains far from the ultimate state of enlightenment and nirvana.
Wright points out that he is “a naturally bad meditator” (16) and has “attention deficit disorder” (17), making him, he argues, an ideal candidate to explore the potential for most anyone to benefit from meditation. And it’s clear that as he gains experience meditating he does find benefits. The successes he does have do not come without struggles and uncertainty, and he acknowledges toward the end of the book that he remains far from the most profound level of enlightenment Buddhism professes to offer. But even reading about the challenges he has faced provides insight into what one can expect form starting one’s own meditation practice, and the assurance that it’s not necessarily supposed to come easy. And, it makes the success he does find in the practice he develops seem that much more possible for a reader to reasonably hope for.
Wright has written an engaging and illuminating book, drawing clear parallels between concepts of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience developed in recent decades, and Buddhist teachings now millennia old. He brings a wonderfully light touch to the subject, while including enough of the details and experimental evidence to give his work a solid foundation. By including his own experiences learning to meditate, he helps ground the discussion for the reader. We learn that he suffers from a similar set of foibles and anxieties as most all of us, and through his willingness to share them and their consequences on his meditation practice, he has created a fascinating and enjoyable read from start to finish.
Other reviews / information:
Robert Wright has appeared on several radio programs and podcasts, including:
In a wide-ranging discussion, he spoke with Sam Harris on the Waking Up podcast, linked to at right.
An interesting point he makes on the show (and again in the On the Media interview linked to below) is regarding 'success' in meditating. When meditating, one is generally told to begin by concentrating, say, on one's breath to help empty one's mind of thoughts; then, if one notices oneself to be distracted by some random thought that occurs, to bring oneself back to ones focus on the breath. For people new to meditation, the occurrence of a distracting thought can seem like a failure to sustain meditation, but Wright argues just the opposite: the recognition that one has become distracted is actually a success, and in fact an important one, because it indicates that one is beginning to become more aware of one's thoughts, and when one becomes distracted, and this can carry over positively to one's life beyond meditation.
As a part of an On The Media episode from late 2017, linked to at left, he discussed how mindfulness can help one avoid outrage fatigue in this time of apparent political calamity.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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