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

"Robert Wright is probably best known for a book called The Moral Animal . He’s an excellent writer—sceptical, very intelligent and with a background in evolutionary psychology as well as the history of religion . He looks at Buddhism from his own western, secular perspective and from his practical experience of meditating, going on retreats, and so on. He’s written this book—which is a combination of evolutionary psychology, philosophy , regular psychology, anecdotes and autobiography —defending the view that a non-religious and naturalised Buddhism captures something essential about the human condition. ‘Naturalised Buddhism’ is removing from Buddhism the idea that we will be reincarnated and some of the metaphysics about the ultimate nature of the universe. He’s arguing that there is something that is profound that remains when you subtract some of these more exotic elements. You can also remove the tendency, within some practising schools of Buddhism, to treat the Buddha as quasi-divine, or even divine. Instead, you can look at Buddhism as a philosophy of life. “You don’t want to be relaxed about a noise you hear and then find there is a sabre-toothed tiger jumping on you” Buddhism is a philosophy which has, at its heart, the notion that life involves all kinds of suffering. That’s the starting point. What Robert Wright has added is an evolutionary biologist’s take on that, which is that human beings evolved genetically in a very different kind of environment. If you’re living in a forest, hunting for food and running around without much protection, it makes sense, from an evolutionary perspective, to be trigger-happy about rustles-in-the-dark. You don’t want to be relaxed about a noise you hear and then find there is a sabre-toothed tiger jumping on you. It’s better to have the fight-or-flight mechanisms kicking in and having false positives from time to time. That will maximise your chances of survival. Nowadays we don’t live in such a dangerous environment, and yet we have evolved as these anxious animals who are constantly looking for the worst that’s about to happen to us. That’s just one example of how we’ve got the wrong kind of apparatus for living in the current world. That’s the biological evolution—but cultural evolution is also possible, where we can come to realise this. Buddhism is one way that allows us to become aware of this and live differently. And the core technique for him in Buddhism—which I think is true for Buddhism as a religion as well—is meditation. This is a mindfulness meditation where, at its simplest, you stop and close your eyes, concentrate on your breath and observe the passing thoughts and feelings that you’re having. You create a kind of distance between yourself and what he calls the CEO—the controlling part of your mind. You realise that you’re not in control of where thoughts are coming from, of what floats into your mind. Some of them are repetitive and obsessive. It’s not as if you’re simply the director of all this. So that’s moving towards this Buddhist notion of no self, that there isn’t this master self that’s controlling everything. He ties that in with some neuropsychology and neuroscience which suggests, similarly, that most of what we are operates beneath the surface—and that we confabulate about our degree of control of our lives. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He’s suggesting, first of all, that this version of Buddhism is true in the sense that it gives an accurate picture of the nature of what it is to be human. But he’s also got a moral twist on this—which is harder to defend probably, but not implausible—that the practice of meditation, if it’s widespread, would allow people to get a distance on the widespread tribalism, the worst excesses of self-interest, antagonistic, anger-based reactions to things, and so on. You can delay and observe what’s happening, rather than just going along with it. More Buddhist meditation in the world would not only make individuals happy, he thinks, but also make society better. We’d become less obsessive about our own particular idiosyncrasies, we’d recognise them as things which, although they are us, are not things that we’re choosing. We can observe them without being completely controlled by them. As he puts it there’s a paradox here that the philosophy of ‘no self,’ once you come to realise it as an accurate picture of what you are, leads you to have more control. From time to time I have tried meditation , and it’s interesting. It is certainly scientifically corroborated that the practice of mindfulness meditation has beneficial effects on many people’s health and eliminates certain kinds of obsessive worries for some people. Wright has a degree of evangelism about him, but he’s not saying this is the only way to achieve a better life. He says it’s a way of eliminating suffering from many people’s lives, and it worked for him. The book is given more authority by the autobiographical elements, which are quite funny as well. He’s a really great writer. This is a book that’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for a number of weeks, because it’s so accessible as well as interesting. He’s a really clever, intellectually sound thinker, but he wears his learning lightly and he explains things as he goes along. He carries you along with his anecdotes and self-deprecating humour. Even turning the other cheek? That’s quite an extreme philosophy that, when somebody abuses you, you should turn the other cheek to get an even worse form of abuse… At the level of moral teaching, I don’t think they’re incompatible. If you’re talking about Christian ethics—treating people with respect, loving your neighbour, compassion, treating the poor well—great. Being brought up in a Western society, these are the values that we learn at school, or from other people, as being admirable (though they’re overlaid with other things). It’s what’s supposed to underpin Christianity—belief in eternity and a Day of Judgment and an afterlife—that is harder to stomach. Buddhism is more easily cleansed of what I see as supernatural beliefs than Christianity. For Buddhism, there isn’t the starting point where you think that God did this and God did that, so it starts off without being a God-based religion. That makes it a lot easier to remove those bits. Christianity is so tied up with the beliefs about an afterlife and the consequences of misdemeanour and thrives on making people feel guilty. Some people might wonder why I’m choosing Why Buddhism is True as a philosophy book, because it sounds like it’s not quite that. Universities may construct certain little pigeonholes that philosophers have to sit in, but that is a constraint on thinking in many ways. If you believe some university philosophers, you can’t go outside your pigeonhole and connect with other bits of the world—you have to do your own little thing inside it. Robert Wright is somebody who is not tied down at all by other people’s conceptions of what it is legitimate to think about, and, as a result, he’s a really interesting thinker with a huge readership."