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

by Robert Wright

in this particular conversation, I asked Narayan whether Rodney’s perspective is widely shared among Vipassana teachers. Did she take the idea of the formless seriously? Yes, she said, she did. And, no, the things Rodney had said about the formless weren’t considered radical in her circles. “Joseph would talk that way too,” she said, referring to Joseph Goldstein. So I pressed her on what precisely was meant by the term. She confirmed my suspicion that it didn’t mean that the physical world doesn’t exist or that it’s devoid of structure. Tables exist, buzz saws exist. After a few minutes of conversation I felt I got her gist. I asked, “So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?” She answered, “Exactly.” I hasten to add that this doesn’t mean we live in a meaningless universe. Deeply embedded in Buddhist thought is the intrinsic moral value of sentient life—not just the value of human beings but the value of all organisms that have subjective experience and so are capable of pain and pleasure, of suffering and not suffering. And this value in turn imparts value to other things, such as helping people, being kind to dogs, and so on. Moral meaning is, in that sense, inherent in life. But the point Narayan was making is that, as we go about our day-to-day lives, we impart a kind of narrative meaning to things. Ultimately these narratives assume large form. We decide that something we’ve done was a huge mistake, and if we had done so...