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

by Robert Wright

the main point is just that all kinds of curiosity—ranging from a driving, headlong quest to a pleasant stroll along the byways of speculation—do seem to involve feelings. It’s no surprise, then, that brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system, the system involved in motivation and reward, in desire and pleasure. So this is what I take away from many hours of failing to meditate (I mean, many hours of failing to meditate and occasionally succeeding at mindfully observing this failure): thoughts that grab my mind and carry it along with them have feelings attached, however subtle those feelings may be. I’m happy to report that this link between feeling and thought has been observed by people whose powers of meditative introspection are way better developed than mine. In June 2015, shortly after sending a rough draft of this book to my editor, I rewarded myself with a two-week meditation retreat at the Forest Refuge, an appendage of the Insight Meditation Society that is geared toward experienced meditators. The guiding teacher for those two weeks was a psychotherapist and former Buddhist monk named Akincano Marc Weber. One night during a dharma talk, he said, “Every thought has a propellant, and that propellant is emotional.” The word propellant suggests the answer to an important question: When your mind is wandering, when your default mode network is running the show, how does the network decide which module gets to prope...

In a famous sutra called The Greater Discourse on the Destruction of Craving, the Buddha says that a “mind object”—a category that includes thoughts—is just like a taste or a smell: whether a person is “tasting a flavor with the tongue” or “smelling an odor with the nose” or “cognizing a mind object with the mind,” the person “lusts after it if it is pleasing” and “dislikes it if it is unpleasing.”

So if you’re walking out of a store jamming a 3.5-ounce chocolate bar into your mouth and a passerby looks at you quizzically, you can say, “This is so I can get more work done this afternoon.” Presumably the passerby will then think more highly of you than if you’d said, “I’m out of control, okay?” Sometimes the social stakes are higher than what a passing stranger thinks of you. If everyone you know finds out that you’ve been cheating on your spouse, you can’t just say “I was driven by sexual urges that were designed by natural selection to maximize genetic legacy.” Then people will go around saying you’re the kind of person who cheats on a spouse. And of course, you’re not that kind of person! So you need to be able to say something more like “But you have to understand: my spouse had grown emotionally distant and wasn’t meeting my deep need for companionship and intimacy.” Then people will say they can’t really blame you. So it helps to have already heard that side of the argument, and watched it carry the day, before you decide to have the dalliance. Then you’re ready.

the more we ponder the connection between reason and feeling, the dimmer the prospects seem for keeping our behavior under truly rational control. First we learned that Hume seems to have been right: our “reasoning faculty” isn’t ever really in charge; its agenda—what it reasons about—is set by feelings, and it can influence our behavior only by in turn influencing our feelings. Then we learned that, actually, even the term reasoning faculty suggests more in the way of orderly deliberation than is typical of the human mind. The view emerging here is that we don’t so much have a reasoning faculty as reasoning faculties; modules seem to have the ability to recruit reasons on behalf of their goals. This in turn suggests that “reasoning” is sometimes a euphemism for what these “reasoning faculties” do. Sure, one module may say something truly reasonable and well-documented, like “If you eat the chocolate, you’ll have trouble sleeping.” But another module may say something like “You’ll do more work if you eat the chocolate”—even if history shows that what you’ll actually do is peruse social media with unusual fervor. And it’s hard to separate the valid reasons from the invalid reasons, because sometimes the least valid reasons feel good—and feelings tend to carry the day. But cheer up! Just because feelings are critical players in this drama doesn’t mean we’re powerless to intervene. In fact, we have a tool—mindfulness meditation—that’s well suited to intervening at the level o...

Here’s a passage from the Samadhiraja Sutra, a Buddhist text that’s about nineteen centuries old: Know all things to be like this: A mirage, a cloud castle, A dream, an apparition, Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.

As you ponder these words—formlessness and emptiness—two other words may come to mind: crazy and depressing. It seems crazy to think that the world out there isn’t real, that things that seem substantial are in some sense devoid of content. It also seems kind of depressing; I don’t run into a lot of upbeat, fulfilled people who go around rejoicing in the emptiness of it all. But I’ve slowly come to think that, actually, this idea isn’t so crazy, and that in fact it makes more and more sense as psychology advances. And as for the depressingness: thinking of the perceived world as in some sense empty doesn’t have to strip your life of meaning. In fact, it can allow you to build a new framework of meaning that’s more valid—maybe even more conducive to happiness—than your old framework. I hasten to add: my willingness to defend “formlessness” and “emptiness” depends on what exactly they’re taken to mean, and different Buddhist thinkers have meant different things. I’m not here to defend the most extreme version of “mind-only” Buddhism, with its claim that the world out there doesn’t really, ultimately exist. At the same time, I’m not just pulling a bait and switch; I’m not going to define formlessness and emptiness in some sense that’s so narrow and technical that the “validity” I claim for the underlying idea turns out to be trivial. I think there’s an important, if subtle, sense in which we attribute too much form and content to reality, and I think appreciating this can hav...

There is a pretty uncontroversial sense in which, when we apprehend the world out there, we’re not really apprehending the world out there but rather are “constructing” it. After all, we don’t have much direct contact with the world; the things we see and smell and hear are some distance from our bodies, so all the brain can do is make inferences about them based on indirect evidence: molecules that waft across the street from a bakery, sound waves emanating from a jet plane, particles of light that bounce off trees.

During meditation, our stories about things can fall away. For example, sometimes I meditate on sounds. I may do this rhythmically, focusing on my breath on the inhale and some sound in my environment on the exhale. Or I may go whole hog and just focus on the sounds, ignoring my breath entirely. In fact, sometimes at a meditation retreat, a teacher will devote a whole session to sound meditation. If you sink deeply enough into this practice, the structure you “impose” on sounds can start to dissolve. For example, an airplane may fly overhead, and you hear an airplane-flying-overhead sound. Except you don’t necessarily think, “Oh, an airplane.” You’re so immersed in the texture of the sound that you may not immediately think, “Oh, an anything.” It’s just pure sound, unattached to the idea of a particular, concrete object. I guess it’s what an airplane would sound like to somebody from a culture that didn’t have airplanes or to an alien from a civilization so advanced that its aircraft didn’t make noise. It would just be sound—not the sound of anything.

Once I was at a meditation retreat, and a new dormitory was being built, so there was the sound of hammers and buzz saws. Now, you might think that construction noise isn’t conducive to quiet contemplation, or for that matter to anything pleasant at all. (I’ve never seen “buzz saw” offered as a downloadable ring tone.) And in fact the meditation teacher who explained early on that we’d be hearing construction noises all week did so with an apologetic tone. But, as the teacher reminded us, a big part of mindfulness meditation is to accept the reality you face. Normally if you heard the abrasive, annoying sounds of construction, you might close your window or do something else to tune them out. But here the idea was to accept the sounds themselves while not buying into the idea that they’re abrasive and annoying. Doing this isn’t easy, but it’s straightforward in principle. The key is to meet the abrasiveness head-on—to, in a sense, examine the abrasions. You pay attention to the discomfort the noises create. Where in your body does annoyance or even revulsion reside? What is the texture of the feeling? The more fine-grained your examination, the more complete your acceptance of the feeling, the more its negative energy drains away.

If we can turn literal noise into music, can’t we turn figurative noise—all kinds of unwelcome perceptions and thoughts and feelings—into figurative music? Or at least take the harshness out of them? And it may be obvious how I’m going to answer that question: Yes, we can (with sufficiently diligent practice).

What exactly did my little buzz-saw symphony have to do with the formless, with emptiness? Well, for one thing, at this retreat I think I had managed to let go of what you might call “the buzz-saw form.” The sound of a buzz-saw is part of a whole structure of connotations—central among them, of course, the idea of a buzz saw. And I think one reason we find buzz-saw sounds grating is because they’re part of that structure—that is, because we know they’re coming from buzz saws. Buzz saws, with their well-known capacity to sever bones as well as wood, are things many of us don’t welcome contact with. Maybe the connotations of buzz saws—and the negative feelings those connotations evoke—help give us an aversion to the sound.

Remember Ajahn Chah, the Thai monk who said that if you try to understand the idea of not-self by “intellectualizing” alone, your head will explode? He once recounted a time when he was trying to meditate and kept getting interrupted by sounds from a festival in a nearby village. Then, as he recalls it, he had a realization: “The sound is just the sound. It’s me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won’t annoy me. . . . If I don’t go out and bother the sound, it’s not going to bother me.” I wouldn’t take that anecdote too literally; it’s not as if sound bothers you in retaliation for your bothering it. The point is just that a sound by itself is a passive, not an active, thing, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So to make it unpleasant, you have to go out and, in a sense, do something to it.

This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it’s the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.

Yes, the buzz saw exists. It consists of things like a power cord, a blade, and a trigger. These, you might say, are among the buzz saw’s “qualities.” But when I talk about the “essence” of the buzz saw, I’m talking about something we perceive in a buzz saw that is more than the sum of such qualities, something that carries distinctive connotations and emotional resonance. And if I manage to divorce myself from some of those connotations and that resonance—enough that I can actually enjoy the sounds of a buzz saw—then that essence has started to erode. To put it another way, before this particular meditation retreat I might have said, “It is part of the essence of buzz saws that they make unpleasant sounds.” But it turns out that making unpleasant sounds isn’t actually inherent in buzz saws. And if it isn’t inherent in them, how can it be part of their essence?

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...

There’s the premise that having a few painful experiences this week means the retreat was on balance bad for me, whereas in fact its long-term effects are unknowable. And at the base of this narrative lie the most basic kinds of premises: simple perceptual judgments such as “This buzz-saw sound I hear while trying to meditate is bad.” And this kind of meaning, which seems so firmly embedded in the texture of things, isn’t, in fact, an inherent feature of reality; it is something we impose on reality, a story we tell about reality. We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with the stories begins at their foundation. Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, a tool for examining our stories carefully, from the ground up, so that we can, if we choose, separate truth from fabrication.

there’s long been a school of thought which holds that ordinary things do evoke affective reactions, if subtle ones. In 1980, the psychologist Robert Zajonc, expressing what was then a somewhat eccentric view, wrote, “There are probably very few perceptions and cognitions in everyday life that do not have a significant affective component, that aren’t hot, or in the very least tepid. And perhaps all perceptions contain some affect. We do not just see ‘a house’: we see ‘a handsome house,’ ‘an ugly house,’ or ‘a pretentious house.’ We do not just read an article on attitude change, on cognitive dissonance, or on herbicides. We read an ‘exciting’ article on attitude change, an ‘important’ article on cognitive dissonance, or a ‘trivial’ article on herbicides.” Note, by the way, that Zajonc implicitly equates having feelings about things with making judgments about them. This equation is true to the Darwinian view (laid out in chapter 3) that, functionally speaking, feelings are judgments. It’s also true to the meditative technique of relaxing judgment by critically inspecting our feelings. But I digress. Zajonc continues, “And the same goes for a sunset, a lightning flash, a flower, a dimple, a hangnail, a cockroach, the taste of quinine, Saumur, the color of earth in Umbria, the sound of traffic on 42nd Street, and equally for the sound of a 1000-Hz tone and the sight of the letter Q.”

Zajonc seems to have been right; human beings are automatic evaluators. We tend to assign adjectives to nouns, whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly. When you think about it, Zajonc almost had to be right. 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.

Rodney had been trying to explain to me what the experience of emptiness is like. On the one hand, I gathered, there’s a sense in which things in his perceptual field don’t project their independent identities as strongly as they do for most of us. But, Rodney emphasized, you don’t lose your ability to identify things. “You want to be able to pick up a pair of glasses and put it on, and not think that it’s a pencil,” he said. “You don’t lose the shapes or colors of things. It’s just that the space between them no longer divides.” I asked, “Do you have less strong emotional reactions to things than you might otherwise have? Do you invest them less with, kind of, emotional content?” He replied, “That would make sense, wouldn’t it—that if things weren’t as substantial as you believed them to be, your reaction to things would also simmer? So that happens. You see, all the states of equanimity come through the realization that things aren’t what we thought they were.”

Remember, for starters, that when I talk about our affect being dampened, our feelings being subdued, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Indeed, I’ve tried to show why certain feelings are a poor guide to reality. And I’ve suggested, more broadly, that the entire infrastructure of feelings should be viewed with a certain suspicion, given that it was built by natural selection, whose ultimate aim isn’t to foster clear perceptions and thoughts but rather to foster the kinds of perceptions and thoughts that have gotten genes spread in the past. So for me to characterize Rodney’s experience as a dampening of feeling certainly isn’t to say that it couldn’t clarify his view of the world.

There’s one other thing that essence seems to be intertwined with: stories. The stories we are told about things, and the stories we tell ourselves about things, influence how we feel about those things and, presumably, thus shape the essence that we sense in them.

Wine is an especially clear example of how stories inform our pleasures (“That was a very good year”), but Bloom thinks that, if you look closely enough, every pleasure has a consequential story behind it. He once said to me, “There’s no such thing as a simple pleasure. There’s no such thing as a pleasure that’s untainted by your beliefs about what you’re being pleasured by.” He used food as an example: “If you hand me something and I taste it, part of my knowledge is that it was given to me by someone I trusted, and I would taste it differently than if I found it on the floor, or if I paid a thousand dollars for it. Or take paintings. It’s true that you can look at a painting and not know who painted it . . . and just appreciate it largely based on what it looks like. At the same time, you know it’s a painting.” In other words, he continued, “it’s not a natural occurrence of paint splattered on a wall. . . . Somebody made it at some time for display, and that colors things.” So too, he said, with “the simplest of sensations: an orgasm, drinking water when you’re thirsty, stretching, anything. It’s always under some sort of description. It’s always viewed as an instance of some sort of category.” There is always, in other words, an implied narrative. The fact that pleasure is shaped by our sense of essence, and thus by the stories we tell and the beliefs we hold, suggests to Bloom that our pleasures are, in a sense, more profound than we may realize. “There is always a dep...

Though I’m using Weber to illustrate the Buddhist idea of emptiness, I should concede that he is in some ways not well suited to that purpose. He did study extensively in the Zen Buddhist tradition, but he has also studied in, and been influenced by, Hindu traditions. And there are parts of Buddhism he rejects—the most important of which, for our purposes, is the term emptiness. He considers the term, at best, misleading. He says he’s never known anybody who reached great contemplative depths and reported, “Oh, it’s a big void.” His own experience of the world is too rich to just call it empty without qualification. “I’ve used words like empty fullness or full emptiness,” he says. But whatever you want to call Weber’s experience of the world, it sounds very much like what Rodney Smith describes: a world in which things don’t have distinctive essences that set them sharply apart from one another. Though Weber, like Smith, can of course tell the difference between a chair and a table and a lamp, and responds appropriately to each, these items don’t project independent identities as forcefully as they used to; there’s a continuity to things. “There’s not that differentiation between them and their background,” Weber says. “They’re all one stuff.” He sometimes describes this “stuff” they seem to be made of as a kind of energy, but “there’s no differentiation in energy or how you feel about them.”

Maybe the reason babies get so immersed in shapes and textures is because they haven’t yet developed their filing system, their sense of essence. In other words, they don’t yet “know” what the “things” surrounding them are, so the world is a wonderland of exploration. And maybe this helps explain how Weber could say that “emptiness” is actually “full”: sometimes not seeing essence lets you get drawn into the richness of things. Another way to put it is to say that in some cases the story evoked by essence is a minimizing story: That’s just a tree or just a piece of celery. But in other cases—the fantastic glass of wine, the tape measure that belonged to JFK—the story is an amplifying story, so loud that it overwhelms intrinsic experience. Maybe essences can be labels that discourage experience altogether, or labels that encourage experience but in some sense distort it. At any rate, that Weber equates having a strong emotional reaction to something with having a “story” about it makes sense to me, and so does the idea that jettisoning both the story and the emotion would tend to leave things with a less distinctive essence than they’d otherwise project. But is this really possible—stripping away the story, the background knowledge, behind your sensory experience? And, if so, what is going on in the brain when that happens?

What does it matter if, as Weber suggests, the story-free consumption of wine is a purer, even pleasanter experience than the more common kind of drinking? Most wine drinkers strike me as pretty happy with the way their wine tastes, however laden it may be with dubious narratives. It’s not as if deficient wine-drinking is a looming global crisis. But the implications of all this go beyond wine. We’re exploring the brain’s capacity to create illusions. This particular experiment studied the specific illusion that the intrinsic taste of a beverage depends on the story that has been affixed to it. But that’s just one example of a more general illusion: that the “essences” we sense in things really exist, that they inhabit the things we perceive, when in fact they are constructions of our minds, with no necessary correspondence to reality. Things come with stories, and the stories, whether true or false, shape how we feel about the things and thus shape the things themselves, giving them the full form we perceive.

“the fundamental attribution error.” The word attribution refers to the tendency to explain people’s behavior in terms of either “dispositional” factors—in other words, the kind of person they are—or “situational” factors, like whether they happen to be late for a talk. The word error refers to the fact that these attributions are often wrong, that we tend to underestimate the role of situation and overestimate the role of disposition. In other words, we’re biased in favor of essence. The term fundamental attribution error was coined in 1977 by the psychologist Lee D. Ross, and its implications can be disorienting. For example, it’s common to think of criminals and clergy as being two fundamentally different kinds of people. But Ross and fellow psychologist Richard Nisbett have suggested that we rethink this intuition. As they put it: “Clerics and criminals rarely face an identical or equivalent set of situational challenges. Rather, they place themselves, and are placed by others, in situations that differ precisely in ways that induce clergy to look, act, feel, and think rather consistently like clergy and that induce criminals to look, act, feel, and think like criminals.” The philosopher Gilbert Harman, after reviewing the literature on the fundamental attribution error, raised questions about the very existence of such character traits as honesty, benevolence, and friendliness. “Since it is possible to explain our ordinary belief in character traits as deriving from c...

From natural selection’s point of view, there’s no reason for people to give much weight to such a possibility—the possibility that niceness and goodness are largely situational, not dispositional, properties. After all, the essence model—the belief that each person has a generally good or a generally bad disposition—works pretty well. If someone is consistently nice to you, it makes sense to get into a relationship of reciprocal niceness—in other words, a friendship. And a belief that the person is essentially good does a fine job of drawing you into that friendship. What’s more, this belief will make it easy for you to go around saying that this person is good—which is handy, since speaking highly of a friend is part of the reciprocal altruism that constitutes friendship. Seeing essence-of-good in your friends lets you discharge this part of the deal effortlessly. It frees you from the nagging awareness that, for all you know, when you’re not around, your friends spend their time bilking elderly people. If, on the other hand, someone is consistently mean to you, then seeing essence-of-bad in him is what leads to optimally self-serving behavior on your part. Not only will you avoid doing favors that would probably go unreciprocated anyway; you’ll go around saying, with conviction, that he is a bad person. And it makes sense to say that your enemies are bad people, since the more you can do to undermine their stature, the less they’ll be in a position to hurt you.

It turns out that the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to overestimate the role of disposition and underestimate the role of situation—isn’t quite as simple as psychologists originally thought. Sometimes we actually downplay the role of disposition and amplify the role of situation. There are two kinds of cases in which we tend to do this: (1) if an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute it to circumstance—he’s just giving money to the beggar to impress a woman who happens to be standing there; (2) if a close friend or ally does something bad, then here too circumstance tends to loom large—she’s yelling at a beggar who asks for money because she’s been stressed out over her job.

What’s less well-known than the study’s famous quantification of bias is that the authors raised questions about whether bias was really the right word. When we think of a cognitive bias, we think of a distortion of what would otherwise be a clear view of the thing perceived. But that presupposes that there is a thing being perceived. Hastorf and Cantril wrote, “It is inaccurate and misleading to say that different people have different ‘attitudes’ concerning the same ‘thing.’ . . . The data here indicate that there is no such ‘thing’ as a ‘game’ existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’ The ‘game’ ‘exists’ for a person and is experienced by him only in so far as certain happenings have significances in terms of his purpose. Out of all the occurrences going on in the environment, a person selects those that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position in the total matrix.” Hastorf and Cantril weren’t talking about the movie The Matrix, of course. But, like the movie, they were raising doubts about how real “reality” is—about whether it makes sense to talk about “things” existing out there, independent of the minds that conceive them. They wrote, “For the ‘thing’ simply is not the same for different people whether the ‘thing’ is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach.”

Leda and I were discussing the relationship between these modules and the various biases that afflict human apprehension of the world. Earlier in the conversation I had talked about how our view of the world can be colored by whichever module is dominating our consciousness at the moment. She questioned whether it made sense to talk about a process of “coloration”—as if there was some uncolored view that had existed before the color was applied. “There’s always some psychological mechanism doing something,” she said. “It’s creating our world, it’s creating our perception of the world. That’s why I wouldn’t say domain-specific mechanisms color our perceptions—I’d say they create our perceptions. There’s no way of perceiving the world that doesn’t involve carving it conceptually into pieces.” This sounds quite like the view from Buddhism: everything, from spinach to football games, is empty of inherent existence; things—forms—come into existence in our consciousness only after we have taken some combination of elements in our perceptual field and imposed a collective meaning on them.

We go through each day attaching positive and negative tags to things we see. Being affiliated with a tribe—a football team, a nation, an ethnic group—is a particular instance of that tendency, and sometimes a particularly intense instance of it: our tribe can be very good, and its enemies very bad.

Though my long history of opposition to, even enmity toward, the plantain weed did have a kind of moral aura surrounding it, I wasn’t deploying nearly all the moral weaponry I’m capable of deploying. The really heavy-duty weaponry is reserved for human beings. And yet the line across which the weaponry is deployed—the line between “good” humans and “bad” humans—is often no less arbitrary than the line separating weeds from other plants. There is a meditative technique specifically designed to blur this line. It is called loving-kindness meditation, or, to use the ancient Pali word for loving-kindness, metta meditation. Typically, the meditation starts with you making a point of feeling kindly toward yourself. Then you imagine someone you love and direct some loving-kindness toward him or her. Then you imagine someone you like and direct some loving-kindness toward that person. Then you think about someone you don’t feel strongly about one way or the other. And so on—until you get to an actual enemy. If all goes according to plan, you manage to feel loving-kindness even for that enemy.

The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi is said to have written, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

I wouldn’t recommend relinquishing your sense of essence as thoroughly as Fred, the victim of Capgras delusion mentioned in the previous chapter. But that’s not something you have to worry about anyway. I’m not aware of any meditators having taken things that far—not even those who seem to have gotten somewhere in the vicinity of enlightenment. Fred was useful in illustrating the link between essence and affect, but he’s not useful in illustrating where the dharma leads. Still, he does raise an interesting question about where the dharma can lead. Even if it isn’t going to lead you to where Fred was—to a point where you see so little essence that you can’t figure out who is who—is it possible that it could lead you too far? Suppose, for example, that, though you can still accurately identify your spouse as your spouse, you see less essence-of-spouse than you used to, and suppose your feelings change accordingly. Will that mean you love your spouse less deeply now? Or, to take another example, will parents who meditate intensively come to love their offspring less intensely? Indeed, doesn’t the whole Buddhist idea that you should let go of your attachments encourage, in some sense, less parental love as we’ve always known parental love?

suppose some meditation teacher, in response to this question about the prospect of diminished love, gave a less reassuring answer: “Yes, if you meditate a whole, whole lot, there’s a chance that the actual magnitude of your love for your offspring will drop a bit.” Would that scenario really be such a horrible one? Imagine a world in which affluent American parents showered slightly less devotion and concern on their children. And imagine they spent the time saved thinking about children who don’t have parents at all and asking what they could do to help them. Would that be so bad? It’s great that natural selection gave us the capacity for love and compassion and altruism, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept natural selection’s guidance on how to allocate these precious resources.

After a long pause, he said, “If one takes that too literally, one might come away with the idea that the ultimate aim of Buddhism is to become a completely unemotional, emotionally flat, emotionally deprived automaton.” At this point, one of his epic smiles erupted. He started laughing as he said, “As my mother used to say, as far as I’m concerned, between an enlightened Buddhist and a vegetable, there’s no difference.” He reared his head back and laughed for a full five seconds before continuing to quote his mother: “Is this why you become a Buddhist monk, to become a vegetable?” Then he got serious again. “But I would say that in my opinion, my experience, as one continues to practice the Buddhist path, it enriches the emotional life, so that one becomes emotionally more sensitive, more happy and joyful. And I would say that one can respond to things in the world in a freer, more happy, more delightful way.” Makes sense to me. After all, 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. And this selective engagement with feelings, this weakened obedience to them, can in principle include the feelings that shape the essence we see in things and people. I pressed Bhikkhu Bodhi a bit further on this affect and essence business. I said, “Doesn’t part of the freedom come from the fact that you are not at...

William James wrote, “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.” In that sense, he observed, “our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.”

Lots of information impinges on my brain, and my brain decides which information it will consider part of my self and which information it won’t consider part of my self, and which information—say, the cry of an offspring—falls somewhere in between. And I take it for granted that those decisions comport with some deep metaphysical truth about what is I and what is other. But in fact my brain could have been wired in a different way, so that it interpreted this information differently, leaving me with a very different sense of the distinction between I and other. For example, people with a condition known as mirror-touch synesthesia pretty literally share the feelings of people in their vicinity. If they see someone being touched, they feel the touch, and brain scans show much the same neuronal activity they would have if they were being touched. You can imagine a process for creating organic beings—either natural selection operating under quirky conditions or some process other than natural selection—that would make mirror-touch synesthesia the norm rather than an aberration, in which case the prevailing conception of what self means would be very different.

I asked him about a line of his I recalled reading, something to the effect of: The bad news is that you don’t exist; the good news is that you’re everything. Elaborating on that passage, Weber said to me, “If you’re nothing, if you disappear, you can then be everything. But you can’t be everything unless you are nothing. It just logically follows that’s the case.” Well, I’m not sure it logically follows, but apparently it seems like inexorable logic if you’re in the state Weber is in. He continued, “If you are nothing, instead of just disappearing and becoming a void, you find out that in some strange way—you actually see this, you perceive it this way—that everything is all one thing. This is a cliché, mystical statement, but it really is perceptible: you can deeply sense that everything is all one thing. And somehow, strangely, it’s inside of you.” It didn’t take long for Weber’s comments to get blowback in the discussion forum. Some of the blowback was the kind you’d expect: people finding the paradox at the heart of Weber’s experience inscrutable, if not worse. One student wrote, “ ‘I am nothing means I am everything’ is pretentious twaddle which actually means ‘I am on such a high spiritual plane that you can’t possibly understand me.’ ”

“Buddhist philosophy does not espouse oneness.” And she was basically right. Though you can certainly find respected Buddhist thinkers who will put things roughly the way Weber did, you won’t find this idea of the oneness of everything in the mainstream of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, the philosophy that so emphasizes the idea of emptiness. After all, if the things we see in the world out there are in fact empty of essence, then in a sense they don’t exist—at least, not as things per se. And of course the self, according to Buddhist philosophy, doesn’t exist. So how could everything—a bunch of things “out there” that don’t really, strictly speaking, exist, and a self “in here” that doesn’t really, strictly speaking, exist—all be one? Nothing plus nothing adds up to nothing, not one, right? That’s a simplified, almost cartoonish version of the actual Buddhist argument. But it captures the spirit of the argument and helps explain why orthodox Buddhists would bridle at loose talk of “oneness.” On the other hand, once you go beyond the caricature and look a bit more deeply at the mainstream argument, you start to wonder whether the bridling is really in order. In fact, pondering the students’ reaction to Weber led me to believe that the line between the ideas of emptiness and oneness is pretty fuzzy.

an interesting possibility: maybe the deepest meditative experiences had by Buddhists and the deepest meditative experiences had by Hindus in the Advaita Vedanta tradition are basically the same experience. There is a sense of dissolution of the bounds of self and an ensuing sense of continuity with the world out there. If you’re Buddhist (at least, a Buddhist of the mainstream type), you’re encouraged to think of that as a continuity of emptiness; and if you’re a Hindu, you’re encouraged to think of it as a continuity of soul or spirit. For that matter, maybe some Abrahamic mystics—Christians, Jews, Muslims—who during contemplative practice feel a union with the divine are having somewhat the same experience as the Hindus and Buddhists, and interpreting it in a way that is closer to the Hindu than the Buddhist perspective. The core experiences remain the same, but the doctrinal articulation varies.