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

by Robert Wright

Humans tend to anticipate more in the way of enduring satisfaction from the attainment of goals than will in fact transpire.

Dukkha is a relentlessly recurring part of life as life is ordinarily lived. This fact is less evident if you translate dukkha as it’s conventionally translated—as “suffering” pure and simple—than if you translate it as involving a big component of “unsatisfactoriness.”

The source of dukkha identified in the Four Noble Truths—tanha, translated as “thirst” or “craving” or “desire”—makes sense against the backdrop of evolution.

becoming less enslaved by craving and aversion doesn’t mean becoming numb to feelings; it can mean developing a different relationship to them

Our intuitive conception of the “self” is misleading at best. We tend to uncritically embrace all kinds of thoughts and feelings as “ours,” as part of us, when in fact that identification is optional.

The intuition that objects and beings we perceive have “essences” is, as the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness holds, an illusion.

Many Buddhist teachings, including several of those listed here, could be lumped under the rubric of “awareness of conditioning,” where “conditioning” means, roughly speaking, causes.

To a large extent, that’s what Buddhist liberation is: a fairly literal escape from chains of influence that had previously bound us and, often, to which we had previously been blind.

if you want the shortest version of my answer to the question of why Buddhism is true, it’s this: Because we are animals created by natural selection.

awakening would be a more literally accurate translation of the ancient term that is commonly rendered as enlightenment. This is the term that is the basis both for “the Buddha” (awakened one) and for the name of the tree—the Bodhi tree—under which the Buddha is said to have had his great awakening.

Consider a poem attributed to a sixth-century Chinese monk known as the Third Patriarch of Zen (sometimes called the Third Patriarch of Chan, Chan being the Chinese school of Buddhism that was the precursor of Zen). The poem begins: The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When not attached to love or hate, all is clear and undisguised. Separate by the smallest amount, however, and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth. If you wish to know the truth, then hold to no opinions for or against anything.