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

by Robert Wright

Stephen Batchelor, a longtime proponent of “secular Buddhism” and the author of the book Buddhism Without Beliefs, has written, “There is no such thing as the unconditioned, only the possibility of not being conditioned by something.”

There’s something ironic about the zone I was in. Science, in its displacement of traditionally religious worldviews, is sometimes said to have brought on the “disenchantment” of the world, draining it of magic. And you would think that a meditative discipline devoted, in some sense, to tamping down the influence of feelings on perception, to fostering a view of sober clarity, would only abet that tendency. But Batchelor says meditative practice can lead to the “re-enchantment” of the world, and I know what he means. After that first retreat, I felt like I was living in a zone of enchantment, a place of wonder and preternatural beauty.

You might say that the path of meditative progress consists largely of becoming aware of the causes impinging on you, aware of the way things manipulate you—and aware that a key link in that manipulation lies in the space where feelings can give rise to tanha, to a craving for pleasant feelings and an aversion to unpleasant feelings. This is the space where mindfulness can critically intervene.

You could say that enlightenment in the Buddhist sense has something in common with enlightenment in the Western scientific sense: it involves becoming more aware of what causes what.

Emptiness, you may recall, is, roughly speaking, the idea that things don’t have essence. And the perception of essence seems to revolve, however subtly, around feelings; the essence of anything is shaped by the feeling it evokes.

If Chandrakirti had been writing after Darwin, he might have put the point this way: Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species. If having sex with armadillos had been the only way our ancestors could get their genes into the next generation, you and I would think armadillos are attractive—not just cute in an offbeat way, but deeply enticing. You might have trouble controlling your urge to caress them. Alert drivers on country roads in Texas might screech to a halt every now and then for an impromptu armadillo liaison. And, needless to say, there would be no moral transgression more grave than killing an innocent armadillo.

That’s the way the perception of essence works: it smuggles judgments into our mind by cloaking them in feelings that are themselves so subtle, or at least so routine, as to often escape conscious recognition.

If you saw all this from outer space and in time lapse, so that billions of years were compressed into minutes, it might seem like you were watching the growth and maturation of a single planetary organism. Indeed, this growth might seem driven by such powerful developmental logic that the continued congealing of that organism—that is, the emergence of a peaceful and orderly global civilization—was inevitable.

So, yes, we need to reject the core evolutionary value of the specialness of self. Indeed, there’s probably never been a time in human history when this rejection was more vital. But we don’t want to reject what is also in a sense a value of natural selection’s: that the creation and sustenance of sentient life is good. Happily, mindfulness meditation is well suited to fighting that first value while serving the second one. As a bonus, it brings us closer to the truth.

One thing about meditation teachers that bothered me from the get-go was their frequent insistence that we yogis not be hard on ourselves. This is such a common refrain that I’ve encountered people who thought “Don’t be hard on yourself” was a core Buddhist teaching, a message that pervades ancient scripture. It’s not. Here’s a passage from one of the Buddha’s discourses: “Monks, true knowledge is the forerunner in the entry upon wholesome states, with a sense of shame and fear of wrongdoing following along.” You will have to look a long time to find a mindfulness meditation teacher in modern America encouraging students to feel shame.

feeling. The more you focus on the objective fact—on the feeling itself and its instantiation in your body—the less unpleasantness you may feel. This is not a trivially easy feat, but it’s doable, and it counts in favor of the Buddha’s claim that dukkha is in some sense optional, and that the way to reduce if not eliminate it is to see reality clearly, to see objective facts for what they are and for no more than what they are.

Your meditation sessions don’t have to be all that long before it becomes obvious that stress reduction can be more interesting than it sounds. It isn’t just that you feel a little more relaxed by the end of a meditation session; it’s that you observe your anxiety, or your fear, or your hatred, or whatever, so mindfully that for a moment you see it as not being part of you.

retreat: “Boredom can be interesting.” It’s true, but seeing its truth will involve first spending some time absorbing another truth—Boredom can be really boring!—and persisting in the face of it.

William James, who, more than a century ago, in his book Varieties of Religious Experience, tried to find a framework that would encompass all the forms of experience, Eastern and Western, that we call religious. James said that, in the broadest sense, religion can be thought of as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it, that the world would be set up this way: that the path you embark on to relieve yourself of suffering would, if pursued assiduously, lead you to become not just a happier person but a person with a clearer view of both metaphysical and moral reality. Yet that is the Buddhist claim, and there is substantial evidence in favor of it. This three-part alignment—the alignment of metaphysical truth and moral truth and happiness—is embodied in the richly ambiguous word that lies at the heart of Buddhist practice: dharma. This ancient word is most commonly defined as “the Buddha’s teaching.” That’s accurate insofar as it goes, but the word also refers to the core truths that are being conveyed by the Buddha’s teaching. Dharma thus denotes the reality that lies beyond our delusions and, for that matter, the reality about how those delusions give rise to suffering; and it denotes the implications of all this for our conduct. In other words, the dharma is at once the truth about the way things are and the truth about how it makes sense to behave in light of the way things are. It is both description and prescription. It is the truth and the way.

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. Mindfulness meditation involves increased attentiveness to the things that cause our behavior—attentiveness to how perceptions influence our internal states and how certain internal states lead to other internal states and to behaviors.

So these are some of the main considerations that I hope justify the title Why Buddhism Is True. But 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. Natural selection built into our brains the tendencies that early Buddhist thinkers did a pretty amazing job of sizing up, given the meager scientific resources at their disposal. Now, in light of the modern understanding of natural selection and the modern understanding of the human brain that natural selection produced, we can provide a new kind of defense of this sizing up.