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auspicious
joltingly
spigot
monotonous,
consequential
discernible
chastisement.
notwithstanding.
fulminating
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. Note how profound—or at least
arcane,
salvation of the world can be secured via the cultivation of calm, clear minds and the wisdom they allow.
tribalistic
animosities
peril.
exhort
conjectures
Southern Baptist.
Baptist
hymns,
jettisoned
morose
trepidation.
Human beings often fail to see the world clearly, and this can lead them to suffer and to make others suffer.
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.
The two basic feelings that sponsor dukkha—the two sides of tanha, a clinging attraction to things and an aversion to things—needn’t enslave us as they tend to do.
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 more expansive and more common interpretation of the Buddha’s second discourse—as saying that the “self” simply doesn’t exist—is rendered in various ways in various Buddhist texts. A common rendering—that there is no CEO self, no self that is the “doer of deeds,” the “thinker of thoughts”—is substantially corroborated by modern psychology, which has shown the conscious self to be much less in charge of our behavior than it seems to be.
What I call the “exterior” version of the not-self experience—a sense that the bounds surrounding the self have dissolved and were in some sense illusory to begin with—is not empirically and theoretically corroborated in the same sense that, I argue, the “interior” version of the not-self experience is corroborated.
The intuition that objects and beings we perceive have “essences” is, as the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness holds, an illusion.
The preceding point about essence and essentialism is one illustration of the broader proposition that not seeing the world clearly can lead not just to our own suffering but to bad conduct in the sense of making others suffer needlessly.
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.
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.
Theravada
Mahayana
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and on the title page, right below the title, are the words “by the Interdependent Universe.”
inchoate
ecumenical
inflicted
many researchers now believe dopamine doesn’t cause pleasure but, rather, tends to accompany it for other reasons, and is more directly involved in the anticipation of and longing for pleasure than in the experience of pleasure per se.
“epiphenomenalism,”
primordial
