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

by Robert Wright

explained as the natural product of a brain that had been engineered

came to believe: if you want to escape from the Matrix, Buddhist practice and philosophy offer powerful hope. Buddhism isn’t alone in this promise. There are other spiritual traditions that

truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.

some specific personal problem. They may have no idea that the kind of meditation they’re practicing can be a deeply spiritual endeavor and can transform their view of the world. They are, without knowing it, near the threshold

to walk through it.” This book is an attempt to show people the door, give them some idea of what lies beyond it, and explain, from a scientific standpoint, why what lies beyond it has a stronger claim to being real than the world they’re familiar with.

but that’s because thinking about succeeding gets in the way of success! And, granted, if you do achieve meditative “success,” that may lead to

of mind—less relentlessly focused on achieving certain kinds of distant material goals, more aware of the here and now.

can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may me...

Buddhist teachings. Then again, there’s paradoxical stuff in modern physics (an electron is both a particle and a wave), and modern physics works

guest when I was four and a baseball bat at a brother-in-law when I was twelve. Happily, my penchant for throwing things at people has waned with age, but the underlying volatility hasn’t

Plus (and perhaps relatedly) there’s my attitude toward other human beings, which could get in the way of the metta, or loving-kindness, that you’re supposed to deploy during a certain kind of meditation.

individual humans I have trouble with. I’m prone to a certain skepticism about people’s motives and character, and this critical appraisal can harden into enduringly harsh judgment. I’m particularly tough on people who disagree with me on moral or political issues that I consider important. Once I place these people on the other side of a critical ideological boundary, I can have trouble thinking generous

Hence another paradox of meditation: the problems that meditation can help you overcome often make it hard to meditate in the first place. Yes, meditation may help you lengthen your attention span, dampen your rage, and view your fellow human beings less judgmentally. Unfortunately, a short attention span, a hot temper, and a penchant for harsh judgment may slow your progress along the meditative path.

that the average person scores higher on them than used to be the case. Technologies of distraction have made attention deficits more common. And there’s something about the modern environment

cultural or political or all of the above—that seems conducive to harsh judgment and ready rage.

ethnic, national, and ideological lines. More and more, it seems, groups of people define their identity in terms of sharp opposition to other groups of people. ...

more belligerent forms of tribalism. And if it can help me overcome them—help me tamp down rage and contemplate my enemies, real and imagined, more calmly—it can help just about anyone overcome them. That’s what makes me such an exemplary laboratory rat. I am a walking embodiment of what I consider to be the biggest problem facing humanity. I am,

auspiciously located on Pleasant Street in the town of Barre. There, every day, I would do sitting meditation for a total of five and a half hours and walking meditation for about that long. As for the rest of the day, when you add three (silent) meals, a one-hour “yogi job” in the morning (vacuuming hallways, in my case), and listening to one of the teachers give a “dharma talk”

focusing on your breath as I am. Early in the retreat, I could go a whole forty-five-minute meditation session without ever sustaining focus for ten consecutive breaths. And I know, because I was counting! Time and again, after I counted three or four breaths, my mind would wander, and then eventually I’d realize that I had lost count—or, in some cases, that I was still going through the motions of counting but was in fact thinking about something else and not consciously feeling the breaths.

very unpleasant tension in my jaw that made me feel like grinding my teeth. This feeling kept intruding on my focus, and, after trying for a while to fight the intrusion, I finally just surrendered to it and shifted my attention to the tension in my jaw. Or maybe it wasn’t so much

the point of focusing on your breath isn’t just to focus on your breath. It’s to stabilize your mind, to free it of its normal preoccupations so you can observe things that are happening in a clear, unhurried, less reactive way.

but rather just experiencing them straightforwardly and observing them. This altered perspective can be the beginning of a fundamental and enduring change in your relationship to your feelings; you can, if all goes well, cease to be their slave.

jaw, and that’s not where I am. I’m up here in my head.” I was no longer identifying with the feeling; I was viewing it objectively, I guess you could say. In the space of a moment it had entirely lost its grip on me. It was a very strange thing to have an unpleasant feeling cease to be unpleasant without really going away. There is a paradox here. (Don’t say I didn’t

meditation teachers prefer, for somewhat technical reasons, to put it, “nonattachment”). This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.

very sad—and this is something you can experiment with even if you’ve never meditated—is sit down, close my eyes, and study the sadness: accept its presence and just observe how it actually makes me feel. For example, it’s kind of interesting that, though I may not be close to actually crying, the feeling of sadness does have a strong presence right around the parts of my eyes that would get active if I did start

unpleasantness in any sense an illusion? Certainly, by adopting another perspective, I made it disappear—and that’s something that’s often true of what we call illusions: shifting your perspective dispels them. But are there any additional grounds for thinking of it as an illusion?

loathing, self-loathing, and more. Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

have been unbearable pain. In June of 1963 a monk named Thich Quang Duc staged a public protest of the South Vietnamese government’s treatment of Buddhists. On a cushion placed in a Saigon street, he assumed the lotus position. After another monk poured gasoline over him, Duc said, “Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngo Dinh Diem

people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally.” Then he lit a match. The journalist David Halberstam, who witnessed the event, wrote, “As he burned he never moved a muscle,

“normal” feelings, thoughts, and perceptions are in some sense illusions—is important for two reasons.

One reason is simple and practical: obviously, if many unpleasant feelings—feelings of anxiety, fear, self-loathing, melancholy, and so on—are in some sense illusions, and we can use meditation to dispel them or at least weaken their grip on us, that’s news you can use.

practical value as well. Figuring out when our feelings mislead us will help shed light on the question of whethe...

reality, is as crazy as it sometimes sounds. Is perceived reality, or a sizable chunk ...

This question takes us into depths of Buddhist philosophy that aren’t often plumbed in popular accounts of meditation. Naturally enough, these accounts tend to focus on things with a near-term payoff—stress reduction, boosting self-esteem, and so on—without getting deeply into the...

meditation this way, as a purely therapeutic device that doesn’t deeply change your view of reality, is a perfectly fine ...

relationship of the perceiver to the perceived and examining the underpinnings of our normal view of reality. If you’re thinking seriously about taking the red pill, you’ll be curious as to whether the Buddhist view of the world “works” not just in a therapeutic sense but in a more philosophical sense. Does this Buddhist perspective, with its seemingly topsy-turvy conception

sheerly philosophical grounds, also has implications for how we live our lives—implications that, though in a sense practical, are probably better described as “spiritual” than as “therapeutic.”

world.” Buddhism began to split into different schools of interpretation not long after it arose, around the middle of the first millennium BCE. As a result,

The most basic division in Buddhism is between the Theravada school and the Mahayana school. My own meditative tradition, Vipassana, derives

Mahayana lineage (to which Quang Duc belonged) that you find the most radically broad conception of illusion. Some Mahayana Buddhists even subscribe to a “mind-only” doctrine that, in its more extreme incarnations, dismisses the things we “perceive”

Buddhism at large. But even mainstream Buddhist thinkers accept some version of the concept of emptiness, a subtle idea that is hard to capture in a few words (or in many words) but certainly holds, at a minimum, that the things we see when we look out on the world have less in the way of distinct and substantial existence than they seem to have.

idea that the self—you know, your self, my self—is an illusion. In this view, the “you” that you think of as

you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems. Both of these

This book is in no small part an exploration of these two ideas, and what I hope to show is that they make a lot of sense. Both our natural view of the world “out there” and our natural view of the world “in here”—the world inside our heads—are deeply misleading.

clearly does lead, as Buddhism holds, to a lot of suffering.

And meditation can help us see them ...

scientific foundation of a Buddhist worldview, I don’t mean “scientific foundation” in the sense of scientific evidence th...

to show as much. And I don’t mean “scientific foundation” only in the sense of what’s going on in the brain when you’re meditating and starting to change your view of reality—though I will, to be sure, get into some of the more important brain-scan

of using all the tools of modern psychology to look at such questions as these: Why, and in what particular ways, are human beings naturally deluded? How exactly does the delusion work? How does delusion

work? And what would it mean for it to work fully? In other words, does the elusive state that is said to lie at the culmination of the meditative path—sometimes called enlightenment—really qualify for that term? What would it be like to see the world with perfect clarity?