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

by Robert Wright

take work. Still, it would be nice to know if the struggle for enduring peace is also the struggle for truth; as long as we’re undertaking a task as Herculean as saving the world, it would be great to kill two birds with one stone! It would also be nice to think that when people pursue the path to liberation—use meditation to try and see the world more clearly, and in the process reduce their suffering—they are helping humanity broadly, that the quest for individual salvation advances the quest for social

to take a closer look at our feelings: pain, pleasure, fear, anxiety, love, lust, and so on. Feelings play a very big role in shaping our perceptions and guiding us through life—bigger than most people realize. Are they reliable guides? That’s a question we’ll start

the title of this chapter is a larger question: What the hell are we talking about here? Illusions are things that seem to be true but aren’t—and what would it even mean to say that feelings are “true” or “false”? Feelings just are. If we feel them, then they’re feelings—real feelings, not imagined feelings. End of story.

view. In fact, one of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

works isn’t the same as saying that it’s intellectually valid.

reactive to some of your feelings makes you happier doesn’t mean it brings a truer apprehension of the world. Maybe this less reactive stance is like a narcotic:

world. If we want to see whether meditation does, in fact, bring you closer to the truth, it helps to ask whether some of the feelings it can liberate you from would otherwise have carried you away from

creatures such as bacteria? One reason it’s hard to say is that feelings have an odd property: you can never be absolutely, positively sure that anyone or anything other than you has them.

that it’s private, not visible from the outside. So I don’t know for sure that, say, my dog Frazier has feelings. Maybe that wagging tail is just a wagging tail!

my species is the only species with feelings. I suspect that when my cousin the chimpanzee writhes in seeming pain, it is writhing in actual pain. And if, from chimpanzees, you go down the ladder of behavioral complexity—down to wolves, lizards, even jellyfish, and (what the hell) bacteria—I don’t

is a rough consensus among behavioral scientists on what the original function of good feelings and bad feelings was: to get organisms to approach things or avoid things that are, respectively, good for them or bad for them. Nutrients, for example, keep

organisms alive, so natural selection favored genes that gave organisms feelings that led them to approach things containing nutrients—that is, food. (You may be familiar with such feelings.)

gave organisms feelings that inclined them to avoid such things—feelings of aversion. To approach or to avoid is the most elemental behavioral decision there is, and feelings seem to be the tool natural selection used to get organisms to make what, by natural selection’s l...

with the fire means that there’s such a thing as too much warmth. The job of these and other feelings is to convey to the organism what’s good for it and what’s bad for it. As the biologist George Romanes put it in 1884, twenty-five years after Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared, “Pleasures and pains must have been evolved as the subjective accompaniment of processes which are respectively beneficial

environment. Typically these judgments are about whether these things are good or bad for the survival of the organism doing the feeling (though sometimes they’re about whether these things are good or bad for close kin—notably offspring—since close kin share

encourage the organism to avoid are indeed bad for it. We could say feelings are “false” or perhaps “illusory” if they lead the organism astray—if following the feelings leads to things that are bad for the organism.† This isn’t the only way you could define true and false in a biological context, but it’s one approach,

yes. But here’s the thing: natural selection designed our feelings in a particular environment—an environment with no junk food, an environment in which the sweetest thing available was fruit. So a sweet tooth served us well; it gave us feelings that, you might say, were “true” in the sense that they steered us toward things that were good for us. But in a modern environment, which features

“empty calories,” these feelings become “false,” or at least not reliably true; they sometimes tell us something

feelings that, back when they entered our lineage, served our ancestors’ interests but that don’t always serve our interests now. Take road rage. The desire to punish people who treat you unfairly or show you disrespect is deeply human. And admit it: though there’s something unpleasant about

And you can see why natural selection would have made righteous rage attractive: in a small hunter-gatherer village, if someone took advantage of you—stole your food, stole your mate, or just generally treated you like dirt—you needed to teach him a lesson. After all, if he learns he can get away with abusing you, he may do it again and again. Worse still, others in your social universe will see that you can

counterproductive. So if meditation did liberate you from obedience to these feelings, it would be, in a certain sense, dispelling an illusion—the illusion you implicitly subscribe to when you follow the feeling, the illusion that the rage, and for that matter the revenge it inspires, is fundamentally “good.” It turns out the

they apply to feelings: if they feel good but lead us to do things that aren’t really good for us, then they’re false feelings. But there’s another sense in which

judgments about whether doing certain things will be good for the organism; they come with actual, explicit beliefs about things in the environment and how they relate to the organism’s welfare. Obviously, such beliefs can be true or false in a pretty

misperceptions are known as “false positives”; from natural selection’s point of view, they’re a feature, not a bug. Though your brief conviction that you’ve seen a rattlesnake may be wrong ninety-nine times out

actual false perception about the physical world and, for a moment, a false belief; (2) in the case of the snake, your emotional machinery is working exactly as

literal sense; the feeling fills you with a conviction—a judgment about what’s in your immediate environment—that is pretty reliably untrue. This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help

illusion: the snake illusion, in the long run, may well be good for you; it may keep you safe from harm that would otherwise befall you. The same goes for comparable illusions that, depending on where you live, might be more likely to visit you than

victimized you. I have a fear that all this may be sounding more clear-cut than it is. It may seem as if there are two kinds of false feelings—the unnatural,

ignore the former, whereas obeying the latter makes sense. In the real world, it turns out, these lines can get blurry. For example: Have you ever been visited

you’ve offended someone—is perfectly natural; staying on good terms with people boosted our ancestors’ chances of surviving and reproducing.

offended the person, even feeling bursts of certainty that you’ve done so. This may be another one of nature’s false positives; the sense that you’ve erred may be “designed” to be so powerful that you’ll take remedial action more often than it’s really called for.

so hard to take. In a hunter-gatherer village, the person you feared you’d offended would live, oh, fifty feet away from you and you’d see her again in, oh, twenty minutes or so. At that point you could gauge her demeanor and perhaps be reassured that

on occasions like this. What’s not natural are features of the modern world that make it hard to find out whether the feeling was or wasn’t an illusion. So the feeling lasts longer than is likely to be of any practical value. And, unfortunately, the feeling is unpleasant.

unpleasant product of environmental mismatch is painful self-consciousness. We’re designed by natural selection to care—and care a lot—about what other people think of us. During evolution,

someone who knows little or nothing about us. That can add a little pressure to the occasion, and it may add more if your mother was prone to saying “You get only one chance to make a good first impression!” You may find yourself scanning the person for feedback

again, a feeling—an uncomfortable feeling of self-consciousness—sponsors a kind of perceptual illusion, a basic misreading of the behavior of others. Modern

reactions that make little sense except in light of the environment in which our species evolved.

thing you did on a public bus or an airplane, even though you’ll never again see the people who witnessed it and their opinions of you therefore have no consequence. Why would natural selection design...

give much thought to us one way or the other is often an illusion, as is our unspoken sense that it matters what pretty much everyone we see thinks of us. But these intuitions were less often illusory in the environment of our evolution, and that’s one reason they’re so persistent today.

being in the presence of a bunch of people you’ve never seen before, it’s speaking to all of them at once. The mere thought of such an event can give us terrifying

positives” are different from “false rattlesnake positives.” After all, your momentary fear that a rattlesnake was afoot had no bearing on whether or not a rattlesnake would in fact turn out to be afoot. In contrast, your PowerPoint-apocalypse anxiety may conceivably have headed off a PowerPoint

though anxiety is sometimes productive in this sense, people do a lot of worrying that serves no good purpose.

our environment has changed since the human species evolved. Our ancestral environment didn’t feature cocktail parties, slumber parties, or PowerPoint. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have to navigate roomfuls of people they’d never met, or send their children off to sleep in homes they’d never seen, or give presentations to an audience consisting largely of people they didn’t know very well,

evolved nature and the environment in which we find ourselves isn’t just a modern phenomenon. For thousands of years, there have been human social environments that weren’t the ones we were designed for. The Buddha was born to a royal family, which means he lived in a society with clusters of population much bigger than a hunter-gatherer village.

shape. In one discourse the Buddha listed as one of the “five fears” the “fear of embarrassment in assemblies.” This fear remains in the top five today; some polls, in fact, show public speaking to be the most dreaded

the risk of repeating myself), I’m not saying that social anxiety isn’t in any sense a product of natural selection.

evolution—featured lots of social interaction, and this interaction had great consequence for our genes. If you had l...

impressing people mattered, even if PowerPoint wasn’t the thing you impressed them with. Similarly, if your offspring didn’t thrive socially, that boded ill for their reproductive prospects, and hence for your genes. So genes inclining us toward anxiety about our social prospect...

they’re often unproductive, sponsoring illusions that are of no value at all. Thus can we have beliefs—about, for example, the near-certainty of impending disaster—that are false both in the literal and the pragmatic sense: they aren’t true, and they aren’t

you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things,