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

by Robert Wright

enlightenment. Becoming enlightened, in the Buddhist sense of the term, would entail wholly ridding yourself of the twin illusions from which people tend to suffer: the illusion about what’s “in here”—inside your mind—and about what’s “out there” in the rest of the world.† Just in case this state of perfect understanding doesn’t sound appealing, I should add

describe it is liberation, as in liberation from suffering (or at least from dukkha, however you choose to translate

multifaceted word). And yet another term for this state is nirvana. Surely y...

attained enlightenment, and for that matter whether there are any, are questions I’m not qualified to answer. But there do seem to be people who so thoroughly dispel illusions about what’s “in here” and what’s “out there” that they cross some sort of threshold. They attain and then more or less sustain a state of consciousness that is radically different from ordinary consciousness—and that, by their account, is exceedingly pleasant.

There’s a natural tendency to think of these transformations as sudden and powerful. After all, isn’t that the way the great spiritual apprehensions happen? Moses and the burning bush, Muhammad in the

meditation during that first retreat suggested as much; I did have the sense that I was suddenly getting a radically truer view of things and that I had made some kind of big breakthrough. And, though I don’t think this experience brought me anywhere near actual enlightenment, I do think that some people get into or at least near that rare territory in sudden and dramatic ways via concentration meditation. But since that first retreat, I’ve come to believe

in fact lead to the same kind of place, a place of sharply and vividly altered perspective.

observing the world inside you and outside you with inordinate care—can do more than tone down troublesome feelings and enhance your sense of beauty.

here.” What begins as a modest pursuit—a way to relieve stress or anxiety, cool anger, or dial down self-loathing just a notch—can lead to profound realizations about the nature of things, and commensurately profound feelings of freedom and happiness. An essentially therapeutic endeavor can turn into a deeply philosophical and spiritual endeavor. This

walk around seeing things with near-perfect clarity, having undergone an enduring and momentous shift of perspective, and that I live in the general vicinity of bliss. Sadly, no. But I’ve now talked to enough highly adept meditators, who have traveled much farther along the path than I have, to

overcaffeination. And one thing I’ve noticed in talking to those highly adept meditators is that, almost invariably, they recognize these and other kinds of experiences I’ve had as the kinds of experiences they too had somewhere along the path. Indeed, in many cases these experiences seem to have paved the way for their more encompassing illuminations. Though I haven’t seen the whole edifice of enlightenment, apparently I’ve seen some of the building blocks.

meditation that has let me see these building blocks. The mindfulness meditation I’ve done has been within a particular school of meditation known as Vipassana (pronounced vih PAW suh nuh). Vipassana is an

usually translated as “insight.” The name of the place where I did that meditation retreat in 2003, the Insight Meditation Society, could be rendered as the Society for Vipassana Meditation, which in fact

mindfulness that some people use the two terms interchangeably. But the distinction is important. Mindfulness meditation is a technique you can use for various purposes, beginning with simple stress reduction. But if you are doing mindfulness meditation within a traditional Vipassana framework, the ultimate purpose is more ambitious: to gain insight. And not just insight in the everyday sense of understanding some new stuff. The idea is to see the true nature of reality,...

existence sound as if, actually, they wouldn’t be too hard to apprehend. The first is impermanence. Who could deny that nothing lasts forever? The second mark of existence is dukkha—suffering, unsatisfactoriness.

with new subtlety, to see them at such high resolution that you deeply appreciate their pervasiveness. But the third mark of existence, “not-self,” is different. With not-self, comprehension itself is a challenge.† Yet according to Buddhist doctrine, it is crucially important to grasp not-self if your goal is vipassana: seeing reality with true clarity, such clarity as to pave the path to enlightenment.

insistence on giving it a standing ovation. But it’s not without significance. What I was saying in that session with my teacher was that I—that is, my “self,” the thing I had thought was in control—don’t readily control the most fundamental

what I’m thinking about. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this absence

the importance of grasping not-self. And later in the book we’ll see that, however ironic it sounds, grappling with the sense in which you don’t exist is a step to...

monk who did much to spread awareness of Vipassana meditation in the West, used to warn about the difficulty of grasping the Buddhist idea of anatta, or “not-self.” The basic idea is that the self—your self, my self—in some sense doesn’t exist. “To

fathom not-self without meditating and without fear of detonation. I’m not saying you’ll succeed in fathoming not-self. I’ll try to help you get as close to success as possible, but if at the end of this chapter you feel you still don’t have a crystal-clear understanding

just making a point about the difficulty of grasping this idea intellectually. He was also underscoring the importance, in Buddhism, of grasping key ideas experientially, through meditation. There’s a big difference between seeing the not-self

what it means firsthand. And that’s particularly true if you want to not just apprehend the idea of not-self but actually put it to use, harness it to become a happier person and even a better person: to feel a new sense of connection with your fellow creatures and a new sense of generosity toward them.

are selfless—in the sense of not having a self—can make you selfless in the more fa...

“According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.”

would realize they don’t have a self! But here we run into a problem: experiencing full-fledged not-self is typically reported only by meditators who have done a whole, whole lot of meditating—certainly more than I’ve done. If saving the world depends on a big chunk of the human race having this experience,

threshold that you either manage to finally cross, to transformative effect, or forever fall short of, getting no edification whatsoever. As strange as it may sound, you can, with even a fairly modest daily meditation practice, experience a little bit of not-self. Then, as time goes by, maybe a little more. And—who knows—maybe someday you’ll have the full-on, transformative version of the experience. But even if you don’t, important and lasting progress can be made, and benefits, for you and for humankind, can accrue along the way.

called “intellectualizing”—trying to understand not-self conceptually, in the abstract—can help a person get on this path of meditative progress. Particularly worthwhile, I think, is pondering the argument that the Buddha himself made about not-self.

should put a warning label on top of Ajahn Chah’s warning label, because the Buddha’s argument has quirks that in some ways steepen the inherent challenge of...

begin is with the primordial text, Discourse on the Not-Self,

subject. The occasion for the discourse is an encounter with five monks. Events follow a pattern that’s common in such encounters: the Buddha takes the monks through the logic behind some aspect of his teaching, and they are instantly persuaded. In fact, in this case they are instantly enlightened. By the end of the discourse they’ve all transitioned from being mere monks to being arhats, truly enlightened beings. These monks are said to be the first

thought. And the fact that this particular discourse on not-self is the one that did the trick gives it a special place in the Buddhist canon. Like lots of doctrines in lots of ancient philosophies and religions, not-self is subject to varying interpretations, and when people argue about its true meaning, they can point to various Buddhist texts for support. But this particular text is foundational.

anything that warrants the label self. He conducts this search systematically; he goes through what are known as the five “aggregates” that, according to Buddhist philosophy, constitute a human being and that human’s experience. Describing

present purposes we can label them roughly as (1) the physical body (called “form” in this discourse), including such sense organs as eyes and ears; (2) basic feelings; (3) perceptions (of, say, identifiable sights or sounds); (4) “mental formations” (a big category that includes complex emotions,

aggregates. The Buddha runs down this list and asks which, if any, of these five aggregates seem to qualify as self. In other words, which of the aggregates evince the qualities you’d expect self to possess?

spend a lot of time defining his terms. Still, if you pay close attention to his arguments against the self, you can get some sense of what he meant by self—a sense of what particular properties he’d expect something

For starters, he links the idea of self to the idea of control. Listen to what he says about the aggregate

really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies. He then goes through the other four aggregates, one by one. “If feeling were self, then feeling would not lead to affliction,” and you’d be able to change your feelings by saying “May my feeling be thus, may my feeling not be thus.” But, of course, we don’t ordinarily have this kind of control over our feelings—hence the tendency of unpleasant feelings to linger even though we’d rather they didn’t.† So feeling, the Buddha concludes, “is not-self.” So too with perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Are any of these things really under control—so completely under control that they never lead to suffering? And if they’re not under control, then how can we think of them as part of the self?

people tend to associate with the self, and it’s not the only

property the Buddha examines in this discourse. When I think of my self, I think of something that persists through time. I’ve changed a lot since I was ten years old, but hasn’t some inner essence—my identity, my

of this claim, since he holds that everything is in flux and nothing is permanent. In the Discourse on the Not-Self, he applies this skepticism to each of the five aggregates. “What do you think of this, O monks?

commonly associated with a self—control and persistence through time—are found to be absent, not evident in any of the five components that seem to constitute human beings. This is the core of the argument the Buddha makes in this first and most famous discourse on not-self, and it’s commonly taken as the core Buddhist argument that the self doesn’t exist.

doesn’t exist has one odd feature: an occasional tendency to suggest that the self exists. Near the end of the discourse, delivering

“This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.” He says that a monk who follows this guidance unswervingly “becomes passion-free. In his freedom

sense the self doesn’t exist, human language isn’t very good at describing reality at the deepest level. So as a practical matter—as a linguistic convention—

consider the possibility that in this famous sermon, the Buddha didn’t really mean to be denying the existence of the self. If you’re wondering why the last half of the previous sentence is italicized, it’s to underscore what a radical idea this is, at least among mainstream Buddhist thinkers. Still, it’s

possibility, you’ll get blowback from the many non-maverick Buddhist scholars who insist that, no, according to Buddhist philosophy, the five aggregates are all there is to a person, even if the Buddha didn’t say that in this particular discourse. And it’s true that the exhaustiveness of the five aggregates did become a tenet of Buddhist philosophy. Then again, so did the idea that the self doesn’t exist.

of Buddhist philosophy; we’re asking whether they were originally part of Buddhist philosophy—whether the Buddha himself held them. And the point is

after the aggregates have been abandoned: maybe not all aggregates are created equal. Maybe one of them—consciousness—is special. Maybe, after “you” let go of all five aggregates, it’s this one aggregate that is liberated, released from entanglement with the other four. And maybe that’s what “you” are after letting go of the idea of the self: a kind of purified

the not-self, talk as if “you” abandon consciousness just as thoroughly as you abandon the other aggregates—as if, in other words, the “you” that is left after liberation