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

359 Pages·2016·2.29 MB·English

by  Robert Wright

ii

iii

iv

v

Contents

Contents ...................................................................... v
A Note to Readers .................................................... xiii
Taking the Red Pill ..................................................... 1

An Everyday Delusion ........................................................................... 5

Why Pleasure Fades............................................................................... 7

Unhelpful Insights ............................................................................... 10

e Truth about Mindfulness ........................................................... 12

Paradoxes of Meditation .......................................... 16

My Big Breakthrough .......................................................................... 21

Pain at Doesn’t Hurt ....................................................................... 23

When Are Feelings Illusions? .................................. 29

Obsolete Urges ..................................................................................... 32

False Positives ....................................................................................... 34

Public Speaking and Other Horrors ................................................. 39

Levels of Delusion: A Recap ............................................................... 43

Bliss, Ecstasy, and More Important Reasons to
Meditate .......................................................................... 47

Concentration and Mindfulness ....................................................... 50

Mindfulness in Real Life ..................................................................... 53

Approaches to Enlightenment .......................................................... 56

Insight Meditation ............................................................................... 59

e Alleged Nonexistence of Your Self ................... 62

e Seminal Not-Self Sermon ........................................................... 64

Does Not-Self Really Mean No Self? ................................................ 68

vi

A Heresy Examined ............................................................................. 69

Taking the Ache out of Toothache .................................................. 74

Taking Charge by Letting Go ............................................................ 76

Your CEO Is MIA ...................................................... 80

Of Two Minds ...................................................................................... 83

e Darwinian Benefits of Self-Delusion ........................................ 87

Of Many Minds .................................................................................... 92

e Mental Modules at Run Your Life ................ 98

Jealousy: Tyrant of the Mind .......................................................... 103

Messy Modules .................................................................................. 108

How oughts ink emselves .......................... 113

What It’s Like to Watch Your oughts ...................................... 119

What Fuel Propels oughts? ........................................................ 123

Feelings as Filing ............................................................................... 126

“Self” Control .......................................................... 130

Why Feeling Governs ought ...................................................... 132

Reason and Chocolate ...................................................................... 134

Does Your Inner Judge Really Judge?............................................ 137

Is “Self-Discipline” Really the Problem? ....................................... 141

A New Approach .............................................................................. 144

Attention Deficit as Addiction ....................................................... 147

Hatred as Addiction ......................................................................... 149

Encounters with the Formless ............................... 153

Turning Noise into Music ............................................................... 157

It’s Stories All the Way Down ........................................................ 161

e Upside of Emptiness ........................................ 164

Exotic and Ordinary Essence .......................................................... 167

vii

e Infiltration of Perception by Feeling ..................................... 171

e Disturbing Invisibility of My Brother ................................... 173

Feelings and Stories .......................................................................... 177

e Man without Stories ................................................................. 179

Stories and Brain Scans.................................................................... 182

A Weedless World .................................................. 185

Our Essence-of-Person Machinery ............................................... 187

Our Essence-Preservation Machinery .......................................... 192

e Essence of Opposition .............................................................. 194

My Brief Flirtation with Loving an Enemy .................................. 199

Party Time .......................................................................................... 205

Like, Wow, Everything Is One (at Most) ............... 208

Evolution and the Bounds of Self ................................................... 211

My Inadvertent Online Controversy ............................................ 215

Emptiness, Oneness—What’s the Diff? ........................................ 217

e Time I Didn’t Kill a Man Who Was Snoring ....................... 223

Two Sermons and ree Poisons .................................................. 228

Nirvana in a Nutshell .............................................. 232

How Weird Is the Unconditioned? ............................................... 237

Is Enlightenment Enlightening? ............................ 243

e Enlightenment Checklist ......................................................... 245

Well, Aren’t We Special? ................................................................. 247

Emptiness as Truth ........................................................................... 250

Feelings in Cosmic Context ............................................................ 252

Einstein and Enlightenment ........................................................... 254

e Point of View of the Universe ................................................. 258

A Brief History of Life ...................................................................... 261

viii

Meditation and the Unseen Order ........................ 266

Clarity Begins at Home .................................................................... 270

e Slippery Slope toward Enlightenment .................................. 273

Saving the World through Clarity ................................................. 276

Speaking of Salvation ....................................................................... 280

Is “Secular” Buddhism a Religion? ................................................. 282

Truth and Beauty .............................................................................. 286

1: Taking the Red Pill ....................................................................... 307

2: Paradoxes of Meditation ............................................................. 307

3: When Are Feelings Illusions? ..................................................... 307

4: Bliss, Ecstasy, and More Important Reasons to Meditate .... 309

5: e Alleged Nonexistence of Your Self .................................... 310

6: Your CEO Is MIA ......................................................................... 314

7: e Mental Modules at Run Your Life ................................ 315

8: How oughts ink emselves ............................................. 317

9: “Self” Control ................................................................................. 318

10: Encounters with the Formless ................................................. 318

11: e Upside of Emptiness .......................................................... 319

12: A Weedless World ..................................................................... 321

13: Like, Wow, Everything Is One (at Most) ............................... 322

14: Nirvana in a Nutshell ................................................................. 324

15: Is Enlightenment Enlightening? .............................................. 325

16: Meditation and the Unseen Order .......................................... 326

ix

For Terri, Mike, Becki, and Linda

x

xi

WRITER:
But tell me before you go. What was the worst
thing about being down here?

AGNES:
Just existing. Knowing my sight was blurred by
my eyes, my hearing dulled by my ears, and my
bright thought trapped in the grey maze of a
brain. Have you seen a brain?

WRITER:
And you’re telling me that’s what’s wrong with
us? How else can we be?

—A Dream Play by August Strindberg,

as adapted by Caryl Churchill

xii

xiii

A Note to Readers

Any book with a title like Why Buddhism Is True should have
some careful qualification somewhere along the way. We might
as well get that over with:
. I’m not talking about the “supernatural” or more exotically
metaphysical parts of Buddhism—reincarnation, for example—
but rather about the naturalistic parts: ideas that fall squarely
within modern psychology and philosophy. at said, I am
talking about some of Buddhism’s more extraordinary, even
radical, claims—claims that, if you take them seriously, could
revolutionize your view of yourself and of the world. is book is
intended to get you to take these claims seriously.
. I’m of course aware that there’s no one Buddhism, but
rather various Buddhist traditions, which differ on all kinds of
doctrines. But this book focuses on a kind of “common core”—
fundamental ideas that are found across the major Buddhist
traditions, even if they get different degrees of emphasis, and may
assume somewhat different form, in different traditions.
. I’m not getting into super-fine-grained parts of Buddhist
psychology and philosophy. For example, the Abhidhamma
Pitaka, a collection of early Buddhist texts, asserts that there are
eighty-nine kinds of consciousness, twelve of which are
unwholesome. You may be relieved to hear that this book will
spend no time trying to evaluate that claim.
. I realize that true is a tricky word, and asserting the truth of
anything, certainly including deep ideas in philosophy or
psychology, is a tricky business. In fact, one big lesson from

xiv

Buddhism is to be suspicious of the intuition that your ordinary
way of perceiving the world brings you the truth about it. Some
early Buddhist writings go so far as to raise doubts about whether
such a thing as “truth” ultimately exists. On the other hand, the
Buddha, in his most famous sermon, lays out what are commonly
called “e Four Noble Truths,” so it’s not as if the word true has
no place in discussions of Buddhist thought. In any event, I’ll try
to proceed with appropriate humility and nuance as I make my
argument that Buddhism’s diagnosis of the human predicament
is fundamentally correct, and that its prescription is deeply valid
and urgently important.
. Asserting the validity of core Buddhist ideas doesn’t
necessarily say anything, one way or the other, about other
spiritual or philosophical traditions. ere will sometimes be
logical tension between a Buddhist idea and an idea in another
tradition, but often there won’t be. e Dalai Lama has said,
“Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better
Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”
—Robert Wright



Taking the Red Pill

At the risk of overdramatizing the human condition: Have you
ever seen the movie e Matrix?
It’s about a guy named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), who
discovers that he’s been inhabiting a dream world. e life he
thought he was living is actually an elaborate hallucination. He’s
having that hallucination while, unbeknownst to him, his actual
physical body is inside a gooey, coffin-size pod—one among many
pods, rows and rows of pods, each pod containing a human being
absorbed in a dream. ese people have been put in their pods by
robot overlords and given dream lives as pacifiers.
e choice faced by Neo—to keep living a delusion or wake
up to reality—is famously captured in the movie’s “red pill” scene.
Neo has been contacted by rebels who have entered his dream (or,
strictly speaking, whose avatars have entered his dream). eir
leader, Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne), explains the
situation to Neo: “You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you
were born into bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste or see
or touch—a prison for your mind.” e prison is called the
Matrix, but there’s no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix
ultimately is. e only way to get the whole picture, says
Morpheus, is “to see it for yourself.” He offers Neo two pills, a red
one and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his