Buddhism Is More ‘Western’ Than You Think

By Robert Wright

Not long ago I was accused of something I hadn’t realized was a bad thing: clarity. Adam Gopnik, reviewing my book “Why Buddhism Is True,” in The New Yorker in August, wrote: “He makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear.”

Underlying this allegation (which I vigorously deny!) is a common view: that Buddhist ideas defy clear articulation — and that in a sense the point of Buddhist ideas is to defy clear articulation. After all, aren’t those Zen koans — “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and so on — supposed to suggest that language, and the linear thought it embodies, can’t capture the truth about reality?

Gopnik seems to think that this drift of Buddhist thought — its apparent emphasis on the inscrutability of things — largely insulates it from scrutiny. Buddhist discourse that acknowledges, even embraces, paradox may “hold profound existential truths,” Gopnik says, but by the same token it has, as a kind of built-in property, an “all-purpose evasion of analysis.” So apparently people like me, who would like to evaluate Buddhist ideas in the light of modern science and philosophy, should save our breath.

The question Gopnik is raising isn’t just an academic one. Every day, millions of people practice mindfulness meditation — they sit down, focus on their breath, and calm their minds. But the point of mindfulness meditation isn’t just to calm you down. Rather, the idea — as explained in ancient Buddhist texts — is that a calm, contemplative mind can help you see the world as it really is. It would be nice to critically examine this powerful claim, but if we can’t say clearly what Buddhists mean by “the world as it really is,” then how can we examine it? How can we figure out — or even argue about — whether meditation is indeed drawing people closer to the truth about reality?

The cultural critic Edward Said famously used the term “orientalism” to refer to a patronizing way Westerners sometimes think of Eastern cultures and ideas — as charmingly exotic, perhaps, but as deficient in various Western virtues, including rationality and rigor. Said was talking mainly about Middle Eastern cultures, but much the same could be said of Buddhism: Western thinkers may cherish its art and its cryptic aphorisms, and may see meditation as therapeutically useful, but many of them don’t imagine Buddhist thought playing in the same league as Western thought; they don’t imagine a Buddhist philosophy that involves coherent conceptual structures that can be exposed to evidence and logic and then stand or fall on their merits.

This condescension is unfounded. Not only have Buddhist thinkers for millenniums been making very much the kinds of claims that Western philosophers and psychologists make — many of these claims are looking good in light of modern Western thought. In fact, in some cases Buddhist thought anticipated Western thought, grasping things about the human mind, and its habitual misperception of reality, that modern psychology is only now coming to appreciate.

“Golden Buddha, 2005” by Nam June Paik.Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Consider a quote that Gopnik employs in suggesting that appraising Buddhist philosophy may be a fool’s errand. It is from a Zen Buddhist who, in analyzing a famous text called the Heart Sutra, wrote this: “Things exist but they are not real.” I agree with Gopnik that this sentence seems a bit hard to unpack. But if you go look at the book it is taken from, you’ll find that the author himself, Mu Soeng, does a good job of unpacking it.

It turns out Soeng is explaining an idea that is central to Buddhist philosophy: “not self” — the idea that your “self,” as you intuitively conceive it, is actually an illusion. Soeng writes that the doctrine of not-self doesn’t deny an “existential personality” — it doesn’t deny that there is a you that exists; what it denies is that somewhere within you is an “abiding core,” a kind of essence-of-you that remains constant amid the flux of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and other elements that constitute your experience. So if by “you” we mean a “self” that features an enduring essence, then you aren’t real.

Now, you can argue with this line of thought — with its characterization of the self, its definition of “real” and “exist,” and so on. But the point is that this line of thought is clear enough to argue about — just like the lines of thought Western philosophers produce. In fact, David Hume, an emphatically Western philosopher, made an argument against the reality of the self that is so similar to longstanding Buddhist arguments as to make some scholars (including, as it happens, Alison Gopnik, Adam’s sister) suspect that Hume had encountered Buddhist thought.

In recent decades, important aspects of the Buddhist concept of not-self have gotten support from psychology. In particular, psychology has bolstered Buddhism’s doubts about our intuition of what you might call the “C.E.O. self” — our sense that the conscious “self” is the initiator of thought and action.

A particularly famous experiment seems to show that, before we are consciously aware of deciding to perform an act — push a button, say — the physical processes that initiate the act are already underway. Other experiments suggest that our minds are good at fabricating reasons that we do certain things and hold certain opinions — and that the fabrication happens unconsciously, so that the conscious mind is itself duped into believing these stories, along with their implication that the conscious mind is running the show.

If much of this sounds disappointingly free of the charming paradox commonly associated with Buddhism, I have good news: There is a paradox that can surface if you pursue the logic of not-self through meditation. Namely: recognizing that “you” are not in control, that you are not a C.E.O., can help give “you” more control. Or, at least, you can behave more like a C.E.O. is expected to behave: more rationally, more wisely, more reflectively; less emotionally, less rashly, less reactively.

Here’s how it can work. Suppose that, via mindfulness meditation, you observe a feeling like anxiety or anger and, rather than let it draw you into a whole train of anxious or angry thoughts, you let it pass away. Though you experience the feeling — and in a sense experience it more fully than usual — you experience it with “non-attachment” and so evade its grip. And you now see the thoughts that accompanied it in a new light — they no longer seem like trustworthy emanations from some “I” but rather as transient notions accompanying transient feelings.

Note how, in addition to being therapeutic, this clarifies your view of the world. After all, the “anxious” or “angry” trains of thought you avoid probably aren’t objectively true. They probably involve either imagining things that haven’t happened or making subjective judgments about things that have. In other words, these thoughts are just stories the brain spews out; they are often manifestly misleading, and abandoning them will tend to leave us closer to clarity than embracing them would.

Mindfulness meditation can be enlightening in another way, too. It can make us more aware of how our buttons get pushed — more aware, say, of how people or things we encounter trigger certain feelings and certain stories and thus certain behaviors. Somewhat like “Western” psychological science, mindfulness can illuminate the workings of the mind.

There’s a broader and deeper sense in which Buddhist thought is more “Western” than stereotype suggests. What, after all, is more Western than science’s emphasis on causality, on figuring out what causes what, and hoping to thus explain why all things do the things they do? Well, in a sense, the Buddhist idea of “not-self” grows out of the belief undergirding this mission — that the world is pervasively governed by causal laws. The reason there is no “abiding core” within us is that the ever-changing forces that impinge on us — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes — are constantly setting off chain reactions inside of us.

Indeed, this constant causal interaction with our environment raises doubts not only about how firm the core of the “self” is but, in a sense, how firm the bounds of the self are. Buddhism’s doubts about the distinctness and solidity of the “self” — and of other things, for that matter — rests on a recognition of the sense in which pervasive causality means pervasive fluidity.

The kind of inquiry that produced Buddhist views on the human psyche isn’t scientific; it doesn’t involve experiments that generate publicly observable data. It rests more on a kind of meditative introspection — somewhat in the spirit of what Western philosophers call phenomenology. Yet Buddhism long ago generated insights that modern psychology is only now catching up to, and these go beyond doubts about the C.E.O. self.

For example, psychology has lately started to let go of its once-sharp distinction between “cognitive” and “affective” parts of the mind; it has started to see that feelings are so finely intertwined with thoughts as to be part of their very coloration. This wouldn’t qualify as breaking news in Buddhist circles. A sutra attributed to the Buddha says that a “mind object” — a category that includes thoughts — is just like a taste or a smell: whether a person is “tasting a flavor with the tongue” or “smelling an odor with the nose” or “cognizing a mind object with the mind,” the person “lusts after it if it is pleasing” and “dislikes it if it is unpleasing.”

Brain-scan studies have produced tentative evidence that this lusting and disliking — embracing thoughts that feel good and rejecting thoughts that feel bad — lies near the heart of certain “cognitive biases.” If such evidence continues to accumulate, the Buddhist assertion that a clear view of the world involves letting go of these lusts and dislikes will have drawn a measure of support from modern science.

Gopnik thinks that attempts to corroborate Buddhist ideas with modern science run into a contradiction. After all, Buddhism is in a sense suspicious of “stories” — such as those stories that mindfulness meditation can help liberate us from. And, Gopnik says, science is just “competitive storytelling” — which means, he says, that Buddhism is “antithetical” to scientific argument. He writes, “Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend.” Well, this irony doesn’t seem to have deterred the Buddhists who, a couple of millenniums ago, compiled the “Abhidhamma Pitaka,” which puts names on lots of mental phenomena and tells stories about how they relate to one another. And it doesn’t seem to bother the Dalai Lama, who has embraced science as a legitimate way to test Buddhist ideas.

I agree with Gopnik on one thing: There are parts of Buddhist philosophy that, even when properly understood, seem paradoxical or opaque. But these tend to involve the same issues that drive Western philosophers toward paradox and opaqueness — for example, the relationship of consciousness to the physical body. Language is indeed (as notable Western philosophers have held) incapable of encompassing all of reality, and I’m pretty sure that the human mind is incapable of comprehending all of reality.

All we can do is clear away as many impediments to comprehension as possible. Science has a way of doing that — by insisting that entrants in its “competitive storytelling” demonstrate explanatory power in ways that are publicly observable, thus neutralizing, to the extent possible, subjective biases that might otherwise prevail. Buddhism has a different way of doing it: via meditative disciplines that are designed to attack subjective biases at the source, yielding a clearer view of both the mind itself and the world beyond it.

The results of these two inquiries converge to a remarkable extent — an extent that can be appreciated only in light of the last few decades of progress in psychology and evolutionary science. At least, that’s my argument. It may be wrong. But it’s an argument that can be engaged by anyone willing to engage it — which is something it has in common with Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist psychology.

 https://www.nytimes.com/