Buddhism is more "Western" than you think

Robert Wright (The Stone, The New York Times, Nov. 6, 2017); Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

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

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Why... (simonandschuster.com)

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 (2017), 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.

Light Morning Meditation in Floyd, Virginia 2017 (Lori Marsh/Light Morning Community)

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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.

Why Buddhism is True (Robert Wright)

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.

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.” More