Inbox scrap 66

introduction

the dominant strand of modern Buddhism, known as “Buddhist modernism,” is full of confused ideas. They coalesce around what I call “Buddhist exceptionalism.” Buddhist exceptionalism is the belief that Buddhism is superior to other religions in being inherently rational and empirical, or that Buddhism isn’t really a religion but rather is a kind of “mind science,” therapy, philosophy, or way of life based on meditation. These beliefs, as well as the assumptions about religion and science on which they rest, are mistaken. They need to be discarded if Buddhism is to take its rightful place as a valuable contributor to a modern cosmopolitan community. Cosmopolitanism, the idea that all human beings belong to one community that can and should encompass different ways of life, provides a better framework for appreciating Buddhism, and for understanding religion and science, than Buddhist modernism. That is the argument of this

We were used to running all over our ten-acre property doing whatever we liked. Now we had to take off our shoes and keep quiet whenever we entered the main lodge. There were more dinners with mushy brown rice and overcooked steamed vegetables that not even huge gobs of ketchup could fix. A weird formality seemed to have taken over many people in the community. The occasional silent meals were the worst. To get anyone to pass you anything you had to make hand gestures and bow afterward. Of course, we made faces at each other trying to get someone to break down and laugh. Then we’d run around imitating the pious expressions and silly gestures of the adults. I was the oldest kid, and sometimes I would go to the daily group meditation at five-thirty in the afternoon before we ate dinner at six o’clock. My father thought the presence of Zen made the meditation room’s atmosphere thick and weighty, but the Zen demeanor seemed forced to me.

The Christian monks were very interested in the practice, but the Japanese Zen teacher and his disciples showed little interest in Christian ideas at the lunch discussion. Afterwards, Pennington told me that he was interested in Zen as a way to revitalize Christian contemplative practices so that Christians wouldn’t feel the need to turn to Buddhism. 3

Tsong Khapa, The Essence of True Eloquence. 4 This work examines some of the most difficult and subtle points of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy. Tsong Khapa defends the Prāsaṇ gika Madhyamaka viewpoint, according to which all phenomena lack defining characteristics, even conventionally, and only negative (reductio ad absurdum ) arguments, rather than positive reasoning (syllogisms), should be used to establish that phenomena are empty of any inherent nature. By making these Indian

In Buddhism I found a philosophy that answered questions about the meaning of human life and how the mind works and that could stand on its own in the debates I was studying in my philosophy classes about whether there is a way the world is in itself, apart from the mind, or whether everything depends on the mind. But, unlike European philosophy, Buddhism also offered “enlightenment” or “awakening,” and meditation practices attuned to it.

With Thurman as my advisor, I wrote my senior honors thesis on the twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji, whom I had discovered in a comparative religion seminar with Thurman and Lal Mani Joshi, a visiting Buddhist scholar from India. Nishitani had studied with the German thinker Martin Heidegger and had used Buddhist Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy and Zen to develop his own critical response to philosophical problems found in Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger. I was excited to read his book Religion and Nothingness, in the way only a young student can be. 5 Here was a gripping Buddhist response to modernity, especially to the loss of transcendent meaning and the problem of nihilism. Nishitani followed Nietzsche in describing nihilism as the predicament of feeling compelled to deny that life has meaning—because meaning could come only from something transcendent that is no longer credible—while not being able to give up the yearning for transcendent meaning. Nishitani used the Madhyamaka idea that all things are “empty” of an inherent nature, and therefore have no transcendent ground, to break through nihilism and restore meaning. Moreover, he described a kind of meaning that’s radically immanent, here and now, and discoverable through meditation. His philosophy seemed to reenchant the world. In my gap year before starting graduate school in philosophy, I turned my thesis into a paper on Nishitani and Heidegger; it appeared in the journal Philosophy East and West and was my first published article. 6

The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. 7 This book was the first academic work to explore the relevance of Buddhist philosophy and meditation for cognitive science, as well as to advance the “enactive” approach to cognition, which describes cognition as sense-making through embodied action.

I couldn’t connect with any of them. It didn’t feel right to count my breath in Korean or chant in Japanese or try to do complex visualizations of Tibetan Buddhist deities. I kept encountering anti-intellectualism, sanctimoniousness, naïve reverence, and downright fetishism. I wondered whether I was being too uptight and why I couldn’t just let go.

These scandals, the different responses to them on the part of Asian Buddhist teachers, the problem of patriarchy in Buddhism, the modern movement of Buddhist feminism, and recent efforts at diversity and inclusion in Buddhist communities are not the subject of this book. 12 I mention the scandals because people I know have suffered as a result of them. These events and their harmful effects need to be acknowledged in any book on modern Buddhism. They’re also one reason why I was unwilling to join the Buddhist communities I encountered.

I couldn’t see myself joining a traditional Buddhist monastery, and I was getting pretty skeptical of the North American “dharma scene.” Still, my cycle of trying to be a Buddhist and finding that it didn’t work for me continued for a while. Only after I’d been working with the Mind and Life Institute did I begin to figure out why I couldn’t be a Buddhist.

Mind and Life Dialogues, a series of meetings between the Dalai Lama and scientists about science and Buddhist philosophy and meditation practice.

an in-group/out-group structure was developing. Skeptical or critical voices asking tough questions were being sidelined. Can scientists who are personally invested in meditation practice be objective and impartial in their research on meditation? Why is there so much antecedent commitment to establishing that meditation is beneficial when many people also report experiencing negative effects? Doesn’t it distort both Buddhism and science to use Buddhist concepts such as “awakening,” “pure awareness,” “innate goodness,” or “Buddha nature” to interpret scientific studies of the brain and behavior? Such questions were often pushed aside.

I also noticed that Buddhism was getting special treatment. Buddhist exceptionalism was rampant, as Buddhism was seen as superior to other religions, or as not really a religion but rather as a kind of “mind science.” Buddhist meditation practices were regarded as inherently different from prayer or worship. Ancient Indian Buddhist taxonomies of mental states were treated as if they were the direct product of meditation and as objective maps of the mind, rather than scholastic philosophical systems that aimed to reconstruct and systematize the Buddha’s teaching in as unambiguous a way as possible. Coupled to the special status given to Buddhism was the special status given to neuroscience, or more precisely, the small part of neuroscience that is human brain imaging. The result was a kind of “neural Buddhism.” 14 According to this way of thinking, “enlightenment” is a brain state or has unique neural signatures, mindfulness practice consists in training the brain, and cognitive science has corroborated the Buddhist view that there is no self.

There were dissenting voices, especially from historians of religion, philosophers, and anthropologists, but they were in the minority. Buddhist exceptionalism and neural Buddhism were becoming the default framework for most of the discussions about the scientific study of meditation.

Note: conventional science was so accepting of the “no self” mistranslation because they saw it as a contrary view the the belief in a soul, rather than the adjective to be used in a phenomenological analyzatjon of lives experiemce that it actually is. They take it as a metaphysical proposition

At first I looked at these problems through philosophical and cognitive scientific glasses. Later I also came to see them from a historical perspective.

From a cognitive science perspective, the problem with neural Buddhism is that it’s “brainbound” or “neurocentric.” It rests on the assumption that cognition happens inside the brain instead of being a performance of the whole embodied being embedded in the world. The proper scientific framework for conceptualizing meditation isn’t human brain imaging; it’s embodied cognitive science, the study of how cognition directly depends on the culturally configured body acting in the world.

From a philosophical perspective, the problem with Buddhist exceptionalism is that it presents Buddhist theories of the mind as if they’re value-neutral descriptions, when they’re based on value judgments about how to cultivate or shape the mind to realize the supreme Buddhist goal of nirvana. In philosophical terms, the theories are normative—they’re based on ethical value judgments—and soteriological—they’re concerned with salvation or liberation. Buddhist theories of the mind lose their point if they’re extracted from the Buddhist normative and soteriological frameworks.

couldn’t help thinking throughout the retreat that what was happening didn’t match the rhetoric of “learning to see things as they are.”

This seems to be misinterpreted as objectivism

How could this not direct and shape what we were experiencing? Were we learning to “see things as they are,” or were we shaping them to be a certain way? And wasn’t the whole effort guided by a certain vision of the Buddhist goal as dispassionate mental peace?

the philosophical and scientific problems I was thinking about—as well as the Mind and Life Institute, the earlier dialogues between Varela and the Dalai Lama, and the new meditation retreats for scientists—were caught up in the older and broader movement that historians call “Buddhist modernism.” 16 This is the modern and transnational form of Buddhism that downplays the metaphysical and ritual elements of traditional Asian Buddhism, while emphasizing personal meditative experience and scientific rationality. Buddhist modernism presents itself as if it were Buddhism’s original and essential core, when in fact it’s historically recent.

Looking at my experiences over the years through a larger historical perspective made me realize why I couldn’t be a Buddhist. Since I didn’t want to join a traditional Theravāda, Zen, or Tibetan Buddhist monastery, the only way to be a Buddhist was to be a Buddhist modernist. But Buddhist modernism is riddled with philosophical problems.

Buddhist exceptionalism is an inherent part of Buddhist modernism. Buddhism is presented as if it were either superior to other religions in being inherently rational and empirical, or as not really a religion but rather as a kind of “mind science” based on meditation. These ideas are mistaken and rest on misconceptions about religion and science.

“Religion” is a term created by European scholars; it isn’t native to the languages of premodern Asian Buddhism. 17 Nevertheless, from the perspective of the scholarly study of religion, the Buddhist tradition falls within the scope of the term. Religions consist not just of beliefs and doctrines but also of social practices of meaning-making, including rituals and contemplative practices. Religions instill a sense of transcendence, a sensibility for that which exceeds ordinary experience.

Science isn’t a monolithic edifice of final principles and established facts. Rather, it’s a system of orderly and testable public knowledge comprising multiple and sometimes rival views of the universe, life, and the mind. It includes not just experimental investigations with increasingly sophisticated technologies but also epistemology, linguistics, logic, and mathematics. In a broad sense, science is a form of public knowledge based on testable empirical observations and rational principles that can be intersubjectively agreed upon.

Science can devolve into narrow-minded ideology no less than religion can, and religion can nurture and inspire science. Asking whether science and religion are compatible or incompatible is like asking whether art and science or art and religion are compatible or incompatible: it all depends on the larger culture that contains them.

Religion and science have never been separate and autonomous spheres, or “nonoverlapping magisteria” in Stephen Jay Gould’s famous phrase. 18 On the contrary, they constantly intersect, usually with friction. Often the friction leads to conflict; sometimes it leads to cooperation and new insights. The culture and historical epoch determine the forms conflict and cooperation will take. Gould’s proposal to reconcile religion and science by treating them as independent realms, each with its own authority, is a nonstarter.

The “new atheists” recognize that religion and science can’t be separated in the way that Gould proposes, but their campaigns to stamp out religion in the name of science misunderstand the meaning-making activities of religions. Religions don’t explain the universe as science does; they create meaning through rituals, communities, textual traditions, and ways of understanding life’s great events—birth, aging, sickness, trauma, extraordinary states of consciousness, and death. The new atheists also misunderstand science. They fail to see that when science steps back from experimentation in order to give meaning to its results in terms of grand stories about where we come from and where we’re going—the narratives of cosmology and evolution—it cannot help but become a mythic form of meaning-making and typically takes the structures of its narratives from religion. 19

Buddhist modernism encourages a kind of false consciousness: it makes people think that if they embrace Buddhism or just pick out its supposedly nonreligious parts, they’re being “spiritual but not religious,” when unbeknownst to them religious forces are impelling them. These forces include the desire to be part of a community organized around some sense of the sacred, or the desire to find a source of meaning that transcends the individual, or the felt need to cope with suffering, or the desire to experience deep and transformative states of contemplation. (Of course, other kinds of forces may be impelling them, too, such as the need to sublimate desires, as described by Freud, or capitalist forces, as described by Marx.) The actions people undertake to satisfy these desires, such as practicing meditation or going on retreats, are also religious. People use the word “spiritual” because they want to emphasize transformative personal experiences apart from public religious institutions. Nevertheless, from an outside, analytical perspective informed by the history, anthropology, and sociology of religion, “spirituality without religion” is really just “privatized, experience-oriented religion.”

Buddhist modernism is now replete with appeals to the supposed authority of neuroscience. It has claimed that neuroscience confirms the truth of the Buddhist idea that there is no self, that neuroscience shows that mindfulness meditation “literally changes your brain,” and that enlightenment has “neural correlates.”

These ideas aren’t just wrong; they’re confused. The self isn’t a brain-generated illusion or nonexistent fiction; it’s a biological and social construction. Anything you do “literally changes your brain”; evidence for mindfulness meditation leading to beneficial changes in the brain is still tentative; and mindfulness meditation is a social practice, whose positive or negative value depends on social facts beyond the brain. “Enlightenment” isn’t a singular state with a unique brain signature; it’s an ambiguous concept, whose different and often incompatible meanings depend on the religious and philosophical traditions that give rise to them. Contrary to neural Buddhism, the status of the self, the value of meditation, and the meaning of “enlightenment” aren’t matters that neuroscience can decide. They’re inherently philosophical matters that lie beyond the ken of neuroscience.

Since I see no way for myself to be a Buddhist without being a Buddhist modernist, and Buddhist modernism is philosophically unsound, I see no way for myself to be a Buddhist without acting in bad faith. That is why I’m not a Buddhist.

not to argue that Buddhist modernism is less “authentic” than “traditional” Buddhism. Such arguments are nonstarters. There is no one traditional Buddhism. Buddhism is an evolving tradition that has taken innumerable forms over the millennia in Asia and now in Europe and North America. Trying to go back to the “original teachings of the Buddha” is a typical Buddhist modernist move (and one that Buddhist modernism shares with the equally modern phenomenon of religious fundamentalism). The move flies in the face of the fact that we have no direct access to what the Buddha thought and taught. To be inspired by the early Buddhist texts and construct out of them a message for today is one thing; to try to legitimize one’s construction by claiming historical veracity for it is another. Buddhist modernists typically take the second step and thereby undermine their case. 21

We shouldn’t conflate Buddhist modernism and Buddhism in the modern world. Buddhist modernism is only one way to be a Buddhist in the modern world. There are also traditional monastic forms of Buddhism throughout the world, and what are sometimes called “ethnic Buddhisms.” There is also Buddhist fundamentalism (for example, in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand). These forms of Buddhism aren’t insulated from each other; rather, they intersect in complex ways. Nevertheless, Buddhist modernism can be singled out as a recognizable historical movement and a widespread contemporary phenomenon. As historian David McMahan observes in The Making of Buddhist Modernism, “Buddhist modernism is becoming the lingua franca of Buddhism as it is presented in transnational, cosmopolitan contexts.” 22 The language of Buddhist modernism is becoming a “meta-language” for how to interpret the fundamental elements of Buddhism and situate them in the modern world. Although the context of my critique is Buddhism in the modern world, the scope of my critique is Buddhist modernism, or more precisely, Buddhist modernism in Europe and North America, since Asia is evolving its own unique forms of Buddhist modernism. My critical arguments apply to European and American Buddhist modernism, not to every form of Buddhism or Buddhism as a whole.

The positive part of this book is an argument for cosmopolitanism, the idea that all human beings belong to a single community, regardless of their religion or ethnicity. In the Mediterranean philosophical narrative, this idea goes back to Epictetus, a first-century Stoic philosopher, who said, “Never, when asked one’s country, answer, ‘I am Athenian or Corinthian,’ but ‘I am a citizen of the world.’” 23 Cosmopolitan thinking stretches from ancient Greece and Rome through the European Age of Enlightenment and into the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. South Asia and East Asia have their own versions of cosmopolitanism, as does Africa. The historian Sheldon Pollock uses the term “the Sanskrit cosmopolis” to describe the classical South Asian world of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and later Islam, in which Sanskrit was the language of literature. 24 In East Asia, the “three teachings” of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism coexisted and cross-fertilized each other.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a British, African, and American philosopher, has recently reinvigorated cosmopolitanism. 25 He argues that the values worth living by are many, not one; different people and societies can and should embody different ways of life; we ought to care about the welfare of the individuals engaged in those different ways of life; and the insights of any one tradition are not the exclusive preserve of that tradition or any other.

Cosmopolitan thinkers move across different religious, scientific, philosophical, and artistic traditions and explore the presuppositions and commitments of those traditions. Cosmopolitanism offers a perspective from which to adjudicate the complex relationship between religion and science. It provides a better way for us to appreciate Buddhism’s originality and insights than Buddhist modernism.

My title for this book—Why I Am Not a Buddhist —recalls the title of philosopher Bertrand Russell’s famous essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” which he originally gave as a lecture to the National Secular Society in London on March 6, 1927. I admire Russell’s philosophical brilliance and his courage as a social critic and political activist. There are important differences, however, between his aims and mine in this book. Unlike Russell, I’m not concerned to argue against religion. His view that fear is the foundation of religion and that science can help us to get over this fear is simplistic. My feelings toward Buddhism aren’t hostile, as his were for Christianity. (Of course, Buddhism in North America doesn’t have the kind of pernicious social power that Christianity did in early twentieth-century England.) Nevertheless, I approve of his words at the end of the essay: “We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world—its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it.” 26 I argue that the Buddhist intellectual tradition can help contribute to this effort in a cosmopolitan world without our having to accept the dubious claims of Buddhist modernism.

1
the myth of buddhist exceptionalism

Imagine you came across two books, one called Christian Biology and the other called Why Christianity Is True. What would you expect to find in them? I’d expect a historically informed version of the first book to say something about the marvelous medieval concept of the “Book of Nature,” the idea that nature and its orderly laws are part of God’s revelation and that studying them can lead to knowledge of God. In North America today, however, the book would likely be about “creation science” and “intelligent design theory.” These theories are pseudoscience. They try to make the religious claim that nature is the product of a divine creator—who also happens to be the Christian God—look scientifically legitimate. I’d expect the second book to recite a bunch of religious beliefs to persuade the reader that Christianity—more likely, a particular Christian denomination—is the one true faith. A highbrow version would give theological arguments to the same end.

Now suppose you came across books called Islamic Biology and Why Islam Is True. Or Hindu Biology and Why Hinduism Is True. What would you think?

There are no books with any of these titles (to the best of my knowledge). But there are books called Buddhist Biology and Why Buddhism Is True. 1 David Barash, an evolutionary biologist and psychologist, is the author of Buddhist Biology, and Robert Wright, a journalist well known for his promotion of evolutionary psychology, is the author of Why Buddhism Is True.

Do you react differently to these Buddhist titles? Many people do. The titles tend to elicit interest rather than provoke suspicion. Why Buddhism Is True was a New York Times bestseller in 2017, and it was celebrated by scientists, journalists, and Buddhist meditation practitioners alike. Buddhism is perceived differently from other religions, especially in relation to science.

There is a popular idea that Buddhism is inherently rational and scientific. People say that Buddhism isn’t so much a religion as it is a philosophy or a way of life. Some scientists have described it as “the most science-friendly religion.” 2 It dispenses with the concept of God, upholds direct observation, understands things in terms of cause and effect, maintains that everything constantly changes, and says that there is no essential self or soul. The religious parts of Buddhism are supposed to be extraneous and not too difficult to remove. Once you get rid of them you can see that Buddhism at its core is really a psychology based on meditation. Buddhist meditation isn’t like prayer or other kinds of religious contemplation or ritual; it’s an applied mind science. These are the reasons people give for thinking that Buddhism isn’t really a religion, or that if it is, it’s different from and superior to other religions.

I call this way of thinking “Buddhist exceptionalism.” Exceptionalism is the belief that something is extraordinary and superior,

Model theism

as in American exceptionalism, the ideology that the United States has a unique history and mission that make it superior to other nations. Buddhist exceptionalism is the belief that Buddhism is superior among the world religions in being inherently rational and empirical.

Buddhist exceptionalism is widespread and influential. It shapes how people see Buddhism in the battles between science and religion. Adam Frank, an astrophysicist who also writes about science and religion, captures the perception when he writes, “In the endless public wars between science and religion, Buddhism has mostly been given a pass.” 3

David Barash begins Buddhist Biology with these words: “There is an intriguing exception to what I, at least, see as the conflict between science and religion: Buddhism. Perhaps this is because Buddhism is as much a philosophy as a religion, or maybe because Buddhism is somehow more ‘valid’ than, say, the big Abrahamic three (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).” 4

Robert Wright argues that science corroborates the “core ideas” of Buddhism. These ideas are not “the ‘supernatural’ or more exotically metaphysical parts of Buddhism—reincarnation, for example— but rather … the naturalistic parts: ideas that fall squarely within modern psychology and philosophy.” 5

Even the staunchest scientific critics of religion give Buddhism special treatment. Richard Dawkins, in his back-cover endorsement of Buddhist Biology, says, “Buddhism is surely religion’s best shot.” Sam Harris, in Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, writes: “Buddhism without the unjustified bits is essentially a first-person science. Secular Judaism isn’t.” 6

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4 . Barash, Buddhist Biology, 2.

5 . Wright, Why Buddhism Is True, xi.

6 . Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 209.

Buddhist exceptionalism frames the science-religion dialogue from the Buddhist side as well. Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, in his Mind and Life Institute Dialogues with scientists and philosophers, often says that there is a “Buddhist science” and that “Buddhism is more than a religion. It is a science of the mind.” 7

As historians know, the Dalai Lama is repeating a move that goes back to the nineteenth century. 8 Christian missionaries in Asia had proclaimed the superiority of Christianity because it possessed science and advanced technology. European colonizers had given the same reason for the superiority of European civilization altogether. But Asian Buddhist intellectuals and reformers figured out how to turn the argument around. They countered that Buddhism is the truly scientific religion. These innovative Buddhists downplayed ritual, devotion, and beliefs and practices that Europeans thought were superstitious. They declared that Buddhism has no creator God (even though it has an elaborate array of celestial deities and acknowledges local gods and spirits); that Buddhism relies on reason and personal insight, not faith (even though it has many objects of faith and devotion); and that the Buddha was a human being, not divine (even though he is believed to have a “supramundane” nature). Indeed, these Buddhists argued, Buddhism is not so much a religion as a science of the mind.

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7 . “Buddhism Is a Science of the Mind: Dalai Lama,” His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, November 5, 2006, https://www.dalailama.com/news/2006/buddhism-is-a-science-of-the-mind-dalai-lama

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8 . See David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Donald S. Lopez, Jr., The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); and Donald Lopez, Jr., From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Historians call this modern reformulation of Buddhism “Buddhist modernism.” 9 It minimizes the metaphysical and ritual elements of traditional Asian Buddhism, while emphasizing scientific rationality together with personal meditative experience. Buddhist modernism presents itself as if it were Buddhism’s original and essential core. But, in fact, it’s historically recent.

Buddhist modernism arose in Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the encounter between Buddhist reform movements and European religion, science, and political and military dominance. Buddhist reformers, especially in Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), tried to reassert Buddhism as a national religion in the face of British colonialism and missionary Christianity. One of their main tactics was to present Buddhism as being a uniquely scientific religion compatible with the modern world. Protestant and European Enlightenment values strongly shaped this form of Buddhism, despite its presenting itself as Buddhism’s original essence. Similarly, in Japan, the “New Buddhism” movement, which was closely tied to Japanese nationalism, presented Zen as superior to Western religion, while D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) reframed Zen using ideas from German and English Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. 10 These modern, hybrid forms of Buddhism were exported to the West, where they continued to undergo transformation while also being imported back into Asia. Thus, from its inception, Buddhist modernism has cut across cultural and geographical contexts and is thoroughly transnational.

Buddhist modernism typically goes together with Buddhist exceptionalism. Modern Zen is a prime example. Modern Zen teachers often say that Zen isn’t a religion. For example, Yamada Ryōun, the abbot of Sanbō-Zen (formerly called Sanbō Kyodan), a lay Zen organization headquartered in Japan, says that religion requires faith in a transcendent being beyond the self, whereas “Zen is experientially finding one’s true self” and discovering “the truth of existence.” 11

This Zen version of Buddhist exceptionalism is specious. Faith in a transcendent being isn’t a universal feature of religion. Zen has ritual, scripture, liturgy, monastics, and priests. Moreover, “one’s true self” and “the truth of existence,” in the senses intended, are religious notions. They are soteriological, concerned with liberation and salvation. They involve a sense of transcendence, an orientation to something that goes beyond ordinary experience. Zen is unquestionably religious.

Of course, this statement raises the question of how to define “religion.” Scholars disagree about this issue. 12 The important point, with which they generally agree, is that conceiving of religion as a matter of beliefs held by the individual person or experiences taking place within the individual mind is an idiosyncratically modern conception of religion based on the historically recent and outlying case of Protestant Christianity. Given this way of thinking about religion, it’s easy to take the step of trying to assess a religion by examining its beliefs according to scientific criteria. All religions, including Buddhism, when viewed as being about beliefs in supernatural agents (gods, celestial buddhas and bodhisattvas) or supernatural principles (karma), cannot but seem ridiculous in the eyes of science in all the ways today’s “new atheists” never tire of pointing out.

Scholars have shown that the Protestant conception of religion is inadequate for understanding religions as social forms of meaning-making. 13 Religions create meaning through rituals, communities, shared practices, textual traditions, and interpretive frameworks for understanding the great events of life—birth, aging, sickness, trauma, extraordinary states of consciousness, and death. Religions instill a sense of transcendence, a sensibility for something of significance that transcends quotidian existence. Every form of Buddhism, even so-called secular Buddhism, includes these elements.

Buddhist exceptionalism presents Buddhism as uniquely suited to the modern world, but we can sanitize any religion in this modernist way. Consider modern Christian humanism, which stresses the humanity of Jesus, unites Christian ethics with humanist principles, promotes science, and calls attention to the Judeo-Christian and ancient Greek sources of scientific ideas such as the “laws of nature.” Or consider Liberal Judaism, which regards the Torah as written by human beings, not written by God and given to Moses on stone tablets, and emphasizes the progressive Jewish intellectual tradition. Indeed, many prominent American Buddhist teachers are also liberal Jews (or Jubus).

Many Buddhists today will respond that Buddhism is exceptional in being a science of the mind. This idea originated with Buddhist modernism in the nineteenth century but gained greater momentum in the twentieth century and is now widespread.

One of the first European Buddhist converts to call Buddhism a science of the mind was Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994), a German-born monk from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), whose birth name was Siegmund Feniger. In his influential book The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (first published in 1954), he identified what he called the Buddha’s “mind-doctrine” with a “science of the mind.” 14 Its method (or a large part of it) is “bare attention.”

Nyanaponika coined the term “bare attention” to explain the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness.” A half century earlier, the Pali language scholar Thomas William Rhys Davids (1843–1922) had used the word “mindfulness” to translate sati (Sanskrit smṛ ti ), which means “memory” and has the sense of bearing something in mind by continually recollecting it. To be mindful of your breathing in meditation is continually to have it be present to your mind, that is, not to forget it from moment to moment. To be mindful of the Buddha’s teaching that all compounded and conditioned things are impermanent and unsatisfactory is to hold that teaching before the mind as an object of meditation. The practice of mindfulness and the different objects it can take are the theme of the “Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness” (Satipaṭṭ hāna Sutta ), attributed to the Buddha. 15 Nyanaponika glossed this kind of holding in mind or retention of a meditative object as a bare attention to it. To be mindful of your breathing means not to lose track of it, and the way to do that is to keep your attention on it without getting caught up in discursive thoughts about it. These kinds of thoughts chain associatively to other thoughts, which take you away from the breath, so you need to learn how to drop them, while keeping your attention on the breath.

Nyanaponika stated that the “method of Bare Attention … tallies with the procedure and attitude of the true scientist.” Bare attention manifests “the genuine spirit of the research worker” and “will always unite the Buddha-Dhamma [teachings of the Buddha] with true science, though not necessarily with all the theories of the day.” But whereas “secular science … is limited to the discovery and explanation of facts” and “to a theoretical knowledge of the mind,” the “Buddha’s mind-doctrine … aims at the shaping of the mind, and, through it, of life. In that object, however, it meets with that branch of modern psychology which is devoted to the practical application of theoretical knowledge.” 16

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14 . Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (London: Rider, 1962; Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1992), 23–24, 41.

15 . Bhikkhu Anālayo, Satipaṭṭ hāna: The Direct Path to Realization (Birmingham: Windhorse, 2003).

16 . Nyanaponika Thera, Heart of Buddhist Meditation, 42.

Nyanaponika juxtaposed descriptive claims about the mind with statements about how one should shape the mind and life, according to the Buddhist path. The second kind of statements are ethical injunctions based on value judgments. In philosophical terms, they are normative claims rather than descriptive ones. Science pursues disinterested explanatory knowledge of the mind, whereas Buddhism also seeks to shape the mind according to certain norms and goals. But this juxtaposition of the descriptive and normative aspects of the Buddhist viewpoint hides a problem, one that still haunts the Buddhism-science dialogue today.

On one hand, bare attention—the method of the supposed Buddhist mind science—is said to reveal how the mind truly is. It’s said to reveal the truth of the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self” or “nonself” (anattā or anātman ), that there is no abiding self or soul and that the “mind is nothing beyond its cognizing function.” 17 The no-self doctrine isn’t presented as an antecedent normative framework that tells us what ought to happen as a result of practicing bare attention, namely, that we should no longer identify with the mind as the self. Rather, bare attention is presented as disclosing the antecedent truth that there is no self. Bare attention is likened to a scientific procedure or instrument for observing and establishing how things are.

On the other hand, mindfulness meditation is a practice that shapes the mind according to certain goals and norms, such as making the mind calmer and less impulsive. Nyanaponika writes that “Bare Attention slows down, or even stops, the transition from thought to action,” and “the plasticity and receptivity of the mind will grow considerably.” 18

How are these two ways of thinking about bare attention—as disinterested disclosure of how the mind truly is versus as shaping it according to a valued standard—supposed to be related? They seem to be in tension. To disclose something requires not changing it as you disclose it. To shape the mind is to change it. How can bare attention reveal the mind if it also changes it?

Consider scientific observation compared to bare attention to one’s own mental processes. Scientific observation, like meditation, is a practice and an acquired skill. You need to learn how to see through a microscope or a telescope. But these kinds of instruments are separate from the objects they provide access to, and they don’t change them (except, perhaps, at the quantum scale). A scanning electron microscope doesn’t alter the structure and workings of a cell, and an optical or radio telescope doesn’t alter stars and planets. Bare attention, however, isn’t an instrument applied to the mind from outside. It’s not separate from the mind; it’s a kind of mental process or cognitive function. It changes other mental processes, so it affects the mind. Indeed, in Nyanaponika’s terms, it not only “shapes” the mind but also ultimately helps to “liberate” it from all cravings and attachments.

Nyanaponika asserted that “in the light of Bare Attention, the seemingly uniform act of perception will, with increasing clarity, appear as a sequence of numerous and differentiated single phases, following each other in quick succession.” This “basic observation,” he continued, “will prove to be a truly scientific observation.” 19

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17 . Ibid., 41.

18 . Ibid., 43.

19 . Ibid., 39.

But how do we know that everyday active perception is really made up of a sequence of single phases as opposed to being a continuous flow that gets turned into a sequence of short-lived phases as a result of practicing bare attention while sitting still or deliberately walking very slowly (as one does in the practice of modern Theravāda “insight meditation”)? Does bare attention reveal the antecedent truth of no-self? Or does it change experience, so that experience comes to conform to the no-self norm, by leading us to disidentify with the mind so that it’s no longer experienced as “I” or “me” or “mine”? Is bare attention more like a light that reveals things or a mold that shapes them?

Note: The right hemisphere is able to integrate individual aspects of things into a coherent whole whereas the left sees only separate entities. Or how Descartes views time

My point isn’t that Buddhists can’t come up with answers to these questions. Rather, it’s that simply appealing to the experience of bare attention won’t answer them. The answers must come from the Buddhist “mind-doctrine,” that is, from Buddhist philosophy, which is not just descriptive but also inherently normative (it makes value judgments) and soteriological (it is concerned with salvation and liberation). In other words, it’s not the case that the experience of bare attention independently establishes the descriptive truth of the Buddhist mind-doctrine; rather, the Buddhist mind-doctrine is needed to give meaning to the experience of bare attention. Buddhist meditation and Buddhist doctrines go together and mutually reinforce each other. Furthermore, Buddhism contains many different theories of the mind, conceptions of liberation or salvation, and meditation practices. So, there is no one Buddhist answer to these questions.

In general terms, the issue is how to evaluate Buddhist descriptive and explanatory assertions about the mind in relation to Buddhist normative assertions. Likening Buddhist meditation to a scientific method glosses over this complicated issue.

Buddhist exceptionalists typically conflate the descriptive and normative aspects of Buddhist doctrines and meditation practices. For example, Sam Harris writes: “a person can embrace the Buddha’s teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative (and, one must presume, a buddha) without believing anything on insufficient evidence.” He thinks Buddhism is like science: “One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being).” 20 Harris makes it sound as if there is empirical, scientific evidence for the Buddha’s normative teaching, including the ideal norm of buddhahood and the possibility of its attainment.

I disagree. The concepts of nirvana (nirvāṇ a ) and awakening (bodhi ) aren’t scientific concepts; they’re soteriological ones. They aren’t psychological constructs whose validity can be established through measurement. In other words, they aren’t operationalizable. This doesn’t detract from their importance. On the contrary, many important concepts aren’t operationalizable. Take aesthetic concepts, such as “beauty,” “perfection,” “the sublime,” or wabi-sabi (the Japanese aesthetic of transience and imperfection). There is no way to establish what is beautiful or sublime or displays wabi-sabi on the basis of measurement. Aesthetic concepts are always subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning is constituted by the artistic practices, theories, and communities in which they figure. Soteriological concepts are like aesthetic concepts in this respect. They’re always subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning is constituted by the communities of practice and thought in which they figure. It’s a conceptual mistake to think that belief in the validity of Buddhist soteriological ideas is based on having sufficient scientific evidence for them. They aren’t the kind of ideas that can be directly established by science. If you embrace the Buddha’s teaching, it’s not because you have scientific evidence of its truth. Rather, you embrace a certain vision of the world that tells you how to lead a meaningful life. The Buddha’s teaching has been interpreted in many ways throughout history, including today. You may strive to reinterpret it so that it doesn’t contradict science, but science can’t directly confirm or disconfirm it.

Harris openly espouses Buddhist exceptionalism, though in his case the label “Eastern exceptionalism” may be more apt: “Several Eastern traditions are exceptionally empirical and exceptionally wise, and therefore merit the exceptionalism claimed by their adherents.” 21 By “Eastern traditions” he means Buddhism and certain modern variants of the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedānta. (He lumps them all together, despite their many differences.) But he singles out Buddhism. He says that it “isn’t primarily a faith-based religion”; “its central teachings are entirely empirical”; it “possesses a literature on the nature of the mind that has no peer in Western religion or Western science”; and unlike Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, its teachings “are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation,” but rather are “empirical instructions.” 22

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20 . Sam Harris, “Killing the Buddha,” Shambhala Sun, March 19, 2006, available at https://samharris.org/killing-the-buddha/ .

21 . Harris, Waking Up, 29.

22 . Ibid., 28–30.

In my view, these generalizations are simplistic and tendentious. Harris is working with the popular but limited concept of faith as belief without sufficient evidence. But the proper meaning of “faith” is trust or confidence in someone or something. Christian faith is trust or confidence in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and trust or confidence in the possibility of salvation. Buddhist faith is trust or confidence in the teachings of the Buddha, and trust or confidence in the possibility of awakening (bodhi ) and liberation (nirvāṇ a ).

Faith is central to Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhism. In the Abhidharma—the systematic presentation of the Buddhist doctrine—faith is listed as a wholesome or virtuous mental factor and as one of the five spiritual faculties. (The other four are diligence, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom.) Faith has four main objects: karma and rebirth; the Buddha’s teaching that existence is conditioned, impermanent, and fundamentally unsatisfactory; the “three jewels” of the Buddha, his teaching, and the Buddhist community (especially the monastic community); and the Buddhist path, including the prospect of liberation from suffering and the experience of nirvana. 23

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23 . See the entry for śraddhā (faith) in Robert E. Buswell, Jr., and Donald S. Lopez, Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 847–848.

These central teachings aren’t empirical; they’re normative and soteriological. They’re based on value judgments that aren’t subject to independent empirical test, and they evaluate the world according to the desired goal of liberation. Although it’s unquestionably true that Buddhism possesses a vast and sophisticated philosophical and contemplative literature on the mind, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also possess sophisticated philosophical and contemplative writings about the mind. These writings build on the rich and intricate heritage of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic thought. The Buddhist texts aren’t less metaphysical than the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ones. Buddhist literature about the mind is filled with metaphysical viewpoints that modern people find doubtful. Finally, although the teachings of Buddhism aren’t considered to be the product of divine revelation, the cognition of a buddha is traditionally considered to be omniscient and infallible, and hence his or her teaching is incontrovertible.

Harris is writing within a now solidified tradition of Buddhist exceptionalism based on how modern Buddhist meditation teachers have repackaged meditation as a science of the mind. One of the most prominent examples is S. N. Goenka (1924–2013), a well-known Burmese Indian teacher of Buddhist vipassanā (insight) meditation. He declared that “Buddha was not a founder of religion, he was a super-scientist. A spiritual super-scientist.” Goenka said that what happens during the ten-day meditation courses he designed and that now occur around the world “is pure science.” He also insisted that “Buddha never established a religion. Buddha never taught Buddhism. Buddha never made a single person a Buddhist.” Like science, the Buddha’s teaching is “a universal teaching,” and once it became Buddhism, “it devalued the teaching of the Buddha.” 24

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24 . S. N. Goenka and Helen Tworkov, “Superscience: An Interview with S. N. Goenka by Helen Tworkov,” Tricycle, Winter 2000, https://tricycle.org/magazine/superscience/ .

Notice that Goenka wasn’t saying that we, today, can be inspired by the Buddhist tradition to create new forms of lay meditation practice in order to lead better lives in the modern world. He claimed to be returning to the Buddha’s original message and form of practice.

This claim to return to a founder’s original message is a typical modern religious move. One way to make the move is to be fundamentalist; another way is to be modernist. We can easily craft a modernist Christian version of this way of thinking: “Jesus never established a religion. Jesus never taught Christianity. Jesus never made a single person a Christian. Jesus’s teaching is a universal teaching, and once it became Christianity, it devalued the teaching. We need to return to Jesus’s original message.” Modern liberal Christians often express these kinds of thoughts and sentiments. To think that analogous statements about the Buddha have more validity or aren’t really religious is an example of Buddhist exceptionalism.

Another example of likening the Buddha’s “original message” to science comes from Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, a contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher. 25 He allows that Buddhism can be practiced as a religion but says that’s not what the Buddha taught. Buddhism is a “science of the mind.” Dzogchen Ponlop gives a modern image of the historical Buddha as “spiritual but not religious.” Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, embarked on a “spiritual quest,” eventually “abandoned religious practices,” and found his own answers in an experience of enlightenment that goes beyond all belief systems.

Again, we see the typical, modern religious move—shared by modernists and fundamentalists alike—of invoking what the historical founder is supposed originally to have taught as a justification for one’s own viewpoint. What we’re actually offered, however, is an image of the Buddha that was created by nineteenth-century European Orientalist scholars. For them, “the origin of Buddhism was an exemplary case of a great man heroically standing up against the faceless collective power of society and tradition, thus evoking an image that the modern West has come to champion and idolize.” 26 These scholars likened the Buddha’s rejection of the Vedic authority of the Brahmin priests to Martin Luther’s rejection of papal authority. Buddhism was even called the “Protestantism of the East.” 27 This iconoclastic image of the Buddha is so familiar to us now that we take it for granted. But it’s not an accurate historical depiction. The Buddha was one seeker (śramaṇ a ) among many of his time, and he was far from being alone in rejecting the Vedic authority of the Brahmins.

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25 . Charles Prebish, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, and Joan Sutherland, “Is Buddhism a Religion?” Lion’s Roar, January 4, 2019, https://www.lionsroar.com/is-buddhism-a-religion-november-2013/ .

26 . Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 136.

27 . Ibid., 134 n. 17.

Dzogchen Ponlop says: “You’re not required to have more faith in the Buddha than you do in yourself. His power lies in his teachings.” 28 Some Buddhists today may think this way, but it’s hardly how most Buddhists throughout history have understood their relationship to the Buddha and his teachings. On the contrary, the Buddha is typically portrayed as omniscient and transcendent (“supramundane”), whereas we’re fundamentally ignorant and confused, trapped in the beginningless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (saṃ sāra ). We need to place our faith in the Buddha (and a host of bodhisattvas) and not rely on our limited perspective and defective perception.

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28 . Prebish, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, and Sutherland, “Is Buddhism a Religion?

The irony of Goenka’s and Dzogchen Ponlop’s remarks is that they’re religious, not scientific. They spin a mythic story with a hagiographic image of a founding figure that has little basis in known historical fact.

We know very little about the “historical Buddha.” The Buddha wrote nothing. There are no written accounts of his life and teachings by his contemporary disciples. His orally preserved teachings weren’t written down until the first century BCE, several centuries after his death, in places far removed from where he lived. They were written down in languages that the Buddha didn’t speak. (We don’t know exactly which language the Buddha spoke.) By that time—and no doubt long before—his teachings had become subject to divergent and rival interpretations. We know much less about the Buddha as a historical figure than we do about Jesus.

One scholar has tried to sift through the texts and reconstruct “what the Buddha thought.” 29 Another scholar has argued that “we do not have [scientific, empirical] grounds for speaking of a historical Buddha at all.” 30 In his view, we should treat the recluse Gotama as a remote literary figure like Homer, Agamemnon, or King Arthur. There may be actual historical people behind these names, but we have no concrete historical evidence about them.

Both views are extreme. The Buddha’s teachings were orally preserved in a culture that emphasized the accuracy of memorization through recitation. So, relying on the oral tradition and its later written preservation can give us some reliable evidence. Nevertheless, the point remains that we can’t extrapolate beyond these materials to know what the Buddha as a historical person really thought and taught, and the earliest materials are already at least one step removed from the Buddha. 31

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29 . Richard F. Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought (London: Equinox, 2009).

30 . David Drewes, “The Idea of the Historical Buddha,” JIABS (Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies ) 40 (2017): 1–25, at 19.

31 . See Rupert Gethin, “Gethin on Gombrich, ‘What the Buddha Thought,’” H-Buddhism, January 2012, https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/16095/gethin-gombrich-what-buddha-thought .

We do know, however, how the modern image of the historical Buddha came to be constructed by Orientalist scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 32 This Buddha—who manages to be the founder of a “world religion,” while also being “spiritual but not religious,” a heroic iconoclast, a mind scientist, a free thinker, and a rational empiricist philosopher—was forged “in a European philological workshop.” 33 He is a modernist conceit. He is the figure being revered when Goenka and Dzogchen Ponlop say that the Buddha was a mind scientist.

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32 . See the books by Lopez in note 8. See also Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, chapter 4 .

33 . Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 130.

A more nuanced—but still problematic—way of tying Buddhism to science comes from B. Alan Wallace, an American Buddhist meditation teacher and writer. 34 He makes the important point that we shouldn’t take our terms for granted. “Religion,” as we understand it today, is a modern concept. Ancient peoples didn’t carve up the world into “religious” versus “nonreligious” spheres. 35 Of course, it doesn’t follow that they didn’t have something that we may have reason to call “religion.” Rather, the point is that our familiar division between religion and other areas of human activity—art, philosophy, politics, and science—reflects a recent way of thinking that we should be careful not to project onto other times and places. We should also note that the modern notion of Buddhism as a “world religion” is bound up with the Protestant conception of religion as being a matter of beliefs reflectively held within the individual mind by a community of adherents. 36 Indeed, Buddhism was the first non-Christian religion that nineteenth-century European philologists included in their new category “world religion.” 37 Protestantism is also responsible for the modern idea that “spirituality” is located within individual personal experience and is distinct from religion in the form of rituals administered by priests. This idea of spirituality strongly shapes how people today think about meditation. It’s what they mean when they talk about being “spiritual but not religious.” For all these reasons, pointing to certain elements of Buddhism as “religious” and others as “spiritual” reveals more about our concepts and ways of thinking than it does about Buddhism in its traditional Asian forms.

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34 . B. Alan Wallace, “Introduction: Buddhism and Science—Breaking Down the Barriers,” in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, ed. B. Alan Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 5. See also B. Alan Wallace, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), and B. Alan Wallace and Brian Hodel, Embracing Mind: The Common Ground of Science and Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 2008).

35 . See Nongbri, Before Religion.

36 . See Nongbri, Before Religion, and Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions.

37 . Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 23.

We also shouldn’t take the term “science” for granted. In a broad sense, science is a form of public knowledge based on testable empirical observations and rational principles that can be intersubjectively agreed upon. Science isn’t an exclusively Greek and European creation, for there were important Babylonian and Egyptian contributions to science, as well as many African, Arabic, Chinese, and Indian scientific achievements in astronomy, linguistics, logic, mathematics, medicine, and technology. From this broad historical and cultural perspective, it certainly makes sense to talk about Buddhist contributions to science or scientific elements of the Buddhist intellectual tradition.

Nevertheless, Wallace’s thinking rests on Buddhist exceptionalism. He writes, “in flatly classifying Buddhism as a religion both its philosophical and scientific features are simply overlooked.” 38 This makes it seem as if religions generally don’t have philosophical and scientific features, that Buddhism is special in having them, and that therefore Buddhism shouldn’t be classified as just a religion. But Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have rich philosophical and scientific traditions of thought. Classifying them as religions hardly implies that these features must be overlooked. On the contrary, a proper understanding of these religions requires understanding the roles that philosophical and scientific thinking have played in their intellectual traditions. Buddhism is no different and isn’t exceptional in these respects.

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38 . Wallace, “Introduction,” 8–9.

Wallace presents a tendentious picture of Buddhism and science. He engages in Buddhist apologetics by promoting Buddhist meditation as a kind of science, one whose “theories have allegedly been tested and experimentally confirmed numerous times over the past twenty-five hundred years, by means of duplicable meditative techniques.” 39

I disagree. Buddhist theories of the mind are based on textual traditions that purport to record the remembered word of the Buddha, on religious and philosophical interpretations of those texts, and on Buddhist practices of mental cultivation. The theories aren’t formulated as scientific hypotheses and they aren’t scientifically testable. Buddhist insights into the mind aren’t scientific discoveries. They haven’t resulted from an open-ended empirical inquiry free from the claims of tradition and the force of doctrinal and sectarian rhetoric. They’re stated in the language of Buddhist metaphysics, not in an independent conceptual framework to which Buddhist and non-Buddhist thinkers can agree. Buddhist meditative texts are saturated with religious imagery and language. Buddhist meditation isn’t controlled experimentation. It guides people to have certain kinds of experiences and to interpret them in ways that conform to and confirm Buddhist doctrine. The claims that people make from having these experiences aren’t subject to independent peer review; they’re subject to assessment within the agreed-upon and unquestioned framework of the Buddhist soteriological path.

Wallace writes that, within Buddhist “mind science,” “critiques by anyone other than professional contemplatives are taken no more seriously than critiques of scientific theories by nonscientists.” 40 This statement gives the lie to his claim to be scientific. Imagine a psychoanalyst who says, “Critiques by anyone other than professional psychoanalysts are taken no more seriously than critiques of scientific theories by nonscientists.” Psychoanalysis and certain forms of Buddhist meditation both focus intensively on the dynamics of the psyche. To be a psychoanalyst you must undergo a lengthy analysis (at least three years) with an experienced psychoanalyst; to be a “professional contemplative” you must undergo a lengthy training under the instruction of an experienced contemplative (including at least one three-year meditation retreat in some Tibetan Buddhist traditions). None of this makes psychoanalysis or Buddhist meditation immune from outside critique. (Indeed, for millennia Buddhist philosophers themselves have debated about what it’s possible to know through meditation.) Saying that such critiques shouldn’t be taken seriously encourages a blinkered attitude that is highly prone to confirmation bias (the tendency to interpret ambiguous information or evidence as confirming one’s antecedent beliefs). If you think that Buddhist meditation is somehow different from psychoanalysis in this respect—that it provides a special window onto the mind immune from outside criticism—then you’re in the grip of Buddhist exceptionalism. (Of course, there is an analogous form of psychoanalytic exceptionalism, which was popular in certain circles in the twentieth century.)

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39 . Ibid.

40 . Ibid.

I’m not saying that Buddhist meditative techniques haven’t been experientially tested in any sense. Meditation is a kind of skill, and it’s experientially testable in the way that skills are, namely, through repeated practice and expert evaluation. I have no doubt that Buddhist contemplatives down through the ages have tested meditation in this sense. I’m also not saying that meditation doesn’t produce discoveries in the sense of personal insights. (Psychoanalysis can also lead to insights.) Rather, my point is that the experiential tests aren’t experimental tests. They don’t test scientific hypotheses. They don’t provide a unique set of predictions for which there aren’t other explanations. The insights they produce aren’t scientific discoveries. Contrary to Sam Harris, Buddhist meditation isn’t a “first-person science.” Indeed, the very idea of “first-person science” is nonsensical (science is public and collective).

I’m also not trying to devalue meditation. On the contrary, I’m trying to make room for its value by showing how likening it to science distorts it. Meditation isn’t controlled experimentation. Attention and mindfulness aren’t instruments that reveal the mind without affecting it. Meditation provides insight into the mind (and body) in the way that body practices like dance, yoga, and martial arts provide insight into the body (and mind). Such mind-body practices—meditation included—have their own rigor and precision. They test and validate things experientially, but not by comparing the results obtained against controls.

I’ve been using the word “science” mainly to refer to modern experimental science. This is the kind of science that the Christian missionaries and European colonizers extolled and that the modern Buddhist reformers took as their model when they likened Buddhist doctrines to scientific theories and Buddhist meditation to scientific observation and experimentation.

Of course, one can take issue with this way of restricting the meaning of the term “science.” Consider that we call logic and mathematics “formal sciences,” as opposed to “empirical sciences.” “Science,” in this larger sense, refers to any systematic body of public and testable knowledge, not just to the kind of knowledge acquired through controlled experimentation.

A more radical idea from twentieth-century European philosophy is that there can be a descriptive science of the mind that studies the various types of conscious experience from an experiential perspective. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) advanced this idea when he inaugurated the philosophical movement known as phenomenology, which he defined as “the science of the essence of consciousness.” 41 By “essence” he meant necessary structures. For example, a necessary structure of perceptual experience is that things appear to you perspectivally—you can’t see or touch something in its entirety from all angles at once. Husserl argued that, from the perspective of the theory of knowledge, phenomenology is the primary science, because it’s required for the philosophical justification of the meaning of empirical and formal scientific statements. For Husserl, scientific models and theories are abstractions from concrete, lived experience. They’re empirically adequate for controlling and predicting events within the ever-expanding range of our experience, but they don’t give us true representations of how the world is beyond that range. Moreover, they depend for their meaning on the necessary structures of consciousness that make possible our experience of the world. Husserl’s phenomenological empiricism was thus more radical than the empiricism of experimental science. Although Husserl’s phenomenology has occasionally been misdescribed as an effort to do “first-person science,” he didn’t describe it this way, but rather presented it as a collective and intersubjective project.

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41 . See Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: Routledge, 2012), 63–65.

It’s striking that the modern Buddhists who assert that Buddhism is or contains a mind science don’t take the philosophical step of revamping their conception of science along these lines. 42 They may challenge some of the materialistic assumptions that scientists make, but they don’t pursue an epistemological critique of science, as Husserl did when he argued for phenomenology. This drawback is all the more surprising given that Buddhist philosophy has the resources for developing such a critique. Instead of following this path, however, these modern Buddhists invoke science because of its prestige and authority in the modern world. They rhetorically deploy the term “science” to promote a particular image of Buddhism—the Buddhist exceptionalist image.

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42 . Notably, Alan Wallace’s books (see note 34), including The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), don’t mention phenomenology.

When I and other philosophers and scientists have raised epistemological issues about science with the Dalai Lama at the Mind and Life Dialogues, he has generally resisted them. He apparently prefers to accept, for the purposes of the dialogue, the standard image of science, which is both positivist (science relies on sense experience and eschews metaphysics) and realist (science gives us true theories about the world).

I’ve always found this attitude frustrating and puzzling. It’s frustrating because it limits the dialogue. It precludes a full and freewheeling debate about what science is and how it works. It’s puzzling because a major strand of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy—the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school—is relentlessly critical of both the positivist idea that sense experience is immediately given to us, uncontaminated by concepts, and the realist idea that there is a way that the world essentially is in itself independent of any conceptual framework and that the mind can know this world. 43 Furthermore, although many scientists make these positivist and realist assumptions, Francisco Varela, the founding scientist of the Mind and Life Institute, had a decidedly different conception of science, one that was phenomenological and constructivist. For Varela, scientific knowledge is always constructed out of the interpretation of culturally configured lived experience, and the criterion for its evaluation is empirical adequacy (accuracy for observable aspects of the world), not truth in the sense of correspondence to a mind-independent reality. 44

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43 . See Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

I suspect that the Dalai Lama’s resistance to this way of thinking about science comes from his investment in the effort of a growing number of scientists—many of whom are Buddhist—to show that Buddhist meditation and secular forms of meditation derived from Buddhism have beneficial effects on the brain and behavior. Maybe he thinks that challenging the positivist and realist image of science would distract from this effort.

At the same time, the Dalai Lama insists that there is a “Buddhist science.” At a Mind and Life Dialogue called “Perception, Concepts, and the Self,” which took place in December 2015 at the Sera Monastery in India, he interjected during the opening remarks to say that the dialogue wasn’t between Buddhism and science, but rather was between “Buddhist science and modern science.” At other times, he distinguishes between “Buddhist science” and “Buddhist religious practice,” which he says is “Buddhists’ private business.”

The idea that we should distinguish between Buddhist science and Buddhist religion is central to the Dalai Lama’s strategy in these dialogues. He wants to work with scientists to reduce suffering and promote human flourishing. He also wants to strengthen Tibetan Buddhism in the modern world. This requires using science to modernize Buddhism while protecting Buddhism from scientific materialism. A key tactic is to show—to both the scientists and the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community—that Buddhism contains its own science and that modern science can learn from it.

Nevertheless, keeping “Buddhist science” and “Buddhist religion” apart in these dialogues proves to be impossible. When the topic is sense perception and conceptual cognition, the Dalai Lama relies on “Buddhist science,” namely, Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophical theories of perception, cognition, and inference. These theories generally presuppose mind-body dualism—that mental phenomena and physical phenomena have different and mutually irreducible natures. When the cognitive scientists in the dialogue challenge this dualist framework, the Dalai Lama shifts registers and relies on “Buddhist religion.” Specifically, he relies on tantric (Vajrayāna) conceptions of the body. Tibetan Buddhists say that the tantric perspective is the “highest” (most comprehensive and accurate). The tantric texts don’t belong to the philosophical corpus; they’re religious texts. They’re concerned with ritual, devotion, sacred sounds (mantras), union with deities, and subtle body energies. They’re very much “Buddhists’ private business.” They present a unique vision of the body as composed of many subtle energy patterns that are interdependently linked to subtle states of consciousness. The Dalai Lama appeals specifically to this vision to respond to scientific challenges to the Buddhist view of the mind-body relation. 45 In this way, he deploys a religious framework to deal with a scientific issue. Religion reappears in the form of tantric meditation theory and practice, in contradiction to the idea that meditation is a science and not religion.

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44 . See Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991; rev. ed. 2016).

45 . For a detailed description, see Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), chapter 3 .

In my view, the term “Buddhist science” is a misnomer. The Dalai Lama uses it to mean investigating phenomena by means of meditation, and logic and epistemology. As I’ve argued, however, neither Buddhist meditation nor Buddhist philosophy constitutes a science in the sense of being based on testable hypotheses in controlled conditions. Buddhist meditation and philosophy are inseparable from Buddhism understood as a religion. They presuppose and derive their meaning from the normative framework of the Buddhist path and its ultimate goal of liberation. They can innovate within this normative framework, but they can’t call it into question or reject it. They can’t contradict Buddhist scripture. Buddhism is hardly exceptional in these respects; on the contrary, it’s just like other religions.

Even if we use the word “science” in a broad sense to mean any systematic body of public and testable knowledge, the term “Buddhist science” is misleading. In pre-Islamic India, scientific thinking comprised the fertile interactions between the Buddhist, Brahminical, Jain, and naturalist intellectual traditions. Many of the intellectual tools of linguistics, logic, and the analysis of the natural world came from these other traditions. The Buddhists developed these tools in innovative ways, especially in logic and epistemology. Their innovations were taken up, modified, and extended by the Brahminical, Jain, and naturalist thinkers. Scientific thinking belonged to what historian Sheldon Pollock calls the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” the transregional world of South Asia in which Sanskrit was the language of science and literature. 46 The Indian tradition of scientific thinking—like scientific thinking generally—is inherently cosmopolitan.

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46 . Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

Some Buddhists (especially American and European converts) may argue that Buddhist philosophy is inherently more scientific (rational and empirical) than the other Indian philosophical traditions. But this is false. If you doubt me, read a good introduction to Indian philosophy. 47

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47 . I recommend Roy W. Perrett, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See also Jonardon Ganeri, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

People sometimes say that Buddhist philosophy is scientific because it denies that there is a single, permanent, and unchanging self, whereas the Brahminical philosophers assert that there is a self. The assumption is that no-self views are more scientific than self views.

Note: they interpret this way because they want it to be true. Their contempt for religion clouds their interpretation

this assessment is simplistic. Both traditions agree that what we ordinarily take to be a self—the body or the mind—doesn’t meet the criteria for being a self. Neither the body nor the mind is either an abiding subject of consciousness beneath or behind the changing mental states, or a supreme controller of the mind and body. Therefore, neither the body nor the mind should be identified with as a true self. Such mistaken identification causes suffering, according to both traditions. Where they disagree is that the Brahminical thinkers assert the existence of a self as a principle of identity distinct from the changing states of the body and the mind, whereas the Buddhist thinkers deny the existence of such a self. The philosophical debate mainly focuses on how to explain cognition. The Buddhist philosophers argue that cognition can be explained in terms of a causal series of mental and physical events without postulating the existence of a distinct subject. The Brahminical philosophers reply with powerful counterarguments designed to show that explaining how perceptual recognition and memory work requires positing a continuously existing subject to unify the causal series in the right way (so that I remember my previous experiences and not yours). 48 The whole debate is a philosophical one. It even can be read as a proto-cognitive-scientific debate about competing models of cognition. It isn’t a debate between a “scientific” viewpoint and a “religious” one. Philosophers today have combined insights from both traditions to develop new models of the mind and the self. 49

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48 . For an introduction to the debate, see Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007), chapters 5 and 6 . For a presentation of the Brahminical Nyāya theory, see Kisor Kumar Chakrabarti, Classical Indian Philosophy of Mind: The Nyāya Dualist Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), chapter 5 . For a contemporary formulation of the Nyāya arguments, see Arindam Chakrabarti, “I Touch What I Saw,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 103–116. For broader coverage of Buddhist and Brahminical debates about the self, see Irina Kuznetsova, Jonardon Ganeri, and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, eds., Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue: Self and No-Self (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012).

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49 . See Jonardon Ganeri, The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

It’s also not the case that Buddhist philosophy is inherently more scientific than the philosophies of other religions. For example, it’s sometimes said that Buddhist philosophy relies on experience more than scripture, so that when there’s a contradiction between the two, scripture is to be rejected in favor of perception and inference. But this assessment is partial and oversimplified. Some Indian Buddhist thinkers, as a matter of philosophical principle, reject testimony based on scripture as being a separate and distinct instrument of knowledge. This is mainly because they want to block appeals to the authority of the Vedas on the part of Brahminical philosophers. But other Buddhist philosophers accept testimony as a source of knowledge independent of perception and inference (though, of course, they reject any appeal to the Vedas ). In either case, it’s unthinkable in practice to reject the word of the Buddha or any of his conceptual and analytical frameworks (such as the so-called five aggregates or the mental and physical elements that are said to make up a person).

Another move is to say that although religious thinkers generally turn away from scripture when they pursue philosophy or science, Buddhists have always done this since the beginning. I doubt that this is true. The early Buddhists were mainly concerned with codifying the Buddha’s teachings and establishing the Buddhist monastic community. The later rise of scholastic philosophy was common in South Asia across Buddhism, Brahminical traditions, and Jainism. At roughly the same time in the Latin Middle Ages, Augustine (354–430) argued that the “Book of Nature” was easier to read than the “Book of Scripture.” This metaphor of the “Two Books”—where reading the “Book of Nature” meant discerning the lawful order of the universe as part of God’s revelation—was used by the church fathers up to the seventeenth century, and Christians writing about science and religion today still use it. 50 Christianity, no less than Buddhism, has always had ways of keeping scripture and science separated.

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50 . See Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, “The Two Books Prior to the Scientific Revolution,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 57 (2005): 225–248.

Consider also what “empiricism” truly means in Buddhist philosophy, especially for the Dalai Lama in the context of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. In Buddhist scholar Janet Gyatso’s words: “There, true empiricism has to do with the deep knowledge revealed by the Buddha, based on the Buddha’s own enlightened realization, and is only directly knowable by him and similarly advanced yogis. For the Dalai Lama and indeed much of Buddhist epistemology, trust in these enlightened realizations trumps any possibility of proving them wrong; indeed, scientific testing will only prove them correct.” 51 This kind of empiricism is based on the idea of the infallible “yogic perception” and omniscient enlightenment of the Buddha. It’s not scientific empiricism. It goes way beyond even phenomenological empiricism.

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51 . Janet Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 197–198.

Some parts of Buddhist philosophy—for example, the emphasis on causality—align with science; other major parts—the idea that karma is inseparable from the workings of causality, the Mahāyāna idea that all sentient beings have an innate Buddha nature—do not. The same can be said of other religious traditions. For example, the Christian idea that there is a lawful order to the universe aligns with science—indeed, it’s one of the historical sources of the modern scientific worldview. But the idea that this lawful order derives from a personal creator God or deity no longer seems aligned with science, though in earlier times it did.

Of course, modern Buddhists can and do work to reinterpret ideas such as karma and innate Buddha nature in ways that may make them seem compatible with science. But Christians, Hindus, and Muslims can and do work to reinterpret the ideas of their traditions in ways that may make them seem compatible with science. Once again, there’s nothing special about Buddhism in this regard.

Instead of trying to divide Buddhism into “Buddhist science” and “Buddhist religion,” it’s better to distinguish between Buddhism as a religion and Buddhism as a cultural and civilizational force. 52 When the Dalai Lama talks about “Buddhist science,” he aims to modernize Buddhism as a religion, especially among his own Tibetan people, and to promote Buddhism as a positive cultural force in the world. Both aims require working to advance a transnational scientific and cosmopolitan worldview that includes Buddhism, especially its rich intellectual and contemplative traditions.

I am very sympathetic to these aims. My work on the Buddhism-science dialogue supports them. 53 But I think that the idea of “Buddhist science” doesn’t serve them well. Buddhist exceptionalism belongs to the rhetoric of Buddhist modernist apologetics. It distorts Buddhism, and it distorts science and religion.

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52 . See Charles Hallisey and Frank Reynolds, “Buddhism: An Overview,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 2, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 334–351, and Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World, 406.

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53 . Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, Embodied Mind, and Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being.

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is buddhism true?

We should regard the proposition that science corroborates the “core ideas” of Buddhism and hence that Buddhism “is true” in the same way. For example, the scientific idea that phenomena depend on causes and are transitory doesn’t give us a good reason for thinking that Buddhism is true, even though Buddhism contains a version of this idea. You can accept the scientific idea without being a Buddhist, and being a Buddhist requires a lot more than subscribing to this one idea. In Buddhism, the idea that all “conditioned phenomena” depend on causes and are impermanent is inseparable from the value judgment that these phenomena are “tainted” or prone to cause mental afflictions, and so are inherently unsatisfactory. The Buddhist idea of causation is also inseparable from the ideas of karma and rebirth. It’s bound up with thinking that the cause-effect relation is inherently moral—good causes bring about good effects, and bad causes bring about bad effects—and that moral causation carries over from one life to the next life in a self-perpetuating cycle that ends only with final liberation and the attainment of nirvana—the “unconditioned” state of peace. Thus, the idea of causation has a religious meaning in Buddhism that it doesn’t have in science.

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no self? not so fast

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the Buddha rejects the question of whether there is a self together with any positive or negative answer to that question. The Buddha is understood as teaching a practical method for how to stop mistakenly identifying with anything as the self, but he isn’t understood as allowing for a transcendent consciousness. Rather, he is interpreted as rejecting metaphysical questions about the existence or nonexistence of the self and instead as urging that we shouldn’t identify with anything in our experience as the self. The Buddha is seen as giving an analysis of experience from within and not a metaphysical analysis of what there is outside of experience. 13

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The problem with this interpretation is that it invokes a distinction between the analysis of what there is (metaphysics) and the analysis of experience (phenomenology) that seems foreign to the Nikāyas. Although the Buddha is primarily concerned with experience, he often makes claims about what exists and what doesn’t exist from the vantage point of what we can know from experience—and especially what he knows from his experience. In philosophical terms, the Buddha makes metaphysical claims, but he makes them from an empiricist standpoint rather than a speculative one. As we’ve seen, the Nikāyas provide strong evidence for taking the Buddha’s teaching to be that there is no self (according to the Vedic-Brahminical criteria of selfhood). The denial of the self is made on empiricist grounds (by appealing to experience). Nevertheless, as an assertion about what doesn’t exist, the no-self claim is a metaphysical one.

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Still, one might wonder why the Buddha doesn’t explicitly say that there is no self. Instead, the formula is “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.” He also remains silent when Vacchagotta asks both “Is there a self?” and “Is there no self?” If there is no self, why doesn’t the Buddha just say so?

In the case of Vacchagotta, the Buddha explains to his disciple Ananda his reasons for keeping silent. 14 If he had said to Vacchagotta that there is a self, “this would have been siding with those ascetics and brahmins who are eternalists,” that is, who believe that there is an unchanging and eternal self. If he had said that there is no self, “this would have been siding with those ascetics and brahmins who are annihilationists,” that is, who believe that there is nothing after death and that all that we are is destroyed at death. He also tells Ananda that he can’t say to Vacchagotta that there is a self, because this is inconsistent with the truth that all phenomena are nonself, and he can’t say that there is no self, because Vacchagotta will become more confused and will mistakenly think, “It seems that the self I formerly had does not now exist.”

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There may be other reasons why the Buddha doesn’t explicitly say that there is no self. Consider the statement, “There is no self.” Asserting it as being the case logically commits the speaker to believing it. But if I say, “I believe that there is no self,” this will seem like a performative self-contradiction (the statement refers to the “I” while denying the self), especially if I don’t properly understand exactly what is being denied (a permanent subject of consciousness, and a subject that exercises control over the body and the mind). The same problem arises if I say “I am not a self” or “I have no self.” Furthermore, unless one has achieved liberation and completely freed oneself from the “conceit” (māna ) of “I”—the deep, habitual tendency to feel that one’s existence is based on an “I”—there may be no way to think or say the first-person pronoun “I” without reinforcing the “I” conceit. So, perhaps the Buddha doesn’t say that there is no self because internalizing this thought in the wrong way will reinforce the “self conceit” in his listeners. 15

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work our way toward this point, let’s look at two contemporary philosophers who maintain that there is no self and whose work is informed by Buddhism.

The first one is Thomas Metzinger (who once described his views to me as “analytical neuro-Buddhism”). 22 He argues that if there were a self, it would have to possess a number of properties. 23 It would have to be not just a subject of experience and an agent of action, but also an independent thing (a “substance” in the philosopher’s sense). It would also have to be a mental or spiritual thing, a single thing at any given time and over time, and be distinct from any other thing. Science, however, provides no evidence to support the existence of a thing with these characteristics. Hence, we should conclude that there is no such thing as a self. As Metzinger writes, “no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self.” 24 He allows, however, that there is a “phenomenal self,” which “is not a thing, but a process.” Strictly speaking, however, it isn’t a self, but rather is the content of the brain’s “self-model.” 25 Because we’re unable to recognize the model as a model, we experience its content as if it represented a real self apart from the model. But there’s no such thing in reality. Hence, the self is an illusion.

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22 . Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York: Basic, 2009).

23 . Thomas Metzinger, “The No-Self Alternative,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 279–296.

24 . Metzinger, Being No One, 1.

25 . Ibid.

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The problem with this argument is that it rests on a tendentious concept of the self. Metzinger assumes that “self” means a personal essence inhering in an individual substance (an independent thing that is the bearer or owner of properties). He denies that there is such a thing and therefore concludes that selves do not exist. But this conclusion follows only given this concept of the self. His argument requires the premise that for something to be a self, it must be a single, unique, unified, and independent thing with a personal essence. Some philosophers have conceived of the self in this way, but many others have not. A more measured conclusion would be that a certain kind of self doesn’t exist or that the self isn’t an independent thing.

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The second philosopher is Miri Albahari. 26 In Analytical Buddhism, she argues that the self we habitually take ourselves to be is an illusion. We experience ourselves as bounded individuals, personal owners of experiences, and controlling agents of actions, but in reality, there is no self that possesses these attributes. Instead, the impression of self arises from seeking happiness by identifying with transitory mental and bodily experiences as “me” or “mine.” When this desire-driven identification happens, a self-other distinction is put into play and a felt boundary is drawn between what belongs to the self and what doesn’t belong to the self. Albahari argues that “boundedness” and “personal ownership” are illusions generated by desire-driven identification. Experiences seem to be owned by a bounded and independently existing “I,” but in reality, repeated acts of identification create the appearance of an “I.” In her terminology, although the self appears to be “unconstructed” by the sequence of experiences and to exist apart from them, in reality the impression of self is constructed out of these experiences. Since the self purports to be something it isn’t—namely, an unconstructed and independent thing—it’s an illusion. Furthermore, since there is no self, the psychological process of identification is inevitably thwarted, and so the desire-driven, happiness-seeking project undermines itself and ultimately leads only to frustration. If we could remove the deep-seated “craving” for me and mine that drives the identification process, we would thereby remove the illusion of self and realize the inherently selfless (ownerless) nature of experience.

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26 . Miri Albahari, Analytical Buddhism: The Two-Tiered Illusion of Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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Albahari’s account of how our sense of self is constructed is perceptive, but her claim that the self is an illusion suffers from the same problem as Metzinger’s account. It rests on a tendentious concept of the self as unconstructed by and independent of the sequence of experiences. Although some philosophers have thought of the self in this way, many others have not. Since William James’s Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, and George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society, from 1934, philosophers and scientists have thought of the self as a developmental and social construction and as not existing apart from experience. A more measured conclusion of Albahari’s argument would be that a certain kind of self doesn’t exist or that the self isn’t an unconstructed thing.

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Philosophers and cognitive scientists today don’t think of the self as an unconstructed thing with a personal essence that owns the sequence of experiences. So, denying that there is such a thing isn’t enough to establish that there is no self whatsoever. Nevertheless, one could argue that we habitually take ourselves to be such a thing, even if we intellectually reject such a thing’s existence. This assessment amounts to claiming that the desire-driven impression of the self as an unconstructed personal essence, owner of experience, and agent of action is our default sense of self and the prime motivator of our behavior. Varela, Rosch, and I made this claim in The Embodied Mind, but now I think it’s problematic.

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We need to ask what kind of claim it is. If it’s supposed to be phenomenological, a claim about our experience, it’s not obviously true. Although sometimes we may feel as if our self is an unconstructed personal owner of our experiences—as the earlier thought experiment about imagining having a different body or mind illustrates—it’s not clear that we habitually experience our self this way, even at a deep psychological level. According to phenomenologists, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we habitually experience ourselves as living bodily subjects dynamically attuned to the world, not as mental egos who happen to appropriate a particular body as their own from a witnessing perspective. 27 If the claim is supposed to be scientific, a claim of empirical psychology about our behavior, it needs to be experimentally tested and corroborated. But this hasn’t been done. If the claim is supposed to be philosophical—that the concept of the self is the concept of a desire-driven and unconstructed “I,” or that the word “self” properly refers only to such a thing—it’s contentious, because there are other philosophical accounts of the concept of the self and other philosophical and scientific uses of the word “self.”

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27 . See Aaron Henry and Evan Thompson, “Witnessing from Here: Self-Awareness from a Bodily Versus Embodied Perspective,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 228–251.

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The assertion that the illusion of an unconstructed personal “I” is the cause of mental suffering may look like a straightforward empirical claim about our mental lives. But it’s really a normative claim and a soteriological claim. It’s normative because it tells us that we ought to strive to abandon any feeling of being an independent and unconstructed thing with a personal essence and that we shouldn’t identify with our experiences as belonging to a personal ego. It’s soteriological because it tells us that following this instruction will liberate us from mental suffering and provide lasting mental peace. The claim articulates a Buddhist perspective on the world, not an independently established truth of psychology.

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Earlier I argued that soteriological concepts aren’t scientific. They can’t be defined in terms of measurable factors, and they can’t be tested experimentally. Like aesthetic concepts, they’re always subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning is constituted by the practice communities in which they figure. Therefore, it’s a conceptual mistake to treat them as if they had a scientific status.

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Buddhist modernists, however, typically treat soteriological concepts as if they were scientific. For example, Albahari treats the idea of seeing through the illusion of self as if it were an isolable causal factor that produces the outcome of “awakening.” Thus, she writes: “If ‘awakening’ is indeed possible, then seeing through the illusion of self is a powerful explanatory mechanism by which we can come to understand the profound cognitive shift that is said to occur” (her emphasis). 28

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28 . Miri Albahari, “Review of Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, ” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, July 12, 2015, https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/waking-dreaming-being-self-and-consciousness-in-neuroscience-meditation-and-philosophy/

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The term “explanatory mechanism,” however, is inappropriate. An explanatory mechanism is a set of causal factors that we invoke to explain the production of some behavior, and when we specify the factors and the behavior, no ambiguity is allowed. But “seeing through the illusion of self” isn’t a separate causal factor that produces “awakening”; it’s part of the meaning of awakening. In addition, the specific meanings of “awakening” and “seeing through the illusion of self” differ according to the particular Buddhist tradition, even in the earliest historical sources, so there’s no neutral, tradition-independent way to give an unambiguous meaning to these concepts. Treating “seeing through the illusion of self” as a causal factor and “awakening” as a behavioral outcome is typical of Buddhist modernism. It’s a scientistic distortion of the inherent multivalence of Buddhist concepts.

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Metzinger and Albahari both distinguish between the self and the sense of self. They define the self as an independent thing or entity, and the sense of self as the feeling or impression of being a self. They deny that there is a self but acknowledge that we have a sense of self. In contrast, philosophers in the phenomenological tradition reject any attempt to define the self apart from the sense of self. 29 The self isn’t defined as a thing or a personal essence, but rather in terms of self-awareness, the experience of being a subject and an agent. To put the idea another way, phenomenologists maintain that the self is a structure of experience, the structure whereby one experiences oneself as oneself.

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29 . See Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); and Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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Self-awareness takes different forms. According to phenomenologists, a minimal form of self-awareness is a constant structural feature of any conscious experience. They call this kind of self-awareness “prereflective.” This means that the awareness happens before we do any reflecting on our experience and that it’s implicit rather than explicit. The idea is that every conscious experience appears to itself, without any reflection or thought, as a conscious experience, or to put it another way, that all experiencing involves implicitly experiencing that very experiencing. 30 For example, when you look at the sunset, you have an awareness not just of the colors but also of your seeing. Your seeing isn’t the object of your experience; it’s not what you’re focusing on. But it’s experientially present to you along with the sunset. In phenomenological parlance, you experientially “live through” your seeing while focusing on the sunset. According to phenomenologists, prereflective self-awareness is necessary for the other kinds of self-awareness, and it constitutes the sense of self in its minimal form.

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30 . See Galen Strawson, “Self-Intimation,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (2015): 1–31.

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In contrast, reflective self-awareness happens when you reflect on your experiences. Psychologists call this kind of awareness “meta-awareness,” which they define as an explicit awareness of the current contents of experience. For example, when you’re doing some task and you notice that your mind is wandering, you become explicitly aware of your train of thoughts and how they’re disconnected from what you’re doing. Meta-awareness is a kind of “metacognition,” which is thinking about or monitoring your own mental states.

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Metacognition is required for certain kinds of memory and planning for the future. Your knowledge of your own memory abilities, including your ability to remember past experiences as your own, involves metacognition. Similarly, prospective memory—your ability to plan for the future and to remember to carry out your plans—involves metacognition. Metacognition is required for the “autobiographical self,” the sense of self that draws on your memories of your past experiences, and it’s required for “narrative identity,” the sense of self that consists of the collection of stories that you tell about yourself to give your life structure and purpose.

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Phenomenologists also emphasize bodily self-awareness. The most fundamental form of bodily self-awareness is the prereflective experience of your own body as you perceive, move, and act. This kind of bodily self-awareness is different from the awareness you have of your body when you recognize yourself in a mirror or see yourself from the outside via a video camera. Prereflective bodily self-awareness is an experience of yourself as a bodily subject, rather than a perception of your own body as an object.

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Finally, phenomenologists have given considerable attention to social self-awareness. There are many kinds of social self-awareness, but phenomenologists emphasize the kind that consists in being able to be aware of yourself through the eyes of other people. This kind of “intersubjective self-awareness” is required for being able to think of yourself as one person in a community of others.

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From the phenomenological perspective, the self is a multifaceted construction, made out of different kinds of self-awareness, not an unconstructed personal essence or independent thing. Given this viewpoint, there are no grounds for saying that the self is an illusion. Of course, there are illusions and delusions of selfhood, both ordinary and clinical ones, but it doesn’t follow that the self as such, as a structure of experience, is an illusion. Although illusions are mental constructions, not all mental constructions are illusions. To say that the sense of self is a construction—or rather that it’s a process that’s under constant construction—doesn’t logically imply that there is no self or that the sense of self is the presentation of an illusion.

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There’s a traditional Buddhist way to make this point. It requires making a terminological and conceptual distinction between “self” (ātman ) and “person” (pudgala ). If we restrict “self” to mean a personal essence that is the independent owner of experience and agent of action, and we use “person” to refer to the multifaceted construction that includes modes of self-awareness, then we can say that whereas the self is an illusion or nonexistent fiction, the person exists. In other words, from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy, my argument that the self is a construction can be taken as an argument for the claim that the person is a construction.

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In the Indian context, this terminological distinction makes sense, given the meaning and valence of the Sanskrit word ātman. In our contemporary context, however, the distinction seems forced, given the many and varied meanings of the word “self” in philosophy and psychology. Furthermore, Buddhist modernists, especially neural Buddhists, don’t respect this terminological precision, with the result that their statement that the self is an illusion generated by the brain is highly misleading and runs the risk of being what Buddhist philosophers would regard as a nihilistic denial of the person. For these reasons, I prefer to speak of the self as being a construction, and the part of the sense of self that involves the impression of an unchanging and independent personal essence as being an illusion.

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To say that the self is a construction allows for the possibility of selfless states, experiential states in which the sense of self is highly attenuated or absent. But how to conceptualize such states is tricky. Phenomenologists think of them as ones in which reflection or meta-awareness is absent, because they deny that there can be experiential states that lack prereflective self-awareness. But this is controversial outside phenomenology. Similarly, some Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophers maintain that all awareness is “reflexive” (self-aware) and hence that there can be no experiential states that lack “reflexive awareness.”

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The Buddhist notion of reflexive awareness can be seen as one way to address the issues about the apparent unity of consciousness that the Nyaiyāyikas target. The idea is that when I’m aware of the blue sky, I’m also aware of my seeing the blue sky, and that when I remember the blue sky, I also remember my seeing the blue sky. 31 Thus, a causal sequence of moments of awareness always includes an awareness of itself from within as that very awareness. Some Buddhist philosophers also maintain that there is a kind of subliminal “storehouse consciousness.” It underlies the surface levels of sensory and mental cognition, and it contains stored impressions of past experiences, which are likened to “seeds” that “ripen” under the appropriate conditions.

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The Brahminical philosophers argue that these Buddhists are smuggling in a self through the back door. Buddhist philosophers who reject the ideas of reflexive awareness and the storehouse consciousness make the same accusation against their fellow Buddhists. These controversies reinforce the point that the debates about the self were always dialectically evolving in Indian philosophy.

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For the purposes of my point about the self being a construction, however, we can set these debates aside. If the self is a construction, as I’ve argued, it stands to reason that it can be dismantled—perhaps through certain kinds of meditation—while some of its constituents, such as bodily life or sentience, remain present. Whether such selfless states are beneficial or detrimental, according to normative or soteriological criteria, is a further question.

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In cognitive science, there are a growing number of theories of the self, understood as a structure of experience. These theories examine how the self emerges from and depends on our culturally configured biological capacities.

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Many of these theories build on the classic work of Ulrich Neisser, who has been called “the father of cognitive psychology.” He distinguished five kinds of self-knowledge and five corresponding concepts of the self. 32 The “ecological self” is the experience of being an active bodily agent geared into the immediate physical environment. This concept of self connects to the phenomenological idea of bodily self-awareness. The “interpersonal self” is the experience of being a self in relation to others. This concept of self connects to the phenomenological idea of intersubjective self-awareness. The “extended self” is the experience of having a recollected past and an anticipated future. This concept of self connects to the phenomenological ideas of autobiographical and narrative self-awareness. The “private self” is the experience of having one’s own inner experiences. This concept of self connects to the phenomenological idea of subjectivity, which in its basic form is prereflective self-awareness but also includes reflective self-awareness. Finally, the “conceptual self” is the experience of having a mental representation of the self that one uses when one thinks about oneself. This concept of self connects to the phenomenological idea of reflective self-awareness.

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None of these concepts of self or ways of using the word “self” entails the concept of the self as a personal essence or an independent thing. As philosopher Shaun Gallagher writes, these aspects of selfhood should be understood not as “modifying something that has its own independent existence,” but rather “as organized into certain patterns,” such that “a particular variation of such a pattern constitutes what we call a self.” 33

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31 . See Evan Thompson, “Self, No Self? Memory and Reflexive Awareness,” in Siderits, Thompson, and Zahavi, eds., Self, No Self, 157–175.

32 . Ulric Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge,” Philosophical Psychology 1 (1988): 35–59.

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The way I like to put this idea is that a self is an ongoing process that enacts an “I” and in which the “I” is no different from the process itself, rather like the way dancing is a process that enacts a dance and in which the dance is no different from the dancing. 34

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33 . Shaun Gallagher, “A Pattern Theory of the Self,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013): 443, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00443 .

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Just as it’s misguided to think that a dance is inside the muscles of a dancer, instead of being an expression of the whole body in dynamic interrelation with the world and other dancers, so it’s misguided to think that we could find a self inside the brain. To say that there’s no self because it can’t be found inside the brain is to misunderstand the concept of self. Like a dance, a self is an emergent process, constructed through bodily and mental activities at many scales of space and time. A self supervenes on the enculturated, living body in a rich social setting. Although it’s a mistake to think that a self has an independent and nonrelational existence, being dependent and relational doesn’t make it unreal.

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The best contemporary accounts of the self aren’t exclusively Buddhist ones. Rather, they’re cosmopolitan accounts that interweave ideas and insights from multiple traditions. Philosopher Jonardon Ganeri’s work is a paradigm. 35 He combines ideas from across the “Sanskrit cosmopolis”—from Buddhist, Brahminical, and Jain thinkers, as well as the tradition of Indian naturalism and materialism. I find his cosmopolitan, pan-Indian perspective to be much more productive for cross-cultural philosophy than a strictly Buddhist view. From a historical perspective, to privilege the Buddhist view isolates it from the rest of South Asian philosophical culture. From a philosophical perspective, to privilege the Buddhist view in isolation from its dialectical interdependence with other traditions is to engage in Buddhist apologetics. Multifaceted views of the self as a construction draw from a larger and richer body of cross-cultural philosophical materials than do Buddhist modernist no-self views. Multifaceted views work better in our polycentric, multicultural, cosmopolitan world, and they have a greater degree of consilience with cognitive science.

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34 . See Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

35 . See Ganeri, The Self.

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4
mindfulness mania

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Mindfulness mania is rampant in North American society. 1 Mindful living, mindful parenting, mindful eating, mindful sex, mindful leadership, mindful coloring books—the list goes on. A story in Wired proclaims, “In Silicon Valley, Meditation Is No Fad. It Could Make Your Career.” 2 A Forbes column declares, “Why Mindfulness Techniques Can Bring You Success in a Wired World.” 3 The subtitle of yet another self-help book, The Mindfulness Edge, reads “How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule.” 4 There is even a place called MNDFL, which says that it “exists to make humans feel good” and advertises itself as “New York City’s premier meditation studio.” 5 The Atlantic describes it as “A Gym for Mindfulness,” while Vogue calls it “Manhattan’s Must-Visit Meditation Studio.” 6

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1 . Robert E. Buswell, Jr., and Donald S. Lopez, Jr., “Which Mindfulness?,” Tricycle, May 8, 2014, https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/which-mindfulness/# .

2 . Noah Schachtman, “In Silicon Valley, Meditation Is No Fad. It Could Make Your Career,” Wired, June 18, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/06/meditation-mindfulness-silicon-valley/ .

3 . Frances Booth, “Why Mindfulness Techniques Can Bring You Success in a Wired World,” Forbes, July 15, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/francesbooth/2014/07/15/why-mindfulness-techniques-can-bring-you-success-in-a-wired-world/#11a936d63497 .

4 . Matt Tenney and Tim Gard, The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule (New York: Wiley, 2016).

5 . See MNDFL, https://mndflmeditation.com .

6 . “A Gym for Mindfulness,” Atlantic, video, December 31, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/422337/mindfulness-gym/ ; Monica Kim, “The Only Quiet Room in New York City: Introducing Manhattan’s Must-Visit Meditation Studio,” Vogue, November 5, 2015, https://www.vogue.com/13368729/meditation-yoga-mndfl-studio-new-york-city/ .

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Many Buddhists bemoan this narcissism and mass marketing of mindfulness. They point out that mindfulness isn’t an ethically neutral technique for reducing stress and improving concentration; it’s a practice for increasing wholesome mental states and behaviors and decreasing unwholesome ones. “Right mindfulness,” which is the seventh part of the Buddhist “Eightfold Path,” requires self-restraint and concern for the welfare of others. It’s incompatible with greed and shouldn’t be marketed as a commodity for personal or corporate enhancement and one that reinforces the status quo. Some Buddhist critics have called this commodification “McMindfulness.” 7

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7 . Ron Purser and David Loy, “Beyond McMindfulness,” HuffPost, July 1, 2013; updated August 31, 2013, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-purser/beyond-mcmindfulness_b_3519289.html

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This critique is fine as far as it goes. But it’s superficial. Social critics, philosophers, and scholars of religion have long pointed out that the modern fetishizing of Buddhism and yoga, and Asian religions in general, fits perfectly into a consumerist corporate culture that needs to pacify itself from the endless stress of global capitalism. 8 It’s undeniable that mindfulness techniques have become one means to achieve this end, and it’s undeniable that Buddhist modernism has been a driving force for making them into an international marketable commodity for individual “happiness” and “peace of mind.” 9

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8 . Slavoj Žižek, “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism,” Cabinet 2, Spring 2001, www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/western.php ; Jeremey Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2005).

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9 . Jeff Wilson, Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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Sometimes people insist that this trend isn’t “authentically” Buddhist. The idea of “authentic Buddhism,” however, is unhelpful. Buddhism is a constantly evolving tradition that has taken numerous forms throughout its history. It’s a missionary religion and has always been enmeshed in the economic systems of its home cultures. For example, the Buddha and his followers relied on lay donations. Rich bankers, caravan merchants, and powerful rulers supported the Buddha and the later establishment of monasteries, and in return they received religious “merit.” Buddhism spread throughout Asia on the Silk Road trade routes between India and China. So, if one intends to criticize mass-marketed mindfulness, the criticisms have to be made on grounds other than appealing to authenticity and economic purity.

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Another nonstarter is disparaging Buddhist modernist conceptions of mindfulness in favor of traditional ones. Buddhism has no single, agreed-upon traditional understanding of mindfulness. Rather, Buddhism offers multiple and sometimes incompatible conceptions of mindfulness. 10 The word “mindfulness” translates the Sanskrit smṛ ti or the Pali sati, which means “memory.” In the context of meditation, it refers to the ability to hold a chosen object in mind without distraction or forgetfulness. According to some Buddhist psychological systems, mindfulness is intrinsically wholesome; according to others, it’s neutral (neither wholesome nor unwholesome). One position is that every moment of awareness is always associated with some quality of mindfulness; another position is that mindfulness is sometimes present and sometimes absent. 11 “Classical” approaches to mindfulness meditation practice emphasize the importance of judging what’s before the mind according to an explicit set of values; “nondual” approaches reject evaluative judgment, downplay moral codes, and emphasize “mere nondistraction” without discrimination. 12 “Contemporary mindfulness,” the style of mindfulness practice central to Buddhist modernism, draws largely from the “nondual” style rather than the “classical” style of mindfulness practice. 13

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10 . John D. Dunne, “Buddhist Styles of Mindfulness: A Heuristic Approach,” in Handbook of Mindfulness and Self-Regulation, ed. Brian D. Ostafin, Michael D. Robinson, and Brian P. Meier (New York: Springer, 2015), 251–270; Robert Sharf, “Is Mindfulness Buddhist? (and Why It Matters),” Transcultural Psychiatry 52 (2015): 470–484; Robert Sharf, “Mindfulness and Mindlessness in Early Chan,” Philosophy East and West 64 (2014): 933–964.

11 . Collett Cox, “Mindfulness and Memory: The Scope of Smṛ ti from Early Buddhism to Sarvāstivādin Abhidharma,” in In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, ed. Janet Gyatso (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 67–108.

12 . Dunne, “Buddhist Styles of Mindfulness.”

13 . John D. Dunne, “Toward an Understanding of Nondual Mindfulness,” Contemporary Buddhism 12 (2011): 71–88.

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Many of the scientists who investigate mindfulness meditation have helped to enable its mass marketing. These scientists, and not just the journalists who report their findings, bear responsibility for the meaningless mantra that mindfulness “literally changes” or “rewires” your brain. Anything you do changes your brain. Despite the hype, scientific evidence that mindfulness practices induce long-lasting, beneficial changes in the brain is still tentative. 14 Indeed, one recent scientific study suggests that there may be a bias toward reporting positive findings in clinical studies of mindfulness and that negative results may go unreported. 15 Furthermore, the idea that there’s such a thing as a distinct “mindfulness” component, which is isolable from the social context of meditation practice and which functions as an “active ingredient” in the individual brain, is likely a mistake, because many of the experienced benefits of mindfulness practices, whether religious or secular, are inseparable from the social and communal settings of the practice. 16

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14 . Nicholas T. Van Dam, Marieke K. Van Vugt, David R. Vago, Laura Schmalzl, Clifford D. Saron, Andrew Olendzki, Ted Meissner, Sara W. Lazar, Catherine E. Kerr, Jolie Gorchov, Kieran C. Fox, Brent A. Field, Willoughby B. Britton, Julie A. Brefczynski-Lewis, and David E. Meyer, “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 13 (2018): 36–61.

15 . Stephanie Coronado-Montoya, Alexander W. Levis, Linda Kwakkenbos, Russell J. Steele, Erick H. Turner, and Brett D. Tombs, “Reporting of Positive Results in Randomized Controlled Trials of Mindfulness-Based Mental Health Interventions,” PLoS ONE, April 8, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0153220 .

16 . Robert Sharf, “The ‘Work’ of Religion and Its Role in the Assessment of Mindfulness Practices,” lecture presented at the conference “Perspectives on Mindfulness: The Complex Role of Meditation Research,” Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, May 21, 2015; Eleanor Rosch, “The Emperor’s New Clothes: A Look Behind the Western Mindfulness Mystique,” in Handbook of Mindfulness and Self-Regulation, ed. Brian D. Ostafin, Michael D. Robinson, and Brian P. Meier (New York: Springer, 2015), 271–292.

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Two misguided ideas about mindfulness meditation are widespread. One is that mindfulness is an essentially inward awareness of your own private mind. The other is that the best way to understand the effects of mindfulness practices is to look inside the head at the brain. These two ideas reinforce each other. Given how we’re prone to think about the mind and the brain, if you think that being mindful is gazing inward at your own private mind, you’re likely to think that measuring its effects is best done by looking inside your brain. And if you think that the real action of mindfulness is what goes on inside your brain, you’re likely to think that being mindful is about observing your own private mind. In both cases, the way of thinking is what philosophers call “internalist.” It focuses on what goes on inside the individual mind, which is taken to be a kind of private theater, and superimposes this onto what goes on inside the brain.

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These ideas loop back onto how we think and talk about ourselves. Scientists and clinicians—and not just journalists—make statements like, “To be a mindful parent or a mindful co-worker, you need to learn how to down-regulate your amygdala through mindfulness training.” Mindfulness is conceptualized as inside the individual mind, while the mind is taken to be fundamentally the brain. As a result, we come to think of ourselves, especially our mental lives, through the confused construct of the “mindful brain.” 17

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17 . Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

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People are mindful, not brains. The expression “the mindful brain” may be a case of metonymy (the figure of speech whereby we substitute an attribute for the whole of the thing meant). More likely it’s just a category mistake: it ascribes a property to the brain that properly belongs only to people.

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The category mistake is tied to a fundamentally unstable way of thinking about who you are in relation to your brain. On one hand, you’re separate from your brain, because you can learn to control it through mindfulness training. Training your mind changes your brain. On the other hand, you are your brain, because your mind is taken to be fundamentally what your brain does. You need to train your brain for mindfulness to become a lasting mental trait. One way of thinking is dualist; the other is materialist. Western culture is presently caught up in the back-and-forth oscillation between these two extremes.

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To get beyond them, we need a way to understand how you’re not your brain without your being separate from it. The embodied and enactive approach in cognitive science gives us this understanding: you are an embodied being, and your brain enables your cognition to take place, but your mind isn’t the same as what happens in your brain. Your mind includes the rest of your embodied being embedded in the world and in relation to others.

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Here’s an analogy. A bird needs wings to fly, but the bird’s flight isn’t inside its wings; it’s a relation between the whole animal and its environment. Flying is a kind of embodied action. Similarly, you need a brain to think or to perceive, but your thinking isn’t inside your brain; it’s a relation between you and the world. Cognition is a kind of embodied sense-making. More generally, you need a brain to have a human mind, but your mind isn’t inside your brain; it’s a relation between you and the world, including society and culture.

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A figure from a 2014 Scientific American article on the neuroscience of meditation vividly illustrates the problematic idea that mindfulness is in the head. 18 The article discusses three kinds of meditation practices—“focused attention” meditation, “open monitoring” meditation, and compassion and loving kindness meditation. Focused attention meditation requires keeping your attention on a chosen object, such as the sensation of breathing, and cultivates the ability to remain centered in the present moment while being vigilant of distractions. Open monitoring meditation drops the selective focus on a chosen object, while keeping the attitude of vigilance and fostering the ability to be aware of whatever thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise from moment to moment. Compassion and loving kindness meditation aims to cultivate an altruistic perspective toward others and a readiness to act to relieve their suffering.

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18 . Matthieu Ricard, Antoine Lutz, and Richard J. Davidson, “Mind of the Meditator,” Scientific American, November 2014, 39–45. The figure derives from an earlier figure in Wendy Hasenkamp, Christine D. Wilson-Mendenhall, Eric Duncan, and Lawrence W. Barsalou, “Mind-Wandering and Attention During Focused Attention: A Fine-Grained Temporal Analysis of Fluctuating Cognitive States,” Neuroimage 59 (2012): 750–760.

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The figure depicts focused attention meditation in terms of a dynamic cycle of mental processes and corresponding brain activations. The mental cycle comprises sustained attention, distraction and mind wandering, becoming aware of the distraction, reorientation of awareness, return to sustained attention, distraction and mind wandering, and so forth. Each of these mental processes or cognitive activities is depicted as being tied to the activation of particular brain areas, that is, neural regions understood as crucial nodes of neural networks specific for particular cognitive activities. Mind wandering is tied to activation of the default-mode network (posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, and posterior inferior parietal region); becoming aware of distraction is tied to activation of the salience network (anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex); reorientation of awareness is tied to activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the inferior parietal lobule; and sustaining focus is tied to activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

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I give two arguments against this way of thinking about meditation and the brain. The first argument shows that it’s empirically unwarranted to map the cognitive functions involved in meditation practice in general, and mindfulness meditation in particular, onto particular brain areas or networks. The second argument shows that it’s a conceptual mistake to superimpose mindfulness onto particular brain areas or networks.

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The first argument starts from the premise that the proper level of description for any cognitive function, such as attention, is the whole, embodied subject or person, not brain areas or networks. For example, it’s not brain areas or networks, but rather the embodied subject or person who is, properly speaking, attentive. This is a conceptual point.

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The second step of the argument is an empirical point. It is unlikely that there is a one-to-one mapping between particular cognitive functions and particular brain areas or particular neural networks (especially as currently identified using functional brain imaging). For example, there is no straightforward correspondence between the cognitive function of attention and activity in a particular area of the brain.

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It follows from these two points that it’s unwarranted to map the cognitive functions involved in meditation practice in general, and mindfulness meditation practice in particular, onto particular brain areas or the differential activation of particular neural networks.

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In support of the first step of the argument—that the locus of cognition is the person, not the brain—consider the cognitive function of attention. Christopher Mole, a philosopher of cognitive science, has argued that the best way to conceptualize attention is not as a distinct process, but rather as a mode in which multiple cognitive processes unfold in relation to each other. 19 His term for this mode is “cognitive unison.” The idea is that performing a task—whether it be a perceptual and motor task or a mental one—draws on a variety of cognitive processes, which must operate together in a coordinated, coherent, and sustained way. Attention isn’t any one of these particular processes, nor is it some collection of them; rather, attention is the unison of their operation in the service of the task performance. As long as the processes continue to operate in unison, the agent is attentive. At the level of the brain, various kinds of neural processes may facilitate cognitive unison, but such unison happens at the level of the whole embodied agent performing a task. Just as there is no place in the orchestra where unison resides, so there is no place in the brain where attention resides. Attention is the agent-level phenomenon of the task-relevant, cognitive processes operating in unison.

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19 . Christopher Mole, Attention Is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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These ideas apply to meditation. Focused attention meditation requires cognitive unison. First, you need to place and keep your body in a particular position in relation to your immediate environment, which often includes the social setting of other practitioners. Second, you need to choose an object of attention, such as the felt sensation of breathing, from the range of your experience. Third, you need to make your interoceptive and cognitive resources operate in unison in order to focus on that object and return to it when you notice that you’ve strayed from it. These three requirements hold, too, for a purely mental object of attention, such as a visualized mental image. Indeed, the task demands on cognitive unison are greater in this case, because the object must be mentally sustained in order to be attended to, and it must be attended to in order to be mentally sustained.

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Open monitoring meditation also requires a kind of cognitive unison. In this kind of meditation practice, being mindful takes the form of “mere nondistraction” no matter what arises, rather than selective focus on a particular object of attention. Nevertheless, the overall task structure of maintaining unison, with its dynamic cycle of distraction versus nondistraction, remains in place. Mere nondistraction requires the unison of moment-to-moment mental, sensory, and motor processes, so cognitive unison is operative. From the perspective of the cognitive unison model, open monitoring meditation practice is a kind of attentional practice, even if the kind of attention isn’t selective or focal.

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Given this understanding of attention as cognitive unison, mapping sustained attention onto a particular brain area, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is a category mistake. In certain contexts, activation of that brain area facilitates attention, but it doesn’t generate or constitute attention. Attention isn’t inside the brain; it’s a way in which the whole person (partly because of his or her brain) is engaged in a task—the way of cognitive unison.

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Let me turn to the second step of the argument, that there is no one-to-one correspondence between cognitive functions and brain areas or networks. Here I rely on work by the philosopher Michael Anderson and the cognitive neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa. 20 In an examination of large databases of brain imaging data, they demonstrate that there is no one-to-one correspondence between particular brain regions and particular cognitive functions. Rather, any given region can be activated across a wide array of tasks, depending on the context, and any given task can activate a variety of regions. In addition, they argue that it is highly unlikely that there is any one-to-one mapping between cognitive functions and neural networks. Thus, understanding the brain in terms of networks rather than individual regions will not make the mapping between brain activities and cognitive functions one-to-one, rather than many-to-many.

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20 . Michael L. Anderson, Josh Kinnison, and Luiz Pessoa, “Describing Functional Diversity of Brain Regions and Brain Networks,” Neuroimage 73 (2013): 50–58; Luiz Pessoa, “Understanding Brain Networks and Brain Organization,” Physics of Life Reviews 11 (2014): 400–435.

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For these two reasons—first, that cognitive functions, such as attention, are modes of activity at the level of the whole person or agent, rather than being particular brain processes; and second, that the mapping between brain regions or networks and cognitive functions is many-to-many—it’s empirically unwarranted to map the cognitive processes that make up meditation onto particular brain areas or networks in a one-to-one way.

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I turn now to my second argument against superimposing meditation onto the brain. I summarize each step of the argument and then present them in detail.

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The first step is that mindfulness consists in the integrated exercise of a host of cognitive, affective, and bodily skills in situated action. The second step is that brain processes are necessary enabling conditions of mindfulness but are only partially constitutive of it, and they become constitutive only given the wider context of embodied and embedded cognition and action. The conclusion is that it is a conceptual mistake to superimpose mindfulness onto the differential activation of distinct neural networks.

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The first step of the argument concerns the understanding of mindfulness. As noted earlier, “mindfulness” has no single meaning or definition in the Buddhist tradition. Buddhist modernists typically interpret “mindfulness” to mean “bare attention,” which they take to be direct awareness of sensations and thoughts as they occur, without making any judgments about them. The Pali word sati and the Sanskrit word smṛ ti, however, have the sense of continually “bearing in mind,” “remembering,” or “recollecting” something. According to the Satipaṭṭ hāna Sutta, the scriptural authority on the cultivation of mindfulness in the Pali Canon, one strives continually to bear in mind the body, feelings, mental states, and mental factors. 21 This kind of mindfulness practice requires attention, memory, and metacognition (cognizing one’s own mental processes), as well as a proper conceptual understanding of phenomena as impermanent and not-self. As Buddhism grows and develops across Asia, however, “nondual” styles of mindfulness arise that depart from this “classical” conception of mindfulness in various ways. 22 In particular, these nondual styles aim to induce a state in which the subject-object structure of ordinary experience subsides and mindfulness consists in “mere nondistraction” devoid of subject and object.

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21 . Bhikkhu Anālayo, Satipaṭṭ hāna: The Direct Path to Realization (Birmingham: Windhorse, 2003).

22 . Dunne, “Buddhist Styles of Mindfulness”; Sharf, “Mindfulness and Mindlessness in Early Chan.”

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From a cognitive science perspective, no matter which conceptualization of mindfulness and which style of mindfulness practice we choose, the first step of my argument holds: mindfulness—whether as conceptually structured “bearing in mind” or as nondiscursive “mere nondistraction”—consists in the integrated exercise of a host of cognitive, affective, and bodily skills in situated action (where this includes both formal practice sessions and the rest of everyday life).

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To bring out the rest of the argument, consider the following analogy. Being a good parent consists of a host of emotional and cognitive skills and putting those skills into play in action. The skills and the behaviors based on them clearly depend on the brain—and improving them changes the brain—but they aren’t private mental states and don’t exist inside the brain. Although it’s conceivable that unique patterns of brain activity correlate with being a good parent in a given context, appealing to their presence wouldn’t explain what it is to be a good parent. Parenting doesn’t exist inside the brain; it exists in the social world of human life. Furthermore, what counts as good parenting depends on the social context and the culture. So, parenting isn’t visible simply at the level of the brain. To bring it into view we need a wider perspective, one that takes in the context of the whole person as well as the social and cultural environment.

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Exactly the same points apply to practicing mindfulness. Being mindful consists of certain emotional and cognitive skills and putting those skills into play in the social world. Take the classical Buddhist conception of mindfulness as “bearing in mind” or what we could call “recollective attention.” Mindfulness as recollective attention includes attentive observation of your body, monitoring your thoughts and feelings, and continually remembering to do these things from moment to moment so that you can bring your mind back to them when it wanders away to something else. In cognitive science terms, exercising these mental skills requires being able to integrate awareness, attention, memory, and metacognition. Practicing mindfulness as “mere nondistraction” also requires coordinating these cognitive processes.

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The cognitive and emotional skills that constitute being mindful, as well as the behaviors based on them, clearly depend on the brain—and improving them changes the brain—but they aren’t private mental states and don’t exist inside the brain. Although it’s possible that unique patterns of brain activity correlate with being mindful in a given context, appealing to their presence wouldn’t explain what mindfulness is. Trying to explain mindfulness or identify it at the level of the brain is not only conceptually confused but also bad neuroscience.

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The idea that mindfulness is in the head feeds the current mindfulness mania. It reinforces selfish individualism—all you really need to deal with is your own mind, not the larger social setting. You can practice mindfulness in the privacy of your own office cubicle. The idea that mindfulness is a private practice reinforces consumerism by making mindfulness into a commodity that an individual can try to acquire.

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Buddhists who object to “McMindfulness” argue that selfish individualism and commodification run counter to the whole point of the Buddhist tradition. 23 It’s argued that being mindful in any full or rich sense involves societal and environmental change and can’t be effected simply at the level of the individual mind or brain.

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23 . Purser and Loy, “Beyond McMindfulness.”

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For this critique to have traction, it’s important to see why the very idea of mindfulness being in the head is misguided. The idea rests on a conceptually confused and empirically faulty understanding of the relationship between the mind and the brain. The brain enables cognition, but cognition isn’t a brain process; it’s a form of embodied sense-making.

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We need an approach to the scientific study of meditation different from the “brainbound” or “neurocentric” approach. Here we can look to what is known as “4E cognitive science,” according to which cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. 24 4E cognitive science grows out of the “enactive approach,” which Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and I proposed in The Embodied Mind. 25

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24 . Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, eds., The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

25 . Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991; rev. ed., 2016).

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The idea that cognition is embodied means that it depends directly on the body as a functional whole, not just the brain. 26 For example, studies of visual perception have shown that active movement directly contributes to the content of perception. 27 In other words, how you move directly contributes to how and what you see. People make different judgments about depth and three-dimensional structure depending on whether they are actively moving or being passively moved in exactly the same way. Self-generated motor activity on the part of the body doesn’t simply cause perception; it’s part of perceiving and directly contributes to how and what you see. 28

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26 . Evan Thompson and Diego Cosmelli, “Brain in a Vat or Body in a World: Brainbound Versus Enactive Views of Experience,” Philosophical Topics 39 (2011): 163–180.

27 . Mark Wexler and Jeroen J. A. van Boxtel, “Depth Perception by the Active Observer,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 431–438.

28 . Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

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Another example of embodied cognition comes from studies of gesture, language, and thought. 29 These studies suggest that gesture is not a mere accompaniment to speaking and thinking, but rather is an integral component of them. Gesture is thought in action.

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29 . David McNeil, Gesture and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Susan Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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The idea that cognition is embedded means that cognition—especially adaptive, intelligent behavior—relies heavily on the physical and social environment, which serves to scaffold—to build and support—ongoing cognition. The body’s sensory and motor systems provide the medium through which cognition is embedded. In cognitive scientist Randall Beer’s words: “Strictly speaking, behavior is a property of the entire coupled brain-body-environment system and cannot in general be properly attributed to any one subsystem in isolation from the others.” 30

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30 . Randall D. Beer, “Dynamical Systems and Embedded Cognition,” in Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, ed. Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 138.

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The idea that cognition is extended means that the environment, specifically material and symbolic resources and tools, is not only an outer scaffold for cognition, but also part of cognition itself when it is coupled to the brain and the rest of the body in the right way. 31 One of philosopher Andy Clark’s examples is an arithmetically adept accountant who can solve problems quickly and reliably by copying numbers to a scratchpad as she works, rather than holding those numbers in her biological short-term memory. 32 Clark argues that the scratchpad functions not as a mere prop or support for her calculations, but as a proper part of her cognitive activity, no less so than her biological memory.

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31 . Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

32 . Clark, Supersizing the Mind.

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Merlin Donald’s version of this idea is especially relevant here. 33 He focuses on the environment of symbolic culture and argues that the human brain is a cultural brain: it is adapted to symbolic culture and cannot develop and function properly as a cognitive organ unless it’s embedded in a cultural environment. Donald proposes that biological memory systems and symbolic memory systems (writing, computers) constitute an extended, hybrid cognitive system. Human memory extends beyond what’s contained inside the individual head. Cultural materials and processes are so densely intertwined with the brain’s development and functioning that they operate as a necessary part of human cognition. Donald argues that this culturally extended cognitive system makes possible an overall expansion of the capacities of human consciousness, enabling voluntary attention and metacognition—precisely the mental capacities required for mindfulness.

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33 . Merlin Donald, The Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Cognition and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

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Donald’s ideas connect to those of other cultural psychologists, notably Lev Vygotsky and Michael Tomasello. 34 Vygotsky proposed that all higher mental processes, those involving metacognition, appear twice in development—first, socially, and second, internalized individually. Socially, a child participates with others in cultural practices and shared mental activities; with repeated experience, the child internalizes the shared mental activities so that they become individual. For example, in joint attention, the child and the caregiver recognize each other as paying attention to the same thing (say, a toy). Eventually, the child comes to understand that she, too, can be an object of shared attention, and so she internalizes an outward perspective on herself. Coming to have such an outside perspective from within is crucial for metacognition. Tomasello builds on this idea. He argues that voluntary attention and metacognition are internalized forms of social cognition, dependent on being able to share intentions, imitate others, and share attention.

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34 . L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

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The idea that cognition is enactive is that in being embodied, embedded, and extended, it enacts or brings forth a lived world of meaning and relevance. Cognition is sense-making through embodied action. This was the central idea of our book The Embodied Mind.

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The enactive approach implies that, under many conditions, locating cognitive processes at the level of neural networks gets the boundaries of the cognitive system wrong. A better unit of analysis is the coupled brain-body-world system. This idea is central to “cognitive ecology,” which uses the tools and perspective of 4E cognitive science to study “cognitive ecosystems.”

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the rhetoric of enlightenment

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In 1857 an anonymous article appeared in the Times of London that referred to the Buddha as “the Enlightened.” In the same year, Max Müller, a German-born philologist and professor at the University of Oxford, published the article under his name in his book Buddhism and Buddhist Pilgrims. Here is how he described the Buddha: “Buddha himself went through the school of the Brahmans. He performed their penances, he studied their philosophy, and he at last claimed the name of the Buddha, or the Enlightened, when he threw away the whole ceremonial, with its sacrifices, superstitions, penances, and castes, as worthless, and changed the complicated systems of philosophy into a short doctrine of salvation.”

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“Buddha” means “awakened one,” from the Sanskrit verbal root budh, “to awake” or “to awaken.” Müller was one of the first scholars to render the abstract noun bodhi, “awakened,” as “enlightenment.” The translation caught on. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become commonplace to write about Buddhism using the words “enlightened” and “enlightenment.” 2

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1 . Max Müller, Buddhism and Buddhist Pilgrims: A Review of M. Stanislas Julien’s “Voyages des Pèlerins Bouddhistes” (London: Williams and Norgate, 1857), 14. For discussion of Müller and the emergence of “enlightenment” as a translation for the Sanskrit and Pali word bodhi, see Richard S. Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment: Buddhism, Religion, Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006), chapter 1 .

2 . Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment,

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Müller was a founding figure of the European academic study of religion, a discipline he described as the “science of religion.” Casting the Buddha in the image of the Protestant Reformation—as rejecting superstition and the caste of priests, and as “enlightened”—proved appealing and is now widespread.

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“Enlightenment” in English is also used as the name for an epoch, the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, the eighteenth-century European and American philosophical movement that emphasized reason, science, and liberty and opposed religion, especially the Catholic Church. Immanuel Kant, in his 1784 essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” defined “enlightenment” as humanity’s “emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.” Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without someone else’s guidance. The “motto of the enlightenment,” Kant wrote, is, “Dare to be wise. Have courage to use your own understanding.” 4

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3 . John C. Olin, ed., A Reformation Debate: Sadoleto’s Letter to the Genevans and Calvin’s Reply (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 73. See also Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment, 2.

4 . Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, trans. H. B. Nisbet (London: Penguin, 1991), 5.

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Müller’s presentation of the Buddha fit the sensibilities of the Age of Enlightenment. The Buddha was said to strike out on his own, reject Vedic ritual, rely on his own understanding, and discover for himself the truth of liberation. This mythic image of the Buddha is central to Buddhist modernism and can be contrasted with images from other eras in which he is a transcendent being with divine attributes.

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