Why Buddhism is true

Yesterday, I spent the morning at a funeral for a friend from my book club who died last month, and the evening in a rare meeting of the book club- rare because the two folks who were the main organizers have moved out of state, but they were of course in town for the funeral. One of the things we did at book club was divide some of the books our friend had left behind, and I hadn't realized she had quite an interest in Buddhism.

So this morning I'm reading one of those books: Robin Wright’s Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. I think this is going to be my weekend reading for a few weeks. I read the first few chapters this morning, and the first thing is that he is a really good writer. He mentions The Matrix as an example of how Buddhism is true, and it turns out that the producers had made Keanu Reeves read one of his books, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary psychology in everyday life. Now I want to read that book, because apparently what it talks about is how evolutionary psychology has wired the brain in ways that hurt us in modern life. That sounds like a really refreshing perspective on evolutionary psychology. Usually when I read about evolutionary psychology, it's from people who think it's great that we're hardwired in our genes to rape people or whatever it is they think we have evolved to do. Apparently Write’s perspective on this is that evolutionary psychology was “designed”--and he puts designed in quotation marks because he's aware that it's not actually designing it's just a mechanism-- basically that it has designed our brains in ways to get us to perpetuate our genes.

So he goes through some examples of this, using a powdered doughnut, which seems to be his weakness. We know the donut is bad for us but we crave it anyway. He says basically that evolution wants us to pass on our genes, so it selects for traits that do that, and one of the traits is to get us to eat a lot and have sex a lot so we reproduce ourselves. So it sets up our brains so we are pleasure seeking, but those pleasures necessarily have to be transitory, because otherwise we would not perpetuate the behavior that it wants us to have, to perpetuate our genes. This is a really interesting perspective on evolutionary psychology and it makes me want to read more of his stuff.

So he does start out the book by making some caveats: he says when he said calls the book Why Buddhism is true, he is specifically referring to a type of western Buddhism where the focus is on meditation and techniques of mindfulness;he's not talking about traditional Asian Buddhism with its belief in supernatural beings and reincarnation. He's much more interested in techniques of the mind. He acknowledges the variety in Buddhism the problem with saying that anything is true etc. So he's really just focusing on I think the the Buddhist diagnosis of the problems of human condition, and the techniques of meditation.

And I do think it's a really interesting approach to suggest that the problems of the human condition are a response to evolutionary psychology. The way he explains it makes a lot of sense to me. That our brains are a certain way, but we don't necessarily have to accept that seems like a really good approach to both evolutionary psychology and human existence. I've read through the second chapter where he talks about his own experiences of meditation, and why he is a quote bad meditator it in part because he can't focus his attention in part because of his own outbursts of rage. I really find myself identifying with a lot of what he has to say and he's a super engaging writer.

The part of this so far that has most resonated with me is that he identifies tribalism as the fundamental problem of our time. He was writing this eight years ago, and if anything I think tribalism has become even more the problem of our time. “Technologies of distraction have made attention deficits more common. And there's something about the modern environment-- something technological or cultural or political or all of the above-- that seems conducive to harsh judgment and ready rage. Just look at all the tribalism-- the discord and even open conflict among religious, ethnic, national, and ideological lines. More and more, it seems, groups of people define their identity in terms of sharp opposition to other groups of people. I consider this tribalism the biggest problem of our time period I think it could undo millennia of movement towards global integration, unravel the social web just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach. Given the world is still loaded with nuclear weapons and that biotechnology is opening a Pandora's box of new weaponry, you can imagine our tribalistic impulses ushering in a truly dark age.”