Evan Thompson's new little book makes a wonderful foil to all the reading I've been doing lately about Buddhism. It gives clear voice to a number of the problems and reservations I've encountered for myself in studying meditation and its accompanying theory. However, unlike the Bertrand Russell essay from which the title derives, Thompson is quite sympathetic to Buddishm. He himself has significant meditative experience and a deep knowledge of Buddhist history and philosophy (studying this is his profession after all). In his introduction, you almost get the sense that he would like to feel comfortable calling himself a Buddhist, but for reasons of intellectual honesty and precision just can't get there. Perhaps surprisingly, the problem for him lies less in the fact that he doesn't believe in the classic metaphysical concepts we associate with Buddhism -- karma, rebirth, enlightenment -- than in the fact that he doesn't believe in the philosophical underpinnings of the peculiar form of "Buddhist Modernism" that has arisen in the past century of East-West interaction. These underpinnings turn out to be, essentially, scientific materialism. So the subtitle of the book could almost have been "Why I am also not a Scientist".
Consider his own summary of the book:
My argument has been that Buddhist modernism distorts both the significance of the Buddhist tradition and the relationship between religion and science. Buddhism gained entry to Europe and North America in the nineteenth century by being presented as a religion uniquely compatible with modern science. Now, in the twenty-first century, Buddhist modernist discourse is at its height. But this discourse is untenable, as we've seen. It's core tenets -- that Buddhism is a "mind science"; that there is no self; that mindfulness is an inward awareness of one's own private mental theater; that neuroscience establishes the value of mindfulness practice; that enlightenment is a nonconceptual experience outside language, culture, and tradition; and that enlightenment is or can be correlated with a brain state -- are philosophically and scientifically indefensible.
None of these points is really a critique of traditional Buddhist beliefs. They all center on the blending of Buddhism and science that has become the default public face of a newly missionary Buddhism as it expands around the globe. Thompson's point is not the simple political one that the West has culturally appropriated traditional Buddhism. His first chapter -- "The Myth of Buddhist Exceptionalism" -- outlines a fascinating history of Buddhism, starting with its Indian philosophic backdrop, and explores the very real ways in which it evolved though its encounter with Western ideas. The punchline though is that most of what we today call "mindfulness" was invented in Burma in the past 100 years. Buddhist modernism is not a European or American invention; it's an import. His point is not to complain about modern "inauthenticity" but to combat the conflation of religion and science that this globalization of Buddhism has produced.
In addition to that historical chapter, the book has: a wonderful rebuttal to Robert Wright's misguided and forgettable Why Buddhism is True; a great discussion of various concepts of the self in both Buddhism and cognitive science that debunks "the self is an illusion" idea as an oversimplification; a compelling critique of the idea that meditation is a purely empirical "first-person science"; and an extended discussion of the philosophic problems you run into if you try to think of enlightenment as simultaneously some particular state of the brain and some transcendent means of being-in-the-world.
I did find the final chapter of the book a little bit weak or insipid. Thompson tries to move beyond critiquing the scientific and universalist tendency implicit in Buddhist modernism, and to offer a positive vision of what Buddhism actually can teach us. His answer to this is actually fairly simple.
In my view, the significance of the Buddhist intellectual tradition for the modern world is that it offers a radical critique of our narcissistic preoccupation with the self and our overconfident belief that science tells us how the world really is in itself apart from how we're able to measure and act upon it.
I think this is a fine statement of what Buddhism offers. But it comes wrapped up in a long discussion of a philosophical vision he calls (following Kwame Anthony Appiah and others) "cosmopolitanism". Maybe he didn't do the theory justice, but it sounded like a whole lot of why can't we all just get along, kumbaya, beautiful soul stuff. Sure, it would be great if we all learned from different traditions and maintained an open and non-dogmatic mind about what the ultimate truth might look like. We could see Buddhism as contributing some interesting ideas, science contributing others, with philosophy and art and other religions throwing things into the mix as well. And when I'm sitting in my armchair I may even be able to juggle all these perspectives and look at the world through many eyes. In fact, as a confirmed dilettante, I feel like I specialize in this sort of juggling. I think it's an inspiring vision as far as it goes and we could really use more of this sort of "paradigmatic agnosticism". But of course, we also have to act in the world. And no amount of open and honest conversation is going to put to rest all the questions that arise when that action has to be based on your paradigm or my paradigm. A dialog of differences without a clear hierarchy is a good first step, but you will not remove questions of power with nothing more than good intentions.
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