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by John Horgan
Buddhist Retreat
Why I gave up on finding my religion.
For a 2,500-year-old religion,
Buddhism seems remarkably compatible with our scientifically oriented
culture, which may explain its surging popularity here in America. Over
the last 15 years, the number of Buddhist centers in the United States has
more than doubled, to well over 1,000. As many as 4 million Americans now
practice Buddhism, surpassing the total of Episcopalians. Of these
Buddhists, half have post-graduate degrees, according to one survey.
Recently, convergences between science and Buddhism have been explored in
a slew of books—including Zen and the Brain and The Psychology of
Awakening—and scholarly meetings. Next fall Harvard will host a colloquium
titled "Investigating the Mind," where leading cognitive scientists will
swap theories with the Dalai Lama. Just the other week the New York Times
hailed the "rapprochement between modern science and ancient [Buddhist]
wisdom."
Four years ago, I joined a
Buddhist meditation class and began talking to (and reading books by)
intellectuals sympathetic to Buddhism. Eventually, and regretfully, I
concluded that Buddhism is not much more rational than the Catholicism I
lapsed from in my youth; Buddhism's moral and metaphysical worldview
cannot easily be reconciled with science—or, more generally, with modern
humanistic values.
For many, a chief selling point
of Buddhism is its supposed de-emphasis of supernatural notions such as
immortal souls and God. Buddhism "rejects the theological impulse," the
philosopher Owen Flanagan declares approvingly in The Problem of the Soul.
Actually, Buddhism is functionally theistic, even if it avoids the "G"
word. Like its parent religion Hinduism, Buddhism espouses reincarnation,
which holds that after death our souls are re-instantiated in new bodies,
and karma, the law of moral cause and effect. Together, these tenets imply
the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our
naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach
or as a saintly lama.
Western Buddhists usually
downplay these supernatural elements, insisting that Buddhism isn't so
much a religion as a practical method for achieving happiness. They depict
Buddha as a pragmatist who eschewed metaphysical speculation and focused
on reducing human suffering. As the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman put
it, Buddhism is an "inner science," an empirical discipline for fulfilling
our minds' potential. The ultimate goal is the state of preternatural
bliss, wisdom, and moral grace sometimes called enlightenment—Buddhism's
version of heaven, except that you don't have to die to get there.
The major vehicle for achieving
enlightenment is meditation, touted by both Buddhists and
alternative-medicine gurus as a potent way to calm and comprehend our
minds. The trouble is, decades of research have shown meditation's effects
to be highly unreliable, as James Austin, a neurologist and Zen Buddhist,
points out in Zen and Brain. Yes, it can reduce stress, but, as it turns
out, no more so than simply sitting still does. Meditation can even
exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions in certain
people.
The insights imputed to
meditation are questionable, too. Meditation, the brain researcher
Francisco Varela told me before he died in 2001, confirms the Buddhist
doctrine of anatta, which holds that the self is an illusion. Varela
contended that anatta has also been corroborated by cognitive science,
which has discovered that our perception of our minds as discrete, unified
entities is an illusion foisted upon us by our clever brains. In fact, all
that cognitive science has revealed is that the mind is an emergent
phenomenon, which is difficult to explain or predict in terms of its
parts; few scientists would equate the property of emergence with
nonexistence, as anatta does.
Much more dubious is Buddhism's
claim that perceiving yourself as in some sense unreal will make you
happier and more compassionate. Ideally, as the British psychologist and
Zen practitioner Susan Blackmore writes in The Meme Machine, when you
embrace your essential selflessness, "guilt, shame, embarrassment,
self-doubt, and fear of failure ebb away and you become, contrary to
expectation, a better neighbor." But most people are distressed by
sensations of unreality, which are quite common and can be induced by
drugs, fatigue, trauma, and mental illness as well as by meditation.
Even if you achieve a blissful
acceptance of the illusory nature of your self, this perspective may not
transform you into a saintly bodhisattva, brimming with love and
compassion for all other creatures. Far from it—and this is where the
distance between certain humanistic values and Buddhism becomes most
apparent. To someone who sees himself and others as unreal, human
suffering and death may appear laughably trivial. This may explain why
some Buddhist masters have behaved more like nihilists than saints.
Chogyam Trungpa, who helped introduce Tibetan Buddhism to the United
States in the 1970s, was a promiscuous drunk and bully, and he died of
alcohol-related illness in 1987. Zen lore celebrates the sadistic or
masochistic behavior of sages such as Bodhidharma, who is said to have sat
in meditation for so long that his legs became gangrenous.
What's worse, Buddhism holds that
enlightenment makes you morally infallible—like the pope, but more so.
Even the otherwise sensible James Austin perpetuates this insidious
notion. " 'Wrong' actions won't arise," he writes, "when a brain continues
truly to express the self-nature intrinsic to its [transcendent]
experiences." Buddhists infected with this belief can easily excuse their
teachers' abusive acts as hallmarks of a "crazy wisdom" that the
unenlightened cannot fathom.
But what troubles me most about
Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the
surest route to salvation. Buddha's first step toward enlightenment was
his abandonment of his wife and child, and Buddhism (like Catholicism)
still exalts male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. It seems
legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as
essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual. From this
perspective, the very concept of enlightenment begins to look
anti-spiritual: It suggests that life is a problem that can be solved, a
cul-de-sac that can be, and should be, escaped.
Some Western Buddhists have
argued that principles such as reincarnation, anatta, and enlightenment
are not essential to Buddhism. In Buddhism Without Beliefs and The Faith
To Doubt, the British teacher Stephen Batchelor eloquently describes his
practice as a method for confronting—rather than transcending—the often
painful mystery of life. But Batchelor seems to have arrived at what he
calls an "agnostic" perspective in spite of his Buddhist training—not
because of it. When I asked him why he didn't just call himself an
agnostic, Batchelor shrugged and said he sometimes wondered himself.
All religions, including
Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was
created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast,
science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the
raison d'être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and
we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but
science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel.
Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but
it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science's disturbing
perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality
can.
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