What Satisfies Me
I recently came across a December 2, 2011 article in the Scientific American entitled “Why I Don’t Dig Buddhism” by Josh Horgan. Here is the link for it:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-i-dont-dig-buddhism/
I think that some of his issues with Buddhism are worth considering. I won’t presume that I can convince Josh Horgan or anyone else to convert to Buddhism, but I do want to write down why his issues with Buddhism are not my issues.
“One problem was that meditation never really tamed my monkey mind.”
Well, yeah. It won’t necessarily. It takes a lot of time and practice to gain the skill of keeping your attention where you want it. It’s like cultivating any other skill or building up any other muscle. Also, some people may have more talent for it while others may have to work harder and longer. That doesn’t mean the ability to train one’s attention isn’t worth cultivating. Also, silent sitting may not be the right practice for everyone. In my own case, I wasn’t able to just sit still or calm down and focus my mind on the breath until after two years of doing a chanting practice for about half and hour every morning and evening.
“The mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, when I interviewed him, compared meditation to a scientific instrument such as a microscope or telescope, through which you can glimpse spiritual truth. This analogy is bogus. Anyone can peer through a telescope and see the moons of Jupiter, or squint through a microscope and see cells divide. But ask 10 meditators what they see, feel or learn and you will get 10 different answers.”
Seriously? I can look through a telescope or a microscope too but not know what I’m looking at. I can stare at an x-ray for hours but I wouldn’t be able to tell a tumor from a shadow or from some bone or organ that is supposed to be there. Because I can’t instantly interpret what I see, does that mean that the training for astronomers and doctors is bogus? Because I can’t run a marathon without extensive training and exercise does that mean no one else can really do it? This is ridiculous. Mental cultivating is a real thing, whether or not it can be perfected right off the bat. The mind is an instrument, it can be built up and honed.
“Research on meditation (which I reviewed in my 2003 book Rational Mysticism, and which is usually carried out by proponents, such as psychologist Richard Davidson) suggests how variable its effects can be. Meditation reportedly reduces stress, anxiety and depression, but it has been linked to increased negative emotions, too.”
Anyone who bothers to read classical meditation manuals like Tiantai Zhiyi’s Great Calming and Contemplation or Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification or even writings from other non-Buddhist traditions on contemplation will quickly realize that many methods of calming and contemplation are offered for different types of people. Not all Buddhists sit silently trying to follow the breath. In addition, these manuals all talk about different negative emotions that may arise or other disturbing mental phenomena (like hallucinations or voices) and how to deal with them. It was well known that silent sitting is not some panacea, and that some people need to go through such things as a “dark night of the senses” or “dark night of the soul.” Just because modern people try to hype silent sitting meditation as if it were some panacea that can easily bring about a McEnlightenment without any real training or supervision does not mean the classical sources do not present a much more nuanced, refined, and effective program of mental cultivation.
“Moreover, those fortunate souls who achieve deep mystical states—through meditation or other means—may come away convinced of very different truths.” He then cites one Buddhist meditator who was an idealist and another who is a materialist.”
All I can say here is “no shit Sherlock.” This has been known and accounted for within Buddhism for a very long time. That is why Indo-Tibetan Buddhism has its tenet system and why East Asian Buddhist schools have their doctrinal classification systems. It is well known that different people have different experiences and insights and different traditions account for this in more or less satisfactory ways, showing that it is possible to at least suggest how continued practice and study can help a meditator not get stuck in shallow views and assumptions but instead keep developing deeper and deeper insights. Most of these systems all presume that the deepest insight transcends attachment to any conceptualized view. Buddhism has never claimed that every meditator will necessarily all come away with the same degree of insight, at least not initially.
“Blackmore looks favorably, however, upon the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, which holds that the self is an illusion. "Where, exactly, is your self?" Buddha asked. "Of what components and properties does your self consist?" Since no answer to these questions suffices, the self must be in some sense illusory. … Actually, modern science—and meditative introspection—have merely discovered that the self is an emergent phenomenon, difficult to explain in terms of its parts. The world abounds in emergent phenomena.”
Again, this shows ignorance of the tenet systems and doctrinal classification schemes. These explain that no-self and even emptiness are skillful means to get Buddhist cultivators to let go of the naive idea that there are fixed independent phenomena. They are not denying that there are conditioned selves or phenomena that are experienced, in other words yes there are emergent phenomena, but no these phenomena are caused and conditions and therefore empty of a fixed independent self. There is no conflict here. Neither the no-self nor the emptiness teachings are nihilistic, and specifically are meant to be the Middle Way between absolutism and nihilism.
“Then there is the claim that contemplative practice will make us gentler, more humble and compassionate. … But given the repulsive behavior over the past few decades of so many gurus … you could conclude that mystical knowledge leads to pathological narcissism rather than selflessness. … Instead of becoming a saint-like Bodhisattva, brimming with love for all things, the mystic may become a sociopathic nihilist.”
Again, the Buddhist tradition has accounted for this from the very start. It is why the Buddha taught the eightfold path and not the “one-fold path [of “meditation”] of the upper middle-class way.” The Buddha walked away from the yogis who taught him meditation and enabled him to attain very refined altered states of consciousness. He downplayed the use of meditation to merely gain supernatural powers. The Buddha’s cousin Devadatta mastered these techniques, gained the exalted states of mind and supernatural powers according to the tradition, but was still envious to the point of trying on multiple occasions to kill the Buddha. Obviously, meditation alone is not enough. It must be coupled with the cultivation of a skillful/wholesome way of life, the deliberate cultivation of positive emotions like loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, and above all directed towards insight into the conditioned nature of phenomena which (and here is the real claim) will undercut attachment and aversion to conditioned phenomena and resolve (or at least greatly ameliorate) greed, hatred, and delusion. Buddhism has never claimed that silent sitting meditation all by itself was enough to even make someone a nice person let alone enlightened or liberated from suffering.
“I have one final misgiving about Buddhism—or rather, about Buddha himself. His path to enlightenment began with his abandonment of his wife and child. Even today, Tibetan Buddhism—again, like Catholicism—upholds male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. To me, "spiritual" means life-embracing, and so a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexual love and parenthood is not spiritual but anti-spiritual.”
Fair enough, but of course my response to this is to read the Vimalakirti Sutra at the very least, wherein those who cling one-sidedly to monasticism are raked over the metaphorical coals by an enlightened layman and also in one chapter a goddess who take them to task for their male chauvinism. Also, I must point out that judging Siddhartha Gautama by the standards of 21st century North American middle-class values is very shallow and misguided. To begin with, Siddhartha was no deadbeat dad. His wife and son were hardly abandoned, they were left in a palace with an extended family that had a vested interest in taking very good care of them. Also, in his culture at that time it was considered a higher calling that was socially acceptable (at least to some) to renounce the home life. The Buddha’s father only resisted it because he wanted Siddhartha to become his heir and only retire from home life in old age. In any case, while some Buddhist traditions still do exalt monastics as the only real Buddhists, there are many (such as Nichiren Buddhism for one) that do not.