Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 417: Why I’m Not a Buddhist | Evan Thompson

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

This episode features Evan Thompson, author of the book Why I Am Not a Buddhist. Evan Thompson is a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His work and research focuses on the nature of the mind, the self, and human experience combining cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, particularly Asian philosophical traditions. This episode explores: Thompson’s beef with what he calls “Buddhist exceptionalism,” “Buddhist modernism,” and “neural Buddhism;” why Buddhism is so attractive in the Western world; our culture’s need for validation of meaning through science; McMindfulness and the Western obsession with individualism; the dialogue between science and Buddhism; what the Buddha meant by the word dukkha, or suffering; and Evan lays out his case for an alternative to Buddhist exceptionalism, which he calls “cosmopolitanism.”Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/evan-thompson-417See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, the title of today's episode, I will admit, is a bit of a bait and switch. We're calling the episode why I'm not a Buddhist, but personally, I do call myself a Buddhist. We went with it because it happens to be the title of a recent book whose author you're going to hear from today. Before I introduce my guest though, it's just a little bit of background here. As a journalist and as a human, I deeply value skepticism to be clear, not nihilistic, burn it all down cynicism, but instead a good nature challenging of ideas, both other people's ideas

and my own. I don't espouse these beliefs just because I think being skeptical is the right or ethical thing to do, although I do think it's right and ethical, but also because I think it's the wisely selfish thing to do. Life is better in my experience when you're not putting yourself through the subtle pain of dogmatism, clinging to beliefs that you know somewhere in your psyche may not be fully supportable. Also, life is more interesting when you open your mind to input from other people. So today, I'm going to try to walk the walk on this. I invited on a guy named Evan Thompson, who wrote the aforementioned book, Why I'm Not A Buddhist. The very title is challenging,

given that I have long called myself a Buddhist. In his book, Evan takes a hard run at people who have profoundly influenced my thinking, including Sam Harris and Robert Wright, both previous guests on this show, given how smart Evan is, and you will hear this. Wrestling with his ideas has forced me to ask the question, have I fully thought through calling myself a Buddhist? A little snippet from his bio here, Evan Thompson is a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver.

He works on the nature of the mind, the self and human experience. His work combines cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Asian philosophical traditions. In this conversation, we talk about Thompson's beef with what he calls Buddhist exceptionalism, also Buddhist modernism and neural Buddhism. Why Buddhism is so attractive in the Western world, our cultures need for validation of meaning

through science, mic mindfulness, and the Western obsession with individualism, and the dialogue between science and Buddhism and what Evan believes are some of the overhyped claims that have emerged out of said dialogue. We have a little back and forth over with the Buddha meant by the word duke, often translated as suffering. He also laid out his case for an alternative to Buddhist exceptionalism, which he calls cosmopolitanism.

I mentioned this on Monday's episode, but we are dedicating this whole week to interviewees who challenge my and perhaps your views on Buddhism. If you missed it, go check out Monday's episode with Swami Tiagannanda, who gives us a sort of Hinduism 101. Okay, we'll get started with Evan Thompson right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral. Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos,

to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10percent.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Like, it's only fans only bad where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO Maybe it makes sense to start with a little personal background just to make clear to the audience that for a guy who was written a book called Why I'm Not a Buddhist, you've actually had a lot

of exposure to Buddhism. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I have had a lot of exposure going back related to my childhood to when I was a kid about nine or ten years old. I grew up in a community that was an alternative, you know, counter-cultural community. You could say this is in the 1970s on Long Island and then also in New York City in Manhattan. And I was founded by my parents. My father's name was William R. Win Thompson. He was a writer, kind of a cultural critic, had been a professor of humanities in English, and he founded this community with my mother, Gail Thompson, as an alternative educational, spiritual community that had resident meditation teachers and religious figures, but also scientists and philosophers and poets, kind of a salon

in that respect, you could say. And among the resident teachers were Buddhist teachers from different Buddhist traditions and Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, a few people in the early days who had been involved with the Insight Meditation Society and in Barry Massachusetts. And so I grew up around Buddhist teachers. Some of them Asian, you know, Tibetans from Asia and then some of them Western converts, I suppose you could say,

or Western people who had found their way to Buddhism. So Buddhism was just kind of always there in my frame of reference, and in my experience, my dad taught me to meditate when I was seven or eight. He was very involved, really, with yoga and Hindu meditation, not so much Buddhism, though he was close friends with a number of prominent American Buddhist teachers. So I was exposed to Buddhism in that way as a sort of way of life practice, especially focused around meditation. And I was also always a very kind of bookworm kid. So I would read stories about the Buddha either written for children or eventually kind of found my way into reading things about Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist scriptures. And that eventually led me to go to college and major in Asian studies.

And there I studied Buddhism a lot with Robert Thurman, who's a well-known American Buddhist scholar and writer. So that's really my first exposure to Buddhism came in that childhood setting. At what point did you start to this phraseology a little overly strong, but what point did you start to sort of turn against Buddhism? And I know that's overly strong, but to have your opinion go a little bit southerly direction. Yeah, I wouldn't say I turned against it.

So in my book, why I'm not a Buddhist, I try to frame it in terms of this idea that I consider myself a friend to Buddhism and I want to be a good friend. And so a good friend is someone who points out critical things that you don't want to let pass. So that's how I think of it myself. But in terms of how I arrived at that point, that was actually a long journey over many years. It's still an evolving journey for that matter. I was very drawn to Buddhism all along the way, and it was when I became involved

in the dialogue between Buddhism and science, particularly neuroscience, the brain science of meditation. So this is much later in my life, starting around 2001, 2002, 2003 that I became involved with the Mind and Life Institute and the work that it has done to promote conversations between especially the Dalai Lama and Western scientists and to promote and support the scientific study of meditation. My misgivings really crystallized at that phase

about how the science Buddhism dialogue had been evolving. And prior to that, I had explored, I suppose, more personally trying to connect myself to different Buddhist communities. But I always felt uncomfortable that there was a kind of exoticism, or you could say fetishizing a kind of uncritical way of thinking about Buddhism that I found exemplified in these communities that in my book I call Buddhist exceptionalism. And so this is the idea that,

oh, Buddhism isn't really a religion, it's a philosophy, it's a way of life, it's a therapy, it's a mind science, you hear different ways of this thought is expressed. And because it's not a religion, it's therefore superior to other religions, like Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism. And this I found very difficult to accept because the behavior that I witnessed and that I also participated in

was obviously religious behavior. It was ritual. There was iconography. There was chanting. was obviously religious behavior. It was ritual. There was iconography. There was chanting. And I grappled with this for a long time. And it was when I became more aware of the history of how Buddhism came to the West, and the particular form that modern Buddhism took

in North America, and how Buddhism was, you could say promoting itself culturally, that was when my misgivings kind of really crystallized. And so my target became this way of thinking that I call Buddhist exceptionalism, which I think distorts Buddhism. I think Buddhism is a very rich and important tradition, but it's a religious tradition. And to the extent that it presents itself as exceptional, my analogy is American exceptionalism. So the United States is a unique, obviously extremely important country in the world,

but American exceptionalism is the belief that it's not just different, but it's superior to any other country. And it can't be understood in terms of the usual concepts we would apply, like race or class, in the way that we would analyzing other nation states. So Buddhist exceptionalism is kind of a parallel. Buddhism is superior to any other religion and the concepts that we would use to describe other religions like faith or supernatural agency, divinity, God, those don't really apply to Buddhism. And this is a modern rendition of Buddhism that just is not historically accurate. Just trying to sort of interpolate back to the ways I've talked about Buddhism and I want to say from the beginning here, I make a lot of mistakes all the time.

So I'm very willing to change my messaging going forward based on this conversation. So I want to signal that now. I could fit pretty much four square into the group of people that you're criticizing here. And yet, I don't think I've ever said it's not a religion. I think it can be for sure millions of people practice it as a religion that's inarguable all over the world with faith claims, you know, metaphysical claims, rituals, and I think that's great.

I think it is also true that you can, or I've long thought, and I'm willing to have this conviction challenged and change, perhaps in this conversation, that one can come from as I do a skeptical, secular background and embrace some of the practices and teachings of Buddhism without having to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Granted, there are plenty of claims made by the Buddha and the Buddhists that are metaphysical and I have not seen any evidence for things like reincarnation, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't believe it uncritically. However, the loophole there, and I know you're aware of this, is the Buddha's insistence

that you shouldn't believe anything he says, take it on face value until you've got the proof for yourself. I believe the poly term for that is a, he possible, come see for yourself, I believe the poly term for that is a hepocicote, come see for yourself. So where am I going wrong in how I'm thinking and talking about this? Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily say that you're going wrong, Buddhism and all religions evolve, and in the modern world, it's a general feature of religion that they secularize, that they become less sectarian, that they downplay traditional aspects that are perceived to be in conflict with say a scientific worldview. This is something that we see across the spectrum.

So we see it in Buddhism, we see it in Hinduism, we see it in strands of Islam, we see it obviously in Judaism, we see it in strands of Islam, we see it obviously in Judaism, we see it in Christianity. So it's the rhetoric of exceptionalism that gets attached to that, that I am particularly criticizing. And it's also, I would say, the, in some cases, inability to see that often what we reconstitute in a secular world and call not religious and call secular is nonetheless religious in a much richer sense of the word, which really has to do with social practices of making meaning out of life and of ritual and of community. So I mean, if you go to a meditation retreat, as I know you have it, places like spirit rock

or insight meditation society, as I also have done, I haven go to a meditation retreat, as I know you have it, places like spirit rock or insight meditation society as I also have done, I haven't done it spirit rock, but I have it in sight meditation society. Often what you, or at least in my experience, what's given is a rhetoric of here we aren't engaged in religion, we're engaged in seeing the mind as it truly is from moment to moment. in seeing the mind as it truly is from moment to moment. But then if you look at what is being said and what's being done, it's overtly religious because you're being given a conceptual system, a framework of meaning to make sense

of what is happening to you as you're sitting, observing your breath, you're giving concepts like moment to moment arising, craving, attachment, clinging, letting go. These are all Buddhist concepts. And you're surrounded with teachers and people in a community who reinforce them collectively. And I have no objection to that. I mean, that's human life. What I object to is the claim that that isn't religion or that that is somehow unlike other versions of that that we also see in Christianity or Judaism, that is somehow more rational or

more modern. That's really what I'm targeting. I mean, I think mindfulness practice in the modern forms in which it's being taught. I'm not arguing against that. I think that benefits a lot of people. I mean, we could have another conversation about how it sometimes gets co-opted into a kind of consumerist worldview, which commodifies it.

That, I think, is problematic. But the general secularization or ecumenicism around the actual practice that benefits people have no complaint about that at all. It's the false consciousness that attaches to that when people say, oh, I'm spiritual but not religious. Or everything I'm doing is in harmony with science or is indeed validated by science.

So that's another move you'll see is garment teachers at places like IMS and spirit rock will say things like, science proves the validity of this. So they use science to legitimize something, which is fundamentally a different kind of human activity from science that can't be directly legitimized by science in that way. It's like saying, I can use science to legitimize art. It's, well, you can have a conversation between the two, but that's just confused to think that science legitimizes art.

Art is a different kind of human practice of meaning, and so is religion, and religion is what goes on often in these settings and places. So that's more where I'm coming from. You said a lot there that I want to- I did. No, but that's not a criticism that you said a lot of fascinating stuff there, and I want to give it enough air time to really explore it, including this idea of science, legitimizing meditation,

or Buddhism, and also your concerns about the commercialization of the practice. I may be on the wrong side of history. Both of these things, so let's get to them. But let me just touch on this idea that you talked about when you go on a meditation retreat, and I think it's probably true when you even use certain meditation apps that you're being sold, you would argue this idea that you're seeing reality as it is, but there's an overlay of what you are calling religious concepts like craving and moment-to-moment awareness

or what the Buddha's called, dependent origination or cause-and-effect. This is happening because that happened before this. And so you can actually see that when you look more closely at your present moment experience, you can see how there is this chain of causality. And I'm just wondering, are those concepts like craving and clinging? Are those actually religious? I buy that this is a system, a schema, but I don't know if it's any more religious than say, I don't know, I take a spin class and they're using lots of verbiage to describe my position on the bike.

Yeah. Okay. Great. That's a good question. So, maybe we should just set aside the word religion just for a moment because it's a problematic word and people use it in different ways and scholars define what they mean by religion in different ways. So I would maybe zero in on the issue by saying that the concepts that are being given to one in these settings are normative.

They have to do with values. They have to do with meaning and norms. And that's fine. I have no objection to that. What I would call into question is the way that they are presented as if they are neutral in an observational sense. That if you just look and see, it will become apparent to you that this is the way it is. When what is actually happened is you're being guided to look in a certain way that is

antecedently structured and informed by these values. So in the context of, say, a concept like creating or attachment, we could say maybe there's a more superficial way that that's used. We all feel urges that on our better judgment we decide, now I shouldn't really do that or that was a mistake. But at a deeper level of thought where the concept is coming from in Buddhism, it really has to do

with a vision of the world as fundamentally prone to suffering, as fundamentally because things are impermanent and conditioned in the Buddhist language, that is, they come to be through causes and conditions in their holes that are made up of parts that are compounded, that such things are inherently unsatisfactory, because if you attach to them, you can never be satisfied. Now if I state it like that, it's clearly a kind of normative, you could just say a general sort of ethical orientation to the world, which in and of itself is fine, but it's open to debate whether that is actually how we want to look at things. Different way of looking at things would be to say, well, yes, there is impermanence,

but there's also joy and life is tragic. So the joy comes and it goes. And we shouldn't emphasize this kind of deeper sense of craving and attachment that in a Buddhist context really is the fuel for the ultimate goal, which is awakening or enlightenment, which is another concept that we see used in these retreats, where traditionally what that means is the cessation of all suffering and the burning up, if you will, of the fuel of karma, which literally means not generating any new mental intentions because karma and mental intention are the same thing in Buddhist psychology, which traditionally

also means no rebirth, but it's a kind of ultimate dispassion. And that's very uncomfortable in the modern setting because we don't have that worldview, most of us, I mean some of us do, but most of us don't. And so what you then see is a kind of attempt to domesticate that concept, to make it, well, awakening is really just kind of an ultimate encyclological well-being. It's like the ultimate cool or something like that. You're sort of ultimately chill, right? Or it's like at sort of trans-personal, maybe mystical state where you have this ineffable feeling of attunement or oneness.

So we have to then try to domesticate the concepts. And when we do that, in a way, we make them too easy for us, and we again disguise the normativity of them. So I'm trying to call out all this stuff, not because I think it's inherently wrong or bad. I don't think that. I just think it's misleading to think that it isn't there. It makes things too easy for us.

I mean, Buddhism is a challenging tradition. And if we domesticate it too quickly and too easily, we take away what actually I think is really valuable about it, which is it shakes us up. If you really kind of look at things from the perspective that has animated much of Buddhism throughout history, it can be very unsettling. And we're very good in North America

at domesticating things and making them less unsettling. I mean, that plays into the consumerism also. I agree with a lot of what you're saying. What I like about Buddhism is the unsettling part. And I think shaving that down is a mistake depending on what audience you're talking to. I think it does make sense to meet people where they are, to not scare them away at first blush,

but I think we should pretty quickly get into, like, telling the truth about what it is, Buddhism is claiming to offer. And I agree that as soon as you get into talking about enlightenment, from what I can tell, having not experienced it myself, even fractionally, that seems to be, like, feel reasonably comfortable saying,

that's a religious claim, although science, you know, there's been some brain scan activity, you know, MRI research on the brains of meditators and so that some of that's pretty interesting, although I know you have some criticism of it. But I guess where you lose me a little bit though, is in describing kind of the shallower end of the pool,

the what I would call not very religious end of the pool, where you go on a meditation retreat or you'll listen to any Buddhist teacher, and they say, yeah, the term of art is suffering. That is a mis-translation. I think you could call it just unsatisfactoriness or unreliability. Reality is often unsatisfying and unreliable given how it's not often that way. It is always that way, given how it's changing all the time. And you said that you could argue with that view and say, well, there is joy, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think the Buddhists are saying there's no joy. I think what they're saying is

there's a lot of joy and there's a lot of pain. And that is the nature of life. And if we cling too hard to the joy and spend a lot of time rejecting the pain, that is what is going to equal suffering. To me, when I hear that, that just seems like advanced common sense. It doesn't seem like a religious claim. Yeah, so, I mean, it depends, I guess, how it's said and what the context is. So there is a way of rendering that as kind of common sense, as you say, where it's basically, don't get too hung up on things, things change, you need to be flexible, you need to have some equanimity. We don't need Buddhism to tell us that, particularly.

The fact that we find Buddhism attractive when it tells us that I think signals more about our own history, I'm speaking now of Western Europeans and North Americans, our own history of dissatisfaction with our previously native religious traditions. I mean, Buddhism is now native in a way obviously because it's being with us for a while. So there's a common sense rendition and we don't need Buddhism for that. And then there's a deeper or let's say more punchy rendition, which is where Buddhism starts to get some bite where I actually disagree that we should translate Dukka as dissatisfaction rather than suffering because I think that's a watering down. I think Dukka

means pain and dissatisfaction just is too tepid. I think what the Buddha enunciated in the text where we have his teachings, I mean, as a historical side, we don't really know much about him as an actual historical figure, but in the text that we have where his teachings are presented, the Noble Truths are the truth of suffering. And that is that everything is impermanent, you're gonna eventually get sick and die, and you need to do something about it because it's gonna happen again in another life.

I mean, so there's a bigger story there. And that's a powerful message, but it's not the only message. And when Buddhism historically goes into a culture like China, Chinese had difficulty with this message because they were much more oriented around confusion, philosophy, and the values of family, and not, you know, renouncing the world. And that's a little bit like us. We find that message at its more punchy form.

We find that difficult because we're about making the world a better place, improving things socially and materially, advancing science, doing all these things that from a more punchy version of the Buddhist message are kind of distracting yourself from what's really fundamental, which is, you know, no matter what you do, it really sucks. And what are you going to do about this? And the only thing you can really do about it is try to deal with your own mind. And that's really what you should be doing, first and foremost. So to come back to the way you phrase the question, I think it depends on how that message is articulated and who's saying it and what the context is

for determining what it really means. So are you saying that there are ways to articulate this that wouldn't be what you would deem religious? I think there are ways of secularizing certain aspects of meditation practice. Say, you know, what we generally nowadays call, you know, mindfulness. There are unquestionably ways of secularizing that. John Kabadzin's Mindfulness Space Stress Reduction is a great example of this. Mindfulness Space Cognitive Therapy,

that's another example, where if we wanted to put it in traditional Buddhist terms, certain aspects of the eightfold path, particularly, you know, right mindfulness and right understanding, those get excised, you could say, from the larger Buddhist framework, and they get recast in secular terms, and then we devise new kinds of communities around them.

So if you practice, or if you take a mind from the space stress reduction course or program, you have a new community. You have your fellow practitioners, you have the teacher, you have a sense of meaning for how to deal with chronic pain or for how to deal with illness.

And that's, I think, extremely valuable. I mean, I think that had benefits a huge number of people. And that's secularized in the sense that it's not presented in an explicitly religious way. And you don't have to be explicitly religious or religious in any sense, really, in terms of how you think about yourself to participate in it. So certainly that can be done. I think there are still aspects of religion or religious behavior that enter into that that have to do more with ritual and meaning making. So this is where the word religion gets tricky because some scholars will say, well, religion means beliefs that you have. It's a very Protestant sort

of conception of religion. And other people say, no, religion is really about your social practices, your sense of community, your rituals, the narratives you have to make sense of things like birth and death and trauma and altered states of consciousness and all these things. And something like MBSR might, from this based dress reduction, can participate in making that kind of meaning. But there's no point in trying to argue that's religious. I mean, it's secular. And I think it's very beneficial to many people. I know many people who have benefited from it. And I have no argument with it whatsoever. It's the exceptionalism rhetoric that I am particularly concerned to call out.

Coming up, Evan Thompson walks us through the origins of our modern understanding of Buddhism and why he believes Buddhism has become so attractive in the West and is often tied to our cultures need to validate meaning through science. We're also gonna talk about what critics call make mindfulness. That's right after this.

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You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondering app. you can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Let's go back to this Buddhist exceptionalism. I believe you also use the term Buddhist modernism and I don't know if there's some difference there. Can you talk about the roots, the history that led us to this situation where we have what you're calling Buddhist exceptionalism and maybe also Buddhist modernism. Yeah, so Buddhist modernism is a term that historians use, and they use it to refer to a form of Buddhism that arises in Asia when it encounters the West, particularly in

say colonial contexts like Salon or Sri Lanka, where you have Christian colonizers who say Christianity is the superior religion, it's the religion of civilization, it's the religion of science. So we're talking about the 18th and 19th centuries, 19th century, especially. And they basically portray all other faiths or all other religions or belief systems and practice systems they encounter, such as Buddhist ones as superstitious, as sort of backward superstition. And what happens in, say, a place like Sri Lanka is that you have a Buddhist reform movement happening on the part of monastics who emphasize meditation in a way that meditation isn't really emphasized previously. Meditation in the sense of like sitting, practice, observing the mind, observing the breath,

what we're familiar with as meditation today. That gets emphasized, and it also gets promoted to lay people, not to monastics, which is very unusual historically. And so this is a way of trying to build up Buddhism in the culture, in the face of Christianity, Christian oppression, really. And along with that, it's a very clever move, is to say, well, actually Buddhism is the

rational, scientific religion, not Christianity because we don't have any need of belief in a creator God, we don't have any need of belief in an immortal soul. We emphasize causality, cause and effect. And so when Buddhism travels to the West and gets exported to the West, it's those aspects that get emphasized, which are very appealing to Westerners, of course, because they're in a kind of Protestant culture where they're dissatisfied with a lot of traditional Christianity, especially Christianity mediated by priests, say. So the idea that you have a direct personal pipeline to some spiritual reality that you could access through meditation.

This is extremely appealing to us. And we think of it as, oh, that's what Buddhism really is and has always been when it's a very innovative, modern presentation of Buddhism that's in a way been designed to counter the West. And so it comes to the West, people love it, and then it gets exported back to Asia. And you get this like back and forth ping pong kind of translational phenomenon. And that becomes the Buddhism that we know in the modern world. There's a Japanese version of this that has to do with Zen, which is a little bit different, but it has some similar features.

In the Zen case, so a writer like DT Suzuki, you know, very important Buddhist scholar and writer about Zen in the 20th century, he's very influenced by American transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson and American philosophers and psychologists like William James, and he takes their concepts about experience, and he uses them to understand what Zen is about. And then he says, well, Zen isn't really a religion, or it's the sort of true essence of all religions. So if you're a Christian or a Jew, you can practice Zen and tap into what Christianity and Judaism at a deeper level are really about, though they've kind of lost touch with it. That's sort of the exceptionalism bit.

So that becomes the kind of Buddhism that we're familiar with. And that's sort of the exceptionalism bit. So that becomes the kind of Buddhism that we're familiar with. And that's Buddhist modernism. And that's just Buddhism evolving into the modern world, religions change, evolve, that's all fine in a way, except that it presents itself as one, what Buddhism has always been. The original essence of Buddhism going back to what the Buddha himself said. It presents itself as that, which is historically just completely not the case. And it often, not always, but often, this is a sort of typical trait espouses Buddhist exceptionalism. That Buddhism is special and different from other religions. There's actually just as a parenthesis here, there's a Hindu version of this in the 19th

century as well. So when yoga in the form of Hindu meditation and also physical posture practice, when that comes to the West in the 19th century and early 20th century, it's almost a first wave, a little bit ahead of Buddhism. There's a Hindu exceptionalist rhetoric. What Hinduism does, it's a little different, is it sort of swallows up all religions and it says all religions swallow is up all religions. And it says all religions can be within the tent of Hinduism, but we give you a spiritual technology for liberation that taps you into the divine if you want to think of it in a god way, a theistic way, or the ultimate ground of being if you want to think of it in a more kind of mystical way. So Hinduism does that. Buddhism does that as part of the sort of just dynamics of Asian religion coming to the West. And exceptionalism gets attached to that. Hinduism is different from all other religions because we have this special spiritual technology or Buddhism is different from

all other religions because it's rational, scientific, empirical, and it's a feature of Buddhist modernism. It's not that in every Buddhist modernist context you would see it, but it's a feature of Buddhist modernism. It's not that in every Buddhist modernist context, you would see it, but it's a typical trait of Buddhist modernism. So that's kind of the link between the two. I appreciate the history. And I guess where I'm finding myself going as a secular person raised by atheists scientists,

how am I to understand why I was and am so attracted to Buddhism? And what is the responsible way for me to talk about that to other people? Because to me, I don't know if I would call myself an exceptionalist, but Buddhism does seem different to me that the fact that there is no creator God, the fact that the guy himself, the Buddha, was saying, don't believe anything I say until you can see the evidence in your own mind, the fact that he was really coming up with a table of elements for human experience that you can do these practices and see a real difference in your life. And I know this is a sensitive area for you. The fact that there has been all of this interesting science, I know that the science is not dispositive, it doesn't prove anything beyond the shadow of a doubt, but it certainly seems

tantalizingly suggestive in important and meaningful ways. That all seems different to me than other religions, but again, I'm open to the fact that I'm blinkered here. No, I mean, I wouldn't say you're blinkered. I think this is the cultural frame we have right now. So there's a bunch of different things you said that kind of our ingredients in that cultural frame that we need to kind of pick apart.

So the idea that the Buddha is sort of an empiricist and he said, don't take my word, come examine for yourself. Now, he says that in one text, in a particular context, and modern Buddhist love it, this is kind of cherry picking. You take that one text where he says it in a particular context, and you make it the overarching message of Buddhism. It's not the overarching message of Buddhism.

I mean, the Buddhist says a lot of things in texts. Some of them are inconsistent. The texts have been worked over by many hands, and sometimes he berates people for not following properly what his teaching is. So the idea that somehow he's this comes see for yourself modern kind of empiricist, this is part of Buddhist modernism. It's a Buddhist modernist representation of a historical figure. It's a fiction. I mean, it's a powerful fiction and fiction is fine, but it is a fiction.

It doesn't have historical veracity. It doesn't have historical truth. So that's one thing. So then the idea that he gives this kind of table of elements, this sort of psychology for looking at the mind. Yes, he does, but so do all, you know, many other thinkers throughout human history. Aristotle gives one, Thomas Aquinas gives one, Descartes gives one, the Confucians give

one, the Greek Stoics give one, all of these are normative. They all have to do with, here's a way of looking at the mind to orient your attention to what you should be valuing. And the Buddhist one emphasizes that what makes up the body and mind are really impersonal. And you feel that there's a self, but actually everything that makes you up is impersonal. And it's impermanent.

And then it guides you to re-understand your experience in that framework. Now, the fact that we're so attracted to that one and we don't pay attention to any of the other ones, I think part of it is just our lack of a deep historical consciousness, as North Americans, we don't have much of a deep historical consciousness, but part of it is that Buddhism has been very successfully at formulating itself in these modern terms, where these table of elements are presented as if it's scientific, but it's not. It's normative. There's no sort of objective validation of the Buddhist model or map of the mind. In fact, Indian philosophers, both within Buddhism and

across Buddhism and Hinduism and Jainism and the sort of materialist, atheist, Indian philosophers, they all argued about this for thousands of years. It's just we don't know about that. So that would be a second thing I would say. Now, as for the God part, it's true, Buddha is not a God. He's a human being, and that's very important. But he has exceptional, super mundane qualities, even in the earliest texts, right? He comprehends all of his

past lives. He comprehends the workings of karma throughout the universe. He has a completely pure, unstained, incorruptible mind. And as Buddhism evolves, especially in Mahayana Buddhism, this so-called greater vehicle of Buddhism that develops in India and goes to East Asia and also to Central Asia and Tibet, We have divine Buddhas. We have celestial Buddha beings who are deities, basically. They're not Creator gods, but they're deities. Buddhism is very successful at hiding off all of this and presenting itself in the modern world.

Again, I don't have an objection to religions changing and transforming to meet modernity, but there are Christian versions of this. There are Jewish versionsity. But there are Christian versions of this. There are Jewish versions of this. There are Hindu versions of this. There are Muslim versions of this. So then the question becomes, okay, so why is Buddhism so particularly attractive to us? And when I say that, I mean, I feel that attraction too,

and have felt it. So my own grappling with all of this is my own trying to like come to terms with this, especially being raised in a kind of weird 70s eclectic, syncretic context. So why is Buddhism so attractive? Well, there I think it's just, we have to tell a kind of historical story that we have some very charismatic, bright Americans who come from kind of secular, Jewish backgrounds where science is really valued. And they go to Asia in the 60s and 70s and they come under the influence of very charismatic Buddhist modernist Asian teachers and they bring it back and it meets a felt need and that's kind of where we are today. And again,

I have no quarrel with that. I mean, that's how religions have always worked. They've always evolved and transformed. But I want us to understand this. I want us to see it for what it really is and not kind of whitewash over it in the exceptionalist ways and in the ways that then, so this might segue us into the other thing you mentioned, the ways that then think that science proves this

or validates this. So then we get the move, which is, okay, but look, we can study meditation using the tools of human neuroscience, brain scans and electrophysiology, and we can see that meditation has significant effects on the brain. So first thing to say is that evidence is interesting. It's a lot more tentative than the hype around it.

We really need to distinguish cultural hype from the science. The scientists themselves know this. I'm not criticizing the scientists, though sometimes without mentioning names, some of them participated a little bit of the hype, but you know, scientists are cautious, careful, rigorous, honest people, and they know that hype is one thing, science is another. So the science is more tentative. And we have not studied other practices in a comparable way, because Buddhism is sexy for us.

We haven't looked at devout prayer. We haven't looked at, actually, there has been some work on rituals like fire walking, which is kind of interesting, that shows really big physiological effects. But we haven't looked in the same way at other kinds of practices. And we also have, because we're very individualistic in our North American mindset, we tend to

think that the right way to get a grip on this is to take the individual meditator and put him in the brain scanner and look at what their brain does, which completely removes them from a larger social context of practice. So if we look at how people are affected in community by devout forms of worship, we might actually see some very profound changes in the brain because everything you do affects your brain. Like, it's trivial to say meditation changes your brain because everything you do affects your brain.

I mean, I had a cup of coffee this morning and that boom affects my brain, that little shot of espresso. So everything changes our brain. The question is what kinds of lasting changes are there? And are they a function of meditation in this individualistic way that we think about it? Or is a lot of the larger social context of support and meaning building, the kinds of things that anthropologists study.

Maybe that's actually what is equally, maybe even more responsible. So we just have not studied this in the same way. I mean, I could summarize this by saying that most of the scientific studies, not all, but most of them are underpowered in terms of the number of subjects they look at and are under-controlled in terms of the various of subjects they look at and are under-controlled in terms

of the various factors that could be at work and how they compare and control for the different factors, social versus individual. Yeah, I really agree with pretty much everything you just said. And where it leaves me is, and again, I'm saying this aloud so that you can take potchats at it. I'm encouraging you to do that. Where it leaves me is, yeah, first of all, we should not hype the science.

We should be very careful about that. I had that drilled into me by my scientist wife and scientist parents. So we should not hype the science. It is irresponsible to do that. We should say that it is in its early stages. I think we should, over time, improve the quality of the science.

We should also start studying these other practices from other faith or secular traditions because that's just interesting because the goal of all of this should be to get at what works to improve the human condition and to reduce this pandemic of psychological afflictions from depression to anxiety to addiction to suicide. And I would argue that it doesn't feel wrong to me to look at the science tentative and incomplete that it may be around meditation, either Buddhist or secular and think, huh, that's really interesting. That might get me to try this stuff. And at which point, in my experience, the science no longer matters,

because I see my life improving at a moment-to-moment basis. And so what, with the, you know, there's a friend of mine, Willoughby Britton, the neuroscientist from Brown, says, who cares what the blobology, those attractive blobs on the MRI scans might be indicating, I know what the chocolate really tastes like. So please fire away. Yeah, no, I don't really have any quarrel with any that I completely agree. I think to me, sometimes it's a bit like saying science proves that, well, so here's an example. Science proves it's good to learn a musical instrument when you're young or the proves is way too strong. Science supports the benefits of learning to play a musical instrument when

you're young for the development of your brain. Yeah, there's some scientific evidence for that, but long before the science gave us that evidence, we knew that learning a musical instrument was a good thing to do, and we knew that if somebody, particularly, was adept at it and took to it, we should encourage them, and if somebody really, really didn't like it and it wasn't their thing, you know, we'd ease off a little bit, depending on how stern apparent you are, I suppose. We know these things.

And it's the way that our culture right now so emphasizes the validation of meaning through science, that if it weren't validated by science, well, then we should not give it any attention. Most of us don't think that way on the ground, but there's a real rhetoric out there. That's how we should look at things. And that just feeds the fact that our culture is in a crisis of meaning. I mean, that's really what it's about, right? We're in a kind of crisis of meaning.

There's many challenges that our human civilization is facing right now. And we're looking for sources of meaning. And we think that the only acceptable ones are ones that science would have to somehow directly validate. And I think that's an unbalanced way of thinking. I think that in a more wholesome culture, we would see that a culture is like an ecosystem. It has many diverse species. It has biodiversity and human biodiversity as you have art, you have science, you have philosophy, you have religion, and they can come into friction with each other, but they need to support each other and learn to get along. And that's not by science validating every other one as the ultimate arbiter of what's

important. That would be, I suppose, one thing I would want to emphasize as just part of my own message, I suppose you could say. Can I jump in on that? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Sorry, because I know you had something else to say, and I really hate interrupting people, but just to stay with that for a second.

I guess I have a little bit of a different take without actually, I don't think, disagreeing. Much, I mean, I can see your point that it might not be healthy to have a culture where we are relying on science to quote unquote, validate or prove everything, but from where I sit as a self-described evangelist, trying to get people to do things that there seems to be a lot of evidence that are good for you in a world where we have so much on happiness and dysfunction. If I take as a given that science is kind of the lingua fruca, the coin of the realm, then it's very useful for me to be able to say, yeah, there's this evidence. It's not dispositive.

It's not proof beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it's pretty interesting that there is this long and tantalizing list of health benefits that made a crew to people who do this practice. That's really useful for me as an evangelist and I feel okay about that. But again, I'm open to having my mind changed. Yeah, so there I would say it depends on the context. So if we're in a say secular context, and you say something like you just said, maybe, you know, about the benefits of, say, NBSR or NBCT, which, again, I want to emphasize, the evidence is hyped, right? So there's some evidence, but it's still hyped. But let's just say for purposes of

argument now that there's good evidence for those modes of therapy, really, that's fine. It's when we're in a religious context like IMS or Spirit Rock or Zen Center and we get a religious teacher or a religious figure certifying their religion by claiming science validates this. That is what I object to because that's just, I mean, that's a kind of philosophical confusion. Something that's a kind of descriptive empirical investigation of the world can be relevant to a value system, but it never validates the value system. There's always a gap between values and facts. It takes work to connect them and you don't ever derive one from the other.

So it's this idea that somehow the science now shows, I mean, let me put it this way, when that kind of statement is made, science is being used to proselytize or to preach. And that I object to. For what it's worth and it might not be worth much, Having done a non-trivial amount of retreats, but certainly not all of the retreats in the world, I've never actually heard anybody say that, nor do I think I've heard any of our hundreds of guests say that, but I could have missed it for sure,

because I miss a lot, but that's just the thought that's coming to mind right now is certainly not a proof of much. I mean, that's good. I'm glad to hear that, that you haven't heard that because I've heard it a lot. I mean, that's good. I'm glad to hear that that you haven't heard that because I've heard it a lot. I mean, it may be because I mean, context where that message is going to be presented more, you know, the meditation retreats I've done, they tend to have a lot of scientists,

present, and clinicians. A lot of times this is presented in a context where people do clinical psychological work or psychiatry, and that message sometimes gets presented a lot in those contexts. But I mean, I'm happy to hear that you haven't heard that so much. Yeah, mostly, I mean, certainly the way I would discuss it with people who are clinicians, and I'm not a clinician, I'm not a scientist. So the way I would describe it as just a pretty close to a schmo is there seems to be some interesting evidence that again, it's not dispositive and it's intriguing. It's worth taking a look at as you

try to treat people who are in extremists. Anyway, I did interrupt you as you were endeavoring to make a separate point. So I want to give you a chance to make that point. All right, so that point, the separate point or the second point, was going to be that I definitely agree and think it's important that these practices, let's just call it mindfulness, help people deal with life crises and suffering. I mean, your descriptions in your books of your own experience are very moving. I mean, I've had similar experiences myself where those kinds of practices have been very beneficial.

I would never quarrel with anything that makes someone's life better in that sense. But I would say that because our culture is so consumerist and individualist, that we often address problems that are social and structural by focusing exclusively, sometimes even obsessively on the individual. So this is in the world in which we're talking, this is what the word, make mindfulness is used to designate, is that we have a kind of commodification of aspects of meditation practice and mindfulness, and it's imported into systems or structures where people are suffering, where their suffering is just not adequately addressed by doing mindfulness all by themselves in their office cubicle because there's a larger structural issue of inequity or injustice at play and that needs to be addressed. makes their lives better and makes them suffer less within, of course, an ethical framework

of doing this. But let's not use that as a way of covering over or failing to see that there are often larger political, systemic, structural issues that aren't addressed by those things at an individual level. I mean, I know there can be a range of different political viewpoints about how to fix these things or which ones are the problems. That's of course a different kind of discussion, but I'm just signaling the fact that there are those kinds of structural issues. And they're kind of papered over when you just say, well, if you pay attention to your breath and practice mindfulness meditation every day for 20 minutes

in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening or whatever, you're going to feel better. I mean, yeah, you might feel better, but some of your stress might not really be best to stress that way. There might be bigger things at play. Yeah, well, I think I agree with all of that. And let me respond and encourage you again to take pot shots at what I say nitpick, whatever. Because if I'm wrong, I want to know it sooner rather than later. My view on that is, you know, I've always described myself as a sort of a maximalist when it comes to human flourishing.

I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. I think it's one tool among many. Psychotherapy, medication, access to nature, friendship, meaningful work, exercise, healthy diet without being obsessive about it. These are all levers that we should be pulling, as well as meditation if you're into it. That's one thing. As it pertains to the McBindfulness beef that meditation is often sold, plays right into the Western obsession with individualism. I think I kind of shared that, which is why I'm a really increasingly vocal proponent of adding in a practice that was often taught right alongside mindfulness as far as I understand in traditional Buddhism. But as now, I think in the mindfulness praise, deemphasize to the detriment of the movement or whatever you want to call it. And certainly to

the detriment of practitioners, I think, which is the Brahma-Vihara's or loving kindness practice where you are boosting your capacity for warmth towards yourself and everybody else. And I think that, first of all, I mean, I'm gonna cite the science, which I know with you as dicey, but that science as early as it may be seems to indicate in a very interesting way

that love is not a factory setting. It's a skill that we can boost our capacity for warmth and being sort of an omnidirectional force that includes ourselves and the world. And I think that in my experience and my cursory understanding of the science seems to indicate that we can nudge ourselves out of this solipsistic approach to the practice. And towards something I would call enlightened self-interest, which is that you're more engaged in the world

in helping other people, and that in fact helps you. And you get on this virtuous upward spiral, not in perpetuity, but you have greater access to that. So please, fire away at that. Yeah, so I mean, the Brahma Vihara has come from particular discourses of the Buddha, or where the Buddha is presented as giving a discourse. And there's kind of an interesting question about how they fit into other forms of Buddhist meditation practice over historical periods. I would say that the modern version that you encounter in the form of loving

kindness, meditation, meta practice in the insight meditation communities. I think that's very much a Buddhist modernist practice. I think that's probably been crafted in, you know, I could stand corrected by historians of meditation on this, but I think that the way that we practice that today is very much a modern innovation. That's not a criticism, that's just a description. And of course, I have no quarrel with the claim that love, kindness, empathy, that these are skills. I think all ethical traditions in human thought view them as skills, secular and religious, and the home base where you learn them is in the family,

or where that's where you're supposed to learn them anyways, is in the family, and then you kind of radiate them outwards. I have no quarrel with that. The modern meta-practice, I'm a bit more ambivalent about because often I find that feeds are placed into our cultural narcissism.

There we are sitting in the sphere of our own inner mind, radiating out warmth and compassion to somebody that we're mentally simulating or imagining. Does that directly translate into being a better person in the world? I don't know. It might be beneficial, but it could reinforce and fuel our self-preoccupation and narcissism. The whole idea of self-compassion that we see, I have real problems with the concept of self-compassion. I think compassion is a complicated thing,

that it isn't one thing. It's made up of a bunch of different mental components and skills and focusing on yourself and being kind to yourself and feeling compassion to yourself, not beating yourself, up, not berating yourself. I mean, yes, there's a sort of common sense way in which sure that's good. But then the whole idea of turning it into a practice in our individualist consumerist culture,

I think feeds into our narcissism, where these practices reinforce a kind of self-preoccupation. So I'm kind of skeptical about the self-compassion, meta stuff. I have to say, I mean, this is neither here nor there in terms of like an argument or making a case, but I find those practices kind of off-putting just personally. I find them forced. I find them kind of sanctimonious. I find them mannered. They don't really resonate with me. I've learned a lot more about how to be a good person and how to be kind by dealing with like my teenagers, be rating me for my short coming. I'm not a big fan of those practices. I got to say. Well, I have not here to convince you to do them. I've had a very negative reaction to the practices at first myself, but I've found that getting over myself and doing them has

actually been really helpful. And again, I'm not an expert in all of the scientific research on meta, but from what I've seen, it's intriguing. Again, I want to stress, it's not dispositive, it's not conclusive, but it seems to be intriguing and it seems to have physiological, psychological, and behavioral. And again, there's more work that needs to be done, but it is intriguing to me. And if you don't like the Buddhist modernist version of loving kindness, there are Tibetan versions, low-jong, etc., etc., that you can try. And I guess as it pertains to self-compassion, I, while I acknowledge it, could for sure, given the rampant individualism in our culture, be torched and perverted into reinforcing individualism. My understanding of how it works both in speaking to practitioners and being a practitioner myself is that if it is reinforcing

individualism, it is a misunderstanding. That in fact, the warmer you can be towards yourself, less seriously, you can take yourself. The more open you are to seeing that the self is not as solid as you may have thought in the first place. That can open the door to a healthier relationship to other people. And so that's how it's certainly played out in my mind, and I believe, again, without having these studies at hand that there's some evidence to support this. Yeah, I mean, that's the theory for sure. I think in terms of the evidence, again, there's a few studies. We don't have sufficient power in the studies and sufficient controls and comparison to other things, but if we don't want to grieve about that, I'm not trying to argue that people shouldn't do those practices.

I'm not trying to tell people what they should do at all, actually. I'm trying to sound a cautionary note that the way that those practices are presented and enacted, I think can feed our narcissism and individualism. And that's what I want us to be vigilant about. But I certainly am not saying, if it works for you, don't do it. I would never say something like that. Well, I agree with your call for vigilance on that, given how strongly the culture is encouraging us to be self-obsessed.

Coming up, Evan talks about the current dialogue between Buddhism and science, and why he's adopted the concept of cosmopolitanism as an alternative to Buddhist exceptionalism. That is right after this. I'm a little sheepish that we've gotten this for in the interview and I haven't asked you about your more positive view because I've forced you to spend a lot of time running down aspects of Buddhism, but you do have an alternative that you're arguing for instead of arguing against something.

The alternative is cosmopolitanism. Could you please hold forth on that? Yeah, so this is not meant to be an alternative to Buddhism. It's really meant to be an alternative to how to think about the Buddhism science dialogue, which is really the context in which all of these thoughts have kind of come together for me. So cosmopolitanism, it's a philosopher's term, so it doesn't mean globe-trotting jet-setting kind of cosmopolitan or the cocktail cosmopolitan. It's an idea that comes out of ancient Greece and is very important in the European enlightenment. And we see analog ideas in India and China. And that is that we are one human family. There are many different human traditions, different religious

traditions, different philosophical traditions. It's a good thing that there are many different traditions. We should be concerned about the welfare of the individuals in those traditions, even if we're not in that tradition ourselves. And we should try to foster conversation and dialogue across traditions, not to convert one another or try to play a game of one upmanship, but rather so that we can sharpen our understanding, know each other better, and create richer forms of human flourishing. So this is a philosopher's term, cosmopolitanism is sort of used to mean that idea. And it comes from an ancient Greek philosopher

who, you know, when he's asked, who are you, where do you come from, where do you belong? And he says, don't say I'm Athenian, don't say I'm Corinthian, say I'm a citizen of the world. And it's this idea of identifying with the human community. And so within that kind of overarching, you could say empathetic identification with humanity, Buddhism and science are having this cultural, dance, exchange, dialogue. And rather than trying to use science to justify Buddhism or use Buddhism to kind of embellish science, which is what I saw happening in the Buddhism science dialogue a lot, it's more important to see them as different frameworks of understanding where Buddhism

is inherently a value system, and to let them critically interact and engage with each other, where instead of thinking, it's always about science showing Buddhism to be correct, or incorrect for that matter. Thinking about it as a two-way dialogue in which the Buddhist tradition, or any other tradition participating in the conversation, can challenge some of the assumptions of science, not to be anti-science, but to say, well, the scientific way of looking at the world isn't the only way of looking at it, that there's always a larger ethical question about knowledge, given that knowledge in some sense is infinite, it's never ending, but we're finite limited beings. There's always questions about what is it really important

to know? What is valuable for us to know and what's valuable for us to translate into action or to implement? Historically, science has a pretty checkered track record on some of these questions. Science has been amazing. Like in the past year, the creation of an entirely new vaccine, new type of vaccine at unprecedented speed.

I mean, this is science at its best. This is fantastic. But science has done a lot of not so great things in its history and always revolving around that are questions of ethics. And the Buddhist tradition is a really deep repository of ethical thinking. So a balanced dialogue in this larger cosmopolitan context would say there are different traditions.

It's important that we value them. We don't try to reduce one to the other. We don't try to legitimize or justify one in terms of the other. We let them engage in a really open no-holds barred kind of conversation where they improve each other. And I mean, historically, I think that is the aspiration of the Buddhism science conversation. That's what everybody sort of strives for. But often it falls short of that. Because people fall back into a way of thinking where they think, oh, it's really about science validating Buddhism, or it's about Buddhism sort of embellishing science. And so cosmopolitanism is a philosophical framework that allows us to step back and kind of give a bigger

picture of what we should be doing. So the last chapter of my book, why I'm not a Buddhist, kind of sets out that idea and uses it as a way for really trying to actually promote the Buddhism science conference, but seen in this different cosmopolitan light. Is there never any utility to having science look at what the physiological and psychological benefits of meditation, Buddhist or otherwise might be as a way to signal to skeptical folks who could otherwise benefit from the practices that maybe they ought to have a look? It depends on context. I think there's a benefit to looking at practices that have been secularized. I think it's different to look at practices in a religious context if your

aim is to somehow show that what's being done within the religion is scientifically arguable for. I mean, like take studies of long term Tibetan Buddhist meditators, where in some studies, we see Tibetan Buddhists monks who have devoted their life to Buddhism. And we see very interesting differences in brain activity compared to novice meditators. So these are interesting, but it isolates the brain out of this larger context of a life that's devoted to a religion that's devoted to a practice. And so if we think, oh, what we see in these neuroscience studies somehow proves the way of life, that I think would be misguided.

It shows that human beings are incredibly plastic and depending on what you do in your life, especially if you're devout and serious about it, it's gonna have profound effects on your brain. But we know that for other things. I mean, the example I use in my book is Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello. I mean, it stands to reason that if we were to scan Yo-Yo Ma's brain, we would see very different patterns

of activity from someone who can't play the cello or someone who can, but doesn't have his level of skill. But that's not really very interesting because we would expect that in advance anyway. And it doesn't really validate cello playing that he has this exceptional brain seen through the lens of neuroscience. The validation of cello playing comes in a social human context of performance and valuing music. And it certainly doesn't tell us anything about the meaning of what he's playing. You can't know anything about Bach and all of the deep Christian meaning that's saturated into Bach by looking at what's going on in Yoyama's brain when he plays the cello.

So that's, I think, the way we should look at it when we look at the brains of Tibetan Buddhist meditators. They're cello players of meditation. But that doesn't tell us about cello playing and it doesn't tell us about Tibetan Buddhism, just as it doesn't tell us about cello playing in Bach in the case of Yo-Yo Ma. Let me end with a sort of personal question I have for the last decade or so. Basically I said, yeah, I'm a Buddhist. I mean, I sometimes will say, I'm a Buddhist the way I'm a journalist.

I do Buddhism every day. But not just the meditation practices, but the ethical practices are important to me too. I fall short all the time. But things like right speech, for example, wise speech, just as one example. What would you advise? Because I'm also really interested in this view you call cosmopolitanism. I think there's a lot to be learned from many traditions. And I'm open to it.

I'm not a Buddhist fundamentalist. I think there's something from any other tradition that's, for example, I draw a lot from, in my personal life, from psychology and psychiatry. And yet I do say I'm a Buddhist, it's just the same way I say I'm a journalist. What do you think? Is that misguided?

Oh no, not at all. I think, I mean, it's not for me to say to anyone what they should call themselves or how they should identify with one or another community. I mean, I think that's perfectly fine. I never in my book argue, for example, that somebody shouldn't be a Buddhist. I mean, the book is not an argument

that's meant to convince people not to be Buddhists, either who are or aren't Buddhists. I never argue against anyone calling themselves a Buddhist. The title is really about my own personal experience of how it was always assumed that I was a Buddhist because of the kind of work I was doing. I would participate in the Buddhism science dialogues as a philosopher.

I grew up around Buddhism a lot. I spent time going to Buddhist meditation retreats, especially at kind of science meditation retreats. People would assume I was a Buddhist. They would just assume that I was. And at various points in my life, in some sense, tried to be, and it kind of never really worked for me. And so the title, why I'm not a Buddhist, is just people would ask me, are you a Buddhist? And I would say, well, no, I'm not. And then they'd want to know why. It's like, well, shouldn't you be given everything you're doing? Why aren't you? So I sort of felt I had to explain and work out for myself, like writing for me is always

an exercise and working something out for myself. Sort of work out for myself while I wasn't. But there was never any presumption that anybody else should be or not be or should describe themselves in any way. So I mean, in your case, if that's what you feel you are, and that's the community in which you feel at home, then why not? I mean, I had no problem with that whatsoever. Before I let you go, can you please plug your book

and anything else you've put out into the world that might be interesting to people listening? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So the book that we've mostly been having the conversation orbit around is a book that came out in 2020 called Why I'm Not A Butist. I think it's just coming out in paperback this month February, I think it's out in paperback. And then my book that's immediately previous to that,

which also people might be interested in is called Waking Dreaming Being. And it's about the self and consciousness seen through the lenses of neuroscience and meditation and philosophy and the kind of three-way conversation between those. It's a kind of full view of consciousness across the whole sleeping waking cycle. So waking consciousness, including perception and mind wandering and meditation and then what happens when you fall asleep, what happens when you dream, lucid dreams, it covers out of the body experiences in sleep, it covers dying and the death process and near death

experiences. It's all about the relationship between consciousness and our feeling of self understood through meditation and philosophy, including Asian philosophy. Indian philosophy plays a big role in meditation. So some of your listeners might be interested in that. And I'm working on two books that won't see the light of day for a little while yet. One is a co-authored book with two friends of mine who are physicists also involved in the science-religion dialogue. Adam Frank, who's an astrophysicist at University of Rochester and Marcelo Glycer, who's a theoretical

physicist at Dartmouth. We're writing a book called The Blind Spot, Science, Experience, and the Search for Reality, and then a book I'm working on myself called Dying, our Ultimate Transformation, and it's a book about what happens to the mind and the brain in the dying process, especially as we see it in hospice, and new neuroscience studies

of what happens to the brain in dying. And it particularly is concerned with some of the benefits that contemplative perspectives and contemplative end of life care can bring to our understanding of death and dying. Evan, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me. Great time talking to you. Thanks again to Evan. I do want to make one final point before I let you go here today. You might remember toward the end of that conversation. The one you just heard.

Evan made the point that while mindfulness can be a helpful tool for improving individual wellbeing, it shouldn't be used to paper over larger systemic structural issues that need to be addressed in order to materially improve people's lives. As you heard, I agreed with that point. In my response, I talked about how meditation is, in my view, just one tool among many that people can try out, and also that practices such as loving kindness may actually boost our capacity for warmth and make us more motivated to engage in the world and in helping other people. What I was trying to get out there, and maybe didn't state as clearly as I meant to hence this clarification, what I was trying to get out there was

that taking better care of ourselves is one way to cultivate the resources we need to be able to address some of the injustices to which Evan was alluding. Also, I was trying to point out that there's some research that seems to suggest that practicing loving kindness can reduce your bias and increase your generosity and prosocial, that's the opposite of anti-social tendencies. So I just wanted to be clear that I do take Evan's point. Some kinds of human suffering do need to be addressed via political or systemic change and mindfulness shouldn't be used to sort of paper over that. Before we actually end this episode, let me say thank you to everybody

who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ, Kashmir, Justin, Davy, Kim Baikamam, Maria Wartell, and Jen Plant with audio engineering from our good friends over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus guided meditation from the very well-loved Orinjie, so for you. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

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