📙 Why I Am Not a Buddhist

“Why Buddhism is true” thus turns out to mean “Why some core ideas and takeaways of modern, American, naturalistic Buddhist thought can be made consistent with evolutionary psychology.” Wright uses evolutionary psychology to legitimize a naturalistic version of modern North American Buddhism. If evolutionary psychology corroborates the naturalistic Buddhist diagnosis of the human condition, and if modern Buddhist mindfulness meditation supplies the remedy for our condition, then Buddhism is true.

In The Embodied Mind, we call this idea “groundlessness.” Knowledge and meaning lack any absolute foundation. Cognition as enaction means that cognition has no ground or foundation beyond its own history, which amounts to a kind of “groundless ground.” To borrow the image of philosophers Jay Garfield and Graham Priest, we’re in endless free fall but there’s no bottom.

My argument has been that Buddhist modernism distorts both the significance of the Buddhist tradition and the relationship between religion and science. Buddhism gained entry to Europe and North America in the nineteenth century by being presented as a religion uniquely compatible with modern science. Now, in the twenty-first century, Buddhist modernist discourse is at its height. But this discourse is untenable, as we’ve seen. Its core tenets—that Buddhism is a “mind science”; that there is no self; that mindfulness is an inward awareness of one’s own private mental theater; that neuroscience establishes the value of mindfulness practice; that enlightenment is a nonconceptual experience outside language, culture, and tradition; and that enlightenment is or can be correlated with a brain state—are philosophically and scientifically indefensible.

To work our way toward this point, let’s look at two contemporary philosophers who maintain that there is no self and whose work is informed by Buddhism.

Metzinger writes, “no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self.”24 He allows, however, that there is a “phenomenal self,” which “is not a thing, but a process.” Strictly speaking, however, it isn’t a self, but rather is the content of the brain’s “self-model.”25 Because we’re unable to recognize the model as a model, we experience its content as if it represented a real self apart from the model. But there’s no such thing in reality. Hence, the self is an illusion.

The problem with this argument is that it rests on a tendentious concept of the self.

His argument requires the premise that for something to be a self, it must be a single, unique, unified, and independent thing with a personal essence. Some philosophers have conceived of the self in this way, but many others have not.