Special Episode: Interview with Evan Thompson on Buddhist Exceptionalism
We class up the podcast this week with another special interview with a philosopher specialising in Asian philosophical traditions, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind.In our discussion with Evan we address the reception and presentation of Buddhism in the West, whether it is accurate to describe it as a mind science, and how 'Buddhist modernism' is related to Buddhist exceptionalism. We also get into debates of the nature of Self and whether Sam Harris is correct to claim that modern cognitive science has confirmed the insights from Buddhism.This is not an episode targeting the tradition of Buddhism but rather an examination of a specific (modern) manifestation of Buddhism that is particularly popular in the West (and has long been a topic of fascination for Chris!).So join us to distill the real teachings of the Buddha and hear how our ramblings are confirmed by 2,500 years of introspective mind science!LinksEvan's (excellent) book: 'Why I am not a Buddhist'An engaging debate between Robert Wright & Evan ThompsonAmerican Philosophical Association Newsletter with a Book Symposium on 'Why I am not a Buddhist'Interesting debate betwen Sam Harris and Evan Thompson on whether Sam is promoting Buddhist Modernism (paywalled)
It's the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown and with me is Chris Kavanagh and today we have a guest with us to talk about some spiritual and Buddhist related things to our gurus.
Hey Chris.
Yeah, that's right.
We are joined by Evan Thompson who's A professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and for our purposes is probably most relevant for a book that he wrote called Why I Am Not a Buddhist and he's also had some recent conversations with Sam Harris on the nature of Buddhist modernism and no self and the relation to like kind of
cognitive science and also the author Robert Wright, who wrote the book, Why Buddhism is True.
Quite a provocative title.
So thanks for coming on, Evan.
There's quite a lot of ground I think we'd like to cover with you.
Welcome.
Great.
Thank you.
Thanks for inviting me.
I can legitimately say, Evan, that I only came across your work after the Two Psychologists, Four Beers interview that you did.
But you're now up in my pantheon of academics that I greatly admire.
So I'll try to still be critical, but your work is really up my alley, so to speak.
Oh, thanks.
That's very nice to hear.
That's great.
So we should ask Evan, why isn't he a Buddhist?
What's wrong with Buddhism?
Great, great.
Go right for that.
Yeah, so, I mean, so this is one of the things about the title of my last book, Why I'm Not a Buddhist.
You know, there's different ways you might hear that title.
And the way that the title actually came to be is that people thought I was a Buddhist.
Because, you know, I've been very active in the science-Buddhism dialogue, especially through the Mind and Life Institute, which, you know, organizes meetings between the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan.
Teachers and scholars and Western scientists, especially, you know, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists.
And I've been involved in a number of those meetings and had participated in other kinds of Buddhism science discussions in other places.
And so people in those forums generally would assume that, oh, well, you know, you're a philosopher and you're engaged in this dialogue, so, you know, you must be a Buddhist.
And I would then say, well, no, I'm not.
And then they would want to know why.
Either they would ask in a way that suggested, well, maybe I really should be, or they would ask in a way where the feeling was, oh, that's interesting.
Why not?
Tell me more.
And so that's how the title came to me, is to explain why I'm not a Buddhist.
So it's not that I think there's something wrong with Buddhism, or that I'm trying to convince other people that they shouldn't be Buddhists.
So my title is different from Bertrand Russell's Why I'm Not a Christian, where he's really out to attack Christianity.
And so that's not what I'm doing.
Basically, the argument in my book is that I, as a 20th century, 21st century Westerner, in my interaction with Buddhism, the kind of Buddhism that is available to me...
Is Buddhist modernism, a particular form of Buddhism that arises in the 19th century, that's bound up with modernity, that arises in Asia, gets exported to the West, gets imported back into Asia.
And so if you're not Asian and raised in a traditional Asian Buddhist household, and you're a Westerner, and you're encountering Buddhism, you could go to Asia and you could live in Asia, become a Buddhist fanatic.
That's like a life path.
I was pretty clear that that really wasn't.
The path I wanted to follow when I was thinking about the possibility of becoming a Buddhist.
So that left Buddhist modernism, which is sort of Buddhism, you know, in Europe and in North America, that's the sort of modern Western Buddhist center, both in my experience of those places and then in my kind of critical reflection on the,
let's say, the philosophy of Buddhist modernism, I found that it was really...
Full of a number of, you know, what I would call philosophical confusions around what I call Buddhist exceptionalism.
So Buddhist exceptionalism is a term I use for the idea that, well, Buddhism either really isn't a religion or Buddhist modernism really isn't a religion.
It's a philosophy or a way of life or a therapy.
And it's more supported by science than other religions.
It's a uniquely rational and empirical religion.
And, you know, in a nutshell, the problem with all of that is that, one, it misunderstands what religion is.
It thinks that religion is about what you believe and that that should be kind of subject to scientific criteria of evaluation.
I don't think that's right.
I mean, I think that's as misguided as thinking that art is about what you believe and should be subject to scientific criteria of evaluation.
Because it misunderstands religion and it misunderstands Buddhism, which is, you know, fundamentally a religion, it misunderstands...
How science and religion should interact with each other and relate to each other.
So in a nutshell, I mean, the reason I'm not a Buddhist is that were I to be a Buddhist, I would have to be a Buddhist modernist.
I don't find Buddhist modernism philosophically acceptable.
And so my book is basically a kind of philosophical critique of Buddhist modernism.
There's a lot of very interesting threads to pull on there, Evan, and especially I'd like to get into...
Buddhist exceptionalism and Buddhist modernism in a bit more depth.
But before that, there was an issue that I think is important and probably we should flag up to our listeners that for those that aren't familiar with your work and background, I think your particular pathway into interest in this topic and that it didn't arrive later in life,
which is more common for people interested in Buddhism in the Western setting.
If you don't mind, would it be okay for you to just...
Yeah, yeah.
So I was raised as a kid and teenager in the 1970s in a commune that was founded by my parents.
And my dad, William Irwin Thompson, was a university professor.
He quit the university in 1973, set up his own alternative educational institute and center that was run as a commune, Not just an intentional community.
It was a place where there were conferences and courses and activities that brought together scientists and philosophers and spiritual teachers from many different religious traditions.
And so in that context, and I was homeschooled in that context, Buddhism had a pretty strong place.
We had strong ties to the San Francisco Zen Center.
Through the friendship of my dad with Richard Baker Roshi, who was the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center at that time in the 60s and 70s into the early 80s, we had Zen practitioners and monks from the San Francisco Zen Center come and live with us, teach us Zen meditation.
We had other spiritual teachers, you know, from Christian ministers to Sufi teachers to, you know, Hindu yogi teachers.
It was a very eclectic, kind of syncretist.
I was exposed to the idea of syncretism, let's call it, modern syncretism, you know, sort of modern North American, New Age syncretism, I suppose you could say.
I was exposed to that as a kid and grew up in that, and Buddhism was a strong element in the mix.
And then when I went away to university, I got my undergraduate degree in Asian studies.
So I studied Chinese language, Chinese history, you know, Buddhist philosophy.
The history of Buddhism.
And that interest had come out of my upbringing.
It was called the Lindisfarne Association.
And so my interest in Asian philosophy, in Buddhism, it really came from that upbringing.
So that was where I was first exposed to these things and then kind of continued in my education and then in my intellectual work subsequently to be engaged with those things.
You know, on a more personal level, I mean, it's one thing to say, you know, oh, I'm a philosopher and I think there are philosophical problems with Buddhist modernism, you know, that's sort of one kind of thing.
But on a more personal level, I mean, I grew up around spiritual seekers and spiritual teachers and saw a lot of the pitfalls of that in our society.
Behavior that I would consider to be abusive, you know, manipulations of people in various ways.
Sometimes...
Deliberately and harmfully, other times unintentionally, but just that was the effect.
This has been a problem that, especially sexual abuse, this has been something that has plagued a lot of these Asian spiritual centers or organizations in the Western world.
So I saw a reasonable amount of that firsthand.
I wasn't the recipient of that, but I certainly knew people who were and I witnessed it.
And that was something also in the mix is that if you judge things by how people behave, then that's a problem.
In your book, and you mentioned that in other interviews as well, the kind of reaction whenever Zen monasticism was introduced to the community and the reaction of the kids to experiencing that after a more kind of...
Sound, you know, hippies or like syncretic approach to a more rigorous monastic thing.
And it was just very telling to me that that's a lived experience, which is something that most people don't consider.
And touching on the issue of sexual abuse in my own background, which is much more limited than that, I developed an interest in Buddhism in my kind of teenage years, partly as a reaction to growing up in a...
I ended up joining a meditation group and it was organized by a group called the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order.
In Northern Ireland, this was one of the only Buddhist groups that existed at that time.
And nothing untoward happened to me there.
I found some elements of the group that had this emphasis on Kilyana Mitra, like spiritual friendship and so on.
It was mainly for me a meditation experience, but I subsequently, after moving to London and later in life, learned that that group had serious issues with sexual abuse amongst the leadership, including the person who taught the group that I was a part of in Belfast.
And it just struck me as, yeah, that those issues do seem widespread.
They're also widespread in Christianity, like the Catholic Church sex abuses are well known.
I think it's important that the element of exoticism can sometimes paper over those, but your background in particular, it kind of dilutes.
The exotic appeal, because you have to experience as a child, like the frustration of being not allowed to play because of a monk and so on.
So I think you come from a unique background, even without the subsequent academic career.
Yeah, there's a lot of things in the mix there, I would say.
So my dad, he was raised with an extremely intensive dose of Irish Catholicism, American Irish Catholicism.
Mother is Catholic, his father is Protestant.
Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, but in the United States.
And he was sent away to Catholic military school when he was a young child.
Catholic military boarding school, I should say.
By the time he was 13, this was in Los Angeles, he left the church and then he looked for other things.
And he found yoga in the form of the Paramahansa Yogananda Self-Realization Fellowship in the 1950s in LA.
Having been raised Catholic, he actually had, in that intense way, he actually had a pretty critical eye towards a lot of, let's say, religious misbehavior, because he had seen a fair bit of it from a young age.
So our situation in the community was actually pretty good compared to some other places.
The kid's perspective is a whole other perspective again, because if you're a kid and you're used to a certain kind of, you know, like you can run around and do anything and then you go away and you come back and the Zen monks have arrived and everything's regimented and, you know, and you're a kid and you're kind of like, well, wait a minute,
what's all this about?
What's going on?
And when you're a kid, you also, especially if you're like about to enter adolescence, you're very good at picking up on...
Piousness, mannerisms, sanctimony, hypocrisy.
Radar is kind of primed for that.
If you have that as a young formative experience, then when you go forward and grow up, in my own case, because I was so interested in Buddhism and I had learned to meditate at a young age, I did actually...
Journey through a number of different Buddhist centers in North America looking for, you know, places where I could establish some kind of connection to a meditation practice or to a teacher and always my alarm bells would go off because I just, you know, I could feel it,
you know, having grown up around some of that kind of stuff.
And it was only as an adult much later that I realized, oh, well, actually...
This is a cultural phenomenon that you're picking up on.
As a philosopher, of course, I could also then do a kind of investigation of some of the deeper intellectual philosophical things that this is sitting on in the case of Buddhist modernism.
So, yeah, so that's kind of more of my personal path through this stuff.
You guys have talked about some of the ways in which Buddhism is in many respects just like any other religious or spiritual affiliation as a social, psychological phenomenon.
You know, this idea of Buddhist modernism, I guess, somehow purports to make it a little bit special and a little bit different from other faiths.
So maybe you could say a bit more about that.
What happens in the 19th century in colonial Asia, say in Sri Lanka, you know, you have a Buddhist population, you have an effort to reform the monastic institutions in a context where you have occupying,
controlling Christian Missionaries and governance.
And they're telling the Asian population, well, Christianity is the superior religion.
It's the religion of science.
It's not backwards.
It's not superstitious.
The superiority of it is sort of borne out on the ground by the fact that it's the conquering faith, if you want to think of it that way.
So you get a very clever move on the part of Buddhist intellectuals and Buddhist reformers, which is to turn the argument around and say, well, actually, Buddhism is the scientific religion because we don't believe in a creator god, or a creator god is sort of irrelevant to the Buddhist faith or Buddhist religion.
We don't believe in an immortal soul, so this is the Buddhist idea of there is no enduring self.
We believe in the fundamental law of causality.
All things are subject to causes and conditions, that everything is in flux and is impermanent.
So you get a sort of mobilization of Buddhist thought along with a sort of reformation of Buddhist practice that emphasizes meditation, downplays kind of traditional ritual and metaphysical beliefs.
And is then wrapped in the mantle of scientific rationality.
And that's what gets exported to the West.
And Westerners love this because they're dissatisfied with Christianity.
They're in the 19th, 20th century context of modernity and the disenchantment of the world and industrialization and materialism.
And so they want, they're hungry for, I mean, this is still true, actually, hungry for a kind of religiosity or spirituality that is scientific.
Or another move that we see made is not so much an appeal to science.
So D.T. Suzuki makes this kind of move.
Not so much an appeal to science as an appeal to direct, non-discursive, non-conceptual experience that is the essence of all religions.
Actually, it would be how D.T. Suzuki would put it.
Zen isn't a religion, it's the essence of all religions.
So it's this idea that if you practice Zen, you kind of get a direct...
Channel into a kind of underlying spirituality that is compatible with modernity and science, even though he doesn't use the rhetoric of science to legitimize it so much.
So that's a move that kind of draws on Western romanticism and transcendentalism.
But running through all of that is this exceptionalist idea that Buddhism is special, not in the sense that it's...
Unique, because every religion is unique.
It's especially rational, especially empirical, especially scientific, or especially attuned to the transcendent, I suppose you could say.
Now, you do see this rhetoric also in Hinduism.
So there's a kind of Hindu exceptionalism where actually the Hindus sort of would incorporate Buddhism into Hinduism.
They would say, well...
But it was Indian and we regard him as an avatar of Vishnu.
And so we'll just kind of assimilate Buddhism into this larger Hindu framework, which is a very clever move, too.
So you get a kind of Hindu exceptionalism or Asian exceptionalism, I suppose you could say, as part of the ways that Asian religions are encountering modernity and their exportation to the West.
And then that gets imported back into Asia.
So you have Asian teachers.
So, you know, my argument against Buddhist exceptionalism is, it's like American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism is the idea that the United States is unique among all nations, it has a unique destiny, a unique mission, can't be analyzed in terms of the social-political theories you would use for other nation-states, it stands alone, and that's manifestly false,
and it also impedes certain kinds of conversations that are very important to have.
The same thing happens with Buddhism.
It's manifestly false that Buddhism is exceptional in the ways that it claims to be.
Of course, it's unique, as all traditions are.
Those exceptionalist claims, I think, are false.
Buddhism, when you dig deep into what Buddhism claims to be uniquely rational and empirical, when you scratch below that, you find a very, very deep religious framework informing it, without which you really can't make good sense of.
Of what's being said, actually.
So the exceptionalism is false, and it also impedes valuable conversations.
So it's actually, it's an obstacle to having a rich dialogue between a Buddhist and a scientist, or a Buddhist and a Christian in the interfaith dialogue context.
That's, you know, in a nutshell, my complaint about it.
Yeah, you guys are much more well-versed in this than me, but in a limited way, in listening to Sam Harris talk about...
His version of Buddhist modernism and the way he presented it as a fundamentally, of coming at truth via a fundamentally scientific process of introspection and revelation.
And that's when all of my alarm bells started ringing, because I think that's the epistemic problem, isn't it?
That is, however one casts it, that is completely opposed to principles of replicability and observation and so on.
There shouldn't be any revealed truth.
I don't think he would call himself a Buddhist or present himself as a defender of Buddhist modernism.
I think the move that he would make is that Buddhism is exceptional in that it has these special meditation practices.
that he would say are scientific in a certain sense of the word and that what we need to do is to extract that from its religious home base in traditional Buddhism and we need to create a kind of after-religion spirituality that would also be scientifically I think that would be how he would put it.
So the idea that just runs as the operative idea there is that meditation reveals to you how the mind is, reveals the right kind of meditation, I suppose I should say, reveals to you, I mean, right in his sense of what is the right kind,
reveals to you the underlying nature of consciousness or the nature of the mind.
It enables you to see that the self is an illusion.
And so meditation is like first-person science would be the term that he would use.
Fundamentally disagree with this because I think meditation is a practice in which you learn a conceptual system from your meditation teacher or from the meditation books that you read or from the meditation community that you participate in socially.
You learn a kind of social practice and a conceptual vocabulary and framework and you internalize it and you...
View your experience through it.
And a lot of that means that you are, in an ongoing way, constructing and sculpting your experience to be a certain way.
So it's not as if you're disclosing some antecedently given nature of the mind.
I mean, I think meditation is, in a way, a skill.
Or let's say that certain kinds of practices that cultivate awareness and attention are, they're like skills.
You practice them repeatedly.
You can, you know, become more proficient in them.
But skills are constructive things.
They reorganize your mind and your body and they construct it according to certain norms.
So that's the crucial thing is that there are norms that are being brought to bear to construct or articulate your experience in a certain way.
And so the rhetoric of, oh, you're just laying bare the underlying nature of the mind is not consistent with that.
Yeah, the way you describe it, it's very much a particular experience that is particular to you, particular to...
It's a constructed kind of thing.
And I guess someone like Sam would argue that you are tapping into something universal.
Yeah.
One more comment before I hand you over to the tender mercies of Chris.
I know he's got so many things to ask.
I mean, just one thing that occurred to me when you were outlining that history of modern Buddhism, it just struck me that it's...
There's a parallel there with Christianity because, of course, Christianity did evolve historically even before colonial interactions with the rest of the world.
They paired away a lot of spirituality and the ritual with it, with Protestantism, of course, and you have varying versions of it.
And I guess those versions of Christianity, I guess, synced reasonably well with modernity and more older-fashioned versions of Catholicism that me and Chris grew up with.
Yeah, no, I think that's right.
I mean, I think you have a general phenomenon that's tied to modernity, where, you know, religions have to find their place in modernity, and they do that in different ways.
And one, of course, is through, you know, liberalizing in certain ways.
The Protestant Reformation actually has a huge influence on how thinkers like D.T. Suzuki and Buddhists are re-articulating Because they're interacting with Christianity that's been shaped by Protestantism,
and they're recrafting Buddhism to meet some of the norms that are being imposed upon them in the form of Protestantism.
And Catholicism also has its versions of finding its way in modernity.
And so this is just a general phenomenon of modernity.
So when someone says, well, Buddhism is uniquely rational, when you sort of step back, it's, well, that's...
No, it's just that Buddhism is articulating itself in a way that emphasizes certain ideas to make them consistent or more harmonious with modernity.
But you see the same thing in Christianity.
You see the same thing in Islam.
You see the same thing in Judaism.
You know, there are all different ways of doing that.
The thing, I suppose, about Buddhism that some people find very appealing that isn't the case with Protestantism, what Buddhism does is it emphasizes, Buddhist modernism emphasizes, Meditative experience.
And of course, Protestantism traditionally really downplays that kind of thing.
It emphasizes the idea of a personal relationship to divinity and dispensing with the mediation of priests.
The Protestants aren't particularly interested in the mystical traditions of Christianity, which actually you find more on the part of Catholics.
And so Buddhism comes along and says, look, we have these meditative traditions that calm the mind, that attune you to something transcendent.
And that's kind of been dropped out of Christianity with Protestantism.
So you get this kind of Protestantization.
On the one hand, and then you get something else, which people are hungry for.
That's why I think it has such tremendous, you know, cultural appeal and cultural force.
And in and of itself, I actually don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I mean, that's just how religions evolve.
That's history.
What I object to is the rhetoric that obfuscates or conceals that because it creates a kind of false consciousness that people think they're doing.
You know, people say, I'm spiritual, but not religious.
They don't understand that going on meditation retreats, lighting a little candle and doing your asanas in the morning, I mean, these are all religious behaviors under a larger anthropological understanding of what religion is.
It's just we have a culturally very narrow conception of what religion is.
And so we think being spiritual isn't being religious when it's really just a more individualistic, privatized way of being religious.
So this is more what I find troublesome and problematic.
It overlaps in a little bit with Sam Harris and Robert Wright's position.
If I follow Wright, your argument isn't that Buddhist modernism as one strand in a very multifaceted tradition that will change over time, will change in the future, that there's nothing wrong with the existence of...
But in the same way, intelligent design and creationism are a certain interpretation of Christianity, right?
The moral attachment to whether they're valid science is a different question, but they are a manifestation of the Christian tradition.
But so setting aside the validity of the claims of Buddhist modernism and seeing it as a modern interpretation of Buddhist traditions, maybe with a heavy dose of Western interests in some of those areas.
But as I read it, a lot of your criticism focuses around As you put it there, the rhetoric, which ties that interpretation to the authentic core that was the original, pure teaching of the Buddha.
And Matt and I, when we analyzed this short episode of Sam Harris's where he was advocating for his app and kind of talking about the approach he has, Matt made the point, well, maybe Sam would agree that,
you know...
The Buddhist components, you can just drop them.
And if that's the case, is there an issue with it?
And from my experience, I'm not focusing just on Sam.
I mean, this is a wider trend.
But I haven't noticed that there's many people who do that, who are willing to say, well, I recognize that this interpretation is an idiosyncratic modern version that would not apply.
by two millennia ago, which there were very different concerns then.
From the way I see it, it looks like people need that connection to the tradition
Yeah, that's another element in the mix, is that part of the rhetoric of Buddhist modernism is this idea that we're going back to the original inspiration in the form of the Buddhist teachings before they became
corrupted by tradition, by either, you know, elaborate metaphysics or elaborate ritual or indigenous cultural superstitions.
We're going back to kind of the The authentic, rational core of the Buddha's original teaching.
Now, let me just say in parenthesis, this is also a feature of modernity because we see the same thing in Christianity.
We see people saying, we need to go back to the original message of Jesus to recover the teachings in the Gospels, and we need to sort of bypass the centuries of church dogma.
This is a feature of modernity, and the mirror image of it, or the shadow side of it, if you want to put it that way, I want to go sort of Jungian for a moment, is fundamentalism.
Because fundamentalism basically structurally, not the specific content, but structurally does something very similar, which is that there is a fundamental teaching and all the rest, you know, we have to get rid of and we have to hew to the fundamental literal teaching of Jesus or of the Buddha.
To some extent, you always see this in the history of, let's say, Buddhism or other religions.
You always see an appeal to the founder.
A new way of connecting with the founder.
Zen does it by saying, we're the scripturalist tradition, we're the transmission that goes directly from the Buddha through the patriarchs in the form of meditative realization, while Zen has as many scriptures as any tradition.
So it's a kind of rhetorical thing that happens.
But in the case of Buddhist modernism, I think why people are attracted to it, modern people, because of the disenchantment of the world.
To use Weber's term, they're hungry for meaning, for enchantment.
And so the idea of connecting to a kind of original prophetic or awakened teacher whose message is essentially individualistic and rational and therefore can be brought into harmony with science,
I mean, that's a very powerful, appealing thing.
You see this happening In many, many different forms.
And of course, then if you go and study Buddhism, or any religion for that matter, you know that, well, no, it's actually not like that.
And I mean, in the case of Buddhism, it's especially not like that, because we know virtually nothing about the Buddha as an actual historical figure.
You know, everything we know about the Buddha comes at least from one or two removes, because the teachings are preserved orally.
And they get amended and changed through various oral recitations.
Then eventually they come to be written down much later.
And, you know, the records we have of the teachings as they're written down are already worked over by many hands.
It's not as if we even really know very much about the Buddha as a historical figure.
Now, I make that point not to...
To criticize Buddhism, but to criticize the idea that you can somehow get outside of the evolving Buddhist tradition, get back behind it to the original teacher.
Whereas a more, if you will, honest way of being a Buddhist modernist, or trying to be a modern Buddhist, let me put it more neutrally, would be to say, here we are in modernity, we want to locate ourselves within an evolving Buddhist tradition.
How are we going to do that?
Well, here's what we're going to work with and what we're going to emphasize without any presumption that this is truly what the Buddha said or the Buddha thought.
That would be straightforward and much more honest.
Yeah, though maybe slightly less satisfied.
Maybe.
You know, at least on the superficial level.
On a superficial level, yeah.
I'll mention that, as I said, you know, having a personal interest in Buddhism for teenage years and engaging in...
Meditation practices and whatnot.
Then when I went to study Buddhism at university at SOAS, I encountered what you're talking about, you know, the actual traditions and the richness and diversity and that they don't fit neatly into the stereotypical image of the Buddhism,
nonpartisan mind scientist, right?
No, a Sramana movement in an embedded context, which is then...
Interpreted in so many different ways across millennia.
To me, that divergence and all the differencing focuses and the debates between the philosophical traditions is rich and super interesting and completely independent from why it might be useful for you to engage in Vipassana meditation.
Increase your productivity at work or even for self-actualization.
So yeah, just to emphasize, I completely agree that it might be initially less satisfying, but there's a greater intellectual depth there in the actual traditions.
And I think, Matt, you've made analogies before in the stuff we've looked at with Kind of modern health and wellness spaces and this individualistic focus on it.
Maybe you have a question related to those connections?
Yeah, Evan.
I'd be interested whether you could make some of those connections for us or help us figure it out because some of the modern versions of Buddhism and it probably applies to other traditional religions as well seem to have evolved so as to be quite consistent with Whatever you want to call it,
this neoliberal individualistic self-development culture where, you know, we have a meritocratic kind of approach and there is a big focus on many different levels on people developing themselves in various ways.
And it could range from someone like Gwyneth Paltrow who's encouraging you to connect with your inner goddess or whatever, or you could get these male versions where it's a bit cruder, but these...
People who train yourself to power pose and be a pickup artist or things like that.
And even in my field in psychology, we have areas like positive psychology and some areas in organizational psychology which definitely speak to, for example, there's this concept of transformational leadership which executives really love, right?
Because everyone wants to be a transformational leader, right?
It feels like in many different ways there is just a desire for people to, one, obtain some kind of meaning, and two, obtain these recipes to develop and improve and optimize themselves.
And I think it seems to me those motivations are pulling Westerners towards things like Buddhist modernism.
So, yeah, what sort of connections do you see?
Yeah, no, I definitely see those connections.
I think those have actually been going on for a while.
They may be especially accentuated or exacerbated now, but if you go back to read Hindu modernists who are, in a way, the first wave of the Asian religions to hit the West, people like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda,
so they're, you could say, re-articulating and packaging Hindu religion and spirituality.
For the modern world, and they're emphasizing things like the power of positive thinking and meditation as improving your health and as making you successful in a capitalist society.
That rhetoric, that discourse goes back to the 19th century, actually.
Today's version is the neoliberal version.
I would say really since the 70s ended and Reagan was elected in the United States and in Canada, North America, you have a kind of complex mutual influencing of a neoliberal culture with meditation.
All of the things that you mentioned are in the mix, positive psychology.
Then, you know, with the development of neuroimaging and the advances in neuroscience over the past 20 years, you get a kind of train your brain rhetoric, a link to...
Brain plasticity.
So you get a kind of neuroscientized discourse that validates scientifically this is how to become a transformational leader.
You practice these things and you'll change your brain.
So we get that discourse as well.
This is because of the larger cultural and social values in which we swim.
And I would say the breakdown or the fragmenting of More collective and communal bonds, you know, sort of ethical communal bonds, the breakdown of those and the emphasis, the extreme emphasis on the individual and on wealth.
That, you know, is very much shaping a lot of the discourse.
Now, it's not all of it because, you know, take, for example, something like mindfulness-based stress reduction created by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
John was working on this in the 1970s in a pain clinic in Massachusetts General Hospital, and he was really concerned with, how can I help people deal with chronic pain?
Because the medical system, which is itself a product of this capitalist, in the United States especially, a product of this capitalist system, the medical system is leaving these people behind, and they're suffering this debilitating chronic pain.
And he knew from his own experience of things like meditation and yoga that there might be something there that could help people.
The mindfulness-based stress reduction program for that purpose.
And I think that that has tremendous value and importance.
I know many people's lives who've really been profoundly affected, whose lives have been made better by it.
And I don't want to gainsay any of that.
At the same time, it's in a larger cultural context of American health insurance companies with no public or very minimal public health care, with a culture that values wealth and the individual.
And it has been destroying community and the environment for decades.
That's a strong factor in these practices.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying.
So to make these observations that there are these sort of cultural push and pull factors, it isn't to say that the things that are sometimes proposed, whether it's mindfulness or something...
It doesn't mean they're inherently wrong or completely devoid of any merit.
It's important to acknowledge the kinds of reasons that people are attracted to those sorts of things.
Yeah, and to realize, I think that there are some phenomena and issues that are systemic.
And the idea that you, if you practice meditation,
I mean, that's incredibly naive.
Reinforces sort of neoliberal individualism.
You know, some things just have to be addressed systemically.
Sorry, I have to make another connection there.
You just reminded me of the notorious Race to Dinner and Robin DiAngelo.
So the little point that I'll make there is that they're often criticised for taking this hyper-individualistic and introspective approach.
In fact, in some clickbait that gets circulated, they mention, don't try to change the world.
Don't go out there.
You need to look inwards.
Anyway, it just seems similar.
This is from an anti-racist perspective, right?
D 'Angelo is kind of arguing about, famous for white fragility.
Yeah, looking at the way to address racism is to focus on white guilt.
Maybe there's a component of that, but like you say, systemic issues are relevant.
And I can't help but think as well, this is a point I made after your appearance with I was discussing that mindfulness as a practice, even we can completely set aside the issue about the empirical evidence that exists for some of the claims,
which I think all three of us here would regard as relatively weak for the stronger claims and maybe okay for some of the weaker claims.
If I went to a psychology conference and there was a Tibetan monk who came up or somebody gave a talk in the saffron robes of a Tibetan monk about mindfulness practices and maybe even using mandalas or something as an aid for introspective practices,
that there wouldn't be much of an eyelid batted, I think, if someone suggested that.
But if a Catholic priest went up in his collar and talked about how we could use introspective prayers that focus on the suffering of Jesus on the cross as a means to relieve stress or anxiety, that people would react very differently.
They would react like, well, you could do that, but there's a healthy dose of religious aspect in there.
And that disparity just strikes me as very obvious that there's a set of beliefs.
And it seems to me to relate, obviously, to kind of exoticism, just because Buddhism in the West is, in some sense, regarded not as religious, but philosophical.
But in Japan, for example, that isn't the case.
So everybody would immediately, you know, they probably wouldn't care also, but they would not feel...
This strong attraction to seeing a monk in a robe.
Yeah, no, for sure.
I mean, there's a double standard.
There's no question about it.
I mean, I've experienced this being on planning committees for Mind and Life events.
People perceive a Christian talking about centering prayer very differently than they perceive a Buddhist talking about mindfulness.
That's because of exoticism, and it's because of Buddhist exceptionalism.
As sort of ingrained in the culture, that I think is just simply, that's just deleterious across the board.
I think that if you're interested in what contemplative or religious practices or rituals, how they affect people, and you're interested in that scientifically, In a very large and rich sense of science,
not just what's going on in the brain if you look at people using a scanner, but what's going on socially and culturally and cross-generationally from the perspectives of anthropology and social science.
Centering prayer or contemplating the suffering of Jesus as a way to understand the suffering of all humanity is an extremely important thing to be concerned with, as much as You know, meditating on the bodhisattva of compassion.
It's just we don't perceive it that way because, I mean, some people, of course, are sensitive to this.
You know, I don't want to generalize about everybody, but generally speaking, our culture is not, there's a double standard.
It's not sensitive to this.
Yeah, this echoes to me a bit, Evan, and something I wanted to talk with you about is...
I read the chapter on the issue of no self, and it's a very nuanced discussion that probably we can't do justice to in the time that we have.
But I did want to raise a couple of points about that.
So I think a lot of people are probably relatively familiar with the popular criticism of the sense of self from Buddhism, that there is no permanent, unchanging self.
And when you introspectively try to Analyze the self, it crumbles apart into temporary states and whatnot, right?
And this was part of the main contention with your disagreement with Sam, I think, around the issue of the way that he presents no self as being validated by cognitive science research.
I have some questions related to that, but maybe for the listeners to see it, could you encapsulate that argument you have?
Yeah, sure.
So the idea is that, or the general discussion kind of proceeds here, where people say things like, you know, Buddhism holds that there is no essential self,
that...
The feeling that there is an essential self, a self that's present from moment to moment that doesn't fundamentally change in its kind of inner nature, that it feels like there is a self, that that feeling is an illusion because there is no self.
We can see this in meditation practice.
Neuroscience shows us that there is no self because if we look inside the brain or we analyze the cognitive processes that make up the mind, we don't find any kind of central organizing self.
So then people say things like, well, science validates Buddhism or science validates what you discover experientially when you meditate.
That's usually the way that discussion goes.
The problem I have with that is that what science suggests...
That is the best, I think, way of interpreting what science has to tell us about the self is that there is a self, but it's an ongoing construction.
Some aspects are bodily and biological.
Some aspects are social.
Some aspects are cognitive.
But there is a kind of ongoing constructive process that gives us a sense of self, and that sense of self is actually functionally quite important for a number of things.
And so it's distorting to say that science shows that there is no self or that the self is an illusion, because in order to say that, you have to introduce a very, very limited and tendentious idea of self, which is that if there were a self,
what it would truly be would be a kind of like, you know, inner pearl, central executive boss in the mind.
Yeah, if you define a self in that narrow way, there isn't a self like that.
But there is a self as a process that's under constant construction.
Now, in the case of Sam Harris, his line of thought here is basically to say, when you practice meditation, you realize there is no self.
In this limited sense of the self that it seems that you feel in your head, behind your eyes, that's sort of always with you, you find that that sort of dissolves experientially when you meditate.
And I would say, one, that's a very sort of limited way of understanding self-experience, sort of normal, everyday, habitual mode of self-experience, I don't think is this idea of like a little guy behind the eyes who's sort of always looking out as an observer on the world.
I think that's already a kind of intellectualized, reflective construction of self-experience.
That would be one thing.
And then the idea that meditation reveals there being no self.
That's a description that you find within a conceptual system like Buddhism that's premised on no self.
But other meditative or contemplative traditions that are premised on other conceptual systems wouldn't agree with that description or would describe it in another way, either as an attunement to a true self or a more authentic self or some kind of harmony with the self in action.
I mean, there's lots of different modes of description that would come into play depending on the Yeah,
I really appreciated the, you know, you made an argument for The value of taking a more, a more syncretic or cosmopolitan perspective that appreciates, you know, that there were critiques of Buddhist notions of self within the Indian traditions.
And I'm from Hawaii.
And, you know, Western concepts of self as well, I think are worth including in those kinds of discussions.
But the one that struck me particularly is I do some research.
I'm interested in the ritual cognition in the sense that you're discussing not ritual cognition focused just on the individual, but in the social bonding it creates amongst groups and so on.
So not just individual level focused.
And one of the parts that we look at in that research is the...
Impact of transformative ritual experiences on autobiographical memories and self-identity.
And you discussed those in the chapter, that autobiographical memories and metacognition seem to problemize the notion that the modern cognitive...
Research and neuroscience has revealed we fundamentally lack a self because, as you indicated, it very much depends what you define self as.
And if you define it, including things like the processes that create autobiographical memory and metacognition, you could make the argument that the insights are also supporting a particular notion of self.
It's just one that is embodied and exists in kind of social...
Interactions as well.
So not, like you say, not this kind of core little man sitting in your head, driving everything and making note, but more that those processes endure over life.
And the very fact, you know, that we have illnesses or mental illnesses or that we can get brain injuries.
I mean, this probably gets us into a slightly different area, but that you can.
Fundamentally damage an individual's sense of self or transform it suggests that there is something there beyond a complete absence of self-identity.
Yeah, no, definitely.
I think when we're talking about things like autobiographical memory and planning for the future and metacognitive processes where you have to understand certain cognitive processes and experiences as belonging.
To you or as, you know, figuring in your agency.
These are really crucial to human flourishing.
And when they're damaged or when you experience certain kinds of dissociative states, your ability to function is, you know, is compromised.
You know, your ability to function as an individual and in relationship to others is compromised.
So a discourse that says, well, You see this sometimes in discussions of mindfulness and mind-wandering, actually.
So you'll see people say, well, mindfulness is good and mind-wandering is bad.
Why is mind-wandering bad?
Because it takes you out of the present and because you imagine yourself in various kinds of scenarios, but that's the sort of mental construct of self.
Well, some mind-wandering is bad if you're stuck in certain ruts.
Or if you're not mind-wandering, but you're actually sort of in a ruminative loop characteristic of depressive mentation, that's not good.
But mind-wandering can actually be incredibly creative and generative and can be very important for mentally simulating and emulating situations as a kind of, as it were, offline rehearsal.
And if you have a language, a rhetoric, and a practice that says, No, you want to be non-judgmentally in the present.
That's the preferred mode.
Then I think you are actually distorting and harming the sort of full range of human capacities that are important for us to lead distinctively human lives.
So there, we need a more fine-grained discussion.
We need to say, well, some kinds of...
Mind wandering may not be very good.
And some kinds of mindfulness practice in certain settings may help with that.
But it's also important that you have mental spontaneity and that you have autobiographical memory and an ability to plan for the future.
If you didn't have those things, you wouldn't be able to do what you do as a human being.
In some way, that seems to dovetail with the emphasis that you see on individual Self-perfection and the transformation of the world is first achieved by working on yourself.
That's one of the common messages.
And you clearly, from your writing, get a lot of benefit and kind of deep interest from engaging with the Buddhist philosophical traditions.
And not in a reductive sense, but in an interactive way where you can...
But you've used Buddhist philosophical approaches to criticize reductive scientific approaches to the mind as well.
I have kind of two points and they're probably unrelated, so I'll mention them and you can pick.
But one is about that point, like where you see Buddhist traditions or other religious traditions that they might have a criticism that can be leveled at The scientific style of reasoning about mind,
like where do you think the good substance is there?
And secondly, in this connection where there is right, in the same way, within the Buddhist tradition, there is a focus on the need to try and perfect yourself and to work on your own mind as a As a practice,
right?
And that before you focus on influencing the rest of the world and so on, we know that can be taken into pathological directions and self-aggrandizing or at least self-indulgent directions.
But isn't it also the case that that could be a...
Like, good advice, basically, right?
Like, before you set out to address all the systemic injustices and alter the world, that you probably should have a healthy dose of your own limitations and biases.
So, starting with the first one about Buddhist philosophy, Buddhism has an incredibly rich intellectual tradition, you know, across millennia and South Asia, East Asia, now, of course, the West.
A lot of the richness of the Buddhist philosophical tradition is very...
Relevant if you're interested in, you know, the mind, cognition, because there are rich discussions of, you know, perception, of concepts, of attention.
And I see that as part of the heritage of world philosophy.
I'm a philosopher and, you know, I'm interested in what traditions exclude and then what they prioritize and what they focus on.
And when you put different traditions in dialogue with each other, then you're going to put the exclusions and the foci in interaction with each other, and you're going to just get a richer sense of the nature of the mind, for example.
I also, though, would say that it's very important to see Buddhist philosophy, say, in India in the sort of larger dialectical context of its interaction with other systems, you know, Hindu and Jain especially, and then, of course, in China with, you know, Confucianism and Taoism as well.
You know, as a philosopher, that's how I look at Buddhist philosophy is it's part of the world heritage of philosophy and it's very rich and very interesting.
Aspects of it are very relevant to, you know, live issues in cognitive science about, you know, what are concepts?
What, you know, how does attention work?
There are definitely insights in the tradition that I, you know, I don't think it's a question of science validating them.
I think it's more a question of there are kind of conceptual pathways that are explored.
In the Buddhist tradition, so let me give you a concrete case so it's just not all general.
So in Buddhism, we see the development of a theory of concept formation that, to simplify tremendously, basically says that we form concepts in the sense of like perceptual categories, recognition categories, like chair and table, sort of like typical prototypical concepts in the cognitive psychology sense of today,
that we form those through A kind of excluding and ignoring of differences in order to accentuate and highlight similarities to our perceptual systems.
And we don't really see an idea of concepts and concept formation in Western philosophy like that until we get to cognitive science.
So it's very interesting that Dharmakirti and Dignaga, these Indian philosophers from the 5th, 6th century, 7th century, developed this very sophisticated, using the sort of Sanskrit philosophical apparatus, theory of concept formations that basically says,
well, you know, we selectively exclude things.
We ignore them.
Not because they are fundamentally different, but because we screen them out and focus on other things, given our biases, our interests.
That's a very interesting idea that's very rich for discussion in relationship to philosophy of mind and cognitive science today.
So that's just to give an example.
Now, the second thing you mentioned...
It was basically that there's a self-indulgent aspect, but there is a potential kernel of wisdom there and how to distinguish.
So, I mean, partly it's common sense.
If you want to work well with people to change things positively, being an asshole is not going to help, right?
You need to be a good team player.
You need to be attuned to other people's...
You need to have some empathy, you need to have some theory of mind, you know, and that requires that you don't always default to your own limited selfish perspective.
I mean, that in a way is kind of common sense that we get from being social, you know, highly social linguistic primates, I would say.
We don't really need Buddhism or...
Cognitive neuroscience.
There is a different kind of issue that is maybe more...
Interesting, which is kind of like the old disagreement between the Freudians and the Marxists, which is like, do you go out and change society and change class structure and that's what enables you to change consciousness?
Or do you do the psychoanalytic journey, transform your libidinal being and your ego and your relationship to your unconscious, and then you go and work to transform society through that?
This is kind of like an old argument, right?
Especially on the left.
The old left, you know, today's left is a totally different story.
The old left, you know, had that argument.
This is, in a way, an interesting debate within contemporary Buddhism.
So some Buddhists, socially engaged Buddhists is the term that they often use, think that Buddhism today in modern society needs to be socially engaged in order to,
you know, walk the Buddhist path.
You need to practice the bodhisattva virtues in a socially engaged, social justice way.
And then other Buddhists, contemporary Buddhists, say, no, that's an illusion.
You really need to work on yourself, because you're going to go out and do that, and actually, because you're a mess, things are going to be worse, and politics is ephemeral, and you should focus more on fundamentals.
You can imagine how that argument would go even within.
Buddhism leaving out its connections to other things.
My perspective on that is that we live in a society that, I mean, is fundamentally pathological.
The climate crisis is the manifestation of this.
We've been living consumerist, individualist, treat the environment as basically just a resource for us.
We've been living this for, you know, two, three hundred years.
If we keep doing that...
We're going to basically destroy our own habitat.
You know, on the worst case scenario, we're going to go extinct.
I mean, the planet as a planet is going to be fine.
There are lots of forms of life.
Bacteria are very resilient.
But there will be a fair amount of biodiversity loss and human life will probably not make it through if we follow that way of doing things.
So in the face of that, the idea that if you just meditate in your office cubicle and practice mindfulness, the problem is going to go away.
I mean, that's incredibly self-indulgent and incredibly naive.
I mean, I'm caricaturing it to make a point, obviously, right?
I don't know, Evan, though, that we've seen a lot of, especially in the conspiracy theory, the anti-vaccine movement is remarkably tied to that.
You can preach the motto of...
The spiritual connection you have of all of those people around you and the importance of the environment and stuff.
And then you'll go on the screen about how wearing a mask cuts that connection.
And so there's definitely an overlap between putting your head in the sand and at least the conspirituality edge of the bone.
Yeah, that's true, actually.
That's true.
I mean, the kind of thing we see there is it seems like a contradiction where people that seem to be drawing upon ideas that came out of the 60s and the counterculture, environmental and hippie kind of movement seem to be commingling with a kind of know-nothing libertarianism in which there's a huge distrust towards any kind of communitarian public health type measures.
On the other hand, a huge attraction to a kind of bespoke, tailored, supplement-oriented treatments that are somehow very, very different in their minds.
Yeah, no, that's true.
That's true.
You guys know much more about this than I do, but I think the internet exacerbates that and creates a whole new relationship to, say, the 60s and 70s.
A whole new way that information is distributed and understood or not understood.
So that's a new wrinkle.
You have this kind of informational proliferation and at the same time you have a breakdown of certain kinds of communitarian structures that are really necessary for a healthy, flourishing society.
And those two things together is a bad mix.
Yeah, yeah.
You made me think of it just by mentioning global warming as an issue.
That's another issue, of course, which calls for Communitarian solutions.
It's just individualistic.
Not using plastic bags or something won't solve that.
Yeah, no, that's right.
Driving a Prius and recycling is not going to solve that.
It's probably better to drive a Prius than, you know, a big monster truck, but it's not really what the issue is about at this point.
I think we're heading towards wrapping this up.
I think I could...
A place to do that is to talk about your recommendations, I suppose, a little bit, talking about cosmopolitanism, I suppose, and not being about saying, oh, you know, Buddhism is terrible, it's all a scam, and not saying that indeed about anything,
even including positive psychology, which I really, really don't like.
I'll give you positive psychology.
I'm not a big fan either.
No, no.
But I am a big fan, certainly, of the cognitive psychology and those computational models of perception and so on that you mentioned as an example.
But to steer it towards, I guess, your recommendations or just general advice, I suppose, or what you think is a good approach, would you say that this cosmopolitanism is to...
Just adopt a healthy skepticism, but to enjoy the richness that's offered by these varying traditions and seeing what good advice, what good ideas can be extracted from it.
But what are the things we shouldn't do and what are the unhelpful things?
Yeah.
So, I mean, that depends on who you are, where you're coming from.
And if you're a Buddhist, one of the points of my book is to say to Buddhists, You know, I think Buddhism is an incredibly valuable, precious human tradition, and I don't think Buddhist modernism is helping it.
So if you're a Buddhist, thinking beyond Buddhist modernism, finding a different way to be modern and to be Buddhist than...
Buddhist modernism.
That's the suggestion.
It's not for me to tell Buddhists how to do that.
That's for them to figure out.
Obviously, it would be presumptuous for me to tell them how to do it.
But given my involvement with Buddhism and my belief that it's a very important tradition, that's my suggestion.
Buddhist modernism is full of these problematic and confused ideas.
And of course, if you're a Buddhist, you have to find your place in the modern world and figure out how your tradition is going to carry forward.
And so the task then is to do that in a way that is in some sense a movement.
I think what I call cosmopolitanism in the book,
I use the term in the philosophical sense of A worldview that emphasizes the commonality of human beings, that they form one community or one family.
I think we need to extend that in the face of climate crisis to think of the biosphere as part of the community as well.
And that's a limitation of cosmopolitanism.
Historically, it tends to be very anthropocentric.
But leaving that aside for the moment, this idea of a larger human community in which there can be different values, And different ways of life.
The stipulation is that, you know, these have to be values worth living by.
It's not that anything goes, but there can be different values, different ways of life, different religious intellectual perspectives.
And what's important is that they be in a kind of conversation with each other because conversations are how traditions evolve in relationship to each other and how new things get generated.
I think...
And I think this...
In the case of the exchange between Buddhism and science, I think what's important here actually is not using science to validate Buddhism or using Buddhism to embellish science, but rather that Buddhism is an ethical system.
And speaking in a very sort of general way across all the different Buddhist traditions, you know, Buddhism has certain fundamental ethical ideas and ethical values, and that's what's important for us to be thinking about.
In a society in which we have this incredibly advanced instrumental means of knowledge and change, which is science and technology, we need to really be in deep conversations with the ethical traditions of human practice, of which Buddhism is certainly paramount,
but there are others, in order to deal with the crisis actually that we face.
We're not just in a sort of crisis moment in the sense of the climate crisis, because the climate crisis is an extended...
Ecological transformation.
It's not like the pandemic.
The pandemic is sort of a crisis here and now that hopefully we'll get through.
So-called climate crisis is not like that.
It's an extended ecological transformation.
And the question is how we human beings are going to find our way through that.
And we need the richest of human ethical traditions to help us deal with this.
And that's, for me...
Where Buddhism and other traditions need to be in conversation with each other, and especially with science.
Yeah, I really appreciate the time you've given us, Evan, and I also want to recommend to everyone that is listening that they do check out your book, Why I'm Not a Buddhist, because as well as detailing the issues with Buddhist modernism and whatnot,
I find a lot of good material there about just good...
Philosophical discussion about the nature of self and then the chapter which and an issue that we haven't even touched on in this interview concerns the criticisms you have with evolutionary psychology approaches or maybe particular instantiations of that approach because I think you're generally more positive towards kind of Gene culture co-evolution approaches and dual inheritance.
So it's maybe the more reductive evo-psych that you take issue with.
But I don't want to break it up because I think Matt has opinions on it.
And also it's a very interesting topic.
So maybe we can get you back sometime too.
Yeah, that'd be great.
Happy to talk about that one sometime.
That's a full topic in and of itself for sure.
But this has been great.
And yeah, as I say, it's both very indulgent for my own interest, but I think very relevant to the spheres that we look at and that there's the points that you raise about there being double standards and exceptionalism applied to traditions which are Unfamiliar and have been exoticized.
That, to me, seems like a good message as well, that people should just be a little wary of, especially, as you point out, in the modern world where we have the internet and a kind of very positive ability to access different traditions,
different cultures from around the world now.
But there's an issue of this potential flattening.
Of them all into, you know, a universal mindset or a particular modernist interpretation.
So, yeah, I think that's a really good message.
And thanks for coming on.
Yeah, thanks for the conversation.
Lots of fun.
Great to be here.
Yeah, thanks so much, Evan.
My final comment will be that, like some of the lessons I took from...
What we've talked about is how it's not like a hit piece on Buddhism or anything like that, but the way in which the misuse of claims to authority and having perhaps a kind of epistemic privilege, it happens in this situation.
We also see it, obviously, in the appropriation of science and turning it into a form of scientism as well.
And I think that's just a really important general...
Lesson for everyone to take.
So I'm confirmed, obviously, in my scientific bias.
I want to see the model.
I want to see the data.
I want to see the computational model of it working, and then I'll believe it.
But until then, I think, yeah, we get some pretty cool ideas from these different traditions.
And Evan, I was just wondering.
I mean, I heard for myself.
Robert Wright and Sam Harris reacted to your criticisms.
And the discussions were good, I thought, between the both of them.
Although maybe Robert Wright was slightly more receptive.
But in any case, outside of those two figures, your critiques are some of the most direct that I've seen, especially from the perspective of somebody who knows these people, have organized conferences, have toured around with the Dalai Lama and so on.
How is your position received from Buddhist modernists and maybe, you know, traditional Buddhists?
That's an interesting question.
I guess it would depend who you asked.
I think some people are very receptive to it and have sort of wanted there to be something like this.
They felt that something isn't quite right.
They may be Buddhist themselves or they may not be, but in some way they, you know, they're involved in this.
This dialogue or this cultural phenomenon and their reaction is, oh yes, this is putting its finger on something that's been troubling me but that I haven't quite been able to formulate.
So that's the reaction from some people.
Of course, I get negative reactions too.
I get negative reactions across a range.
you know one sort of negative reaction is the kind of reaction that I guess Sam Harris exemplifies which is just digging into the spirituality science program that that he's got I don't think he's particularly moved by my arguments I mean he invited me to talk about
them which is great but I don't you know I don't think it was particularly persuasive to him so there's that kind of
I'm thinking about, you know, scholars who are famous for popularizing Buddhism in the West, who might be implicitly critiqued in that kind of thing.
A lot of them are dead.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of them are dead.
Without naming names, I can definitely think of some contemporary Buddhist teachers who would not like what I have to say, who I know personally.
Among scholars of Buddhism, most scholars of Buddhism are familiar with the kind of material that I'm using in the book.
There are some Buddhist philosophers, you know, Western Buddhist philosophers.
There's actually, you know, if you want to go deep into the sort of philosophy weeds on this, there was the latest issue of the newsletter of the American Philosophical Association.
They have a newsletter that's devoted to Asian and American philosophy.
The latest issue, I can send you the link afterwards, the latest issue is devoted to about seven articles on my book with a response by me.
And there are some philosophers who basically Are arguing, well, Buddhism is exceptional, and Buddhism is rational and empirical, and here's why.
And then I have my response to that.
So if you really want to get into the...
The way philosophers argue about this, you can dive into that.
So just to say, obviously, I'm not going to convince everybody.
Yeah, we'll include a link to the issue for people who are so motivated.
But I will.
For the really keen listeners.
Really keen listeners, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
There's some good pieces in there, actually.
There's some sympathetic ones, some very good sympathetic ones that kind of expand the discussion in ways that are quite useful.
Along the lines of cosmopolitanism, actually.
It's a good exchange.
But yeah, it's for diehard philosophy fans, for sure.
Thank you so much, Evan.
It's been enlightening.
And I feel that, yeah, I've introspected.
I now understand why my particular philosophical approach is correct.
And if everybody just tried a bit harder, they'd see that.
