Buddhism

An axial age Religion begun by Siddhartha Gautama in the 6th century BCE.

The Four Noble Truths

The basis of Buddhism:

1. We are perpetually dissatisfied. “Dissatisfied” is a translation of dukkha, sometimes translated as “suffering” (or “pain”) but that makes it sound like the cause is purely outside, whereas dissatisfaction has two causes: reality, and the expectations we hold for reality which it rarely meets.
2. The cause of dissatisfaction is craving. “Craving” is a translation of taṇhā, something like desire. We suffer because we want what we don’t have, and even when we get it we soon tire of it and want something else. (See the hedonic treadmill)
3. We can end our dissatisfaction by ending our craving. Not, as we all tend to implicitly believe, by “finally” satisfying the craving, but by…
4. We can end our craving by following the Noble Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path gets pretty deep and prescriptive, but the practical heart of it is mindfulness: to notice our craving when it arises and, instead of immediately and perpetually feeding it, instead watching it until it recedes; and to focus on the present moment, which is the only reality we have access to (though we tend to spend our attention on regrets about the past and worries about the future).

The Three Marks of Existence

1. Impermanence (anicca): nothing lasts forever
2. Unsatisfactoriness (dukkha): we suffer disappointment because we don’t accept impermanence. We try to hold on to fleeting pleasures, or avoid inevitable difficulties.
3. no-self (anatta): there is no unchanging, permanent self “inside” us, but rather we construct our concept of a self by attaching to impermanent thoughts and feelings. “I want ice cream but there isn’t any” leads to (mild) suffering, but if we can come to see that as “A desire for ice cream has arisen, but it is not me and will pass away” we can avoid that suffering.

Why Buddhism Is True, a Neuroscientific Perspective

At the end of Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment is an appendix, “A List of Buddhist Truths” according to modern neuroscience. Of course, the more supernatural aspects of Buddhism such as gods and reincarnation don’t make the list—Wright’s point is that Buddhism’s diagnosis of human psychology has proven remarkably prescient:

1. Human beings often fail to see the world clearly, and this can lead them to suffer and to make others suffer.
2. Humans tend to anticipate more in the way of enduring satisfaction from the attainment of goals than will in fact transpire.
3. Dukkha [suffering or dissatisfaction] is a relentlessly recurring part of life as life is ordinarily lived.
4. The source of dukkha identified in the Four Noble Truths–tanha, translated as “thirst” or “craving” or “desire”–makes sense against the backdrop of evolution.
5. The two basic feelings that sponsor dukkha – the two sides of tanha, a clinging attraction to things and an aversion to things – needn’t enslave us as they tend to do.
6. Our intuitive conception of the “self” is misleading at best.
7. The more expansive and more common interpretation of the Buddha’s second discourse–as saying that the “self” simply doesn’t exist–is rendered in various ways in various Buddhist texts.
8. What I call the “exterior” version of the not-self experience–a sense that the bounds surrounding the self have dissolved and were in some sense illusory to being with–is not empirically and theoretically corroborated in the same sense that, I argue, the “interior” version of the not-self experience is corroborated.
9. Leaving aside the metaphysical validity of our ordinary sense of self, and of alternatives to that ordinary sense of self, there is the question of moral validity.
10. The intuition that objects and beings we perceive have “essences” is, as the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness holds, an illusion.
11. The preceding point about essences and essentialism is one illustration of the broader proposition that not seeing the world clearly can lead not just to our own suffering but to bad conduct in the sense of making others suffer needlessly. Or, to put a more positive spin on it: Seeing the world more clearly can make you not just happier but more moral.
12. Many Buddhist teachings, including several of those listed here, could be lumped under the rubric of “awareness of conditioning,” where “conditioning” means, roughly speaking, causes.

In short:

if you want the shortest version of my answer to the question of why Buddhism is true, it’s this: Because we are animals created by natural selection. Natural selection built into our brains the tendencies that early Buddhist thinkers did a pretty amazing job of sizing up, given the meager scientific resources at their disposal.