I thought I was going to be wildly overprepared for my 12yo’s questions about Buddha. I’ve been reading about Buddhism for my entire adult life, but it turns out my emphasis on meditation practice specifically has left me rather naive about the rest of the religion. My son’s paper was on the Buddha’s life story, a narrative that I’ve read countless variations of but has so far meant very little to me. In revisiting just the basic outline I was floored by a beat I’d completely ignored until now, the beat that immediately precedes his awakening.
By this point in the story, the Buddha has walked away from a hollow life of pleasure and power, but is also now butting up against the limits of the opposite extreme: “Due to eating so little, my limbs became like the joints of an eighty-year-old or a corpse, my bottom became like a camel’s hoof, my vertebrae stuck out like beads on a string, and my ribs were as gaunt as… [yada yada]” He goes on like this for a while, even mentioning that he passes out whenever he tries to take a shit.
“This is as far as it goes, no-one has done more than this. But I have not achieved any superhuman distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones by this severe, grueling work. Could there be another path to awakening? Then it occurred to me. I recalled sitting in the cool shade of the rose-apple tree while my father was off working.”
I must have encountered this detail about his childhood memory before — it’s in the damn Wikipedia summary! — but it hit me like a revelation this time. Much of my faith in the path of meditation is drawn from memories of peace in its various flavors, mostly from childhood. I asked my son if he could relate to this easy, open bliss that suffuses certain childhood memories, and he responded with a confident recognition.
My son couldn’t relate, however, to the adult Buddha’s feelings towards the memory. “Why am I afraid of that pleasure?” the Buddha asks himself as he reflects on the bliss of childhood. Fear! Why fear? He realizes that, in fact, there is no good reason to be afraid, that the pleasure he felt under that rose-apple tree was of a fundamentally different nature than the pleasures of palace life he’d fled. He decides in that moment to eat a proper meal, offending all of his followers who probably felt like they had been cheering for like the Jordan of asceticism. But after the meal, the Buddha returns to meditation and promptly discovers the Four Noble Truths.
This linking of a childhood memory with a fear response was the explosive element of this for me, illuminating the Truths with an immediacy I’d never appreciated. The first Truth, that life is unsatisfying, becomes obvious if we can conjure such memories of true peace and contrast them with our ordinary experience of life. I asked both of my kids (my youngest is 8), if they related to ruining a good experience for themselves because they wanted it to last forever, and both nodded. They also both related to ruining a good experience because they were instead clinging to some other idealized image they’d had in mind. These memories likewise stand in sharp contrast to that easy bliss, unmediated by “expectations”, and so reveal the second Truth: this universal dissatisfaction comes from grasping at something other than what is.
Nobody would deny a child the simple joy of sitting under a tree on a nice day, or decry them for being well-fed, and yet the Buddha had become so committed to self-denial that he was unable to reconnect with such joy without feeling complicated about it. I like to think of him as feeling ridiculous in that moment, finally able to see himself as that child so obviously deserving of rest.
The fear isn’t the critical element per se. I think in another swath of the multiverse the Buddha begins his life as an ascetic and runs off to a life of pleasure. “The Middle Way“ is too-often explained as this path between asceticism and indulgence, as though the Buddha’s big revelation was, “Eat some porridge every once and a while, it’s fine!” That takeaway dissolves so easily into relativism and thus promptly into nihilism, and the Buddha’s whole deal was to position himself in contrast to both nihilism and eternalism — that’s the Middle Way he’s talking about.
How the Middle Way does not collapse into relativism has been one of the big sticking points during my time with Buddhism, and whatever progress I’ve made seems to have come from discovering some previously invisible lens I’d been placing over everything. Us moderns like to think of our conscious experience as something generated by the brain based on incoming sense data, and we separate the world as it exists “out there” from the experience we have of it. When people take psychedelics we think of them as disrupting this generated experience, not actually manipulating the world temporarily.
But when the Buddha is talking about “eliminating the self,” for example, he’s speaking as a practicing meditator who believes he’s having revelatory experiences about the fabric of reality, and he’s teaching techniques for how to have your own revelatory experiences. He’s saying that one can eliminate the sense of self from experience. When I feel the need to make this square with modern science, my first step is to remember that it’s possible to have profound insights about the nature of experience itself without actually concluding anything at all about the universe beyond it. We should also expect truth claims about what’s possible in experience to be deeply wild given the possibility space that dreams and drugs cast a light on. Further, this modern framework does a runaround the most basic truth there is: experience is all we have. The fact that we are having an experience is literally the only thing that we can know for sure is real. In this sense, modifying experience is modifying reality.
With the Middle Way, the Buddha is arguing that it’s possible to experience the world without it collapsing into eternalism or nihilism. If we're accustomed to thinking of these concepts as belief systems it’s not immediately clear how they apply to our experience. Eternalism is the sense that things happen for a reason, that an eternal force has created an eternal universe, that I really exist and my soul will be saved. We experience an eternalist world when we defend an ideal, or trust God's plan, or do math. The big shock of Buddha's life is the discovery of old age, sickness, and death: the anti-eternal, the impermanent. His parents delayed these facts as long into his adulthood as they could, making his freak out so monumental that he left his wife and kids and hit the road (corny). If everything is fleeting, what’s the point? These are the sorts of cliché thoughts we have when we experience the world nihilistically. We’re unable to grant meaning to anything, unable to motivate ourselves to action. We resist and ignore whatever pleasure is right in front of us, unable to access even the basic joy of sitting under a tree on a nice day.
The Four Noble Truths are often framed as a medical metaphor: the first Truth (life is unsatisfying) being the symptom, and the second (dissatisfaction comes from grasping) the diagnosis. The third Truth is the cure: the elimination of grasping. When the Buddha reflected on his memory of the rose-apple tree, he recovered a peace that "has nothing to do sensual pleasure." Seeking pleasure and denying pleasure create the same problem: your experience becomes relative. We begin to taste the distance between what is happening and what we feel should be happening. Under the tree, as a child and again now, he found a way to simply be.
The fourth Truth corresponds to the procedure. This one, honestly, is a scam. It’s not a “truth” at all, but a whole lifestyle program with eight separate pillars, each of which frequently contain many more numbered lists. They hook you with these first three brilliant insights and now they’ve got you signed up for classes. The good news/bad news is that the techniques work so the lock-in just gets worse.
One of the Buddha’s most essential practice instructions is to notice the impermanent nature of all phenomena. By attending to impermanence in our experience, we discover that many things we think of as stable entities actually reveal themselves to be fuzzy and ambiguous upon examination. If you pay close attention to your breath you find that it is not a smooth, continuous wave but rather a cloud of buzzy micro-sensations zipping in and out. There is no one sensation that could plausibly characterized as “the” breath, an insight that, in a way, reverses our normal flow of experience.
When light hits our eye it comes in as splotches of color, which become organized into edges, which organize into shapes, then into volumes, objects, and so on. This process of categorization and abstraction allows the mind to discard lower level details and efficiently attend to things at the object level. Our best theories of consciousness, like predictive processing, argue that most of what we experience is actually not sense data at all, but a generated model made out of predictions, only occasionally updated by the senses in response to significant incongruences that ripple up the layers of organization.
A stereotypical autistic trait is to find clothing tags incredibly bothersome. This can be explained through predictive processing as an abnormal relationship between the generated predictions and the incoming sense data: typically one might notice the scratchy sensation on their neck, identify/categorize it as the tag, and proceed to safely ignore future scratchy sensations as they are now predicted by the categorization. If we’re unable to form that category, the scratchiness remains perpetually ambiguous and distracting: Was that a bug I just felt? Did a leaf fall down my shirt?
The other extreme poses problems as well: schizophrenics project hallucinated meanings onto the world, labels and interpretations that are plainly not present in their sense data. But of course, there is no “shirt tag” in our sense data. There is only ambiguous scratching. But, generally speaking, it behooves us to not find the ambiguity distracting. When our minds create/recognize the entity "tag” we are imputing a prediction directly into our experience of the world, a claim about the future blessed with the taste of reality: a very similar scratching sensation will arise again and it belongs to the same essence/entity as the previous scratches. As our experience becomes littered with these conceptual overlays we distance ourselves from the nature of bare attention. We can't simply rest under a tree. We're annoyed by the bugs, we feel guilty for not doing something more productive, we feel anxious about our inability to relax. By a certain point we're not noticing any tree at all, we're noticing our feelings about our feelings about the trees. The tree becomes a symbol of the downfall of the West somehow and we're on the road to schizophrenia. And so we turn our attention backwards: Where is the downfall of the West? Is it here beneath the tree with us right now?
In America we tend to teach meditation through noticing the breath, while in Asia it’s traditionally more common to do visualizations or chants. I suspect the breath is productive for us because it’s always available in an objective-seeming way, but it’s also evidently variable as it flows in and out. When the breath is experienced as an ambiguous cloud of sense data, the mind ceases to find evidence for the conceptual grouping known as “the breath” and it drops that barrier from the world. It turns out that every single aspect of our experience has this open, cloudy, spacious nature upon examination. We work from the (relatively) obvious cases like the breath through to the subtle cases like our sense of being embedded in space and time, or the Mystic’s Delight: the self–world boundary. Even low-level basics like “things get larger as they get closer” are learned and thus can be unlearned.
In older traditions there was a tendency to interpret these experiences as revelations of nihilism. This characteristic of essenceless-ness often gets translated as emptiness. My current meditation teacher, Michael Taft, to whom I owe much of my understanding, prefers the translation spaciousness or openness precisely because emptiness, particularly in English, tends to carry an inherent tone of nihilism. In the original languages emptiness can also invoke potentiality, in the way a vessel is empty. And indeed even in practice, it's very common for a meditator to end up in a rut of nihilistic interpretations, articulated well by David Chapman (who I must also credit for ideas in this post).
But remember the Buddha’s story: his awakening occurs as a rejection of nihilism. When you realize that your breath lacks a stable essence, it does not mean the breath disappears. The sensations are still there! They're likely beautiful and sweet upon close inspection. You can even notice the arising of categories and thoughts, attending to them while still knowing their generated nature, akin to a waking dream.
This reveals yet another Western frame that confounded me when making sense of Zen readings in particular. When I would read about dropping the ego and behaving in this intuitive flowy manner, it mostly sounded like a recipe for misery. When I'm not feeling self-conscious and just letting my id drive my behavior that often manifests as, say, endless monologuing about topics I'm currently interested in (e.g. this essay), totally ignoring the glazed eyes of my audience. It sounded like running on autopilot, which has not been good for me. In fact, the improvisation spoken of by Buddhists is the exact reverse: it's precisely the proliferation of ego that enables autopilot, the slower, second system of thought that interprets, judges, intends, etc.
Predictive processing argues that perception and action are mirror images of each other. When our predictions disagree with our sense data we have two options for reconciling them. If we catch something out of the corner of our eye that seems incongruent we can turn our attention towards it, collect richer sense data, and update our explanation/prediction to account for it. Or, more weirdly, we can take an action that changes the world around us in order match our incorrect prediction – the theory argues the same cognitive mechanism handles both. We imagine ourselves eating a donut and the dissonance between that imagined state and our current state motivates us to action.
When we meditate and slow down enough to track the various microcomponents of our experience we can quickly discover this process for ourselves. We notice the formation of an image of a reality that could be, we notice the assessment that we’d prefer that reality, we notice the image of what steps we’d take to pursue that reality. Typically these beats often blur together in a rapid-fire sequence and we’re suddenly standing in the kitchen eating the donut, with no memory of the precipitating flow of experience that led us there. But when we can see these moments for what they are it feels like letting a phone ring: neither answering it and getting involved, nor disabling the ringer and ignoring it. Of course, you still can answer the call, and you often should, but it’s an altogether different experience to answer it from this position of spaciousness, with room to breathe around the impulse. It’s not nihilism — the donut tastes even better this way, and sitting under a tree fucking rules.
Illustrations from Zen & The Art of the Macintosh by Michael Green.
"I need you clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle."
"Nah man, your attachments will only contribute to dukkha."
I started to post this as a note, but then I thought I should put it in the comments too…
This essay is wildly ambitious, and there is a lot to unpack, but the insights on the composition and decomposition (my terms) of our perceived environment are helpful if this is an arena you’re aware you’re invested in. Any meditator instructed to pay attention to their breath will find this illuminating more than a little helpful or at least intriguing.
Much of this is touching on questions I’m wrestling with right now on whether we truly know our loved ones. I see that the people I love most in the world, whose actions I can predict, and whose moods I’m locked into - are also unknown or not known satisfactorily.
I think this sense of incomplete knowing I have of my dearest loved ones is very, very, very much related to what’s under the microscope here. I have a composed wife and son and daughter, but I sense it is incomplete. The model I create for “them” is deficient.
In Buddhist terms there is suffering exactly at that spot. My loved ones are no more reliably known to me than my breath. Other than the live moment-to-moment interaction with them, they are it truly knowable in a possessed way.