This page contains brief reviews of several books about Buddhism or science that the author studied or consulted during the writing of HACIA EL BUDA DESDE EL OCCIDENTE. It also includes the full bibliography of the whole research project.
Books reviewed:
(1) The Art of Living
by William Hart (9) The Selfihs Gene, by Richard Dawkins
(10) On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins
(11) The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield
(1) The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation: As Taught by S. N. Goenka by William Hart THE ART OF LIVING introduced me to S. N. Goenka’s Vipassana Meditation courses and motivated me to sit in the Vipassana ten-day silent retreat. Even though no text or lecture replace actual experience (the word “water” does not quench thirst), this book provides a good flavor of what meditation is about. It also gives sufficient rationale on why you should meditate and on how suffering ends with the practice of the Teachings of the Buddha. Goenka and Hart refer to happiness as the absence of suffering. I do not like the term “happiness” because it means a different thing to each person. I prefer “harmony” (everybody agrees on its meaning) and, in consequence, the Buddha’s goal is the elimination of “disharmony” or, in other words, the purification of the mind. Anyway, whatever we have to do to reach happiness or harmony and, most important, why the practice of the eightfold path works properly are both very well explained in THE ART OF LIVING.
(2) Buddhism without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor The thrust of BUDDHISM WITHOUT BELIEFS is not that the Teachings of the Buddha are simple and easy to understand but that they must be simple and that anything supposed to be practical must also be understandable. The Teachings display both qualities; it cannot be different. The four noble truths is all what you need to know and the noble path, the fourth truth, is all what you need to practice. The corruption of the original truths gave Buddhism the complexity displayed by its numerous schools and branches. According to Batchelor, the noble truths are statements to be acted upon, no to be believed. Truths are facts that bring understanding while beliefs are assumptions that make up religions. Truths repeated mechanically, without real understanding, also lead to dogmas. “Truth repeated is not truth”, said Krishnamurti. The first part of the book is just excellent; the fact that the book is very short makes it even better. Toward the end, however, it gets somewhat sophisticated. I particularly take exception to one statement in Batchelor’s book. However idealistic and worthwhile it may be, “social engagement” is not in the essence of Buddha’s Teachings. This would go beyond the four noble truths.
(3) The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life by Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard
This is a wonderful and beautiful book. Wonderful because, as the Dalai Lama writes in the cover, “it shows how fruitful open-hearted dialogue can be.” And beautiful because such dialogue happens to be between father and son, two very bright minds who look at the world from quite different perspectives. Reviewing this book would require many pages; I just want to highlight something that I considered particularly instructive (even though I disagreed with it). From the the Buddha’s time up to now there have been hundreds of monks and holy men—social scholars—abstractly describing ecstatic and “samadhic” experiences. More recently, neurologists—nature scientists—are “painting” somebody else’s experience (that of monks and nuns) using imaging technology. But Mathieu Ricard Revel is one of the few who can actually speak simultaneously from both the experience and knowledge of the monk and the scientist. His metaphors of the tenth link of the dependent origination chain (from becoming to birth/rebirth), illustrating the phenomenon to his pragmatic father, are the most clarifying and explanatory I have ever read. Coming from an educated and eminent biologist, they have my deepest respect. Still, as I said, “rebirth” is the only notion of the basic Teachings of the Buddha which I do not share. (I personally consider “rebirth” a belief that does affect the extraordinary and elementary quality of the Buddha’s Teachings). And those explanations of something I don’t share or understand do not make the book any less excellent.
(4) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
The more you know about any subject, the higher the need for systems thinking and the more you should try to understand the relationship of everything with the whole. Social and natural sciences are intimately connected. That is what Edward Wilson wants to explain with his thesis of the unity of knowledge. Nothing could be more challenging taking into account the limitations of the human mind on one hand –reasoning capacity, time availability, reading & listening speed, understanding ability– and the uncontrollable growth of human knowledge, on the other. Doctor Wilson succeeds in the transmission of his message. The fact that, as Doctor Wilson states, “Human mind has evolved to believe in gods not in biology,” complicates the issue. Consequentially, religions are a natural outcome of evolution. The biologist does not refer to any religion in particular, even though he acknowledges his Christian background. He quotes Spinoza on the interchangeability of the concepts of God and nature. Buddhism is not even mentioned in the book. But I find that “consilience’ as a word is close to “Dhamma,” the Buddhist expression for NATURAL ORDER. And both the Buddha and the scientist agree that moral, as the regulator of social conduct, is a human—not a godly—subject.
I often repeat the excellent definition that Thich Nhat Hanh suggests for the first noble truth: Right view is the absence of views. (Alternative translations for right view include right belief, right understanding, right judgment, and right opinion—this latter I like a lot.) Even though as “absence of views” such definition does not appear in the Pali Canon, it is implied in many of the Buddha’s discourses. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching has four parts. Parts I (The Noble Truths) and II (The Eightfold Path) are an excellent summary of Siddhattha Gautama’s teachings. Part IV, which contains the text of some of the best known Siddhattha Gotama’s discourses, is also very appropriate within the context of the book. Part III, however, contains many “views” and it is an excellent “introduction” to how complicated and abstruse Buddhism may become. Yes, the five aggregates and the three characteristics of phenomena are instrumental in understanding the meaning of “suffering” (I prefer “disharmony”) in Buddhism. But the three doors to liberation, the three bodies of the Buddha and the six paramites (among several other abstract notions) get into the optional, if not unnecessary, doctrine. Humankind needs now, more than ever, the wisdom of the Buddha’s Teachings. To spread them therefore, its presentation demands simplicity and intelligibility. In summary: A very good book; without some portions of Part III would be even better.
I have read several English translations of the Dhammapada —a dozen partially, half a dozen totally. As a non-Pali reader, I do not have any opinion on the grammatical quality of such translations. By reading any two, you will easily understand the difficulty of putting ancient eastern texts in western languages. As a rule, however, the spirit of most of the versions remains clear and transmits a good sense of the Buddha’s Teaching. On the other hand, anybody can judge the readability and the beauty of any work regardless its origin. As such, Eknath Easwaran’s book is excellent. His 80-page Introduction to Siddhattha Gotama’s life and Teachings by itself justifies acquiring the book. The Pali Canon paragraphs that Easwaran quotes are “tuned” for the logical western-minded reader. (He probably overdid his metaphors though at least once. I could not trace in any of Buddha’s discourses “what a disciple losses through meditation: sickness, anger, depression, the burden of old age, the fear of death.” I do not think the Buddha said such words but that is probably what he meant.) Chapters’ introductions by Stephen Ruppenthal are also very illustrative. The fact that Easwaran is an Eastern scholar, not a Buddhist one, provides his writings the impartiality and independence that the Buddha would like to see in any intention to spread his Teachings.
(7) Buddha’s Nature: A Practical Guide to Discovering Your Place in the Cosmos by Wes Nisker
This was the first book that showed me the reasonableness of the Buddha’s Teachings when looked through the crystal of contemporary thought. Wes Nisker did a good job in this respect. As many Buddhist thinkers, particularly in the Mahayana school and specifically in zen Buddhism, the author considers that the key to the end of suffering (or to awakening, to enlightenment or to direct knowledge) resides in mindfulness, this is, the permanent application in everyday living of the right attention, the seventh factor of the eightfold path. The Buddha provides exhaustive details on how to practice meditation or mindfulness in his discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness (which I prefer to call the Manners to Establish Attention). This discourse (of which there are two very similar texts in the Pali Canon, one the Collection of Long Discourses and other in the Collection of Middle Length Discourses) is the main “raw matter” of Nisker’s book. The foundations of mindfulness are four phenomena—physical body, sensations, mental states and the Teachings concepts—and Chapter 3, the bulk of the book, consists of four parts, each one dedicated to the corresponding foundation. The book provides a number of meditation techniques for each foundation and gives scientific background on why they should benefit meditation practitioners. I find of much interest the way Wes Nisker presents the first three mindfulness foundations but take exception to the fourth one. I recognize (and so does the author) that this one is the “trickiest foundations” but I am positive that it is not about “thinking about thinking” (as Nisker names this fourth part of his Chapter 3). The Canon Pali refers to the fourth foundation as dhammas, the most important word in Buddhism (and one the most difficult). Dhamma means, among several translations, both the natural order and the Teachings of the Buddha (which are about the natural order). Therefore, the fourth foundation of mindfulness is precisely about the essential Teachings of the Buddha. This exception and the lack of a properly organized structure in its contents reduce the quality of an otherwise very interesting book.
(8)
The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya by Maurice Walshe
This is one of the books that anybody seriously interested in studying the Teachings of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha, should acquire. It contains the English translation of the so called long discourses—34 in total—of the Pali Canon Division of Discourses. Of particular importance are the
Mahasatipatthana Sutta (#22) and the
Mahaparinibbana Sutta (#16), two of the most important discourses of Siddhattha Gotama. The latter describes the events that took place over the last three months of the Buddha’s life. The former explains in detail the meditation techniques used by most Buddhist schools and emphasizes the importance of permanent mindfulness in everyday living. As a rule, the Buddha’s discourses are tedious and repetitious due to the way they were written. Almost every sentence is reiterated several times, most likely for mnemonic purposes. As it is well known, the Pali Canon was orally transmitted over more than four hundred years before being committed to writing during the first century B. C. in what is today Sri Lanka. The “formulaic” format is not the translator’s fault. What he did wonderfully, on the other hand, was adding excellent material of his own to the book. The Introduction is a very good presentation of the Buddha and his Teachings followed by abstracts of the 34 discourses which, together with the alphabetic index toward the end of the book, prove to be a really nice map to guide the reader toward the topics of his/her interest. The excellence of Maurice Walshe’s work is complemented with more than 1,100 endnotes which offer expansions and clarifications to translations and references to other sacred Buddhist texts as well as hundreds of illustrative commentaries.
(9) The Selfihs Gene, by Richard Dawkins
I read this book for the first time in the 80’s and found it excellent; it is quite well placed in number nine of the Discover Magazine 2006 list of Greatest Science Books of All Time. When Dawkins first published his book back in 1976, he wrote that, though the theory of evolution was generally recognized and barely doubted then, “the full implications of Darwin’s revolution had yet to be realized.” I feel positively that those implications are now absolutely realized and only religious fanatics dare to question natural selection. This quantum leap in universal understanding is due in a large proportion to The Selfish Gene. Dawkins not only explained Darwin’s selection but also expanded it backward in time with sound clarifications to the emergence of the first self-replicable molecule and forward to the recent time through imaginative elucidations about the replication of cultural characteristics through what he calls “memes.” Memes, the social equivalences of biological genes, is a word the author created and is nowadays of common use in social sciences.
When I became seriously interested in the Teaching of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha, there were a few notions in common between the Teachings of the ancient sage and the assertions of the modern biologist—the inexistence of metaphysical essences in living beings, the purposelessness of life as a phenomenon, the “undivine” nature of morality—that I decided to read once more The Selfish Gene. In a material universe, how or where does Buddhist reincarnation fit with Dawkins’s biology? Here I have my own interpretation (which the bright English scientist most probably does not share). Each gen or, better said, the design in it coded, is eternal. Says Dawkins: “Each gen leaps from body to body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink in senility and death. The genes are the immortals, or rather, they are defined as genetic entities that come close to deserving the title”. So, the much talked reincarnation or rebirth of some Eastern religions could be well assimilated to body-to-body transmission of genetic information, instead of some kind of mysterious energy or metaphysical essence. Enough of that! My biological interpretation of Buddhist reincarnation does not add a bit to the wonder of this book. The Selfish Gene is just superb.