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person, a superficial person.” Rajneesh may in fact have been consciously paraphrasing Ecclesiastes. Many religious
teachers know little beyond the scriptures of their sects, but
Rajneesh had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s spir-
itual literature.
The literary critic Harold Bloom makes the bold claim in
his 1998 book that Shakespeare invented the modern human
mind. In act 4, scene 3, of Macbeth, Shakespeare vividly
expresses our modern, post-Stoic, non-Buddhist sensibilities.
When the nobleman MacDuff is told, “Your wife and babes
are savagely slaughtered,” he is struck dumb. When encour-
aged to speak, his tenderness floods out: “All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
at one fell swoop?”
Macbeth’s challenger, Malcolm, trots out the standard
Stoic line, “Dispute it like a man,” and MacDuff responds:
“I shall do so; / But I must also feel it as a man. I cannot but
remember such things were that were most precious to me.”
Malcolm then encourages MacDuff: “Be this the whetstone of
your sword. Let grief convert to anger; blunt not the heart,
enrage it.” Soon afterward MacDuff takes his revenge, kills
Macbeth, and restores peace to Scotland, all through the
driving forces of love, grief, and anger. He chooses to be a
man of feeling rather than a Stoic, and is nobler for it.
EMOTION AND CULTURE
Stories and plays like Macbeth give us approximate guidelines
for social behavior. As Aristotle understood, these dramas
enable us to experience and try out for size a huge range of
emotions in a contained “virtual” way. Stories explore nearly
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every emotionally charged situation, but love, power, and death are particularly appealing. Many great nations have a
foundation myth of warfare and would not be nations without
it. For the Greeks, the foundation story was the Iliad, which
starts on the very first page with the wounded pride and rage
of Achilles. Any educated Greek boy of twenty-five hundred
years ago would know how to act well in war because of his
knowledge of the legends.
A child brought up on stories is doing a simulated explo-
ration of emotions he or she will face in later life. The Greek
and Indian myths, the biblical histories, the Grimm Broth-
ers’ fairy tales—all are educational as well as entertaining.
In Victorian England, the novels of writers such as Charles
Dickens were felt to be so edifying for the masses that they
could largely replace the moral strictures of moribund Chris-
tianity. The millions who wept over the fate of Little Nell in
The Old Curiosity Shop were learning how to weep and what
to say as they wept, according to the culture of the day. These
are good Christian virtues of empathy and caring, but taught
and refined through fiction. (Oscar Wilde famously provided
the intellectual counterview: “One must have a heart of stone
to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”)
We love stories, movies, novels, and histories so much
because they are literally mind-expanding. We can explore
whole psychic universes via the rocket fuel of simulated emo-
tion. But perhaps the finest training in emotion comes from
music. The love songs that we hear in our teenage years often
shape us for life.
I had a strange but fortunate musical upbringing. When
I was ten I came across a huge cache of classical records that
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I was free to borrow. My parents had just bought a record player, and I was able to stumble my way through Stravinsky, Bartok, Mahler, Schoenberg, Strauss, and Bach. As a kid I
loved bizarre rhythms, loud noise, vivid color, and over-the-
top emotionality. I had the luxury of entering the mind of
a Russian aristocrat in Paris (Stravinsky), and the mind of a
Bohemian Jew in Vienna (Mahler). I would never have devel-
oped that range of human sympathy through sitting alone
and meditating.
Music also inoculated me against Buddhism. When I
signed up for my first Vipassana retreat, I had a flash of
insight. I thought: “If I find out that there is no place for Jimi
Hendrix in this system, it’s not for me.” Hendrix at that time
was my symbol of the god-intoxicated musician.
And of course, there isn’t. The Buddha hated all sensory
pleasures. He would also have told Aristotle, Galileo, Shake-
speare, Newton, Bach, Beethoven, Darwin, Einstein, Joyce,
and Picasso to stop wasting their lives in trivial pursuits.
Nor did he have any sense, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins did, that “the world is charged with the grandeur of
God.” It is perhaps anachronistic to expect the Buddha to see
Nature as a source of wonder and delight, but many people
in antiquity did. He said nothing to encourage any kind of
engagement with the world or with aesthetic beauty. His val-
ues were utterly alien to mine. His arguments were sound, but
I knew his conclusions were wrong.
EMOTION AND VALUES
An emotion is essentially a deep, intuitive value judgment
about something. Emotions are the source of nearly all our
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personal values, and yet we hardly ever consider them in isolation or even know what they are. Emotions tend to be sub-
liminal, automatic, habitual, and instinctive. Although they
drive our behavior, we are far more likely to give our available
attention to the actions they initiate.
To be mindful of an emotion means holding it in mind
distinct from what usually surrounds it. To stop and look
at an emotion typically puts the brakes on it, which is a
desirable outcome both for the Buddha and for most
psychologists. However, seeing an emotion clearly can also
tell us how much we value something and why. When we do
this, the sati-sampajjana formula kicks in. The clear percep-
tion of something ( sati) leads to a more accurate evaluation
( sampajjana) and a better outcome.
Since the purpose of emotion is to drive behavior, we
can uncover our core values by looking at how we choose to
spend our time and energy. These are the biological equiva-
lents of hard cash. They tell us how much we think something
is worth. We can reverse engineer from our actions back to
the emotions behind them.
So how many hours a week do you spend on the following:
Work? Social relationships? Entertainment? Exercise? Infor-
mation gathering? Deliberate learning? Eating? Distraction?
Rest? Does the balance feel right, or at least good enough?
Once you know how you spend your time and energy, y
ou
can then look at the emotion and valence and ask, “Why?”
In each case, it could be any one or combination of the
following emotions and motivators: pleasure, fear, love, ambi-
tion, desire, excitement, duty, shame, empathy, escapism, fan-
tasy, self-pity, pride, habit, guilt, boredom, or fatigue. Once we
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can hold a particular emotion in mind ( sati), the evaluation ( sampajjana) is bound to arise: “Is this optimal? Is this too
much or too little? Should I give this more energy or less?” We
could scale it down or scale it up, or shift it sideways to include
another emotion, or target it for a more rewarding outcome.
It is not at all easy to isolate, hold, and evaluate an emotion
( sati-sampajjana), but it can be very satisfying when we do.
To summarize, the Buddha and many mindfulness writers
tend to pathologize emotion in pursuit of a tranquil mind.
They attempt to minimize emotion—in contrast to Aristotle,
who preferred to optimize it. They seek to control and reduce
it rather than develop it.
In fact, there are many good reasons for cultivating emo-
tion. These include the following: (1) Emotion is essential for
rationality and good judgment. (2) Emotion powers all our
actions for good or bad. Every emotion can be adaptive if
expressed optimally at the right time. (3) Emotions and their
valences are the source of our core personal and social values.
(4) Emotional intelligence is essential for free and satisfying
social intercourse. (6) Emotion as expressed through story
and music trains us in cultural sophistication and empathy
with others. We can use mindfulness to cultivate all of these
aspects of our humanity, but the results will not look partic-
ularly Buddhist.
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20
Embodied Thought
Meditation is commonly seen and promoted as a way of
escaping the tyranny of runaway thought. Many mind-
fulness writers go further and seem to regard cognition itself,
like emotion, as a kind of pathology. They certainly feel it is
antagonistic to meditation, and hardly ever have a good word
to say about it. As Paul R. Fulton and Ronald D. Siegel write
in the anthology Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, “Mindful-
ness meditation is distinguished from other [psychotherapeu-
tic]) traditions by its near total abandonment of thinking. . . .
When we are hijacked by discursive thinking about the past or
future, we have left the domain of mindfulness.”1
Mindfulness writers often attack thoughts by denying
their reality. For instance, in their bestselling book Mind-
fulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic
World, Mark Williams and Danny Penman say, “Mindfulness
meditation teaches you to recognize memories and damag-
ing thoughts as they arise. . . . They are like propaganda. They
are not real . They are not you.”2 And in another essay from Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd 232
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Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, Paul Fulton suggests, “By learning to see thoughts as events with no special reality, we
come to appreciate our mind’s incessant tendency to build
imaginary scenarios that we inhabit as if they are real.”3
As Kabat-Zinn has said, “Our thoughts may have a degree
of relevance and accuracy at times, but often they are at least
somewhat distorted by our self-centered and self-serving
inclinations.”4 Elsewhere he argues that while we meditate we
should deliberately note our thoughts one by one, and return
to the breath as quickly as possible. “During meditation, we
intentionally treat all our thoughts as if they are of equal
value . . . we intentionally practice letting go of each thought
that attracts our attention, whether it seems important and
insightful or unimportant and trivial.”5 To see all thoughts as
“of equal value,” whatever their contents, and to let them all
go, implies that they are all worthless.
Psychologists and mindfulness writers like to appear
calm and objective, but you can feel the invective behind
the words they use to describe thinking: discursive, unreal,
biased, hijacked, transient, propaganda, deceptive, distorted,
self-centered, self-serving, imaginary, incessant, trivial, and
so on. These terms would be often appropriate, but the total
absence of any positive descriptors is telling. I assume these
writers do know the value of cognition, but they obviously
regard it as antagonistic to the mindful state itself. They seem
to feel that thinking should only occur before or after being mindful, but never during it.
These writers seem to be taking their inspiration from Zen,
and in particular Dogen, whom you might remember from
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and think of not-thinking. How you think of not think-
ing? By not thinking! This is the essence of zazen.” In the
“Fukanzazengi,” Dogen instructs: “Cast aside all involve-
ments and cease all affairs. Do not think good or bad. Do
not administer pros and cons. Cease all the movements of
the conscious mind, gauging of all thoughts and views.”6
Earlierin the same text, he recommends: “Cease from
practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing
words and following after speech, and learn the backward
step that turns your light inward.”7 Elsewhere he says,
“Non-thinking must become the eye through which you
view phenomena.”8
This mystical, antithought tendency runs deep in Bud-
dhism, but, strange to say, it doesn’t come from the Buddha!
The Modern Mindfulness movement is frequently criticized
by orthodox Buddhist authorities, teachers, and scholars for
so blithely dismissing the philosophic aspects of the tradition.
The Buddha himself valued analytic, goal-directed
thought very highly indeed. The four training disciplines of
the Sutta all converge on mindfulness of thought, which is
the apex of the mind-training pyramid. The purpose of the
training is to develop a mind capable of sustained, penetrat-
ing insight ( vipassana) into the nature of reality itself. Or to
put it more simply, the purpose of mindfulness according
to the Buddha is productive, goal-directed thought, not the
absence of thought.
Buddhism is the most philosophically structured of all
great religions. The doctrine is presented as a series of ratio-
nal, step-by-step arguments that converge on the truth from
different angles. If you accept its premises, it presents a
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Every Buddhist school has a tradition of philosophy
around this cluster of arguments, which is usually regarded
as the peak of the spiritual path. None of these traditions is
truly philosophic in the Western sense of open-ended dialectic
and skeptical enquiry. Nor are they scientific or empirical as is
frequently claimed by modern enthusiasts. They still require
a high degree of unquestioning faith, and they all focus nar-
rowly on their own hypotheses. However, they do present
alternative modes of thought that we can usefully apply today.
Nor is there just one approach. Each of the three major
forms of Buddhism dominant in the West has its own in-house
style. We can call them “embodied thought” (the Buddha’s
original formula); “contemplative thought” (in Tibetan Bud-
dhism); and “intuitive thought” (in Zen).
CONTEMPLATIVE THOUGHT
Let’s start with contemplative thought. Most religions have
practices in which we are asked to contemplate various spiri-
tual and moral ideas. In the Dalai Lama’s lineage, the “Lamrim”
is the equivalent of the Catholic catechism, but much larger. It
is a training discipline with a long list of themes that the monk
or keen practitioner was encouraged to meditate on for years.
These themes are regarded as the summation of the whole
teaching according to Tibetan Buddhism. Studying formally,
the practitioner would spend days or weeks on each one, com-
plete with visualizations, prayers, purification rituals, and a
rote learning of all the arguments, and he may repeat this
cycle indefinitely throughout his life.
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The Lamrim includes themes such as the imminence of
death; the dangers of material existence; the danger of falling
into lower rebirths; the horrors of the hell realms; the peer-
less value of the teaching; the great good fortune of having
a guru; overcoming “self-cherishing” and attachment to self;
taking refuge in the Buddha, in the dogma, and in the clergy;
the moral mechanics of karma; suffering and the end of suf-
fering; the aspiration for enlightenment; cultivating univer-