Tao Te Ching
Why Buddhism is True
The Dalai Lama, The Mind and Life Institute, and many proponents of Secular Buddhism seem to mainly approach science through a lens of Buddhist teachings. This New York Times best-selling book mainly takes the opposite pathway, from science to Buddhism. It’s closer to Chögyam Trungpa’s Shambhala teachings that he describes as “what the world is starved for… a manual for people who have lost the principles of sacredness, dignity, and warriorship in their lives.” The skyrocketing popularity of Why Buddhism is True validates Trungpa’s 1977 prescient insights.
Quotes from Why Buddhism is True
“As enlightenment begins to dawn, reality, which had seemed all chopped up, turns out to possess an underlying continuity, a kind of infrastructure of interconnection.”
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“Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns”
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“By looking at things from the point of view of natural selection, we see why the illusion would be built into us, and we have more reason than ever to see that it is an illusion.”
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“I consider tribalism the biggest problem of our time… it could undo millennia of movement toward global integration… just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach.”
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“In fact, one big lesson from Buddhism is to be suspicious of the intuition that your ordinary way of perceiving the world brings you the truth about it.”
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“Natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.”
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“Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.”
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“Pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure.”
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“Realizing you’re not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.”
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“The conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.”
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“The sense of beauty feels more like something the mind just naturally relaxes into when the preoccupation with self subsides.”
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“we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction”
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“What causes all the hatred?… human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real us’; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real them.’”
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“Why Buddhism is true: because we are animals created by natural selection.”
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“You can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success”
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“Zen is for poets, Tibetan Buddhism is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.”
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