I want to offer readers of Reckonings a sense of a fairly short essay entitled "What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can't," by Adam Gopnik, which appeared in the August 7 & 14, 2017 issue of The New Yorker.
Gopnik is also reviewing two recent books on Buddhism, Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True (2017) and Stephen Batchelor’s After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (2015). While he thus discusses Buddhism more generally, and in its American incarnation, he is primarily interested in its practice. He spends little time discussing the Buddha's own life, but that time is well spent:
" Sometime around 400 B.C.E.—the arguments over what’s historically authentic and what isn’t make the corresponding arguments in Jesus studies look transparent—a wealthy Indian princeling named Gotama (as the Pali version of his name is rendered) came to realize, after a long and moving spiritual struggle, that people suffer because the things we cherish inevitably change and rot, and desires are inevitably disappointed. But he also realized that, simply by sitting and breathing, people can begin to disengage from the normal run of desires and disappointments, and come to grasp that the self whom the sitter has been serving so frantically, and who is suffering from all these needs, is an illusion. Set free from the self’s anxieties and appetites and constant, petulant demands, the meditator can see and share the actualities of existence with others. The sitter becomes less selfish and more selfless."
And when Gopnik gets down to his real subject, meditation, he is downright refreshing. He reminds us of the value of Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are, and the extraordinary Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And he has a way of briefly describing our practice that clarifies and persuades us again of its value:
"Meditation, even the half-assed kind, does remind us of how little time we typically spend in the moment. Simply to sit and breathe for twenty-five minutes, if only to hear cars and buses go by on a city avenue—listening to the world rather than to the frantic non sequiturs of one’s “monkey mind,” fragmented thoughts and querulous moods racing each other around—can intimate the possibility of a quiet grace in the midst of noise."
Does Adam Gopnik consider himself a Buddhist? I don't know. But his last summary paragraph returns us to the lovely spirit of a line I've already quoted: "a quiet grace in the midst of noise":
"Secularized or traditional, the central Buddhist epiphany remains essential: the fact of mortality makes loss certain. For all the ways in which science and its blessed godchild scientific medicine have reduced the overt suffering that a human life entails, the vector to sadness remains in place, as much as it did in the Buddha’s time. Gotama’s death, from what one doctor describes as mesenteric infarction, seems needlessly painful and gruesome by modern standards; this is the kind of suffering we can substantially alleviate. But the universal mortality of all beings—the fact that, if we’re lucky, we will die after seventy years or so—is not reformable. The larger problem we face is not suffering but sadness, and the sadness is caused by the fact of loss. To love less in order to lose less seems like no solution at all, but to see loss squarely sounds like wisdom. We may or may not be able to Americanize our Buddhism, but we can certainly ecumenicize our analgesics. Lots of different stuff from lots of different places which we drink and think and do can help us manage. Every faith practice has a different form of comfort to offer in the face of loss, and each is useful. Sometimes it helps to dwell on the immensity of the universe. Sometimes it helps to feel the presence of ongoing family and community. Sometimes it helps to light a candle and say a prayer. Sometimes it helps to sit and breathe." ♦