Chapter
Eighteen
Waking up
compares the Buddha with Jesus. While the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gau-
tama, was ‘merely a man who woke up from the dream of being a separate self ’,
Jesus was supposed to be the son of the creator of the universe. This, says Harris,
‘renders Christianity, no matter how fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all
but irrelevant to a scientific discussion about the human condition (2014, p. 30).
Hinduism shares with Buddhism the idea that we live our ordinary lives in the
world of maya or illusion: an unenlightened dream of duality in which self and
the universe seem to be distinct. But most of its many traditions also include per-
sonal and celestial deities, and the idea that each of us is or has an eternal self or
soul called the atman. Nonetheless, the highest principle of Hindu philosophy,
Brahman, is not a personified deity, but an impersonal spiritual force, the ultimate
reality of the universe, and there are nondualist traditions in Hinduism, especially
in Advaita, in which Brahman and atman are ultimately found to be identical –
although both may still be considered distinct from a material, bodily reality. Bud-
dhism is more fully atheist and teaches no-self and nonduality more consistently
than any other tradition.
Buddhists are also urged not to worship anyone or believe any doctrines, but to
inquire into their own minds, and have faith that they too can wake up. In Bud-
dhism without Beliefs, the British scholar and Zen Buddhist Stephen Batchelor
(1997) explains that the noble truths are not propositions to be believed in, but
truths to be acted upon. Practising Buddhism entails an inquiry into oneself that
supposedly reveals the emptiness and impermanence of all phenomena, the
illusory nature of self, and the origins and ending of suffering. Harris agrees. The
teachings of Buddhism are, he says, ‘empirical instructions: If you do X, you will
experience Y’ (2014, p. 30). This is reminiscent of Max Velmans’s motto for all of
science: ‘If you carry out these procedures you will observe or experience these results’
(1999, p. 300).
This structural affinity with science runs deep within Buddhist teachings. A cen-
tral teaching in all branches of Buddhism is the doctrine of conditioned arising,
or co-dependent origination. The Buddha taught that all things are relative and
interdependent, arising out of what came before and in turn giving rise to some-
thing else in a vast web of causes and effects. This can be seen as a very early
statement of a scientific principle of cause and effect – and of the conviction
that there is no magic involved, no skyhooks. Not accepting this is one source
of illusion, or ignorance. This principle is applied specifically to consciousness as
well as to everything else, and the Buddha denied the possibility of there being
consciousness without the matter, sensations, perceptions, and actions that con-
dition it (Rahula, 1959). This conception of an interconnected, causal universe is
compatible with basic physics and modern science in a way that a universe cre-
ated and sustained by any god is not.
A good example of this is the practice of the Buddhist jhanas, the series of eight
increasingly absorbed states reached through deep concentration (Chapter 13).
Although they are rarely practised these days, the American meditation teacher
Leigh Brasington (2015) gives precise instructions for inducing them. After a
series of preliminary concentration practices, the first involves concentrating on
positive emotions and feelings throughout the body. This induces what feels like
a flood of energy, manifesting in heat, shaking, or trembling that sounds rather
like the esoteric notion of a kind of ‘primal energy’ called kundalini. This is then