2023-07-31: It not that he's not a Buddhist, he just can't find a Buddhist tribe that he likes and he's limited his thinking to believing that he can't be a buddhist without belonging to any of the Buddhist tribes. I got that from the intro, I don't know that I'll go any further as it feels like he going argue pedantically for the rest of the book about why the various buddhist tribes are wrong. I don't disagree and yet I identify as a buddhist in that there's a bunch of very useful philosophy attributed to a, possibly apocryphal, person named Buddha and I try to get as much as I can from that very useful philosophy.

Interesting book. About Buddhism and especially some modern variants, told with great knowledge about eastern religions, philosophy, and science. I didn’t get it all, and I felt a bit skeptical about Thompson’s interest in “embodied cognition” but the book was challenging and thought-provoking. It was written partly in response to Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True” which is a book I also enjoyed, although Thompson makes some valid criticisms of it. ( )

Although this not an easy book to read, I found it thought-provoking and well-written. Perhaps this is only because I had been thinking about some of the issues raised in the book and the vague descriptions of enlightment, the role of criticsm vs. authority, karma, the nature of mindfulness, . . . that appears in Buddhist literature. I do think the book could have had a more descriptive title,for instance: "A critique of Buddhist modernism and erroneous conflation of neuroscience and Buddhism," or something on that order. The book is not a diatribe against Buddhism and does not parallel Russell's "Why I am not a Christain." I found both his discussion of neuroscience and Buddhist doctrines, dare I say it, enlightening. It is not the easiest book I've ever read, but far from the hardest. I had to read a few chapters a couple of times. The first time to get the broad scope of the argument and a second to follow the details in the construction of the argument. The second reading was generally worth it.

The book is not hostile to Buddhism. He does make a good case for Buddhism being a religon that cannot be substantiated by neuroscience. He also spends a good deal of time on the concept of "mind" and presents the thesis that the brain state, as studied in neuroscience, is only one component of the mind.

I would (and have) recommended the book to readers already familiar with a smattering of Buddhist literature or interested in the prospects of a secular Buddhism. The author raises a variety of interesting questions that I found to be worth thinking about. (No answers yet.) ( )

I don’t remember where I came across this book but I was curious because I’ve explored and examined Buddhism and rejected it as untenable, so what would be someone else’s reason? I also decided to read it in parallel with Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, which I never finished forty years ago. Where Russell is cogent and succinct, Thompson … is not. I’ve seen that Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty* certainly applies to the social sciences. But there has to be a stepped up version on steroids when it comes to philosophers. Jeez, they can sure take a simple thought and complicate the hell out of it. With less than no value added. So, is my problem with Thompson or philosophers in general? Both. Thompson clearly has the academic chops to analyze his subject, but he also is firmly stuck in the peat bog. I may get trolled on this, but while I agree with Thompson's end result, his arguments are mired in, well, stuff like this: "Mindfulness meditation isn’t a kind of private introspection of a private mental theater. Meditative introspection isn’t the inner perception of an independent and preexistent, private mental realm. Mindfulness meditation is the metacognition and internalized social cognition of socially constituted experience."

I'm not going to go into all of the highlighted sections where I had issue... there are too many. I will share a few of the parts that made sense but bottom line, this is languaged up, à la Dawkins's Law.

[on the attempts to tie Buddhism to science} ... the point is that our familiar division between religion and other areas of human activity—art, philosophy, politics, and science—reflects a recent way of thinking that we should be careful not to project onto other times and places.

[on the scientists who investigate mindfulness meditation] These scientists, and not just the journalists who report their findings, bear responsibility for the meaningless mantra that mindfulness “literally changes” or “rewires” your brain. Anything you do changes your brain. Despite the hype, scientific evidence that mindfulness practices induce long-lasting, beneficial changes in the brain is still tentative.

[and, right after that, he notes} Indeed, one recent scientific study suggests that there may be a bias toward reporting positive findings in clinical studies of mindfulness and that negative results may go unreported.

{good... he didn't identify it, but that is the halo effect}

[on whether Buddhism is true] In my view, “Is Buddhism true?” isn’t the right question to ask. Instead, we should ask: What does Buddhism have to teach us? What can we learn from Buddhism? What do we find in Buddhism that we don’t find in other traditions? And, my favorite one: How can debating with Buddhists—past and present—invigorate our thinking?

* Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty from A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings

states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Physics is a genuinely difficult and profound subject, so physicists need to – and do – work hard to make their language as simple as possible (‘but no simpler,’ rightly insisted Einstein). Other academics – some would point the finger at continental schools of literary criticism and social science – suffer from what Peter Medawar (I think) called Physics Envy. They want to be thought profound, but their subject is actually rather easy and shallow, so they have to language it up to redress the balance.

( )

A necessary book challenging concepts taken for granted in any number of Western dharma centers you’d walk into.

Does science “prove” the Dharma to be worthy of elevation over other spiritual traditions? Is the “unconditioned mind” not just a different, maybe useful, kind of conditioning? What’s wrong with treating Buddhism as a religion rather than trying to validate it through some other, more culturally prestigious means?

Thompson’s arguments absolutely need to be entertained by practitioners. I just wish the text was a little more of a joy to read. ( )