Is Meditation a Means of Knowledge?

Mark Siderits

The purpose of our panel is to investigate the relation between meditation and the sorts of questions that the three previous panels have taken up. Meditation is an integral part of Buddhist practice. The question is whether it holds any lessons for us concerning the relation between mind and reality and how we can best come to know the nature of the world.

            One often hears claims about the benefits of meditation for physiological and psychological well-being–even for one’s success in business. Such claims have a very long history. The classical Indian sources credit yogins with various supernormal powers. But by and large the Buddhist tradition has held these things to be a distraction from the business at hand, which is attaining liberation from suffering. What role does meditation play in the Buddhist enlightenment project?

            My characterization of meditation’s role for the path to nirvana will no doubt be controversial. But this is nothing new. While most Buddhists agree that both philosophy and meditation are necessary for enlightenment, there is a long history of tension between the partisans of philosophy and of meditation, with each side accusing the other of giving undue weight to their preferred practice. I am a philosopher by training and occupation, so perhaps I’ve got it all wrong. But my understanding of the situation is this. The Buddhist enlightenment project is aimed at helping us overcome existential suffering by dissolving the false assumption underlying such suffering–that there is an ‘I’ whose life can have meaning and value. Philosophical reasoning helps us see how our deep-seated sense of interior subjectivity might not reflect reality, but instead result from a process of conceptual construction. Such reasoning can only take us so far, though. The point of meditation is to bring home to the practitioner in a very concrete and immediate way the fact that there is no one home.

            We all know the difference between the sort of knowledge that can be called ‘merely theoretical’ and the kind that can effectively disrupt deeply entrenched habits. I ‘knew’ for many years that smoking can damage the heart as well as the lungs. But it wasn’t until I heard the wrong note on the cardiogram that I quit–that very day. We can likewise know perfectly well that there is no enduring entity underlying the flow of mental states. David Hume presumably knew this. But such knowledge doesn’t disrupt the habits, forged from earliest childhood, of thinking of such states as ‘mine’. And of thinking of this ‘me’ as on ongoing project for which the events of this life have significance. Hume noticed that when he left the study to play backgammon with friends, he also left behind whatever convictions he had attained concerning the unreality of the self. Meditation represents a way of seeing in a concrete and immediate way that the general truth applies in one’s own case. In meditation one learns to dissect one’s mental acts, and thereby see that they aren’t what we take them to be–the performances of a mental agent. To see that beneath the surface appearance of a unified seer and doer there is a large variety of impersonal mental events in complex causal interaction. It is this experience that presumably brings about liberation from the illusion of a self and the suffering engendered by that illusion. Indian epistemologists generally agreed that perception is the foremost of the means of knowledge. And they also agreed that this is because in perception we are more directly in contact with the fact being cognized than we are when employing such other mechanisms as inference and testimony, so that our awareness of the fact in question is more vivid. The role of meditation in the enlightenment project seems to be just another instance of this general stance.

            So what does this tell us about the role of meditation in finding out important truths about the mind and reality? It might suggest that the Buddhist meditation tradition represents a 2500-year-old ‘mind science’ to which neuroscience should look for insights. The thought here would be that meditative techniques are designed to enhance one’s introspective powers, so that what one observes in meditation more accurately reflects mental reality than do the deliverances of folk psychology. If meditation is a kind of perception, then perhaps it should be taken up as a tool in the cognitive science lab.

            Perhaps. But I think the conclusion may be a trifle premature, for two reasons. The first has to do with the obvious point that introspection is methodologically problematic in the science context. There just isn’t any reliable way of getting independent confirmation of the results. It will be objected that Buddhist meditation techniques have proven reliable and effective for millennia. The difficulty is that this fact alone does not rule out the possibility of confabulation. Indeed it is easy to see how mastery of Abhidharma philosophy would prime the meditator to individuate the mental states of their inner lives in terms of the categories of the tradition. And those categories, it is well known, arose out of the efforts of early Buddhist commentators to make sense of the array of technical terms the Buddha used in his teachings concerning meditation. So the typology of mental states at the heart of the Buddhist meditation tradition rests on the assumption that the Buddha’s teachings give an accurate mapping of the mental landscape. And attributing omniscience to the Buddha on this subject is incompatible with the universal fallibilism that is common to the methods of the sciences.

            This brings me to a second and deeper reason to be skeptical about the claim that the Buddhist meditation tradition can be directly incorporated into cognitive science. The argument for doing so seems to depend on the idea that meditative techniques enable one to see mental states as they really are in themselves, stripped bare of what the folk psychology of common sense projects onto them. Some Buddhist philosophers would embrace this idea. The Abhidharma schools, including the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna, thought that meditation enables us to see mental reality as it is in itself, stripped bare of the useful concepts we superimpose on it. But not the Madhyamaka school. For Mdhyamaka, the notion of self-individuating entities–the notion that there is one right way to carve up the world–is incoherent. This is the point of the Madhyamaka doctrine of emptiness, the doctrine that nothing has its nature intrinsically. And it would seem to follow from this that there can be no such thing as a theory-neutral way of observing the mind and its states. This seems to follow because it does follow from the doctrine of emptiness that there are things there to be observed–things with determinate natures–only given the sorts of interests that inform a theory. According to Madhyamaka, what one finds when using the powers of introspection developed in meditation is determined in part by the interests reflected in Abhidharma theory.

            To this I hasten to add that the same goes for the observations used to test theories in cognitive science (or any science, for that matter). If Madhyamaka is right and all things are empty of intrinsic nature, then the observations used in the construction and confirmation of scientific theories must likewise depend on some going theory or other. Cognitive science is no more able to show us the mind as it is in itself than is meditation. If the Madhyamaka arguments are sound, there is no such thing as how the mind is in itself.

            Of course this may make it seem as if cognitive science could after all utilize the results of Buddhist meditation. If no enterprise can lay claim to ultimate epistemic privilege when it comes to discerning the nature of the mind, what reason can there be to deny that the observations derived from a Buddhist mind-science are scientifically respectable and worth the attention of cognitive scientists? In principle, none. But I suspect that the two theories are unlikely to mesh particularly well. For the interests that determine the context of Abhidharma theorizing are quite unlike those that generate the scientific context. The former have to do with how to best live our lives. The latter have to do with technologies of material transformation.

            This brings me to a final point. I believe that the jury is still out on the possibility of a strictly physicalist cognitive science. Physicalism may be on its way to winning the battle over mental causation. But the thorny problem of qualia remains. The question I want to raise is whether Buddhists have an interest in the outcome of this debate. Many would claim that they do. Many would say that the Buddhist project is incompatible with physicalism. And they would point to the role of meditation in the Buddhist project as proof. The argument here would be that this role depends on the irreducibility of the mental states that are investigated in meditation. If physicalism is true, then those mental states are reducible to strictly physical events of some sort or other. So then meditation could not reveal the final truth about the mind. All it would reveal is how the mind appears given a certain set of interests and cognitive limitations. And thus it could not serve to undermine our implicit belief in a self. Only the ultimate truth–how things are independently of all interests and cognitive limitations–could do that.

            It will be clear what I think a Mādhyamika would say in response to this. Given the Madhyamaka doctrine of emptiness, there is no such thing as ‘the final truth about the mind’. Indeed for Mādhyimakas all the passionate debate over the truth of physicalism would just serve to reinforce their conviction that metaphysical disputes involve subtle forms of self-construction. But I think that Abhidharma could also agree there is no reason for Buddhists to prefer one outcome in the debate over physicalism. Or at least there is no reason deriving from the role that meditation plays in the project of attaining liberation from suffering. That role depends on the efficacy of meditation in undermining the seeming reality of the categories of folk psychology. Meditation does this by showing how the subject of cognition can be reduced to a set of causally related, impersonal mental events. If physicalism is true, then those mental events allow of further reduction. But this does not threaten the success of the reduction. If meditation succeeds in showing us why it would seem as if there is ‘someone home’ when there isn’t, then it has done its job. The possibility of further reduction does not call that into question. After all, no one questions the reduction of developmental biology to biochemistry on the grounds that biochemistry is further reducible to quantum mechanics.

            I hope it is clear that nothing I have said here has any implications for the neuroscientific investigation of meditational states. That investigation is something I think Buddhists should welcome, since it might lead to new techniques for attaining liberation from suffering. The question I have tried to address is whether Buddhist meditation can be more than a new object of investigation for brain science–whether the two can enter into an epistemic partnership. As I said, because I am a philosopher, my views on that question may be all wrong. If so, I expect that my fellow panel members will set me straight. I look forward to hearing what they have to say.