Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

About this book

New York Times Bestseller From one of Americas greatest minds a journey through psychology philosophy and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. Robert Wright famously explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain. The mind is designed to often delude us he argued about ourselves and about the world. And it is designed to make happiness hard to sustain. But if we know our minds are rigged for anxiety depression anger and greed what do we do? Wright locates the answer in Buddhism which figured out thousands of years ago what scientists are only discovering now. Buddhism holds that human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearlyand proposes that seeing the world more clearly through meditation will make us better happier people. In Why Buddhism is True Wright leads readers on a journey through psychology philosophy and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age. At once excitingly ambitious and wittily accessible this is the first book to combine evolutionary psychology with cutting-edge neuroscience to defend the radical claims at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. With bracing honesty and fierce wisdom it will persuade you not just that Buddhism is truewhich is to say a way out of our delusionbut that it can ultimately save us from ourselves as individuals and as a species.