Buddha's Nature: A Practical Guide to Discovering Your Place in the Cosmos - Softcover

Nisker, Wes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553379992 ISBN 13: 9780553379990

Publisher: Bantam, 2000

Synopsis

The Buddha said that "everything we need to know about life can be found inside this fathom-long body." Then why is most people's spirituality--whether Buddhist, Christian, or Jewish--completely cut off from their body? In this provocative and groundbreaking book, you'll discover that enlightenment comes not from "out there," but from a deep understanding of our own personal biology. Using the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, a traditional Buddhist meditation, Nisker shows how cutting-edge science is proving the tenets first offered by the Buddha.

And he provides a practical program, complete with meditations and exercises, that enables readers to become mindful of the origins of emotions, desires, and thoughts. One of the great synthesizers of East and West, Nisker shows how to incorporate the traditional understanding of the Buddha with the latest scientific discoveries while on our spiritual journey. He shows that we are not separate from nature and the evolving universe. The way to enlightenment lies within our very biology.


Most important, Nisker offers a practical program--complete with meditations and exercises--so readers can take their own evolutionary journey into their bodies to find the origins of emotions, desires, and thoughts.  Nisker provides a liberating way for each of us to incorporate into our lives the understanding, proven by the latest scientific evidence and foretold in the great traditional teachings of the Buddha, that we are not separate from nature and the evolving universe.  Our biology is not our destiny, but our way to enlightenment. -->

About this title

About the Author

Wes Nisker is the bestselling author of Crazy Wisdom and a renowned lecturer who has taught courses on Buddhist meditation at the Esalen Institute, the University of California, and Spirit Rock Buddhist Meditation Center. He is the founder and co-editor of the international Buddhist journal, Inquiring Mind.

From the Back Cover

"What The Tao of Physics did to connect east and west in the realm of physics, Buddha's Nature does brilliantly in the realm of biology and the mind. This is the new Tao of evolution."
--Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart

"This book will be welcomed as one of the best efforts yet to bring together meditators and scientists. It is an instrument for our greater joy and achievements."
--Thich Nhat Hanh, author of Peace Is Every Step

"A milestone in contemporary Buddhism...[Nisker] grounds the Buddha's teachings in discoveries made by the neural and evolutionary sciences. I dare you to find a book on science that is so personal, or a book on meditation that is so funny and forgiving."
--Joanna Macy, author of World As Lover, World As Self

From the Inside Flap

aid that "everything we need to know about life can be found inside this fathom-long body." Then why is most people's spirituality--whether Buddhist, Christian, or Jewish--completely cut off from their body? In this provocative and groundbreaking book, you'll discover that enlightenment comes not from "out there," but from a deep understanding of our own personal biology. Using the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, a traditional Buddhist meditation, Nisker shows how cutting-edge science is proving the tenets first offered by the Buddha.

And he provides a practical program, complete with meditations and exercises, that enables readers to become mindful of the origins of emotions, desires, and thoughts. One of the great synthesizers of East and West, Nisker shows how to incorporate the traditional understanding of the Buddha with the latest scientific discoveries while on our spiritual journey. He shows that we are not separate from nature and the evolving universe. The w

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PROLOGUE
 
 
WHO IS GOING ON HERE?
 
The inspiration for this book goes back at least as far as my first meditation retreat, which took place in 1970 in the village of Bodhgaya, India. The temple in which I began to practice this ancient art was just a few minutes’ walk from the Bodhi tree where more than 2,500 years earlier the Buddha is said to have sat down and found self-liberation. I was part of a great wave of young Westerners who had traveled to Asia in a somewhat confused, romantic search for new ways of understanding life and living it.
 
When I sat down to meditate at that first retreat, I was already twenty-eight years old and had a liberal arts degree from a fine American college and several years of graduate school, and I had undergone some Freudian and gestalt psychotherapy. But in all that time no one had ever hinted to me that I could observe myself in this meditative way, or that by developing certain faculties of my mind I could see into my deepest biological and psychological conditioning for myself, and in the process even unravel a few threads of it.
 
Although Western therapies had given me a glimpse into the influences of my personal history on my present life, I had never explored the much more powerful impact of life itself, or how just being a human or an animal has laid down the basic conditions of my existence. I had never learned to understand or to feel myself as part of nature in any way, or as interwoven with the world in any form. While psychotherapy had shown me how to see into the origins of my personality, I had been given no clue how to see through it; I had been taught how to gain some freedom for myself, but never how to gain freedom from myself.
 
As it is for many people, my first meditation retreat was therefore full of fascinating, painful, self-shattering revelations. I was amazed to discover a pure knowing part of my mind that was somewhat different from my thinking mind. I had never imagined that I could actually listen to myself think, nor that it would be so humbling to do so.
Our culture emphasizes the development of intellect—reading, writing, and ’rithmatic—and I had come to place the highest value on thinking and my ability to manipulate thoughts. After all, that is what we are graded on in school. Like most of us, I came to regard what was in my mind as my primary identity. In some strange sense, who “I” was did not involve the earth, the history of life, the cosmos, hardly even my own body. What I had grown up believing, quite literally, is that “I think, therefore I am.”
 
During my first few meditation retreats, I was consequently quite surprised to hear myself thinking against my will. I would be trying to pay single-minded attention to my breath, and my mind would continue to produce all sorts of thoughts and ideas. Who was doing this thinking? And if I am not the director of my thinking, then what am I doing with all that free time? More to the point, if I am not my thinking, who am I?
 
“The practice of mindfulness meditation has allowed me to look clearly and sometimes even calmly at my mind and body, and to ask questions like these. After many years of meditation and study I don’t claim any great final liberation, but I do feel that my primary identity has shifted. More and more I feel myself included in the world and, just as important, the world included in me.
 
Sometimes I think it strange that I perhaps wouldn’t have felt this inclusion—or for that matter known of this method of self-observation—all on my own. The attitude of meditative mindfulness seems so obvious to me now, and the practice seems so necessary to a clear understanding of my life. Shouldn’t we all just discover these things as a natural part of our human development? Over the years, as I continued to study Buddhist ideas and practices, I began to notice an amazing correspondence between this ancient wisdom and the discoveries of modern science. What first captured my interest, along with that of many others, were the breakthroughs in the fields of quantum physics and astronomy that seemed to corroborate ancient Buddhist perspectives. By the late seventies, however, I had become equally fascinated with the stories coming from the natural sciences, especially from the fields of evolutionary biology and psychology. These disciplines had begun revealing in very precise detail how deeply embedded and interwoven humans are with all of life and nature, echoing the most fundamental of Buddhist insights.
 
The more I studied both Buddhism and the evolutionary sciences, the more they seemed to me to be a marriage made—let’s say—in evolution. The two disciplines draw strikingly similar maps of mental and emotional life, and also agree on the fundamental laws of nature and living systems. Most important, I am convinced that Buddhism and evolutionary science can serve each other in ways that have profound implications for all of us.
 
As I will explain in detail throughout this book, the evolutionary sciences lend support and guidance to the Buddhist practices of self-liberation, offering very specific information about our place in the scheme of things. The sciences show us how interwoven we are with all life through the history of molecules, cells, bones, and brains.
 
Buddhist meditation, in turn, can make the latest discoveries of evolutionary science relevant and vital in our lives. Through the ancient Buddhist transformational practices, the scientific revolution can actually be placed in the service of the spiritual. Together the two can offer us what I call evolutionary wisdom.
 
Evolutionary wisdom is quite simply the deep realization of our nature as nature. I am not just referring to an abstract knowledge of other primate species as our ancestors, but rather to a deep sense of our co-emergence with the elements, the sea and atmosphere, cellular life and sunlight, plants and animals, sentience—the whole evolutionary shebang. Evolutionary wisdom is also a recognition and exploration of the special gifts we seem to have been given by nature, and how we might best use them to awaken to our human condition and perhaps even improve upon it.
 
It is important to state that this book is not about getting rid of our personality or individuality—as if that were even possible—but rather about gaining access to our most basic identity. When we can experience ourselves as part of the processes of biological and cosmic evolution, we automatically begin to break free from the domination of ego. We are finally able to loosen the tight shoe of self. Our lives gain new dimension, context, gestalt. We begin to give ourselves some space.
 
Buddha’s Nature is a practical guide, offering meditations and reflective exercises that I hope will lead you to greater self-awareness, and thereby to increased freedom and happiness. Most of the exercises in the book are variations of traditional Buddhist practices, interpreted for our time through the filters of modern science and intended to be provocative, easy, and even fun to do.
 
These ideas and practices come, for the most part, from the Theravadan school of Buddhism, known as the Path of the Elders. This school is based on the earliest written record of the Buddha’s teaching, compiled 500 years after his death in numerous texts collectively called the Pali Canon. (Pali is the Sanskrit-based language spoken by the Buddha.) The most significant segments of the Pali Canon are the discourses (sutras, in Sanskrit) given by the Buddha as he instructed his followers on the path of self-awareness and liberation.
 
The Path of the Elders has been preserved in India, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, and Sri Lanka, and it has become one of the most popular Buddhist schools in the modern Western world. The primary meditation practices of the Elders’ tradition are often referred to as “insight” (vipassana), and most of them are based on the development of the mental faculty known as mindfulness.
 
For scientific advice, I have drawn from writings and interviews with experts and interpreters from many disciplines, but especially from those in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychology. In particular, I have been inspired by people engaged in some way with both science and meditation practice who have brought the two together in their work, including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Daniel Goleman, Mark Epstein, Francisco Varela, Candice Pert, and Fritjof Capra, among others.
 
This book is dedicated to the perennial goals of Buddhism, which are to foster self-awareness and compassion, and to relieve suffering—in short, to evolve. As Buddhist scholar Robert A. F. Thurman has said, “Buddhism is an evolutionary sport.” This book is an invitation to play that game, and to the increase of wisdom, peace, and happiness that it can offer.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0553379992
• ISBN 13: 9780553379990
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256