Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice. B. Alan Wallace. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. xi+292 pages, ISBN-13: 9780231158343 (pbk), $27.95. Discourse and debate over "Buddhism and Science" is fraught with underlying tension, as varying approaches, apologetics, and epistemes come into and fade from view. In Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic, B. Alan Wallace brings together his work in the study of Buddhism and Science and his promotion of meditation and contemplative practice towards affecting a shift in the conversation between Cognitive Science and Buddhism. Situated somewhere between a scientific episteme and a Buddhist worldview, Wallace outlines the "materialist problematic" in the study of modern science and philosophies of mind. Embarking on a "middle way" of skepticism that neither outright eschews traditional authority nor dispenses with rigorous and rational inquiry, Wallace seeks to insert a Buddhist-inspired "empiricism" into the discourse as a way of overcoming a certain nihilism that emerges in materialist frameworks. Meditations is divided into two parts: "Restoring Our Human Nature" and "Transcending Our Human Nature." The first segment is concerned primarily with thinking through and beyond reductive and materialist commitments in scientific fields, commitments that collapse human nature into physical happenstance. In it, Wallace first calls into question the supposition that consciousness and subjective experience are merely derived from material and physical events. His concern is that commonly held and "un-falsifiable" assertions that the brain produces emergent properties (thoughts and mind) preclude research into alternative theories and deprive us of earnest engagement with consciousness, and thereby we are alienated from our own minds. To that end, Wallace draws uncritically on William James and a generalized "Buddhism" to propose instead an open-ended epistemology that leaves room for a subjective and introspective dimension of the mind sciences, which is both skeptical and "radically empiricist." He argues for the introduction of a third dimension to what he and others in the Buddhism and Science dialogue term "Mind Sciences." This dimension would complement neurological and behavioral approaches, and would allow the mind and mental qualia to be examined and analyzed directly and in greater depth. The second segment, having sought to extract consciousness from the occlusion of materialism, proceeds to engage Buddhists' modes of contemplation to think through a disentangling of habituated suffering and genuine happiness. Wallace adopts a Buddhist hermeneutic of the mind--that humans have an intrinsic potential for balance and well-being--and analyzes modern, clinical incorporations of mindfulness. Though generally supportive of such ventures, he mounts a well-pointed critique that such usages of mindfulness meditation tend to overlook the ethical dimension of Buddhist contemplative traditions, noting that any such extrication sunders their profundity. Particularly, he distinguishes the passive, nonjudgmental presentations in some contemporary psychologized mindfulness practices from those found in Buddhist traditions, wherein one goes beyond mere "nonjudgmental attention" to recognize and purify afflictive mental states. That is to say, he highlights that an ethical subject-cultivation is at play in Buddhist traditions, and the depth of that cultivation is lost by reducing "meditation" to a simple distanced observation. Wallace concludes his meditations by drawing on explications of samatha and vipasyana in Indian Buddhist traditions, and Dzogchen (rdzogs chen) from Tibetan traditions, to demonstrate and herald an investigation into the causes of cyclic existence towards seeing "pristine awareness"--the highest realization within Dzogchen. He widens his earlier discussion of "clinicized" mindfulness, noting that a refined and stabilized attention--which can be arrived at by way of Buddhist contemplative practices--could bring a well-focused open gaze to contemporary Cognitive Science. …