Is Wisdom in the Brain?

Abstract

their best, these traditions offer a portal into a radically new (lived) understanding of what it is to know, to be, to act, and to be an embodied self in time. Western approaches have so far tended only to nibble around the edges of these traditions. For example, meditation may be taken simply as a technology for therapy in which one's old notion of self can better get what it wants. Or Eastern forms may be viewed as spirituality in the transcendent sense in which hard questions of embodiment need not be confronted. Zen and the Brain brings up those hard questions. A second trend, equally notable, is that of reductionism in science, psychology, orthodox medicine, philosophy, even folk beliefs. In the cognitive sciences, this takes the form of the increasing faith that all of human functioning, including what was once the field of psychology, is fundamentally reducible to the brain: Human values are inherently properties of brain activity, and we invite logical confusion by trying to treat them as if they had an independent existence . (Roger Sperry, cited by Austin, p. 589). Zen and the Brain plants itself squarely in the middle of the very hard questions that arise at the interface of these two trends. What happens when neuroscience and the practice of Zen wisdom meet? Long ago, in a distant land, a man's brain abruptly changed (p. 3). Thus does Austin, a neurologist, begin his story a description of the Buddha's enlightenment, so stated as to be controversial to almost everyone. Austin's journey toward this position began in 1974, when he spent part of a sabbatical year in Japan at the Kyoto University School of Medicine. There he started meditation practice a Rinzai Zen teacher, Kobori-roshi. From the beginning, there appears to have been a dual thrust to his efforts, meticulously trying to follow instructions and sit zazen, while at the same time keeping painstaking notes on his experiences, categorizing them in such a way that they could be explained by, or might contribute to, our knowledge about the brain. The book is built around an autobiographical core. Austin has organized his meditation experiences into roughly five stages and, to try to do neurophysiological justice to the phenomena encountered in each stage, has amassed an encyclopedic summary of the way in which present-day neuroscience views the structures and functions of the brain as it might be related to such experiences. The first stage is one of simply settling down. Austin's experiences include those of posture, breathing, eye gaze, relaxation, positive affect, brief periods of fewer or no thoughts (which impress Austin greatly), and some loosening of his sense of himself. In the second stage, Austin reports a number of peculiar experiences, such as bright lights and blank vision, which, although understood by Zen to be irrelevant side effects, are as relevant as anything else for Austin's endeavor of understanding the brain. Stage 3 consists of one brief but intense absorption experience in which he loses the sense of a separate watcher and, after a moment of what he calls a vacuum plenum, gains clarity, a sense of 180° surrounding space, and a vivid visual image of a maple leaf. It is Stage 4 that forms the heart of the matter; Austin calls it a taste of kensho. One morning, some 8 years after he began his zazen practice, while he is standing in an unfamiliar London train station, the scene abruptly changes to one of viewerless immediacy possessing three qualities: Absolute Reality, Intrinsic Rightness, Ultimate Perfection (p. 537). A few seconds later, he also realizes that this reality is timeless, with nothing more to do ... and nothing whatsoever to fear (p. 538). Within seconds, other certainties dawn on him, such as that this view cannot be conveyed conceptually and that he feels totally released mentally. The fifth stage consists of the rest of his life. Although kensho experiences were not repeated, he in icates an aftermath of greater acceptance and a more relaxed sense of the I-Me-Mine self.