Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life by Nicolas Bommarito

Abstract

Reviewed by: Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life by Nicolas Bommarito Jake H. Davis (bio) Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life. By Nicolas Bommarito. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii + 298. Hardcover $19.95, ISBN 978-0-190887-50-6. In Seeing Clearly, Nicolas Bommarito brings together Buddhist theory and practice with a deceptively simple sophistication that few have managed in the contemporary era. Meditation teachers have contributed to the self-help section an abundance of guides to Buddhism and meditation, many of them elegantly worded and sometimes simple and practical. Yet many of these works also stumble unwittingly into philosophical problems discussed with great care and complexity in footnoted academic volumes read mostly by a small circle of scholars. Bommarito's accomplishment as a philosopher is evident not only in the clarity of his exposition, but also in what he doesn't say, in the many philosophical blunders he does not fall into. Yet the reasons for not saying what he doesn't say are, for the most part, left for elsewhere. This allows his exposition to remain straightforward and accessible, aimed unwaveringly at the practical goal of facing up to the troubling aspects of life and living from that truth. Seeing Clearly offers us an outstanding example of work that is philosophically sophisticated, thoroughly Buddhist, and refreshingly contemporary. The first portion of the book is devoted to Philosophy, the second to Practice. Bommarito is adept at explaining both the distinction and also the connection between the two. Both theoretical understanding and practical transformation aim at solving a single problem, that "our visceral ways of experiencing things misrepresent how the world is" (p. 17). To change this, you need to know some facts about how the world is, and you need to know some facts about what to do in light of how the world is. But knowing these facts is not enough. We can understand and evaluate Buddhist claims as abstract ideas, but seeing the truths that Buddhist teachings are pointing to "isn't just a matter of changing what you think or believe, but also how you perceive, feel, and experience life" (p. 5). In line with this emphasis on experience, Bommarito offers one delightfully apt analogy after another, helping to bring into focus things that might otherwise be too foreign or too familiar to see clearly. The analogies he [End Page 1] offers for relic veneration and Buddhist pilgrimage, for example, opened up for me a new--and more charitable--way of understanding those practices. An Elvis fan might get more excited about listening to Elvis's music after a pilgrimage to Graceland, and you might call your friend more often after visiting a place where you spent time together when you were young. In the same way, making a pilgrimage to a special place or handling a special relic can make you more motivated to actually make changes to how you live your life and to actually do other Buddhist practices. (p. 149) Bommarito also offers a pointed analogy for the modern appropriation of Buddhist mindfulness practices. He asks us to imagine an Asian country where people have started using rosaries to relieve stress and anxiety. They start selling their own brands of rosaries and having conferences where they invite Catholic priests to speak, though they ask them to downplay the role of God and faith in the rosary practice. This is because, they say, they've actually discovered the true essence of Catholicism and it doesn't involve any of the other Catholic practices or beliefs at all. Turns out, Catholics have just been mistaken about what their own religion is really about for thousands of years. (p. 198) Bommarito's point here is that for Buddhists, awareness practices are done with a particular purpose: "if you're trying to solve a fundamental problem in life by retraining your mental habits, it's important to develop a focused awareness of what's really going on in and around you" (p. 198). Using mindfulness meditation for sleep or productivity may well work, "but like using a rosary for relaxation, it's pretty different from how it works in its original context" (p...