Emotions in Buddhism

IN A LENGTHY WRITTEN exchange with a colleague on the subject of citta it became clear that there is something unusual about the way early Buddhism treats emotion. To begin with there is no word in Pāli or Sanskrit for "emotions" as a separate category of experience. On the other hand there are words for distinct emotions such as fear (bhaya), anger (koda, rosa), hatred (dosa), joy (ānanda, pamojja), sadness (domanassa, soka) and so on. So emotions are concepts in themselves, but do not form a natural category different from other kinds of experiences. However the received tradition is that ancient Indians treat emotions under the heading of 'mind'. Alongside this we frequently find the suggestion that citta ought to be translated as 'heart'. I want to look again at this.

When I wrote about citta back in March 2011 (Mind Words) I bent my definition to include emotions. I am not so sure now. To recapitulate: citta comes from the root √cit which I defined thus: "√cit concerns what catches and holds our attention on the one hand, and what we move towards [or away from] on the other." My colleague had consulted Margaret Cone, the Pāli Lexicographer and author of the new Dictionary of Pali, about her dictionary definition and she replied that citta means 'thinking, thought, intention'; with no mention of emotion. This raised the concern that emotions were being "left out", which is quite an interesting proposition. Are emotions being left out here?

On reflection I decided that emotions are not being left out, but they are being defined differently from how we define emotions. From the early Buddhist point of view experience has a bodily component (kāyika) and a mental component (cetasika). This much is clear from the Salla Sutta (SN 36.6, PTS S iv.207), which makes a distinction between bodily pain, and mental suffering: the arahant has the former, but not the latter. [1] Now, we know that emotions too have a felt bodily component, and hence we often use 'feeling/feelings' to talk about or describe emotions: "I feel happy", "how are you feeling" etc. And we know that emotions have a mental component and that this mental component is what distinguishes emotions from other types of bodily sensation (i.e. proprioception, the normal operation of the viscera, or physical touch).

Likewise from the point of view of physiology emotions are indistinguishable from each other. Cordelia Fine summarises some the research on this in her entertaining little book A Mind of Its Own. She points out, for instance, that the mechanism that makes our heart race with fear, exhilaration or plain physical exertion is the same in each case. The body has very limited responses to stimulation. Fine sums it up with this equation:

emotion = arousal + emotional thoughts.

Arousal, it turns out, comes in one flavour but differing intensities. Arousal simply prepares the body for activity. If you are shaking fear, or anger, or trembling with anticipation of reward it's all just arousal. And what makes the experience distinct is the accompanying thoughts.[2]

Now this view of emotion is quite consistent with the early Buddhist model which seems to see emotions as agitation accompanied by thoughts. The Pāli word for empathy is anukampa: literally 'to tremble along with' i.e. to feel what someone else feels. In the Mahāmaṅgala Sutta we find that one aspect of the highest blessing is:

Phuṭṭhassa lokadhammehi, cittaṃ yassa na kampati;
Touched by objects of experience, his mind is not agitated. (Sn 47)

Considering lokadhamma recall that loka is our experiential world, and a dhamma is the object of manas, hence my translation as 'objects of experience'. So what usually happens when we have an experience is agitation (kampati) of our mind (citta). Interestingly when the word emotion first entered the English language from French in the 16th century it meant 'agitation'. So what has changed?

I think what changed was first the 18th century European Enlightenment, followed by the Romantic reaction against it, which itself found expression in the Psychoanalytic movement. I think this partly because I've read David McMahan's book The Making of Buddhist Modernism and agree that these are some of the main influences on the modern world generally, and have deeply influenced the presentation of Buddhism around the world since the 19th century. McMahan includes Protestantism as well, but we can leave that aside for now.

Partly due to Enlightenment propaganda we see the period before the emergence of science as one of rampant irrationality and superstition. (Though this was countered in the popular imagination by the Romantic idea of the "noble savage", and in fact superstition and irrationality are still rampant!) Enlightenment thinkers began to apply objectivity and reason to many problems, and discovered they could solve many of them. Whatever else we say about Newton, Locke, Hook & co. we must acknowledge their great achievements. So great was their success that they and their successors began to see reason as superior to emotion. To them the universe seemed like a giant clockwork machine that they could take apart and fully understand. To be fair this notion was not new to them, but was originally a product of theological thinking about 'the music of the spheres' and the 'great chain of being' which had been around for centuries. Enlightenment thinkers were consciously disenchanting the world, and felt more free as they did so: free from the irrational leadership of the Church which feared reason and knowledge, and free from the small fears which ruled every day life. Soon they began to be free of the fear of diseases like Smallpox as well. And free from some of the uncertainty of life. We enjoy these freedoms largely without acknowledgement these days, and with apparent resentment amongst many Buddhists (who seem to hate scientists, perhaps because they have been so successful?).

However the disenchantment cultivated by Enlightenment figures left some people feeling that such a mechanical universe was lacking something. In England especially poets began to celebrate the mystery of the cosmos, and especially to revel in the unreasoning and irrationality of flights of emotion. They sought to topple reason from the pinnacle of human endeavour and replace it with emotion. The Romantics indulged in all kinds of emotions, and produced art, literature and music designed to stimulate strong emotions - everything from love to horror. And they took all kinds of mind altering substances for the intense experiences they produced. They did not let society tell them how to live - the heroic individual and their emotional life ruled. For Romantics the exotic and mysterious provoked the kinds of emotions they enjoyed, so they cultivated an interest in them - the intellectual was seen as dull and lifeless. They also worshipped nature and valued the natural world, or at least an idealised notion of it. In many ways the morality 1960s was simply a late flowering of a seed planted by the 18th and 19th century Romantics (and just as misguided). This focus on emotion seems to underlie the idea that emotions are a particular category of human experience, and one of very high value.

In some ways we can see the Psycho-analytical movement as an attempt to reconcile these two rather monstrous cultural forces. Freud certainly saw himself as a scientist, and his subject of study was the emotional life of the patient. History has shown that Freud, while a gifted observer and writer, was no scientist. Only recently are neuroscientists starting to put psychology on a proper scientific footing. But Freud and his successors have profoundly influenced the way we view emotions. Emotions are hypostasized and become a special category of experience, distinct from thoughts and simple body sensations. Thoughts convey reason, while emotions are an expression of our mysterious 'soul' or 'spirit', a Romantic expression of our true nature. If we are to understand ourselves, the Psychologists tell us, then we must understand our inner emotional life; we must delve into the sources of our emotional reactions. It is because of the Romantics and Freud that we believe that an unexpressed emotion represents a danger to our well-being. As William Blake said:

Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

This is very far from either the early Buddhist view, or the emerging consensus from neuroscience. Buddhists texts are constantly telling us to use reason to keep our emotions in check. We are to avoid stimulating agitation by withdrawing our attention from sensory stimulation. This aspect of Buddhism is notably unpopular in Romantic Western Buddhism. We cannot bring ourselves to believe that saṃsāra is all bad. We just want to enjoy ourselves a little: by which we seem to mean to stimulate the emotions: be it joy, or horror. Unfortunately for us Western Buddhism is mainly lead by people from the Baby Boomer generation, and from that part of it which saw the Hippy movement, with its Romantic hedonism, self-absorption, self-indulgence, and intoxication, as a good thing. Renunciation is anathema to the Romantic.

In conclusion early Buddhism had a very different view of emotions than the view current in the Western World. Emotions were not a distinct category of experience, though I would argue that most of what we call emotion these days does fit into the broad category of papañca (though even the definition leans towards the mental rather than physical). Therefore the Buddha has no position on emotion, and emotions as a category play no part in his methods. Yes, we cultivate metta, but note that in the locus classicus, the Karaṇīyametta Sutta it is the mind (mānaso) that includes all beings, not the heart. Yes, we cultivate pamojja; and yes we suppress anger. But there is no theory of emotions as a distinct type of experience. At best emotions simply agitate us, and can be divided into those that fool us into craving, and those that fool us into aversion.

We Buddhists have long had critiques of materialism. We understand to some extent the influence of Scientific Rationalism. We also have some understanding of the influence of Protestantism. But we seem to have almost no notion that we are influenced by the Romantic movement, or by the German philosophical counterpart Idealism. Most Buddhists get interested in Psychology to some extent since it seems to related to what we do, but we have no sense that it channels Romanticism. There is no traditional critique of Romanticism perhaps because it wasn't a traditional view, whereas some form of materialism always was. Western Buddhists (and I may say the Triratna Order in particular) desperately need to develop a critique of Romanticism because it is such a powerful influence on how we see ourselves and the world, and its unchallenged assumptions impede our progress in the Dharma. This is not to say that we should reject Romanticism out of hand, only that we should be aware of the history of these ideas and how they influence our worldview.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. The kāyika/cetasika distinction occurs in other places as well, e.g. M i.302, iii.288-90; S iv.209, iv.231; v.111; A i.81, i.137, ii.143.
2. That these different kinds of thoughts are handled by different brain structures using different neurotransmitters doesn't change the facts of the physical manifestation in the rest of the body produced by the sympathetic nervous system and a narrow range of hormones.

Further Reading:

• 'The Psychology of Emotions in Buddhist Perspective' Sir D. B. Jayatilleke Commemoration Lecture, Colombo, 1976 by Dr. Padmasiri de Silva. Access to Insight, 21 February 2011.
• Buddhist and Psychological Perspectives on Emotions and Well-Being. Paul Ekman, Richard J. Davidson, Matthieu Ricard, and B. Alan Wallace. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 4 (2) 2005, p.59-63.
• James, William (1884) 'What is an Emotion?' Mind, 9, 188-205. Online: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/emotion.htm.
• Le Doux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain. Orion, 1999.
• BBC Radio 4 did a whole series of science programs in the emotions [needs Real Player].

Love and the Ordered Universe

The idea that the universe is non-random, above all that the universe follows rules analogous to human social rules that we can understand and follow in order to get along, is one of the most pervasive human myths and an important idea in most religions. Indeed we could define myth in this sense as a story or narrative which conveys the sense of an ordered universe, and in what way the universe is ordered (i.e. myth is descriptive); and religion as attempts to ensure we follow the laws implied by an ordered universe (i.e. religion is prescriptive). In ancient India this order was called first ṛta and then dharma.. In some tellings of Greek myth first there was khaos - an unordered, unstructured void - and then the ordered universe, the kosmos, was brought into being.

Since the European Enlightenment it has been discovered that mathematical models can describe aspects of the world very accurately. Simple equations such as F=ma or E=mc² tell us a great deal about how matter behaves, and what to expect from it in the future - matter appears to 'obey' these 'Laws'. In the course of my education I studied these physical laws in great detail, and personally demonstrated many of them. But along the way I began to see that my education in science consisted in being presented with a series of increasingly sophisticated models, none of which was true in any absolute sense, and none of which did much for my angst. The Laws of physics are useful and accurate descriptions of matter under most circumstances, but they do not meet every need.

Just because we perceive order, does not mean that there is order. Hopefully readers will recall the movie A Beautiful Mind. It no doubt romanticised the experience of madness, and yet it highlighted something about the human mind. Our mind sees patterns - we are pattern recognition sensors of the highest sensitivity. In fact we tend to see order where there is none. Give a human being a random array of points of light (like, say, the stars) and we fill it with a bestiary and a pantheon that reflects everything that we care about. Given random events we will see connections. In the movie John Nash becomes obsesses with and delusional about patterns, but this was a natural faculty gone haywire, not simply a product of madness.

One could also say that religion is simply our collective hopes and fears writ large and projected out onto the universe: our worst fear is that the universe is devoid of rules, or else utterly determined by rules; the hope is that there are enough rules to make life predictable, not too many as to make it stultifying. We want to be free to act, to choose, to experience novelty; but not too much. We want to know that the sun will rise each day, that the seasons will appear in due course, that the crops will grow and ripen; that we will have enough food and water, that predators will not carry us or our loved ones away etc. Most of these are not very sophisticated and reflect our evolved biological needs rather than our intellectual longings. Our societies overlay this with a veneer of sophistication, but our actual needs haven't changed in millennia, just the strategies for meeting those needs. As social primates it's important for us to establish social rules and hierarchies and for everyone to keep to them in order to fulfil our social needs. Hence we see the personified forces of nature as a celestial society, or as in ancient China as a celestial empire. The gods of course are not observed to obey the same social rules as humans, but never the less we discern order amongst them and do what we can to facilitate that order through sacrifice and prayer (all gods are similar in needing to be propitiated in order to behave - rather like over-sized toddlers). Many gods are effectively alpha-male primates in the sky - demanding submission and the best food. It seems irrational until you look at, say, chimp behaviour (I highly recommend reading Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man for instance). Part of the reason that apparently irrational religion is so very popular is that it speaks directly to deep human needs.

I wonder if this mismatch between our basic biology and intellect may be behind the mismatch between ordinary people and intellectuals? Recently I watched TED video of Richard Dawkins exhorting his audience to militant atheism. One of the points he makes is that amongst members of the American Academy of Science less that 10% believe in a god. When you compare that to members of the public it's more like 75% of people believe in a god. Dawkins quotes (ex)president Bush as saying an atheist could not be a patriot. Atheism is, however, the largest category of religious belief in the USA after Christianity - outnumbering Judaism, Hinduism and all other religions put together. But atheists have no political voice in the USA. I thought that was a very interesting point.

Intellectuals can generally see that the idea of a creator god is not credible, and it is interesting that Christian intellectuals back off from anthropomorphic versions of god even when they cannot give up the idea altogether. Ordinary people are harder to convince because they still project their hopes and fears onto the universe. And they want the universe to care. A caring universe is often personified as a loving mother or father (I don't recall any culture describing the universe/nature as a favourite aunt or uncle for instance).

The universe described by scientists seems not to care about us. I had an important realisation about this some years back when I used to surf on the rugged West Coast beaches near Auckland, New Zealand (especially Piha). These beaches are potentially dangerous and every year several people drown there, though with care they provide excellent surfing and swimming. The waves just roll in to their own rhythm, and they do not hesitate to drown the incautious. The sea does not glory in killing people, or regret one getting away. The sea is completely and utterly indifferent to us. When you float around on it for hours at a time, several days a week for a couple of years this becomes apparent. The ocean is magnificent, beautiful, fascinating, and thrilling, but it is not alive, not sentient. The ocean does not care, because it cannot. Caring is something that humans do.

I believe the universe is like this also. The universe does not care about us. It is not an ethical universe (i.e. it has no bias towards 'good') but one which is not aware at all, let alone aware of us and our needs: the universe is largely inanimate and driven by physics and chemistry. This might sound bleak or hard, scientists are often accused of being cold, but I'm not finished. Because the wonder is that self-aware beings can and do care. Sure, other animals experience consciousness and emotions so some extent. I don't deny that. But humans have this ability to rise above circumstances that no other animal possesses. We have an ability to be altruistic not possessed by other beings - for instance we help strangers, and can turn enemies into friends. In effect it is humans that provide the love, the caring, and the emotional warmth in the universe because they are products of consciousness, especially self-consciousness.

In response to one group of Brahmins who were concerned about the afterlife (Tevijja Sutta DN 13), the Buddha described a series of meditations in which one radiates positive emotions for all beings. One first of all radiates general goodwill, friendliness, love. One makes no distinctions between any beings, but imagines all beings everywhere being happy and well. Then we imagine that all people in need getting what they need, all the ill and unhappy beings becoming well and happy. Then we imagine ourselves celebrating along with everyone who has good fortune. And finally we radiate equanimity - a pure positivity not dependent on circumstances, but which arises out of our identification with all beings everywhere. What finer use of the imagination is there? It is no coincidence that the Buddha named this group of practices brahmavihāra (dwelling with god) and said of them that dwelling on the meditations was like dwelling with, or perhaps as, Brahmā (the creator god - usually depicted with four faces looking in the cardinal directions). The name was probably aimed at Brahmanical theists whose religious goal was brahmasahavyata 'companionship with Brahmā'. In response to concerns about the afterlife the Buddha simply teaches us to love without bounds in the here and now (as the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta says).

The Buddha's point is much the same as I have been saying. The universe, god if you will, is not the source of friendliness, love, caring, compassion. We are. Love is a human quality that emerges from our consciousness. It is up to us to provide this quality. It's a big job, and so we must set about it systematically, and collectively. Else we may fail, and we all know what that failure looks like. Fortunately we have ways of developing these qualities, and we have exemplars to inspire us. All we need do really is allow ourselves to be inspired, and have a go at the practices.

Buddhist Atheism and Darwin

Since being contacted by Ted Meissner of The Secular Buddhist podcast for an interview (an enjoyable experience), I've been taking more interest in the theme of non-religious Buddhism as an adaptation of Buddhism to Western Culture. I've watched a Stephen Batchelor video on YouTube, and read various articles. Batchelor is a voice of reason and I appreciate his contribution. At the same time I've discovered that I very much enjoy Richard Dawkins' polemical approach to religion.

Not long ago I changed my strap-line for this blog to "Western Buddhism... the Buddhist Enlightenment colliding with the European Enlightenment" which reflects my growing interest in how we adapt Buddhism to Western culture in a way that honours both. Though now a Buddhist and writer, I grew up secular and focussed by education on science. I have a B.Sc in chemistry from Waikato University, NZ. However, during my studies I realised that a detailed knowledge of the theory and practice of science was not enough. I was still largely unhappy, even depressed, most of the time, despite getting good grades in my chemistry classes. I did some shopping around before becoming a Buddhist and joining in with the Triratna Community. Buddhism seemed to offer what I was missing, and a large part of that was a community of people with coherent, well articulated, but also lived values. I found at the Auckland Buddhist Centre back in 1994.

In this post I want to look at one kind of rhetoric used by religions adapting to new cultural surroundings, and contrast that with how Charles Darwin changed the Christian Church forever. In the Hindu tradition there is a popular narrative about Gautama the Wake. He was in fact the ninth avatara of Viṣṇu, and he manifested in order to stop Hindu's from carrying out animal sacrifices, to reform the Hindu class system so as to allow the śudra class to be liberated. Hindu's therefore see Gautama the Wake as a reformer from within. I have met people, both in the West and in India, who hold this view in all seriousness and who tried to convince me of it. Of course no Buddhist takes this seriously. The lie is so great and so bold that we hardly know where to begin to refute it. However the avatara story is not rhetoric intended to convince Buddhists that really they are Hindus. No, the rhetoric has a primarily internal audience. This is a story that is mainly told by Hindus for Hindus.

Buddhists have used precisely this tactic. I've already pointed out that despite the efforts of many scholars (with K. R. Norman and Richard Gombrich at the forefront) to find parallels and echoes of the Upaniṣads in early Buddhist texts, that the early Buddhist portrayal of Brahmins suggests a slim and superficial knowledge - a second-hand caricature - rather than a true critique (See especially Early Buddhism and Ātman/Brahman). It might make sense to see the Buddhist critique of Brahmins as similarly intended for an internal audience, especially in light of the historical failure to convince many Brahmins. Later on we see other aspects of Indian religion being absorbed by Buddhists: Sarasvatī and Śrī in the Golden Light Sūtra; Śiva in the Karaṇḍavyūha Sūtra, and again in the Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṃgraha where Śiva is converted to Buddhism and becomes a dharmapāla (often the form of Mahākāla). Indeed if you look at the periphery of the early Tantric Buddhist maṇḍalas you will find all manner of deities from the Vedas and Pūraṇas, some of whom like the ḍākiṇī who go on to become quintessentially Buddhist! So Buddhists have long employed this same kind of rhetoric, critiquing other religions for an internal audience. I think it helps to strengthen group coherence, and faith in one's chosen path, especially perhaps under adverse circumstances.

I've noticed this same tactic on the Secular Buddhist Facebook page where there is a running critique of traditional Buddhism in terms of what it gets wrong: basically traditional Buddhism contains some superstition and some untestable metaphysical beliefs, such as, and perhaps especially, a belief in karma & rebirth. In my Secular Buddhist interview, Ted and I talked about rebirth & karma and the difficulties they pose for contemporary Buddhists. I am personally very sceptical about rebirth (see Rebirth and the Scientific Method), but I have argued that a belief in karma linked with rebirth might have pragmatic value when seen in the right light as a motivation to be ethical (see Hierarchies of Values). Mind you, I see beliefs per se as rather secondary to practical matters - what motivates someone to be ethical is less important than the fact that they are ethical. Motivations get refined by practice.

Buddhist Atheists, or secular Buddhists, or whatever we call them, have a problem not unlike the problem of 'Christian Atheists' (people whose belief system is defined by not believing in the Christian God). I suppose most Christian Atheists would claim that they don't believe in any god, but the fact is that the most of the public dialogue revolves around the existence or non-existence of the Christian God. Christians still set the agenda. One of the things I see as vitally important for modern discourse (over which I have almost no influence; but, hey, everyone has an opinion) is that we who are atheists need to find some positive content and start talking about incessantly. We need to stop defining ourselves in terms of what we do not believe, in terms of opposition to the mainstream. God is irrelevant.

One of the reasons that Charles Darwin has been so successful is that he did not set out to criticise the Church or its members. He set out to observe nature, and presented positive evidence of what he found. He did not invent the evolution meme, but he decisively showed that it was the über-meme of biology. Of course it had massive theological implications, but he more or less left it to the Church to work them out. Ironically the Darwin Correspondence Project draws out the fact that Darwin had not intended to attack church doctrine:

"But Darwin was very reticent about his personal beliefs, and reluctant to pronounce on matters of belief for others. His published writings are particularly reserved or altogether silent on religion." - What Did Darwin Believe?

Darwin is a model for anyone who thinks a paradigm needs overturning. He didn't, as far as I know, complain about the lack of a level playing field, or the lack of political influence amongst the intelligentsia (as Richard Dawkins does in his 2007 TED presentation); and he did not directly attack church doctrine - he didn't need to. Though we still argue about implications of his finding, we cannot ignore them. Darwin destroyed the church doctrine of creation by merely presenting his evidence to the Royal Society and the world.

In a sense I'm not interested in reading that traditional Buddhism is getting it all wrong. I agree that an Iron Age tradition, whose most recent innovations are medieval, is unlikely to sit well in our Information Age. It's a given that ancient traditions are failing to live up to the present situation, because we who live in these times, who invented these times, can barely understand and cope with them. On the other hand traditional Buddhism clearly helps many people to lead more meaningful and fulfilling and ethical lives - just as Christianity still appeals to many good people.

On the other hand the idea that Buddhism is inherently in tune with a scientific worldview is not true either - it is rooted in old-world ideas that no longer make sense. Many of those responsible for presenting Buddhism to the Western audience since the 19^th century have been passionate about the European Enlightenment rationalist legacy, and they have edited Buddhism to suit Western tastes. Aspects of Buddhism distasteful to the Western mind are often simply left out, glossed over, or explained away; and it's not until a closer association that we find that they are indubitably and perhaps indelibly present. It's not necessarily an intention to deceive, more like a strategy to attract people with what we already know attracts them, but to some extent it is a deception. One consequence is that some Buddhists still claim that the historical Buddha did not believe in any gods, but our own scriptures show him, on almost every page, conversing with gods from various religions. If he did not believe in gods, then who was he talking to?

What I want to see is evidence that leads to conclusions that change the way we think about life in general, from which we can work out the implications for Buddhism. I don't see this coming from Cosmology or Quantum Mechanics or any branch of physics. I think the parallels drawn to these disciplines are either prosaic or spurious. Probably we will find interesting results from ecologists, and evolutionary biologists - especially the followers of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, and if I had more time I would go back to Lovelock, and read Margulis (who argues that symbiosis and cooperation are more important drivers of evolution than specialisation and competition). For my money I think we will find compelling evidence to change the way we Buddhists think in the work of neuroscientists such as Oliver Sacks, Antonio Demasio, V. S. Ramachandran, Joseph LeDoux; and their colleagues such as Thomas Metzinger (philosopher), and Martin Seligman (psychologist). I had not read anything in this area for some years, but have been working through Metzingers's recent book The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. It's not always a joy to read, but the book has some very interesting things to say (more to come on Metzinger!). Clearly those who study consciousness and the mind are much closer to our interests than those who study matter.

Rather than railing against rebirth, karma, or any traditional beliefs (which I think will convert very few people) we would be better off to focus on talking about the implications neuroscience research. One fascinating instance of this is the unfolding discovery of just how intimately connected are consciousness and the brain - this area of study is surging ahead at the moment. The conclusion that mind and brain are inseparable seems increasingly obvious; and the idea of disembodied consciousness increasingly unlikely. I predict that actual rebirth won't survive as a viable meme for much longer except in marginal, fundamentalist sects. However symbolic rebirth as a myth (in the Joseph Campbell sense) may well continue to inform our lives. And we will understand the difference more clearly. The challenge will be presenting what is in fact a highly technical body of knowledge to a readership already overwhelmed by information, with a decreasing attention span, and not trained in the kinds of thinking required to truly grasp the implication of science.

The Darwinian approach of presenting a mass of positive evidence and allowing people to come to their own conclusions can change the world. Although an oppositional rhetoric (as described above) for an internal audience must have some value (or it would not survive), it won't reach beyond the borders of the converted - it is not useful for proselytising. In order to make changes in society, even in Buddhist society, one has to be clear that there is a better alternative, and I'm not sure that Buddhist atheists (or perhaps anyone who identifies with the label atheist) have found what that is yet - they know what they're against, but not what they are for. Or at least what they are for is actually part of the background of modern life (secularism, rationalism, materialism etc).