A Sober Assessment of Buddhism
Buddhism’s self-portrait as a clean break from the ancient Indian world it sprang from has always struck me as a bit too tidy, too convenient. Siddhattha Gotama didn’t conjure his insights in isolation; he was neck-deep in the turbulent intellectual waters of the Gangetic Plain, a place where yogis and ascetics were already pushing the boundaries of what the human mind could endure and uncover. He trained under figures like Āḷāra Kālāma, mastering states of nothingness that any Upaniṣadic seeker would recognize, and he flirted with the extreme self-mortification of the Jains before rejecting it. The vocabulary he wielded—karma as volitional force, saṃsāra as endless cycling, the devas as celestial busybodies—was the common currency of that era, drawn from a shared pool of Vedic, Sāṃkhya, and proto-yogic thought. Even the architecture of his path, with its split between the observer and the observed, echoes the Sāṃkhya of the Sāṃkhyakārikā, where puruṣa (the silent witness) stands apart from prakṛti’s ceaseless flux.
What sets the Buddha apart isn’t some wholesale invention, but a scalpel-like intervention at the system’s core. He borrows the yogic engine—ethical restraint to quiet the noise, samādhi to forge a blade of focused awareness—and drives it to the fourth jhāna, that threshold of luminous stability where the mind hangs suspended, free of gross distraction. From there, the paths diverge. A Sāṃkhya yogi might press on into formless infinities, affirming the puruṣa as the eternal seer, untouched by the world’s mess. The Buddha, in his pivotal twist, turns that same blade inward, dissecting the seer itself. “This too,” he insists, “arises and passes; this too is marked by impermanence, suffering, and non-self.” No refuge in a cosmic spectator; no eternal soul to cling to. It’s a move of breathtaking audacity, one that upends the very metaphysics it inherits, transforming liberation from isolation of the self into its total deconstruction.
And yet, this philosophical sharpness coexists with a tradition that, in practice, often feels anything but austere. Walk into a temple in Thailand or Sri Lanka, and you’re immersed in ritual: the rhythmic chant of paritta suttas to ward off misfortune, offerings of flowers and incense before gilded images, the sprinkling of “charged” water for protection against ghosts or bad luck. Relics are venerated as potent talismans; monks perform blessings that blur into exorcisms. The cosmology underpinning this is no mere metaphor—thirty-one planes of existence, from hellish torments to deva heavens, with yakkhas and petas lurking in the margins. Scholars like Melford Spiro nailed it when they split Buddhism into nibbanic (the elite quest for transcendence), kammatic (lay merit-making for better rebirths), and apotropaic (magical safeguards against life’s hazards). These layers aren’t add-ons; they’re the fabric of how most Buddhists live the tradition.
The doctrinal sleight of hand here is clever: rituals are “skillful means” for the unready mind, faith (saddhā) is provisional confidence to be verified, the Buddha isn’t a god but a supreme teacher. But let’s call it what it is—this is religion, full stop, with all the human warmth and occasional superstition that entails. The claim that Buddhism is purely rational inquiry ignores how these elements sustain communities, providing psychological anchors in a world of uncertainty. It’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise, especially when the lived reality for millions involves quasi-theistic devotion to the Buddha as a protective force.
Strip away the institutional gloss, and Buddhism reveals itself as a psycho-technology, a set of tools for hacking perception. Ethics clears the deck; concentration unifies the scattered mind through the jhānas, those states of intensified clarity where reality snaps into hyperreal focus—colors brighter, boundaries porous, the ordinary world’s filters stripped back. At that fourth jhāna fork, the real engineering begins: not ascent into bliss, but a plunge into the mechanics of experience itself. Practitioners report an “auto-deepening attractor,” a gravitational pull where the mind, once sufficiently still, falls toward a sober unveiling. The conceptual overlay—the constant mental narration of “me” and “mine”—thins out. What emerges isn’t euphoria but a stark obviousness: the self was always a contraction, a knot in the fabric of awareness. This is the phenomenological heart, shared across schools, whether a Chan master’s breakthrough or a forest monk’s glimpse of the deathless citta.
Here is where the tradition cracks open, and the crack matters far more than most practitioners realize.
The question sounds abstract, almost scholastic: when the self-contraction releases, what remains? Is it nothing—a blown-out candle, silence where the noise used to be? Or is it something—a luminous ground that was always present, now unobscured? On paper, this reads like a dispute for philosophy seminars. In the texture of actual practice, over months and years, it is the difference between two entirely different human outcomes.
Call them the Negative Pole and the Positive Pole. The terms are imperfect but serviceable.
The Negative Pole, crystallized in scholastic Abhidhamma and strict Madhyamaka, treats the endpoint as cessation pure and simple. Nibbāna is the extinguishing of the fires—greed, hatred, delusion—and with them, the extinguishing of the one who burned. There is no residual awareness to speak of, no ground, no luminosity. The arahant doesn’t “experience” nibbāna the way you experience a sunset; the very machinery of experience has been dismantled. Language falters here, as it should. But the framing of the path that leads to this endpoint carries its own gravitational force. If the destination is extinction, then practice becomes a sustained act of subtraction. You are peeling away layers of illusion, and beneath the last layer is not a hidden treasure but the absence of the need for treasures altogether.
The Positive Pole, articulated in Tathāgatagarbha literature, Chan/Zen, Dzogchen, and the Thai Forest masters’ talk of the “radiant citta,” inverts the emphasis. Here, liberation is less about extinguishing and more about uncovering. The defilements were never part of the mind’s fundamental nature; they were, in Ajahn Chah’s image, guests who overstayed their welcome. Show them the door, and what remains is not a void but the host—awareness itself, clear and self-luminous, never born and so unable to die. Sheng Yen, holding both Linji and Caodong transmission, framed it with characteristic precision: emptiness and Buddha Nature are two grammatical moods for the same reality. One says what it isn’t (a fixed, graspable thing); the other says what it does (know, shine, remain).
Now, why does this matter beyond the meditation cushion?
Because doctrine is not inert. It metabolizes into instruction, and instruction metabolizes into the felt texture of sitting, and the felt texture of sitting—repeated thousands of times—metabolizes into a human character. The small difference at the level of metaphysics becomes a large difference at the level of the nervous system.
Consider the psychological posture each pole encourages.
Under Negative Pole instruction, the practitioner relates to their experience as a problem to be solved by removal. Craving arises: let it go. Selfing arises: see through it. The body is analyzed into its unlovely components—bones, bile, viscera—to break attachment. The goal is cool dispassion, the arahant’s unshakeable equanimity. There is a purity to this, and for certain temperaments it works brilliantly. But notice the ambient message: you are the site of an error, and your job is to undo yourself. Over years, this can produce practitioners who are impressively still and remarkably hollow. Dissociation gets mislabeled equanimity. Emotional flatness gets mistaken for peace. The tradition has a term for this failure mode—sīlabbata-parāmāsa, attachment to rites and practices—but rarely notices when the attachment is to a self-image of the perfectly detached meditator. In more fragile individuals, the sustained “letting go” rhetoric, absent a floor to land on, can tip into depersonalization or nihilistic depression. The Dark Night stages (dukkha-ñāṇas) documented in Theravāda maps hit harder when there’s no doctrinal ground beneath you, only further dissolution.
Under Positive Pole instruction, the practitioner relates to their experience differently. Defilements are still obstacles, but they’re understood as obscurations of something already intact, not evidence of a fundamental brokenness. The message is: you are not a problem to be erased; you are a treasure to be unearthed. This reframe lands in the body. Practitioners report a sense of being “held” by the practice even as it dismantles surface identity. The Thai Forest monks speak of the citta as indestructible, and this isn’t just metaphysics—it functions as a psychological anchor. When the contents of mind get chaotic, there’s a place to stand. Ajahn Maha Boowa called it “the one who knows”; Sheng Yen called it “silent illumination.” Whatever the label, the structural effect is a floor beneath the falling. This doesn’t make the path easier—if anything, the Positive Pole demands you stop hiding behind ideas of your own inadequacy—but it makes it safer, particularly for Westerners arriving with pre-existing trauma or fragile ego structures.
The divergence extends beyond individual psychology. It shapes the kind of communities that form around each pole.
Negative Pole communities, when functioning well, are disciplined, austere, impressive. Monasteries run like clocks; practitioners are serious, often silent. But there’s a tendency toward coldness, an implicit ranking where the “more renounced” look down on those still entangled with worldly emotions. Newcomers can feel they’ve entered a hospital where everyone is being treated for the disease of having a self. The warmth that does exist often comes from individual teachers who’ve softened the doctrine through their own realization, not from the doctrinal framing itself.
Positive Pole communities skew differently. The message “you already have Buddha Nature” tends to produce settings where people are met with welcome rather than diagnosis. There’s more laughter, more relational warmth, more willingness to integrate practice with daily life. The danger is laxity—a kind of premature “we’re all already enlightened” that excuses sloppy ethics or unexamined shadow. But when the pole is held with rigor, the result is practitioners who can dismantle their egos without losing their humanity in the process. Bodhisattva ideals flourish here: the realized being who sticks around, who loves the mess of the world, who refuses transcendence as an exit strategy.
Zoom out further and the civilizational footprints diverge.
Theravāda cultures, weighted toward the Negative Pole, have historically excelled at textual preservation and monastic purity. They’ve produced fewer aesthetic or philosophical innovations—less art, less poetry, less fusion with secular culture. The logic is consistent: if the world is burning, why build beautiful houses in it? Chan and Zen cultures, by contrast, exploded into calligraphy, landscape painting, tea ceremony, martial arts, garden design. When form is emptiness and emptiness is form, form becomes a legitimate playground for awakened activity. The tradition engaged its civilizational context instead of withdrawing from it. Tibetan Buddhism, with its elaborate Vajrayāna technologies and its fusion of Madhyamaka with Dzogchen, produced one of the most visually and philosophically dense cultures on the planet—until external forces flattened it.
None of this is destiny. Individuals transcend their training all the time; a Thai Forest master like Ajahn Chah radiated more warmth than a thousand doctrine-compliant monks. And both poles have their failure modes—the Negative collapses into nihilism and emotional vacancy, the Positive inflates into spiritual narcissism and bypassing. But the center of gravity matters. When a tradition consistently frames liberation as annihilation, it attracts and forms one kind of person. When it frames liberation as recognition of intrinsic wholeness, it attracts and forms another. Over generations, these differences compound.
For the novice stepping into this fray, the experience is disorienting: a marketplace of ontologies, each lineage peddling its “true” Buddhism while preaching non-grasping. The institutional machinery—sectarian branding, teacher egos, cultural hierarchies—amplifies the noise. Yet warmth in a community is a tell: it often signals a Positive Pole undercurrent, where newcomers are met as fellow bearers of innate potential rather than deluded patients needing correction. Coldness, by contrast, hints at Negative Pole rigidity, where doctrinal correctness trumps human connection. Neither warmth nor coldness guarantees realization, but they shape whether the path will be survivable.
Buddhism’s flaws are real: its historical self-mythologizing as uniquely rational ignores its yogic debts and ritual underbelly; its internal schisms, when unacknowledged, confuse and alienate seekers; its failure to name the Negative-Positive divide leaves practitioners caught in crossfire they can’t see. But these are the marks of a human endeavor, not a divine download. What endures as valuable is the unflinching diagnosis of suffering’s mechanics, the precision-engineered tools for attentional mastery, the ethical scaffolding that grounds insight in compassion, and the communal structures that have preserved these gifts across millennia. Above all, the tradition’s boldest stroke—dismantling the observer without leaving a void, or dismantling the observer while revealing the ground that was never absent—remains a profound contribution to human self-understanding. Approach it not as gospel, but as a map drawn by explorers who went further than most. The territory is yours to verify.