After all, the Buddha preached liberation from suffering. These Buddhism purists aren’t against reducing stress. The second kind of blowback comes not from Buddhism skeptics but from Buddhism aficionados, who lament that meditation has-in some circles, at least-become so mundane as to invite ridicule from the Adam Grants of the world. For example, exercise takes the edge off stress. “Every benefit of the practice can be gained through other activities,” Grant says. The author and business guru Adam Grant has complained of being “stalked by meditation evangelists.” Which bothers him all the more because the feats they harp on are so pedestrian. First, because goals like stress reduction are so clear, attainable, and gratifying, many people now sing the praises of meditation-which deeply annoys some people who don’t. This drift from the philosophical to the practical has inspired two kinds of blowback. In fact, mindfulness meditation is often packaged in frankly therapeutic terms: “mindfulness-based stress reduction.”
When companies like Goldman Sachs start offering free meditation training to employees, and puts a meditation room on each floor of a San Francisco office building, it’s a safe bet that heightened appreciation of Buddhist metaphysics isn’t the goal. Most of today’s meditators aren’t following the guidance of the Bloomberg News headline that accompanied Ford’s quote: “To Make a Killing on Wall Street, Start Meditating.” Still, the past decade’s wave of interest in mindfulness meditation has had a utilitarian air. Of course, a stereotype is just a stereotype.
Wright has taught in the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania and the religion department at Princeton and is currently visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. This article is adapted from his new book Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. Robert Wright ( is the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and The Evolution of God (a Pulitzer Prize finalist). It had gone from deepening your insight to sharpening your edge. And “space is like a rock because it is empty.” Fast forward half a century, and hedge fund manager David Ford, in an interview with Bloomberg News, was summarizing the benefits of meditation this way: “I react to volatile markets much more calmly now.” Buddhist practice, once seen as subversive and countercultural, now looked like a capitalist tool. “There is no me and no you,” Kerouac wrote. One minute founding beatnik Jack Kerouac was spouting arcane Buddhist truths that meditation is said to reveal. It was sometime between the 1950s, when Zen Buddhism seeped into the beat generation, and the early 21st century, when mindfulness meditation seeped into Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It’s hard to put your finger on the point when the Western stereotype of Buddhist meditation flipped. Is mindfulness meditation a capitalist tool or a path to enlightenment? Yesīy Robert Wright | illustrations by Valero Doval