Sapiens and Buddhism

Recently I listened to the book “Sapiens.” The author looks at the development of the human race, starting from the point where we evolved to be hunter-gatherers, then moving upwards through the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, and everything he can think to mention in between.

One of his fundamental points in the book I found to be very interesting. He had a line in it that went something along the lines of:

In order to work in groups larger than 150 or so people, human beings needed to develop the ability to believe in concepts entirely of their own imagination. For example, God, money, the limited liability company, and nations. Not something real, like rivers or trees, but something of pure fiction.

The first thought one might have to this is that it’s a remarkable observation. A second thought is that it’s also a fundamental delusion that believes a river or a tree is a “real thing.” In fact, what we call a river or a tree is a constantly changing, impermanent form that we arrange with our senses. A river never stays the same from moment to moment–our minds take a moving structure that has particles moving in some pattern together, and is acted upon by various forces in the environment (water from upstream, sunshine, the riverbank, rocks, animals, fish, clouds) and we mistake that as a permanent thing which exists in its own right. If the causes of the river were to be removed, the river–or idea of it–would cease to be.

As a result, the author makes a fundamental error: he has succumbed to the same delusion which Buddhists and many other spiritual traditions see as the root of suffering, which is attaching to form. At the same time, from doing this, he has missed the causes and conditions that bring about the “imagined reality” of, for example, money. Money is fundamentally an agreement between large numbers of people. It “exists” in the sense that we all agree it exists, which can be likened to forces operating on the concept of money. Human beings can intelligently see that the ever changing imagined belief of money has causes which bring it about. We are still fundamentally deluded in the sense that our subconscious minds tend to forget that it’s impermanent and not existing in its own right, but that is the same as the river and the tree.

River, tree, money, animal, child, wife, limited liability corporations, the rule of law, the wind blowing on a warm summer evening, a lion roaring in the plains of Africa. They all have this in common: they exist for but a moment. They come from emptiness and they return to it. They cannot be held onto, or grasped. And yet, they are also still here, in this moment.