Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life

by Nicolas Bommarito

Many of us, even on our happiest days, struggle to quiet the constant buzz of anxiety in the background of our minds. All kinds of worries--worries about losing people and things, worries about how we seem to others--keep us from peace of mind. Distracted or misled by our preoccupations, misconceptions, and, most of all, our obsession with ourselves, we don't see the world clearly--we don't see the world as it really is.

In our search for happiness and the good life, this is the main problem. But luckily there is a solution, and on the path to understanding it, we can make use of the rich and varied teachings that have developed over centuries of Buddhist thought.

With clarity and compassion, Nicolas Bommarito explores the central elements of centuries of Buddhist philosophy and practice, explaining how they can improve your life and teach you to live without fear. Mining important texts and lessons for practical guidance, he provides a friendly guide to the very practical goals that underpin Buddhist philosophy. After laying out the basic ideas, Bommarito walks readers through a wide range of techniques and practices we can adopt to mend ingrained habits.

Rare for its exploration of both the philosophy that motivates Buddhism and its practical applications, this is a compassionate guide to leading a good life that anyone can follow.

Genres: Philosophy, Buddhism, Religion, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Psychology, Self Help

320 pages, Hardcover

Published July 1, 2020

About the author

Nicolas Bommarito is assistant professor in philosophy at the University at Buffalo in New York.

Reviews

[John Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot of this book that I had difficulty understanding so it took me quite some time to digest it and finish the book. There were several bits and pieces that seemed very important and a whole lot of things that help me get a better understanding of Buddhism but were not useful to me otherwise.

I enjoyed learning how other cultures and religions see the world. I also learned that the Western version of Buddhism is quite different from Asian versions and that there are many different shools of Buddhism.

[reetika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helped me fall asleep on many, many nights (and that’s a good thing).

[Maher Razouk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book opened my eyes . Fascinating

[Chet Taranowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good, but there is something about condescending the tone of the author that was off putting for me. But in all fairness he did a pretty good job of explaining the philosophical foundations of Buddhism and an excellent job of reviewing the various Buddhist practices.

[Lucy Shen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was a good unbiased intro to Buddhism for me, broken down into simple terms. Only complaint is that sometimes this simplicity would result in long winded explanations which could have been more concise. Complimentary to my reading of A Tale for the Timebeing (Nao) and HunterXHunter (Netero).

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Having words for colors can be useful, but you might start assuming that there are only as many colors out there as there are names for them. But in reality there’s a full spectrum of colors in the world, many more than we could ever name.”

American professor of philosophy and Buddhism Nicolas Bomb Burrito does a wonderful job of explaining what Buddhism’s really about, paying more attention to practice than most similar books do. On the philosophy side, he doesn’t even explicitly say what the Four Noble Truths are, yet manages to shine a light into the heart of Buddhism all the same.

Particularly valuable is how Bomb Burrito shows that the perception and idea of Buddhism in the West has been shaped by those who have introduced and promoted it. Part of this is the modern conception (and what I think of as the misappropriation) of 'mindfulness', and how this has been divorced from other elements. The popular Western version of Buddhism notably plays down 'supernatural' elements, too. This book helps illuminate how important these are.

Bomb Burrito has a deep knowledge and understanding, not just of modern Western ideas of Buddhism, but about its Asian roots. His learned yet open-minded and informal book is about knowing, doing, and how to do - all in a very readable package.

What’s more, he loves and recommends Osamu Tezuka's 1980s manga about the life of the Buddha!

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book which spends most of the first half explaining Buddhism from a philosophical perspective. I found much of it helpful and interesting, although i had to re-read some of it in order to grasp what Bommarito was saying. Still, I think the average reader could understand most of it. The second half of the book got into some more esoteric content, but then toward the end switched into descriptions and the purpose of different types of practice in Buddhism. This was more practical and fairly helpful. The list of Buddhist texts and resources at the end was appreciated. So while the book didn’t quite answer all my questions about Buddhism, it was worthwhile.

[Martin Bortnick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a great exploration of Buddhism! This is a book that I will keep in my library and reread and refer to it often. The author does a great job of explaining Buddhist principles and making them easy to grasp without placing any Buddhist tradition above any other. The book was enlightening, thought provoking and enjoyable! Deserves a hundred gold stars!

[Aynur Aslanova · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a need to read some sentences and paragraphs of this book a couple of times. This book sends you to a meditative state, to a philosophical questioning.. It's not because you hear these sentences, thoughts for the first time, but because one more time you remind yourself what life is all about.

[Arend · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read. The author describes it as "how a modern American philosopher makes sense of Buddhism," and that is spot on. The book's structure (Philosophy; Practice) didn't work for me, since it left me wanting on both counts. The Further Reading is well annotated and quite helpful, however.

[Dan Burt · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.7 stars.

[Thady · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great insights into Buddhism and its philosophy and practices

[Mills College Library]

294.3444 B696 2020

[Judi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A practical presentation of Buddhism basics that provides techniques to reinforce understanding and personal practice.

[Christopher Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice little introduction to Buddhism. This a good book for someone new to the subject, or someone wanting a simple explanation of Buddhist ideas.

[Zach Toad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alongside "Why Buddhism is True" by Robert Wright, "Seeing Clearly" is the best introductory book on Buddhism I've read. Many features of the book's approach make it particularly worthy of your time: the simple, straightforward writing style; Bommarito's admission that the book is only one distinctly American philosopher's take on Buddhism and its most helpful elements; a chapter-long survey of other kinds of Buddhism practiced around the world; the hard-nosed, honest depiction of suffering and anxiety in life. But what I found most impressive about the book was its defense of philosophical activity and its willingness to place meditative practice alongside it as a means of more fully digesting and embodying and seeing the world through the lens of the overarching Buddhist philosophical outlook. Many schools of Buddhism, even the Buddha himself, recommend against intellectual thought, system-building, and getting too caught up in conceptualizations. But Bommarito rightly points out that Buddhism has a variety of rich traditions of thinkers and writers, who have spilled a lot of ink debating, discussing, and arguing hardcore problems in metaphysics and epistemology. Evidently, philosophy plays *some* part in Buddhism.

Bommarito masterfully explains explains the major doctrines, especially the foundational concept of emptiness. The chapter "Heaps and Hurricanes" launches us into a clear-eyed argument that all phenomena in the world (or at least in our experience) are relational, interdependent, and composite. There are no tables and chairs, just material stuff arranged into the shapes of tables and chairs. No objects have a wholly independently-existing, intrinsic essence. This logic applies even to us humans: we are just composite, ever-changing, relational entities—unfolding psychophysical processes—with no stable, permanent essence or self. Radical, far-out, and probably true. At this point, however, I think the book would have benefited from discussing some of Derek Parfit's work, especially his thought experiments, like the Teletransporter, to deepen the readers appreciation of how radical the doctrine of no-self is: we all have a deep, intuitive sense that using the Teletransporter would be like dying, but the upshot of Buddhist thought (as well as Parfit's) is that the Teletransporter is as good as normal, day-to-day survival. Notwithstanding this small omission, there is a pedagogical genius in Bommarito's sequence—first explaining the doctrine of emptiness, then applying it to the self, instead of approaching this difficult metaphysical landscape the other way around.

The latter half of the book, which focuses on various meditative practices, might have been even a bit more practical, providing more explicit instructions for each technique in mind-training. Nevertheless, the fact that this section still reads like philosophy is helpful. It fills out much of the picture drawn in the first half of the book. Here, Bommarito helped clarify for me the relationship between focused, concentration-based mindfulness practices and the more open Zen- or Dzogchen-style practices, which are based around immediately seeing Buddha Nature and the preconditions for any experience at all. The basic idea is that the mind must first be calm and still to see things clearly.

Bommarito's book is easy and quick, yet deep and comprehensive. I will recommend it enthusiastically to anyone interested in these ideas—in what seems to me the most important and most plausible philosophical outlook we humans have built.