Interrogating Texts on Yoga and Buddhism

Creative reading of texts on Yoga and Buddhism in the light of recent discoveries in psychology and neuroscience can throw new light on those texts and expand the realm of modern psychology as well. This article uses two modern psychological discoveries in particular: (1) memory reconsolidation, and (2) the distinction between wanting and liking.

Carlo Rovelli — in his book Anaximander and the Birth of Science (whose English translation came out in 2023) — makes the following observation (p. 14):

… though the Imperial Astronomical Bureau in China existed almost without interruption for more than twenty centuries — and though it had at its disposal astronomical observations gathered over thousands of years, along with some of the empire’s most brilliant minds, chosen on the basis of merit following a series of rigorous exams — its results were far from brilliant. Just three hundred years ago, the institute’s ability to predict celestial phenomena was vastly inferior to that of Ptolemy’s Almagest, written more than fifteen hundred years earlier. What’s more, the institute had not yet grasped the fact that the earth is round.

Rather than concluding from this that the Chinese were incapable of doing science,1 I would rather draw attention to another recent quotation, by another illustrious scholar: Jared Diamond. Diamond points out that science is not only a question of observation and measurement. More fundamental perhaps than observation and measurement is the general outlook, the worldview of the person who is to do the observing and measuring. Historians of science sometimes use the German expression Fragestellung to refer to this outlook or worldview. The Fragestellung may determine what people will be interested to observe and measure, and what ideas they are willing to develop. Diamond then says (2015: 488; see also p. 489):

As for new ideas made possible by a new Fragestellung, consider first the foundation of the several modern sciences constituting population biology: taxonomy/systematics, evolutionary biology, biogeography, ecology, animal behavior, and genetics. At least until recently, most research in all those fields except genetics involved observations, counting, and measurements requiring no equipment. Most of that research could have been done by Aristotle, Herodotus, and their contemporaries in classical-age Greece over 2,000 years earlier. … Aristotle could … have examined Greek animals and plants and arrived at Linnaeus’ hierarchical taxonomy. Herodotus could have compared the species of the Black Sea with those of Egypt and thereby founded biogeography. And any ancient Greek could have grown and counted pea varieties as did Gregor Mendel in the 1860s, noticed the differences between Willow Warblers and Chiffchaffs (a related warbler species) as did Gilbert White in the 1780s, watched young geese as did Konrad Lorenz in the 1930s, and thereby founded genetics, ecology, and animal behavior. But ancient Greece lacked the necessary Fragestellung that lent interest to counting pea varieties and scrutinizing warblers and young geese. The rise of those branches of population biology from the 1700s onward was due to a modern Fragestellung that generated data (without the need for invention of microelectrodes or X-ray crystallography), which in turn generated ideas, in areas where previously there had been neither data nor detailed ideas.

Foot Notes

¹ On the Chinese opposition to Western science, see Wong 1963.

I add one quotation, this one by Richard Dawkins (2017: 152):

Aristotle is one of many highly intelligent thinkers who, one might suppose; could have worked out the principle of evolution by natural selection, but didn’t. Why not? Evolution by natural selection is the kind of idea, you might think, that could occur to a great thinker and naturalist in any century. Unlike Newton’s physics, it’s hard to see why it needed two millennia of shoulders to stand on. However, it clearly did, so my intuition must be just plain wrong.

Is this intuition wrong because it fails to take Aristotle’s Fragestellung into consideration? One would think it is.

These quotations show, I think, that a crucial side of scientific and scholarly activity is the way collected materials are interrogated, what Fragestellung they are subjected to. Merely collecting materials was not appreciated in classical India either. They had a special nyāya for such activities: the kākadantagaveṣaṇanyāya or kākadantaparīkṣānyāya, which Apte’s dictionary describes as “The maxim of searching after a crow’s teeth, used to denote any useless, unprofitable, or impossible task.”

In this paper I wish to concentrate on the way we, modern textual scholars, interrogate our material. It cannot be denied that our branch of study collects mountains of material, often by making texts available. However, do we put in enough effort interrogating that material? With hindsight, the Chinese astronomers should have interrogated their material more energetically, and so should the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. We would not like it if in future centuries we, textual scholars of the 21st century, will be accused of not interrogating our material more creatively.

What, then, should be our Fragestellung? Don’t expect me to give a general answer to this question, which, in this general form, is totally beyond my reach. I’ll rather give an example where a different interrogation of Indian textual material seems possible and promising.

Two preliminary remarks are necessary. The ancient Chinese and Greek thinkers considered had enough information (or so we think) to arrive at the conclusions that they missed out on. The Chinese astronomers could have known that the earth is round based on their extensive observations, but they did not draw this conclusion. Aristotle could have arrived at Linnaeus’ hierarchical taxonomy, or at the theory of evolution by natural selection, but he did not. In looking at ancient Indian texts, the situation is different. We may be able to draw conclusions from the data they provide, because we have information that the authors of those text did not yet possess. The Fragestellung in that case is not insufficient in the case of those authors. Our goal is rather to make sure that our Fragestellung, as moderns, is adequate to optimally interpret the data presented in those texts.

With this in mind, look at the classical texts of Yoga and Buddhism. These texts contain challenges even for those who refuse to be taken in by fashionable ideas. Some of these challenges have never been addressed, despite the great interest that these movements evoke, both inside and outside academia. Prominent among these is the oft repeated claim that certain practices described in their early texts can bring about radical psychological changes.

The study of religious texts often obliges scholars to take much of what they find in those texts with a grain of salt. Few scholars will literally believe the supernatural claims made in those texts. I assume that nowadays nobody alive believes in Zeus, the sky and thunder god of ancient Greece. This is understandable and justified. However, the tendency to reject a priori what we find in religious texts may go too far. At least in theory, each rejection needs some kind of justification. We do not believe in the existence of the creator god Prajāpati because we now have a different explanation of how the universe came into being (or perhaps better: we look for different explanations). For most of us this will be an explanation proposed by modern science, which leaves no place for Prajāpati. Many of the contents of religious texts can be similarly discarded. However, no contents should be discarded without justification.

This takes us back to the texts of Yoga and Buddhism. What do we know about radical psychological changes? Is it enough to discard the claims made in those texts? If there are good reasons, preferably scientific reasons, to do so, no one has yet bothered to formulate them explicitly, as far as I know. The question remains: Does it make scientific sense to take these claims seriously?

In an article contributed to a recent felicitation volume (Bronkhorst 2024) the following task was considered. Do the relevant Indian texts contain passages that can be easily interpreted in terms of memory reconsolidation? Memory reconsolidation is a recent discovery in psychology. It implies that emotionally charged memories can be erased (this is the technical term used) and therefore deprived of their emotional charges if they can be consciously remembered along with those charges. Erasure takes place if this happens within the reconsolidation window (i.e., while the memory is still labile) and is accompanied by what is called mismatch or prediction error (i.e., a different emotional response to the remembered event).

Here is a short description of how memory reconsolidation relates to more common therapeutic methods in humans:²

Foot Notes

²Phelps & Schiller 2013: 199; emphases added.

Studies examining the behavioral interference of emotional memories in humans have explored both conditioned aversive memories and appetitive memories. A common nonpharmacological technique to change conditioned emotional reactions is extinction training. Extinction involves recurrent presentations of the CS [conditioned stimulus] without aversive or appetitive outcomes, which leads to a gradual decrease in the CR [conditioned response]. Similar to acquisition, extinction is a learning process, but now the CS is associated with no aversive or appetitive outcome. Importantly, there is abundant evidence that standard extinction training results in an additional memory trace representing an alternative for the CS (e.g., safe). Because the initial aversive or appetitive memory trace still exists, the CR can return after extinction training in a number of circumstances … However, if extinction training occurs during reconsolidation while the memory is still labile, it is possible that this new information will get incorporated into the original memory trace, thus updating the original emotional memory and changing its emotional significance.

Interestingly, the main texts of classical Yoga contain passages that illustrate erasure. I invite you to look with me at one of them.

The Pātañjala Yogaśāstra (= Yogasūtra + Yogabhāṣya) contains the following passage in and around sutra 1.50:³

When the yogin has attained the insight connected with absorption, the mental trace (saṃskāra) of that insight comes about anew and anew.

The mental trace born from that [insight] impedes other mental traces (sutra 1.50)

The mental trace that arises from the insight connected with absorption obstructs the stock of mental traces that has arisen out of the insight connected with everyday wakefulness. Since the mental traces connected with everyday wakefulness have now been overcome, no mental contents arise from those any longer. Once those mental contents have been suppressed, absorption comes about, followed by the insight connected with absorption, and then the mental traces produced by that insight. In this way the stock of mental traces increases again and again, followed by insight, then mental traces.

This passage points at memory reconsolidation: Mental traces (the ones arising from the insight connected with absorption) obstruct mental traces connected with everyday wakefulness. Replacement of some, or even all, “ordinary” mental traces with mental traces related to some better insight is precisely what we would expect successful memory reconsolidation to achieve.

Note that this passage does more than merely repeating what we know already from modern psychology. It tells us how emotionally charged memories can be consciously remembered so as to be erased. The method it proposes to gain access to those memories is mental absorption. It is in a state of mental absorption, and as a consequence of that absorption, that “mental traces connected with everyday wakefulness are overcome”, to borrow the terminology of this passage.

To sum up what we have so far discussed: Recent discoveries in psychology allow us to go beyond the texts, to do more than just trying to understand them in the light of the ideas expressed in those texts themselves. In return, they may turn our attention to something that had received as yet no attention in modern psychology, in this case the role of mental absorption.

This example shows, I hope, that we can do more with old texts than interpreting them in light of the background philosophy of their authors. This is clearly the primary task of philologists. However, we are allowed, even obliged, to go further in our interrogation of those texts. I would think that the passage from the Yogaśāstra just considered has gained in interest by bringing in recent developments of psychology. It certainly obliges us to take texts such as the Yogaśāstra seriously, as potentially more than just the imaginations of some ancient thinkers.

Let us now move on to the Buddhist noble truths. A recent article, called “The Buddhist noble truths: are they true?”, dealt with this topic (Bronkhorst 2023). These self-styled truths were, rightly or wrongly, believed to have been pronounced by the Buddha in his first sermon. They are often repeated in longer or shorter form in the early texts. Here they are:

This, O monks, is the noble truth of suffering: Birth is suffering, old age is suffering, sickness is suffering, dying is suffering, to be united with the unloved is suffering, to be separated from the loved is suffering, not to obtain what one desires is suffering, in short, the five-fold clinging is suffering.

This, O monks, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is the thirst which leads from birth to birth, together with lust and passion, which finds gratification here and there: the thirst for pleasures, the thirst for being, the thirst for non-existence.

This, O monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: the complete and passionless cessation of this thirst, letting it go, expelling it, separating oneself from it, giving it no room.

Foot Notes

³ samādhiprajñāpratilambhe yoginaḥ prajñākṛtaḥ saṃskāro navo navo jāyate/ tajjaḥ saṃskāro ´nyasaṃskārapratibandhī (1.50)/ samādhiprajñāprabhavaḥ saṃskāro vyutthānaprajñāprabhavaṃ saṃskārāśayaṃ bādhate/ vyutthānasaṃskārābhibhavāt tatprabhavāḥ pratyayā na bhavanti/ pratyayanirodhe samādhir upatiṣṭhate/ tataḥ samādhijā prajñā tataḥ prajñākṛtāḥ saṃskārā iti navo navaḥ saṃskārāśayo vardhate/ tataś ca prajñā tataś ca saṃskārā iti/ (ed. Maas 2006: 83-87)

This, O monks, is the noble truth of the path which leads to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path, to wit: right faith, right resolve, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right thought, right absorption.

Modern scholars may be tempted to look upon these self-styled truths the way they look upon other truths proclaimed in ancient religions, such as claims about the god Prajāpati. That is to say, scholars may take these truths with a grain of salt. However, these truths make no supernatural claims, nor do they conflict with our modern scientific world view. (Full disclosure: I pass over in silence the marginal and implicit reference to rebirth and karmic retribution.) They may not correspond to how people feel about themselves or about the world, but this is irrelevant. There was a time when people’s gut feelings told them that the earth was flat, or that the sun turned around the earth. Those people (or their descendants) had to come to terms with the discovery that their gut feelings did not correspond to reality. In this same manner, however fanciful and extravagant the complete cessation of suffering may sound to us, we must stop looking at these claims through the glasses of our gut feelings and instead consider whether they are, or are not, in agreement with what we know about the world (and about human psychology in particular).

In the article just mentioned, it was argued that at least one respectable psychological and neuroscientific theory appears to support, or at least be compatible with, these self-styled truths. This does not mean that these “truths” are necessarily true. However, it does mean that we are not justified in simply ignoring them. We have to take them seriously, which means in this case that we must try to understand them literally.

This is not the occasion to enter into the nitty-gritty of neuroscientific theories. Two relatively new psychological findings will get us going. The first one we have discussed already; it is memory reconsolidation. The other concerns the fundamental difference between wanting and liking, a difference that has drawn the attention of academic psychology. A recent publication (Berridge & Robinson 2016: 670) describes it as follows:

Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psychological process of ‘wanting’ a particular reward is dissociable from circuitry that mediates the degree to which it is ‘liked’. Incentive salience or ‘wanting’, a form of motivation, is generated by large and robust neural systems that include mesolimbic dopamine. By comparison, ‘liking’, or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and fragile neural systems, and is not dependent on dopamine. The incentive-sensitization theory posits the essence of drug addiction to be excessive amplification specifically of psychological ‘wanting’, especially triggered by cues, without necessarily an amplification of ‘liking’. This is due to long-lasting changes in dopamine-related motivation systems of susceptible individuals, called neural sensitization. A quarter-century after its proposal, evidence has continued to grow in support of the incentive-sensitization theory. Further, its scope is now expanding to include diverse behavioral addictions and other psychopathologies.

I will not comment upon the technical aspects of this quotation. Important for us is the following: If we replace the term wanting with desire or thirst, we end up with the second and third noble truths which, as you will recall, linked thirst to the origin of suffering, and explained the cessation of suffering in terms of the complete and passionless cessation of thirst.

How, then, can wanting be eliminated? At this point memory reconsolidation comes in. Assume for a moment that many (if not all) of our wants are based on forgotten experiences. These experiences are forgotten, to be sure, but they have left traces in our minds in the form of hidden memories.4 If these hidden memories can be brought back to consciousness, memory reconsolidation can help to erase them in the manner described above. The way to bring them back to consciousness, we have just learned, is through mental absorption. Together, mental absorption and memory reconsolidation may, in ideal circumstances, remove wants, i.e., desires. At the uppermost limit, the result will be the complete and passionless cessation of thirst, and of the suffering that results from it.

This does not yet answer the question how mental absorption can bring about memory reconsolidation. Does mental absorption provide access to hidden memories, and if so, how does it do so? A closer study of mental absorption (and of related phenomena, including attention and concentration) strongly suggests that it is essentially negative: it excludes stimuli. We concentrate on a phenomenon by excluding interfering stimuli such as sounds, sights, as well as distracting thoughts, i.e., both external and internal stimuli.

This happens through the activation of certain serotonin receptors in the brain (5-hydroxytryptamine-2A or 5-HT2A receptors), which dampen both external and internal stimuli. Hidden memories tend to be “surrounded” by phobias, which prevent access to those memories. These phobias, too, are (internal) stimuli that can be dampened by absorption if it is deep enough. This is, in essence and in as few as possible words, the way in which mental absorption can provide access to hidden memories.⁵

Foot Notes

⁴ Note that, in rats in any case, “an experience learned during the infantile amnesia period is stored as a latent memory trace for a long time; indeed, a later reminder reinstates a robust, context-specific and long-lasting memory” (Travaglio et al. 2016: 1225; see also Alberini & Travaglia 2017). For human infants, see now Ramsaran & Frankland 2025; Simms 2025; Yates et al. 2025.

Knowing this does not remove all obstacles. Most people are not capable of attaining such depth of absorption and are not even able to attain it in spite of much practice. Interestingly, there may be a shortcut. Mental absorption, as we have seen, corresponds to the activation of 5-HT2A receptors in the brain. Activating 5-HT2A receptors is precisely what psychedelics are known to do. This suggests that great depth of absorption can be reached with the help of psychedelics. This would of course require that the experience be guided by the subject after intake of a sufficient amount of the psychedelic. And this would be only the beginning, because memory reconsolidation only takes place on condition of mismatch or prediction error. This, too, depends on the active involvement of the subject. Since to my knowledge no such experiments have as yet been recorded, there is no more I can say about it.

Not everyone will be inclined to agree with this depiction of what can possibly happen to a human mind. It pushes memory reconsolidation to unheard of limits. What the four noble truths claim is that memory reconsolidation can indeed be pushed to those limits. Is that correct? It is obviously not for me to give a definite answer to that question. However, I do insist that scholars cannot and should not discard these self-styled truths without giving them proper thought. As pointed out at the beginning of this paper, we can interrogate our texts creatively, introducing new ideas where this is possible and appropriate. The alternative is to read those texts the way a machine would read them. The end result would probably be that sooner or later we can leave our task to AI, and that result would no doubt be unsatisfactory. It seems unlikely that we can any time soon leave it to AI to come up with a different and interesting kind of Fragestellung.⁶

1. Alberini, Cristina M (2013) Memory Reconsolidation. Amsterdam etc.: Elsevier.
2. Alberini, Cristina M, Travaglia, Alessio (2017) Infantile amnesia: A critical period of learning to learn and remember. The Journal of Neuroscience 37(24): 5783-5795.
3. Apte VS (1957-1959) Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 3 vols. Poona.
4. Berridge, K. C. & Robinson, T. E. (2016): “Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction.” American Psychologist 71(8): 670-679.
5. Bronkhorst, Johannes (2023) The Buddhist noble truths: Are they true”? Religions 14(1): 82.
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7. Bronkhorst, Johannes (forthcoming) “Religion and the brain: on consciousness and attention.” Religions
8. Bronkhorst, Johannes (forthcoming a): “Mental absorption: an alternative to free association?” Academia Mental Health and Well-Being
9. Dawkins, Richard (2017) Science in the Soul. Selected writings of a passionate rationalist. Black Swan.
10. Diamond, Jared (2015) New ideas triumph by replacing old ones.” In: This Idea Must Die, John Brockman, Harper Perennial, pp. 486-489.
11. Lewis, Martha Mitchell, Melanie (2025) Evaluating the robustness of analogical reasoning in GPT models.” Transactions on Machine Learning Research.
12. Phelps, Elizabeth A, Schiller, Daniela (2013) Reconsolidation in humans.” = Alberini 2013: 185-211.
13. Ramsaran, Adam I. & Frankland, Paul W. (2025) Babies form fleeting memories.” Science 387(6740), 1253-1254.
14. Rovelli, Carlo (2023) Anaximander and the Birth of Science. Translated by Marion Lignana Rosenberg. New York: Riverhead Books.
15. Simms, Chris (2025) Babies do make memories — so why can’t we recall our earliest years?”
16. Travaglia, Alessio Bisaz, Reto; Sweet, Eric S, Blitzer, Robert D, et al. (2016) Infantile amnesia reflects a developmental critical period for hippocampal learning.” Nature Neuroscience 19(9): 1225-1233.
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