The Buddhist vision is just one of the great religious and philosophical traditions that see reality as only properly understood with the transcendent dimension. It comes through meditation, since it is wisdom above and through any purely intellectual insight; it is in but not of the humdrum and everyday. In fact, the body is thought of as the gateway for such a deeper sensibility – the universal is found in the particular, to deploy the technical terms – which is why Buddhist teachers put such store on silence and stillness, “just sitting”. Then you can really notice the movements of mind and the messages, pleasurable and painful, of the body. Mindfulness is nurtured in Buddhist training because that prepares the individual for the flashes of non-conceptual intuition and experience that, with discernment, bring understanding and are the grounds of wellbeing.

Personally, I think there is much in what is beginning to be explored in the interaction between Eastern and Western thought. For instance, there is the possibility that Western philosophy has almost stalled when it comes to offering a vision of life because it has become too intellectual – too intellectually brilliant, you might say – that brilliance casting the need for practical intelligence in the shade. In all the technical talk between academic philosophers, conducted almost exclusively among themselves, philosophy has become stuck on the conceptual.