Buddhism and psychology
According to Austrian psychologist Gerald Virtbauer,[3] the contact of Buddhism and European Psychology has generally followed three main approaches:[4] The earliest Buddhist writings are preserved in three-part collections called Tipitaka (Pali; Skt.
The suttas also enumerate three "unwholesome roots" (akusala mulas) of suffering, negative emotions and behavior: raga (passion or lust); dosa (hatred or malice); and moha (delusion, or false belief).
A later Theravada text, the Abhidhammattha-sangaha (11th-12th century) says: "The latent dispositions are defilements which 'lie along with' the mental process to which they belong, rising to the surface as obsessions whenever they meet with suitable conditions" (Abhs 7.9).
According to Padmal de Silva "Buddhist strategies represent a therapeutic model which treats the person as his/her agent of change, rather than as the recipient of externally imposed interventions.
The highest state a human can achieve (an Arahant or a Buddha) is seen as being completely free from any kind of dissatisfaction or suffering, all negative mental tendencies, roots and influxes have been eliminated and there are only positive emotions like compassion and loving-kindness present.
"[14] Another set of negative qualities outlined by the Buddha are the five hindrances, which are said to prevent proper mental cultivation, these are: sense desire, hostility, sloth-torpor, restlessness-worry and doubt.
This was termed the madmans leave (ummattakasammuti)[16] The texts also assume that this 'madness' can be cured or recovered from, or is at least an impermanent phenomenon, after which, during confession, the monk is considered sane by the sangha once more.
There are four categories of dharmas in the Theravada Abhidhamma: Citta (awareness), Cetasika (mental factors), Rūpa (physical occurrences, material form) and Nibbāna (cessation).
An important event in the interchange of East and West occurred when American psychologist William James invited the Sri Lankan Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala to lecture in his classes at Harvard University in December 1903.
Writers in the field of transpersonal psychology (which deals with religious experience, altered states of consciousness and similar topics) such as Ken Wilber also integrated Buddhist thought and practice into their work.
Suzuki, Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Alan Watts, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg have attempted to bridge and integrate psycho-analysis and Buddhism.
British barrister Christmas Humphreys has referred to mid-twentieth century collaborations between psychoanalysts and Buddhist scholars as a meeting between: "Two of the most powerful forces operating in the Western mind today.
One influential psychoanalyst who explored Zen was Karen Horney, who traveled to Japan in 1952 to meet with Suzuki and who advised her colleagues to listen to their clients with a "Zen-like concentration and non attachment".
Zen, different as it is in its method from psychoanalysis, can sharpen the focus, throw new light on the nature of insight, and heighten the sense of what it is to see, what it is to be creative, what it is to overcome the affective contaminations and false intellectualizations which are the necessary results of experience based on the subject-object split"[34]The dialogue between Buddhism and psychoanalysis has continued with the work of psychiatrists such as Mark Epstein, Nina Coltart, Jack Engler, Axel Hoffer, Jeremy D. Safran, David Brazier, and Jeffrey B. Rubin.
Olendzki outlines an important problematic between the two systems, the Freudian practice of free association, which from the Buddhist perspective is based on: "The reflexive tendency of the mind to incessantly make a narrative of everything that arises in experience is itself the cause of much of our suffering, and meditation offers a refreshing refuge from mapping every datum of sensory input to the macro-construction of a meaningful self.
Person centered therapist Manu Buzzano has written that "It seemed clear that regular meditation practice did help me in offering congruence, empathy and unconditional positive regard.
[59]The skills that Thanissaro argues are more conductive to happiness include Buddhist virtues like harmlessness, generosity, moral restraint, and the development of good will as well as mindfulness, concentration, discernment.
This analysis was codified during the first millennium after his death within the system called, in the Pali language of Buddha's day, Abhidhamma (or Abhidharma in Sanskrit), which means 'ultimate doctrine' ... Every branch of Buddhism today has a version of these basic psychological teachings on the mind, as well as its own refinements.
[l] Two increasingly popular therapeutic practices using Buddhist mindfulness techniques are Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Marsha M. Linehan's dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT).
[65] Describing the MBSR program, Kabat-Zinn writes: This 'work' involves above all the regular, disciplined practice of moment-to-moment awareness or mindfulness, the complete 'owning' of each moment of your experience, good, bad, or ugly.
For example, "self as context" is argued to emerge from deictic verbal relations such as I/You, or Here/There, which RFT laboratories have shown to help establish perspective taking skills and interconnection with others.
For example, Buddhism may diagnose our anxiety, depression, and other symptoms of mental illness as stemming from greed and aversion, while encouraging us to treat them by taking the Noble Eightfold Path, developing tranquillity and insight, through the meditative practices of samatha and vipassana.
[93][94] Dr. Albert Ellis, considered the "grandfather of cognitive-behavioral therapy" (CBT), has written: Many of the principles incorporated in the theory of rational-emotive psychotherapy are not new; some of them, in fact, were originally stated several thousands of years ago, especially by the Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers (such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) and by some of the ancient Taoist and Buddhist thinkers (see Suzuki, 1956, and Watts, 1959, 1960).
This is similar to using a CBT technique known as "emotional training" which Ellis [96] describes in the following manner: Think of an intensely pleasant experience you have had with the person with whom you now feel angry.
Kearney writes: Epstein and Rubin want to rewrite Buddhism on their own terms, taking the ocean of the Buddha's wisdom and reducing it to a puddle small enough to accommodate the views of Freud and his successors.
[97]American Theravada monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu[99] has also criticized the interpretation of Buddhism through Psychology, which has different values and goals, derived from roots such as European Romanticism and Protestant Christianity.
[101] Recognizing the widespread alienation and social fragmentation of modern life, Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes: When Buddhist Romanticism speaks to these needs, it opens the gate to areas of dharma [the Buddha's teachings] that can help many people find the solace they're looking for.
When this is done we may never get to see that the real purpose of the teaching, in its own framework, is not to induce "healing" or "wholeness" or "self-acceptance," but to propel the mind in the direction of deliverance – and to do so by attenuating, and finally extricating, all those mental factors responsible for our bondage and suffering.
[102]In 1961, philosopher and professor Alan Watts wrote: If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West.
[103]Since Watts's early observations and musings, there have been many other important contributors to the contemporary popularization of the integration of Buddhist meditation with psychology including Kornfield (1993), Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach, Epstein (1995) and Nhat Hanh (1998).
