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PSYCHOLOGICAL MEDITATIONS Archives / Links Buddhism & Postmodern Psychology American Dogen / Maitreya Buddha 2001 Spring Summer Autumn Winter Spring 2002
Waiting for American Dogen(Maitreya Buddha)
Buddha usually appear as “this very moment”, however perceived or defined. Being always “just that…..” Buddhas may or may not be perceived as Buddhas by others, nevertheless, they always continue being Buddhas just as they are. However, since the “as they are” is inherently empty and not any fixed entity, Buddhas appear as simply “this” […….] or “that” [……..], as me and you, as “this very moment” and as the entire Universe. They “appear” only when Mind appears (…) divided into its object / subject modes of Being. Whenever a Buddha realizes that he or she is Buddha as a human being, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha rejoice, leap forward, and “Buddhism” takes yet another turn.
The last 2,600 years of Buddhism have been marked by such occasional appearance of realized Buddhas, of spiritual guides, whose insights, understanding or manifestation of the Dharma not only subsumed and included all prior teaching traditions but also reformulated them into a new philosophical turn, new school or spiritual paradigm. Today, two centuries after Buddhism was introduced to the West, many practitioners in this country wonder how long will it take for another Buddha, another uniquely enlightened mind, another Nagarjuna, Asanga, Milarepa, Hui-Neng, Hakuin or Dogen to appear in American Buddhism?
Alas for all of us, as the timeline in the box below suggests, it may to take quite a long time again.
In the past, it was always at least 600 years after Buddhism was first transplanted to a new culture or country before a truly original teacher / reformer would appear – suggesting, if one can extrapolate from history – that it may take another 450 years for one to emerge here, in the West.
More time is needed for Buddhism to take root on the American soil, more time to assimilate with the culture at large and to mature enough for its new, truly Western, form to eventually emerge. Even more time is probably needed for an American teacher, another Nagarjuna, Asanga, Milarepa, Hui-Neng, Hakuin or Dogen to appear in the U.S., a teacher who will not only conclude the transmission of Dharma to this new land but who will also legitimize American Buddhism as a new and fully autonomous tradition.
And when it finally arrives, what is the American Buddhism likely to be, 400 - 500 years from now? How is that future American Maitreya Buddha, likely to lead, galvanize and propel American Buddhism into its next Millennium?
Historically, Buddhism, born out of Hinduism and Yoga traditions in ancient India, has always tended to absorb native spiritual tradition and culture of the country to which it arrived. As it moved East throughout Asia, it merged with Confucianism and Taoism in China, assimilated shamanism in Tibet and adapted to the Shinto Samurai culture in Japan.
Similarly, the future of American Buddhism is likely to be shaped by the entire Western / American culture and its future evolution in the time to come.
One can anticipate that, by the year 2,500, American Buddhism in will have assimilated and merged with the following “Western” influences:
· Language – translating Buddhism into the Western context will impose the English language and its vocabulary on the Dharma. A complete translation of most of Sanscrit, Chinese, Tibetan and Japanese texts should be completed within the next 100 years and most of the Buddhist canon will be available to Western readers in English. Terminology and understanding of particular terms is likely to evolve to adjust to the usage within the Western culture. New, original, modern “sutras”, or Dharma texts, will appear and gradually replace the old ones. Future, American, Nagarjuna, Asanga, Milarepa, Hui-Neng, Hakuin and Dogen will “re-write” the old texts and create a uniquely English-language “school” of Buddhism.
The future is always different from our speculations about it. However, we know that Buddhism will have to change in its encounter with the West. The old Theravada / Mahayana tradition will be, eventually, replaced by a new "school" or paradigm. Since science and technology, along with democracy and global marketplace, are the most dominant forces shaping the world today, the postmodern science will become the next discourse of Buddhism, not only in the West but worldwide. That fully autonomous American / Western Scientific Buddhism will need a teacher, who like others did before, will propel it into the next Millennia. That person, whoever he/she will be, will find a way to translate the Dharma into a new language of science, psychology, cognitive neuroscience and postmodern / postindustrial culture.
To save all sentient beings, we all need to do our best to make it happen as soon as possible.
Buddha usually appear as “this very moment”, however perceived or defined. Being always “just that…..” Buddhas may or may not be perceived as Buddhas by others, nevertheless, they always continue being Buddhas just as they are. However, since the “as they are” is inherently empty and not any fixed entity, Buddhas appear as simply “this” […….] or “that” [……..], as me and you, as “this very moment” and as the entire Universe. They “appear” only when Mind appears (…) divided into its object / subject modes of Being. Whenever a Buddha realizes that he or she is Buddha as a human being, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha rejoice, leap forward, and “Buddhism” takes yet another turn.
Towards Postmodern Psychology and Psychotherapy
(work in progress)
"Life is full of suffering because of a fundamental lack, not only a perception of a lack, but the actual lack of our absence."
Postmodern psychotherapy can be described as a composite of psychodynamic therapy, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, Buddhism, quantum physics and semiotics used conjointly in the treatment of mental disorders and in facilitating personal growth.
Postmodern
psychotherapy addresses each person at the level of the subjective
experience conceptualized as inter-subjectivity. It
assumes that each person’s subjective experience is the central and
fundamentally self-validating, non-reducible characteristic of being
human and conscious. Every person constructs a unique, distinctly
subjective version of reality, lives within it and enacts it in one’s
inter-actions with others. At the same time, however, it is acknowledged that each person’s subjective experience is always affected by an infinite number of physical, chemical, biological, cultural, interpersonal, psychological and symbolic factors, exerting their influence across time and space, only few of which we know and understand at this time. Subjective experience is influenced by outside objects. One “becomes”, eventually, that which one has been “subject-ed” to. Subjects and objects mutually co-construct each other and become, in the final analysis, impossible to separate. What one “was not” before, one “becomes” now by being infused with it. Every subject is always also an object, every object always a subject. Subjective reality, fundamentally, is not exclusively (nor exclusive) of any “one” – it is always co-constructed, possible only as an “inter-subject-hood” of one “Reality”.
Postmodern psychotherapy combines psychoanalysis, DSM-based psychiatry, cognitive science, Buddhism and semiotics within the practice and technique parameters of psychodynamic therapy. Psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry provide the theoretical framework and clinical foundation assuring that all commonly accepted guidelines for clinical practice are fully and strictly adhered to. Buddhist meditation and Mahayana tradition of self-exploration are integrated with the more traditional treatment interventions. Language and semiotics are used as the main vehicles of understanding, (de)constructing, communicating and transforming subjective experience. Cognitive, strategic, systemic and humanistic techniques are used adjunctively, as needed.
However,
in spite of its manifest interdisciplinary character, postmodern
psychotherapy is not discipline-bound nor theory-centered and
does not attempt to be eclectic or integrative. Instead, it can be best
understood as being subject-centered in its focus on the
here-and-now of the subjective experience co-constructed by
inter-subjective “subject-objects”, both in life and in therapy.
A role of Buddhism in Postmodern Psychotherapy Buddhism
liberates, offers a glimpse into the absolute, a sense of transcendence
in the realization of fundamental emptiness, realization of the
emptiness of the present moment, the emptiness of existence and mind,
psychotherapy gives one skills to unlock the mind, to diagnose the
symptoms, unearth their causes and to heal them. Buddhism’s “suffering” (duhkha) manifests itself as Life is full of suffering because of a fundamental lack, not only a perception of a lack, but the actual lack of our absence. If
the absence is lacking, then there is suffering. Of course there are
moments of great joy, love, ecstasy, in fact there is the entire
spectrum of human emotions arising from just being alive and human, but
the lack of your absence – which is nothing but your life – is the
source of your suffering. Our very existence originates from the lack of
absence, so there is that actual experience of not being absent, of the
lack, of not not-being there, and that lack, life itself, is causing
suffering. That fundamental suffering manifests itself as psychiatric and psychological symptoms so well described in the DSM system of psychopathology. Depression, suicide, panic attacks, anxiety, perversions, addictions, violence, psychosis, hundreds of other. They are real, they exist, we all do suffer in some way. And that suffering and symptoms is where Buddhism and psychotherapy meet. They both address the same aspect of life and being. One might say, that therapy then moves on to devise a system of healing, systems of alleviating of the suffering, of reducing, decreasing, eliminating or controlling the symptoms. Hundreds of systems have evolved to do just that – the major ones being psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic/psychodynamic therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, and psychopharmacology.
Buddhism and postmodern psychotherapy are similar to the extent they both attempt to understand the Mind and find a way to alleviate human suffering.
In Buddhism, the essence of the Mind (sunyata) and the ubiquity of suffering (duhkha) are, arguably, best described by the Mahayana doctrines of Emptiness and Interdependent Origination and by the Four Noble Truths, while the Eightfold Path (sila, samadhi, prajna) charts the general path towards personal liberation (Nirvana, Enlightenment). Correspondingly, postmodern psychotherapy combines cognitive psychology and psychoanalytic theory to describe how minds work and borrows from the DSM system of classification of psychiatric symptoms to catalogue diverse manifestations of individual suffering (anxiety, depression, psychosis, personality disorders, etc.) Duhkha, the first of the Four Noble Truths and the Buddhist term for any form of dis-ease, pain and suffering corresponds to the inherent conflictedness of our lives and the inescapable presence of psychological symptoms addressed in any psychotherapy. To understand the potential role of Buddhism in postmodern psychotherapy on has to understand why people suffer.
And we do not mean the physical pain, although, it may actually be involved, we really mean the psychological pain, despair, anguish, anxiety, depression, psychosis, alienation, self-destructive behavior, aggression, suicide, etc. There are many ways in which people suffer, and the pain takes on infinite and infinitely subtle manifestations so well depicted in art and so often seen in clinical practice. But is suffering limited to people only? Everybody would agree that all animals experience physical pain, but how about the “mental” pain –depression, loss, anxiety? And what about other forms of life? Is suffering contingent on having a mind? Consciousness? Self? Do plants and trees suffer? And how about inanimate object? Can we imagine a river or a mountain suffering? Do industrial or human waste dumped into delicately balanced ecosystems of our land creates a form of suffering? If it destroys life and living organisms, pollutes water and soil, poisons and sickens people who live there – does it create some sort of universal suffering? What are the boundaries of suffering – when her child is in pain, the mother suffers, somehow child’s and mother’s pain are connected or maybe even really just being one, even if we can’t see it as long as we function within the more narrow sense of our individuality restricted to inside of our skin? Do we suffer when others suffers? And what empathy really is? Is it resonating with the other or is it experiencing the same state, emotional, physical or psychological? And what about a farmer, a rancher who can’t sleep at night when his land or his cattle is destroyed by a natural or man made disaster? Individual pain is never just individual, it transcends, it permeates all those who are sensitive enough to experience it.
Buddhism asserts that all duhkha results from some form of desire, including the desire for existence and the desire for non-existence. Similarily, postmodern theory places psychological symptoms in the realm of Desire and Lack (wish, instinct, drive, motive, need, deficit, deprivation, etc.), fundamental precursors of any individual self, identity and behavior.
Buddhism does not elaborate on the “how” of how symptoms develop, why depression and not anxiety, why obsessive rituals and not panic attacks. In Buddhism, all suffering is one suffering, the suffering of the Universe. And the Buddhist Eightfold Path is presented as a way out. Right understanding, right speech, right action, right life - what on the surface of it appears a uniform prescription for all, is, in its actual implementation, completely individualized. It is always, ultimately, my right speech, my right understanding, my action, my suffering, my life, and this is where psychotherapy and Buddhism overlap. It is a person attempting to change him/herself…and anything that pertains to changing mind, speech or behavior is, by definition, a realm of psychology. The same thing looked at from two different perspectives. Not
only two perspectives but two different methods. And it is the
methods where Buddhism and psychotherapy begin to diverge. Psychotherapy
is codified in the psychoanalytic and the cognitive paradigms,
psychopharmacology, inpatient crisis interventions, the entire “mental
health” industry as we know it. Buddhism is different, with its
meditation at the core, teacher / student matrix of interactions, its
monasticism, Sangha, precepts, vows, mind-to-mind-transmission, Buddhism
approaches a person completely differently. And
there is the outcome, the end, or is there? What is the prescriptive
outcome of Buddhist practice? The art of happiness? Compassion?
Boddhisatva’s realized and actualized enlightenment? And what is the
outcome of psychotherapy? At bare minimum, alleviation of symptoms, a
lack of diagnosable mental disorder. Happiness? Health? Adjustment?
Insight? Freud’s “ability to play, work and love”? It
is easy to see that there are similarities and differences here.
Capacity for happiness and insight overlap for Buddhism and
psychotherapy, enlightenment is clearly not even addressed in therapy,
usually relegated, and rightly so, to the realm of religion. But what is
“enlightenment” in Buddhism? Maybe it exists in psychology under
different names? Mystical experience, peak experience? “Flow” in the
“zone”? From James and Maslow to contemporary post- modernists,
there has always been a great interest in the transcendental in
psychology. Freud and Jung grappled with it. Is compassion similar to
empathy? Altruism? What is health, happiness, compassion? This
area needs more clarification of those basic terms to sort through it,
but just looking at it, it appears that even in the outcome, there are
great similarities, or at least similar concepts which may, or may not,
actually denote similar realities. So,
in summary, it looks that in Buddhism and psychotherapy the nature of “the
problem” is similar – suffering manifesting itself in psychological
and psychiatric symptoms. The solutions are very different –
psychotherapy vs. Buddhist practice; the outcomes may actually be more
similar than not…when the terminology and concepts are clarified. And,
fundamentally, there is only one soul, one mind, to treat and to save.
Some say that we do not need to divide it into different conceptual
fields of practice and treatment. There is only one person in front of a
therapist or a Buddhist teacher. A person who seems to need some sort of
help or liberation. So when we sit in front of each other, it is yet
another Mysterium of a healing dialogue, because, somehow, words heal
your suffering and my alienation from you. And, as we talk, as you
reveal yourself even more to me, I don’t know if I am being Buddhist
or just therapeutic. Actually, I forget myself in your story. What is
psychotherapy anyway? Somehow people have realized that speaking heals,
brings things out, to focus, focus of the mind, two minds. You and me,
leaning over your illness, your pain, touching it with words, touching
it with attention, feelings and our imagination, ourselves touched, as
we discover the new and the old buried under the skin of our minds.
Your
words flow, language flows, and we change the direction, telling,
retelling, listening, hearing, till the pain dissolves. Even if life
does not have a rewind button, we can change the past in the present of
our dialogue. Living without a possibility of return is living in the
Real, but there can also be the Imaginary transformed by the
Symbolic….. And there is the lack, the lack of absence, the lack of emptiness, your life, and there is the emptiness of the lack….a possibility for healing and liberation.
More psychological meditations:
Buddhist Practice and Psychotherapy 10 Questions for a Buddhist Teacher Zen Master Dogen on "Existence"
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