Comparative Studies in Existentialism

·期刊原文
Tangles and Webs:Comparative Studies in Existentialism, psychoanalysis and Buddhism.
BY Padmasiri de Silva.
Vol.27, no. 4
Philosophy East and West
P460-462

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P460

This monograph, which confirms Professor de Silva's
status as one of the leading East-West thinkers in
Sri Lanka, revolves around the related issues of
anxiety and self as understood by various
existentialist thinkers and psychotherapists and in
early Buddhism. The Book follows an irregular
course, touching on issues raised by Kier-

P461

kegaard, Sidney Hook, Sartre, Heidegger, Ludwig
Binswanger, Freud, Marx, Fromm, and, of course, the
Buddha.

The first chapter gives a cursory look at the
history of existential philosophy, indicating what
family resemblances run through its diverse
teachings. The second chapter deals with Kierkegaard
and Buddhism on the notion of pleasure, which finds
its expressions in the notions of the "aesthetic
stage of life" and kaama-tanhaa. As de Silva has
pointed out in the case of the corresponding ideas
of angst and dukkha, which cannot be equated but
which do overlap in certain usages, so Buddhism and
Kierkegaard could well agree as to the
unsatisfactoriness of aestheticism and kaama-tanhaa.
Both systems would affirm the primacy of the
religious dimension of the person. However de Silva
contends that, due to its theistic underpinnings,
the notion of "repentence," which for Kierkegaard
plays a major role in the religious life, has no
counterpart in Buddhism. This may be, but the point
could have been more forcibly made had de Silva
analyzed more closely the grammar of the terms "sin"
and "avijjaa" in the Christian and Buddhist
religious systems. However, de Silva makes a good
point in showing that Kierkegaard's emphasis on
repentence would be seen by a Buddhist as
pathological. As he aptly notes: "The Buddha has
very clearly shown that in the final analysis,
anguish cannot be matched by anguish; anguish has to
be mastered by equanimity" (p.29).

De Silva then takes up Sidney Hook's criticism
of Buddhism, which offers that the Buddha's notion
of dukkha is not convincing because he does not find
death per se as truly tragic, as he feels the Buddha
did. De Silva has a rather easy time dismissing
Hook, who looks like a straw man because it is not
death per se at which the Buddha recoiled in horror,
it was the fact that we die in spite of a powerful
desire that we live (bhaava-tanhaa) and that we are
reborn despite our desire for annihilation
(vibhaava-tanhaa).

In a chapter dealing with anxiety, de Silva
considers such notions as Freud on "separation
anxiety" (the parallels to which are more fully
explored in de Silva, Buddhist and Freudian
Psychology (Colombo: Lake House Investments Ltd.,
1973, especially chapter 4) ; Sartre's idea of
anxiety as nonbeing (n俛nt) as correlated with his
conceptions of bad and good faith; and Heidegger's
notion of anxiety (dread) which can break through
"the flight of the self from itself." De Silva finds
this important common denominator running through
existentialist thought on anxiety (p.53): "Thus
Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre agree that an
honest encounter with dread and anguish is the only
gateway to authentic living."

Considering Buddhist notions of anxiety, de
Silva finds a much more detailed analysis. The
Buddha taught that some types of anxiety, such as
paritassanaa and sa^mvega, are conducive to spiritual
growth as spurrings on toward the goal. Other types,
such as uddhacca and kukucca, which might be more
allied with Western notions of guilt and perhaps
Kierkegaard's notion of repentence, are found to be
dysfunctional. Further, the Buddha distinguished
"objective anxiety," bahidhaa asati paritassana, as
in the case of anxiety about the loss of something
which existed, from "objectless anxiety, "
ajjhatta^m, which is being anxious about something
that is not real. The paradigm of this second type
of anxiety would be the case of fear of the Buddha's
teachings as annihilationism, wherein the believed
but unreal self is found, by the Buddha's analysis,
to be lacking. De Silva is implying here that the
confrontation with n俛nt, angst, dread, et cetera,
is nauseating to the existentialist because he had
implicitly believed in what the Buddha

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would classify as an eternalist doctrine. The Buddha
found ajjhata^m to be rooted in false beliefs about
the self, and it is here that the Buddha's therapy
may truly begin. Thus de Silva's analysis shows that
the Buddha did not, as did the existentialists, stop
with anxiety, but probed deeper: "While the
existentialist emphasizes the encounter with dread
and nothingness, the Buddhist is seeking a diagnosis
of it... the Buddha is saying that the intensity of
anxiety was due to a false doctrine of eternalism...
Hence anxiety, far from being an authentic mood, is
an expression of attachment to wrong views about the
self" (p.55). De Silva notes that the Buddha's
analysis of anxiety was so thorough that one finds
twenty forms of anxiety enumerated in the Sa^myutta
Nikaaya,III,15-19.

Analogous to the philosophical/psychological
notion of anxiety, according to de Silva, is the
sociological concept of alienation. While de Silva
points to Marx's contribution in seeing both
powerlessness and egoism as underlying alienation,
the parallels between Buddhist and Marxist thought
on this topic are not fully developed.

In a chapter dealing with therapy. de Silva
approvingly notes Binswanger's letters to Freud,
which speak of a need to develop an image of man as
such which goes beyond Freud's image of ill man.
This is found to be the crux of the thrust of
existential psychotherapy: that the "patient" must
be treated as a person and not merely as a
repository of symptoms. If it could be held that
anxiety is not something which a person "has" but
which a person "is", then "...the need to re-examine
the image of man and the concept of human nature
comes out very clearly in the existentialist
analysis of anxiety" (p.74), an area which de Silva
finds richly developed in Buddhism.

Overall, the book is one of the most successful
treatments of Buddhist and existentialist
comparative thought I have come across. The author's
depth of understanding of both traditions avoids
superficial or prejudicial comparisons, and this is
possibly the key to the book's strength. One hopes,
along with the author, that if this book
"...stimulates interest among psychologists and
psychiatrists to look out for such wider horizons,
then perhaps an occasional agonizing riddle of a
philosopher does have some point" (p.75).

NATHAN KATZ
Temple University