Buddhist and Western Psychology, Edited by Nathan Katz

·期刊原文

Buddhist and Western Psychology, Edited by Nathan Katz

Reviewed by Frank J. Hoffman

Philosophy East & West

V. 36 (October 1986), pp. 431-434

Copyright 1986 by University of Hawaii Press

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This anthology consists of four parts, covering psychological implications of Pali Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, Sanskrit Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism, with an Introductory Essay by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali scholar and psychologist, who died shortly after completing his paper for this publication.

It may not only be the reviewer's particular interest in Pali Buddhism that leads him to conclude that Part One is in many ways the showcase and exemplary section of this volume. Not only does this section have more contributors than any other, but the quality of work in this sections, in general, good. Some of the best minds in Pali Buddhist studies are represented by papers which will not diminish their reputations. To take three salient examples, the late Rune Johansson, Jan Ergardt, and Padmasiri De Silva have each produced valuable work which requires no introduction.

Johansson's article attempts to define different types of defense mechanisms and to discuss "the Buddhist equivalents and their psychological background" (p. 11). He provides a derailed analysis of motivations for giving (daana), employing Buddhist and Freudian terms, as well as a discussion of frustration and defense mechanisms in Buddhism. Instances of "rationalization," in which those monks avoid work "who do not have the ability or the energy required for achieving the personality transformation," are found in the texts, as well as that "intellectualization" by which "philosophies and theologies are born" from a context of avoiding meditation and training (p. 20). The article concludes with an argument to the point that defense mechanisms "are closely related to and could be called a type of aasava" (p. 21).

George Elder's article presents some psychological observations about the Buddha's life based on the Nidaanakathaa. He offers an account of the Buddha's life, while recognizing the problem of legend and history, "along the lines of a psychology of integration as opposed to a psychology of repression" (p. 34). Here one sees Buddha's struggle with Maara as a matter of projection and self-struggle, in which integration is achieved through a renunciation of masculine power in touching the earth, symbolic of feminine wisdom.

Jan T. Ergardt's contribution focuses on citta in the religious life of early Buddhism and on Jungian categories as descriptions and explanations of that religious life seen in the texts. Ergardt's article is scholarly, well documented, thematically relevant, and rooted in the Majjhima Nikaaya. While 240 footnotes may seem excessive documentation for an article, no one can say that Ergardt's contribution lacks attention to detail. Careful pruning of relevant quotations from Jung along with attention to the Pali texts results in cautious exposition and worthwhile reading. If Ergardt errs, then it is on the side of caution. Sometimes he does not come down squarely enough on one side or another of an issue with argument. For instance. after quoting Jung's distinction between the principle of causality and that of synchronicity, Ergardt comments: "It is preferable that in this context we interpret kamma-dhamma in psychological terms, as a synchronicity principle, although our texts do not exclude the possibility of the causal principle" (p. 61). If the texts are compatible with both views, then more argument is in order as to why one is preferable.

Masefield's paper contains an abundance of charts mapping the mind/cosmos relations

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in the Pali Nikaayas. Masefield does not take the well-traveled path of those (for example, Kalupahana) who distinguish between nibbaana attained by the arahant in this life (with substrate) and nibbaana of the arahant after death (without substrate), and he has elsewhere criticized this distinction (Religion, 9 (1979); for a critical rejoinder see my "Rationality and Mind in Early Buddhism" (London dissertation. 1981), pp. 178-182). Neither will he have anything to do with the PTS dictionary claim that nibbaana is purely and solely an ethical state. Instead he employs the terms adhidaivata, adhyaatman, and adhibhuuta to refer to reality, goes on to explain nirvaa.na as "quite literally" a place (p. 81), and concludes that the authors of the Pali Nikaayas "shared a worldview very similar to that encountered in the Vedic and Upani.sadic tradition" (p. 83). There are problems all along Masefield's way. He argues that had the adhibhuutam perspective appeared in the B.rhadaara.nyaka Upani.sad, it would have been subdivided into subtle and gross forms, which would "have to be seen as similarly identical al the appropriate level with Brahman and Aatman" so that: "Adhidaivata, adhyaatman, and adhibhuuta are thus three different and equally relative means of referring to the same neutral 'something' that is reality." The inference here is from what would have been to what is in fact "the true picture" (p. 71). Secondly, in superimposing his tripartite Hindu view of reality on Buddhism, he argues that in the "Nikaayas to talk adhidaivata or adhyaatman were simply alternative windows on the sensory world of the kamaloka and supersensory world of the Brahmaloka, [hence] there seems no good reason why they should not also have held this to be so in the case of nibbaana ... portrayed adhidaivata, as a visible or audible place or region transcending the phenomenal world of becoming" (p. 82). Again, as with the first problem, not enough has been said to warrant the conclusion. Further, the consequences of accepting Masefield's nibbaana are unfortunate ones. For the Buddha's setting aside the claim that the Tathaagata exists after death becomes inexplicable. It is the eternalist view, not in accord with the middle path, but implicitly attributed to Buddhism by Masefield. And if Buddhists and Hindus "shared a worldview" in the way that he thinks, then just why the Hindus regarded the Buddhists as unorthodox requires explanation. Without reverting to an inaccurate view of the Nikaayas as merely "unsystematic ramblings," it is possible to say that Masefield's view of the relation of Buddhism to Hinduism is too tidy to be accurate and leaves many unanswered questions.

Mokusen Miyuki develops a view of Buddhism as "a pragmatic approach for dealing with dukkha, or disease of life, through the transformation of the ego" (p. 105). He explains the Buddhist approach with reference to Jung's analytical psychology and ma.n.dala symbolism.

Padmasiri De Silva's essay is literate and wide-ranging. In it he attempts to outline differences between the Humean feeling-centered approach to therapy, the Spinozistic thought-centered approach, and the Buddhist attention-centered one. He discusses the nature of the emotions and their neglect by philosophers, tries to sort out the kinds of philosophical questions related to the emotions, and attempts to clarify how specific theories of emotion entail different therapies. All of this appears somewhat ambitious for a single paper, but De Silva has given considerable thought to these matters, and the result printed here constitutes his inaugural lecture in the University of Peradeniya.

Part Two, on Japanese Buddhism, contains papers by Akihisa Kondo, Steven Heine, and Richard De Martino. Kondo's paper compares Dr. Karen Horney's neo-Freudian ideas on therapy with Buddhism from Kondo's point of view as a practicing Tokyo

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psychiatrist and former student of Horney. The main upshot of this comparison is that Horney's analysis of the neurotic mind uses a similar approach to that of Buddhism. Kondo's statement of Freud's analysis of mind as "libido, superego, and ego" (p. 139) is inaccurate and should have been "id, superego, and ego."

Steven Heine's paper uses Freud, Heidegger, and Sartre as hermeneutical lens with which to study Dogen. The kanji appendix is appropriate, but contains some errors (in both e and g the character for "being'' is written with the component for "eye'' rather than "moon") (p. 165).

De Martino's article on the human condition and Zen explores the theme of the transcendence of subject and object in interpersonal relations. It is followed by a stylistically interesting Chinese and Japanese character index.

Part Three of the book, on the psychological implications of Sanskrit Buddhism, contains articles by Gustavo Benavides and Stephen Kaplan. Benavides' article is scholarly and well-documented (with six and one-half pages of prose and four and one-half pages of notes!). In it he presents the double-bind theory of schizophrenia as a "paradigm capable of explaining the logical foundations of human behavior" (p. 100).

Kaplan's article begins with the questions of how we see a world and where we see a world. Difficulties with the mind-brain identity thesis and the projection of the mind thesis as implying, respectively, that mental entities are internal and external are discussed. These theses are rejected as attempts to answer the questions: "The questions of how we see the world and where we see the world have answers, but these answers seem less than totally satisfactory" (p. 214). Kaplan argues that "holographic psychology offers valuable insights into the nature of our perceptual processes" (p. 216). According to this view: "Like holographic images, the constructed perceptual images are projections. Thus, we perceive what we have constructed and our constructions appearing projected are believed to be independent, objective realities" (p. 218). The question of how and where we see the world is discussed in terms of the `Suura^ngama Suutra and the Trisvabhaavanirde`sa by Vasubandhu. In the former, the Buddha explains that citta has no location. In the latter text Vasubandhu makes the distinction between paratantra and parakalpita, for example, in the case of an illusory elephant where "the elephant is the kalpita svabhaava, its form is the paratantra (nature) and the elephant which is not existent there is regarded as the parinispanna" (p. 219). On the one hand, "the nature of parikalpita is to demand that there is a real elephant," an object ''out there"; on the other, "the subject who experiences is imagined to be distinct from that which is experienced" (p. 220). The confluence between Yogaacaara Buddhism and holography occurs, Kaplan argues, when one realizes "that our perceptual images, like images in a hologram. are not such that we can affix a spatial location to them" (p. 221). Hence to ask where the mind and its perceptual images are is to ask an unanswerable question (p. 222). Kaplan thus dispenses with his original questions by showing them to be baseless parikalpita ones. It is odd, however, that he earlier says that the questions "have answers" (p. 214) in view of his final dissolution. rather than resolution. of the problem. And the reader may ask whether Kaplan's claim, "our mental images have no more of a locus than do holographic images" (p. 222), has been substantiated by sufficient argument. Without asserting that mental images do have locations, one can say that the grounds for rejecting the mind-brain identity thesis are not very detailed, considering the importance of the issue for the overall argument of the paper.

Part Four, the Psychological Implications of Tibetan Buddhism, contains articles by

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Herbert Guenther and Nathan Katz. Guenther's contribution attacks rationalistic and mechanistic reductionism, and his interwoven presentation of Heideggerian thought and Tibetan texts eludes capsule summary. Guenther's characteristically imaginative translations of terms deserve more discussion than he gives them: for example, when he renders citta as "feedback mechanism" (p. 235).

The editor of this volume, Nathan Katz, explains in his article how "we find in both Jung and Tibetan materials an image of a disturbing female figure, leading one to a guru or a psychiatrist (or in less fortunate cases, to a mental hospital), who, by the process of psychotherapy or meditation becomes beneficent" (p. 256). Katz argues that the anima or mkha gro ma offers a paradigm for a nonreductionistic, noncompartmentalized psychological study of a Buddhist and Jungian sort.

What is the thread linking all these articles? Padmasiri De Silva's mention of what he wished to avoid in one of his sections, namely, constructing a "new herbarium area laid out by a gardener trying, to amass together some rare varieties of exotic plants" (p. 122) nay, unfortunately, be applicable to the work as a whole. At any rate, the "Psychological Implications of X" format (plug in Pali, Sanskrit, and so forth) allows the authors to write about their research interests without constraint. But since the connections between articles are tenuous at best, the reader is likely to ask whether there is any justification for including specifically these articles in the anthology.

To some extent this volume illustrates the tensions implicit in any such enterprise in which the guru and the scholar collaborate. This collaboration can be useful for both sides, as the volume itself shows. What the volume lacks is a synoptic, meta-essay on Buddhist and Western psychology which would elucidate connections between authors views and point out areas of controversy.

Several of the contributors (for example, Trungpa, Katz. and Guenther) demonstrate awareness of the problem of reductionism, and some (Trungpa and Katz) point specifically to a problem of reducing Eastern thought to fit Western categories. But reductionism can take various forms, and although it is dubious whether Buddhism can be reduced to any Western psychological or philosophical school without distortion, it is equally dubious whether Buddhism can be reduced to Western therapeutic training without remainder. One important question which this anthology gives rise to is: to what extent is a psychological interpretation of Buddhism in terms of Western categories possible, so that Buddhism is "explained" without being "explained away"? A reflective answer to this question would take into account that Buddhism is not merely a matter of technique, but a matter of religious and philosophical commitment as well.

On balance, despite the absence of a sound, synoptic perspective and the inclusion of articles of varying quality, several of the papers in this collection break new ground. The volume is therefore recommended to those who, with care and ability, can separate the wheat from the chaff for their own purposes.