Buddhism and Psychologyby Zach RowinskiIntroductionAt the beginning of the twentieth century, the Theravādin Buddhist spokesmen Dharmapāla attended a lecture by the famed philosopher and one of the founders of psychology, William James at Harvard University. James, upon noticing Dharmapāla, asked him to speak to the class about Buddhist thought. At the end of Dharmapāla’s talk, James is reported to have said, “This is the psychology everybody will be studying twenty-five years from now.”1 In actuality, it was roughly three decades before any individuals even began to reflect on Buddhist psychology in any systematic manner, and then, it was only a very small handful of thinkers who did so. The reasons for this lag in the study of Buddhist psychology is not entirely clear. Nathan Katz has suggested the reason why Buddhist scholars after Rhys-Davids (an early Pāli scholar) stopped focusing on Buddhist psychology was simply because they were occupied by a much broader field of study – namely Buddhist study itself and the language and cultural difficulties that came together with trying to make sense of a completely foreign tradition.2 Perhaps another reason for the lack of rigorous study of Buddhist psychology was due to the advent of behavioral psychology in 1913 and John Watson’s influential rejection of introspection. This lack of attention to Buddhist psychology during the first half of the twentieth century did not endure into the fifties, sixties, and seventies. In fact, in the latter half of the twentieth century, of all the areas of interaction between Buddhism and science, the interface between Buddhism and psychology is by far the largest area to be explored any group of professional scientists.3 Resources on Buddhism can be found from authors based in nearly every major sub-discipline of psychology ranging from the early psychology of Freud to the more recent field of evolutionary psychology, and all the major movements in between. In an attempt to examine the range of attitudes and approaches that psychologists, Buddhists, and academic Buddhist scholars have taken in approaching this interface, this bibliographic essay gives an overview of some of the literature on Buddhism and psychology from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. The hope is that this overview reveals not only some of what has come about through the interaction between Buddhism and psychology, but also what elements have been absent in the exchange, elements important to a deeper exchange of ideas and practices between these two disciplines. It will be seen that William James was only partly incorrect about the future impact of Buddhism on Western psychology. While Buddhist psychology has never been the “psychology that everyone is studying,” Buddhist ideas and practices have had a measurable influence on certain strands of Western psychology, though certainly not as quickly as James predicted. Many of the more serious and informed approaches toward the use Buddhist theory and practice in Western psychology are only just beginning to take place.In general, resources on Buddhism and psychology can be seen to reflect at least three basic orientations or areas of focus: (1) Philosophical and theoretical interpretations of Buddhist concepts; (2) use of Buddhist practices and concepts in psychotherapy; (3) the application of Buddhist practices for the development of a psychology of awakening. It should be added that this threefold classification is highly idiosyncratic and may ultimately prove unsatisfactory for making in depth conclusions about the interface between Buddhism and psychology. Despite its limited utility, the hope is that it gives the reader some orientation and perspective on the range of resources published in this area. In the future, the hope is to restructure this entire presentation according to a more interpretive approach to the resources. Nevertheless, as an initial attempt, this rubric can serve as the basis for future changes.4Theory and PhilosophyA unifying thread of many sources on Buddhism and psychology has been in the theoretical and philosophical interpretation of Buddhist concepts within the context of modern psychology. Many of these sources may be relevant to therapy, but are not written by therapists themselves or may be only suggestive of how Buddhist ideas and concepts (rather than Buddhist practices) can be applied to thinking about suffering and mental disease. This approach is distinct from the resources to be discussed on Buddhism and psychotherapy which typically attempt to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices like Zen or Mindfulness meditation within therapeutic settings.As mentioned above, the early decades of the twentieth century saw very little in the way of psychological theorizing about Buddhism. Despite interest, for William James there were simply too few translations available at the time for him to comment upon in any detail and references to Buddhism occurred only a handful of times in his major work on religion and science, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Interestingly, James’ openness to Buddhist psychology was not shared by his other major contemporary in psychology, Sigmund Freud. Having heard about Indian meditation, Freud placed it in the context of his own theory of human develop, arguing South Asian meditation practices result in a pathological regression into infantile self-centeredness.5Not everyone within the psychoanalytic tradition shared Freud’s interpretations. Carl Jung, who was expected by many for a time to become the heir of Freudian psychology, was more willing than his predecessor to embrace the insights of Eastern religions. In 1927, W.Y. Evans-Wentz published what became the classic translation of the Bardo Thödol or Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text that came to highly influence Carl Jung. Jung, who was a friend of W.Y. Evans-Wentz, reported that he carried the text everywhere he went and constantly returned to it for ideas and inspiration.6 In all, Jung wrote four major essays on Tibetan and Zen Buddhism and a series of introductions to translations of Buddhist and Taoist texts.7 He also participated in several discussions with well known Zen Buddhists. Jung’s writings have spawned a tradition of psychologists and Buddhist scholars either commenting on his views of Buddhism or applying Jung’s concepts to their understanding of Buddhist teachings.8Jung himself esteemed what he saw as the Eastern emphasis on intuition and spirituality, something he felt offered a counterbalance to Western intellectualism.9 However, like Freud, Jung was wary of the practice of meditation and advised his fellow Westerners that meditation, as a quick route to the experience of the subconscious, could be fraught with danger and was not suited to the “Western” constitution.10 One major problem with Jung’s commentaries on Buddhist ideas, as Guenther – the next individual we will look at – has pointed out, was that Jung himself knew no Asian languages, nor were the translations he read from authoritative. Thus, his interpretations invariably misrepresent the Buddhist tradition.11In the latter half of the twentieth century, many of those to pursue the theory and philosophical aspects of Buddhism and psychology were Buddhist scholars. In 1957, Buddhist scholar Herbert V. Guenther published his Philosophy and Psychology,12 one of the earliest and most informed overviews of Buddhist psychology according to the Abhidharma tradition. Not a psychologist himself, Guenther has heavily drawn upon both scientific theories and continental philosophy to express Buddhist concepts in this and particularly in many of his works that followed during the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. Buddhist Abhidharma literature is a major source for understanding Buddhist typologies of the mind, with some texts outlining six types of consciousness, fifty-one mental factors, (Skt. caitta;Tib. sems ‘byung), and so on.13 For this reason, Abhidharma literature has been a source of interest for of many Western contemporary psychologists in the latter half the twentieth century,14 though few appear to have studied the entire contents of the Abhidharma tradition in any detail. Guenther later published other works on Abhidharma psychology,15 as well as another work on the relation between the Tibetan practice of the “Great Perfection” and a type of psychotherapy called Dasein Analysis16 in a series of multi-author volumes on Buddhism and psychology.Another Buddhist scholar, this time in the Sri Lanka Buddhist tradition, Padmasiri De Silva, was the first to systematically pursue the interface between Buddhism and Freudian analysis in his 1973 publication Buddhist and Freudian Psychology. Particularly noticeable in De Silva’s writings is a sophisticated, and often highly poetic interpretation of Buddhist and modern psychological theories. Like Guenther, De Silva has pursued an experiential approach to Buddhist hermeneutics using German existential philosophy. In his Tangles and Webs, De Silva draws from a common metaphor in existential psychology and in Buddhism of the “human tangle” and how it relates to anxiety and alienation. A later work took the unique approach of exploring emotion and ethics according to Western and Buddhist literature.17In the 1980s and 1990s, we begin to see the first collected volumes on Buddhism and psychology. Nathan Katz ed. Buddhism and Western Psychology features Guenther and De Silva, as well as other well known Buddhist scholars and psychologists, including Richard DeMartino, (Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis), Nathan Katz (Tibetan Buddhism and Jungian psychology), Chogyam Trungpa (Tibetan Buddhism), and Rune E.A. Johansson. The late Rune Johansson, author of The Psychology of Nirvana, pioneered one of the first attempts of any research psychologists to the study of Buddhist thought and practice in a formal institutional setting. Johansson is also notable for his knowledge of Buddhist texts. He was also a student of Sanskrit and Pāli and translated the Dhammapāda into Swedish.18A more recent collected volume is Pickering ed. The Authority of Experience: Essays on Buddhism and Psychology(1997). Unlike the above mentioned volume, The Authority of Experience has benefited from an increasing refinement of the discussion of the range of methodological issues relevant to the Buddhism-psychology dialogue concerning, for one, the question of human subjectivity and its relation to mental health and disease. Further, with the rise of a legitimate field of “consciousness studies” in the psychological and cognitive sciences during the 1980s and 1990s, the door has been opened for creative approaches to the understanding of the human mind from Buddhist, artistic, phenomenological, cognitive, and a myriad of other perspectives. Essays in The Authority of Experience begin to take an affirmative approach toward seeing how Buddhism can contribute toward the advancement of understanding experience.Another very recent volume, Psychology and Buddhism: From the Individual to the Global Community (2003), is a collection of essays on the interface between Buddhism and psychology by a dozen professionals from clinical psychology, psychiatry, education, environmental science, and religious studies. One significant aspect of this volume, and to some degree in The Authority of Experience, is we begin to see practicing psychologists think philosophically about their own discipline while benefiting from advances made only recently in Western Buddhist scholarship in the form of clear and authoritative translations and scholarly analysis. In this volume, for example, we find a trained psychologist speak with authority and in detail about how Chandrakīrti’s view of emptiness relates to modern day epistemology, ethics, and Gestalt psychology, presumably without the author himself having studied Sanskrit or gone to Asia.Buddhism and PsychotherapyThe influence of Buddhism on psychotherapy represents by far the greatest influence Buddhism has had on any Western scientific discipline to date. While we find neither Buddhism nor other Asian traditions affecting much of mainstream institutional psychology, Buddhism has had a significant influence on the less concretely defined grouping of disciplines within psychotherapy. Further, the history of Buddhism and psychotherapy has been explored with great expertise by a number of practicing psychotherapists. Particularly detailed is Jeffrey Rubin’s Psychotherapy and Buddhism: Toward an Integration. Another recent overview and discussion of Buddhism and psychotherapy according to the perspective of another psychotherapist with over thirty years background in the study and practice of Buddhism is John Welwood’s Psychology of Awakening. What follows is a cursory overview of the sources on Buddhism and psychotherapy covering some of the major movements in the past sixty years of exchange, including a discussion of some very recent areas of Buddhist-inspired therapies that have only begun to take shape in the past few years. Psychotherapy is replete with a wide body of techniques for the treatment of a diverse grouping of mental problems. Widely recognized is the psychoanalytic tradition initiated by Sigmund Freud, the cognitive-behavioral tradition with roots in the work of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, Humanistic psychology and its associated Gestalt and Client-centered therapies, as well as two additional families of therapies designated as Group therapies and Family therapies respectively. In reality, there are many more types of psychotherapy than what is included in these formalized groups. Further, the contours of these groups are not fixed. For example, cognitive-behavioral therapies more accurately could be separated into purely cognitive and purely behavioral therapies depending on which theorist or psychotherapist you ask. Some therapists may draw insights from all the above mentioned techniques, as well as non-Western traditions like Buddhism, depending on the patient and the problem.Karen Horney (1885-1952), a well known psychoanalyst, turned to Zen Buddhism in the later years of her life. Her writings came to draw on the influence of D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese Zen scholar whose works laid the foundation for the early Western understanding of Zen and Buddhism in general. Horney even traveled with Suzuki to Japan where she met another important thinker in psychology, Shomo Morita. Morita was the founder of Japanese “Morita therapy,” a type of Zen-inspired psychotherapy.19 Although Horney died in the course of her turn towards spirituality, she recognized that Zen had elements that could be employed in psychoanalysis, such as refined attentiveness and enhanced ability to connect with one’s client.20In the 1950s Beat author Jack Kerouac published his two classics On the Road and Dharma Bums, both of which illustrate the free sprit that characterized popular attitudes that were taking shape towards Buddhism and Eastern religion in general at the time. Also around this period Alan Watts’ writings on Buddhism began to bring aspects of Buddhist thought to larger audiences. Though not a psychologist himself, his Psychotherapy East and West was an early formal attempt to look at these two Buddhist and psychotherapeutic disciplines together. As Rubin points out, Watts also stimulated the interest of the medical community in Buddhist psychology and acted as a visiting lecturer to psychiatrists on several occasions.21 Within the broader landscape of psychology in the 1950s an 1960s we see the development of a number of major approaches of psychotherapy, particularly Cognitive-Behavioral and Humanistic psychotherapy. In their early stages, neither of these psychotherapeutic approaches seem to have had close interaction with Buddhism. Behavioral therapies drew their techniques directly from the logic of classical and operant conditioning studied in thefield of behaviorism, although recently some cognitive therapists have referred to Buddhist mindfulness meditation as a type of “behavioral therapy.”22 The more cognitive oriented approaches within cognitive-behavior therapy however, particularly a branch of which was initiated by the outspoken pioneer of Rational-emotive behavior therapy – Albert Ellis – has widely been recognized for its similarity to Buddhism, especially in recent years.23 Rational-emotive behavior therapy, like certain (though perhaps not all) Buddhist traditions, suggests that the individual’s use of her reasoning capacities can be an effective antidote to unhappiness, anxiety, and depression. Rational-emotive therapy specifically focuses on changing negative patterns of thinking through reasoning carefully about the adverse situations that one experiences rather than mindlessly reacting to them with strong emotions. Some types of cognitive therapy include not only direct sessions with a therapist, but also provide the client with “homework” aimed at furthering enhancing the patient’s reliance on her own cognitive capacities. In a way, through cognitive therapy an individual becomes her own therapist.Within the past decade there have been a variety of cognitive-behavioral therapies that identify themselves with certain types of Buddhist practices. One of these is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), a type of therapy influenced highly by Jon Kabat-Zinn’s program of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. a type stress intervention practice that has received a growing amount of interest in medical establishments throughout the world. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy is a group therapy emphasizing skill-training in meditation practice. A “treatment” session is usually in the form of a simple, guided meditation practice consisting of paying attention to present without evaluating or getting emotionally involved in whatever thoughts or feelings arise. Unlike the above mentioned cognitive-behavioral therapies, MBCT does not ask the individual to change her patterns of thinking, but simply to observe them with bare, unmediated attention. To date, most studies using MBCT have looked at its effect on the treatment of depression and depressive relapse – the preliminary results of which have been positive.24Another recent cognitive-behavioral therapy to emerge has “Mindfulness and acceptance” or Acceptance and Commitment therapies (ACT). In a conference held in 2003, a group of practicing psychotherapists who had alternatively been influenced by a variety of streams of Buddhist meditation in their own CBT techniques convened to bring more organization and dialogue amongst their approaches. The proceedings of their meeting has subsequently been published in a volume entitled Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition. This volume addresses not only ways in which Buddhist practices like mindfulness, insight meditation (Pali: vipassana), and zazen have been used empirically to treat anxiety, eating, addictive, and couple disorders, but also the larger methodological framework for these newly developing therapies. Part of the need for developing a more complete framework for these therapies is due to the ambiguity of exactly what distinguishes behavioral and cognitive therapies in general and how emerging therapies fit within or challenge these frameworks.25A Psychology of AwakeningA major theme in the interaction between Buddhism and psychology, beyond the use of Buddhist-inspired techniques for the treatment of mental disorders, has been an attempt to utilize Buddhist practices toward developing a psychology of what has variously been termed awakening, human flourishing, or the culmination of human potential. Some of the basic gestures toward a psychology of self-improvement and human betterment have precedence inthe history of psychotherapy in the above mentioned field of Humanistic psychology that began in the 1950s and 1960s. Humanistic psychology was in part a reaction to the dehumanizing aspects of the prevailing therapies of psychoanalysis and behaviorism.26 Humanistic therapy emphasizes looking at how the individual conceives of his sense of self, relates with meaning, sees purpose, and understands his own feelings.Another field of psychology inspired by Humanist psychology that emerged in the late 1960s and 70s with more explicit connections to Buddhism and spirituality was the discipline of transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychology was influenced by the developmental theory Abraham Maslow. Maslow is well known specifically for his formulation of a hierarchy of needs. According to this model, humans have different levels of physiological, survival, emotional, social, and self-actualizing needs and motivations at different points in their life. The highest stage on the hierarchy of needs is self-actualization or the need to be creative or to serve others and fulfill one’s full human potential. Within the context of transpersonal psychology, self-actualization was explored through various kinds of meditation both Buddhist and otherwise, as well as practices from other types of spiritual practices that resulted different states of conscious experience. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology has long been the host of articles employing Buddhist concepts by well known authors like Daniel Goleman, now famous for his theory of emotional intelligence, Tibetans Tarthang Tulku and Chogyam Trungpa, and integral theorist Ken Wilber.Although Transpersonal Psychology is still practiced today, its following has declined dramatically since the 1970 and 1980s. However, since the time of the popularity of Transpersonal Psychology and the Human Potential Movement, many individuals have continued to refine and mature their approaches to Buddhism and psychology to this day. Thus a valuable feature of the more recent works such as John Welwood’s Toward a Psychology of Awakening, Diane Shainberg’s Chasing Elephants, and many others is a perspective informed by more than a decade of Buddhist practice.A very recent area of psychology to emerge as recently as 1997 which resonates with Buddhist aims is the field of Positive Psychology. Initiated by then president of the American Psychological Association Martin Seligman, the rationale for positive psychology was to shift the focus of psychology from mental pathology and disease to optimal mental health and flourishing. As a newly born field, Positive Psychology has yet to interact extensively with Buddhist theories and practices, though this may change in the near future with the recent interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration between Positive Psychology and scholars in religious studies.ConclusionWhile this has only been a cursory overview of the exchanges between Buddhism and psychology, we have covered enough territory to return to the William James’ prediction about the future of Buddhist psychology. As noted, though Buddhist psychology is not “the psychology everyone is studying,” it is not entirely true that Buddhism has not significantly affected certain areas of Western psychology. Many types of emerging psychotherapies are grounded in Buddhist theory and practice. Further, Buddhist practices were and are a central interest of Transpersonal Psychology. Most significant has been the discussions and applications that have taken place in the two decades as more and more psychologists are beginning to take more highly informed approaches to psychology using Buddhist concepts. Returning to James’ grand prediction about the future impact of Buddhism psychology, it is true Buddhist psychology has had far less an impact on psychology than, for example,neurobiology or the cognitive sciences. Assuming Buddhist psychology has something important to tell us about human experience, how is it that it has not had more of an effect on the Western study of psychology? One suggestion is that very few of the psychologists discussed have studied any Asian language or have developed a robust knowledge of Buddhist literature. From this perspective, absent in Buddhist-psychology exchanges has been no less than Buddhism itself. Due to not knowing the language, literature, or teachers, many psychologists have not picked up on the ways Buddhists in traditionally Buddhist countries see Buddhist theory and practice operating in practical and profound ways, in whatever form that may be – in Tibet, Sri Lanka, Japan, Vietnam, and so forth. An exciting task of the future will be for psychologists to look at Buddhist path structures (as well as insights from other religious and contemplative traditions) for their operational properties according to how they are understood within the tradition. Until this is done by many psychologists and these Buddhist practices are tested rigorously, the impact of Buddhist theory and practice on psychology may remain somewhat superficial.Another possible answer is that the clinical/therapeutic orientation of much of psychology simply does not fit Buddhist paradigms for the path from suffering to happiness. Perhaps needless to iterate, Buddhist teachings were not formulated with the DSM-IV manual27 in mind. While mindfulness meditation may be a valuable and welcome tool in treating depression and anxiety disorders, that same practice fits into a much broader soteriological framework within a Buddhist tradition that uses it for much different aims – namely liberation from the continuing cycle of suffering and rebirth. Lastly, perhaps the problem can be seen as a failure to do what the late cognitive scientist Francisco Varela was applauded for doing so well: being able to change from his Buddhist and scientific hats in different contexts to approach different questions.28 In other words, while many psychologists have sought a grand integration, perhaps it would be more powerful to allow each tradition to maintain its own contours and borders as they enhance and challenge one another dialogically.BibliographyChristopher, M. S. Albert Ellis and the Buddha: Rational Soul Mates? 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