Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Religion and Spirituality in Community Building 201
science tells us as much about the investigator as it does about the phenomena
being studied.
These ideas from the Ecological community model hint at a paradigm that
disavows the possibility of foundational knowledge. In other words, what we
learn from one setting or community group might be specific to that group, and
there might not be any knowledge that is generalizable to multiple settings. Here
we see a difference between advocates of the Ecological model versus adherents
of Buddhism, who clearly do espouse that there are fundamental values and ways
of breaking the bonds of individual suffering. If this Ecological model perspective
is taken to its extreme, it can lead to the loss of all connection with foundational
values, a loss exemplified in the contemporary philosophy called
deconstructive postmodernism. This worldview posits that there are no universal
truths, but rather that all concepts are culturally constructed and all meaning is
temporary and relative. Adherents believe that this philosophy will liberate its
proponents from all domination, but its critics fear that this liberation could lead
to valuelessness. Spretnak (1991) suggests that this fashionable philosophy leads
to a sense of groundlessness, detachment, and shallow engagement. Ragsdale
(2003), in Chapter 3 of this volume, uses the term “nihilistic relativism” to refer
to this loss of connection with foundational values.
The Ecological approach is a powerful model that provides its adherents new
ways of understanding social and community phenomena, but in many ways it lacks
a value base, which makes it also problematic to decide with which groups to collaborate.
As an example, an Ecological approach could be used to provide resources
and legitimacy to community groups and organizations whose missions are directed
toward further control and domination of other people and of the environment. It is
this value framework that is so often lacking within many of the models that we
have discussed, and the thesis of this chapter is that Buddhist traditions could provide
guides for energizing the visions of the field of community psychology.
Buddhism and other philosophies from the East have contributed to an alternative
way of seeing the world, one that does assume the possibility of fundamental
knowledge. Spretnak (1991) has coined the word ecological postmodernism,
and it joins the value base of spiritual traditions with the action-oriented perspective
of ecological community psychology. Such a framework might provide
community psychologists a more vibrant sense of interconnectedness, one that is
conscious of the unity in which we are all embedded. In the next section, we
review some of the foundational values within the Buddhist school of thought.
Buddhist Values
As mentioned in the previous section, the community psychology models
generally do not endorse the existence of any fundamental values that would be