Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Five Manifestations of the Buddha 49
understanding is “inimical to the Zen Buddhist’s thinking” (p. 371); and they go to
some pains to advise the reader that satori [enlightenment] is at its heart “a regression
to a state of total narcissism” (p. 372). Their argument is highly developed:
[The Buddha] developed a psychological technique of meditation for the purpose of
arriving eventually at the ultimate stage of nirvana – a tranquil state devoid of all
striving and passion. This was to be achieved through a succession of four stages of
meditation (jhana), leading back to the nullification of birth, which is the beginning
and cause of man’s troubles. The goal, therefore, is a psychological and physiological
regression to the prenatal state of oblivion, of pure being, in which the difference
between subject and object vanishes. In the first stage of jhana the world is
renounced as a symbol of evil; contempt for the world results in renunciation of all
worldly desires, and the meditating monk is beset with sorrow. This is analogous to
a state of experimentally induced melancholia. These feelings of sorrow are
replaced in the second stage by self-love, a drawing upon the self for all spiritual
sustenance. This condition represents a still further regression and resembles psychotic
states in which interest is completely centered upon the self. In the third stage
the feeling of pleasure induced by self-love diminishes into apathy, which is then
transformed – in the fourth stage – into complete mental emptiness and uniformity.
Here the ascetic meditator is exalted above pleasure and pain, is free from love and
hate, is indifferent to joy and sorrow, is indifferent indeed toward the whole world,
toward gods and men, even towards himself. He emerges free from all emotion. At
this point he can remember with ever-increasing clarity all the circumstances of his
life down to the least detail. Significantly, recollection of one’s whole development
has been described by Freud as the aim of psychoanalytic treatment for mental
disturbance. However, in Buddhist training the unwinding of the film of life in
a reverse direction goes even further, beyond birth, back through all the previous
reincarnations to the very beginning of life, reversing the developments through all
previous existences. This is nirvana, the end of the regressive journey through the
four stages of jhana, during which all forms of one’s previous lives are reexperienced
in a clairvoyant fashion. That these memories are in fact true may be open to doubt,
for it is understandable that a person intent upon flight from the world and the self
may, in his spiritual fervor, accept his visions as memories of previous incarnations.
It is difficult to reconcile the goal of absorption, nirvana, which is a completely
asocial condition, with Buddhist ethical precepts, healing and devotion to the
“welfare and succor of gods and men.” Absorption with oneself – withdrawal from
the world and society – is an unbridgeable gap between Buddhism and Western psychiatric
thought. Psychoanalysis, for example, strives to conquer the self without
losing the outside world. A complete withdrawal is a goal alien to the Western cultural
tradition, in which man is imbued with a drive toward achievement. This fundamental
opposition of ideals explains why the influence of Eastern thought upon
the development of psychiatry has been only sporadic. As the extroverted interest
of European culture reached its peak in the modern era of science, eventually even
psychology assumed the goals and principles of empiricism and experimentation ...
It is difficult for the Western mind to understand how the satori experience leads
to the achievement of humility, love, and compassion, the end goals of Zen Buddhist