Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Gestalt Psychology and Mahayana Buddhism 85
foundation for further progress on the Buddhist path. And the karmic seeds sown
by meritorious living may bring happiness within the cycles of birth and death.
However, absolutist ethics is ultimately insufficient, compromised by its residue
of absolutization. It cannot liberate us from conditioned existence. Liberation
must await the perfection of wisdom that knows emptiness, which when joined
with compassion, becomes Buddhahood.
Consider the reciprocal relationship between wisdom and compassion.
When compassion is informed by insight into the emptiness of inherent existence,
the result is Great Compassion no longer constrained by any conceptual blindness
regarding self or other. As Nagarjuna says, “Without [an absolute] self, where will
there be the property? Relieved from ‘self’ and ‘property,’ there will be no selfishness
and no possessiveness” (as cited in Thurman, 1981, p. 16). With the reifying
boundary between self and other erased, so too is any basis for cherishing self
at the expense of another. Likewise, when one no longer harbors illusions of
inherent existence concerning other persons or their actions or characteristics,
there is no longer any basis for judgments that would withhold compassion from
them. “Practice charity without regard to appearances,” says the Diamond Sutra
(1990, p. 20), and as one awakens to the authentic nature of reality as empty of
inherent existence and thoroughly relational, this apparently becomes possible.
When compassion is informed by this wisdom, it becomes unrestricted and
unconditional.
On the other hand, where insight into emptiness is informed by compassion,
we are less prone to reify emptiness, to impute inherent existence to the very
notion that rejects all notions of the inherent existence. The reification of emptiness
promotes nihilism. It activates a clinging to the distorted view, which may
separate us emotionally from those we would seek to help. In contrast, a compassionate
heart more readily fathoms the emptiness of emptiness. If our hearts
are open to others, we are less disposed to garble our understanding of emptiness
so as to employ it as a weapon or shield or excuse. This genuine insight sees
through the false boundaries that otherwise condition our expression of love and
care. Compassion thus appears as the implicit wisdom of the heart, naturally
embodying an intuitive understanding of reality as relationship that anticipates
the message of the fully illumined insight. Wisdom and compassion thus strive to
fulfill themselves each in the other.
This Great Compassion stands in contrast to the dualistic morality of
obstructed consciousness. We see that moral dualism is susceptible to some of the
same benighted emotions as those it seeks to redress, where for example it would
withhold care from those it might deem unworthy. Indeed there may be a naive
moral dualism in our wrongdoing, whose narrowed perspective would attach
moral justification to its excesses. As Solomon Asch notes, men “can hardly murder
without invoking justice” (1952, p. 354). Ethical absolutism may also resist
this mentality, and may be indispensable to our efforts at moral restraint, but it is
not fully free of the blindness it opposes.