Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

Gestalt Psychology and Mahayana Buddhism 89
self-existing units represents a nihilistic denial of the authentic relational existence
of things, as well as an absolutist embrace of its notion of element as absolute and
independent reality.
While this comparison is neither comprehensive nor conclusive, it certainly
suggests areas of agreement in Buddhist and Gestalt epistemologies. However, we
must not let general similarities blind us to important differences. To illustrate one
difference, let us return the heart of the Madhyamika reasoning used to uproot the
idea of inherent existence. Here we are invited to identify a seemingly inherently
existing thing, such as a chariot, as the object (of negation), and to look for it –
either in or as its parts, or apart from them. We discover – often jarringly – that we
cannot find the object in either place. Compare this with Köhler’s observation that
the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Gestalt theory seems to echo the
first half of Madhyamika reasoning. If in fact the thing is not the same as it parts,
would Gestalt concur that the thing is not altogether different either?
The compounded nature of matter and experience has been a basic assumption
of scientific thinking throughout the Twentieth Century. It was not composite
nature that Gestalt theory rejected, but the atomistic reduction of phenomena to
mere collections of aggregate parts, and to mechanistic views as to how those parts
were associated in form and function. Gestalt theory pointed to “contexts in which
what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the
separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clear-cut
cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole” (Wertheimer,
1924/1944, p. 84). The thing cannot be simply identified with the parts that compose
it. And Madhyamika agrees: The thing is not the same as its parts.
Madhyamika next asks if the thing is altogether different from its parts. On
the one hand, the inner structure to which Gestalt theory refers implies an internal
differentiation of parts, and a corresponding dependence of the thing upon
these parts. The structural characteristics of the whole are not separable from the
coalescence of parts that give rise to it. The existence of the whole depends upon
its parts, and thus seems to fulfill the second half of Madhyamika reasoning: that
the thing (that is not altogether the same as its parts) is not altogether different
from them either.
On the other hand, the Gestalt emphasis on structure or organization may
imply a reality – albeit a relational one – that supersedes the parts that compose
it. The Gestalt message focuses not so much upon the absence of inherent existence
of all phenomena, even if such “emptiness” is implied, but in the presence
of indwelling coherence and meaning based on internal relations of fittingness
and external relations of differentiation across its “segregated wholes.” There is
a potential here to implicitly confer upon these segregated wholes a sense of
independent existence. From the Madhyamika point of view, the Gestalt embrace
of internal structure and organization may render Gestalt theory susceptible to
a reification of its segregated entities of experience.