Buddhism and psychology

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhism and psychology met in a Harvard classroom in December 1903. The American psychologist William James had invited the Sri Lankan Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala to lecture to his students. When the talk ended, James made a prediction that sounds bold even now. He said, "This is the psychology everybody will be studying 25 years from now."

  That prediction hides an odd puzzle. Buddhism took shape more than two thousand years before psychology became a discipline, so every comparison between them is a modern act of translation. The first such comparisons came from British scholars who were turning Buddhist texts from Pali and Sanskrit into English.

  What did those old texts actually claim about perception, desire and the hidden layers of the mind? Did the Buddha describe mental illness, and did he offer remedies a therapist would recognize? How did a monastic path toward the end of suffering find its way into hospital programs, analysts' offices and university degrees? And why do some of Buddhism's most respected teachers worry that the match has gone too far?

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• 2. The Self That Is Not There

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  The earliest Buddhist writings survive in a three-part collection called the Tipitaka. Its first part, the Sutta Pitaka, holds discourses attributed to the Buddha that are rich in psychological material. Their method rests on personal experience. A practitioner watches the mind from the inside, using introspection and careful self-observation. The Buddha held that an untrained mind is an unreliable witness at first, yet it can be calmed and cultivated until introspection becomes dependable. Watching a person's behavior counted as well.

  The early texts organize perception around the ayatanas, or sense bases, which sort experience into sense organs, sense objects and awareness. One passage spells out the sequence. If "the eye that is internal is intact" and "external visible forms come within its range," then attention from the mind produces "the emergence of perceptual consciousness."

  Then comes papañca, the Buddha's word for conceptual proliferation. The raw feeling, called vedana, gets distorted and elaborated, and the elaboration feeds back into perception itself. Perception therefore depends on desires, interests and concepts as well as on the senses, which makes it misleading. Buddhist practice aims to strip this away and know things as they are, a state named yatha-bhuta ñānadassanam.

  The Buddha singled out the notion of a permanent, solid Self, or "pure ego," as one of the most problematic views. In early Buddhist psychology there is no fixed self, called atta in Pali and atman in Sanskrit. A person is a constantly changing stream of events sorted into five categories called skandhas, meaning heaps or aggregates. The stream of consciousness is one of them.

  He also described the person as a dynamic continuum called namarupa. Nama covers the non-physical elements and rupa the physical ones. Padmasiri de Silva stresses that each side depends on the other, so mind and body form one complex.

  The psychologist Daniel Goleman has drawn a modern parallel. In his account, the "empty self" means there is no "CEO of the mind," only something like committees constantly vying for power. He points to Marvin Minsky's "society of mind" as an example of the same dismantling of the self that cognitive neuroscience finds when it dissects the mind. Goleman suggests the Buddhist model may fit the data far better than the ideas that dominated psychology for the past century.

  The texts add that false belief in an abiding ego-entity lies at the root of most negative emotions. That raises the question of what actually drives people to act.

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• 3. Thirst and Hidden Habits

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  The suttas say that human beings are driven by tanha, a word that literally means thirst, and they name three kinds. Kama tanha is the craving for sensory gratification, sex, novel stimuli and pleasure. Bhava tanha is the craving to survive and continue, which also covers hunger, sleep and the desire for power, wealth and fame. Vibhava tanha is the craving for annihilation, linked to aggression and violence toward oneself and others. A comparison cited from de Silva in 1973 matched these three drives to Freud's libido, ego and thanatos, in that order.

  Each craving begins with vedana, a pleasant or unpleasant reaction to a sense impression. Craving then conditions upadana, a clinging or obsession, and that clinging feeds more craving and striving. The cycle is described as ultimately unsatisfactory and stressful.

  Three unwholesome roots, called akusala mulas, sit behind suffering, negative emotion and harmful behavior. Raga means passion or lust, dosa means hatred or malice, and moha means delusion or false belief. Three wholesome roots oppose them. These are liberality, kindness and wisdom.

  Vedana, or feeling, can be sorted in several ways. It can be physical or mental, pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, and tied to any of the senses. The Buddha also separated worldly feelings from spiritual ones and ranked the spiritual higher. From these quick reactions, combined with situation, concepts and personal history, grow complex emotions such as fear, hatred, hope and despair. Compassion and friendliness are treated as antidotes and as vehicles for self development.

  Padmasiri de Silva divides the emotions of the early texts into four groups. Two belong to the householder, one that obstructs a virtuous life and one that enhances it. Two belong to the recluse seeking perfection, one that interferes with the path and one developed along it.

  Beneath awareness lie the anusaya, latent tendencies that the Pali Canon describes as pre-conscious or non-conscious. Later Yogacara Buddhists called these habitual patterns vasana, meaning impressions, and placed them in an unconscious layer of the mind. A Theravada text of the 11th-12th century, the Abhidhammattha-sangaha, says the dispositions "lie along with" mental processes and rise up as obsessions when conditions suit. The Theravada school also holds that a subconscious stream of awareness, the bhavanga, runs underneath.

  From the 3rd to the 5th century CE, the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism extended these ideas. The result has been called a Buddhist theory of the unconscious. Its centerpiece, the alaya-vijnana or foundation consciousness, stores karmic seeds called bija and undergoes rebirth. It sits within a wider scheme of Eight Consciousnesses, which Tibetan Buddhism also holds.

  Another group of hidden influences goes by the name asavas, translated as influx, canker or inflows. They are said to intoxicate and befuddle the mind, and they arise from factors such as sensuality, aggression, cruelty, body and individuality. The Buddha taught that they must be removed through practice to reach liberation. In this tradition the hidden mind is something to train, not only something to study.

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• 4. Illness and Its Remedies

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  The Pali Canon records the Buddha distinguishing two kinds of illness, or rogo. One is physical, kāyiko rogo, and the other is mental, cetasiko rogo. He traced mental illness to the kleshas, or defilements, rooted in the three poisons of greed, hatred and confusion. Because it is a matter of degree, everyone short of awakening is in some sense mentally ill. He remarked that beings who can claim freedom from mental disease even for a moment are "hard to find in the world," except those "in whom the asavas are destroyed."

  Five hindrances, he said, block proper mental cultivation. They are sense desire, hostility, sloth-torpor, restlessness-worry and doubt.

  Edwina Pio reads the texts as treating mental illness as mostly psychogenic, rooted in "environmental stress and inappropriate learning." The Canon shows a monk named Gagga with symptoms that today would be called mental illness. A breach of monastic discipline by someone who was ummatta, "out of his mind," was pardonable, a concession known as the madman's leave, or ummattakasammuti. The texts assume the condition can be cured, or at least passes. The monk then confesses, and the sangha considers him sane again.

  The Milinda Panha, another Buddhist source, echoes the idea that circumstances cause madness. The Canon also tells of lay people who behave abnormally after losing loved ones. Early sources describe intellectual disability, epilepsy, alcoholism and suicide as well. Buddhagosa argued that suicide comes from mental illness, driven by factors such as lost relationships and physical illness.

  For intrusive thoughts, the Vitakkasanthana Sutta (MN 20), titled The Removal of Distracting Thoughts, recommends five methods. A commentary called the Papancasudani expands on them. Turn to an opposite or incompatible thought or object. Ponder the dangers and harmful consequences of the thought. Ignore it and distract yourself with another activity. Reflect on removing or stopping what causes the thought. Or make a forceful mental effort.

  The Satipatthana Sutta adds mindfulness, which is a skill of attentive self-monitoring more than a formal sitting. The practitioner is told to notice every thought and sensation, including unwanted ones, and to keep attending to them. Through habituation and exposure, such thoughts lose their intensity and unpleasantness. The texts also train positive emotions, namely loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity.

  Samatha and vipassana are the two main types of Buddhist meditation. Samatha calms and relaxes the mind by training attention on a single object. Vipassana builds insight into the impermanent, stressful and selfless character of mental processes, through steady mindfulness and comprehension called sampajañña. Their goal is nirvana, yet the Buddha said they also bring everyday benefits such as relaxation, good sleep and pain reduction.

  Professor William Mikulas and Padmal de Silva have compared these methods with cognitive behavioral therapy. De Silva's list of shared features is long. It includes graded exposure to reduce fear, rewards for desirable behavior, modelling, stimulus control, self-monitoring and training in social skills. It also takes in aversion techniques, distraction and thought stopping, the use of family members in behavior change programs, and cognitive methods for grief.

  Albert Ellis, considered the grandfather of cognitive-behavioral therapy, wrote that some principles of his rational-emotive therapy are thousands of years old. He credited the Greek and Roman Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, along with ancient Taoist and Buddhist thinkers. His example is anger. Buddhism treats anger and ill-will as basic hindrances, and a common antidote is active contemplation of loving thoughts, called metta. Ellis's matching technique, "emotional training," asks you to recall an intensely pleasant experience with the person you are angry at and let those warm feelings outweigh the hostility. For his Buddhist sources, Ellis pointed readers to D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts.

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• 5. Translators and Travelers

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  In 1900 the Indologist Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids published a translation through the Pali Text Society. It rendered the Dhamma Sangani, the first book of the Theravada Abhidhamma, as Buddhist Manual of Psychological Ethics. Her introduction praised the sophistication of a system built on what she called "a complex continuum of subjective phenomena," the dhammas, and on the laws of causation linking them. She returned to the theme for decades, with Buddhist Psychology in 1914 and The Birth of Indian Psychology and its Development in Buddhism in 1936.

  The Abhidhamma is the third basket, or pitaka, of the Tripitaka. It is historically later than the other two, dating from the 3rd century BCE onward. It breaks the mind into elementary factors of experience called dhammas, whose interrelations make up every stream of human experience. The Theravada version sorts them into four categories. Citta is awareness, cetasika is mental factors, rupa is material form, and nibbana is cessation. The authors tried to list every possible factor and every possible relationship between factors. Their achievements include a theory of emotions, a theory of personality types and a psychology of ethical behavior.

  Bhikkhu Bodhi, president of the Buddhist Publication Society, calls the Abhidhamma a philosophy, a psychology and an ethics in one. All three serve a program for liberation. In his reading, it does not look outward as a neutral observer, the way classical Western science does. It starts from experience, so the reality it studies is conscious reality, analyzed as the mind appears to introspective meditation.

  In Japan a separate line of comparison began with two books by Inoue Enryō (1858-1919). These were Psychology of Zen Sect in 1893 and Buddhist Psychology in 1897. In 1920 Tomosada Iritani (1887-1957) gave a questionnaire on Zen practice to 43 people, probably the first empirical psychological study of Zen. Shoma Morita (1874-1938), influenced by Zen, developed Morita therapy.

  Naikan therapy grew out of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist introspection, shaped by Ishin Yoshimoto (1916-1988). It is used in correctional institutions and education, to treat alcohol dependence, and by individuals seeking self development.

  In the 1960s Kasamatsu and Hirai used electroencephalography to monitor the brains of Zen meditators. Japan's ministry of education then promoted studies of the psychiatry, physiology and psychology of Zen in a number of laboratories. Professor Yoshiharu Akishige argued for Zen Psychology, the idea that Zen's insights should inform psychological practice and not only be studied. Akira Onda and Osamu Ando carry the research forward today.

  Koji Sato (1905-1971) began the journal Psychologia: An International Journal of Psychology in the Orient in 1957. It aimed at a dialogue between East and West. Among its contributors were Bruner, Fromm and Jung.

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• 6. The Couch and the Cushion

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  D.T. Suzuki, a Zen scholar, became one of the most important influences on the spread of Buddhism in the West. He collaborated with the psychoanalysts Carl Jung, Karen Horney and Erich Fromm. In 1948 Jung wrote the foreword to Suzuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism. Jung described the enlightenment experience of satori as an "unsurpassed transformation to wholeness." He admitted that psychologists fail when they try to grasp satori through the intellect. Yet he saw a shared aim of self transformation. He wrote that psychotherapy is the one movement in Western culture that partly understands such aspirations.

  Karen Horney traveled to Japan in 1952 to meet Suzuki. She advised her colleagues to listen to clients with "Zen-like concentration and non attachment." Fromm observed "an unmistakable and increasing interest in Zen Buddhism among psychoanalysts."

  That interest filled a workshop on "Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis" in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1957, where Suzuki and Fromm joined other analysts. Fromm argued that at the turn of the twentieth century, most patients sought help for medical-like symptoms that hindered their social functioning. By mid-century, most had no overt symptoms and functioned well. They suffered from an "inner deadness" and an "alienation from oneself." Fromm, paraphrasing Suzuki, called Zen the art of seeing into the nature of one's being and a path from bondage to freedom. He thought it could sharpen psychoanalytic theory and technique.

  Freud's "evenly suspended attention" is one of the practices analysts have set beside Buddhist ones. Buddhism shares other views with psychoanalytic theory too. Both hold that an unconscious mind exists, that unwholesome unconscious forces cause much human suffering, and that practice can bring insight into them. The British barrister Christmas Humphreys described the mid-century collaboration between analysts and Buddhist scholars. He called it a meeting of "two of the most powerful forces operating in the Western mind today."

  Fritz Perls, who created Gestalt therapy, drew on phenomenology, existentialism, Zen and Taoism, and he spent time in Japanese Zen monasteries. His book Ego, Hunger and Aggression (1947/1969) describes "concentration on eating," in which "we have to be fully aware of the fact that we are eating." Its "awareness continuum" is strikingly close to Buddhist mindfulness training. Dick Price later developed Gestalt Practice by adding Buddhist meditation, and Claudio Naranjo has written about Gestalt and Tibetan Buddhism.

  Nina Coltart (1927-1997) was Director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, a neo-Freudian and a Buddhist. She saw distinct similarities between the transformation of the self in psychoanalysis and in Buddhism. In her view the two practices are "mutually reinforcing and clarifying."

  Mark Epstein, an American psychiatrist, practiced Buddhism in Thailand under Ajahn Chah. His books include Thoughts Without a Thinker in 1995 and Psychotherapy Without the Self in 2008. He links the Four Noble Truths to the primary narcissism that Donald Winnicott described in his theory of the true self and false self. The first truth points to the inevitable humiliation of narcissistic self-esteem. The second names the primal thirst that makes it inevitable. The third promises release through a realistic self-image, and the fourth spells out the means.

  David Brazier, who wrote Zen Therapy in 1995, rereads the Four Noble Truths through new translations. Traditionally samudhaya is rendered as origin and nirodha as cessation, which suggests suffering can be ended completely. Brazier reads dukkha as an imperfect existence, like a wheel set crooked on its axle. Thirst, tanha, arises alongside it as a yearning for life to be different. On his reading nirodha means confining that craving, not erasing it, and the limit is what brings freedom.

  In his 1996 book Psychotherapy and Buddhism, Toward an Integration, Jeffrey B. Rubin challenges the Buddhist idea of enlightenment as total purification of the mind. A conflict-free "safehouse" beyond self-interest, fear, lust and greed seems to him quixotic. He suggests that enlightenment may be asymptotic, an ideal that can never be reached, and he points to scandals and abuses by American Buddhist teachers. He also notes that analysts have largely ignored meditation. In his view it could sharpen an analyst's capacity for attention, and he recommends it.

  Axel Hoffer edited Freud and the Buddha, which gathers essays by psychoanalysts and the Buddhist scholar Andrew Olendzki. Olendzki names a tension in free association, Freud's method of letting a patient talk. From the Buddhist side, he says, the mind keeps spinning a narrative out of everything it meets. That habit causes much suffering. The analytic focus on narrative pulls attention away from immediate experience.

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• 7. Mindfulness Goes Clinical

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  Western Buddhism grew rapidly in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1974 Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche founded the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University. Since 1975 this accredited university has offered degrees in "contemplative psychology." In 1975 Trungpa also published Glimpses of the Abhidharma. In it he noted that many modern psychologists found the Abhidharma matched their own recent discoveries. It was as though a teaching from 2,500 years ago had been redeveloped in a modern idiom. The book describes the nanosecond sequence by which a sensation becomes conscious, using the five aggregates.

  In the 1970s Ron Kurtz (1934-2011) created Hakomi therapy, possibly the first mindfulness-based therapy. In the late 1970s the British psychiatrist Clive Sherlock developed Adaptation Practice. He had trained in the Rinzai school of Zen, and the practice draws on the awareness training of Zen daily life. It is used for long-term relief of depression, anxiety, anger and stress.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn built the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, or MBSR. It took ten years and more than four thousand patients at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He describes its core as disciplined, moment-to-moment awareness, the complete "owning" of each moment, "good, bad, or ugly." Kabat-Zinn, a one-time Zen practitioner, says mindfulness is universal in essence. Yet it is no accident, he adds, that it comes from Buddhism, which is overwhelmingly concerned with relieving suffering and dispelling illusions. He sums up the program as intensive training in Buddhist meditation "without the Buddhism." His 1990 book Full Catastrophe Living presents the evidence, and it was revised and reissued in 2013.

  MBSR became influential enough to introduce the term mindfulness into Western cognitive behavioral therapy. In 1987 Kabat-Zinn's students Zindel V. Segal, J. Mark G. Williams and John D. Teasdale developed mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT. In the early 2000s Vidyamala Burch and her organization Breathworks created mindfulness-based pain management for people living with chronic pain and illness. It adds a distinctive emphasis on loving-kindness, and it has been seen as sensitive to concerns about removing mindfulness from its Buddhist ethical framework. A range of clinical studies has demonstrated its effectiveness.

  Marsha M. Linehan, a Zen practitioner, built dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT, around the reconciliation of opposites. She credits Zen for pairing acceptance with change. Mindfulness skills are the first thing taught in DBT, and they are reviewed every week. She calls them psychological and behavioral versions of Eastern meditation practice, drawn most heavily from Zen. Controlled clinical studies have demonstrated that DBT helps people with borderline personality disorder.

  Steven C. Hayes's Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, did not explicitly emerge from Buddhism, though its concepts often parallel Buddhist and mystical ideas. Its originators say it uses acceptance, mindfulness, commitment and behavioral activation to produce psychological flexibility. Mindfulness in ACT combines four aspects: acceptance, cognitive defusion, contact with the present moment, and a sense of self as context. A defusion exercise might ask you to boil a difficult thought down to one word and repeat it aloud for 30 seconds.

  Since 1987, the Dalai Lama has convened Mind and Life gatherings of Buddhists and scientists every two years. Reflecting on a March 2000 session, Goleman noted that every branch of Buddhism has its own version of the Abhidhamma's psychological teachings.

  Neurologist James H. Austin wrote Zen and the Brain in 1998, and he was one of the first to apply EEG and fMRI to Buddhist meditation. Richard Davidson, B. Alan Wallace, Rick Hanson, author of Buddha's Brain in 2009, and Zoran Josipovic have followed. A recent review of the literature on mindfulness meditation concludes that it "exerts beneficial effects on physical and mental health, and cognitive performance." The same review adds that "the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear."

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• 8. Disputed Ground

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  Carl Rogers's "unconditional positive regard" and his stress on empathy have been compared to the Buddhist idea of compassion, karuṇā. Person-centered therapist Manu Buzzano wrote that regular meditation helped him offer congruence, empathy and unconditional positive regard. Interviews with other therapists who meditate found that it improved their empathy, nonjudgmental openness and relationships with clients. Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication has likewise been set beside the Buddhist ideal of right speech.

  Padmasiri de Silva sees the existential "tragic sense of life" as another expression of dukkha. The Buddhist monk Nanavira Thera wrote in the preface to his Notes on Dhamma that the existentialists ask the questions with which the Buddha begins. He added that those who grasp the Buddha's message have gone beyond those questions. Edward Conze was blunter. The existentialists, he wrote, have only the first of the Four Truths, and "knowing no way out, they are manufacturers of their own woes."

  Positive psychology shares Buddhism's interest in positive emotions, strengths and virtues. It also describes the "hedonic treadmill," the chase after fleeting pleasures. Buddhism says this same striving is the root of unhappiness. Kirk W. Brown and Richard M. Ryan built a 15-item Mindful attention awareness scale to measure dispositional mindfulness. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow has been compared to samadhi and to mindfulness, and Ronald Siegel calls flow "mindfulness while accomplishing something." Nobo Komagata and Sachiko Komagata object that the link is more complicated.

  Martin Seligman and the Buddhist monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu both observe that positive psychology is ethically neutral. Inside that framework, they note, you could argue that "a serial killer leads a pleasant life." Likewise "a skilled Mafia hit man leads a good life, and a fanatical terrorist leads a meaningful life." Thanissaro argues that the Buddha cared what you do to find gratification, because some skills lead to steadier long-term happiness. He names harmlessness, generosity, moral restraint and good will, along with mindfulness, concentration and discernment.

  Padmal de Silva argues that Buddhist strategies treat a person as the agent of change, which he compares to humanistic psychology. The Buddhist teacher is only a guide, and the patient can be "a light unto themselves." S. N. Goenka cites Dhammapada 183, which urges abstaining from unwholesome deeds, doing wholesome ones and purifying one's own mind. Relief from mental illness, in his view, arrives only indirectly and is not the main focus.

  Patrick Kearney warns that interpreting the Buddha through psychology has produced "a growing confusion about the nature of Buddhist teachings." He criticizes Jack Kornfield and Mark Epstein for treating psychological techniques as necessary for some Buddhists, and Rubin for his doubts about enlightenment. Epstein and Rubin, he writes, "want to rewrite Buddhism on their own terms," shrinking the ocean of the Buddha's wisdom to a puddle that fits Freud and his successors.

  Thanissaro traces the psychological view of the spiritual life through Immanuel Kant, William James, Jung and Abraham Maslow. He finds its roots in European Romanticism and Protestant Christianity. At its center is healing the "divided self," an idea he calls alien to Buddhism. He names those who impose such goals on the Buddha's message "Buddhist Romantics." He grants that this approach serves people seeking solace, yet it hides the radical teachings of renunciation. Bhikkhu Bodhi shares the worry. Recasting the teaching in psychological terms, he says, forgets that its purpose is deliverance, not "healing" or "self-acceptance."

  Alan Watts saw the matter from the other side in 1961. In Buddhism and Taoism, he wrote, we find something closer to psychotherapy than to Western philosophy or religion. The psychotherapist, he observed, mostly works to change the consciousness of peculiarly disturbed individuals. Buddhism and Taoism aim to change the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted people.

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