A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack

Introduction: Toward a Buddhist Perspective

1 Introduction Toward a Buddhist Perspective If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. —Arthur Koestler If our sense of self is a construct, as Buddhism and contemporary psychology agree, it is also ungrounded.This book is about the ways we have tried to ground ourselves, to make ourselves feel more real. To be self-conscious is to experience our ungroundedness as a sense of lack, but what we are lacking has been understood differently in different historical periods.The chapters that follow show how our understanding of this lack changed at crucial historical junctures; in fact, these new understandings of lack seem to be why those junctures were so crucial in the development of the West. Traditionally, religion is the main way we try to ground our ungroundedness. From such a lack perspective, then, the history of the West is not a story of gradual secularization, for we can never escape the burden of our lack and the need to transcend it. Rather, our history becomes a tale of the increasingly this-worldly ways we have attempted to resolve this lack. Since it is due to our ungroundedness, which is basically a spiritual problem, these attempts have for the most part been unsuccessful. In psychotherapeutic terms: we have unconsciously projected and objectified our lack by trying to ground ourselves somewhere in 2 A Buddhist History of the West the world. Our inability to do that means we continue to be haunted by our own shadow. What makes this a Buddhist history of the West? Reduced to its essentials, Buddhism teaches that, if we want to be happy, our greed, ill will, and delusion must be transformed into their more positive counterparts : generosity, compassion, and wisdom. Is this true collectively as well as personally? The history of the West, like all histories, has been plagued by the consequences of greed, ill will, and delusion. The first two are obvious enough. What is emphasized in the pages that follow is the third: the largely unconscious ways that we have tried to resolve our lack—ways that have often led to greater suffering. It must be emphasized at the outset that this book offers a Buddhist perspective, not the Buddhist perspective. It is one contemporary interpretation of Buddhist teachings that attempts to develop those teachings in a particular direction, in order to understand what they can mean for us today, in a world very different from Shakyamuni’s. In accordance with its own emphasis on impermanence and essencelessness, Buddhism has been adaptable as it has disseminated to other places and cultures. To what, then, is Buddhism adapting today, as it infiltrates Western consciousness? Buddhist-Christian dialogue continues to be a fruitful interreligious encounter; others might point more facetiously to Hollywood’s fascination with Tibetan Buddhism. Yet it is becoming clearer that Buddhism’s main point of entry into Western culture is now Western psychology, especially psychotherapy. This interaction is all the more interesting because psychoanalysis and most of its offspring remain marked by an antagonism to religion that is a legacy of the Enlightenment, which defined itself in opposition to myth and superstition. In spite of that—or because of it?—this interaction between Buddhism and Western psychology is an opportunity for comparison in the best sense, in which we do not merely wrench two things out of context to notice their similarities, but benefit from the different light that each casts upon the other.While contemporary psychology brings to this encounter a more sophisticated understanding of the ways we make ourselves unhappy, it seems to me that Buddhist teachings provide a deeper insight into the source of the problem. What is that problem? For the most part “I” experience my sense-of-self as stable and persistent, apparently immortal; yet there is also awareness of my impermanence, the fact that “I” am growing older and will die. The tension between them is essentially the same one that confronted Shakyamuni himself, when, as the myth has it, he Introduction 3 ventured out of his father’s palace to encounter for the first time an ill man, an aged man, and finally a corpse. Insofar as this problem often motivates the psychotherapeutic quest to understand ourselves and the meanings...