Are You Looking to Buddhism When You Should Be Looking to Therapy? The ultimate goal of Buddhist practice isn’t about achieving mental health. By C. W. Huntington, Jr.
Spring 2018
Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, (excepts) https://tricycle.org/magazine/buddhism-and-psychotherapy/ Some 30 years ago Jack Engler published an influential study based on his experience as both a Buddhist meditation teacher and a clinical psychologist. He had discovered over the years that many people who come to Buddhism are looking for the kind of help they ought properly to seek in psychotherapy. “With the ‘triumph of the therapeutic’ in Western culture,” he wrote, there is a tendency in mindfulness meditation to “analyze mental content instead of simply observing it.” In more recent years this conflation between Buddhist practice and psychotherapy has only deepened. Books tracing associations between the two traditions have proliferated, and the use of mindfulness meditation in a therapeutic setting has become commonplace. Indeed, pristine, unassailable mental health is often assumed to be the ultimate goal of all study and practice of the dharma. The problem, however, is that it isn’t. And when, as it happens, an accomplished Buddhist meditator struggles with severe depression or anxiety—symptoms of a clinically diagnosed psychological disorder—it can be especially difficult for students to understand. Writing after the death of the Canadian Buddhist teacher Michael Stone, who had struggled with bipolar disorder, the Scottish Zen monk Dogo Barry Graham reflected on would-be students who were disappointed to hear that what treats his own mental health issues is not meditation, but Prozac. “Some were upset when I told them to see a doctor before they attempted meditation practice,” he wrote on his blog. The practice of psychotherapy is, accordingly, dedicated to a method of healing that leaves the conventional structure of self-as-agent intact as the focal point of attention, whereas Buddhist spiritual practice engages in a sustained, methodical dismantling of our customary preoccupation with self-centered experience.... At the time of Engler’s study 30 years ago, those undertaking Buddhist practice to solve psychotherapeutic issues—and, according to him, there were many such people—often suffered from various clinical disorders characteristic of an ego that had been traumatized and arrested in the course of its development. They were frequently searching for a way to avoid the developmental tasks essential to the formation of a functioning ego; Buddhism was particularly attractive to them because of its core teaching of no-self, mistakenly perceived as a “shortcut solution to the developmental tasks appropriate and necessary to their stage of the life cycle.” However, what they found in Buddhist practice was, ironically, nothing but an endless hall of mirrors reflecting their own fears and desires.... As practiced in the traditional Buddhist context, mindfulness is not a powerful, spiritualized form of psychotherapy, a device for fine-tuning the ego—much less a strategy for achieving “complete and invulnerable self-sufficiency.” Although in an abridged form it can be legitimately harnessed to the business of healing the self of a range of mental and emotional disorders, as an essential component in the Buddhist path to nibbana, mindfulness is not about becoming a happier, better person. It’s not about “happiness” at all—at least not if “happiness” is understood as the fulfillment of desire. Mindfulness is, rather, about wisdom rooted in insight, renunciation, and unqualified self-surrender. ___________________________ Established in 1990 as a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) educational organization, The Tricycle Foundation is dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. In 1991 the Foundation launched Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, the first magazine intended to present Buddhist perspectives to a Western readership.