THERE IS A famous story in the Zen tradition of China, recounted in the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, that illustrates the critical importance of clear thinking when one practices meditation. It is as relevant in today’s climate as it was thirteen hundred years ago, for misconceptions about meditation continue to bedevil today’s practitioners. A good way of introducing the Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth, this story emphasizes how essential a correct conceptual view can be when one follows the Buddha’s example and tries to deal with one’s own emotional life.
RIGHT VIEW
Forever alert to the tendency of the human psyche to substitute some kind of imagined state of perfection for true understanding, Hung-jen, the departing fifth patriarch, challenged his students and followers of the seventh century A.D. to compose a verse demonstrating their understanding of the Buddha’s teachings. The most satisfactory verse would indicate his successor. The foremost disciple, Shen-hsiu, who was expected to assume the role of the master, presented the following:
The body is the Bodhi tree,
The mind is like a clear mirror standing.
Take care to wipe it all the time,
Allow no grain of dust to cling.
A perfectly acceptable response, Shen-hsiu’s verse made a virtue of the empty and reflecting mind, a recurrent motif in Buddhist literature. But the clear mirror, like the true self, too easily becomes an object of veneration. Such a view merely replaces the concrete self with a more rarefied version that is then thought to be even more real than the original.
An illiterate kitchen boy, Hui-neng, grasped the imperfection of Shen-hsiu’s response and presented the following alternative:
The Bodhi is not a tree,
The clear mirror is nowhere standing.
Fundamentally not one thing exists;
Where then is a grain of dust to cling?1
Hui-neng’s response, which was consistent with the teachings of Nagarjuna and the Madhyamika school in embracing neither absolutism nor nihilism, avoided the trap of idealization that Shenhsiu’s poem retained. Hui-neng avoided the common misconception of liberation as a mind emptied of its contents or a body emptied of its emotions. The mind, or self, that we conceive of does not exist in the way we imagine, said Huineng; if all things are empty, to what can we cling? If the mind itself is already empty, why should it have to be cleansed? If the emotions are empty, why do they have to be eliminated?
Even in a Buddhist community, this view challenged conventional thinking. The departing fifth patriarch, for example, found it necessary to praise Shen-hsiu’s answer in public, while privately rebuking him. Publicly denouncing Huineng, the patriarch secretly named Hui-neng the sixth patriarch and then urged him to flee under the cover of darkness. Yet, Hui-neng, in his own way, was articulating what has always been one of the major components of the Buddha’s teaching, what has become known as Right View.
THE MIDDLE PATH
The Fourth Noble Truth the Buddha articulated in his first teaching at Sarnath was that of the Way leading to the Cessation of Dukkha. Known as the Middle Path, it was said to avoid the two extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification, or, in more contemporary terms, of idealization and denial. Having tried both sets of practices, the Buddha realized that each subtly reinforced the very notions of “I” or “mine” that created the felt sense of suffering in the first place. The search for happiness through sense pleasures he called “low, common, unprofitable and the way of ordinary people,” and the search for happiness through denial or asceticism he called “painful, unworthy and unprofitable.”2 Relaxing the ego boundaries and dissolving the sense of self in pleasurable or even ecstatic experiences did not relieve suffering, nor did giving free reign to the emotions. Attacking the body and subjugating the self, coercing the ego into some kind of surrender, also did not relieve suffering, nor did trying to deny the emotions.
The correct approach, taught the Buddha, lay in the ground between these two extremes. It required the alignment of eight specific factors of mind and behavior: understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. When these factors were properly established, taught the Buddha, they constituted the Path to Cessation. The Eight factors are collectively known as the Eightfold Path: the behavioral categories of Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood are the ethical foundation; the meditative categories of Right Effort, Right Concentration and Right Mindfulness are the foundation of mental discipline traditionally associated with the formal practice of meditation; and the wisdom categories of Right Understanding and Right Thought represent the conceptual foundation that has also been termed Right View. it is this latter category that is often given short shrift by those eager to embark on the meditative path, who then, at best, give answers like shen-hsiu’s.
Consistent with the Buddhist method of approaching an authentic view of self by first bringing the manifestations of false self into awareness, the most effective way of developing the Right View that the Buddha encouraged is to examine the various common manifestations of False View. In doing this, we can see how much our confusion about the nature of our emotions colors our understanding of key words like ego or self. We do not know what to make of our emotions, and we let our various attempts at dealing with them define our understanding of the Buddha’s teaching. To truly follow the Eightfold Path, we must reverse this process. Instead of letting our misconceptions about our feelings influence our understanding, we must let our understanding change the way we experience our emotions.
THE PRIMAL SCREAM
I often have the experience as a therapist of helping someone discover a difficult feeling like anger and then hearing them ask, “What do I do now? Should I go home and have it out?” Sometimes we feel that the only solution is to act out every emotion that we get in touch with. We feel as if we must express it to whomever it is directed or that we are somehow cheating, ourselves. The idea of simply knowing the feeling does not occur to us. This view that emotions will pollute us if we do not get them out is a strongly rooted one that has definite implications for the way in which the Buddha’s teachings on selflessness are often misunderstood.
Many meditators, for example, are puzzled by these teachings and mistakenly strive to rid themselves of what they understand to be their Freudian-based egos. Conventional notions of ego—as that which modulates sexual and aggressive strivings—have led many Americans to mistakenly equate selflessness with a kind of “primal scream” in which people are liberated from all constraints of thought, logic, or rationality and can indulge, or act out, their emotions thoroughly. Selflessness is confused here with Wilhelm Reich’s organismic potency, and the ego is identified as anything that tenses the body, obscures the capacity for pleasurable discharge, or gets in the way of expressing emotion. Popularized in the sixties, this view remains deeply embedded in the popular imagination. It sees the route to enlightenment as a process of unlearning, of casting off the shackles of civilization and returning to a childlike forthrightness. It also tends to romanticize regression, psychosis, and any uninhibited expression of emotion.
Such a view in fact represents a return to the primary process, from which, as we have seen, the fantasized self is fabricated. By casting off the mental activity and thinking characteristic of the Freudian ego (the so-called secondary process), people with this misconception abandon the ego skills necessary for successful meditation, which is essentially an exercise of ego functions: consciously disciplining the mind and body is nothing if not the task of the Freudian ego. Thus, meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using ego to observe and tame its own manifestations. Development of the capacity to attend to the moment-to-moment nature of mind allows the self to be experienced without the distortions of idealization or wishful fantasy. Rather than encouraging a consolidated self sure of its own solidity, the Buddhist approach envisions a fluid ability to integrate potentially destabilizing experiences of insubstantiality and impermanence.
This is an important distinction to make in differentiating the Buddhist view from the conventional Western one. We in the West often imagine that the developed self must be the way we see a champion boxer: strong, muscular, confident, and intimidating. The Buddhist view challenges this conception the way the young Muhammad Ali challenged the boxers of his time. For the Buddha, the correct view is consistent with Ali’s analogy of “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee”: it is a different kind of strength, but it is strength, nonetheless. Attempting to jettison the Freudian ego only undercuts the ego strength that is necessary for successful meditation practice.
UNION
Another popular misconception is that selflessness is some kind of oneness or merger—a forgetting of the self while one simultaneously identifies with the surroundings, a trance state, or an ecstatic union. According to this view, yearning separates one from the ultimate object of one’s passion; and if one gives up one’s emotions, some kind of ultimate satisfaction can be obtained. This view of selflessness as union has strong roots (it is the one that has been influenced by psychedelic drug use, for example), and it is the traditional psychodynamic explanation, dating from Freud’s view of the oceanic feeling. Thus, selflessness is identified with the infantile state before development of the ego: the infant at the breast merged in a symbiotic and undifferentiated union, with no need for any troubling emotion.
The effort in this misunderstanding is to make any difficult emotion disappear. We imagine that we can either replace it with its opposite or induce a numbed state in which nothing need be felt. In union lies the supposed annihilation of the emotions; they can be shed as the individual merges into the state of oneness. People who deal with their anger by always being sweet are using this defense, as are those who seek oblivion in drugs or alcohol. One of the most critical therapeutic tasks for people in recovery from drug or alcohol abuse is to help them find a way to be with their anxieties without rushing to drown those out. The emotionless escape they seek is a vacuity that is the psychic equivalent of the Buddha’s longing for nonexistence.
There are, in fact, states accessible in meditation that induce feelings of harmony, merger, and loss of ego boundaries, but these are not the states that define the notion of selflessness. Also, when certain meditation techniques of one-pointedness are pursued with some perseverance, they lead inevitably to feelings of relaxation and tranquility that are soothing and seductive, in which the more troubling emotions are in abeyance. Yet Buddhism always stresses that such states are not the answer to the problem of the emotions. The distinctive attentional strategy of Buddhism is not one-pointedness but mindfulness, or bare attention, in which moment-to-moment awareness of changing objects of perception is cultivated. It is this practice that focuses attention on the self-concept and that teaches a different way for one to experience feelings.
But psychoanalytic interpreters, and the naive meditators who have followed in their wake, have drawn inspiration only from the concentration practices, and not from the more essential practices of the so-called Great Doubt. They have emphasized the oceanic experience, but not the more terrifying lack of inherent identity. Physicians who have popularized meditation as a technique of stress reduction have also painted a picture of meditation based solely on accounts of concentration practices, and generations of newly practicing meditators have aspired to dissolve their tensions—and their minds—into the pool of blissful feelings that would make them “at one” with the universe, or the Void. Yet selflessness is not a return to the feelings of infancy, an experience of undifferentiated bliss, or a merger with the Mother—even though many people may seek such an experience when they begin to meditate, and even though some may actually find a version of it. Selflessness does not require people to annihilate their emotions, only to learn to experience them in a new way.
SUBJUGATION
Besides feeling that emotions must be either expressed or repressed, we sometimes imagine a third alternative: that they must be controlled, managed, or suppressed. In this view, the emotions are personified as wild animals lurking in the jungles of the unconscious—animals that must be guarded against or tamed to the greatest extent possible. A friend of mine remembers learning to swim and being afraid of jumping into the deep end of the pool, out of fear that he would be dragged down by the forces hiding there. Only later in life was he able to understand that his fear had been of his own powerful emotions. This fear is the source of the misunderstanding of selflessness as subjugation. With this view, too, the emotions are never understood as empty in their own right. They are perceived as real entities over which the person can have only limited control and which must be managed vigilantly to avert catastrophe.
Because of this view, the self is thought of as something that must be subjugated to a higher power. This notion very quickly enters the territory of thinly disguised masochism, for the tendency is to seek a greater Being to whom one can surrender, subduing one’s own emotions in an idealized merger experience where the ego boundaries are temporarily interrupted. The problem here is that the reality of the other is accepted and even revered, while that of the self is denied.
The psychoanalyst Annie Reich, in a classic paper on self-esteem in women, describes this very well. “Femininity,” she says, is often “equated with complete annihilation.”3 The only way to recover needed self-esteem is to merge or fuse with a glorified or idealized other, whose greatness or power she can then incorporate. For both sexes, something similar can seem the only option in spiritual circles: the need to see some one as embodying the idealized qualities of the awakened compassionate mind can be very strong. The wish, in this case, is (again) for some object, person, or place to concretely represent the sought-after qualities of mind. Meditators with this misunderstanding are vulnerable to a kind of eroticized attachment to teachers, gurus, or other intimates toward whom they direct their desire to be released into abandon. More often than not, they also remain masochistically entwined with these figures to whom they are trying to surrender.
DISAVOWAL
A fourth common misconception, popular in what has become known as transpersonal psychology, is the belief that egolessness is a developmental stage beyond the ego—that the ego must first exist and then be abandoned. This is the flip side of the belief that egolessness precedes the development of the ego; instead, egolessness supposedly succeeds the ego. The coping strategy that best defines this misunderstanding is one of disavowal, where troubling emotions are pushed aside or disowned as if they are no longer relevant. They are treated as if they were just a stage that the person had to go through.
This approach implies that the ego, while important developmentally, can in some sense be transcended or left behind. Here we run into an unfortunate mix of vocabulary. Yet listen to the Dalai Lama on this point: “Selflessness is not a case of something that existed in the past becoming nonexistent. Rather, this sort of “self” is something that never did exist. What is needed is to identify as nonexistent something that always was nonexistent.”4 It is not ego, in the Freudian sense, that is the actual target of the Buddhist insight, it is, rather, the self-concept, the representational component of the ego, the actual internal experience of one’s self that is targeted.
The point is that the entire ego is not transcended; the self-representation is revealed as lacking concrete existence. It is not the case of something real being eliminated, but of the essential groundlessness being realized for what it has always been. Meditators who have trouble grasping this difficult point often feel under pressure to disavow critical aspects of their being that are identified with the unwholesome “ego.”
Most commonly, sexuality, aggression, critical thinking, or even the active use of the first person pronoun I are relinquished, the general idea being that to give these things up or let these things go is to achieve egolessness. Meditators set up aspects of the self as the enemy and then attempt to distance themselves from them. The problem is that the qualities that are identified as unwholesome are actually empowered by the attempts to repudiate them. It is not unusual to find meditators insisting in therapy that they do not need sex or had no need for an orgasm, or to find them denying that a frustration was evoking anger. Rather than adopting an attitude of nonjudgmental awareness, these meditators are so concerned with letting it (their unwholesome feelings) go that they never have the experience of the insubstantiality of their own feelings. They remain identified with them through the action of disavowal.
In a similar way, those with this misunderstanding of selflessness tend to overvalue the idea of the “empty mind” free of thoughts. In this case, thought itself is identified with ego, and such persons seem to be cultivating a kind of intellectual vacuity in which the absence of critical thought is seen as an ultimate achievement. As the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman has written of this misconception: “One just refutes all views, dismisses the meaningfulness of language, and presumes that as long as one remains devoid of any conviction, holding no views, knowing nothing, and achieving the forgetting of all learning, then one is solidly in the central way, in the ’silence of the sages.’”5
Contrary to this way of thinking, conceptual thought does not disappear as a result of meditative insight. Only the belief in the ego’s solidity is lost. Yet this insight does not come easily. It is far more tempting—and easier—to use meditation to withdraw from our confusion about ourselves, to dwell in the tranquil stabilization that meditation offers, and to think of this as approximating the teaching of egolessness. But this is not what the Buddha meant by Right View.
EMPTINESS
To counter such tendencies, Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, taught the doctrine of emptiness, or sunyata. Emptiness, he understood, is not a thing in itself, but is always predicated on a belief in something. Referring to the absence of self-sufficiency or substantiality in persons, emotions, or things, emptiness describes the lack of just those qualities of independence and individual identity that we so instinctually impute. Like the reflection in a rearview mirror, emptiness is not a thing in itself, yet it is nonetheless the vehicle for maintaining a proper view of the road in front of us.
The tendency of the human psyche, taught Nagarjuna, is either to reify or to deny, to impute absolute meaning or to impute none. Emptiness was his way of doing neither, of suspending judgment while still maintaining contact with the stuff of experience. It is as necessary for navigating our emotional terrain as the rearview mirror is for our travels on the highway, because when we attempt to drive without using the mirror, we get anxious, never knowing if it is safe to move to the left or right, or if someone is on our tail. When we operate with an appreciation of emptiness, teach the Buddhists, we are protected from the extremes of left and right (of grandiosity or despair), and when we are in danger of being overtaken by our own reactions to things, we can suddenly catch ourselves.
According to the Buddhist scholar Herbert Guenther, emptiness is the experience that “serves to destroy the idea of a persisting individual nature,”6 but it is not an end in itself. It is especially useful in dealing with the thorny problem of the emotions, because a correct understanding of emptiness permits an alternative to the two extremes of emotional indulgence or emotional repression. As we practice meditation, we are forced to examine these coping strategies and to learn an alternative view.
HOLDING EMOTIONS
Emotional experience remains a problematic area for most people. We are all made uncomfortable by the intensity of our feelings, and we develop various ways of defending against this intensity. Buddhist emptiness is the key that unlocks the problem of the emotions. Emptiness is not hollow; it does not mean a vacuity of feeling. Emptiness is the understanding that the concrete appearances to which we are accustomed do not exist in the way we imagine, an experience that the late Tibetan lama Kalu Rinpoche called an “intangible” one, most comparable to that of “a mute person tasting sugar.”7 In particular, it means that the emotions that we take to be so real and are so worried about do not exist in the way we imagine them. They do exist, but we can know them in a way that is different from either expressing or repressing them. The Buddhist meditations on emptiness are not meant as a withdrawal from the falsely conceived emotions but as a means of recognizing the misconceptions that surround them, thereby changing the way that we experience them altogether. The Central Way of the Buddha has particular relevance in our emotional life.
One of the great lessons of the Fourth Noble Truth, and of the Buddha’s teachings in general, is that it is possible to learn a new way to be with one’s feelings. The Buddha taught a method of holding thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the balance of meditative equipoise so that they can be seen in a clear light. Stripping away the identifications and reactions that usually adhere to the emotions like moss to a stone, the Buddha’s method allows the understanding of emptiness to emerge. This is an understanding that has vast implications for the field of psychotherapy because it promises great relief from even ordinary suffering. As the third Zen patriarch, writing in the early seventh century A.D., articulated with great clarity:
When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,
nothing in the world can offend,
and when a thing can no longer offend,
it ceases to exist in the old way….
If you wish to move in the One Way
do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.
Indeed, to accept them fully
is identical with true Enlightenment.8
Training in this attitude of mind is why meditation is practiced.