At the basis of Asian culture there are certain traditions and ways of life that have the outward appearance of religions. However, when one investigates such phenomena as the Vedanta, Yoga, Buddhism, and Taoism more deeply, and becomes familiar not so much with their popular application as with the thought and practice of their most advanced exponents, one discovers disciplines that are neither religion nor philosophy in the Western sense. For, unlike Christianity or Judaism, they only rarely involve “beliefs”—that is to say, adherence to positive, formulated opinions about the nature and destiny of man and the universe based on revelation or intuition. And, unlike Western philosophy, their modus operandi is only quite secondarily the construction of a verbal and logical description or explanation of man’s experience.
Oriental “philosophy” is, at root, not concerned with conceptions, ideas, opinions, and forms of words at all. It is concerned with a transformation of experience itself, and it would seem that one of the things most akin to it in Western culture—akin by form rather than content—is psychotherapy. For this is the one major area in which the West has developed disciplines that aim at transforming the actual processes of the mind, and, through them, of the ways in which we experience the world, usually without commitment to any metaphysical or philosophical theory. Thus the curing of a psychotic or neurotic person, the transformation of the way in which he thinks and feels, is to a large extent the best Western analogy of the special concerns of Oriental philosophy. In many respects, then, it is more accurate to speak of such a phenomenon as Buddhism as psychology, rather than philosophy or religion. But this requires at least two reservations: that in popular practice it has many of the characteristics of a religion, and that its ultimate concerns are, as yet, hardly within the scope of Western psychology.
From the outset, there is one notable difference between the “psychotherapy,” the transformation of the mind, envisaged by an Oriental psychology, on the one hand, and Western psychiatry, on the other. In the West we are chiefly preoccupied with the transformation of mental states that are peculiar to relatively few individuals, and that arise out of certain special conditioning circumstances of the individual’s history. But Asian psychology interests itself in the transformation of states that are common to mankind as a whole, and is thus, as it were, a psychotherapy of the “normal” man. It proposes to change patterns of thought and feeling that are characteristic of the society as well as of the individual, though this does not amount in practice to an attempt to change the society as a whole. For it is recognized that in any given society relatively few individuals seem to have the capacity and the interest to liberate themselves from patterns of conditioning common to all.
It follows that for an Oriental psychology, “normalcy” could never be a standard of mental health—where “normalcy” means the ways of thinking and feeling, the conventions and life-goals, acceptable to the majority of persons in a particular culture. Likewise, the diseases of the mind are not recognized in terms of deviation from the normal. From this (Oriental) standpoint, there is a clear absurdity in trying to achieve the “happy adjustment” of an individual to the conventions of a society that is largely composed of unhappy people. Thus an Oriental psychology such as Buddhism is concerned, not with the peculiar frustrations of the neurotic individual, but with the general frustration, the common unhappiness (duhkha in Sanskrit), which afflicts almost every member of the society.
Buddhist and Hindu psychology agree in ascribing this general unhappiness to avidya—the Sanskrit term for a special type of ignorance or unconsciousness, which is the failure to perceive that certain desires and activities are self-contradictory and “viciously circular.” The victims of avidya are thus described as being in the state of samsara—the “round” or “whirl”—a life pattern that, having set itself a self-contradictory goal, resolves or oscillates interminably to the increasing discomfiture of those involved. Thus self-contradiction rather than deviation from the cultural norm becomes the criterion of mental disease, for which reason this basic difference between Oriental and Western psychology requires some explanation.
Self-contradiction is technically described in Buddhist and Hindu psychology as the human mind in a state of dvaita, which is duality or dividedness, a concept rather more inclusive than the approximate Western equivalent of “internal conflict.” One of the simplest examples of dvaita and its attendant self-contradiction is the making of one’s life-goal the acquisition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It is pointed out that pleasure and pain are relative experiences, such that a life consisting wholly or even principally of pleasure is as far beyond any possibility of experience as a world in which “everything is up” and nothing down. To the degree that one avoids pain one also eliminates pleasure, and so achieves a way of life that is merely indifferent and boring. Consequently a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure or happiness is devoted to a self-contradictory goal, because, in so far as one succeeds in gaining pleasure, there is necessarily a proportionate increase in some form of pain—often the simple, but most unpleasant, anxiety of losing what one has gained.
Buddhist psychology, in particular, emphasizes as perhaps the major form of self-contradiction a division of experience into subject and object, thinker and thought, feeler and feeling. According to Buddhist psychology, the notion that “I” am in some way different from the feelings that I now feel or the thought that I now think, the notion that man’s psycho-organism contains an ego as the enduring subject of a changing panorama of sensations, is an illusion based on memory (smrti). The notion of the ego arises because of the apparent phenomenon of self-consciousness, of knowing that one knows, or feeling that one feels. But it is pointed out that, in fact, we are never actually self-conscious. While thought A exists, we are not aware that we are aware of thought A. “I am aware that I am aware of thought A” is no longer thought A, but thought B. Every attempt to be aware of being aware is an infinite regress, a vicious circle, like trying to bite one’s own teeth. Thought B is not thought A; it is the memory of having had thought A, so that one is never aware of an ego that actually “has” (tense present) an experience. There are simply memory-traces of past experiences, and these suggest a continuous ego as a whirled light suggests a continuous circle of fire.
Thus the self or ego of which we claim to be conscious is in fact an abstraction from memory. The real substratum or content of the ego-experience is the memory of what has been, and not the knowledge of what is. In fact, then, I am not different from my present complex of thought-feeling-sensation. The difference between “I” and “my experience” is a misinterpretation of the difference between two kinds of experience—memory and immediate awareness. In fact, there is no “I” apart from the present, immediate experience. But contradiction arises when we try to make the abstract, conventional, and actually nonexistent “I” do something. For example, let us suppose that the present feeling is one of acute anxiety. If I “feel” that, apart from this anxiety, there is some separate, subjective ego that “has” this state of mind, efforts of will are made to fight the anxiety or to escape from it; the “I” is opposed to the anxiety. The result, however, is the familiar vicious circle of worry, because the effort to get rid of the anxiety is not the work of some independent, controlling “I”: it is the anxiety itself—in a state of self-contradiction that only aggravates it.
But when it is realized that in fact there is no “I” to be rescued from anxiety, there follows a psychic relaxation in which the anxiety itself subsides. This realization is not, of course, a matter of mere theoretical perception, for it arises, not so much through intellectual self-analysis, as through a total awareness (samyaksmrti) of what and how one actually feels now. Buddhist “psychotherapy” values nothing more than simple attention to the actual, immediate content of sensation and feeling—as distinct from the verbalized abstractions that thought constructs about it. Thus it is understood that “ego” is an abstraction, and not a content of the immediately perceived world. It is a convenient abstraction if treated, like the equator, as imaginary. But if treated as real, as an effective agent, it is only a source of confusion and psychic self-contradiction.
From the foregoing it might seem that there is one respect in which Buddhist psychology contradicts itself. It states that the pursuit of pleasure and the flight from pain is an illusory and impossible life-goal, and yet it proposes a deliverance from the “general unhappiness” called duhkha. This reveals an important aspect of the technique of Buddhist psychology. Stated verbally and formally its “goal” is release from duhkha, but in actual practice it dispenses with psychological goals entirely. “Goal” implies futurity, and the object of Buddhist psychology is not future. The object is complete attention to what one feels now, complete presence of mind. This involves the falling away of any notion of a psychological goal, because it dissipates the sense of the “I” distinct from the present feeling, and hence of the possibility of changing or escaping from it. Finding itself “trapped,” totally unable to choose to be other than the “now-state” of the mind, the “I” gives up or expires (nirvana). But this is a case of stirb und werde (die and come to life), of the familiar paradox of the law of reversed effort, of the creative freedom that comes through “self-surrender.”
In our seminar, participants trained in some forms of Western psychotherapy often objected that this “surrender” of the ego would imply the mere abandonment of the psyche to the lawless direction of the unconscious, and that it was an attempted reversion to the undifferentiated state of “primitive mentality” in which the conscious and the unconscious are still confused. But such an objection rests on a confusion between “ego” and “consciousness.” For in practice this dissipation of the ego comes about, not through unconsciousness, but through very intense consciousness, through the clearest awareness of the present realities of psychic life. Furthermore, the various types of Oriental psychology are not at all afraid of the “lawless direction” of an “unconscious,” which has become capable of so great a clarity of consciousness. This may sound paradoxical if it is not understood that in Oriental psychologies such as the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist the unconscious is recognized as the source of consciousness, as that which is conscious. There should be no difficulty in understanding this when put into its simple physical parallel: we are conscious with the brain but not of the brain. We simply do not know how we are conscious, how we remember, how we reason, abstract, and perceive gestalten. We only know that the autonomic nervous system, for example, effects miracles of organization so complex that the conscious intellect is baffled in attempting to understand them. Oriental psychology feels, then, that the direction of life is basically from those unconscious processes that have thus far organized the marvelous complexity of the human form, and that constellate not only the autonomic nervous system but consciousness, memory, and reason itself. One might ask, then, what directions we are to trust if we cannot trust these!
The following quotations from the Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang-Tzu (c. 400 B.C.) aptly express the Oriental attitude to this unconscious process (Tao):
Your body is not your own: it is the delegated image of Tao. Your life is not your own: it is the delegated harmony of Tao. Your individuality is not your own: it is the delegated adaptability of Tao. You move, you know not how; you are at rest, you know not why. These are the operations of the laws of Tao.
Things are produced around us, but no one knows the whence. They issue forth, but no one sees the portal. Men one and all value that part of knowledge which is known. They do not know how to avail themselves of the unknown in order to reach knowledge. Is not this misguided?
Tao is not “God” in the personified or conceptualized sense of the West—not a definite thing, but a negative concept analogous to the unconscious. Chuang-Tzu’s mentor, Lao-Tzu, said: “The Tao which can be defined (lit., tao-ed, made its own object) is not the regular Tao.” Tao is thus the total process of life that cannot be defined nor made conscious because no standpoint of observation exists outside it.
The foregoing considerations, which were but a few of the topics reviewed in our seminar, suggested two points of application for Western psychotherapy. The first was the therapeutic value of the subjective abandonment of any psychological goals, in the future, coupled with the gentle but persistent focusing of attention on the immediately present totality of feeling-sensation—without any attempt to explain, diagnose, judge, or change it. Oriental psychologies do not particularly value rationalized explanations of how a person has come to feel the way he feels, in terms of his past history and conditioning. They do not stress the idea that the perception or understanding of a causal chain, running from the past to the present, effects release from it. For the task of unraveling the conditioning of the present by the past is infinite, since it leads not only to conditioning of the child by parents, but also to the conditioning of the parents—and the child—by their entire social context. By such means, a thorough psychoanalysis would have to go back to Adam and Eve!
Their feeling is rather that we are conditioned unconsciously by the past because of an incomplete and incorrect awareness of the present. Such “wrong-awareness” (avidya) underlies, in their opinion, one of the basic assumptions of Western thought and science: namely, the whole notion that the past contains the entire explanation of the present, that the understanding of what-is-now is complete in its mere history. For Oriental thought, the past exists only conventionally. It has no real existence, being a logical inference from present memory—an abstraction, and not a real, concrete experience. Therapy consists in releasing the mind from treating the abstract as the concrete, without, however, losing the power of abstraction.
The second point of application goes hand-in-hand with the first. Clear awareness, clear feeling, of one’s real and present experience involves, as we saw, the realization that the ego—the continuing “I” as the substratum of changing experiences—is an abstraction and thus not an effective agent.2 It can no more perform an action or effect a psychological change than, say, an inch or the number three. Yet Western science, and especially applied science (technology), is based on the assumption that its immediate objective is always the understanding and control of the environment by the ego. Western culture as a whole rests on the feeling that man, as ego, is the independent observer and potential controller of a world that he experiences as profoundly other than himself. Yet it is for this reason that Western technology leads us repeatedly into vicious circles. For if this split between the ego and the environment is unreal, the whole effort of technology is like the attempt of a hand to grasp itself. Its ultimate issue is the (almost) totally controlled or planned society—the totalitarian state—which is precisely the breakdown of society because it is based on mutual mistrust. It is the maximum effort of everyone to control everyone and everything else. “Am I my brother’s policeman?”
Generally speaking, psychiatry shares most of the unexamined assumptions of Western science. Thus it tends to represent the unconscious as a mass of irrational and chaotic “drives” that have to be organized and controlled by the ego, the conscious. However, the method of control is not that of Protestant Puritanism or Catholic moral theology—the method of whip and spur. It is the much improved method of the humane horse-trainer, who “loves his animals” and gently coaxes them into obedience with lumps of sugar rather than whippings. But from the standpoint of Oriental psychology this is still a quasi-schizoid state of mind. It gives inadequate practical recognition to the fact that consciousness is a function of the unconscious, however much this may be admitted in theory. Man is not dual, the horse and its rider. The relationship of conscious and unconscious is perhaps better represented by the centaur. For it is surely absurd to conceive the unconscious as an unintelligence, a generator of nothing but colossal blind urges with which “we” must somehow come to terms, for we do not actually know how we reason or “will,” or attain creative insight—which is only to say that these are, at root, unconscious functions.
The second point of application is, then, a recognition of the fact that therapy is not the increase of conscious control over the unconscious by the ego. It is rather an integration of conscious and unconscious, preparatory to a type of living, thinking, and acting, which in Zen Buddhism is called mushin (mu “no,” shin “mind’). Mushin is a kind of “inspired spontaneity.” It is the art of making the appropriate responses to life without the interruption of that wobbling and indecisive state that we call “choosing.” In other words, mushin is when acts and decisions are “handed over” to the same unconscious processes, which organize the ingenious structure of the body. Ordinarily, our breathing, circulation, hearing, and seeing all happen mushin—without the necessity of conscious direction and control. But there are also times when we make a witty remark or get an extremely important idea by the same mysterious process. We did not “try”; it just “came.”
Buddhist psychology proposes to facilitate this process to the point where inspired spontaneity is not the exceptional but the usual mode of thought and action. But as in many other arts, this comes about through a process of growth and a subtle kind of “effortless discipline.” It is by no means to be confused with acting wildly—saying or doing the first thing that comes into one’s head. Yet thinking or acting “wild” or at random is indeed the starting point, though, like free-association in the analyst’s office, it occurs in a context (i.e., some sort of ashram or school) where the resultant vagaries are accepted. In due course, one learns to use mushin as a way of action just as one learns the use of any other instrument or faculty, which, at first try, seems erratic and unreliable.3
In Western psychology, free-association—the nearest thing to mushin—has a different objective. The Freudian or Jungian analyst is primarily interested in what associations, symbols, and other diagnostic materials are produced in free-association. It is a way of exploring the unconscious in order to control it. In Buddhist psychology the point of interest is rather that spontaneous images and symbols are produced. The preliminary vagaries of mushin are not analyzed, for mushin is being brought into play as a way of life rather than a diagnostic technique. Herein, I believe, is reflected the wide difference between Eastern and Western psychology, the one trusting the unconscious and attempting to liberate the full depth of its wisdom, and the other trying to arrange a treaty wherein the unconscious accepts the control of the ego in return for certain recognition of its blind demands. But there are many signs that this difference is decreasing. Of late many of us have noted the growth of a remarkable humility and readiness to admit ignorance in Western psychiatric circles. For in the course of scientific research there is a long preliminary stage of rapid progress and easy overconfidence, until a point is reached where every addition to our knowledge reveals, at the same time, a new universe of ignorance. Through such knowledge we come to the place of which Chuang-Tzu said, “He who knows that he is a fool is not a great fool.”
1. This article arose out of an experimental seminar on “The Application of Asian Psychology to Modern Psychiatry,” conducted during 1951 at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco under the direction of three members of the faculty: Frederic Spiegelberg, PhD, Haridas Chaudhuri, PhD, and the author. Dr. Spiegelberg is director of Studies at the Academy, and assistant professor in the Department of Asiatic and Slavic Studies at Stanford University. Dr. Chaudhuri was, before coming to the Academy, professor of philosophy at Krishnagar Government College in India, and is a noted exponent of the philosophy of the late Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Alan W. Watts is a professor at the Academy in the field of comparative philosophy and psychology, and author of many books on East-West relations in religion, philosophy, and psychology, including The Spirit of Zen (1936), The Meaning of Happiness (1940), The Supreme Identity (1950), and The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951). He is now working on a research fellowship in Oriental Philosophy under the Bollingen Foundation.
In a note to the [Journal] editor, Dr. Watts writes, “You will recognize, of course, that this is an enormous subject, such that in eleven-and-a-half typewritten pages I have only been able to sketch some of the general issues. I would have liked to have had space to give adequate recognition to the fact that there are many exceptions to some of my generalizations about Western psychiatry. But just because these are still exceptional, I felt it might be better to omit them in an article dealing with preliminary, large-scale considerations.”
2. It must be understood that we are not here using the term “I” or “ego” to designate the total human organism. In ordinary speech, as well as in psychological jargon, they are seldom so used, but refer rather to a supposed center of consciousness for which other parts of the organism, such as the glands or the limbs, are objects that the “I” has or uses.
3. For further information about the techniques of mushin see Suzuki (1938, chap. 4; 1949). Interesting discussions of the same phenomenon from the standpoint of Western psychology will be found in three articles by E. D. Hutchinson (1939, 1940, and 1941).
Hutchinson, E. D. (1939). Varieties of insight. Psychiatry, 2, 323–332.
Hutchinson, E. D. (1940). The period of frustration in creative endeavor. Psychiatry, 3, 351–359.
Hutchinson, E. D. (1941). The nature of insight. Psychiatry, 4, 31–43.
Suzuki, D. T. (1938). Zen Buddhism and its influence on Japanese culture. Kyoto, Japan: Eastern Buddhist Society.
Suzuki, D. T. (1949). The Zen doctrine of no-mind. London, UK: Rider.
From The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1953, 13(1), 25–30. Copyright © 1953 by the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Reprinted with permission of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.