PSYCHOLOGICAL ATTACHMENT... chan buddhism mind therapy.pdf

PSYCHOLOGICAL ATTACHMENT,

NO-SELF AND CHAN BUDDHIST

MIND THERAPY

Wing-Shing Chan

The role of Chan Buddhism for mind therapy is distinguished from psychotherapy by the

objectives in diminishing or removing the deluded perceived self and the psychological

self of attachments and cravings, which are considered as the more basic origins for

psychological suffering and problems. The Buddhist concepts of impermanence, no-self

and emptiness are discussed to explain the Buddhist explanation for human suffering. A

four-stage theory is described to explain the common Buddhist meditation experience

toward the realization of no-self. Removing psychological attachment is found to be of

explanatory value for many enlightenment episodes of Chan masters. Meditation

concentration and reduction of self-attachment will mutually reinforce each other

toward a complete therapy of the mind. An innovative approach for psychotherapy in

going further to tackle a person’s basic life attachments is suggested.

Nowadays Chan (Zen) Buddhism is often understood as having therapeutic

value for the human mind, and there is a growing number of discussions and

applications associated with psychotherapy (for example, Brazier 1996; Miller

2002; Reynolds 1982; Young-Eisendrath and Muramoto 2002). Psychology and

Buddhism are deemed by many to have a similar goal of psychological betterment

or healing with no fundamental differences. For example, a psychotherapist and

Buddhist wrote:

The psychological and the spiritual are not mutually exclusive, nor is one vantage

pointer ‘higher’ or ‘deeper’ than the other. Like ﬁgure and ground, they represent

two dimensions of one reality. ... Each practice brings with its own particular

perspective, its own advantages and its own pitfalls. (Magid 2003, 80 – 1)

Both disciplines work by understanding how the mind works and through

improving the quality of how the mind functions, whereby emotions, thoughts, and

behaviours can be signiﬁcantly improved. While psychology adopts a comparatively

more objective and empirical approach, Buddhism takes on a meditative, theoretical

and introspective approach. Is Chan Buddhism, ignoring its already very few

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 9, No. 2, November 2008

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/08/020253-264

q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940802556586

254 WING-SHING CHAN

religious aspects, in essence a subset of psychotherapies but employing a different

approach or method? If it is not, are there basic theoretical and practical differences

between Chan Buddhism and psychotherapy for mind therapy? What really

characterizes Chan mind therapy?

To clarify the essential difference on mind healing between psychotherapy

and Chan Buddhism, the theoretical Buddhist concept of no-self (Sanskrit:

anatman), is required to contrast with the concept of self in psychology. The self is

an essential explicit or implicit concept across all psychological disciplines. All

psychological disciplines that involve the study of human personality or social

relationship such as social or psychoanalytic psychology make use of a personal

self as a central theoretical construct in explaining and improving how

people function. The present scientiﬁc psychology can in some way be viewed

as a self-psychology or psychology of the self. The self is either a central object

of study or a taken-for-granted reality used in either theory construction or

experimentation. Although some psychological disciplines focus on the study of

external behaviours (behavioural psychology) or internal brain processing

(cognitive psychology) without working through the macroscopic idea of a self,

few psychologists will deny that the person they study or the psychologists

themselves possess a self or a personality. And if their microscopic studies of the

bit and pieces of human behaviours or thinking ﬁnally combine into a total ﬁgure,

the image of a self inﬂuencing these fragments of behaviours and thinking will

also emerge. Self-integrity and good self-image in managing relationships

and life situations are commonly regarded in psychology as conducive to or

consequences of a healthy psyche.

No-self is one of the most signiﬁcant postulates in Buddhist theory as it

represents the Buddhist’s truth of universal reality and the ideal human mind and

condition. Philosophically the doctrine of no-self can be seen as an extension of

the Buddhist doctrine of ‘Everything is impermanent’ (anitya). Buddhism views

that everything (mind or matter) in the universe arises or ceases due to the arising

or cessation of the other things in association with it—the doctrine of dependent

arising ( pratitya-samutpada). Everything can change at any moment according to

the causes and conditions that are exerting inﬂuences on it. Therefore things are

always subjected to change and deﬁnable only by their interactions with other

things. Hence it is not possible for anything to possess absolute constancy or

permanent being. This is the Buddhist idea of emptiness (sunyata), the emptying

of permanency, immutable self-nature or being. If everything is impermanent, and

therefore is of emptiness, so is the personal self.

The personal self is often analysed in Buddhism in terms of the functions of

the ﬁve aggregates (skandha), consisting of form or bodily phenomena (rupa),

feelings (vedana), recognition or labelling (samjna), volition (samskara) and

self-consciousness or awareness (vijnana) (Gethin 1998, 135 – 136). As these ﬁve

aggregates change from moment to moment, no permanent self other than these

changing experiences can be substantiated. The philosopher David Hume had

also put forth a similar argument for the non-existence of being or personal self

CHAN BUDDHIST MIND THERAPY 255

other than the existence of those constantly changing human perceptions and

recollections (Hume 1921, 245 – 259).

Theoretically the essence of human suffering, anguish or pain (duhkha) can

be analysed in Buddhism in a very concrete way, as being summarized very

succinctly by Rupert Gethin:

That something which is impermanent must be regarded as ‘painful’ (duhkha)

follows, of course, from principles we have found expressed in the second of the

four noble truths: if we become attached and try to hold on to things that will

inevitable change and disappear, then we are bound to suffer. (1998, 137)

It follows that, to remove human anguish or pain, we must remove the attachment

(upadana) or craving (trsna) of our mind from various things or concepts that we

are attached to. This idea, as we shall see, forms the central approach for Chan

mind therapy.

The truth of emptiness or no-self does not render the use of personal name

or expectations about personality meaningless, as many people have mistakably

assumed. Because of our emotional attachments or cravings, we are less

changeable than we really should be, and cling excessively to substance, past

events and personal characteristics, things and concepts that are more subject to

change than we expect or hope them to be. That is why the Mahayana Heart Sutra

states: ‘Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form’. Its meaning is about training

ourselves until we actually perceive all forms (things and concepts) simultaneously

as empty. Functions of all forms continue but there is no emotional clinging.

A common misunderstanding about no-self is to understand the term

merely through its philosophical meaning; that the so-called self is empty of a

permanent immutable being. People often think that this philosophical

understanding of no-self alone is sufﬁcient to lead to the state of no-self or

enlightenment. Quite the contrary, human anguish or pain is essentially a

psychological experience; the successful removal of personal anguish or pain has

to be achieved psychologically, not merely conceptually. Whenever there are

emotional gains or losses coupled with attachment or craving, the sense of self,

the one who suffers from emotional strains, deﬁnitely exists. This sense of self

cannot be extinguished by mere conceptual understanding of the empty nature

of the personal self. From this we can see that attachment and craving can form a

useful psychological deﬁnition of the ordinary people’s self. There cannot be a self

without attachment or craving, for the self is the simultaneous antithesis to the

objects that we are attached to or crave. And whenever there is attachment

or craving, the self exists simultaneously, being responsible for the one who is

attached or who craves and suffers.

Besides the psychological deﬁnition of self by means of attachment or

craving, there is also a perceptual or self-aware deﬁnition of self. For most people

the self refers to the things immediately connected to their body, and more

importantly to their mind. And the mind is characterized by the ever ongoing

thoughts and volitions that control the body and respond to events. The ever

256 WING-SHING CHAN

ongoing internal dialogues in people’s mind that make various evaluations and

judgements seems to most people be representing I. It seems self-evident that

perceptually I am the mind and the mind is I.

Buddhism regards these ever ongoing internal dialogues as illusive,

discursive or scattered thoughts. These thought processes originate involuntarily

like a chain reaction, with one thought continually eliciting another thought with a

momentum owing to past attachments, cravings or conditionings. Many of these

thoughts are emotionally loaded with psychological fear, apprehension, distress,

delusions or excitements, and so forth that merely by themselves are causes for

vexations, distorted perceptions, misjudgement and wrongful behaviours. These

mostly involuntary scattered thoughts in a series seems like a movie story

that consolidates the perceptual idea of the existence of a central I or self that is

responsible for directing the discursive thoughts. For these reasons this deluded

perceptual I or self is a major goal for elimination in order to get rid of human

anguish or pain. The central remedy employed in Buddhism is through

meditation; by calming the mind’s scattered thoughts and watching what the real

mind is about when it is rid of most or all of its discursive thoughts. The next

section will describe the stages of this meditative journey towards realizing the

real mind of no discursive thoughts, often regarded as enlightenment or no-self.

Four stages of mind realization through Chan meditation

Most Buddhist meditation helps calm the mind, clear involuntary discursive

thoughts and lets meditators see more clearly what is inside the mind. As

meditations progress, they eventually realize that their mind or self was an illusion.

For clarity let us describe the process of realization by the following four stages

(cf. Chan 2004, 52) commonly found in Chan Buddhism:

(1) I am the mind—when ordinary people or beginning meditators introspect, they

ﬁnd continuous chains of thoughts, or discursive thoughts, intermingled with

their acts of thinking and volition. It seems that I must be doing all this thinking

that gives rise to these moving thoughts and thus that the mind represents me

and is I. The thoughts as observed in the mind and the observer, the meditator,

cannot be separated subjectively. That what does the thinking is unmistakably

an ‘I’ is also the common human experience that Descartes (1960) in Discourse on

Method depended on to establish his famous ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (‘I am thinking,

therefore I am’), regarded as the most indubitable real existence that can be

taken as the ﬁrst principle of philosophy.

(2) I am not the mind—as meditation progresses and discursive thoughts settle,

the observed thoughts that arise in the mind are clearly separated from the

person who contemplates them. Alas, all those ongoing thoughts that I used to

consider as representing my self cannot be me, as I am now able to observe

them clearly from a distance. The self that these discursive thoughts are made

up of is not I; it is just a misinterpretation of a series of illusive events. The

CHAN BUDDHIST MIND THERAPY 257

separation between the observed (discursive thoughts) and the observer is now

complete.

(3) No-mind—when all discursive thoughts vanish, the mind is non-moving with no

content. The state within meditation is just absolute clarity and serenity. There is

no mind to be found in the sense that the illusive mind comprising of the

integrated interpretation of scattered thoughts is completely gone. If such a

mind suddenly exists no more, it certainly is just an illusion. The meditator can

now be regarded as having seen Buddha nature, self-nature, or having an initial

enlightenment experience. The elimination of discursive thoughts as essential

for the revelation of self-nature, or enlightenment, has been a tradition of

thought in Buddhism. For example, Master Hongzhi Zhenghue, the great Chan

Master of the Southern Song dynasty who invented the practice method of

silent illumination, proclaimed:

If there is any minute movement or disturbance, at that instant you will be

drifting around by karma. When cessation is to the utmost, with no more

possible cessation; that is Bodhi. The mind of supreme purity and brightness;

is not to be obtained from someone else. (Taisho Collection of Buddhist Texts

1924, T2001 (48): 0059c17)

When there is still a contemplator, or an observer contemplating the observed

clarity in the mind, there is still I or a self. There is still dualism between the

observed clear mind and the observer who contemplates.

(4) No-self—less and less effort of contemplation or concentration is required to

sustain the clear non-moving enlightened mind. When the enlightened mind

absolutely clear of even the ﬁnest dust of discursive thoughts can be allowed

to persist effortlessly with the letting go of any slightest effort of meditation,

the observer representing the meditative contemplation exists no more. This is

often represented ﬁguratively in Chan Buddhism by an empty circle with

nothing in it; for the observer, the effort of contemplation can be allowed to go.

Loosening up all practice effort or endeavour (referred to as accomplishment)

is needed for attaining ultimate enlightenment, as stressed by Chan Master

Hongzhi Zhengjue:

In boundless space wisdom streams, inwardly forgetting accomplishment,

straight down to shed away all loadings, and to turn the body around into

position, ... There will no longer be a hair or a dust that belongs to things from

the outside. (Taisho Collection of Buddhist Texts 1924, T2001(48): 74c18)

Opposition between the observed (illusive thoughts or the realm of the clear mind

maintained by meditation effort) and the observer (meditative contemplation

or effort) vanishes. The perfect non-opposing state of no-self, a thorough

enlightenment experience, is realized. The deluded perceptual self vanishes and

so do the vexations and delusions that accompany with discursive thoughts.

Other than the task of relinquishing the psychological self of attachments, the goal

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