8.2.1 The Buddhist tradition.

Buddhism has a long history of interaction with Western psychologists and influenced their thoughts about personality and mental health (Michalon, 2001). In particular the recent positive psychology movement has renewed an interest in Buddhism among Western scientists and therapists. Buddhist thought has had practical applications in dealing with various types of human dysfunctions. Therapists have utilized Buddhist approaches in evaluating HIV risk behaviors among drug users (Avants & Margolin, 2004) in grief counseling (Michalon, 2001), and in alleviating anxiety (Toneatto, 2002). Western therapists have also used meditative strategies ( Walsh & Shapiro, 2006) to produce higher levels of consciousness and Buddhist thoughts contributed to Western thinkers like James (1890), and Maslow (1970 a,b).

Buddhism is an evolved psychology and philosophy that has over time changed and assimilated ideas from a variety of cultures. Of interest is the fact that Buddha lived at about the same time as Confucius in the fifth and sixth century B.C. When Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) left behind a life of luxury he did so in order to understand and alleviate suffering. Central to Buddhist psychology is a search for the middle way as the path toward mentally healthy lives. A person living the middle way is removed from both self-indulgence and self-mortification (Wallace and Shapiro, 2006). Early in his career Buddha gave a talk known as “Setting in motion the wheel of the Dharma” in which he articulated the “Four Noble Truths” seen as the fundamental ideas of Buddhism. In a summarized form these ideas are that suffering (affliction) is real and a fact of life that we cannot escape. However, in the second truth Buddha states that from affliction feelings arise within us to aspire to find situations that are different from the present suffering. For many people escape into pleasure is seen as a solution to suffering. However, Buddha taught in the third truth that such activities or pleasurable objects do not bring lasting satisfaction although they may produce a temporary lack of desire. However, Buddha taught that feelings that arise within us can be controlled and contained. When we control our feelings about desire they can be the source of personal transformation.

The fourth truth is that the path that people choose can lead to self-fulfillment. The path actually consist of 8 steps that include the “right view”; “right thought”;" right speech"; "right action”; " right livelihood" (doing good to others); “right effort”; right mindfulness”; and “right rapture" (the highest level of the understanding of the purpose of life). These eight paths describe how a healthy and mature person must think and act to reach the goal of enlightenment and personal development and living an authentic existence. In summary Buddhism explains the basic existential problem of suffering and how we can react to that with attempts at either unsuccessful escape or by developing our nobility and personal maturity that places the well-being of others as a foremost ethical consideration.

We already know from the work on the interdependent and independent selves that people who live in collectivistic societies do not have self-construals of a separate or autonomous self. In Buddhism it is the ego-based self that create suffering because the byproducts are pleasure-seeking, constant fear and loneliness. Buddhism suggests that the separate self is really a delusion, and that the reality of the self is not enduring but ever changing as we move through life (Mosig, 2006). Personal identity in the Western sense seem a nonsensical notion in Buddhism, since all things including personality can only be understood in relation to other things (Sugamura, Haruki, & Koshikawa, 2007). A person exist only in the context of relationships, and everything we identify as human including speech and other aspects of culture or personality exist because of these relationships. In summary the Buddhist perspective on personality argues that suffering is real and ubiquitous. However, by living a disciplined life and by not seeking escape in pleasure we can find fulfillment in noble service to others.

As noted above Buddhism considers the reification of the self to be an illusion. In the Buddhist perspective there is no soul or “little man behind the screen” in the brain that can be identified as the self or personality. Reification is the process where the mind makes sense out of mental processes by making a material object, substance or “thingness” out of cognition. In the Western tradition personality theorists like Freud reified their concepts by attributing "thingness" to personality in the holy trinity of Id, Ego and Superego. However, in Buddhism such reifications are but delusions and have a reference only in temporary memory. The individual’s self-conception is also a reification and delusion. Nevertheless people conduct their lives and behavior as if they constitute separate entities in the world rather than accepting the reality that the self is a delusionary assembly of cognitive constructs put together by the mind. Cultural languages support reification of the self since personality is discussed as if it really exists. That makes it almost impossible for people to have a true intuition of the mind, personality and the self.

From the perspective of Buddhism the self as reified represents nothing real or objective. So it would seem Buddhism is essentially an atheistic philosophy and psychology since there is no soul to be saved although practitioners of Buddhism may object to this description. We would do well to keep in mind that all philosophies evolved far from their origins, and that Jesus would probably find many current Christian practices absurd. Buddha believed that not only was the teaching of an independent personal self imaginary, but also that it caused great harm to human life. It is from the reification of the self that the concepts of personal ownership derive, and along with that selfishness, conceit, egoism, hatred and pride. Not only do humans lack a soul, but so does everything else in the natural world. Nothing in the natural world can have a separate existence and the mind consist only in the form of temporary parts that are brought together by causal connections. A river is essentially a stable configuration in the mind that we may reify with a name. Nevertheless the river exists in reality as a constantly changing set of components including water and life in the water. A river can be reified and conceptualized as if it has a permanent existence, but again that is a delusion. Thus although we can apprehend the “whole” of aspects of the environment, the whole does not have a separate existence or soul and is not separate from its constituent parts.