Where is buddhas philosophy practiced today

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Sign in or create your OpenLearn account to join the discussion. Feeds If you enjoyed this, why not follow a feed to find out when we have new things like it? Related content tags. Related content. Indian philosophers who accept this principle cite supportive instances such as the knife that cannot cut itself and the finger-tip that cannot touch itself.

If this principle is accepted, then if the self were the locus of control it would follow that it could never exercise this function on itself. A self that was the controller could never find itself in the position of seeking to change its state to one that it deemed more desirable.

On this interpretation, the first premise seems to be true. And there is ample evidence that 2 is true: it is difficult to imagine a bodily or psychological state over which one might not wish to exercise control. Consequently, given the assumption that the person is wholly composed of the psychophysical elements, it appears to follow that a self of this description does not exist.

These two arguments appear, then, to give good reason to deny a self that might ground diachronic personal identity and serve as locus of control, given the assumption that there is no more to the person than the empirically given psychophysical elements.

But it now becomes something of a puzzle how one is to explain diachronic personal identity and agency. To start with the latter, does the argument from control not suggest that control must be exercised by something other than the psychophysical elements? One of their arguments for the existence of a self was that it is possible to exercise control over all the empirically given constituents of the person; while they agree with the Buddha that a self is never observed, they take the phenomena of agency to be grounds for positing a self that transcends all possible experience.

It is clear that the body ceases to exist at death. Yet the Buddha claims that persons who have not yet achieved enlightenment will be reborn as sentient beings of some sort after they die. If there is no constituent whatever that moves from one life to the next, how could the being in the next life be the same person as the being in this life?

This question becomes all the more pointed when it is added that rebirth is governed by karma, something that functions as a kind of cosmic justice: those born into fortunate circumstances do so as a result of good deeds in prior lives, while unpleasant births result from evil past deeds. Such a system of reward and punishment could be just only if the recipient of pleasant or unpleasant karmic fruit is the same person as the agent of the good or evil action.

And the opponent finds it incomprehensible how this could be so in the absence of a persisting self. It is not just classical Indian self-theorists who have found this objection persuasive. Some Buddhists have as well. Among these Buddhists, however, this has led to the rejection not of non-self but of rebirth.

Historically this response was not unknown among East Asian Buddhists, and it is not rare among Western Buddhists today. The evidence that the Buddha himself accepted rebirth and karma seems quite strong, however.

And it would be one thing if his use of the concepts of karma and rebirth were limited to the former. The idea would be that householders who fail to comply with the most basic demands of morality are not likely for reasons to be discussed shortly to make significant progress toward the cessation of suffering, and the teaching of karma and rebirth, even if not strictly speaking true, does give those who accept it a prudential reason to be moral.

And what he taught is not the version of karma popular in certain circles today, according to which, for instance, an act done out of hatred makes the agent somewhat more disposed to perform similar actions out of similar motives in the future, which in turn makes negative experiences more likely for the agent.

What the Buddha teaches is instead the far stricter view that each action has its own specific consequence for the agent, the hedonic nature of which is determined in accordance with causal laws and in such a way as to require rebirth as long as action continues. This is the view that the Buddha appears to have accepted in its most straightforward form. Actions are said to be of three types: bodily, verbal and mental.

The Buddha insists, however, that by action is meant not the movement or change involved, but rather the volition or intention that brought about the change. For it is when actions are seen as subject to moral assessment that intention becomes relevant.

One does not, for instance, perform the morally blameworthy action of speaking insultingly to an elder just by making sounds that approximate to the pronunciation of profanities in the presence of an elder; parrots and prelinguistic children can do as much. What matters for moral assessment is the mental state if any that produced the bodily, verbal or mental change. And it is the occurrence of these mental states that is said to cause the subsequent occurrence of hedonically good, bad and neutral experiences.

And we are told quite specifically A III. Some caution is required in understanding this claim about the defilements. The Buddha seems to be saying that it is possible to act not only without ignorance, but also in the absence of desire or aversion, yet it is difficult to see how there could be intentional action without some positive or negative motivation.

Presumably the enlightened person, while knowing the truth about these matters, can still engage in motivated action. We can now see how compliance with common-sense morality could be seen as an initial step on the path to the cessation of suffering. This excursus into what the Buddha meant by karma may help us see how his middle path strategy could be used to reply to the objection to non-self from rebirth.

That objection was that the reward and punishment generated by karma across lives could never be deserved in the absence of a transmigrating self. The middle path strategy generally involves locating and rejecting an assumption shared by a pair of extreme views.

In this case the views will be 1 that the person in the later life deserves the fruit generated by the action in the earlier life, and 2 that this person does not deserve the fruit. One assumption shared by 1 and 2 is that persons deserve reward and punishment depending on the moral character of their actions, and one might deny this assumption. But that would be tantamount to moral nihilism, and a middle path is said to avoid nihilisms such as annihilationism. A more promising alternative might be to deny that there are ultimately such things as persons that could bear moral properties like desert.

This is what the Buddha seems to mean when he asserts that the earlier and the later person are neither the same nor different S II.

Since any two existing things must be either identical or distinct, to say of the two persons that they are neither is to say that strictly speaking they do not exist. This alternative is more promising because it avoids moral nihilism. For it allows one to assert that persons and their moral properties are conventionally real. To say this is to say that given our interests and cognitive limitations, we do better at achieving our aim—minimizing overall pain and suffering—by acting as though there are persons with morally significant properties.

Ultimately there are just impersonal entities and events in causal sequence: ignorance, the sorts of desires that ignorance facilitates, an intention formed on the basis of such a desire, a bodily, verbal or mental action, a feeling of pleasure, pain or indifference, and an occasion of suffering.

It is useful to think of the situation in this way because it helps us locate the appropriate places to intervene to prevent future pain the evil deed and future suffering ignorance.

It is no doubt quite difficult to believe that karma and rebirth exist in the form that the Buddha claims. It is said that their existence can be confirmed by those who have developed the power of retrocognition through advanced yogic technique. But this is of little help to those not already convinced that meditation is a reliable means of knowledge.

What can be said with some assurance is that karma and rebirth are not inconsistent with non-self. Rebirth without transmigration is logically possible. This has led some to wonder whether the Buddha does not employ a deviant logic. For instance, when the Buddha is questioned about the post-mortem status of the enlightened person or arhat e.

But when he goes on to entertain, and then reject, 3 and 4 the logical difficulties are compounded. Since each of 3 and 4 appears to be formally contradictory, to entertain either is to entertain the possibility that a contradiction might be true. And their denial seems tantamount to affirmation of excluded middle, which is prima facie incompatible with the denial of both 1 and 2.

One might wonder whether we are here in the presence of the mystical. They claimed that the person is neither identical with nor distinct from the psychophysical elements. They were prepared to accept, as a consequence, that nothing whatever can be said about the relation between person and elements.

The consensus view was instead that the fact that the person can be said to be neither identical with nor distinct from the elements is grounds for taking the person to be a mere conceptual fiction. There is also evidence that claims of type 3 involve parameterization. For instance, the claim about the arhat would be that there is some respect in which they can be said to exist after death, and some other respect in which they can be said to no longer exist after death.

Entertaining such a proposition does not require that one believe there might be true contradictions. And while claims of type 4 would seem to be logically equivalent to those of type 3 regardless of whether or not they involve parameterization , the tradition treated this type as asserting that the subject is beyond all conceptualization.

To reject the type 4 claim about the arhat is to close off one natural response to the rejections of the first three claims: that the status of the arhat after death transcends rational understanding.

That the Buddha rejected all four possibilities concerning this and related questions is not evidence that he employed a deviant logic. This is the claim that the Buddha was essentially a pragmatist, someone who rejects philosophical theorizing for its own sake and employs philosophical rationality only to the extent that doing so can help solve the practical problem of eliminating suffering.

He calls all the possible views with respect to such questions distractions insofar as answering them would not lead to the cessation of the defilements and thus to the end of suffering.

And in a famous simile M I. Karen Horney was intensely interested in Zen Buddhism during the last years of her life. R D Laing, another noted psychoanalyst, went to Ceylon, where he spent two months studying meditation in a Buddhist retreat.

There have been many other important contributors,[ 13 , 14 ] to the popularization of the integration of Buddhist meditation with psychology, including Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach, Epstein and Nhat Hanh. The relocation of a complex or neurosis from the unconscious to the conscious easily equates to the principles inherent in right meditation and right understanding.

One might recall that on Jung's deathbed, he was reading a translation of Hsu Yun's dharma discourses and was reputedly very excited by the succinct and direct methods of Chan's practice in working with the unconscious.

Buddha said that life is suffering. Existential psychology speaks of ontological anxiety dread, angst. Buddha said that suffering is due to attachment. Existential psychology also has some similar concepts. We cling to things in the hope that they will provide us with a certain benefit.

Buddha said that suffering can be extinguished. Freedom has, in fact, been used in Buddhism in the context of freedom from rebirth or freedom from the effects of karma. For the existentialist, freedom is a fact of our being, one which we often ignore. Finally, Buddha says that there is a way to extinguish suffering.

For the existential psychologist, the therapist must take an assertive role in helping the client become aware of the reality of his or her suffering and its roots. Buddhistic mindfulness practices have been explicitly incorporated into a variety of psychological treatments.

More specifically psychotherapies dealing with cognitive restructuring share core principles with ancient Buddhistic antidotes to personal suffering. Fromm attributes techniques associated with the latter to Buddhist mindfulness practices. Linehan's dialectical behavioral therapy DBT. This is the essence of full catastrophic living. Not surprisingly, in terms of clinical diagnoses, MBSR has proven beneficial for people with depression and anxiety disorders; however, the program is meant to serve anyone experiencing significant stress.

This emphasis on acceptance as a balance to change flows directly from the integration of a perspective drawn from the practice of Buddhism with Western psychological practice.

They are the first skills taught and are reviewed every week. The skills are psychological and behavioral versions of meditation practices from Eastern spiritual training. Linehan has drawn heavily from the practice of Zen. Controlled clinical studies have demonstrated DBT's effectiveness for people with borderline personality disorder.

Albert Ellis, has written that many of the principles incorporated in the theory of rational-emotive psychotherapy are not new; some of them were originally stated several thousands of years ago, by Taoist and Buddhistic thinkers.

A common Buddhistic antidote for anger is the use of active contemplation of loving thoughts. The school of Behaviorism describe or reduce human functions to principles of behavior, which can be manipulated to create positive effects in the life of the patient. One may consider the story of the Buddha who was approached by a rich but miserly man who wanted to develop his spiritual life but was constrained by his seeming inability to share his wealth with others.

The Buddha addressed this problem by telling him to get into the habit of using his right hand to give his left hand items of value and in doing so learn the art of giving! Cognitive and cognitive-behaviorists focus more on training the mind to review and question assumptions, phobias, fears and beliefs.

These therapists are typically associated with such techniques as visualization and positive self-talk designed to teach, or unlearn, principles that are, respectively, helpful or unhelpful. Again, the noble eightfold path and its focus on right mindfulness and right thinking are the corollary in Buddhist thought.

Gestalt Therapy is an approach created by Fritz Perls, based heavily on existentialist philosophy and significantly, Zen Buddhism among other influences.

Its techniques encourage Right Mindfulness, and the focus on the immediate, phenomenological and experiential reality of the here and now, in the physical, emotional and mental realms. David Brazier in his book Zen Therapy makes a thoughtful comparison of some principal Buddhist concepts and person-centered rogerian Therapy. In basic terms, its goal is to provide the patient a safe place, an environment where he or she may express their problems.

Although the therapist may do little more than provide active and empathic listening, and reflect and validate the thoughts and emotions of the struggling patient, they nonetheless, provide three crucial components for change to occur; unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence or genuiness.

These are the elements that are considered essential to create an environment where the individual can grow, learn and evolve. All therapists do have similar aims. Four Noble Truths are the method to adopt a diagnostic format to explain suffering and its cure; the 1 st Noble Truth identifies the disease, the 2 nd provides etiology, the 3 rd gives a prognosis, and the 4 th suggests a remedy.

Philosopher and Orientalist Alan Watts once wrote: If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy.

We stop torturing ourselves and allow ourselves to enjoy what there is to enjoy. Today the Western world has realized the psychological essence of Buddhism. Many Psychotherapeutic systems in the West are derived from Buddha's teaching. Buddha showed empathy and non-judgmental acceptance to everyone who came to him.

He helped people to gain insight and helped in growth promotion while eliminating troubling and painful emotions. His therapeutic methods are exceptional and can be applied for all times. Prince Gautama gave his entire life in understanding and then propagating his philosophy.

People have devoted their entire lives in studying and understanding his philosophy. This essay is just an expression of what little I have understood on His philosophy and an opportunity to offer my deep tribute to one of the greatest psychotherapists the world has ever produced!

Source of Support: Nil. Conflict of Interest: None declared. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Indian J Psychiatry v. Indian J Psychiatry. Tapas Kumar Aich. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Address for correspondence: Dr. E-mail: ni. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.

Abstract Four noble truths as preached by Buddha are that the life is full of suffering Duhkha , that there is a cause of this suffering Duhkha-samudaya , it is possible to stop suffering Duhkha-nirodha , and there is a way to extinguish suffering Duhkha-nirodha-marga.