Elucidate the relationship between ‘Buddhism and Psychology’

Editor: 

Mangala priya

Watsuthivararam, 

Yannawa, Sathorn,

bangkok, 10120.

Thailand.

Philosophical development which has taken place in western psychology took place long, long ago in the Buddhist psychology of the Abhidhammas. It would also be shown that both east and west have made a unique contribution to psychology and indeed to science as a whole.

In both cases one can trace how the soul becomes the mind, and the mind becomes experience and matter, and in both cases one can see how the ego or self becomes the subject of much dispute.

In the pre-scientific Hindu psychology the Brahmin or soul became the Atman or self and the Atman was seen as an immaterial essence which underlay experience. Both prince Siddhartha and Wundt discarded the soul and the soul like mind, and replaced it by experience and matter. Skhandhas are clearly divided into rUpa which means matter and nAma which means experience. It is always taken for granted in Buddhist writings that mind means experience.

Buddhism recognizes that there experiential evidence for it; at a particular stage of meditation one may develop it if one wishes, but it is not central or essential to Buddhist psychology. Moreover, it is taken to be a function of the same material mind-base which gives rise to all the other aspects of experience. Having made immediate experience the subject matter of scientific psychology,

Generally speaking, the Buddhist method of observation is meditation, which is superficially, rather similar to Wundt’s method of introspection. Wundt’s introspection, however has proved to be unsuitable for specific and controlled observation of experience and is no longer used.

From what has been said so far, we can see that both western psychology and the Buddhist psychology of the Abhidhamma share the same philosophical outlook. They both reject any semi-physical soul, spirit or mind and replace it with experience and matter.

Both the Buddhist and western critics of a central and fundamental ego have pointed out that it has many of the characteristics of the old soul. Buddhism says that to believe that an ego plays an essential and fundamental organizing or unifying role in experience is an error, and if such an ego appears to be universal in human beings, it is only because the error is universal. On the other hand, Buddhism does not deny a self or ego altogether, nor does any western school of psychology do so.

However there are two aspects psychology and indeed science as a whole which are not yet shared by west and east. A unique scientific innovation made by the west is the establishment of a method which can resolve speculation, whether about the ego or the self or anything else which is amenable to investigation. This is the experimental method. It enables science to move from bare description to a study of the mechanisms of how things happened as they do.

Both western and abhidhamma psychology are keen to stress that experience and matter are not opposites – set over against each other -  are closely interlinked in a single process.  This interlinked rupa-nama process is described in the skhandhas. Experimental science is able to explore this process in detail. Neuro-biologists are exploring the contact of sense stimuli and receptors and the resulting nerve impulses sent to the brain. While psychologists are studying the experience to which these nerve impulses and the brain give rise.

Actually experience itself is total, so absolute and nagarjuna called it the absolute truth. It is actual experience just as it is, and so it is also called sunya tathata or empty suchness. Concepts too are part of actual experience when seen just as they are in their empty suchness.

Matter is only what we call experience when we conceive of it as a world composed of things and processes. But such a world us a conceptual representation or model of experience, and so matter is in fact a conceptual model contained within actual experience.

Western and abhidhamma psychology are therefore not different from any other science. They study an aspect of actual experience, and by conceptualizing it, make it a material process. They contribute to the building up of a single scientific model of the entire universe. They accept the conceptual model of a world containing individual people with individual experiences derived from the world around them and lodged in their brains.

The brain activity is not actual experience because brain activity is a concept which exists within actual experience. So the relationship between the Buddhist and western psychology must come to an end. So I hope that I am able to show the philosophical development of modern psychology only repeats that which took place more than two thousand years ago in the Buddhist psychology of the abhidhamma. Only in one respect has western psychology advanced beyond the abhidhamma psychology, and that is in its adoption of experience method. This method has enabled western psychology to move from description of the process of experience to an account of how this process and the brain, actually work, the adoption of the experimental method would enable the abhidhamma psychology to do the same and so become a dynamic science once again. Buddhism’s unique contribution is the Mahayana school, a whole new branch of psychology which deals with the philosophy of science. It has solved the philosophical problems which beset the abhidhamma psychology and which beset western psychology even today.