Encyclopedia of Buddhism Volume One A -L Robert E. Buswell

P SYCHOLOGY
Thus, generally speaking, the Buddhist tradition
may be interpreted as a religious tradition with a
prominent emphasis on the mind and liberation of the
mind, but still a tradition for which the release from
all suffering—if not the total release from an inherently
painful embodiment—is the ultimate goal. Significant
exceptions are found in traditions that have
either sidelined the schemata of rebirth or have demythologized
it. This is the case, for instance, with the
MADHYAMAKA SCHOOL and traditions that adopt similar
rhetorical or dialectic understandings of the dichotomy
between rebirth (SAM SARA) and liberation
(NIRVAN A). In such traditions it is not at all clear that
belief in “rebirth” is to be taken to imply the acceptance
of a psychosomatic process existing outside of,
or independently from, the imaginative faculties of the
individual. The Madhyamaka school, for instance, offers
tantalizing, yet paradoxical and baffling claims that
rebirth and all the suffering that it brings is only the
construction of mind or language, and that suffering
disappears when it is shown to be a mistaken notion.
Be that as it may, the most common normative
principle in elite Buddhism is the belief that liberation
is the consequence of a cognitive and affective shift,
brought about not so much by an intellectual effort,
but by contemplative exercises, and ascetic and moral
training, that entail radical transformations of the person.
In other words, changes in behavior and belief are
understood to derive their liberating power from
changes that can be described as “psychological” only
in the broadest possible sense of the idea of “psychology”:
shifts in the way in which a person perceives what
is real, worthy, desirable, or satisfying, or changes in
passion and affect, in behavior and demeanor, and in
the bodily, sensory, and intellectual faculties. Such
changes are “psychological” also in the sense that they
are behavioral, they require modifications in the mode
and orientation of a person’s mental, verbal, and bodily
action.
A certain “primacy of mind” is a common, and at
times dominant, orientation in elite Buddhist doctrines
of self-cultivation, soteriology, and ontology.
One may also state with a certain degree of confidence
that this elite characterization of the tradition has a
mythic value even outside the small circles of monastic
specialists who engage in the practice of MEDITA-
TION or in formulating the theory of meditation and
sainthood. This makes Buddhism a tradition in which
ideals and techniques of psychological or psychosomatic
self-cultivation play a central role as markers of
religious identity and continuity of tradition.
A philosophy of mind
But the question then arises as to whether or not there
will be any heuristic or practical value in understanding
this psychological orientation—or, for that matter,
explicit Buddhist theories about the structure and the
vicissitudes of the “mental”—as significantly parallel
to Western psychological inquiry, or as viable alternatives
that can be compared by means of common
criteria of truth or effectiveness. The systematic exploration
of such parallels can take us simultaneously in
various directions and across difficult issues of epistemology
and the philosophies of mind and science. This
is fertile ground for future research, but we shall explore
in this entry only cursorily what there is in the
Buddhist tradition, if anything, that may be called a
“psychology.”
Buddhism shares with other Indian systems of religion
and philosophy an interest in how the human self
is constituted, including the nature and origin of the
mental and the bodily broadly understood (namaru pa),
as well as the nature of awareness (vijñapti) and consciousness
(vijñana). Early Buddhist speculation separated
itself from other early śramanic systems by
formulating unique theories about the embodied self
(jlva and kaya) and the state of a liberated being
(TATHAGATA), as well as by formulating critiques of
those who denied the consequences of intentional actions
(kriya), or of those who overemphasized the pervasiveness
of moral causation.
Related to these broad issues were, on the one hand,
early theories of liberation and the PATH, and, on the
other, structural conceptions of the mind-body complex,
which sought to explain the origins, processes,
and ultimate liberation of this complex by identifying
the components and arrangement of mental states and
processes. Some, presumably early, texts show attempts
to reduce the sentient person to elementary
substances, such as water, fire, earth, air, and space.
But, among the most influential of the protoscientific
theories are the structural theories of SKANDHA (AG-
GREGATE), dhatu (sensory domains), and ayatana
(sense faculties). The three theories show obvious signs
of having originated independently from each other,
but one can still treat them, as the tradition does, as
three components of a single theory, which is summarized
below.
We may assume naively that each human person
(pudgala) is a single living (jlva) and a sentient entity
(sattva) that is the objective referent of the word “self”
(atman). Buddhist introspection and inference, how-
680 E NCYCLOPEDIA OF B UDDHISM