AN APPROACH TO BUDDHISM

What makes Buddhism so attractive to disciplines like psychology and psychotherapy? The answer is simple, clear and direct: what makes it attractive is that it has to do with human suffering and the way in which we confront it. The search for serenity, calm and wisdom in the experience of existing, that is, of a life without suffering or worry, appears as an obvious and desirable objective universally. However, suffering is unavoidable. What, then, can we do? If we cannot suppress suffering, we must channel it, provide it with an orientation and maybe a sense. How can this be done? In the daily life of any person that lives in a big city or that practises any labour activity under the dynamic of commercial relations that govern us, the answer is clear: by creating a strong identity and obtaining power, autonomy, success, money, status and the like. In this pursuit, efficiency, competence, promptness and productivity are the means of success. However, that is not the only answer. There are others, although it is not difficult to see the tendency of our culture, enveloped in a strange, abusive and self-destructing idea of development, to “recover” and “assimilate” other ways of conceiving human life that contradict it. Effectively, Buddhism can quickly be transformed into a trend or a consumer product. We will attempt here to skip all these psychological and political complexities, not because we consider them irrelevant, but because adequate reflection on them requires, first, that we understand what we are talking about. In order to do so, and then to focus on its applications to psychotherapy, we will refer directly to the fundamental teaching of the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. Maybe the old philosophical habit of going to the source is here, again, a good methodical approach.

The ideas and the practice
Buddhism is not just a practice, but a practice expressed in diverse oral and written teachings (Sutras). The expression Buddha means, in Sanskrit, “intelligent” or “visionary”. It comes from the verb budh that means “to wake up”, “to pay attention”, “to realize”, “to understand” or “to recover consciousness after a faint”. According to Buddhism, Buddha is the title assigned to those individuals who have made their nature bodi, that is, that they have “woken up” and have made themselves conscious. The Buddha lived between the VI and V centuries BC, the same period in which the basis of occidental culture was founded in Greece. The oral tradition of the teachings of the Buddha was captured many centuries later in written texts called Sutras, originally in Pali (one of the most ancient Indo-European languages) in a text entitled Canon Pali. Later on, these teachings were translated into Sanskrit. Siddhartha Gautama is considered “the Buddha of our era”. It is necessary to emphasize that “Buddha” is not a proper name, but an adjective (meaning “illuminated”), and this is why Siddhartha Gautama is called “the Buddha”. It is also important to mention that Buddhism is considered by many of its followers to be a non-theistic “religion”, which does not fit well with the occidental conception of religion. In Buddhism, strictly, there is no god. It rather concerns matters linked to the human being and the whole of nature. Therefore, the Buddha merely represents an example, acting as a guide and a teacher for those beings who must go over the path alone so as to achieve spiritual awakening and to see truth and reality as they are. It is about understanding the true nature of the mind and the world, and such understanding may be discovered by anybody if the right path is followed. However, since time immemorial, the occidental thought of the Graeco-Roman root has maintained that reality as such is inaccessible to human beings. This conviction does not arise just from the radical constructivism of our time, nor what is confusingly called postmodernity, but it rather reaches back to Plato and, in the modern period, to Kant, Descartes and the other leading lights of Western philosophy. It is enough to remember the Kantian distinction between “phenomenon” (the approachable) and “noumenon” (the thing “itself”, which is unapproachable).

The Buddha
The life of Siddhartha Gautama is implicit in the origin of his experiential postulates (could it be otherwise?). Wisdom has to do with experience of life. As we mentioned, Prince Siddhartha Gautama was born at the beginning of the VI century BC. His mother died when he was born, and the first 29 years of his life went by completely devoid of spiritual activity. He lived with his family throughout this time, got married and had at least one child. His life was one of much luxury and comfort. He received the best education and training possible in his time. At the age of 29, however, he began to feel curious about how things were in the external world and asked his father, Suddhodana, for permission to satisfy his interest. Suddhodana agreed, but prepared for his son’s journey by ordering that the streets be cleared of all sights that might trouble the overprotected conscience of the prince. Yet these careful arrangements failed as Siddhartha, met by crowds when passing through the streets, could not avoid perceiving pain in its most intense forms in what has since been termed the “Four Encounters”: the first three, sickness, aging and death (the body scripts, we might say), and the fourth, an ascetic, the meaning of which is different from the first three, as we will see promptly. Siddhartha realized that he, like any other person, would be subject to the same suffering, and his mood turned sombre, asking himself how somebody can live in peace and happiness if this is what life brings. If growing old, getting ill and dying is what every human being must face, all that constitutes the founding of suffering is, then, unavoidable. It is easy to notice that these paradigmatic situations of suffering indicate the finite nature of the human being and the destiny of existence to end. Siddhartha, worried because of what he had seen, understood that he had remained apart, separated from the life of human beings, encapsulated in a false world and, therefore, that his nature had remained anaesthetized. He thus made a radical decision: he would separate from his father, his wife and his little son and, along with that, from all the conveniences of the palace and all of his possessions. He decided, then, to follow the path of the ascetic seen in the Four Encounters, but in a more radical version, adopting the life of the monks who lived as beggars and lacked all material property.
After a long search and suffering due to hunger, cold, pain and sickness, Siddhartha came to understand four phenomena that would explain the way in which human beings experience life. These phenomena arrived to him one confusing and desperate night, suddenly and all together. They have since been called the “Four Noble Truths”. Without beginning from these four pillars, one will not be able to understand what Buddhism is. Yet, these are not “premises” or theoretical postulates, but rather phenomena open to experience by anybody and self-evident. We might, thus, call them a set of experiential axioms.

Dukkha
The first Noble Truth (Dukkha) holds what we have already said: that in human beings’ lives, suffering is unavoidable. We cannot live without suffering. Naturally, not all sufferings are permanent nor equal, but a life without suffering is unimaginable.
Going to the source, this Noble Truth is described in Samyutta Nikaya 61.11.5, third section of Pali Sutras, as follows: “… birth, growing old, getting sick, death, sadness, sorrow, pain, depression and anxiety are Dukkha, which is associated with what is not wanted, apart from what is wanted and is not possible to reach” (Brazier, 2003).
A long explanation is not required to prove that it is the same suffering that we, as psychotherapists, see daily. However, while human beings do not experience suffering as an isolated and unique entity, each instantiation of suffering generates the deepest and most heart-rending emotions: physical damage makes us writhe in pain; moral damage, in indignation; danger, in fear or terror; the idea of death, in anguish; passionate love, in desperation. When I say “writhe” I mean a violent, deforming twist of one’s entire being. Said briefly, the Buddha found that suffering awakens strong reactions in us. Such emotional reactions were, in turn, termed Samudaya, the second Noble Truth.

Samudaya
The Noble Truth of Samudaya, as an answer to affliction, is wrote in Samyutta Nikaya 56.11.6 (Brazier, 2003) “it is the thirst [the wanting, the difficult search for the cessation of suffering] because of the re-creation [the return to a previous stage] that is associated with greed, ambition, desire for wealth and avarice. It shines wherever pleasure is found. It is thirst for the pleasure of the senses, for desire and for avoidance [of pain]”.
This seems simple and clear, but it is necessary to specify a few terms. In using the expression “thirst” the Buddha refers to a state of great intensity that wants only to be satisfied (the cessation of the suffering). The translation to English of the Sanskrit word Trishna is a familiar expression in the field of addictions: craving. For its part, “re-creation” refers to the attempt to return to being the person we believe we were before the suffering, a kind of “normalization”, “reaffirmation” and “stabilization” of what we suppose defines us in a substantive way. The suffering motivates the search for relief and, as we mentioned, comes with great emotional intensity. What do we want? We want to be eternal; we want eternal youth and we want the absence of illness, loss, depression and anxiety. That is, we want permanence, infinity, security and stability. We know that this is impossible, but in diverse and foolish ways we insist on it. This impossibility is the fundamental source of suffering.
The emotions produced by this situation can be channelled in two main directions: the first is directed to the addicted thirst, that searches for immediate relief and that is usually destructive and, paradoxically, thanatic. The second, which we will see promptly, is a path that leads to overcoming, construction and the vital “nobleness”. We should not confuse this “nobleness” with some aristocratic ambition, as it is in fact exactly the opposite and strongly linked to ethics, which we will see later on. The addiction is the attachment to things, situations and persons that transitorily relieve our suffering (power, money, sex, belongings, substances, food, persons, etcetera). If we succeed in adhering to these things, situations and persons and we thus become dependent on them such that, if they are missing, it produces suffering in us, a circuit of positive feedback is closed (the more you have, the more you want) and is precisely that which we call addiction.
The surprising thing that Buddhism suggests is that the set of patterns of avoidance of suffering, as they repeat iteratively and innumerably, forms a complex scheme that takes more definite shape and consistency over time and, so to speak, starts to “define” the person, establishing his/her features, habits and repetitions such that, in a moment, his/her life takes the appearance of something determined, solid and stable. That is what Buddhism terms “self”. This self is ultimately metaphorically jailed as the Buddha was in his palace, preventing him from seeing beyond the palace to the other, the not-me, what is by itself and what does not refer to us. Thus, the self and its unavoidable self-reference is, for Buddhism, the supreme addiction or the maximum prison.

Nirodha
The second possible direction of the emotions, or energy, released by suffering is that oriented towards the mentioned noble path, which is contained in the third truth: Nirodha.
“The content in the noble truth Nirodha in Samyutta Nikaya 61.11.7, is this (Brazier, 2003): is the complete control of that thirst; is to undo, to break free and refuse to reside in the object of that desire” [to detach].
The control and channelling of that energy require firstly that we free ourselves of the things and situations to which we have become addicted, to stop inhabiting them, understanding that this inhabiting proceeds from “habit” and that, among other effects, hides from us the addicted underlying nature, taking an innocent and naïve appearance. However, it is enough to offer an obstacle to some of our habits to appreciate the power that underlies them. When breaking free of that inhabiting, the suffering again becomes evident: it is that energy that Buddhism proposes we channel, lead and tame, in order to arrive at the fourth Noble Truth: Marga.


Marga
The noble truth Marga, or the fair path or middle path, is the noble path of eight branches, namely, the fair view, the fair thought, the fair speech, the fair action, the fair way of life, the fair effort, the fair conscience and the fair focus (Samadhi).
The expression “fair”, essential to this noble truth, could also be expressed as “correct”, not merely of adequate “measure” but of an ethical and moral value. What is “fair” is what does “justice” in the measure of each thing, permitting its natural flow. In the second place, Marga is not about something we impose on things by a magnanimous or generous act, but something that is in the things themselves. For its part, “the fair conscience” is what is known as mindfulness (in Sanskrit, smriti), meaning “to perceive without catching” or to take an object into account with “reverent attention”.
Finally we want to express that the main ethical principle in Buddhism is not do good but do not harm.