seems peculiar or surprising in either Asia or the
West. The parallel is not totally spurious or devoid of
heuristic value: Important aspects of Buddhist doc-
trine and practice may be construed as efforts at un-
derstanding human psychology. Yet, it would be
imprudent to accept uncritically the accuracy of this
parallelism. The present entry summarizes some of
the reasons why we have come to assume that there
are overlaps in perspective and goals that seem to ar-
gue for an interpretation of Buddhism as a “psychol-
ogy,” and some of the reasons why this seeming
parallelism can be misleading.
Why Buddhism and psychology?
Early in the twentieth century Buddhism became
associated in the Western imagination with the objec-
tives of Western psychology. This presumed connec-
tion has also been accepted by many Asian exponents
of Buddhist doctrine. In suggesting a parallel we often
imagine “psychology” as an idealized source of unas-
sailable truths about better living and human happi-
ness, and perhaps with the mythic, almost mystical,
power that many Westerners attribute to the disciplines
and discourses of Buddhism. The vagueness of many
of these comparisons may also be attributed in part to
the fact that there is no autonomous Buddhist disci-
pline of psychology—that is, a discrete genre of dis-
course (let alone a scientific discourse) corresponding
to the many meanings that the term psychologyhas in
contemporary academic and popular conversation.
Conversely, contemporary scientific discourse does not
as yet have a language to speak reliably about the wide
range of concepts and practices that we intuitively call
“Buddhist psychology.”
The temptation to link observations and normative
conceptions about Buddhism with our ideas about psy-
chology does not reflect a single view of Buddhism.
“Buddhism as psychology” is usually grounded on
ideas that include a number of separate, at times over-
lapping, and at times competing, conceptions about re-
ligion and spirituality. First, it is common to imagine
Buddhism as a therapy, as a way to heal a sick soul—
a mind in error or a person in pain. Second, some con-
sider Buddhist theories of mind parallel to Western
psychological inquiry—perhaps conflating somehow a
broad spectrum of Buddhist doctrines with the equally
diverse set of Western philosophical and empirical psy-
chologies. Third, since the inception of the Western
discipline of psychology, religion has been seen as one
among other objects to be understood with the meth-
ods of scientific psychology (e.g., in both Wilhelm
Wundt and Sigmund Freud). Yet, simultaneously, re-
ligion (and perhaps Buddhism in particular) has been
regarded as somehow coextensive with many of the
doctrines and goals of popular psychologies. Hence, as
a fourth historical connection, one must note that sev-
eral of the above factors have helped to anchor in our
collective mind the otherwise imprecise modern ideal
of an ahistorical “spirituality” that transcends the “tra-
ditional dogmas” of institutional religions.Buddhism as psychology: Traditional views
Traditional Buddhist sources often compare the Bud-
dha to a physician; his dharma is the prescription that
cures all ills. The preferred interpretation of this
metaphor imagines this cure as a healing of the mind—
repairing a mind otherwise immersed in an error that
leads to repeated, almost interminable, suffering across
many lives. But the cure also entails a transformation
of other aspects of the person: bodily demeanor, be-
havior toward others and care of self, emotion and de-
sire. In other words, Buddhists may be suggesting that
important parts (if not the most important or core as-
pects) of their religious practice can be seen as a pro-
ject of comprehensive behavioral modification, with
“behavior” including body, speech, and mind. How-
ever, this transformation of body and mind is also
taken to entail the development of extraordinary pow-
ers that are not within the usual Western conception
of the mental. Such special faculties include the ca-
pacity to transform and replicate the body, the power
to know past lives, and so forth.
Even if it is conceived as purely the healing of an af-
flicted human mind, the Buddha’s cure is believed to
have the power to remove all suffering, because the to-
tal removal of the error, and of the mental turmoil aris-
ing from the error, leads to the end of REBIRTHand the
elimination of all DUHKHA(SUFFERING) of mind and
body. In this sense, Buddhism is primarily a psychol-
ogy if we assume that the cure is fundamentally a men-
tal cure, or if we imagine the desired state of health as
being “psychological” in the sense that it encompasses
the totality of the human being as a sentient being ca-
pable of intentional behavior. Or, one may also adopt
the popular notion that all physical ills are ultimately
psychosomatic, so that “psychological” mental culture
is simultaneously a technique of the whole person. Ad-
ditionally, the concept of “psychology” may be applied
to Buddhism by extending the notion of mental dis-
ease beyond the apparent limits that death imposes on
an individual body, and beyond the limitations of the
mind of a single individual in a single existence.PSYCHOLOGY