16
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BUDDHIST
PSYCHOLOGY IN MODERN JAPAN
Akira Onda
IntroductionMy career as a psychologist began with the study of creativity. I was mainly inspired
by Gardiner Murphy’s works on the subject which made me realize that it is only
approached through the combination of conceptual thinking and emotional
intelligence. This field of creativity seemed to suggest that it was necessary to go
beyond confinements and compartmentalization in psychology.
Creativity was then connected with Zen in my study when I participated in the
1961–2 project on ‘Medical and Psychological Studies of Zen’ financially supported
by Monbusho, the Ministry of Education (Onda 1962). At that time I also began to
practice Zen, dealing with koan and Shikan-taza practices. The comparative studies
I was involved in at the time showed that other forms of meditation or methods like
hypnosis, autogenic training, yoga, nenbutsu, mantra, and ajikan are also relevant to
creativity and healing (Onda 1965; 1967). Since the 1970s, during which arose the
interest in Eastern meditation among Western psychiatrists and psychologists, I have
also been involved in international projects on the subject (Onda 1974/75; 1986;
1992; 1993).
Dhampada, one of the oldest Buddhist texts, begins with the words: ‘We are what
we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the
world.’ This suggests how Buddhism is itself a psychology, though the word
‘psychology’ here may not be spoken in the Western sense. About a hundred years
ago William James recognized the uniquely psychological character of Buddhism
when he invited Dharmapala, a young Buddhist from Sri Lanka and a leader of an
international Buddhist movement, to give a lecture before his students. After the
lecture he told them, ‘This [Buddhism] is the psychology everybody will be studying
twenty-years from now.’ But with a few exceptions like C.G.Jung, most
psychoanalysts, under the influence of Freud’s reductive characterization of Eastern
thought as ‘oceanic feeling’ in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), until recently
tended to regard Buddhism as a regressive state to primary narcissism, or, at best, a
form of mysticism. It is only since the 1990s that more and more psychoanalysts have
come to see in this representative Eastern religion a refined system of psychological
insights (Molino 1998).