Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

Fundamentally subjective

But it is not enough just to be aware of dukkha or ‘the existence of suffering.’ Thus,
Hisamatsu often speaks of the need to inquire into, to penetrate, dukkha in a manner
that is ‘fundamentally subjective.’ Fundamentally subjective means that it is not
merely arbitrary, individual, or personal in contrast to being ‘objective.’ This attitude
can be discerned in Shakyamuni sitting under the bodhi tree. In the preface to his
major study on Eastern Nothingness, Hisamatsu spells it out:

Here my very being becomes an urgent problem. And yet I myself cannot

become some objective data to be solved, for the problem is the totality of my

own suffering existence. This living problem is no other than my own suffering

existence. Like a doctor suffering from a fatal illness with which he might live

or die: not something which can be examined objectively, it is his own illness

which moment by moment draws nearer, threatening. The concreteness of this

problem is realized when I suffer, just as the concrete fact of illness is realized

when the doctor gets ill rather than when he deals with it as the object of his

research.

The problem that I have is my suffering. Because it is I myself that am

suffering, it cannot be dealt with in an objective manner. Because I myself am

suffering I try to free myself—to save myself—from suffering. I am none other

than the problem that must be resolved. And since this existence is a

problematic existence, it cannot be said to truly be existence. This problem

resolved is true existence, in which I find myself settled.

This fundamentally subjective attitude is crucial in Buddhism. Any approach—
whether practical or theoretical—will fall short if it remains merely object-oriented,
assuming something to be grasped, understood, or attained by the subject. This is
true whether the approach involves entering samadhi, passing koans, contemplating
the Buddha in various forms, calming, or introspection. Through such Buddhist
practices it is possible to attain a special state of mind, even to gain some insight. If
the root-source of dukkha is not cut off, however, there is the danger of falling into
a vicious cycle, an infinite regress, of merely going into and out of samadhi or other
such states. Thus, Hisamatsu stressed the need to cut off the entire complex of dukkha
once and for all. This can be done only in a fundamentally subjective manner.

Total and immediate

In his commentary on his conversation with Jung, Hisamatsu pointed out this danger
in relation to psychotherapy by contrasting psychotherapy with ‘deliverance from all
suffering’ through self-awakening to ‘complete and final emancipation’:

Awakening to the self unbound by anything whatever, one is liberated from all

illness at once. If each illness is treated individually as it arises, one recovers

32 A BUDDHIST MODEL OF THE HUMAN SELF