Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

that begins with the intellectual study and understanding of Buddhist basic concepts
and the other five practices.
Like other schools of Mahayana Buddhism, the Yogacara School has the goal of
reaching the state of Nirvana with no fixed abode, the final stage of human
development, beyond suffering and conflict, in which one lives in the real happiness
of both the self and others.

The dual meaning of non-self

The Consciousness-only School, like Western depth psychology, differentiates the
psyche into the surface and the depth, but is very different from the latter in that it
focuses upon awakening in humans.
The teaching of ‘no-self’ (anatman) in Indian Buddhism originally referred to the
fact that not only self, but also all beings and things have no essence apart from
anything else. The person who is fully aware knows this non-substantiality of all
things. Briefly, there is no self as a substance; the excessive attachment to the self,
imagined as a substance, must be renounced and in the higher and more developed
state of consciousness, the error of imagining the self as a substance has been overcome.
If the self is understood as a function that organizes sensations, feelings, thoughts,
and volitions, but has no essences, then it is naturally observed among the Buddhas
as well as the Bodhisattvas. This is a flexible and mature self that is free from any
illusion and open to others. From the standpoint of the Yogacara School,
Enlightenment is not the elimination of self, but the transformation of the whole
mind from the state of eight consciousnesses to the four wisdoms. The conception
of non-self in this sense would lead us not so much to the opposition of self and
non-self but to the continuous and integrative vision of transformation in three stages:
the pre-self stage, the provisional self stage, and the higher self stage.

Jung and the Consciousness-only school

Finally, I would like to explore the possibility of a productive synthesis of the
psychology of the Yogacara School and Jungian depth psychology.
Jung’s psychological theory and the scheme of the human mind corresponds closely
to the Consciousness-only School. With the concept of the collective unconscious
Jung seems to suggest that there is a sphere of the human mind that goes beyond
individuality, and includes all human races, all living species, and even non-living
being, extending to the whole universe. What he calls self in distinction from ego,
which is individual, is the core of the whole psyche that includes both consciousness
and the unconscious, personal and collective. The collective unconscious or the self
seems to cover the same area as the alaya-consciousness, though from a different angle.
Lacking in the Consciousness-only School is the insight into the functioning of
archetypes in the collective unconscious such as mother, father, and shadow.
Therefore, insight into various processes of human life, resulting from the relationship
between consciousness and the unconscious, is unexplored. The Jungian perspective

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