Expositions of Buddhist psychologyInoue grasped the nature of Buddhist psychology in distinction from Western
psychology. In his view, the former is not, like the latter, as a science, based upon
experimental study and therefore exact in the scientific sense, but pursues a religious
purpose of helping people relieve themselves from delusions, with the goal of
Awakening. It is therefore expected to serve as a path to nirvana. Inoue’s insistence
that Buddhist insights should be able to be experimentally demonstrated was to
materialize only more than half a century later. Buddhism and Western psychology,
however, were considered to share the view that mental phenomena are ruled by
psychological laws, and therefore can be studied psychologically.
Inoue’s expositions of Buddhist psychology are based upon Abhidharma, Yogacara,
and Zen. Abhidharma is a psychology of Theravada Buddhism that systematically
classifies and analyzes mental phenomena without positing the mind substance.
According to this psychology, a person is nothing but a composite of five aggregates
(pañca skandhƗ ): forms of matter (rnjpa), perceptions (vedanƗ), conceptions (sa
jñƗ), volition (sa skƗra), and consciousness (vijñƗna). Suffering (dukkha) comes
about due to ignorance (avidyƗ), and ceases through the realization of the truth that
there is nothing like a substantial separate self. Nirvana seemed to Inoue, however,
to be emphasized less in Theravada Buddhism than in later Mahayana Buddhism,
and he was clearly on the side of the latter.
Yogacara is a psychology in Mahayana Buddhism that divides the mind into eight
consciousnesses: the five consciousnesses as five senses, the sixth consciousness as
imagination and thinking, the manas-consciousness as the mind attaching to itself,
and the store-consciousness (Ɨlaya-vijñƗna) as the mind in which impressions of
earlier experiences are stored, and from which all mental phenomena develop. The
manas-consciousness is the very source of all delusions, but only functions by receiving
their material called seeds (bƯja) from the alaya-consciousness. (See Okano’s paper in
this volume for a complete account.)
Yogacara psychology is considered to be a Buddhist version of depth psychology.
The alaya-consciousness is, therefore, sometimes compared with the collective
unconscious in Jung’s analytical psychology. Yogacara psychology was, however,
elaborated in India more than fifteen centuries earlier than psychoanalysis in the
West. Further, Freud and his colleagues had only begun to develop their depth
psychologies when Inoue, without knowing them, presented the system of Yogacara
psychology.
Yogacara psychology’s primary concern is to introspectively understand how we
fall into delusions and are liberated from them. No wonder that contemporary
psychotherapists now look to Yogacara psychology for helpful insights into the
mechanism of falling mentally ill, and being healed. Yogacara psychology explains it
with a theory of three kinds of existence (tri-svabhƗva): paratantra-svabhƗva,
parikalpita-svabhƗva, and pari panna-svabhƗva. Paratantra-svabhƗva means the
ontological fact that all things occur through dependent origination, parikalpita is
the psychological fact that suffering comes about through attachment to the view that
238 THE DEVELOPMENT OF BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY IN MODERN JAPAN