This is a “first draft summary” and commentary on some key material in David Brazier’s excellent book, Zen Therapy (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995).  It is intended solely for the use of students in the Elon University course, PHL 352 – Eastern Philosophy.

Situating the Work:

         We have looked at some of the fundamental teachings of the Buddha.  In particular the Four Noble Truths (including the precepts and the Eightfold Path) and the three marks of existence – dukkha, impermanence and no-self.  We have noted how the Four Noble truths are “read” in the Theravada interpretation and in the Mahayana interpretation.  It is Buddhism under the Mahayana interpretation that enters China to become Ch’an or Zen.  The Abhidharma is a collection of Buddhist teachings on the mind.  Brazier does the best work I have seen on making key features of this teaching accessible to all.

A Note on Ethics West and East:

                 WESTERN ETHICS                                            ZEN  BUDDHIST ETHICS
                                    Following to some extent David Brazier's Comparison
 

                 Tends to see                                                         Tends to look to ethics as
                 individuals as                                                         a part of a practice and a
                 selfish and in                                                          path that is liberative
                 need of restraint
                 for sake of social living

                 Often appears as                                                   Tends to see the precepts
                 restrictions imposed                                               as ingredient to the path --
                 from without                                                          perhaps even as revealing
                                                                                               how the bodhisattva lives.

 It is true that ethics in the West appears restrictive and extrinsic but this is only at the first stages of ethical development.  A deeper way to look at Western ethics is to see how people can internalize both the conduct and the reasons for the conduct.

 Philosophical Ethics involves commitment and criteria (e.g. what is good for the whole and fair to the participant-parts)
            and  appeal to reason and evidence and revisability.

To say X is wrong is on one view of philosophical ethics to say

"There is reason and reason enough -- based on ethical criteria and the facts of the case -- not to do X."

Brazier: To be psychologically healthy is to return to and live from our core ethics.
 Our core ethics even as a list of precepts points to our true nature and hence our true happiness.
 Seen this way, our fully functioning state is a socially constructive (ethical) state.

NOTE:  This is a comparison of Western and Eastern Ethics.  I will ask you to compare Western and Eastern views on therapy.  Zen therapy as Brazier sees it does have an explicitly ethical component, although it is in no way moralistic in tone.  This is one way that Zen therapy (in this version) does differ from most Western forms of therapy.  These claim to be neutral to ethical matters. Whether they are in fact "value-free" is, of course, arguable.
This is not the only way that Western therapies differ from what Brazier calls " Zen therapy."

                                       I  Six senses                                     access   sense data

                                       II  Chitta (The conscious                  accesses  perception, recognition
                                              cognizing mind)
I-IV generates
dualistic                          III  Manas (the censoring mind)   filters all of the above through ego,attraction, rejection
consciousness
based on AVIDYA
primal ignorance             IV  Alaya  (storehouse                     seat of karma, self-passions, mental complexes, etc.
                                                         consciousness)
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                                                                        Buddhata – Buddha Nature
                                                                         Non-dualistic clarity or VIDYA
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Comparison with my Lake Analogy (See To Come to Life More Fully, prologue to Part IV)

 WURT-Y  “surface of the lake”  Me-centered understanding and responding

Note: a WURT is shorthand for a Way of Understanding and Responding To [persons, situations, stories, etc.]
        The "U" or understanding aspect shows up in how we interpret, how we label and language things.
        The "R" or response factor shows up in our emotional charge (e.g. our liking, disliking and identifying)

  As we grow, a surface self grows.  Each of us sees ourself as a center of the world.  We are the measuring rod of everything.  A self-complex forms.  Outer cultural and parental forces teach us.  Now you are a good boy.  Now you are a good girl.  Furthermore, our own likes and dislikes, greeds and hates, form.  We take our likes and dislike to define who we are.  We identify with our greeds and hates and then we anchor in “this self complex” by self-justification.  “That’s just the way I am,” we tell others and ourselves.  Clinging and condemning are joined by the delusion of believing that we truly are who we (and the world) imagine us to be.

 Poem by Wei Wu Wei:

  Why are we unhappy?
  Because 99.9 percent
  of everything we think and
  of everything we do
   is about us.
  And there isn’t any!

Enter Predominance Theory (and Morita therapy).  Enter resources of the will and choice.   This theory says  that we -- as gardeners of our minds -- have tools to pull up the bad weeds and water the good seeds.

The mind is commonly dominated by self-passion and its associated kleshas yet there are more wholesome forces to align with.  For this we have attention and intention, energy and enquiry.  For this we also have mindfulness and equinamity.

 Stopping means accessing what the Sufis call the Observing Self.
The Buddhist tradition speaks of mindfulness and other forms of meditation.
We do STOP – or at least a part of us is able to STOP and STEP BACK so as to observe what is going on.

 The observing, listening self is what I call WURT-Z  -- a large-minded way of understanding and responding.

 From WURT-Z we see what is going on without judgment, without bringing in our own agenda.  Another way to think of the Observing self is that when I have this distance then I see both what is happening and how I am labeling what is happening.  I see what is happening and how I am relating with greed, hate and delusion to what is happening.  In other words, I see both the WHAT (of what is going on) and the WURT – how I am labeling / languaging and emotionally reacting to what is going on.

                                     Now I can also begin to appreciate the I Ching Chant:

         Since from WURT-Z I can see how "I" -- the surface-of-the-lake, cartoon character--  _________( insert your name!) am interpreting things, telling stories, and getting emotionally caught up in my surface identity.   I can also see that this is not the only way to see and be.

        When I bring the Observing "Mirror" Mind to bear, I see more clearly what is going on and how I am relating to it.

         All the while, shining up through the other side of my “mirror mind” as if from the depth is the grace and assistance of
                                            the WHOLE – the TAO – the BUDDHA NATURE.

      At my depth I am part of the whole, a unique perspective on all that is.  James Mark Baldwin once wrote:  "Every genuine act of self-sacrifice is also an act of self-enhancement."  (I would add):  However, the self that is enhanced is not the self that is sacrificed. We sacrifice – again and again – our small-minded self and enhance our larger self.  The large-minded self expands until it is all that is --until what we are expands to include the Whole..
This is what I call WURT-OMEGA -- but it is less a way of understanding and responding than a breakthrough to enlightenment, to unitive consciousness.  To a state where knower and knowing and known no longer apply.  To a state where loving and love and beloved no longer apply.

    Whether we experience unitvie consciousness or not, "our" deepest nature which is at one with the Whole -- our place in the Whole -- acts as what physicists might call "a strange attractor" toward health and wholeness.  Thus, even our distorted energies can be seen as a misguided seeking of the way.  Hence, they can be transformed.

Trio:        Bitter and Sweet Roots & Object Relations
                             & Predominance (choice / tools).

Quartet:       Association   +   Interdependence (or Co-arising)
                      Body Zen     +   Support

Trio:              Karma -- Food -- Higher Powers.

Duo:            Taming the Mind & Creating a Path.

BITTER (AND SWEET) ROOT RELATIONS (and the therapy of Carl Rogers)

         We have seen the three bitter roots (three poisons) and how they produce a larger variety of kleshas -- distortions and clouding of the mind-and-heart.

         Furthermore, all three bitter roots rise out of AVIDYA -- fundamental ignorance -- centered in our tendency to reinforce a narrow or false sense of who we are.

        In greed (or attachment or clinging)  I want everything for ME and I reinforce "the world according to ME."

        In hate (or aversion or condemning), I want to cause the other suffering (or at least blame someone or something for  what I dislike about my life).

        In delusion (or confusion or identifying with less than we are), I anchor in a set of partial identities based on my likes and dislikes  (identifying with, for example, my possessions, my power, my prestige or my  roles and my beliefs). Then I flee a world that does meet these expectations.

        Object Relations explores further how we construct a restrictive self-world and how we become captured by our “self-world” stories.   It highlights how the self complex is at the root of distortion.

 “The objects we perceive  .  .  .  are, unless we are completely enlightened, all shaped and coloured by a personal agenda or intention.  They are conditioned.  (96)

 [Our] clinging and rejecting is just our effort to construct and maintain one particular object, the self.” (p. 97)

Note:  When the Observing self is operating, we have a chance to examine our stories -- especially our stories about who we are and what is absolutely crucial to us.  We have the chance to notice our complaints and blaming and self-justifications.  Here we begin to see our our basic ignorance and our cultural and family and personal delusions fuel our likes and dislikes and these crystalize into our sense of identity.  "That just the way I am."  we say.
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PREDOMINANCE THEORY (and Morita therapy) says that we -- as gardeners of our minds -- have tools to pull up
                                                                                            the bad weeds and water the good seeds.

         The mind is commonly dominated by self-passion and its associated kleshas (cloudiings of the mind-and-heart) yet there are more wholesome forces to align with.  For this, we need attention and intention, energy and enquiry.  For this we also need mindfulness and equinamity.

JGS:   In the work we have done with the I Ching as a wisdom text, we have noted again and again that unless you are awake and alert you have no freedom to be response-able -- i.e. no freedom to see that there are at least two ways to relate to anything -- a small-minded way and a large-minded way.  Without mindfulness, what we think of as choice may simply be unseen conditioning.
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                                                    (1) Association,                                 (2) Interdependence or Co-arising

                                                    (3) Body Zen                                     (4) Support

These help us look at the force of habit -- the tracks we lay down in our body-mind.

ASSOCIATION  (James and Freud and Jung in West)

 Consciousness flows in an unending stream of thoughts, feelings, images, and sensations. (112)  The remedy is mindfulness and wisdom.

 "The more we have lived negatively, the more ready the mind is to fall into negative states."  Conversely, the more we have and continue to live positively (in practice of large-mind), the more ready the mind is to fall into positive states.

WARNING:  Careful here:  There is no substitute for maturity and insight.  We are not talking about positive states as sentimental, naïve, Pollyanna states. Being in large mind does not always mean “being nice.”  Sometimes it means having the courage and the skill to confront what is happening and how we and others are conspiring to continue unwholesome (sometimes unjust) states of affairs.  JGS

Association does not equal determinism.  And those who are suffering from bad experiences need care and kindness.  “the best conditions to bloom.”  Therapy begins with finding ways to give good experiences.

Terms:  Personal mental constructions we unconsciously hold   =   in Buddhist terms, the self-passions.

 The more dominated by “complexes” a mind is, the less open it is to new experience. (117)

 Always:  SATI = stop.  Be mindful.  Notice what is going and how we filter this through our language and emotional valences.
 

Three main aspects of Zen training:
 Renunciant = change circumstances  Go on a retreat.
 Bodhisattva = change the way we act
 Tantra = reconstruct every experience as a blessing

INTERDEPENDENCE or CO-ARISING (and Naikan therapy)

 "The lifestyle and the habit are born together, die together.  This is interdependence theory." (127)  We can’t expect one aspect of our life to deeply change and everything else to remain the same.  Change of heart and mind [begins with] the experiential realization that there is an altogether better way to be. (126)

 We can bring the kleshas into the open and begin to see them as “creative energy in disguise.”  Call for self-study:  watch the kleshas arise, see how they affect us, watch them depart.  E.g. jealousy and anger – they are not presenbt all the time.

            NAIKAN  --  past life work – 1950’s Yoshimoto – examination of one’s past life in relation to others.

 What did this person do for you?  (very concrete and specific)
 What did you do in return [at that time and place]?
 What trouble and worries did you cause them?
At times, an add’l question: what thefts and deceits have I indulged in?
                                                                [in that period of my life]

BODY ZEN (and Gedlin therapy)

 "The mind has the body as its base as later generations have ancestors as base."

 To have the human embodied form is most fortunate.  We have the six sense organs – touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight + the brain.  Enlightenment can occur through any of the sense organs.

   Buddhism – a middle way between extreme asceticism and extreme indulgence
        [between repression and compulsive acting out. JGS]

Quotes:  Zen is practiced by the bowing body [bowing and touching the earth].

    Zen training begins and ends in the body.

    Zen is experience.

   The wisdom which we need is not simply “in” the body: it is in the body’s co-functioning with the world around it.

    Mudras – work with clay – gardening – gentle touch

SUPPORT  (no Western therapy parallel given, although all sorts of support groups are used)

 To shift from unproductive habits to productive habits we need support.

 Good friends can give this in that they can help us through the relationship find the source and can help us in the relationship “put our progress into practice.”

 A plant needs watering and a baby needs feeding if they are to stay alive and grow.  (153)

 “A bad pattern can generally only be renounced by establishing a replacement.  .  .  .    One should establish a desirable activity which is incompatible with the behaviour one wishes to extinguish.” (155)

 Character training:  Good habits become a spring board for high achievement.” (155)

In therapy, what is often needed is that the client learn some new pattern and then be supported while it is repeated again and again until it becomes second nature. .  .  .  When our second nature has been thoroughly trained, our first nature may show itself.  While our second nature remains unruly, however, first nature rends to remain hidden."  (p. 156)
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KARMA

 Karma is the law of moral consequences.  The word “karma” means “action” and is related our word drama.

 In the Buddha’s time, karma referred to ritual actions such as sacrifices to the gods.

 The Buddha taught:

· Offerings should be made to good people rather than gods
· Ritual is valuable if used to deepen one’s life and generate a sense of community
· Actions have consequences as a natural effect (not as punishment from gods).

Consider mental suffering – over the range of what we might call normal neurosis – what we all share.  [I am excluding, for the moment, serious mental illnesses.]

There is necessary suffering – the pain in many life situations intrinsic to bveing human.  Illness. Injury.  Hunger.  Etc.

There is unnecessary suffering.  We generate unnecessary suffering and we can reduce it.

Since karma is created by willful behavior, it concerns both attitude and action.  Therapy similarly must be concerned with both areas: what the client holds in their heart and what they act out in their life.  (160)

How karma works:

a. general attitude to life
b. specific volitional activity
c. latency period
d. trigger experience – possibility for future action
e. if acted out again, new cycle of karma

        All action which springs from self-will produces karma.  An enlightened person produces no new personal karma, but still reaps the effects of seeds already sown.  (161)

        As therapists we will see how our clients continually recreate the same kind of problems for themselves and then try to get out of it by making the same mistakes.  We will also see how states of misery are related to previous actions.  At the same time, in most cases, it will be inappropriate to point these processes out to the client immediately because the client is liable to see this as blame.  It will thus act as a trigger for more trouble.  The therapist may, therefore, often be in a position of having insights which they cannot yet use.  (162)

Example: Remember the story I told in class of how we humans
 differ from rats.  Rats learn not to go down the same path over
 and over when there is no cheese. We do the same thing over
 and over and expect different results!!   "There used to be cheese.
 Don't I deserve cheese?  Well, maybe tomorrow."

We cannot escape karma just because we do not recognize that what we are doing is causing harm.  "If the client is harming others, no matter what the provocation or justification, there will be a price to pay.  It may often, in practice, be outside the therapist's power to prevent the client creating karma for themselves in a specific instance and one might, like a parent watching their child grow up, have to stand by as the client experiments with life, learning the hard way.  The therapist's job is simply to understand and not to judge; to be there willing to go on believing in the client's basic buddha nature no matter what they may do along the way.  In Buddhism there is no judgment: just, the world is so constructed that we bring joy or trouble upon ourselves.  Sometimes the most compassionate course is to stand by and wait for the opportune moment.  Sometimes one can help the client explore their own doubts about what they are doing.  In the last analysis, the client must decide for themselves, but this does not mean that the therapist has no insight into the matter.  Therapy is an intrinsically moral process "  (165)

FEEDING -- the Theory of Food Relations

         This follows on the discussion of karma.  "We act in ways that continue our own troubles.  If we feel resentment or hate, all too often, rather than recognizing that it is like fire scorching our life, we feed it.  .  .  .  We do just the same with greed.  Instead of seeing what it is doing to us, we indulge and encourage it.  Zen does not see this kind of behaviour as 'sinful' so much as simply misguided.  The root of all our troubles is ignorance."  (168)

How do we feed our conditioning?  By contact, by will and by attitude.

 "It is better to see ourselves as villain rather than victim."  (168)

Avidya manifests as greed, hate and delusion.
When avidya is in a state of stasis, it is delusion.
When it moves hungrily toward something it becomes greed.
When it shrinks away from something it becomes hate.
          This is at the basic level of sensuality.
When these three poisons develop as a "self" they manifest in new colours.
When the basic delusion of self becomes expansive, it becomes pride.
When it contracts it manifests as doubt. [perhaps self-doubt -- JGS]  (p.169)

        It is this drishti, our opinionatedness, that we are always feeding.  [whether distorted or extreme or unreal, etc.]  "The Buddha emphasized that we have to overcome our attachment to all views, even Buddhist one, if we are to liberate our minds."

 Two similes:

 a raft -- runing up and down the bank with the raft and not use it or having used it will not let it go.

 a snake -- the teachings are like a snake -- one must know how to pick them up.

HIGHER or DEEPER POWERS

 Nonetheless, we do have potentialities to be developed. Faith, energy, mindfulness, centeredness and wisdom.

"An ordinary person has potential which is based upon the features they were born with -- the senses, sexuality and life.  The spiritual person develops new faculties which become much more imporatant to them."  (176)  Still, everyone possesses vast potential for enlightenment and constructive engagement in existence.

A. Taming the mind -- the Ten Oxherding Pictures.  The story of Mila-repa meeting his teacher, Marpa.

                     " Enlightenment is a by-product of doing what reality requires of us."  (180)

"If we are trying to get something we are acting from ego, whereas when we give somethingup, we experience freedom.
Gain is delusion.  Loss is enlightenment.  As we weed the garden ourside, we also weed the garden of our mind.  Nonetheless. as we advance, we find that the power to direct our lives grows and does become a basis for practice."  (180)

This takes two forms:   MEDITATION / MINDFULNESS +  THE TRANSFORMING POWER OF LIVING BY VOW.

         "Chitta is the conscious attentive part of the mind.  In ordinary people the chitta is led about by all the different objects which come into view, both internal objects (memory and imagination) arising from the alaya storehouse and external objects presented by the senses.  In the bodhisattva, however, chitta is focused upon bodhi, wisdom, and this provides purposefulness.  No matter what objects arise, the bodhisattva is able to see them in terms of bodhi.  Thus, 'Even if the sun were to rise from the wet, the Bodhisattva has only one way.  His way is in each moment to express his nature and his sincerity (Suzuk 1970, p. 54) This is really what, in Buddhism, is meant by living by vow."

 Ordinary people, then, live by their karma whereas bodhsattvas live by their vow.  (181)

 The traditional form of the bodhisattva vow:

 Innumerable are sentient beings: we vow to save them all.
 Inexhaustible are deluded passions: we vow to extinguish them all.
 Immeasurable are the Dharma teachings: we vbow to mastr them all.
 Infinite is the Buddha's way: we vow to fulfil it completely.

 THE POWER TO LIVE BY VOW COMES FROM CONTRITION.  (183)   -- This because "Buddhism is the attempt to free oneself from the grip of basic delusion and self-passion."   All this requires GREAT ENERGY that springs from a CHANGE OF HEART.  Contrition is needed for deep change of heart.

"Contrition is the act of facing ourselves and feeling deeply the pain of our own deluded state.  This is, or should be, the work of therapy."  (184)  "When a person feels contrition, shares it and is heard, they feel restored to wholeness."  (184)

Contrition and change of heart "involves giving up the habit of self-defense."

"In Zen we say: 'All the harm done by my body, speech and mind is caused by greed, hate and delusion, which have no beginning.  I now face and confess it all from the bottom of my heart.' "  (185)

"The path offered by Zen .  .  .  is a life of continually, in each moment, liberating ourselves from ourselves by engagement with the needs of the reality around us.  It is a bodhisattva path which puts the spiritual need of the world first as it manifests in each concrete situation." (186)
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Part Three provides a treatment of Compassion, Love and Wisdom that recapitulates some of the teaching introduced under the discussion of the bitter and sweet roots.  PLEASE REREAD TEXT CAREFULLY on these three chapters!.

         A)  Notion of KARUNA (COMPASSION) -- Bodhisattva: Avalokita or (in feminine form) Quan-Yin or Kannon --
                                                                                                                            she who hears the cries of the world.

         In compassion we wish others free from suffering and is linked with empathy. Thus, we are taken out of ourselves.  All suffering comes from our involvement with defending our self.  Cultivating compassion takes us out of ourself by having us know the other's suffering from the other's viewpoint and to experience the other's suffering as our own but without losing our freedom or wisdom in the process.

        In great compassion we experience our oneness with the whole cosmos.

 "Ordinary compassion is to feel sorry for someone. [This is not quite accurate; it is more than pity. JGS]
Great compassion means to be in unity with the needs of all beings, even the plants and the inanimate phenomena of nature."  (191) Great compassion is more than empathy, more than pity, more than ordinary acts of kindness.

 "The best compassion is that which supports compassion in the other..  .  .  .  Compassion grows from the basic skills of mindfulness."  (196)

 From compassion we derive our sense of purpose.  What we care for takes us into life.  "From a Buddhist perspective, it is the power to give which is what really matters, rather than the power to get."  (198)

 Skills involved:  Role reversal.  Caring for pet, gardens, artistic of work activities.

        B) Notion of MAITRI (LOVE) -- Bodhisattva:  Samantabhadra -- Bodhisattva of patience and action.

        "Love heals greed as compassion heals hate."  (201)  How?  Again by taking us out of ourself.  By wanting to be with the other exactly as he or she is [at surface level and at depth level -- JGS].  This positive regard and this wish that the other flourish are powerful forces.

        Maitri is loving kindness, impartial friendliness.  "The unconditional spirit means acting without regard to getting something in return."  This does not mean that certain people and places and things cannot be special to us.  It means that we see them more and more deeply for what they are and where they are in the great web. To do this there is a surrender of the surface ego.  To do this requires patience and wise knowing of when to act.  As Brazier says: "Fundamentally there is nothing wrong with the client.  The more times we really see this, the more confidence we develop that even the most unprepossessing individual has treasure hidden somewhere upon their person.  If we can create the right conditions, they will be induced to take it our and show it to us."  (205-206)

        "Ordinary love is the love we have for the things and people which are important to ourselves.  Great love is non-possessive and unconditional."

        {As a therapist] I am not here to fix anything.  I am to appreciate another person's world and to intensify their experience of it.  .  .  .  .  Zen works on the principle of emptying rather than filling.  Love is to give a person space in which to follow intuition and put burdens down."

        C) The notion of PRAJNA (WISDOM OR DEEP UNDERSTANDING)  Bodhisattva: Manjushri -- in tranquil
                                                                                                                        meditation on top of a ferocious beast.

 "Understanding is not to be found in explanation but in experiencing for oneself (taiken)."  See 212

Willingness to lay down one's life to speak a true word.  "When the Buddha is on the teaching seat, the stories we have about who we are die."  (214)   Or perhaps we might say they are deeply transformed.

The same alaya -- storehouse -- that holds our karma and kleshas is -- when we see into the heart of the matter -- our treasure house.  Our squawks are reminders of what we care deeply about -- athough often what this truly is remains hidden from us.  JGS

 Karuna and maitri are part of wisdom.

How is such wisdom or deep understanding developed?  Zen Master Dogen speaks of being generous -- giving without expecting anything in return.  Dogen speaks of learning to use loving words, regarding others as we would regard our children.  Dogen speaks of exercising goodwill -- thinkng of ways to benefit the other, and Dogen speaks of coming to a point of not distinguishing between self and others.  (See p. 218)

Remember Manjushri.  "The beast and Manjushri together symbolize the wisdom e are looking for.  When a person has prajna, they also have vidya.  They see the world just as it is and they appear just as they are.  (219)  There is a "rising above conditioning and restoring harmony."
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 "We might say that love is what occurs when we become open to the secret life of another person." ( "not to expose the secrets but to experience their depth" ).

 The task of therapy is to reconnect people to their own depths, to one another and to the world." (256)

 Building community is preventative mental health.  (259)

 Zen is an ecological state of mind.  It is consciousness of interconnectedness leading to an ethic of non-harm.  (262)

 JGS:  How can the principles and practices of Zen seen in this way be applied to our relationships, our communities and the planet itself as a living being?

NOTE:

 "In speaking about Zen, especially in its relation to forms of culture, it is necessary always to bear in mind the difference between Zen as a 'system' of  paradoxes evolved in India and China during a period of three thousand years, and Zen as Zen, that is the spontaneous, individually created timeless-activity-in-time of an undivided mind-body."  R. H. Blyth, quoted in Zen and Zen Classics, compiled by Frederick Franck, pp. 165-166.