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The supreme doctrine

Psychological Studies in Zen Thought

  By Hubert Benoit

Foreword by Aldous Huxley

The Viking Press New York

Foreword

Philosophy in the Orient is never pure speculation, but always some form of transcendental pragmatism. Its truths, like those of modern physics, are to be tested operationally. Consider, for example, the basic doctrine of Vedanta, of Mahayana Buddhism, of Taoism, of Zen. ‘Tat twan asi – thou art That’. ‘Tao is the root to which we may return, and so become again That which, in fact, we have always been’. ‘Samsara and Nirvana, Mind and individual minds, sentient beings and the Buddha, are one’. Nothing could be more enormously metaphysical than such affirmations; but, at the same time, nothing could be less theoretical, idealistic, Pickwickian. They are known to be true because, in a super-Jamesian way, they work, because there is something that can be done with them. The doing of this something modifies the doer’s relations with reality as a whole. But knowledge is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. When transcendental pragmatists apply the operational test to their metaphysical hypotheses, the mode of their existence changes, and they know everything, including the proposition, ‘thou art That’, in an entirely new and illuminating way.

The author of this book is a psychiatrist, and his thoughts about the Philosophia Perennis in general and about Zen in particular are those of a man professionally concerned with the treatment of troubled minds. The difference between Eastern philosophy, in its therapeutic aspects, and most of the systems of psychotherapy current in the modern west may be summarized in a few sentences.

The aim of western psychiatry is to help the troubled individual to adjust himself to the society of less troubled individuals – individuals who are observed to be well adjusted to one another and the local institutions, but about whose adjustment to the fundamental Order of Things no enquiry is made. Counseling, analysis, and other methods of therapy are used to bring these troubled and maladjusted persons back to a normality, which is defined.

Contents

Foreword by Aldous Huxley

Author’s preface

I. On the general sense of Zen thought

II. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’

III. The idolatry of ‘salvation’

IV. The existentialism of Zen

V. The mechanism of anxiety

VI. The five modes of thought of the natural man-psychological conditions of Satori

VII. Liberty as ‘total determinism’

VIII. The egotistical states

IX. The Zen unconscious

X. Metaphysical distress

XI. Seeing into one’s own nature-the spectator of the spectacle

XII. How to conceive the inner task according to Zen

XIII. Obedience to the nature of things

XIV. Emotion and the emotive state

XV. Sensation and sentiment

XVI. On affectivity

XVII. The horseman and the horse

XVIII. The primordial error or ‘original sin’

XIX. The immediate presence of Satori

XX. Passivity of the mind and disintegration of our energy

XXI. On the idea of ‘discipline’

XXII. The compensations

XXIII. The inner alchemy

XXIV. On humility

Epilogue

Index

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