both Buddha and Freud were champions of the individual, great encouragers of one’s ability to break free from mass delusion.

Freud and Buddha By Mark Epstein

TRAVELING IN ASIA IN MY EARLY TWENTIES WITH MY AMERICAN Buddhist teachers (Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Richard Alpert), I woke up one March morning, still a bit Valium-encrusted after an all-night train ride from Bangkok, to find myself in the forest monastery of a Thai meditation master named Ajahn Chah. The monastery wasn’t just in the tropical forest; it was constructed out of it. Ruddy wooden buildings rose on stilts over neatly swept dirt strewn paths. Bird calls mixed with the ringing of chimes, the murmurs of the monks and the faint residue of incense from the temple. Ajahn Chah met with us after we shared the monastery lunch. It was obvious to everyone why we were there, we were part of a pilgrimage of psychologically-minded Westerners pillaging the wisdom of the East, trolling for some seed or shoot that might take root in American soil–we hurriedly constructed a question so as to generate a reply. I can no longer remember our question, but Ajahn Chah’s response still lingers.

Before saying a word, he motioned to a glass at his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked us. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”

People ask me what Buddhism brings to psychotherapy and I think of Ajahn Chah and his glass. Freud, whose dourness put me off in my first encounters with his work, used to say that the best he could do for someone was to take them from a state of neurotic suffering and return them to one of common unhappiness. When I first heard this, I did not sufficiently appreciate Freud’s wry humor, nor did I accept what an achievement common unhappiness could be. I heard Freud as a fatalist instead of as a realist and did not yet see the spiritual potential in his unrelenting opening to reality. I heard the Buddha’s teachings on nirvana as promising relief from common unhappiness and I obviously wanted him for a therapist. I did not yet realize how close the Buddha’s vision was to Freud’s. For just as the monastery was constructed out of the forest and was not separate from it, so is release from suffering constructed out of common unhappiness. Instead of feeling defeated by our suffering, according to both Freud and Buddha, we can learn to use it to open our hearts.
People ask me what Buddhism brings to psychotherapy and I think of Ajahn Chah and his glass. Freud, whose dourness put me off in my first encounters with his work, used to say that the best he could do for someone was to take them from a state of neurotic suffering and return them to one of common unhappiness. When I first heard this, I did not sufficiently appreciate Freud’s wry humor, nor did I accept what an achievement common unhappiness could be. I heard Freud as a fatalist instead of as a realist and did not yet see the spiritual potential in his unrelenting opening to reality. I heard the Buddha’s teachings on nirvana as promising relief from common unhappiness and I obviously wanted him for a therapist. I did not yet realize how close the Buddha’s vision was to Freud’s. For just as the monastery was constructed out of the forest and was not separate from it, so is release from suffering constructed out of common unhappiness. Instead of feeling defeated by our suffering, according to both Freud and Buddha, we can learn to use it to open our hearts.

Both the Buddha and Freud came to appreciate that the source of self-generated misery is an exaggerated sense of self’s absolute reality. As with the glass, we try to make ourselves more real than we really are and we struggle and squirm and fight to maintain that illusion. We fear that if we surrender to the self’s fragility, we will break, not realizing the inherent freedom in being already broken. Professor Robert Thurman of Columbia remembers his elderly Mongolian teacher as putting it this way:

“It’s not that you’re not real,” his teacher would say. “We all think we’re real, and that’s not wrong. You are real. But you think you’re really real, you exaggerate it.”

Mark Epstein, M.D. is a psychiatrist and the author of Thoughts Without a Thinker, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, and, most recently, Psychotherapy Without the Self, (Yale University Press).