As our nation continues to grapple with healthcare reform, I decided to look outside of the mainstream western ideology as it relates to healthcare. These next couple of posts will focus specifically on Zen Buddhism and will hopefully help to shed light on areas that need improvement within our healthcare system. Looking outside of traditional western practices, will enable individuals, both healthcare professionals and patients, to make incremental steps toward larger and more dramatic changes to the current system. It is my intention, through these next two posts, to promote a more non-traditional approach to healthcare, both in the United States and abroad.
Knowledge without compassion is inhuman. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective. ─ Victor Weisskopf [i]
Throughout every culture around the world, psychological ailments and mental illnesses have been issues that societies have had to contend with since the births of most civilizations. There are many reasons why people suffer from psychological problems; these causes range from the physical to the spiritual, from having a chemical imbalance in the brain to maintaining an ineffective approach for dealing with life and the general human condition, with the bottom line being that nothing is permanent. Recognizing the impermanence of all things, living and non-living, parallels the fact that the majority of individuals have to go through life and become old, sick, and die. For some people, this truth can be overwhelming and compound an already vulnerable psyche. According to Buddha and his teachings, recognizing and coming to terms with this truth, will actually begin the process of liberation and enlightenment from human suffering.
Over the ages, there have been many different techniques that have been developed and cultivated to help those that have had mental health issues, from the eastern approaches of “inner transformation and a corresponding commitment to the highest ethical standards,” which includes meditation and following the Noble Eightfold Path, to the traditional Western science approach, which “has sought a solution through knowledge that would ease the human estate through manipulation of the material world.” [ii] The idea of compassion, which is defined as a “human emotional and cognitive experience that does not happen to a single individual in isolation, but as a response to another sentient being,” has traditionally been thought to have a lesser impact on individuals by the Western scientific standards. Compassion is a process that connects us with other human beings and diminishes our “sense of individuality by bringing it into a felt relationship with the pain and needs of some other.” All too often, with the tradition of Western science, science has sought to understand the self as autonomous, disregarding “the processes that may happen ‘inbetween’ individual selves.” [iii] Unlike Western science, which treats the body and spirit as separate but cooperating parts of themselves, Zen philosophy focuses on meditation and compassion to help an individual free themselves from suffering through finding a balance between the spirit and the body.
The conflict between the body and spirit in Western science can be dated back to the beginnings of Western civilization itself. Basically, “some of the problems with integrating traditional scientific [and] complementary … approaches to helping and healing can be traced back to ancient Greece, probably around the 6th century B.C.E.” Plato’s, “Allegory of the Cave,” states that “truth … only occurs in terms of eternally existing ideals or ‘forms,’ which are pure or spiritual in their character and not physical or material in nature.” Similar to Zen, Plato feels that “the pathway to knowledge … lies within, not without, which means that knowing thyself is not only good psychological advice, but it is also the key to understanding in the highest sense possible.” [iv] Aristotle, Plato’s student, takes a completely different view in regards to gaining knowledge. Aristotle philosophizes that “… the route to understanding is external, not internal, and based on observation, not introspection.” He argues that “sensations brings us perceptions of the world; memory enables us to store those perceptions; imagination enables us to recreate from memory mental images corresponding to perceptions …” and humans derive from these mental pictures general thoughts about who we are and how we relate to our environment. [v]
[i] Davidson, 18
[ii] Davidson, 19
[iii] Davidson, 21
[iv] Mruk, 33-34
[v] Mruk, 34
Works Cited
Davidson, Richard J. and Anne Harrington eds. Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.
Ludwig, Theodore M. The Sacred Paths of the East 2nd ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001.
Mruk, Chrisopher J. with Joan Hartzell. Zen and Psychotherapy: Integrating Traditional and Nontraditional Approaches. New York: Spring Publishing Company, 2003.
