Asian Psychology and Modern Psychiatry

At the basis of Asian culture there are certain traditions and ways of life which have the outward appearance of religions. However, when one investigates such phenomena as the Vedanta, Yoga, Buddhism, and Taoism more deeply, and becomes familiar not so much with their popular application as with the thought and practice of their most advanced exponents, one discovers disciplines which are neither religion nor philosophy in the Western sense. For, unlike Christianity or Judaism, they only rarely involve “beliefs”—that is to say, adherence to positive, formulated opinions about the nature and destiny of man and the universe based on revelation or intuition. And, unlike Western philosophy, their modus operandi is only quite secondarily the construction of a verbal and logical description or explanation of man's experience.

Oriental “philosophy” is, at root, not concerned with conceptions, ideas, opinions, and forms of words at all. It is concerned with a transformation of experience itself, and it would seem that one of the things most akin to it in Western culture—akin by form rather than content—is psychotherapy. For this is the one major area in which the West has developed disciplines which aim at transforming the actual processes of the mind, and, through them, of the ways in which we experience the world, usually without commitment to any metaphysical or philosophical theory. Thus the curing of a psychotic or neurotic person, the transformation of the way in which he thinks and feels, is to a large extent the best Western analogy of the special concerns of Oriental philosophy. In many respects, then, it is more accurate to speak of such a phenomenon as Buddhism as psychology, rather than philosophy or religion. But this requires at least two reservations: that in popular practice it has many of the characteristics of a religion, and that its ultimate concerns are, as yet, hardly within the scope of Western psychology.

From the outset, there is one notable differen