You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
THE INTERPLAY of Buddhism and modern Western psychology goes back at least a hundred years. The most spiritual of the world's psychologies and the most psychological of the world's religions, Buddhism teaches that the cultivation of self-awareness dispels ignorance about the nature of the self. William James, lecturing at Harvard in the early 1900s, was known to be impressed with Buddhism's inherent psychological nature. Its core teachings of unsatisfactoriness, transience, and egolessness were not difficult for him to appreciate. He once interrupted a lecture he was giving when he spied a visiting Buddhist monk from Ceylon in the auditorium.
“Take my chair,” he is reputed to have said. “You are better equipped to lecture on psychology than I. Yours is the psychology everybody will be studying twenty-five years from now.”
It was one of the unforeseen legacies of the British colonial experience in India that James knew anything at all about Buddhism. It had virtually vanished in India, the country of its origin, by the time the British arrived there. But thanks to the painstaking work of British explorers, linguists, and amateur archaeologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the hidden legacy of Indian Buddhism was gradually uncovered. Fragments of stupas, burial mounds that became sacred Buddhist monuments, first built by the Indian emperor Asoka in the second century B.C., were dug up and puzzled over by the British sahibs. The inscriptions on these monuments were decoded and the language of the time translated so that the lost history of Indian Buddhism could be gradually pieced