Seeking Enlightenment in the East: Self-Fulfillment or Regressive Longing?

“Westerners who come here to become Buddhist monks are not trying to lose themselves. No, just the opposite. They are afraid of losing themselves, and it takes a long time before this fear goes away.” The man speaking these words was himself a Westerner. Several years earlier he had departed from America and from what he perceived as its fraudulent values and moved to Asia to become a Buddhist monk.

When I first met this man I had already been traveling for several months in Asia, interviewing Westerners who had become Buddhist monks. I was interested in understanding the psychological factors that motivated these individuals to reject their own cultural upbringing and immerse themselves in a foreign philosophy and religious practice. This investigation led me to interview monks in places as diverse as Nepal, India, Burma, Japan, and Thailand. On that particular day in Bangkok when I was conversing with the Westerner who thought that people did not travel to Asia to escape individuality, I realized that my basic premise, derived from previous years of research into the attraction of various cults to many young Americans (Fauteux, 1981), ironically was being both challenged and confirmed.

I had discovered in the men and women who had joined cults in America a propensity toward a regressive loss of individuality. Instead of confronting the exigencies of living their own lives or experiencing the anxiety of making their own choices, they allowed the Reverend Moon to make their decisions, turned to Krishna for personal salvation, and found in Bhagwan the solution to perplexing problems.

What normally defines the psychological boundaries of an individual