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I have been practicing psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism for more than twenty years. At first they felt like two separate practices conducted in parallel. As the years have gone by, however, they increasingly have converged, and I have begun to see them both as structured disciplines of moment-to-moment awareness and to evolve a common conceptual framework to describe the mechanism of character change within each. But before I try to describe that conceptual framework, let me start by saying a little bit about what one actually does when one practices Zen. Although there are almost as many schools of Zen as there are of psychoanalysis, for our purposes, their various styles can be roughly divided into two basic types, which I like to call top down or bottom up.
What I call a top down practice is a concentration practice, such as working on the koan Mu. Traditionally, this is the first koan assigned in Rinzai Zen temples. The practice originates from the story of a famous encounter between a student and the Chinese Zen master Joshu. The monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have the Buddha-Nature?” Joshu answered, “Mu.” “Mu” literally means “no,” even though it is one of the most basic tenets of the historical Buddha's original teaching that every sentient being possesses Buddha-nature. Generations of Zen students have been challenged to present to their teachers the meaning of Joshu's “Mu.” One practices with this first koan by concentrating all one's attention on silently repeating the single syllable Mu breath after breath after breath. Everything becomes this one sound. I breathe Mu in and out; Mu breathes me in and out. Outside and inside disappear, the boundaries between the self and the world disappear, and there is only THIS. When we are nothing but THIS, there is no separation: no separate self, no separate object of experience. No has or has not Buddha-Nature.
I call this a top down practice because it is intended to induce the of kind peak experience that has been cal