For starters...

Masao Abe, a prominent Zen Buddhist scholar from the "Kyoto School" in Japan, once made the following declaration about this thing we call "Zen:" "A normal education means to add on; a Zen education means to take away."

Similarly, in the field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the patient is already burdened with a lifetime of notions, labels, opinions, diagnoses, etc., piled on by everyone from parents to teachers to well-intentioned therapists. So, the theory goes, why add on to the pile? Better to sit quietly, listen wholeheartedly and file away any pretensions associated with "saving" someone in distress. When the time is right, both the psychoanalytic patient and the zen student will begin to look within for the inner resources required to heal themselves.

Zen and psychotherapy represent Eastern and Western approaches to studying the mind and integrating the insights that we experience into our daily lives. I hope that this blog will help to generate discussion on the similarities and differences between the two.

Today's suggested reading:

"Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy"
Edited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Shoji Muramoto